The Brain instantly revoked limitation-orders regarding the sonic-beams, set in motion the manufacturing and synthesizing forces which would produce the field and the gas jets on the bodies of those robots not sent to participate in the oncoming battle outside the Hive, and then, when the single phalanx had gone out to meet the approaching mass of angry humanity, sealed over every entrance to the Hive with tight-fitting partitions of pure Helox.
That this should have been the same day on which global hostility reached its peak was unforeseeable; the fact remains, however, that—forty-five minutes after the sealing of the Hive, at a time when the mobs and the beam-flashing robots were just meeting in brutal conflict—an international nuclear war of one hour's duration broke out, and at the end of that time, the only life remaining on the face of the Earth was that within the Hive, the rest of the planet being bathed in smoke, fire, and the cold flames of deadly radiation. When Bodger had returned to his office to view the battle outside through his private telescreen, where robots and mankind had met, on the scorched plateau outside the city walls, could only be discerned a pitifully few random mounds of molten slag and smoldering cinders. The Brain, seeing the devastation through the same circuits that brought the scene to Bodger's eyes, knew at once that President Frade must have perished in the holocaust, which meant that the Hive no longer possessed a first-in-command to act as a balance against Bodger's rule. It flashed on the proposition screens a demand for an immediate election of a new President, to be selected from the inmates of the Hive.
And the screens went blank as the Brain's circuits rejected the proposal: No one in the Hive was the necessary thirty-five years of age. The Brain, arguing with its own circuits, then declared that, to obviate any longer wait than necessary for a President, the first inmate to achieve the age of thirty-five would be elected by automatic default of the others. Bodger, trying in vain to give orders to the Brain from his office, descended in the lift to discover that the great lead-concrete barrier was closed, and the Brain-control chamber was out of reach of any human agency.
He, and the five million children in the Hive, were its prisoners for—the eldest children admitted being in their tenth year—a quarter of a century.
Late in 2026, on November 12th, his thirty-fifth birthday, Fredric Stanton was elected President of the Hive. By now, the Hive's population was nearly at the ten million mark, most of the children marrying in their late teens. In order to have the weddings properly performed, the Brain had sent crews of robots to modify the ancient rocket engines on the fifth level of each section, turning the firing chamber into a vast temple, and the enormous thrust-tubes into long arcades by means of which the inmates of each sector could enter and leave. A modification of the robot-teacher, modeled on the Brain's inbuilt memories of church hierarchies, was built into the base of the central dais of each temple, a plan further designed to combine the citizens' need to worship with their love of country, thereby making treason not only illegal, but immoral, in the people's emotions. On the day of Stanton's inauguration, the secondary sub-level gaped wide once more, permitting the new President to familiarize himself with the entire setup of the Hive.
Lloyd Bodger, being a sensible man, did not protest this election. His twenty-five year impotency to command had nearly maddened him, and he saw that only so long as there was a President would he have any say-so whatsoever in matters of government in the Hive. Some of Stanton's propositions, in the subsequent four years of his first term, were not to Bodger's liking, but he was unable to fight against the Vote of the Kinsmen (a Stanton-suggested title, since the flavor of the word held more unity than simply "citizen", and was analogous, besides, to the close-knit status of the Hive's inmates), especially when such Votes were initially stimulated into pro-votes by Stanton's control of the Temple Speaksters.