And that, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely me—and charging one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.