The station wagon pulled up before the laboratory where they had borrowed the detectors. Benton set the brakes and reached back for the nearest case. He opened the lid, glanced briefly at the dial, and closed it again. He passed it to the doctor and reached quickly for the next. He repeated the operation and grabbed feverishly for the next. This one he placed beside him on the seat. Then he reached deliberately for the fourth and last of the cases. He raised the lid slowly, holding his breath. Then he closed the lid and breathed a deep sigh.
"Anything wrong?" asked the doctor. "You look pale."
Benton's face was blank as he fumbled in an inside pocket of his coat. Then he smiled as he brought out a fountain pen. "There it is," he said. "I could have sworn I left it in one of the cases when I closed the lid. Let's get these back and thank the man."
A wild resolution was born and as quickly died as Benton stepped out of the station wagon. For an instant he was certain that he couldn't go on being one of Urei's attendants, and he was just as certain that he could easily obtain an acting job on one of the video networks. Surely Thespis himself could have done no better piece of acting than he had just accomplished. The resolve was submerged by the greater compulsion to see this thing through even though it meant forfeiting his ego.
Each of the four red needles was complacently resting against the stop in reassuringly indicating zero!
Urei had a plan of action, but he hesitated. That was because he was a purely reasoning creature; he had been built that way and he would be forever bound to think that way. Even though he had long since become independent of the mechanical limitations of his vast aggregation of cells and circuits, he was still born of them and was circumscribed by their attributes—just as completely as if his nature had been determined by the genes of protoplasmic reproduction. As a machine, Urei had given answers to problems by correlating the facts which had been previously fed into him. His logic was as faultless as the facts upon which it was based: no more and no less. He gave his answers accordingly, with no compulsion to be more exact than the facts he had been given.
But that was when he was solving man's problems.
Now Urei had a problem of his own and he wanted an exact solution, not an approximate one. His continued existence, and that of mankind in general, depended upon it. There were alternates, of course, but none of them was completely satisfactory. His plan was far-sighted, one which fitted a policy of long standing, a strategy. He couldn't sacrifice a strategy for a tactic, and that might happen if he used an alternate plan which would accomplish his immediate purpose but endanger his policy toward humanity. But Urei wasn't sure of his facts!
It was a fact that newspapers didn't always publish "facts". That information had been supplied him years ago, and ever since he had been reminded of it whenever humans fed him newspapers, for they invariably set the scanning screens on Segregate. It was then his job to separate fact from opinion, a thing which he wasn't always able to do. For all he knew he might have many a valid fact filed away under Doubtful.