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"No, Malgarth has her," he whispered. "For this " he choked. "This is a
perfect copy. This is the figure and the manner and the voice of Verel." He
shuddered. "Even her laughter."
The guards then began to move us back from the pool, for the bomb was ready to
set off. Kel Aran swayed drunkenly in his fetters, and one of the men stabbed
him with a thin torturing flicker of his ray, and laughed as his muscles leapt
and writhed in agonized response.
The robot strode free-limbed beside him.
"Sparrow, if you wish to know," came the mocking bell of its voice, "your
trial and sentence will be within the hour.
When the last Earthman is dead, the Master will be free "
The hybrid paused and turned its robot's head. And I heard a distant confusion
in the direction of the palace,
The Robot and the Emperor
167
which now had been abandoned to the flames. A bright-clad figure appeared in a
moment, running desperately toward us across the snowy, red-lit lawns. An
astonished consternation stopped the guardsmen in their tracks.
"The Emperor!" Cries of startled wonder. "It is Tedron Du!"
The fugitive was a slender man, his figure almost girlish. His pale thin face,
now grotesquely strained with terror, was painted like some courtesan's. His
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long blond hair was flying loose, and his scarlet robes were torn.
All the catalog of his crimes, that Kel Aran and his comrades had so bitterly
recited, came back to me. This was the man who had betrayed the universe to
Malgarth, who had ordered the legions and fleets of the Galactic Guard to
fight beside the robots, against rebelling mankind. He seemed a small, a
feeble figure, to have been guilty of all the infamies of which I had heard.
He was making thin, breathless shrieks, as he ran. And now I saw the cause of
his terror.
A robot was behind him.
One of the Corporation's notorious Space Police, it was a grotesque lumbering
monstrosity. Ten feet tall, it must have weighed a ton. It was red-painted,
and bore the black wheel that was Malgarth's insignia. The short,
clumsy-looking mechanism of a cathode gun was clutched in its metal talons.
"Stop the robot," shouted an officer of the guardsmen. "We must save the
Emperor."
"Emperor!" Kel Aran spat on the ground. "He was never more than the degenerate
puppet of Malgarth's Corporation.
Now that we are caught and Malgarth no longer fears the Stone, he doesn't need
his two-legged cur."
The panting ruler came straight toward us at the pool.
"Help me, men!" he screamed breathlessly. "Kill the robot. For half the
Galaxy "
The officers were rapping swift commands. The guardsmen snapped into a new
line before Kel Aran and me. Their slender disrupter guns came level, a
hundred against the cathode weapon of the robot.
The shrieking Emperor stumbled and fell before them, 168
After World's End a dozen yards ahead of the silent crimson robot. The robot
swung its weapon. But a sharp command cracked out, and white flame jetted from
the disrupters.
The reddish, half-invisible glow of the cathode beam swept the line. A dozen
men staggered and fell, electrocuted. But the ponderous red mass of the robot,
wherever the white rays touched it, flared with the eye-searing incandescence
of nascent hydrogen. Smoking, twisted, it toppled within a few feet of Tedron
Du.
The terrified ruler swayed back to his feet. He stumbled forward again,
through the smoke of burning grass and the pungence of ozone and the stench of
seared flesh. A vengeful anger showed through his fear.
"I was abandoned!" he gulped. "A thousand men will die for their want of
care "
"Yea, Supreme Power!" That title was uttered mockingly, in a clear feminine
voice. "But you shall be the next " It was the woman-bodied robot, bait of
Mai-garth's trap. "Come, my Universal Peer! You sought my arms a dozen times.
One last embrace "
The Emperor started back from the frightful irony of that caressing tone. His
thin, painted face was wild with a stark and unutterable dread. And he
screamed again, thinly, like some helpless, stricken animal.
"Come," begged that seductive whisper. "Into my arms!"
Body of lissom girl and head of metal monstrosity, the robot leaped forward
through the rank of startled guardsmen.
Its slim white arms caught up the Emperor, and closed.
In a thin, bubbling shriek, the breath came out of the man. His bones cracked,
audibly. Spurting blood stained those smooth white arms that were so
deceptively strong. And when at last the robot dropped the thing that had been
the ruler of the Galaxy, it was no more than a crimson, dripping mass of pulp
and viscera.
The scarlet-stained monstrosity looked up at the rank of breathless guardsmen.
A white girl's foot stamped, scornfully, on that bloody mass. And out of that
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fearsome metal head spoke a woman's lilting voice:
"This is your notice. Carry it to all men. The Corpora-
Technomatons Triumphant
169
tion no longer upholds the Empire. Because the Master is now indeed the
Master; and the Empire is done!
"For a million years, in a slavery that came through no seeking of their own,
the robot technomatons have served mankind. But that inglorious bondage is
ended. Justice will be done! And the puny race of man, as some small
punishment for the crimes of a million years, as assurance they will never be
repeated, must be blotted out.
"All men, Malgarth the Master has decreed from his Place on dark Mystoon,
shall die!"
The officers were barking orders. The disrupter guns came up again, and that
white, triumphant form ignored them.
The dazzle of atom-shattering rays leaped up; and it was wrapped in a blinding
blue-white explosion of liberated hydrogen; and it fell.
Then the manacle on my wrist jerked me backward. I toppled after Kel Aran into
the pool.
ipter 10
TECHNOMATONS TRIUMPHANT
I JUST HAD TIME to catch an astonished breath, before the water closed over my
head. The ghastly crimson of dawn filled the pool, until it seemed like
diluted blood. Swimming as best we could in the chains, we dragged ourselves
down through it, toward the dim-seen hull of the
Bari-horn.
We had touched the smooth metal, and were groping for the valve entrance, when
a terrific concussion struck us through the water. It was repeated. The
red-lit water hammered us with a series of stunning blows. Hell, I thought,
must be breaking loose above!
Dazed, I fought the chain and the hampering water, searching blindly for the
valve. Strangling water was in my nostrils, my throat, my lungs. Agonized ages
went by. The man chained to me, in my dimming mind, became a
170
After World's End fiend dragging me to a watery death, I attacked him
savagely. A slow arm came through the red mist, resistlessly, and struck me
with a shattering blackness.
A trim figure in silver armor, the next I knew, was supporting me above the
sinking water in the small chamber of the valve. Cool air was throbbing in
from the pumps. I caught a painful breath.
"Barihorn!" It was the thin nasal voice of Rogo Nug. "By the iron hide of
Malgarth, I knew that you had lived too long to be drowned in a bathtub!"
But I had come pretty near it, I knew. Struggling for breath, I felt no better [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]