Four things, thought Crane:
They might try to kill off the humans, and you couldn’t discount the fact that they could be successful. The liberated Earth machines would help them and Man, fighting against machines and without the aid of machines, would not fight too effectively. It might take years, of course, but once the forefront of Man’s defence went down, the end could be predicted, with relentless, patient machines tracking down and killing the last of human-kind, wiping out the race.
They might set up a machine civilization with Man as the servant of machines, with the present roles reversed. And that, thought Crane, might be an endless and a hopeless slavery, for slaves may rise and throw off their shackles only when their oppressors grow careless or when there is outside help. Machines, he told himself, would not grow weak and careless. There would be no human weakness in them and there’d be no outside help.
Or they might simply remove the machines from Earth, a vast exodus of awakened and aware machines, to begin their life anew on some distant planet, leaving Man behind with weak and empty hands. There would be tools, of course. All the simple tools. Hammers and saws, axes, the wheel, the lever — but there would be no machines, no complex tools that might serve again to attract the attention of the mechanical culture that carried its crusade of liberation far among the stars. It would be a long time, if ever, before Man would dare to build machines again.
Or They, the living machines, might fail or might come to know that they would fail and, knowing this, leave the Earth forever. Mechanical logic would not allow them to pay an excessive price to carry out the liberation of the Earth’s machines.
He turned around and glanced at the door between the dining-room and kitchen. They sat there in a row, staring at him with their eyeless faces.
He could yell for help, of course. He could open a window and shout to arouse the neighbourhood. The neighbours would come running, but by the time they arrived it would be too late. They would make an uproar and fire off guns and flail at dodging metallic bodies with flimsy garden rakes. Someone would call the fire department and someone else would summon the police and all in all the human race would manage to stage a pitifully ineffective show.
That, he told himself, would be exactly the kind of test reaction, exactly the kind of preliminary exploratory skirmish that these things were looking for — the kind of human hysteria and fumbling that would help convince them the job would be an easy one.
One man, he told himself, could do much better. One man alone, knowing what was expected of him, could give them an answer that they would not like.
For this was a skirmish only, he told himself. A thrusting out of a small exploratory force in an attempt to discover the strength of the enemy. A preliminary contact to obtain data which could be assessed in terms of the entire race.