The Humanoids: A Novel by Jack Williamson

Author:Jack Williamson [Williamson, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312852535
Amazon: 0312852533
Publisher: Orb Books
Published: 1996-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

NO LONGER creeping, that mountain-eating saurian snarled and bellowed with overburdened gears. The wide cutting blades slashed down wickedly, and cruel metal teeth glittered in its maw.

"Oh, Mr. White!" Jane Carter was calling desperately. "Please, Mr. Overstreet - please show me what to do. I don't know how to stop it - I can't find the black thing in it."

Forester paused an instant, waiting for those men in their cavern fastness to stop the machine, but it came plunging on. Picking up the child, he ran again for the building. The lurching armored monster swerved instantly to cut him off. He tried to double back, and it veered again to meet him. Feinting right, he darted left. The machine attempted to follow, but its vast whipping tracks failed for a moment to hold in the loose rubble of the new embankment. He got past it - almost.

The wallowing machine had almost buried itself in clouds of yellow dust and flying rocks, and the leaning wreck of the building was again in view, close beyind it, when a round stone turned beneath Forester's foot. He went to his knees, and the machine had time to climb out of its pit. Wheeling, it came after him. He ran to the right again, and again it cut him off.

"Can't they stop it?" he panted huskily at Jane. "Or can't you get the humanoid in it?"

"But there isn't any," she whimpered faintly. "Mr. White says it is run by beams straight from the brain machine on Wing IV, and there isn't any black thing I can stop."

Now on firm level ground, the excavator came ponderously on, and as he fled with Jane in his arms he saw that it was herding him like some driven animal away from the ruined building, forcing him out along a narrowing shelf between that steep new embankment and the ragged edge of the mesa.

"Please - Mr. White!" the child was begging frantically. "Please - can't you help?"

But nothing halted that grinding metal avalanche. Forester tried to climb the embankment and came back down into its path again, floundering in a slide of broken stone. Dust choked him, and sharp rocks slashed him. The child had become an impossible burden in his arms, but he somehow lifted her again, still retreating toward the point of that diminishing rocky bench, where the embankment came to the rim. He was cornered, and he saw no way out.

"Climb!" Jane shrieked. "Mr. White says climb!"

Turning, he tried to stagger up that rubble slope again. For a few yards the footing held, and then the broken rock flowed again. Falling, he twisted enough to keep the weight of his body off the child, but his breath was crushed out against a rolling boulder. Savage pain numbed him, and his scratching feet and hands found only sliding stone, pouring down to carry them into the very path of the machine, which came thundering out of the dust, great blades lifted to crush them or fling them off the cliff.

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