No matter how hard the human survivors worked, there still weren't enough of them. So the robots and androids became more and more essential. They became so essential that the manufacture and programming of robots and androids was one of the first industries to be revived. By the time civilization had recovered, the robots and androids outnumbered the people at least three to one.

It was then that a psychologist and scientist named Hudvom had a brilliant idea. At least it had seemed brilliant at the time, although Sela admitted she now very much doubted this. Blade was certain Hudvom's idea was the worst disaster to happen to this Dimension, except the Great War itself.

Hudvom counted the robots and androids. He observed that Inward Eye boxes and Inward Eye tapes were once again being made and used. He concluded that together they were the solution to the greatest problem facing his people.

That problem was preventing another war. War was the result of aggression. Aggression was the inevitable result of the amount and kind of physical activity that people performed. If they would limit themselves to the physical activity necessary to get work done, the problem wouldn't be so serious. But people were always in search of excitement, new sensations, pleasure, and variety. That search too often led them over the edge into a pattern of increasingly aggressive behavior.

Now there was at last a chance to break this deadly pattern. Much work was already being done by the robots and androids. More could be done. Meanwhile, people who wanted to could seek out a variety of sensations through new Inward Eye tapes. By this combination, the danger of people developing aggressive patterns of behavior would be greatly reduced. The danger of another war would be practically eliminated.

Hudvom was a brilliant and persuasive arguer, and people were already more than half ready to listen to him. There had already been small wars between some of the revived city-states. There were thousands of armed androids on hand. Many of the weapons that had made the Great War so terrible had already been rediscovered. Another major war seemed near, and this one would leave nothing alive in all the world.

So Hudvom was heard by thoroughly frightened people, and they thought him a great and wise man. The work began, to put Hudvom's ideas into effect.

The work was done slowly, over several centuries. Gradually the cities came to be inhabited by those who followed Hudvom's theories, who rejected the Physical, sought their sensations from the Inward Eye, and left everything else to the robots and the androids. Gradually those who thought Hudvom's theories were dangerous nonsense, or who simply couldn't adjust to the new way of life, left the cities. Some of them were forcibly expelled. All who left soon sank back to barbarism, as the cities kept a rigid control of all advanced science and technology.

In spite of their primitive weapons, the barbarians were numerous enough to be a danger to the cities. So the Cities of Peace slowly drew into themselves, building their walls and setting up force fields and robot sentinels to guard those walls. The building Blade had stayed in by the Wall had been built to house the human garrison of the Wall, in those distant centuries when such a garrison was needed. It had been abandoned by everyone except robots for more than a thousand years.

Gradually the cities became invulnerable to the attacks of the barbarians. Within five hundred years their life had settled down to a routine. Or at least the life of Mak'loh settled down to a routine. Sela knew practically nothing about what might have happened in the other Cities of Peace. Only three of them had ever sent visitors to Mak'loh, and none of these had come in Sela's lifetime. That lifetime, incidentally, had already lasted some four hundred years, and would probably last another five hundred.

In Mak'loh the routine became simple. The hundred thousand human beings in the city spent two-thirds of their time using the Inner Eye. There were millions of different tapes, and they could be mixed and varied by the computers. The other third of the time, they spent going languidly through various mild Physical activities that still helped to maintain a person's good health and good looks. Sometimes they even made love, although not often enough to produce very many children. At the moment there were in all of Mak'loh only seven nurseries and no more than three hundred children in all seven put together.

Meanwhile, computers, robots, and androids did everything else. The computers controlled the power supply, the protective force fields, the synthetic food factories. They programmed the robots and trained the androids.

The robots mounted guard on the outer Wall and took care of all the heavy maintenance. The androids in the red coveralls were soldiers, pure and simple, produced and trained to be nothing else. They lived in underground caves, connected with tunnels that ran under the whole city and up into the towers along the city wall.

The androids in blue did the thousand and one essential jobs in the city itself. Robots and androids together numbered over half a million, or about five for every human inhabitant of Mak'loh.

The Authority watched over everything. They had been created when the city built its Walls, as a force of trained people, capable of Physical activity, capable of aggression if necessary. They would be too few to use these qualities to endanger the city or themselves. But they would be enough to keep watch for minor accidents and failures and correct them. They would also be able to wake up the whole population of the city in an emergency, turning off the Inward Eyes, reprogramming the robots, retraining the androids, and so on.

At least that was the theory, and with the original thousand-man Authority, it might have worked in practice. Unfortunately, the appeal of the Inward Eye seduced away many members of the Authority. Old age took others. As the birth rate shrank, it became impossible to train enough new members of the Authority to replace those who'd gone. Century by century, the strength of the Authority shrank.

Eventually it shrank to the point where it could no longer do its job properly, and the slow decay of Mak'loh became more rapid. Errors crept into the programming of the robots and the training of the androids. This explained the mad soldier Blade had encountered on the city wall, the simple-minded responses of the Watchers, the deterioration of the gardens. Machines wore out and could no longer be replaced quickly, then could not be replaced at all. The power supply was sometimes erratic. Sometimes an Inward Eye machine would go wild, producing such intense sensations that a person hooked into it would be driven mad.

«At one time, about a century ago, it seemed that things were about to fall apart all at once,» Sela said. «But all of us in the Authority made a tremendous effort and did much of the necessary work.»

«It wasn't enough,» said Blade.

The woman sighed. «This we know. We have known it for fifty years. But we were not strong enough to do any more. We are even weaker now. The only thing we could do to make any real difference would be to declare an emergency and turn off the Inward Eyes. We would have to cast aside all of Hudvom's teachings to do that. I fear the people would not accept that.»

Blade suspected this was an excuse, rather than a reason, to justify the Authority's refusal to grasp the bull by the horns. The real problem was the pleasure the people of Mak'loh took in their carefree, sensual life of Inward Eye and android servants. They would continue to prefer their living death, even as their city fell apart around them. They would probably panic if they were awakened.

Blade didn't blame the Authority for not wanting to grab this bull by the horns. It was a large and ferocious bull. But if they didn't quickly do something drastic, Mak'loh was doomed. It would become a city of the dead who no longer lived, even through the Inward Eye.