Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true. Toward night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to say the prayer for the dying.
While the priest was administering the blessing, the dying man suddenly buckled violently, his hands thrashing, his body contorting up and back, shaking like a bridge wracked by high water. The priest attempted to continue the prayer as the dying man thrashed madly on the bed, every sore on his body pulsing vividly; indeed, as he stretched and his eyes rolled madly in his head, the little sores started to spurt cobalt bile like hideous little dragon mouths spitting gouts of fire. The priest scrabbled for his Holy Book and desperately continued chanting, reaching forward with a tremulous hand to try and place the cross to Nikolai’s cold forehead, but the dying man was bucking forward and back, slapping at his stomach, which bulged forward to an obscene degree. He moaned terribly, and Karnak emitted an awful, high-pitched shriek of distress.
“It is inside,” cried Nikolai. “Inside…”
At that moment the door was kicked open, and two young and handsome men with regimental-grade smokers burst into the sickroom.
“We are representatives of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. We have come today to… dear Heavenly Father!”
For while the man was speaking, Nikolai sat bolt upright, and his skin tore clean from his body like the wrapping ripped from a Class I plaything, his flesh flying free and scattering about the floor of the room like paper and ash. All present, including the two Toy Soldiers, stood frozen as Nikolai Dmitrich issued his last gurgling scream before his head lolled backward at a terrible angle. The remains of his body were shook free like a useless husk: shook free by a hunched, slavering inhuman being, more than six feet in height, its flexing, green-gray exoskeleton rippling with knobby stubs. The monstrosity, now standing astride the sickbed, had some dozens of eyes, clustered around a jagged, reptilian snout ending in a crooked, dirty-yellow beak. A thick, scaly tail swept about the room, while four stubby arms, each ending in a grasping three-fingered talon, lashed out in various directions.
Levin cried out and threw himself in front of Kitty; the priest wept and murmured prayers into his beard. Tatiana leaped in a rapid jeté from where she had been hiding, along with Socrates, behind the curtain in the rear of the room-and landed on one of the Toy Soldiers.
“Ah! Help!” shouted the Toy Soldier, as the Class III, her normal pink hue tinged with furious orange, clawed at his eyes with her long, manicured groznium fingernails. “Help!”
His colleague was unable to respond: for, as the others watched, transfixed, the unearthly creature let out a high, shrieking war cry, bounded off the bed, flexed its gigantic claws in midair, and landed on the other Toy Soldier, who had only just gathered the presence of mind to raise the smoker and draw aim. Before he could fire, the beast snapped its beak shut on the man’s head like the jaws of a trap.
The monster reared back with the soldier’s body dangling limply from its mouth, smashed its fat tree trunk of a tail against the wall, and stomped off through the broken door.
Tatiana meanwhile remained crouched over the other Toy Soldier, battering away robotically with clenched fists, dozens of blows a second, until at last the man stopped moving. The lissome Class III then sat coiled over his body for a long moment, the urgent flash of her eyebank slowly returning to its normal, even pulse.
NIKOLAI DMITRICH ISSUED HIS LAST GURGLING SCREAM BEFORE HIS HEAD LOLLED BACKWARD AT A TERRIBLE ANGLE
Through all of this, Levin stared with forlorn confusion at the sickbed where formerly his brother had lain-now but a tangle of sodden sheets, dotted with pieces of scalp, flesh in ill-colored hunks, small, gray piles of shed skin. Socrates gingerly helped Tatiana to her feet, and then bent to examine the battered body of the Toy Soldier, plucking a visionary-hundredfold from the metallic instrument tangle of his beard.
Kitty regarded her Class III with confusion, love, and fear. “I… I cannot express my thanks, that you took such a risk in defending our safety, as well as your own. But, but Tati…,” she trailed off, and Levin was forced to complete the thought for her: “Tatiana, you have violated the Iron Laws. No robot may strike a human being! How could your programming have allowed such an action?”
“I am uncertain,” said Tatiana slowly, anxiously smoothing out her tutu with one trembling end-effector.
“I shall explain,” answered Socrates, looking up from the Toy Soldier’s unmoving form. “This is not the corpse of a human being. This is groznium. These men were robots.”
As he and Kitty bid a tearful farewell to their brave beloved-companions, and began along the road home to Pokrovskoe, Dmitrich Levin was left to contend with twin mysteries: the grisly death of his brother, apparently as the result of having somehow become a sort of human hatching ground for an abominable alien creature; and the revelation that the Ministry’s new elite cadre, the very persons charged with collecting the nation’s Class Ills for adjustment, were not persons at all but perfectly humanoid robots. These mysteries revived in Levin that sense of horror in the face of the insoluble enigma that had come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had slept beside him. This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of life and death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever.
But now, thanks to his wife’s presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair. In spite of death and fear, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him toward love and toward life.
When they arrived home, the provincial doctor confirmed his earlier suppositions in regard to Kitty’s health: her indisposition was a symptom indicating that she was with child.
CHAPTER 13
FROM THE MOMENT when Alexei Alexandrovich understood that all that was expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without burdening her with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt the madness that simmered like a kind of fever in the back of his brain begin to burn hotter and hotter-exactly what the Face had hoped for. Let Alexei be weak… let him grant forgiveness… let the woman and her mustachioed brigand live and go free… In time, the Face knew, their continuing existence would be a sharp nettle to torture Alexei’s already anguished mind past the point of no return.
Alexei did not know himself what he wanted now. It was only when Anna had left his house, and the II/Porter/7e62 asked whether he desired the full table setting, though he would be dining alone, that for the first time he clearly comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could not in any way connect and reconcile his past with what was now. It was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that troubled him. The transition from that past to a knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness he had lived through miserably already; that state was painful, but he could understand it. If his wife had then, on declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in the hopeless position-incomprehensible to himself-in which he felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the other man’s child with what was now the case; for in return for all this he now found himself alone.