Chapter IV: Part THREE: X (1)

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 _Barihorn_.

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 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 than any other half-drowned human. That strange rôle, as the supernatural champion of mankind, seemed more than ever impossible.

Blue-faced, Kel Aran was panting beside me. He grinned wryly.

"Fortunate, anyhow, that you were ready to help us, Rogo," he panted. "But what is going on, above?"

Another tremendous shock rocked the little vessel as he spoke.

"A battle, that may destroy the planet!" whispered the little engineer. "Another fleet has come! Colossal red cruisers, bearing the black wheel of Malgarth. They have attacked the Galactic Guard. Robots, against the men of the Emperor! By the brazen face of Malgarth, there was never such a fight! It's time for us to go!"

"It is!" agreed Kel Aran. "When we have broken off these chains."

And the _Barihorn_, a few minutes later, darted from the shelter of the pool, up into the red sunrise of Ledros. Into an incredible hell! For the smoky crimson sky was filled with mighty ships of space: the gray fleet of the murdered Emperor vainly resisting the red armada of the robots. Dim-seen mile-long monsters of war darted and wheeled like swarming midges. Blue barytron beams flashed, and disintegrated matter exploded with blinding energy. Rocket torpedoes burst with cataclysmic force.

My stunned senses recorded only a confused impression, as our tiny ship fled upward. Smoke and lancing flame. Hurtling fragments and fiery ruin. I saw the half-fused wreckage of a space ship lying crumpled and flattened where the burned palace of the Emperor had been.

* * * * *

In that pandemonium of flame and thunder and destruction, the atom of the _Barihorn_ passed unseen or ignored. We came up through the careening gigantic craft, into the comparative safety of open space.

All its surface veiled in the bright-flickering smoke of ruin, the planet dropped away. The telescreen showed us other battles raging, on all the fortified planets of Ledros, and here and there between. Jeron put the triple sun behind us, and we raced toward the dark vacant gulf.

"Safe!" I rejoiced.

But the lean face of Kel Aran, as he still manipulated the telescreen to observe those frightful battles behind us, remained very grave.

"No man is safe," he said darkly. "Nor ever will be, unless Malgarth is destroyed. For the robots have thrown away the last pretense of friendship. Now they destroy their duped human allies of the Galactic Guard. Next they will turn upon the defenseless human citizens of every inhabited planet. We must find Verel and the Stone soon--or never."

"Find them," repeated the tall, swarthy Saturnian. "But how?"

The Earthman shook his yellow head.

"I don't know," he whispered bleakly. "Setsi might have helped again, but she is lost. I believe that Verel is in the hands of the robots--otherwise they could not have copied all of her, to trap us. She may be on Black Mystoon. We'd go there, to seek her." He shrugged, hopelessly, wearily. "But no man has ever found that hidden lair of Malgarth."

He straightened again, and his lean jaw squared.

"We can only search," he muttered. "Search every world where men still live--every world the robots have not conquered. Till we find her--or we die!"

The doomed system of Ledros fell far behind, until its vari-colored suns merged into a point of white, until that dimming point was lost upon the telescreen. Planet after planet, wheeling star after star, we scanned with the far-probing finger of the achronic telethron-beam.

And we found no men.

The technomatons of Malgarth had been everywhere victorious.

Their black victory was a thing that crushed the mind.

A foreboding silence came to fill the small hull of the _Barihorn_, so heavy that it seemed to muffle the racing beat of her generators. Kel Aran ceased hopelessly to sing his reckless ballads of the Falcon. Watching his engines with weary red eyes, little Rogo Nug chewed his _goona-roon_ in silence. Zerek Oom made little noise with his pots and pans, and none complained when a mealtime was forgotten.

But at last an eager cry rang through the silent ship.

"Here!" Kel crouched trembling before the cabinet of the telescreen. "A planet where the war still rages. See! The machines have not yet won--not utterly!"

The planet was vast and ancient Meldoon, the outermost of a system of three. The two inward worlds had already fallen to the robots. Their continents had been leveled to featureless plains, pocked here and there with black sprawling aggregations of cyclopean machines. All green was gone from them--all life extirpated. Even their seas had been confined to geometric basins.

* * * * *

World machines!

Sight of them, by any living being, must have set in the heart an intolerable pain.

"What good could come of such a fearful triumph?" whispered the grim Saturnian, standing dark and gaunt above his control bars. "The machines are dead. Their power is only the counterfeit of life. And no life can grow from death."

He steered our invisible-painted craft toward gigantic Meldoon. We studied its war-torn surface through the telescreen.

"Yonder!" whispered Kel Aran. "A city that yet stands! Perhaps Verel will be there!"

His trembling fingers set the dials, and the beleaguered metropolis grew clear upon the screen. A city vaster and more splendid than Earth had ever seen. The many-colored pylons of it towered from nine low hills. It was surrounded with a double wall: one of cyclopean masonry and an outer barrier of pale green flame.

Beyond the flame, filling the wide flat valley that embraced the hills, crowded the robot hordes. Thronged about their ponderous machines of war were grotesque black-and-red metal monsters, of a thousand strange designs.

"Look!" Kel Aran bent toward the telescreen. "The winged ones! One more deadly trick of Malgarth's."

So we first glimpsed the New Robots. There had been none like them in a million years. Their tapered, stream-lined bodies, their graceful wings, were all of silver-white metal. They were beautiful as the Old Robots were ugly. In the smooth swift freedom of their movements was something far different from the clumsy mechanical penderosity of the old technomatons. Something--_vital_.

"They are new!" I cried. "They are too beautiful, too perfect to be ruthless. Perhaps they will be the friends of man."

But the lean Earthman's head shook slightly, and his jaw tensed white.

"No, Barihorn," he whispered. "They will be our most deadly enemies. For they are quicker than the others, and they can fly. See! They are scouting over the city, and leading the others to attack. They are in command."

His tired, blood-shot gray eyes looked at me briefly.

"Malgarth will never repeat your error, Barihorn. No robot has ever betrayed him. Subservience is built into them. Their radio-senses are always tuned to those above. And, machines that they are, they can only obey."

We drove the _Barihorn_ nearer the city, which Jeron identified from his charts as Achnor, the first outpost of the human colonists in this sector of the Galaxy. The siege grew hotter beneath us. The metal horde pressed ceaselessly against the double wall. And a fleet of the red colossal ships of Malgarth, circling above rained the nine hills with bombs and struck with the lightning of destroying rays.

Valiantly, the citizens fought to defend their homes. Every bright pylon seemed converted into a fortress. Swarming men were building barricades from the debris of shattered towers. Blue rays lanced back at the attacking cruisers, and raked the valley beyond the walls.

"We shall land," whispered Kel Aran.

"If we do," warned Jeron, "we may not leave again."

"Take us down," said the Earthman. "This is the only city we have found surviving. It may be the last. If we are to find Verel anywhere, it must be here."

* * * * *

We waited until the slow rotation of Meldoon carried the city into the night side of the giant planet, and then drove our dark-painted craft down through the cone of shadow. The glare and flicker of the siege spread beneath us. We dropped through the shock and vapor of battle, through the wheeling fleet, and into that circle of pale green flame.

It was in a bomb-torn park that we landed, at the brink of a long open grave where seared and shattered thousands lay side by side. Above us a tower of white-and-gold loomed against the green flame in the sky. Great holes yawned in its walls, and its lower floors were hidden behind mountains of rubble. But it was still defended. Blue rays wavered from its crown, and rocket shells roared from gaping windows.

Behind us in the park lay a long incredible bulk of sagging, twisted crimson metal--one of Malgarth's mighty cruisers, that the defenders had brought down.

A little group of ragged, frantic men came running from beyond it. They dropped into a little depression. I saw that they were setting up something that looked like a glass-barreled telescope.

"A disruptor gun!" gasped Kel Aran. "We must show ourselves."

We began tumbling out through the valve just as the first warning glow flashed in the crystal tube. The men stopped it, and then came wonderingly to meet us. Kel Aran went ahead to tell our identity.

It appeared that the Falcon's fame and the amazing rumors of Barihorn had already penetrated here, for we were received with a wild enthusiasm. The gun crew took up all five upon their shoulders--staggering somewhat under Zerek Oom--and started on a triumphal procession about the battered city.

Soon very drunk on the crude alcohol that came from the food-synthesis plants, Zerek began booming out a speech that rekindled hope and the light of battle on the sea of haggard weary faces that we passed.

Gnarled little Rogo Nug earned even more rapturous applause by passing out all his precious stock of _goona-roon_. For supplies of the drug were exhausted in the city, and it could not be synthesized.

"Verel, Verel!" Kel Aran grew hoarse from shouting against the cheering of the crowds and the roar of distant battle and the shattering blasts of atomic bombs that fell almost unheeded. "Is there a girl of Earth in Achnor?"

There was none who knew. His anxious eyes scanned all the strained and want-pinched faces that we passed.

"If she is here," he whispered, "she will come!"

We learned a little of the siege. The population of Achnor had been three hundred million men, and half that many robots. When the trouble came, a daring band of men had seized the Corporation's agency and the arsenal of the robot police. After several days of fighting in the streets, the robots had been driven from the city. Outside, however, they swiftly formed into a beleaguering army.

All the resources of the city had been hastily mobilized for defense. The entire population was enlisted; even young children served in the war industries plants that turned out synthetic food and munitions. For a time the population had been swelled by refugees from less fortunate localities, and even from the two smaller planets. But soon the city had been completely invested. And now a full half the defenders were already dead.

* * * * *

At last we were rescued from the tumult of our welcome by the harassed military commanders of the city. To a haggard, limping officer, Kel Aran repeated his anxious question:

"Is there a girl of Earth in Achnor?" Emotion choked his voice. "Verel Erin is her name. A blue-eyed, yellow-haired girl, carrying the Dondara Stone--the diamond that is the life of mankind. Is Verel here?"

The commandant shook a tired white head.

"No," he said. "All the refugees who came to Achnor were registered. And there was none from Earth among them. I'm sure of that."

The Earthman's unkempt yellow head sank. It rose again, stubbornly.

"Please have your records searched again," he said grimly. "And use every means to find out if any man in the city knows anything of her--or any survivors of Earth.

"Another thing!" he added suddenly. "Find out if any person knows the way to Malgarth's planet, Mystoon. She might be there."

The officer shook his head again.

"We'll try," he said. "But it will be no use to search the records. For if the Custodian were here, and free, she must already have offered us the power of the Stone. And no man has ever learned the way to Black Mystoon."

Achnor was a city of magnificent ruins. Not one mile-high pylon had escaped some injury. The people were half famished, ragged, wild-eyed with fatigue and strain. But still they could sing. I heard them singing Kel Aran's old songs of the space-ways. And I was surprised to hear a Ballad of Barihorn--the lilting legend of my return to destroy the robots I had made a million years ago.

That song depressed me bitterly. I realized more keenly than ever that I was a very ordinary man, hopelessly inadequate for that fantastic task.

We were dining with the commandant, on scant bowls of a yellow flat-tasting synthetic soup, when appalling word came that the robots were breaking through the north defenses. A bomb had wrecked a power plant, opening a gap in the green shielding barrier of atomic energy.

We followed the reserves rushed to meet the invaders. Never had I imagined anything so dreadful. The red gigantic ships, plunging out of the lurid smoky sky, rained tremendous bombs and slashed at the defenders with blue appalling swords of fire. Rocket batteries in the valley hurled ruin and death into the city. And a monstrous horde of robots, commanded by those graceful winged things of silver, came pouring through the gap.

* * * * *

Singing the song of Barihorn, starved and weary and battered with all the appalling forces of that mechanical invasion, the human defenders clung to their posts. And died there. Incinerated by disruptor rays. Buried under toppling debris. Consumed by the acrid luminescent gas that burst from the rocket shells. But every tower became a fortress. No man was taken alive.

"I'm glad that I'm a man," exulted Kel Aran. He was blistered and blackened from a barytron ray that had come too near. His disruptor gun was empty in his hand. "No machine could die like this, for they are not alive!"

"We must leave, Kel." It was big Zerek Oom, gray behind his bright tattooing, hoarse and trembling. "It's time for us to go." He caught nervously at the Earthman's arm. "Or we'll die here, Kel!"

Kel Aran laughed at him, and pushed grimy fingers back through his singed yellow hair.

"And where's a better place to die, Zerek?" he demanded. "There's no other city left. No other men that we can find. There's no hope now of finding Verel. No need, for the technomatons have won. What is there better than to fight with the rest?"

"But, Kel!" Zerek's teeth chattered. "To die--"

"Yes, to die--"

The Earthman's voice caught suddenly. He looked quickly upward. And I saw a flake of prismatic color drifting out of the lurid roaring chaos of the sky. It dropped upon his shoulder, clung there eagerly. And a soft voice warbled faintly:

"Kel! Oh, Kel, poor old Setsi's come so far! Her poor old life is nearly done. But find her a drop of grog, Kel. Please, oh, please! For Setsi's got a thing to tell! Grog, Kel! Just a drop of rum, so she can tell!"

I stared, rigid with wonderment. For the bright thing on the Earthman's shoulder was the sandbat, the curious silicic being that we had lost in Malgarth's trap on far Ledros. Or part of her. For her glittering form was no longer whole.

XI

THE GIRL OF EARTH

Zerek Oom looked sadly at the spoonful of raw synthetic alcohol left in the flask from his hip, and gave it to Kel Aran. The Earthman emptied it into his palm, gently detached the stiffly clinging sandbat from his shoulder and held it over the reeking liquor. The bright, broken body stirred weakly, and it sucked at the fluid.

"Setsi," Kel implored. "What is it you have to tell? Is it--Verel?"

The sandbat was silent, sucking avidly at the alcohol. I saw that it was gravely injured. Two of its six flat limbs were gone. And, over half its remaining body, the iridescent scales had been fused into a dull glassy mass.

"Setsi's hurt! Poor Setsi's hurt! She's dying!" The whirring voice came faintly. "Help her, Kel. Give her grog."

"Tell me!" demanded Kel Aran. "Where is Verel? Do you know?"

The bright many-colored fragment of the silicic being clung to his big hand. The solitary dark eye in the middle of its vivid pattern stared up at him sorrowfully.

"Setsi's come a long way to tell you, Kel." The melodious warbling was so low, beneath the thundering chaos of the robots' assault, that we had to bend intently forward to hear. "Oh, what a long and dreadful way! For she's injured, Kel, oh, so sorely! And the machines rule all the planets she could find, but this. Oh, those evil machines, so blackly evil! They destroy all life. And they have no grog for Setsi!"

The Earthman shook the little shining being, and gazed impatiently into its single eye.

"But, Verel? Where's she?"

"Oh, Kel!" sobbed that faint liquid voice. "Don't be angry with poor Setsi. For she has come so far to tell you, Kel! She had flown all the way from dead Ledros. She's crossed scores of light years of hostile space. Wounded and tired and all alone, she came to tell you, Kel!"

"Tell me what?"

Bright membranes fluttered. Like some incredible, diamond-winged moth, the sandbat lifted briefly from his hand. It dropped back, and clung.

"Setsi's come to tell you that she found Verel, Kel. When she was out alone in space, on the long, long way from Ledros, Kel, her mind found Verel's. Found Verel all alone, Kel. Oh, all alone, Kel. And so in need of aid! For the robots hunt her, Kel. And she has lost the Stone!"

"Where is she?" whispered Kel Aran. "Please, Setsi! _Where_--"

"She's on Meldoon, Kel," came that tiny whir. "Setsi found her on Meldoon, where we are. She's been on Black Mystoon, Kel. Malgarth held her there. Oh, Kel, that's a fearful place! Guarded Mystoon, where old Malgarth hides! But she escaped it, Kel. She came to Meldoon. She tried to enter Achnor. For Achnor is the last city, Kel. But the robots turned her back. She fled into the desert, Kel. For her geodesic sled was wrecked. She's hiding in the desert, Kel. In the grim, gray desert of Kaanat. The robots hunt her, there. She's in danger, Kel. Oh, what black danger!"

"Where? Can you show us?"

"Setsi'll guide you, Kel. She'll show you--if she lives, Kel. For poor old Setsi's dying. Her long, long days are done. Soon she'll join those other two. She'll try to show you, Kel, before she's gone. But she must have a little rum! Setsi's come so far, Kel. Her wound's so grave. She'd die now, Kel, without her rum!"

* * * * *

And the sandbat stiffened suddenly on the Earthman's hand, like some strange diamond-dusted jewel.

"Come!" shouted Kel Aran. "We've got to go to Verel."

We started back toward the park where we had left the _Barihorn_. It was a march through pandemonium. The robot fleet still hailed death into the city, and the metal invaders still swarmed through the gap in the northward defenses. One red mighty ship had fallen across our route. Its mechanical crew survived; it was a mile-long fortress of the enemy, within the city. Flaming rays and fearful explosions met a desperate attempt to storm it. And a metal column came to its aid, led by the trim, silver-winged New Robots.

A sluggish, creeping mountain of purple-shining gas blocked our progress. Dim-seen men within it shrieked and died and flowed into black thick liquid. We took masks from the dead without, and plunged into it.

Kel Aran led the way, clutching the thin bright fragment of Setsi. Jeron Roc stalked beside him, tall and dark and implacable. Zerek Oom was very sober again, green behind his mask. Wizened little Rogo Nug was missing. But he rejoined us suddenly, triumphantly displaying a great bundle of the rust-colored roots of _goona-roon_--he had raided the hoarded stock of a wealthy trader.

We came to the tiny ship, half buried in debris, but unharmed. It carried us upward again, through the glare and din of death. The doomed city dropped beneath, a greenish, red-struck, thunder-shaken storm cloud on the dark face of the planet. We turned eastward, toward the vast flat desert region of Kaanat.

Zerek Oom opened his last treasured bottle of rum. It revived the stiffened sandbat, but feebly.

"Hurry, Kel!" came its faint trill. "Oh, hurry! For Verel is in danger! And Setsi may die before she can show you the way. Hurry, hurry! And find more rum for Setsi!"

Kel Aran held his ear close above the feebly vibrating membrane. Setsi's voice had become too faint for the rest of us to hear. He relayed her directions to Jeron, at the controls.

The land beneath us had been desolated by the victorious robots, ruthlessly. Buildings had been burned, masonry blasted, life blotted from field and forest with poison sprays. There remained only a sere wilderness of barren soil and naked stone.

In the universe of the triumphant robots, life would be exterminated.

"In that canyon!" The voice of Kel Aran was tense and dry. "Beyond the plain."

He laid his ear back upon the bright crystalline thing on his hand. And Jeron dropped our little craft into a vast rugged gorge. Dark jagged walls tumbled down, red and brown and black, swallowing the silver filament of a buried river.

Here and there, however, in some inaccessible crevice, I saw some tiny glint of precious green--some bit of grass or shrub that had escaped the robots. Life was yet a stubborn thing.

The _Barihorn_ slipped around dark fantastic battlements of age-weathered stone, and passed the grim towers that guarded a tributary gorge. Something flashed, then, on a narrow ledge ahead. And the sandbat fluttered briefly on the hand of Kel Aran.

"Oh, there she is," I heard the whirring trill. "There's your Verel, Kel! Your lovely Verel, Kel. And the frightful things that stalk her!" That sad, solitary eye seemed to cloud and darken. "Now, it's farewell, Kel. Oh, forever farewell, to all the long, long life that Setsi's lived." The sobbing warble was almost too faint to hear. "There'll be no more grog for Setsi."

* * * * *

And she stiffened abruptly on the Earthman's hand.

"Here." The eyes of Zerek Oom glistened wetly, and he offered his bottle. "Give her rum, Kel. All of it."

"No." Kel Aran shook his head. "I think--Setsi's dead!"

Hard and fragile as some broken toy of blown glass, the silicic being lay on his trembling palm. The queer still fragment of a gorgeous crystalline flower, green and purple and scarlet and blue.

"Queer," muttered Jeron from his levers. "To think that she had lived since man was born on Earth. And now that she is dead."

But we had no more thought, just then, for Setsi. Kel Aran was already pointing through the ports, shouting. I saw a weary human figure stagger across the ledge ahead, and drop behind a boulder. A bright ray stabbed, and stabbed again. And I saw two bright graceful things wheeling and diving above her, like silver hawks. Two of the New Robots!

"It's Verel!" Kel Aran was sobbing. "This time _really_--Verel!" His lean hand swept Jeron back from the controls, hurled the _Barihorn_ into a reckless dive. And he began to hum the chorus of his old song, "till I find her or I die."

The deadly velocity of that unexpected dive, the deadly skill of the Earthman at the controls, caught one of the winged robots square on the nose of the _Barihorn_, smashed it to bright fragments. The Saturnian tumbled up into the gun turret, to reach our little barytron projector. But the second metal thing had already fled up the gorge. It was gone between two pillars of time-carved stone, before Kel could turn the ship again.

"It will give the alarm!" he muttered. Then his voice was choked with joy. "But Verel! We have found her."

He dropped our little ship lightly on the ledge, and leaped out through the valve. The girl swayed to her feet, and stared at him incredulously. Her young body showed the blue pinch of want. She was ragged, scratched, bruised. A heavy, clumsy-looking cathode gun--a weapon she must have taken from the robots--was clutched in her thin hands. Yet, for all that, she was beautiful.

I could see the lovely Verel Erin that Kel Aran had loved and surrendered in that hidden valley on the Earth. For her hollowed eyes were blue and her hair was a spun-gold tangle, and her tanned face still had a lean honest grace.

She came limping very slowly to meet Kel. The heavy weapon fell from her hands. A queer, stricken wonder had stiffened her face. She reached out a trembling hand, touched his shoulder, his lips. And a slow, transcendent joy illuminated her features.

"Kel!" she said softly, "you've come."

The Earthman moved hungrily, to take her in his arms. But she withdrew. All the joy fled from her face, leaving it bleak and gaunt with pain.

"The Stone, Kel!" she cried bitterly. "I've lost the Stone! Malgarth has it, still, in his guarded temple on Black Mystoon."

XII

THE FASTNESS OF MALGARTH

Knowing that the robots would soon be after us, we left the great planet Meldoon, and fled again into the wastes of space. When we had given her a little to eat and to drink, for the robots had left nothing in this land to sustain any living thing, Verel Erin whispered her story.

Jeron stood by the controls, scanning the telescreen for inevitable pursuit. Little Rogo Nug was tending his hard-driven converters. Zerek Oom, rattling pans in the galley, was cooking up some delicacy for the famished girl. Pale and thin from all her hardships, but yet beautiful, she lay on a narrow bunk. Kel Aran and I stood beside her, and the Earthman grasped her hand.

"We saw the Earth flung into the Sun," said Kel Aran. "And the fleet of Gugon Kul destroying all who sought to escape. A dreadful time!" His voice was husky. "We hardly dared hope for you, Verel."

The girl's blue eyes looked a long time up at his face, in them a blend of joy and dread that somehow wrenched the heart. She caught a deep, sobbing breath, at last, and whispered:

"It's a long time, Kel. A long, long time, since we herded goats in the hidden valley, and climbed to the eagle's nest! Since I was chosen Custodian, and you went away to be a rover of space. Since--" Her whisper caught. "Since the end of the Earth!"

"Tell me." The Earthman bent closer. "What happened?"

"From the observatory on the peak," she breathed, "we saw the fleet come. All the planet was riven with the forces that checked it in its orbit. The sky was shadowed by day and luridly bright by night. Quakes and tidal waves drove us to the uplands. Soon it was clear that the Earth indeed was doomed.

"Then the Warders opened the cave where the ship of escape had been always kept provisioned and ready, against discovery. A crew was chosen, by lot. And I went aboard, with the Stone. The Earth had already dropped past Venus, when the last night fell. We tried to run up the cone of shadow. But a magnetic ray caught us, and the fleet was warned.

"We tried to fight--to fly." Her eyes closed a moment, and her thin face was rigid with pain. "It was no use. We were the prey Malgarth had sent them to hunt. We were brushed with a barytron beam."

She gulped, and her hand went tense in Kel's.

"I woke up in a hospital room on Gugon Kul's flagship, with a humming robot nurse bending over me. All the Warders--all the people I had ever known but you, Kel--and I knew only that you had been lost ten years in space--they all were dead. And the Stone had been taken from me!"

Kel Aran touched her pale brow, softly.

"And what then, Verel."

"When I could walk, robots took me from the room, and up to Gugon Kul. He laughed, and made the robots drag me to a port, and I saw the end of the world. A tiny dark circle splashed in the Sun, and was gone. The Earth--gone!

"Then I was put on a tender ship of the Space Police. I saw no more human beings, Kel. But only whirring, clicking, clattering robots, staring at me with cold blue lenses that had no feeling." She shuddered on the bunk. "A world of machines, without any voices, any laughter, any emotion you could understand. It was dreadful, Kel. Horrible!"

* * * * *

He caught her trembling hand again, waited.

"The robot police took me to some agency of the Corporation," her dry weary whisper resumed. "There they put me on a larger ship, that was laden with the loot of planets that the robots had vanquished. That carried me to some other world. The robot nurses drugged me as we landed. When I came to, we were on another ship, out in space again.

"That ship took me to Mystoon!"

She lay motionless for a long time, then, with her eyes closed again. Her breath was a faint dry sobbing sound. Softly, the Earthman brushed the glistening tangle of yellow hair back from her forehead.

"Mystoon?" he asked at last. "What's it like, Verel?"

The blue eyes opened, somber pools of dread.

"Don't ask me, Kel," she whispered. "I can't endure to talk of Black Mystoon. Not now. No more than I must--Malgarth's there. It has been his hidden fortress for half a million years. It's guarded well. I think I'm the first human being to escape it--if any had been taken there before me. I did it only because I had to find you, Kel. _Had_ to!"

She clutched his hand again, and sighed.

"But still Malgarth has the Stone, on Mystoon. He has preserved it, trying to find in it the secret of his own mortality. I saw it once, while they were making that--that copy of me."

She shuddered again.

"The Stone?" Urgency tensed the Earthman's voice. "Still it has the power to destroy Malgarth?"

The golden head nodded, on the bunk.

"Still it holds the ancient secret, that Barihorn entrusted to it. And now at last it is willing to strike--for clearly no other recourse is left. The Shadow of the Stone came to me before I escaped, and begged for aid to strike. It begged me to send you, Kel, and Barihorn--Barihorn, who it told me had returned to crush his old creation! It foretold that I should find you on Meldoon. And it aided me to plan the escape."

Dark with wonder, her blue eyes came briefly to my face.

"And you are Barihorn," she breathed. "Maker of Malgarth! Well, it's time you returned! Still the Shadow waits, within the Stone. But it won't endure for long, after Malgarth's science has got its secret."

Kel Aran was asking:

"You escaped from Mystoon? How?"

The girl's eyes went back to him.

"I followed the Shadow's plan," she whispered. "It showed me how to snatch the cathode gun from the robot guard who brought me food. How to escape through the long black corridors of Malgarth's temple. How to reach the geodesic sled that was waiting for one of his silver-winged robot commanders. There was pursuit. But the ship was very swift. And I _had_ to reach you, Kel!"

The Earthman then bent over her, tensely.

"You did." And his voice snapped with the question: "Can you guide us back to Mystoon, Verel? Do you know the way?"

Faintly, she nodded again.

"It's a long, strange way, Kel. But I can try. For we must reach the Stone before it is destroyed."

"Or," Kel Aran put in grimly, "before we are!"

Then I ventured to ask an anxious question.

"If this Stone has the power to destroy Malgarth," I asked, "why doesn't it destroy him?"

"If it were as simple as that--" The girl's somber, curious eyes came to me again. "The ages must have fogged your memory, Barihorn. The Stone has the secret of Malgarth's doom, yes. But it has no power to act alone. The Shadow can only guide its human helpers. That is why there were Custodian and Warders."

* * * * *

Her head shook gravely.

"No, Barihorn, the Stone can never strike at Malgarth, unless we arrive to aid it."

Red stars followed us again--the repulsors of pursuing robot ships. But Kel Aran, singing a gay new song of the return of Barihorn and the vengeance of the old Dondara Stone, drove our tiny ship through a dark asteroid cluster. The ponderous cruisers of the fleet were delayed in finding safe passage through those black hurtling islands of space. We gained a little margin of time. And then, with Verel for a guide, Jeron turned the _Barihorn_ toward the secret world of Malgarth's lair.

It was toward the great Horse's Head nebula in Orion that she directed us, that strange ink-black silhouette against the stars that had so puzzled the astronomers of my own day. Twice again we evaded the red stars that pursued. And at last the girl guided us into the dark peril of the stellar cloud.

Vast beyond comprehension, it was a lightless cosmic desert of drifting dust and hurtling rocks and plunging planetary bodies. On all the space charts it was marked, _dangerous, impenetrable_; all shipping was warned to keep two light years clear of its dark fringes.

But Malgarth, it seemed, had found a safe path through its perils, half a million years ago. With Verel's aid, we found that path, and followed it. And all the stars were lost in that cloud of universal darkness--even the crimson stars that had pressed so close behind us.

"I think we have left them," said Verel Erin. "For even the most of the robots do not know the dark way we go.--But there are others enough, waiting for us. Mystoon is guarded well."

That was a strange passage. There was no light, not even any glow of rare _nebulium_. There was only the pattern of unseen magnetic fields to guide us, only fancy to picture the dark walls of death beside us.

Once a frightful hail of meteoric fragments, penetrating even the deflector fields, battered the tiny ship deafeningly. The guiding field-potentials had shifted since she passed, Verel said despairingly. We were lost in that sea of darkness.

But Kel Aran took the controls, and brought us safely out of the meteor swarm. And the pale anxious girl, studying the dials, presently found her bearings again. The _Barihorn_ slipped ahead down that unseen passage. And at last there was light ahead!

A dull-red, ominous glow.

"See the red!" Verel whispered. "That is the zone of destroying radiation, that Malgarth set up to guard Mystoon. A spherical field of force. The black planet is within it."

The crimson shone murkily through clouds of nebular dust. Dark rivers of hurtling stony fragments drew deadly curtains across it. But we came at last into the more open center of the nebula, and dropped toward that gigantic globe of somber red.

"The force-field is a billion miles in diameter," Verel told us. "It acts to repulse or disintegrate all matter that approaches. Thus it serves to guard Mystoon from stray fragments of the nebula--as well as from such guests as ourselves!"

"How can we pass it?" the Saturnian pilot asked.

"The ships of Malgarth have coils that set up a neutralizing field," she told him. "The craft on which I escaped had such a unit. But I didn't learn the design. The only way is to hit it at full power. And hope!"

"I don't know--"

Jeron studied a row of dials, and shook his swarthy head.

"From what the analyzers show, I don't know--"

* * * * *

Humming some gay ballad of space, the yellow-haired Earthman stepped lightly to the control bars.

"I'll take over, Jeron," he said. "We've got to go through."

A brief consultation with the girl, a hasty check of field-intensities, and he called to Rogo Nug to push his converters to full power. The whole ship sang to the musical hum of the engines, and the _Barihorn_ plunged toward that crimson ball.

It expanded before us, against the dark angry clouds of the nebula, like the glowing sphere of some giant sun. And its barrier forces, I knew, could be as deadly as the incandescent gases of a Betelgeuse or an Antares!

The Earthman stood crouched grimly over the controls. The last girl of Earth stood close beside him, one hand trembling on his shoulder.

"We may not pass," her soft voice husked. "But if we must die--the last hope of man--then I would have it this way.--Even in death, there can be a victory."

And her voice joined then, with his, in the chorus of that rollicking, picaresque ballad of space.

That red and awesome globe grew before us, until suddenly, through some trick of refraction, it was a globe no longer, but a colossal incandescent bowl--and we were plunging straight toward its fiery bottom.

I heard the quick catch in the breath of Kel Aran, saw the whiteness on his face and the sudden tensity of his arms on the bright control bars. His song was cut off. And Verel, a broken note dying in her throat, turned to him in choked apprehension.

The _Barihorn_ had met some tremendous force. It lurched and rocked and veered against Kel's guiding skill as if we had encountered a mighty headwind. The even song of the converters had become a thin-drawn screaming. I heard the startled nasal plaint of little Rogo Nug:

"By Malgarth's brazen belly! _Burning up_--"

For, suddenly, the ship was intolerably hot!

I have held a piece of iron in my hand, in the field of a powerful magnet, until it was heated blistering hot by the hysteresis effect. I have seen a potato cooked with ultra-short radio waves. Some force in that radiation-barrier produced a similar phenomenon--but a million times more intense.

The ship was plunging through a cloud of angry red. It seemed to me that the very metal of her hull was almost incandescent. Paint bubbled and smoked. The air, when I tried to inhale, seared my lungs. A million needles of intolerable heat were probing my body.

Verel Erin slipped down in a little white heap, beside Kel Aran. Big Zerek Oom came swaying out of his galley, with a wet towel wrapped around his head.

"That cursed stove!" he gasped. "Gone wrong--"

He toppled, in the corridor.

* * * * *

The grimly crouching Earthman swayed over the controls, and dashed perspiration out of his eyes. I smelt burning skin, and saw the white smoke from his hands, where they gripped the metal bars.

"Barihorn!" he gasped. "If you can lift Verel--the hot deck--"

Another quarter minute, I think, would have completed the matter of roasting us. But we had struck the barrier zone with a velocity many times that of light. Despite the repulsion that had checked our flight, that terrific momentum carried us through.

For suddenly the probing blades of heat were gone from my body. Metal was still blistering to the touch, the air still stifling. But thermostats were clicking, and a cool refreshing breath came from the ventilators.

"We're inside the barrier sphere," whispered Kel Aran, triumphantly. "And _there_--there's Mystoon!"

The girl swayed in my arms, conscious again. We staggered toward the ports. They glowed with dusky red. We were inside a hollow ball of murky crimson--a universe of glaring red!

Jeron came back to the controls. Gingerly, with his scorched hands, Kel Aran set the telescreen upon Mystoon. A huge planet, black against that barrier of lurid red. Its rugged surface was crystallized into fantastic monolithic mountains, cleft with frightful gorges.

Verel caught her breath, and pointed at the screen.

"Below!" she gasped. "Malgarth's pit!"

A yawning midnight chasm grew upon the screen. It must have been a hundred miles across. The instrument revealed no bottom. Interminable walls of black, incredibly massive fortifications ringed its lip. Vast fields beyond them, leveled in that cragged wilderness, were patterned with row upon row of battleships of space, their mile-long red spindles looking tiny as toys.

"Where--" Kel Aran was voiceless, huskily whispering. "The robot? The Stone?"

"The dark temple of Malgarth stands upon a guarded island," the girl breathed, "on the red sea that floors the pit. That is many hundred miles below the mouth. We must pass the fleet, and the forts, and the batteries in the caves below, and the robot hordes that guard the temple. The Stone will be somewhere there. Unless Malgarth--"

Her low voice was cut off. Wordless, she stared at the screen. A terrible silence throbbed in the tiny control room, and became intolerable. For a thing was rising from the black circle of Malgarth's pit.

Something--incredible!

The trembling hand of Kel Aran touched the Earth girl's shoulder. She pulled her dread-distended eyes from the thing upon the screen, and read the question on his face, and shook her head mutely.

The thing was like a ray of blackness. But I knew that it was--_palpable!_ It did not spread with increasing distance from its source. And it was not straight. It writhed and twisted like something living.

It was an inconceivable tentacle of solid darkness, reaching out of the planet, groping for our ship!

"Power!" Jeron gasped a frantic appeal into the engine room phone. "For man's sake, Rogo--power!"

The _Barihorn_ spun fleetly aside--but all her speed was as nothing. For that Midgard Serpent recoiled. It paused, and arched its ebon coils. Its blind head seemed to watch our frantic flight. Then--it struck!

Choking darkness filled the ship. Blackness that was absolute! It pressed upon me, so that I could move no limb. All my senses were smothered. I could hear no voice. Even the racing thrum of the engines was stilled.

I knew only that we were being sucked resistlessly downward--

Into the abyss of Malgarth!

XIII

THE MIRROR OF DARKNESS

That smothering blackness was abruptly gone. Sensation came back, and I could move again. A faint crimson light filtered through the ports. But the silence remained. The engines were stopped. I knew that the _Barihorn_ was motionless.

"Where--" Kel Aran was groping through the scarlet gloom. "What--"

Verel was a white wraith beside him.

"We're in the temple," came her hopeless whisper. "In the power of Malgarth!"

I stumbled toward the nearest port. Outside, in the dim red distance, I could make out great square black columns soaring upward--columns vast as mountains. Beyond them was a wall. Mile upon mile above was a domed black roof, pierced with a vast round orifice through which the dusky sky was visible like a dull-red, malignant sun.

In the immensity of that edifice I sensed the overwhelming might of the robots--this dread, mind-crushing power, born of man but now risen ruthlessly to destroy him.

"Power, Rogo," Jeron begged again. "Can't you give me power?"

The gaunt gigantic Saturnian still struggled vainly with the dead controls. Faintly, from the phone, I heard the nasal voice of Rogo Nug:

"By the steel skull of Malgarth, Jeron, I thought I'd had a stroke! One instant--"

Converters and generators throbbed suddenly to vibrant life. Jeron flung his weight on the power bar. The engines raced and coils hammered against a terrific overload. A tremendous river of energy, I knew, was running into the space-contractor coils.

But the Barihorn moved not one inch!

The tall pilot turned from the controls, bewildered.

"It's still holding us, Kel," he gasped. "Whatever dragged us down!"

The Earthman pushed long fingers decisively back through the thick tangle of his yellow hair.

"Then," he said, "we'll leave the ship, and go out on foot to seek the Stone."

"We may as well." The girl's whisper was thick with dread. "Before _they_ take us out."

She pointed to the ports. A white wing flashed past. A company of the New Robots, I saw, were wheeling through the blood-red gloom, close about the ship. Gleaming in stream-lined grace, they were beautiful as a flock of silver birds. But every one of them held, in slender argent tentacles, a massive cathode gun. However beautiful, they were deadly!

Testing his two thin-tubed disruptor guns, Kel Aran looked anxiously at the pale girl.

"The Stone?" he asked. "Where is it?"

"I don't know." Verel shook her haggard head. "We can only try to search. Unless the Shadow comes--"

"Search?" The fat flesh of Zerek Oom was a livid color beneath his bright tattooing. His thick white hands fumbled a disruptor gun as if it were something utterly strange. "We can't go out, Kel!" he protested hoarsely. "Not against those winged things."

"That's what we came to do," said the Earthman.

* * * * *

And he led the way back toward the valve.

I don't know why I had not looked _down_. I had seen the titanic walls that leapt above us, and the wheeling host of robots. But I had not looked down. And now, when I came to step from the valve in the side of the helpless ship, something caught my breath. Something filled me with a sickness of infinite alarm.

Beneath was a film of blackness. It was like a mirror. For deep, deep in it was a dim image of the red skylight that lit the temple. White phantoms of the winged robots flashed through it. It yielded a shimmering picture of Kel Aran, who had leapt out upon it before me.

It was a pool of darkness. The surface of it spun in a way that sickened me with giddy vertigo. I felt the thin-leashed might of unguessed, cataclysmic forces just beyond that film. It seemed to my reeling senses that that pool was deeper by far than the blood-red sun mirrored in it. It was an unknown gulf, extra-dimensional, deeper than the space between the stars!

I tried to put down that dizzy fear. I held my breath, and gripped the cold butt of my disruptor gun, and leapt out beside Kel Aran, upon that darkly shining film.

At first my feet slipped sickeningly, as if there had been no friction at all to hold them. And then they were anchored with a strange attraction, so that all my strength could not lift or slide them.

It was the power of that mirror-film, I knew, that had drawn down the _Barihorn_, and now held her.

Verel had followed me. Brown little Rogo Nug jumped after her, stolidly chewing his _goona-roon_, and spat a purple stream upon that black giddy mirror. Zerek Oom paused in the valve. He gulped and wheezed and mopped at his tattooed forehead, and then flung himself unsteadily forward. They all slipped and staggered upon that glassy film, as I had done, and were as suddenly held fast.

"By Malgarth's brazen bowels," gasped Rogo Nug, "we're stuck like flies in syrup!"

He swung up his bright disruptor tube, toward the white-winged robots dropping upon us.

"For Barihorn and Man!" The Earthman's battle cry pealed out. "Strike for the Stone!" He began to chant his song of Barihorn, and white destroying rays lanced from the guns in his hands.

That desperate sortie, however, had been hopeless from the first. We could hardly have fought a way through that winged horde, even if the unknown energies of the thing I have called a mirror had not gripped our feet.

The robots did not even use the cathode guns in their talons. They dropped thick about us, a wall of flashing silver. They dived on argent wings. White twisting ropes snatched at our weapons. The guns of Kel Aran must have destroyed a dozen; the rest of us perhaps accounted for as many more--but they were nothing against the hundreds that survived.

* * * * *

One fell upon me, terrible in that bloody light, mysterious in its quick counterfeit of life, beautiful in its silver grace. A white tentacle whipped away my weapon. Argent snakes swiftly wrapped my arms, my ankles, my waist, my throat.

I fought those coiling arms. They contracted ruthlessly, more cruel than fetters of steel. My breath sighed out, and my lungs labored in vain. Blood hammered in my brain. My eyes dimmed, swelled in their sockets.

Alertly, the eyes of the monster were watching me. Bright and hard as some blue crystal, they yet looked oddly alive. In that white, clean-molded, bird-like head, they were clear and beautiful. Perhaps, the vagrant thought crossed my reeling mind, such a machine, in cosmic justice, had as much right as man to survive...

"Kel!" Verel's thin, tortured cry cut through the roaring in my ears. "Kel--_the ship!_"

I twisted my head, against the smooth deadly coils of cold metal about my throat. They seemed to relax a little. My eyes cleared. I looked for the little _Barihorn_, behind us. And it was gone! That dark-shining surface, where it had been, was empty!

Helpless in the tentacles of another robot, the Earth girl was staring down into that black mirror.

"The ship!" she was sobbing. "It--_it fell!_"

I saw it, then, beneath us--fast-dropping into that depthless pool of darkness. It was _sucked_ down, spinning end over end, far faster than it should have fallen. It became the merest whirling sliver, and was lost in the dull round reflection of the crimson sky.

I shuddered, in the metal arms that held me. That black mirror-film was as mysteriously deadly as it had seemed. Which one of us might drop through it next?

All my four companions were helpless as myself. The lean face of Kel Aran was very white. A scarlet stain crept from the corner of his mouth, and I saw that his lip was bitten through.

"Farewell, Vere!" I heard his hopeless whisper. "We've fought in vain. Barihorn, farewell!"

Strange words, from the Falcon of Earth. But his voice choked. His gasping breath stopped. His unkempt yellow head dropped limply forward, and his lean body collapsed in the silver tentacles.

"Kel, Kel!" Agonized, the girl fought the silver ropes that bound her. They sank resistlessly into her white flesh. And the silver being spoke, in a clear, melodious voice.

"Be still. You can accomplish nothing."

That grave calm speech, from the oddly bird-like robot, was somehow a thing eerie beyond expression. And it carried a certainty of victory--of man's extinction--that chilled my heart.

The white tentacles about the Earthman must have relaxed a little. Abruptly, now, he was transformed from apparent death to lightning action. He twisted and surged against the robot that held him, snatching for its unused cathode gun.

His ruse came very near success. His hands found the clumsy weapon, and dragged it from its sling. But the metal coils constricted on his body. His breath came out, in an involuntary scream. His body made snapping noises, beneath that pitiless pressure. His face turned purple. Blood rushed from his lungs. He slumped again, unconscious in reality.

The cathode gun fell out of his hands--

And straight through the dark-shimmering film upon which we stood, as if it had encountered no resistance whatever! It was lost in the red-mirrored disk of sky.

The last trick of the Falcon had failed.

XIV

THE SHADOW OF THE STONE