I turn a corner at random, there in the Maintenance car.

“It was a nice kinda world once,” I says, bitter. “I could go home peaceful and not have belly-cramps wonderin’ if a blonde has called up my wife to announce my engagement to her. I could punch keys on a logic without gazing into somebody’s bedroom while she is giving her epidermis a air bath and being led to think things I gotta take out in thinkin’. I could—”

Then I groan, rememberin’ that my wife, naturally, is gonna blame me for the fact that our private life ain’t private any more if anybody has tried to peek into it.

“It was a swell world,” I says, homesick for the dear dead days-before-yesterday. “We was playin’ happy with our toys like little innocent children until somethin’ happened. Like a guy named Joe come in and squashed all our mud pies.”

Then it hit me. I got the whole thing in one flash. There ain’t nothing in the tank set-up to start relays closin’. Relays are closed exclusive by logics, to get the information the keys are punched for. Nothin’ but a logic coulda cooked up the relay patterns that constituted logics service. Humans wouldn’t ha’ been able to figure it out! Only a logic could integrate all the stuff that woulda made all the other logics work like this…

There was one answer. I drove into a restaurant and went over to a pay-logic an’ dropped in a coin.

“Can a logic be modified,” I spell out, “to cooperate in long-term planning which human brains are too limited in scope to do?”

The screen sputters. Then it says:

“Definitely yes.”

“How great will the modifications be?” I punch.

“Microscopically slight. Changes in dimensions,” says the screen. “Even modern precision gauges are not exact enough to check them, however. They can only come about under present manufacturing methods by an extremely improbable accident, which has only happened once.”