If such a thing were possible, the educators said after consultation among themselves, they would endorse his program. Bodger thanked them, and immediately polled the scattered manufacturers of simple household robots to see if such an electronic educator might be constructed. Until that date, robotry was a minor line of business, there being little demand for anything in the robot-line more complex than a story-teller, or automatic floor-cleaner, or traffic-director. Bodger, stressing the great number of such creatures necessary in the Hive, prevailed upon these individual manufacturers to produce a robot that could combine all the essential features of a teacher: Mobility, loquacity, authority, and impressive personal appearance. These were achieved easily, by the respective use of wheels, speakers, abnormal height, and then the addition of telelensic "eyes", flexible metal "arms", and a non-functional, but esthetically necessary "neck" beneath the eye-bearing section, to prevent the robots' looking like ambulant bank-vaults. In a year's time (during which Barnaby's party won the election by a narrow margin, putting Malcolm Frade into office), the robots were duly built, conveyed to the Hive, and their controls coordinated with the direction-centers of the Brain, and a record five million children, either orphans, children of parents who thought this would better their offsprings' lives, or just plain unwanted children, were brought to, and settled comfortably into Units of, the Hive. The educators, however, demanded that a one-year trial period be given the Hive as an in-living school system, at the end of which time the children would each be tested at the educational level of their current ages to determine whether or not Bodger's program was a success.
When the year was half-over, however, a new and extremely necessary scientific discovery made abrupt mockery of the very existence of the Hive. A simply-generated protective force-field was invented by the technical staff at General Motors, one which would enable every person in the world to own a weather-, wind-, bomb- or anything-else-proof home.
Helox stocks, which had been unsteady since the first failure at tenanting the Hive, nose-dived into oblivion, and wiped out the fortunes of a great many people. Angry and vengeful meetings were held shortly afterward, across the nation, and a national vote was called for to determine whether "our children should be held veritable prisoners in a structure whose uses are already archaic!"
When President Frade, an unexcitable man, logically refused to take action against a government project whose failure might completely undermine an already shaky confidence in his, or any, administration, mobs were formed, and great numbers of people converged from all points of the continental United States to put a stop to the Hive. The leaders of the growing army of angry citizens had more sense than to attack the Hive itself; Helox, unpopular or not, was already in use nationally in an expensive series of ashtrays, pocket combs, and other small items, and was known, by general experience, to be as indestructible as had been claimed by its proponents. They would strike, instead, at the robots who taught the children. "When they're all gone bust," one of the rabble-rousers cried to his impromptu constituency, "Bodger'll have to let the kids go. He can't keep 'em there if they don't get no learning!"
The lowest level of the Hive, of course, was readily accessible, by a multitude of air-lock type entrances, or populating its vast interior would have taken incredible lengths of time. Bodger, alerted by Frade of the oncoming mobs (aside from a direct line to Washington, there was no contact between Hive inmates and the outer world), who were too great in number for the militia to control without actually destroying the misguided people, begged for the use of a strictly military weapon of the time, Feargas, to drive the mobs away. Frade, being dubious as to the advisability of giving the nation's best weapon into the hands of so desperate a man, insisted that the gas be installed, instead, into the robots themselves, to put its use at the discretion of the mechanical Brain, not Bodger's.
Bodger pleaded that such a move, while salutary, would take too much time. Mobs were already reported within a few miles of the mountain region at which the Hive stood. He demanded that paratroops armed with the gas be dropped near the Hive at once, or he would take desperate steps. Frade refused to contemplate such a deployment of troops in such shaky international times. Altercations in the UN were rising in bitterness, and the country had to be constantly on its guard. Its military manpower must be used in defense of its shores, not for such "petty intramural squabbles". Frade further suggested that Bodger put his synthesizers to work on the manufacture of the gas; he could not be bothered further with the problem, being already overdue to attend a meeting of the UN General Assembly, to speak words of encouragement against the dangerous rumblings in the Far East. Bodger, insisting on his rights, found himself speaking into a dead phone. Re-dialling brought the enraging information that the President had already left the White House and was not available for the rest of the afternoon.
Bodger immediately left his office in the top level of the Hive and descended directly to the barracks of the robot-teachers in Sub-Level One, thence through the lead-concrete level to the Brain-control chamber, where he put his problem, via the automatic coding-keyboard, to the Brain itself. Its answer came immediately: A step-up of the robots' disciplinary powers.
In lieu of a hickory switch, or yardstick—either one a decided menace to life in powerful metal hands—the robot-teachers were equipped with mild sonic-beams which could jog the most torpid student into instant and quaking attention, by creating a powerful muscle-spasm throughout the body. These vibratory flagella had a maximum-time limit of one-fifth of a second; longer playing of the beam would be dangerous in the extreme. The Brain suggested that, for the duration of the emergency, the robots be given full scope of this beam. Bodger agreed conditionally: While a phalanx of robots held off the mobs with the beam, the remainder of them should be equipped with Feargas nozzles and the newly developed force-field, to preclude any further incidents of anti-Hive movements from cropping up this way.