Ferdinand Stone, physicist extraordinary, hated the robot men of metal scientifically; and, if such an emotion can be so described, dispassionately. Twenty years before this story opens—in 2991, to be exact—he had realized that the automatons were beyond control and that in the inevitable struggle for supremacy man, weak as he then was and unprepared, would surely lose.
Therefore, knowing that knowledge is power, he had set himself to the task of learning everything that there was to know about the enemy of mankind. He schooled himself to think as the automatons thought; emotionlessly, coldly, precisely. He lived as did they; with ascetic rigor. To all intents and purposes he became one of them.
Eventually he found the band of frequencies upon which they communicated, and was perhaps the
