For a moment he looked at the swinging carcasses. It was almost as if they had struck back.
But he knew what it was. The elbow and shoulder joints had broken down completely.
Springs, he thought, that could withstand five million flexings in the test machines in the icebox, yet they failed with a few flexings when in a suit.
He made a tentative gesture to bend the stiffened arm. It only made his bruised muscles ache worse. The sleeve would not move — as he well knew.
He tried the left arm, flexing it slowly. It seemed all right. He dug his manipulators into the thick plastic of the right sleeve to feel of the springs in the joints. There simply weren't any. He rubbed the fabric back and forth between the manipulators. Lacking a sense of touch, he couldn't be sure, but it seemed as if there were fine metallic shards in the thin sheaths where the springs should have been. They had shattered to bits.
Cold?
They had been tested for months in the icebox. Stationary, flexed at a hundred cycles per minute, heated, cooled again — everything the test engineers could think of had been done to those springs to break them down. And they held.
Until now.
He moved towards the swaying carcasses.
"How are you boys doing? Let's feel that muscle." He flexed the arms of the nearest suit with his left hand. The legs. The joints seemed satisfactory. He went on down the line. As he reached for the next to the last one, his left arm snapped back.