"You see, Cadmus. The Machine is insane. You submitted a problem to it. I don't know what the nature of the problem was, its details, but it was planned to be unsolvable to the Machine. Although the Machine isn't organic, it functions much like an organic brain. Faced with an unsolvable problem that nevertheless must be solved, a human mind goes insane. Our Machine did the same thing. Insanity is a decision of a sort. Sometimes it's the only logical answer to a dilemma. That seems to be the case this time."
Cadmus stared, but he still found it difficult to grasp the scene below. What he saw and heard through the opened windows was horrible beyond the maddest nightmare. The Venusian transmats were still dead. No Venusians were emerging into the valley. But vast rivers of humans from Terra, and Martians from all the cities, were spilling in great masses into the valley—
And to their death!
Wailing, crying in sobbing ecstasy, these rivers were pouring directly into that half-mile deep area of deadly radioactivity surrounding the Machine.
Cadmus murmured in sheer horror. Millions were dying. Millions more would die. The valley was a gigantic pit of carnage. Unless it were stopped every living person on Terra would march out of those transmats and die. So would every living Martian.
"Like the lemmings," said Consar III absently. "A suicide drive. See what you Cadmeans have done with your foolish revolt. Listen to the voice from the council tower."
Cadmus was listening. A decision from the Machine was automatically transcribed and broadcast from the Tower.
"Listen to what the Tower is saying. The voice of the god. It couldn't solve the answer it was forced to answer in any other way except by this extreme and apparently insane way. Yet if this is the only way it could answer the question, then it's logical isn't it? Logical that its answer should be one of defeat, futility, abandonment of all hope."
From the Tower the public address system thundered out over the wailing shambles of destruction in the valley. Its waves of sound bludgeoned the helpless, milling hordes into an ecstatic suicidal rush.
"Life has no meaning. All is futility. There is no hope. The only way out of this problem is death. Death is the final and complete escape."