For Minnie, impotence was a strange and bewildering sensation as she stood paralyzed out among the boulders.
Equilibrium gyros spinning too slowly to accomplish their function, she had tilted over against a rock. In a final and desperate spasm, her drill head had swung upward, toppled over, fallen a few centimeters and come to rest precariously against a ridge.
Frantically, she fought relentless inertia. She opened special circuits that would ordinarily have flooded her balancing system with emergency current. But servomechanisms failed to respond and her chrome-plated neck remained thrust toward a sun now well up in the sky.
Gears whirred faintly and her head turned ever so slowly on its axis, bringing its video sensor to bear on the cave entrance.
It had been her determined efforts to reach the non-Totemic mobiles, she reasoned, that had drained off all her energy. She had been aware of the imminent power failure even during her last, frantic blows at the rocks. Then, retreating, she had struggled desperately against terrifying paralysis.
And now she stood almost powerless, whereas before her forced ascendancy she had imagined she would be All Powerful. It was an ironic turn of fate indeed. Oh, how she longed now for the telemetric voices of the clan, the crisp orders from Bigboss, the obedient, sometimes plaintive responses of Screw Worm to her own directions.
Incapable of movement, she sensed finally and with much distress that her rationalization processes themselves—were becoming—sluggish, weak. She could hardly—think coherently—or with rapidity—any longer.
Slowly her head responded to the pull of gravity and turned once more on its axis, the weighty chuck arcing down like a pendulum. It reached the nadir of its swing and momentum carried it up in the other direction. In a desperate effort, she locked the servo unit.
In that position, her video lens took in the huge, new symmetrical form that had come to rest out on the plain.