The silver marble lay there on the floor of the transmitter, dully gleaming in the red light from the laboratory. The light was red because that cylinder of crimson had breached the protective radiations outside and was reaching inward, quivering back under the assaults of defense-lights, but stubbornly gaining yard by yard toward the laboratory wall.
Belem worked methodically, setting up his tubes and prisms. The table cocooned with bright webbing floated now just beside the door, ready to go out first when transmission functioned again. I could see dimly the face of the sleeper inside. The serenity of that face was impressive in a way I can’t describe.
The second-stage Mechandroid slept, yes, but he wasn’t wholly asleep now. The mind of the machine was awakening. It was time for it to wake. I could feel something in the very air that told me what was happening behind those impassive, emotionless features.
The shape of the features disturbed me, too. There was that haunting familiarity which I had no time now to track down. But I knew I had seen it before.
There wasn’t much time for speculation. I think the laboratory defenses collapsed all at once. I heard no warning but overloaded screens suddenly went down with blinding soundless lashes between us and the attacking forces. I think Belem must have been drawing heavily on the power-reserves in order to finish his experiment in geometric paradox.
He didn’t seem surprised, nor did the others, when there was a dazzle of red and green brilliance in conflict, streaming like colored lightnings through the vast room, making the twisted girders stand out in black silhouette. One of the Mechandroids at Belem’s elbow said something in one of the languages of this age which meant nothing to me.
Belem asked him a question. I caught the name of Paynter in the answer.
Belem moved a prism. His voice was quick but very calm. And this time as he spoke I caught an overtone in the air which the others perhaps, had been realizing for some minutes. I can’t say what it was. A pressure, a deep, serene wave, a quality of newness and difference too intangible to name.
But it was there. After a moment or two I knew what it was.
The sleeper was awake. Not physically yet. His body remained helpless in the cocoon of light. But the mind was speaking to the minds of his creators, a smooth strong mind functioning like perfect, machinery with a deep hum of power.
Belem laid down his tools and turned to me, gripped my arm, urged me away toward a sloping catwalk that spanned the great room.
“What’s the matter?” I asked in bewilderment, following him willy-nilly, because I could feel the metal of his machine-ancestry in that tight grip. “Something wrong? Won’t the gadget work?”
“It will work. You and I are needed elsewhere now. The others can handle the escape.”
“But I wanted to watch—”
“There is no time. You won’t see the demonstration, after all.”
I looked at him dubiously. There seemed to be no threat in his tone, but then there never was.
“What’s happening?”
“A platoon of men is attacking under Paynter. We must hold them back until the matter-transmitter is reactivated. I’m acting under orders. The second-stage Mechandroid is conscious enough to take charge. He told me what to do—look!”
21. Infection Spreading
And that was when the last defense of all went down. There was a blazing flash of crimson that seemed to lick every corner of the room. It died and the white-lit air trembled a little in its wake. But only for an instant.
Then, from somewhere outside, a spear of red light drove at us and, almost concurrently, a steel piston, ten feet thick, shot out like a battering-ram after it. I had a single glimpse of that blank solid-steel muzzle rushing forward like a Titan’s fist—then it crashed through the wall of the building, with a thunderous impact and a shriek of torn and twisted metal, and ripped an irresistible path through the great girders.
It halted.
That cylinder of metal must have been more than half a mile long. Thirty feet of it extended through the riven wall into the chamber where we stood.
The blank muzzle opened like a shutter. Through a transparent wall I saw a little room banked with intricate control boards, and Paynter in a bucket-seat, his eyes shielded by darkened lenses, his mouth drawn down in a grimace as his hands moved swiftly across the panel before him.
A section of the cylinder dropped away. From its interior came leaping men, hooded and armored ‘by light-colored suits of webbing. Each carried one of the basket-hilted paralysis-weapons.
I risked a look behind me. Far away, down a long vista of arched girders, I could see the Mechandroids gathered in a little group about the floating platform on which the second-stage Mechandroid lay and I thought that quick flashes of light were moving there—the same knife-like stabs of brightness I had seen when Belem divided his experimental sphere.
But the soldiers of Paynter were getting dangerously close—more than a score of them, inhuman and frightening in their hoods and protective suits.
Deliberately Belem turned his back on the soldiers running toward us and looked at me.
Twice before I had had this experience. But it wasn’t a trick you could get used to—the quicksilver eyes expanding, rushing forward, slipping, inside your head—and, impossibly, moving into place like supplementary lenses so that Belem was looking out through my own eyes, from within my mind.
I felt his will grip mine with paralyzing strength. Perhaps he thought I might resist. Certainly I would have, had I known what he intended.
Then he had control of my brain as well as my body. Belem’s thought? But they were my own thoughts—superimposed, directing—
He was using my mind, as he might use a telegraph-key, to send out a message—a summons.
I had time only to realize what it was Belem was calling. There was no time to react, to fight the summons—for the answer came almost upon the heels of the call.
From high above the great room I could see that answering shadow sweep into sight. It came out of nowhere, literally out of nowhere, springing into being and moving for– ward with a speed so blinding I could not focus upon it. I had again that instant of recognition, of revulsion—that knowledge of its burning speed.
And then the nova of pure energy exploded outward, as it had done so many times before, from somewhere in the center of my consciousness.
But this time it was different. Never before had the thing been deliberately summoned. Whatever it was, from wherever it came, it had always before struck of its own will. Now it struck through mine—through Belem’s, speaking with my mind. And that gave it a significance and a quality of culmination which its coming had never had before. This time it meant something. This time, perhaps, I would know. The shock of energy blinded me. I waited for the fading to begin.
There was no fading. Instead a second shock followed close upon the first, then another and another—wave after rising wave, tide upon tide of devouring violence. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I was too sick and shaken with the overloading of my nerves, the staggering blows of sensation that battered me. I could not think or reason. I only knew that this time I was lost, drowned in the bursting violence.
It would not cease. It would never cease. It would go on forever ...
I saw the shadow of violence fade from a face. Across what seemed to be wide distances I saw the reflection of unimaginable violence ebb. Yes—the mind behind that face had known the staggering onrush of inhuman tides as deeply as my own.
In the control room of the great steel cylinder Paynter met my gaze—and I read sick horror in his eyes.