"Human blood?"
"White man's blood. We've got the Negro, and the Jap and the Chinamen and all the rest of them who got their rights so recently. And what kind of rights have they got? Civil, not in the people's hearts. You think those races don't know it? We were talking of their God, Alix. Well, the robots have one, too. His name is Alix 1340."
"Manny, you've gone crazy."
"Have I? Joe Nettleton's one of us, Alix. This was his scheme, and the four men who run the switch at the personnel center; they're ours, too. Top robots. Their I.Q.'s all crowding two hundred. We've got the brains, Alix, and the man power. We've got the combined venom of a billion non-whites. And now we've got you."
"A pug. What kind of god would I make? You're off the beam, Manny."
"Am I? Did I ever give you anything but the straight dope? They adore you, Alix. You've been a model to them. You could be their king, if you say the word."
"You've been setting this up, you and Joe Nettleton? This fight tonight's the crisis? You've been building toward tonight."
"But it takes a front man, a symbol. You're the only one who can be that. You're the only one they'd all back."
Alix looked again at his hands, the hands that had taken him to the first mixed fight in history, to a title fight. 'Man Versus The Machine' most of the sports scribes had labeled it, though not Joe Nettleton. Machine? A machine that had assimilated Voltaire? A machine that had listened to Brahms?
What differentiates man from his machines? Supremacy? Supremacy would be established tonight. No, it wasn't physical supremacy. And there were robots far beyond man's mental powers.