"I wouldn't know, it's a new model."
Take the fuse out? Out of him? The fuse—
"Maybe we could hit the eye-lenses with bullets."
No—no. With smashed eye-lenses he would be blind, like Miss Babs. How could he guide her through the village traffic if his eye-lenses were broken?
"Don't get too close! It might jump at us!"
Now bullets were thudding against Toory. He thought for an instant one of them had hit an eye-lens. But it was only the metal plate of his forehead. The bullets sang after him as he flung Higgins' body down, and fled up into the darkness of the rocky cliff....
The dawn was approaching and still, somewhere up in the rocky darkness, Model 2 RY was crouching. Everyone knew that he could not have taken refuge elsewhere, for the cliff had been surrounded. James Erg had been summoned, and had arrived in an Erg truck. Doret, too, had been hastily sent for. And there was a swarm of police.
Erg stood with Doret, a little apart from the men in uniform. The grey-haired scientist was pale, frightened and awed. "This model of yours," Erg said, "is fortunately the only one of its kind I've sold, Doret. I'll refund your money, of course, and never make another 2 RY robot. I dare not do anything else."
Babs had talked with her father; and the hysterical, stricken Mary Higgins had confessed the theft of the diamond-string, and revealed where her husband had hidden it. Everyone knew all of the circumstances now.
"It encountered so many problems so far afield from its training," James Erg was saying. "It's understandable, in a way, but I never anticipated anything like this."