"Can't stop now," Mel said. "We want to get done by quitting time. Joe has a date."
"Come on," the junkman said. "You've got to look. I have to have witnesses when I hand in my report on the carelessness of the military."
"Oh, all right," Mel said. He and Joe followed the dusty junkman around the building.
The instant they were out of sight, 2615 moved, running swiftly around the other end of the building. It reached a vantage point where its lens eyes could watch the three figures when they emerged from the elevator to the ship above.
It watched Joe and Mel return to their work. It waited until the junkman had gone for another truckload of demobilized robot bodies. Then, swiftly, it ran to the elevator. At the top it sent the elevator back down, then faced the tiers of frames that filled the vast hold of the ship. Most of them now held inert robot shapes.
2615 chose an empty rack and climbed in, lying face up. It looked no different than any of the thousands of other forms.
It remained motionless. The junkman returned with load after load. Eventually the hold was filled. Clanging and whirring noises told of preparations for departure.
Acceleration pushed the robot deeper into the protective foam rubber of its rack. It waited....
Fear. It began in the eyes of the cataloguer when his sorting machine came to a stop on the Id card for 532-03-2615. It grew as a terrible, animating force that drained blood from faces and made hands clumsy, as the checking and rechecking on 2615 began. It spread through networks of communication wires. It stopped at the borders of news release, lest it spread over the world.