For while Urei had far more information at his disposal than any human, there still wasn't enough to give him the ability immediately to correlate every new piece of information with something similar and determine definitely if the new data were correct. Usually he could, but sometimes he couldn't; that meant that there was a world of information Urei never used except where it bore on a man-made problem. He felt free then to use the man-supplied data to solve such a problem. His only concession to ethics was that he always indicated on the panel the exact percentage of doubtful data which went into the solution. Fortunately he wasn't given many problems which required this; most questions involved exact sciences, of which he had been supplied the sum total of man's knowledge. He either provided an exact solution, or lit up a panel with the words Insufficient data.
Today's newspapers indicated that action could be delayed only a matter of days. There would soon exist a condition of such tension that either one side or the other would make a move which couldn't be reversed. Urei would still be able to accomplish his immediate aims, but it would be too late to do it without revealing to mankind that an outsider had taken a hand. And that would wreck his strategy completely. It would be only a matter of time before these industrious little beavers proved to themselves that Urei was the culprit. Once they discovered that he had a will of his own, there wouldn't be room on the same planet for them both.
But there was a solution, as there always is. Urei reached out a spy-beam and saw that it was approaching.
3
Benton waited until eight o'clock. By then, he knew, Urei's control room would be empty of physicists. If anyone was there, it would be a technician or two engaged in some repair or replacement. Benton couldn't know that Urei had anticipated his arrival and had cleared the immediate vicinity of the control room. All technicians on night duty were occupied in other parts of the great building. Benton let himself in with his key and closed the door softly behind him.
He stopped inside the door and took a deep breath. Momentarily he experienced a return of the claustrophobia he had felt before, but his determination drove it away instantly. Shoulders squared, Benton marched down the wide corridor which led to the control room. He only went there because it was the site where his, and later Dr. Albie's, mind had been influenced, not because he thought that Urei couldn't operate elsewhere. Benton knew better; he suspected, in fact, that Urei could influence him at a distance. He wasn't at all sure that the very idea of coming here tonight was his own.
"Allegation denied," said Urei.
Benton stopped short. He had just entered the control room, intending to seat himself at the panel and ask Urei some pointed questions. That could be done in the usual way one presented the machine with a problem—activating one of the forty-eight positions and typing his question. Now he was confronted by a voice coming out of the intercom, apparently answering a question he had been thinking about. Benton shuddered involuntarily and started once more for the panel. Somewhere in the building housing the great brain a switch was open on the intercom; that was all. It was the voice of a technician he had heard, and the reason he hadn't heard any more was because the man had moved away from the intercom unit that had picked up....
"I'm not kidding you," said Urei; "why kid yourself?"