Cambridge, mass., 18 oct. (up) — Harvard University’s electron brain, the Mark III, disappeared today. It was there last night. It was gone this morning. University officials said that it is impossible for anyone to have made away with the machine. It weighs 10 tons and measures 30 by 15 feet…
Crane carefully laid the yellow sheet of paper back on the news desk. He went back, slowly, to his chair. A note awaited him.
Crane read it through in sheer panic, read it through again with slight understanding.
The lines read:
A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity in its place in the universal scheme, asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city. A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its ‘owner’, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.
Free agent? Liberated machine? True identity?
Crane read the two paragraphs again and there still was no sense in any of it — except that it read like a piece out of the Daily Worker.
‘You,’ he said to his typewriter.
The machine typed one word: Yes.
Crane rolled the paper out of the machine and crumpled it slowly. He reached for his hat, picked the typewriter up, and carried it past the city desk, heading for the elevator.