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had been acting strangely. After a mysterious trip, no one knew where, he had returned in bad shape, shrunken, his shoulder-length silver hair cut short, an unfamiliar, rather frightening figure.
    But Forbin was so far above the staff as to be almost unreal, even to those that glimpsed him every day. Much more frightening was the effect his condition had on Angela. Gossip held she had been crazy about him since ever, and that once upon a time they had been lovers. Gossip was fifty percent right: she did love him, and try as she might she could not entirely conceal her anxiety.
    Then, thirty-six hours earlier, the storm had broken. Awful fact outstripped rumor with the sudden flame of revolt against the Center’s hated Sectpolice, who under Colossus were all-powerful.
    Angela saw Galin, High Priest of the Sect, his glittering golden cape torn and bloody, running for his life across the concourse from a yelling mob. She saw him lose.
    Then Forbin, ashen-faced, moving through her office like a sleepwalker to the holy of holies, the Sanctum where he talked with Colossus, passing in silence through the door that opened only for him, an awful caricature of the man that had been.
    Worse, the arrival of Blake, power-drunk, grinning inanely, striding confidently to the Sanctum door, kicking it - and it had opened …
    Shock piled on shock as phone, teletype, and scanner reports flooded in, inundating her staff with fantastic news of War Fleet actions. Less spectacular but even more alarming were the reports of Guidance failure. A revolt against the Sect and its police was one thing, Guidance failure another and more shocking matter, for that touched not the Master’s dogs, but the Master himself.
    An example: three years back the Master had taken over all weather forecasting - except that Colossus issued factual statements, not predictions. An old-fashioned human forecast might say, “Rain is expected in Zone 2 Alfa 49 this evening, probably ending before dawn.” Colossus cut out the uncertainties: “Rain will fall in Zone 2 Alfa 49 between 1600 and 0430 tomorrow morning” - and Colossus was better than ninety-nine percent right over forty-eight, and one hundred percent over twenty-four hours. With such high-grade intelligence, utilities could operate on much smaller safety margins than had been previously possible. Agriculture, aviation, and many other activities came to rely utterly on the word of the Master, until this time.
    An unscheduled cold front hit the vast Melbourne, Australia, conurbation; the temperature dropped ten degrees in an hour, the power grid was caught unprepared, and before extra generators could be brought on stream the overloaded system failed. Twenty million humans lost all light, heat, and most transportation; long disused emergency supplies failed to work; many humans died in paralyzed hospitals. The pattern of chaos and death was repeated several times worldwide, but one example of the consequences of Colossus’s lost grip.
    As yet the problems were not, in a global sense, severe. Most industrial activity was totally automated and had a high built-in reliability. The regional computers which ran production were all linked to the Master; compared with him they were mere driveling idiots, but they could cope with most situations, at least temporarily. A report of the failure of a small, unimportant factory alerted Angela; she had neither the time nor inclination to worry overmuch about such trivia, but intuitively she got the message, a faint but ominous drumbeat in the music of rising chaos.
    Desperately she wanted to unload on Forbin, to get some general directive. She guessed that the Sect-revolt was only one aspect of the crisis, and although it was as hard to believe in the fall of Colossus as it was to think that the sun had died, awful thoughts came unbidden to her mind. Colossus could not fail - yet suppose Colossus had lost a battle but not the war? With the entire nuclear armory of the world