THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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Conn and Anse both shouted at it, knowing perfectly well that shouting
was futile. Then they were running for their lives with one of the
crablike all-purpose jobs after them. They dived under the slightly
raised bed of a long belt-conveyer and crawled. Jerry Rivas fired
another shot, somewhere.

The robots themselves were having troubles. They had done all the work
they were supposed to do; now the supervisors were insisting that they
do it over again. Uncomplainingly, they swept and raked and
vacuum-cleaned where they had vacuum-cleaned and raked and swept forty
years ago. The scrap-pickers, having picked all the scrap, were going
over the same places and finding nothing, and then getting deflected and
gathering a lot of things not definable as scrap, and then circling
around, darting away from one another in obedience to their
radar-operated evasion-systems, and trying to get to the outside scrap
pile, and finding that the doors wouldn't open because the door openers
weren't turned on, and finally dumping what they were carrying when the