"Maybe we could hit the eye-lenses with bullets."
No--no. With smashed eye-lenses he would be blind, like Miss Babs. How
could he guide her through the village traffic if his eye-lenses were
broken?
"Don't get too close! It might jump at us!"
Now bullets were thudding against Toory. He thought for an instant one
of them had hit an eye-lens. But it was only the metal plate of his
forehead. The bullets sang after him as he flung Higgins' body down,
and fled up into the darkness of the rocky cliff....
The dawn was approaching and still, somewhere up in the rocky darkness,
Model 2 RY was crouching. Everyone knew that he could not have taken
refuge elsewhere, for the cliff had been surrounded. James Erg had been
summoned, and had arrived in an Erg truck. Doret, too, had been hastily
sent for. And there was a swarm of police.
Erg stood with Doret, a little apart from the men in uniform. The
grey-haired scientist was pale, frightened and awed. "This model of
yours," Erg said, "is fortunately the only one of its kind I've sold,
Doret. I'll refund your money, of course, and never make another 2 RY
robot. I dare not do anything else."
Babs had talked with her father; and the hysterical, stricken Mary
Higgins had confessed the theft of the diamond-string, and revealed
where her husband had hidden it. Everyone knew all of the circumstances
now.
"It encountered so many problems so far afield from its training,"
James Erg was saying. "It's understandable, in a way, but I never
anticipated anything like this."
Something new had been added by a mysterious destiny to Model 2 RY,
something that not all the genius of science could build into it.
"It beats me," one of the Erg Instructors said. "You can't build fear
into a machine. But it's hiding up there now because _it's afraid_!"
Babs Doret's hair gleamed brightly in the dawnlight on the rocky
hillside. "You try calling to him, Babs," Doret suggested. "You were
closer to him than any of us."