There had been other Factories. The remains of them had been found in several places, on each of the other continents. They had been built sometime prior to the war, and all but one of the Factories had subsequently been destroyed.
Yet the Makers were not, as Steffens had supposed, a warlike people. Telepathy had given them the power to know each other's minds and to interchange ideas, and their record of peace was favorable, especially when compared with Earth's. Nevertheless, a war had begun, for some reason Aliencon could not find, and it had obviously gotten out of hand.
Radiation and bacteria eventually destroyed the Makers; the last abortive efforts created enough radiation to destroy life entirely. There were the germs and the bombs and the burning rays, and in the end everything was blasted and died—everything, that is, but the one lone Factory. By a pure, blind freak, it survived.
And, naturally, it kept turning out robots.
It was powered by an atomic pile, stocked with materials which, when combined with the returning, worn-out robots, enabled it to keep producing indefinitely. The process, even of repair, was entirely automatic.
Year after year, the robots came out in a slow, steady stream. Ungoverned, uninstructed, they gathered around the Factory and waited, communicated only rarely among themselves. Gradually the memory of war, of life—of everything but that which was imprisoned in their minds at birth—was lost.
The robots kept coming, and they stood outside the Factory.
The robot brain, by far the finest thing the Makers had ever built, was variable. There was never a genius brain, and never a moron brain, yet the intelligence of the robots varied considerably in between. Slowly, over the long years, the more intelligent among them began to communicate with each other, to inquire, and then to move away from the Factory, searching.
They looked for someone to serve and, of course, there was no one. The Makers were gone, but the crime was not in that alone. For when the robots were built, the Makers had done this:
Along with the first successful robot brain, the Makers had realized the necessity of creating a machine which could never turn against them. The present robot brain was the result. As Steffens had already sensed, the robots could feel pain. Not the pain of physical injury, for there were no nerves in the metal bodies, but the pain of frustration, the pressure of thwarted emotion, mental pain.