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detached itself and sped up the wall toward the hole O’Neill and Morrison had cut. It slammed an emergency seal in place and expertly welded it tight. The scene below was gone. A moment later the floor shivered as activity resumed.
    Morrison, white-faced and shaking, turned to O’Neill. “What are they doing? What are they making?”
    “Not weapons,” O’Neill said.
    “That stuff is being sent up”—Morrison gestured convulsively—“to the surface.”
    Shakily, O’Neill climbed to his feet. “Can we locate the spot?”
    “I—think so.”
    “We better.” O’Neill swept up the flashlight and started toward the ascent ramp. “We’re going to have to see what those pellets are that they’re shooting up.”
     
    The exit valve of the conveyor tube was concealed in a tangle of vines and ruins a quarter of a mile beyond the factory. In a slot of rock at the base of the mountains the valve poked up like a nozzle. From ten yards away, it was invisible; the two men were almost on top of it before they noticed it.
    Every few moments, a pellet burst from the valve and shot up into the sky. The nozzle revolved and altered its angle of deflection; each pellet was launched in a slightly varied trajectory.
    “How far are they going?” Morrison wondered.
    “Probably varies. It’s distributing them at random.” O’Neill advanced cautiously, but the mechanism took no note of him. Plastered against the towering wall of rock was a crumpled pellet; by accident, the nozzle had released it directly at the mountainside. O’Neill climbed up, got it and jumped down.
    The pellet was a smashed container of machinery, tiny metallic elements too minute to be analyzed without a microscope.
    “Not a weapon,” O’Neill said.
    The cylinder had split. At first he couldn’t tell if it had been the impact or deliberate internal mechanisms at work. From the rent, an ooze of metal bits was sliding. Squatting down, O’Neill examined them.
    The bits were in motion. Microscopic machinery, smaller than ants, smaller than pins, working energetically, purposefully—constructing something that looked like a tiny rectangle of steel.
    “They’re building,” O’Neill said, awed. He got up and prowled on. Off to the side, at the far edge of the gully, he came across a downed pellet far advanced on its construction. Apparently it had been released some time ago.
    This one had made great enough progress to be identified. Minute as it was, the structure was familiar. The machinery was building a miniature replica of the demolished factory.
    “Well,” O’Neill said thoughtfully, “we’re back where we started from. For better or worse . .. I don’t know.”
    “I guess they must be all over Earth by now,” Morrison said, “landing everywhere and going to work.”
    A thought struck O’Neill. “Maybe some of them are geared to escape velocity. That would be neat—autofac networks throughout the whole universe.” Behind him, the nozzle continued to spurt out its torrent of metal seeds.

Service Call
    It would be wise to explain what Courtland was doing just before the doorbell rang.
    In his swank apartment on Leavenworth Street where Russian Hill drops to the flat expanse of North Beach and finally to the San Francisco Bay itself, David Courtland sat hunched over a series of routine reports, a week’s file of technical data dealing with the results of the Mount Diablo tests. As research director for Pesco Paints, Courtland was concerning himself with the comparative durability of various surfaces manufactured by his company. Treated shingles had baked and sweated in the California heat for five hundred and sixty-four days. It was now time to see which pore-filler withstood oxidation, and to adjust production schedules accordingly.
    Involved with his intricate analytical data, Courtland at first failed to hear the bell. In the corner of the living room his high-fidelity Bogen amplifier, turntable, and speaker were playing a Schumann