The cab driver gasped: "What the hell." His throat was so dry he could scarcely talk. He turned around to his fare, and the passenger, a young man, was pale and trembling.
"You seeing things, too?" the driver asked.
"I sure am," the fare said unsteadily. "What a thing to do."
For fifteen minutes, over the northwest quadrant of Earth, the words and the pictures went out, and thirteen billion people knew suddenly what lay in the hearts and minds of nineteen robots.
A housewife in San Rafael was at the moment in a butcher shop buying meat for her family. As the thoughts and images started pouring into her mind, she remained stock-still, her package of meat forgotten on the counter. The butcher, wiping his bloodied hands on his apron froze in that position, an expression of horror and incredulity on his face.
When the thoughts stopped coming in, the butcher was the first to come out of the trancelike state.
"Boy," he said, "that's sure some way of sending messages. Sure beats the teledepths."
The housewife snatched her meat off the counter. "Is that all you think of," she demanded angrily.