by Ray Cummings
Carter had been trying to get to the platform. Then he saw the running golden figure carrying Dierdre. Carter veered. He was closer to the ship than was Thor. Then ahead of him he saw Barry; caught up with him.
And Carter gasped, “You snatch her! I’ll try and bring him down—but the fall would kill her!”
“Yes, all right.”
The rocks were shadowed here near die space-ship. They crouched; then leaped. Barry’s clutch seized Dierdre; snatched her away and he fell with her. Desperately Carter clutched one of the huge, clanking, gold-plated legs. Thor fell. And Carter, like a pouncing puma, was astride the bulging mailed chest. Pulling at the fuse-plug. It came out. But there was no hiss. He could feel Thor’s metal fingers still jerking at his shoulders. With the fuse gone, still Thor was fighting.
Then Carter wrenched at the chest-plates. One of them, hinged, flew open.
IT revealed the gargoyle face of the deformed James Torrington! Electroid wizard—maniacal little cripple—Dynne’s Electroid engineer, designer of robots. And Carter reached in, seized him by the throat, with frenzied fingers throttling him. It set Torrington’s interior controls awry. The metal fingers of Thor fell away; the great jointed golden case writhed and trembled for an instant and then was inert. A trap in which Torrington lay helpless, with Carter’s frenzied hands squeezing his throat, shutting off his breath.
It was a chaos to Carter. Cling to him! Kill him! Carter pressed harder, with Torrington’s eyes bulging now and his face blackening, with thick purplish tongue protruding from his goggling mouth. Ghastly gargoyle face. Dimly Carter could envisage this murderous, maniacal genius—hideous so that he had been a recluse, hating his fellow man. Inferiority unhinging his mind so that he had built himself this weird little empire, with humans as slaves—world of the machines—and he—the hideous, deformed Torrington—was the great golden Thor—a God—and little Dierdre to be his Goddess—and in secret, his slave.
“George! Look out! George, hurry—my God—”
Barry’s frantic voice brought Carter to himself. Within the gold case the murderous Torrington was dead. Carter leaped to his feet. Behind him, close at hand now, a group of alumite robots with knives dripping, crimson, were clanking forward.
“George, my God—” Barry was in the door of the space-ship, with Dierdre, recovering now, clutching at him. Carter jumped for them. They banged the door as the first of the robots came with a crashing metal thud against it. And then, in a moment, the little Starfield Queen was rising. Barry, who in his post-academy days had been a student space-navigator, was at its controls. And at one of the bull’s-eye turrets Dierdre and Carter gazed out and down.
The Empire of the Machines was a shambles of still-running murderous metal figures. But the last of the humans lay crimsoned.
CARTER and Dierdre are married now.
The great Dynne Robot Industries have been sold out of the family. There have been no more reports of trouble with any robots, of course; but neither George Carter nor Dierdre Dynne seem interested in mechanical servants. More than that, though living in this modern world they would hardly admit it to each other perhaps, both seem to hate machinery. They have a little palm-clad home in tropical America. Primitive. One might say they were living half a thousand years behind the progressive, civilized world.
They “wanted to get back to nature”—as they laughingly told some of their friends who came visiting from the North. And you who read this may well wonder—is that not perhaps after all the best formula for human happiness?
