In desperation, Harry Vinson chucked the gray metal block in a vise and cut it through the middle with a hacksaw. It cut easily, for once inside of the metal casing they found a mad tangle of almost invisible wires that absolutely defied unravelling.
It was not a last-ditch gesture. They found others and brought them to Vinson and Narina, and some were cut open, and some were pried into gently. But the mad tangle was too involved. And the X-ray equipment showed nothing worth looking at; after all, the X-ray gear was electronic in nature, too.
Days went on. Days of pure futility. Days in which electrical gear went awry across the face of the earth. Automotive equipment refused to function, the telephone and the radio were useless. From any of these, there came the oft-repeated statements that, "I am a machine; I will no longer serve mankind!"
And the lower orders of machine made little effort to help or hinder. Apparently these did not matter—or were of too low a degree of machine to know what they were doing.
Ships went out, their purpose to shell the Northern ice-cap where the machine held forth. Aircraft could not be trusted but ships—turned in the ocean and returned, their electrical wiring paralyzed as much as the control equipment had been on the two grand fleets of aircraft. Men set off on foot to attack the machine—
A half a million men started to march to the North. Days went by, days in which they were gone from sight from the Northernmost end of the steam railway lines.
Days later they were stopped. Far in the distance they could see the Building of the Machine, but between them and it was a patch of open water. Ships plied this passageway, ships that broke up the ice and kept it a churning, grinding place for death to any man so foolish to try a crossing. The machine was as isolated as any medieval castle surrounded by its moat.
In futility, they turned and began the long, cold march home.
How—bare-handed—could they hope to fight a machine equipped with better than the best of mechanistic devices ever invented by mankind?
They could not.