Other of Stanton's bills were proposed and adopted without any more protest from Bodger, who devoted himself almost entirely to the upbringing of his son. The draft bill (to help fight an imaginary war), the marriage-by-twenty-five bill, the designated-areas bill—These and others were put to a Vote, and always carried. Stanton was supreme ruler of the Hive.
The one thing he could not delete from the Brain—to his eternal frustration—was the four-year tenure of the Presidential office. Nor could he sway the Brain's insistence on a maximum of two terms for a man. The only hope for him lay in the Brain's utter disregard of time, a factor hard to root out in a thinking apparatus which was virtually timeless. Stanton therefore declared that henceforth, a "Presidential year" should be a total of five trips of the Earth around the sun. The Brain, not seeing what possible difference this could make, so long as the letter of Article XXII was observed, ratified his proposition, and Stanton—on his second election—had a cozy twenty-year term stretching out before him. In that space of time, he hoped to circumvent, somehow, the inflexible attitude of the Brain toward the hope of his third term.
By the tenth actual year of his second term, radiation in the area had decreased greatly (the mountainous areas had been least affected by the nuclear war), and Stanton dreamed up an innovation to Hive-living that might stem the sensed-but-not-overt atmosphere of discontent among the Kinsmen toward the administration: Tourgyros.
These flying ships would take the Kinsmen soaring out of the Hive, flying above a carefully prepared route that would show them nothing but green valleys, blue skies, and of course the "main hospital", from high enough in the air to preclude their noting it was an empty shell. (Patients had not been taken there to die for years, since the slow lessening of radiation had become apparent; they were fed directly to the disrupting incinerators, to provide fodder for the synthesizers.) This squelched quite a large number of rumor-mongers, and the Hive buzzed with peaceful tranquility for nearly a decade, since the Hive-raised Kinsmen found themselves just as uneasy in the wide-open outdoors as their forebears had been in the celled confines of the Hive.
Then, in 2026, between the hours of five and six-thirty P.M. on the second day of June, an untoward event occurred: All power to the Hive was cut off for that crucial hour-and-a-half, due to an error on the part of Fredric Stanton. In the Brain-control chamber, just after asking the Brain itself to solve the problem of the means by which he could be reelected (a device to which he found himself reduced after nearly two decades of futile scheming), he slipped from the chair before the control panel, and tore loose the wiring leading to the encephalographic metal band upon his head. The Brain, sending information to a point to which it was no longer connected, created a synaptic syndrome in itself, and flared with enough power to throw every circuit-breaker in its cubic miles of wiring. Instantly, the robots ceased walking the streets, the lifts jammed to a halt, and Light-of-Day flickered and went out, being replaced by, not power-generated Ultrablack, but simple inter-Hive darkness.
The reason that period was crucial was that Jacob Corby was just at that moment about to be dropped into the maw of the incinerator chute. When blackness fell, and his robot-captors went slack-jointed and limp, he made his stumbling way back to his Unit, told his daughter Andra the truth of the often-rumored situation in the Hive, then fled for the life he knew would be forfeit if he were caught again when Light-of-Day returned. The lifts being useless, he had many tens of levels to descend on foot, in his attempt to reach the entrance-level of the Hive, hoping the sealed entrances would be disempowered by the Brain's unprecedented failure. But, since he was already a sick man when he had been "taken for hospitalization" in the first place, his heart gave out three levels short of his goal, and the restoration of Light-of-Day brought robots to his side to complete the job which the power failure had interrupted.
But Andra knew the truth, knew it for a fact. And in her career as an actress, she had fallen in with people of imagination and artistry, people who could envision and believe the terrible truth she had to tell. Together with her newly-gathered band, she determined to do something to wake the Kinsmen up to their danger. This information was received by Fredric Stanton through the agency of Robert Lennick, the fiance of Andra Corby. The President instructed Lennick to continue as an apparent member of the movement, that it might be destroyed—not at its weak inception—but when it felt most assured of success. That, felt Stanton, would undermine for a long time any subsequent attempts at well-thought-out revolt. Impromptu revolts were easy to control.
Then Andra Corby herself received an injury suitable for the demand of its immediate treatment, and was taken into custody. She escaped from custody by using a corridor through which the robots could not follow. This situation was cleared up by use of a robot squad to widen that corridor, but Andra Corby is still at large.