by Jerry
“Your companion was glimpsed running from the air-shaft back into a corridor immediately after he had killed the Master, but his identity was not discovered. What is his serial number?”
Out of her terror Eda managed to pluck defiance. “I won’t tell,” she said.
“You are guilty of direct disobedience and attempted escape and are involved in the killing of a Master,” said the Master-Who-Thinks, dispassionately. “You will be taken to the laboratories where the vivisectors will attempt to discover the reason for this conduct.”
“They’ll not!” burst in Grant Perry furiously. “You damned metal monstrosity, do you think you can order humans to torture!”
“Grant, don’t!” cried Eda. “You can’t save me and you’ll make it worse for yourselves.”
“Machines ordering humans to death!” Robert Loring was whispering. “God, it’s incredible!”
“You will take 44-N-626 to the laboratories and deliver her to the vivisection-room.” the Master-Who-Thinks told one of the two waiting metal Masters.
As the monstrous metal shape picked up Eda in its pincer-like arms to begin to move out into the corridor, Grant sprang with white face to aid her. The other Master’s black beam-tube came up for action but Loring had clutched Grant and despite his struggles was holding him back as Eda was taken out into the corrridor.
“Loring, let me go!” Grant cried as the girl and her guard disappeared. “I’ll not let them take her to that torture!”
“You can’t help her, Grant!” Loring exclaimed. “You’ll only be committing suicide!”
The calm metallic voice of the Master-Who-Thinks cut across theirs. “It is apparent that these two humans, whatever their cell is, are insubordinate also,” it stated.
Grant Perry spun around to the great metal hemisphere. “We are and we will be!” he raged. “In our time, machines were slaves to us humans, you damned metal monster! Do you hear me—slaves to us!”
“Grant, for God’s sake—” Loring was tugging at his arm but Grant was too furious to heed.
The Master-Who-Thinks was silent, its glass lens seeming to consider them contemplatively. When it spoke its voice had the same unhuman absence of passion or indignation, and it spoke to the remaining Master guarding Grant and Loring.
“These two humans seem not from any of this city’s cells,” it stated, “and appear unusual in a number of ways. You will take them to the great Master-Who-Thinks whose wisdom directs all this city, in Cell 1. He can examine them, and if he thinks best can have them vivisected to determine the reason for their unusual attitude of defiance.”
At once the Master beside them swung open the door, raising its beam-tube pointedly, and Grant and Loring passed out into the dimlit corridor again. As they started along it, with the Master rolling watchfully just behind them, Grant saw that they were moving farther down the corridor from the shaft of the air-opening, instead of returning toward it.
“The thing will probably take us through the underground passages that connect the cells to this Cell 1 where the Master-Who-Thinks of the whole city is,” he told Loring, who nodded sadly.
“If they had taken us onto the surface, even if but for a little time, we might have had a chance to escape, and get back to where our time drug flasks lie,” Loring said in a whisper.
Grant Perry shook his head. “I couldn’t do it, Loring—I couldn’t go and leave that girl Eda to torture. And yet even now we can’t help her, may be going to the same torture ourselves.”
THEY had gone by then perhaps a half hundred feet along the corridor, which had a little ahead a turn that hid its further length from view. The doors along the metal-walled corridor were closed, and though they had passed two Masters and a few human slaves on emerging into the corridor, there was now none of either in sight ahead or behind them.
Grant had just noticed this when an astonishing thing happened. One of the closed doors they had just passed opened swiftly, a tall man-slave with a bar-like metal tool in his grasp darted out into the corridor behind the Master rolling behind Grant and Loring. He brought the tool down in a terrific blow on the Master’s hemispherical head before the thing could turn!
Instantly all motion on the part of the Master stopped, its head-hemisphere crushed by the blow, and it remained motionless as any inanimate thing of metal.
Grant and Loring had spun around, stared at the man with the bar. He was a stalwart, dark-haired fellow dressed in the regulation metallic tunic, and his face even in that first moment seemed somehow familiar to Grant Perry.
His first swift words explained that to Grant. “I am Birk, brother of Eda with whom you were brought here!” the fellow told them hastily. “Quick, we must get this Master out of the corridor!”
They helped him push the motionless cubical body of the Master into the room out of which he had darted, evidently a supply-room as it held only stacks of metal bars. Once inside Birk closed the door swiftly.
“We will all go to the vivisectors at once if they find us here with this Master I have killed,” he told them. “My life is forfeit as it is if they discover I killed one in helping Eda escape.”
“But why take the risk for us?” Grant asked him. “You never saw us before!”
“I did see you,” Birk told them, “when you were brought back with Eda. I waited here for a chance to free Eda when she was taken past here, but when that occurred there were many Masters in the corridor and I could do nothing. But when I saw you come with your guard there was a chance and I took it.”
The thought uppermost in Grant’s mind found voice. “Where have they taken Eda? Where are the laboratories to which she was ordered?”
“Around the next turn of this corridor are the laboratories of this cell,” Birk said. “But why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t mean to escape or try to escape unless Eda is with us,” Grant Perry told him.
For a moment there was silence in the dim-lit, metal-walled room where Birk and Grant and Loring crouched beside the unmoving cubical body of the metal Master. Then Birk reached, and clasped Grant’s hand.
“There is small chance of any of us escaping,” he said, “but since you are with me we do not escape without Eda.”
“But if we do escape,” Grant said, “if we get back to where our time drugs are, Loring, could all four of us return to our time with them?”
“We could, Grant!” Loring nodded. “You remember I told you that the time drugs affect all in the direct aura of the body taking them, and that the person taking them could take another person through time with him by holding the other close. We can take Birk and Eda back with us to our time all right if we get to the drugs.”
“Good!” Grant approved. “Then the three things we have to do are to get Eda out of the laboratories, to escape with her back up to where the drugs are, and to take the drugs.”
“I have been thinking,” Birk said, “and I believe there is but one chance of rescuing Eda from the laboratories. If I were to go to the vivisecting-room where she will be held, and tell the Masters there that the Master-Who-Thinks ordered me to bring Eda back to him for further questioning, they might let her go with me.”
“There is more chance that they would not,” he admitted, “but there is still a chance that they would, and it seems the only chance, for there is no hope whatever of our being able to take her out of there by force.”
“But what are we to do?” Grant Perry demanded. “Why can’t we—I, at least—go with you?”
Birk shook his head. “You would destroy all our chance, Grant. You and Loring are dressed in such strange garments that you would be noticed instantly, and seeing you the Masters in the laboratories would immediately know that something was wrong.”
“He’s right, Grant!” Loring exclaimed. “It will be best for all if we wait here until Birk returns with Eda, if he can get her by this stratagem. Then we can make a break to get to the surface.”
“And hard it will be to get there,” Birk adde
d. “You two will wait here then as Loring says. I will leave this bar here with you, for it would excite suspicion in the Masters of the laboratories if I carried it.”
“But what about the beam-tube of this Master?” Grant asked, pointing to the black tube held in the unmoving pincer-grasp of the cubical thing beside them. “We can use that for a weapon, can’t we?”
Birk shook his head. “No, Grant, for the blue beams it produces affect only humans and living things like humans—they are beams that in some way change the organic matter of the bodies they strike into inorganic matter instantly, annihilating the life in those bodies. But as the Masters’ metal bodies are themselves inorganic, the beams have no effect upon them.”
He handed Grant the metal bar and turned to the door. “Stir not from this room until I return,” he warned them. “I will be back soon with Eda or will not be back at all, and in that case you must use your own judgment as to escaping.”
Chapter IV
The Revolt
HE SLIPPED out into the corridor, closing the door after him, and was gone. Grant Perry and Robert Loring stared at each other in the dim light, silent as though the situation was too much for words. To Grant the scene around him, the metal room with its stacks of metal and with the motionless cubical form beside them, was unreal in its weirdness.
Yet to his mind, dazed a little by the swiftness and strangeness of what had befallen Robert Loring and himself since taking the time drug, all they had gone through seemed almost unreal. Yet Eda—the slender, dark-haired girl was real enough!
But would Birk be able to free the girl by his stratagem? Grant Perry realized that Birk already should have had time to be back with Eda had he succeeded. Fear of Birk’s failure was grasping Grant like a cold hand when the room’s door opened. With a glad exclamation Grant leapt to it to meet Birk and Eda, then froze.
A Master stood in the door!
The cubical metal thing had no beam-tube but in the instant that it glimpsed Grant and Loring in the supply-room it seemed to comprehend the situation, started a metallic cry as it rolled back from the door. Grant leapt and crashed his bar down squarely on its rounded head, its cry cut off as it became motionless.
But the Master’s metallic cry was answered from somewhere down the corridor by other metallic voices! Loring had leapt out into the corridor after Grant, grasping one of the metal bars stacked in the room.
“Grant, that thing’s given the alarm!” he cried. “There’ll be Masters here in a moment!”
“We can’t leave Birk and Eda!” Grant cried. “I’m going to get them—”
Around the corridor’s turn raced Eda and Birk! “The Masters are coming!” Birk cried, tearing Loring’s bar from him. “Down the corridor—they loosed the beams on us!”
“Quick—to the air-shaft!” shouted Grant.
Before they could move, a cry from Eda! “Behind us—a Master!”
Around the corridor’s turn a dozen feet behind them had rolled a Master in pursuit of Birk and Eda. It stopped, beam-tube rising swiftly with deadly purpose.
Grant remained frozen for the instant with Eda and Loring, expecting the blue beam to wipe them out in the next second. But Birk sprang back with upraised bar toward the Master!
The blue beam flashed when Birk was still a yard from the metal Master! It struck him squarely and as it did so Birk reeled, but as he fell forward his bar crashed down on the Master’s metal head! The tube fell and its beam vanished! Birk lay across the motionless and inanimate Master in a huddled heap!
“The beam got him!” Loring cried. “For God’s sake, Grant, let’s get on! There’ll be other Masters on us in a moment!”
“Birk! Birk!” Eda was crying, but Grant Perry grasped her shoulders, half-carried her with Loring and himself as they raced down the corridor toward the air-shaft. “He’s dead, Eda!” he told her hoarsely. “Unless we get clear quickly they’ll have us too!”
They heard the clamor of pursuit swelling back along the corridor as they raced down it past the closed doors, to the door opening into the round room at the air-shaft’s bottom.
Without hesitating Grant Perry ripped open this door and sprang into the room with bar upraised. The Master on guard there whirled round but before he could complete his turn or raise his tube Grant’s bar had crashed down on the hemispherical metal head. Then Grant and Loring and Eda were on the stepless spiral stair.
Metallic cries reached their ears from below in menacing chorus as they raced up the spiral ramp. They burst up into the brilliant sunlight that was almost blinding, the green plain with its hundreds of round openings stretching behind them. Loring pointed ahead, toward the lake and beach.
“The ridge there by the beach!” he panted. “If we can get to the time drugs—if they’re still there!”
They ran, Grant’s heart thumping. Eda was stumbling, seemed winded. She sank to the ground, motioned them weakly on. “Go on!” she cried to Grant. “You and Loring can escape, Grant, if your drugs mean escape, but if you delay for me the Masters will get us all!”
Grant whipped down, grasped her, and ran on behind Loring. “They’ll not get you without getting me, Eda!” he told her panting.
It was requiring all his strength to run with the girl in his arms. They were half-way to the ridge and now Eda cried out.
“The Masters! They come out of the air-shaft, Grant!”
Grant Perry glanced back, saw a half-dozen cubical metal shapes emerging from the air-shaft’s opening. The Masters had tubes but instead of beaming the fleeing humans were moving after them.
“They’re not using the beams!” Eda exclaimed. “They think we can’t escape them and that they’ll take us alive!”
“They’ll never take me alive to their vivisectors!” Grant cried. “Nor you either, Eda!”
“We can’t make it, Grant!” sobbed Loring. “They’ll be on us by the time we reach the drugs!”
GRANT set his teeth, spurted with the last of his strength, Loring hurling himself staggeringly forward with him. The Masters were close behind, coming rapidly after them, as they reached the ridge.
Loring pawed frantically in the grass, cried hoarsely as he found the two flasks of the green time drug. He thrust one into Grant’s hands.
“We daren’t take the drug here, Grant!” he cried. “We’ve got to take it down on the beach there where we first found ourselves—so we’ll reappear in the room we started from!”
Grant remembered what Loring had told him, the necessity of reappearing in the spot in their own time lest they reappear where matter already was and meet death.
“The spot you marked with the black stone! But can we get there in time?”
“The Masters are close!” warned Eda’s cry.
They rushed over the ridge, down the beach toward the black stone that Loring had placed at the spot of their appearance. As they reached it the half-dozen Masters were coming over the ridge after them.
They had the flasks open as the metal shapes rolled down the sloping beach toward them. Loring drained the green liquid in his flask with a swift motion and Grant, holding Eda with one arm, did the same, then dropped the empty flask to hold Eda tightly to him.
He felt the drug taking swift effect upon him, the world spinning rapidly around him! But as it did so heard a cry from Eda, felt the cold pincer-hands of the metal Masters grasping her, tearing her out of his hold! And as Eda was torn from Grant’s grasp the world spun faster and then he was shot again into blackness.
* * *
Grant Perry came slowly out of black unconsciousness for the second time with the sensation of hands supporting him, anxious voices in his ears. He muttered “Eda!”, clung to the hands holding him, then as his eyes opened, stared upward in amazement.
Bending over him was Dr. Dwale, his scholarly face worried in expression as he lifted Grant. A few feet away Wilson Gunnett was helping Loring to his feet. They were in the room of Loring’s society from which they had started! Grant Perry staggered
up.
“Eda!” he cried. And to Dr. Dwale, “Where is she, man?”
“Who is Eda?” asked Dwale uncomprehendingly. “You and Loring appeared here but moments ago—here on the floor.”
Swift remembrance smote Grant. “Loring, they took Eda! The Masters tore her out of my hold at the very moment we were starting back through time!”
“And you came back with me, without her!” said Robert Loring. “Grant, it’s terrible.”
“But I’m going back for her!” Grant Perry cried. “You hear me, Loring—you’re going to make more of the drugs and I’m going ten thousand years ahead again and get her! Those damned metal Masters are not going to give Eda to their vivisectors! I’m going back!”
“Grant, you can’t!” Loring told him. “It’s impossible to make more of the time drugs—I told you before we started that there were not enough of the rare elements on earth to make more!”
Grant Perry was aghast. “But Loring, surely if you comb the world you can find more, can make more of the drugs? Expense means nothing, man! Think what it means to me and to Eda!”
Loring shook his head sadly. “It’s impossible, Grant. Not all your millions can find any more of the elements which we had already combed earth to find. Grant, I hate to say it, but the time drugs can never again be made.”
“And Eda there, going back to that city of metal monsters and human slaves,” said Grant, staring ahead. “Going back to the laboratories of the Masters—”
He sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands. When he straightened, minutes later, he saw Dwale and Gunnett and Robert Loring regarding him with pitying eyes. He walked over to them.
“Loring, it’s not your fault,” he said. “You can’t make more of the time drug and without the drugs the time that separates me from Eda can’t be crossed. My millions can’t help there, as you say.
“But they can help your society’s work, can establish the community that may preserve a human civilization in some part of earth against the machine menace you foresaw. God knows I believe in that menace now. It can’t save—Eda—but it may save others.