"Blast," he told Jack Grant.
Violently, he pried upon the thing. It came up slowly, like Circe, rising out of the sea—or was it Venus—or Jenna. It was exquisitely formed, delicately shaped, but his hands took it and crushed the softly curving figure into a geometrical cylinder, and the softness left it as he lifted it out of the body of the bomb.
From the vacant hole there came a small flow of neutrons and they registered on the counter he wore.
Lindsay jumped down, the mists clearing. He looked at the thing in his hands and laughed. The laugh welled up and broke into a wild sob. Lindsay crumpled to the ground, holding the fuse in his lap and crying over it.
He cried with grief, raved at his own madness. He ignored his own loss, for had he admitted that, he would have gone mad once more.
Paradox, paradox. He—who had tried to force death—was unable to do so. He was alone and a failure. He hurled the fuse at the vast shell of the robomb.
"Stinking failure," he snarled at it. Then came clearness. He picked up the fuse once more and looked at it. Somewhere in his cloud of madness he had succeeded in defus—
The auxiliary detonator went BANG! and startled him from the last hazy mists of madness into cold reality.
Once back in the loneliness of his ship, he called Haynes. He reported all, in a dull voice and asked for help. Later, the help came to find Lindsay working over the two-ended artificial mind, measuring minute electronic impulses and stimulating the nodules of the filamentary connectors to see what happened. From this sample, he knew that the Terran Technical Corps could devise a means of confusing the mental fuses in other robombs.