Tyrants of Time and two more Stories by Stephen Marlowe

Author:Stephen Marlowe [Stephen Marlowe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783985316199
Publisher: OTB ebook
Published: 2021-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

"You tricked me," Starbuck moaned. "That Robot ... was you."

A knee blurred up at Johnny, exploding in violent pain. He felt himself falling and managed to twist away from the edge of the sundered ramp. He hit the floor with waves of nausea boiling up from his stomach. He lay there, blinking his eyes.

Starbuck came for him.

He drew his legs up instinctively, the knees bent, then straightened as Starbuck leaned over him. His feet caught the big man squarely on the chest, lifted him, pushed—

Starbuck went over the edge of the ramp, screaming all the way down.

Inside, Johnny found Diane, dazed, on the floor. He ignored her. She could wait, for now he was a man possessed. The machinery which he could never hope to understand was all about him, bank on bank of it lining the walls, humming with its strange, sentient energy, glowing and flickering with a million lights.

Kill yourself.

Two words, clamoring, insistent, inside his skull. Their final hope.... He felt himself edging back toward the doorway, and the death which awaited him just outside. He looked at Diane, huddled on the floor, her lips parted—"Johnny...."

I love you, he thought. The words of death and those of life and hope fought inside his skull, twisting his brain, battling there for mastery....

He found something, a length of metal rod. He ripped it loose and began to attack the machinery he would never understand. He was a wild man. The strength flowed in from elsewhere, raising his arm, swinging it high over his head and down. Sparks flew as his metal club battered the crystaline tubes, the delicate wiring, the metal cases. Glass shattered, sprinkled him, brought blood from a dozen cuts on his face. Electricity hummed, then shrieked, then wailed off distantly on a register too high for his ears.

Raise his arm and plunge ... lift it and bring it down, battering, the metal club part of him....

It was Diane who eased the twisted rod from his fingers, soothed him with her words. "It's finished. Easy, Johnny. You've done it."

The place was a shambles. Bank on bank of gutted machinery lay silent there, on a floor strewn with glass, with wire, with filaments, with nameless things which were the brains for a million Robots.

"There's another way out, Johnny. Starbuck took me here. Behind that wall, you—"

She took his hand and they went. The passage was dark and cool and smelled musty, as if air did not circulate very well within it. It was a place for thinking and dreaming of tomorrow. It was a place for realizing you could go back to the hills and find Keleher and his Shining Ones and convince them they should at least look at the City, the City which belonged to them now, to them and DeReggio and his villagers—and all the others. And there must be a coming together of Keleher and DeReggio, with Johnny as mediator, and a realization that the last Plague victim had been smitten and humanity had a long path to travel but could set foot upon it right now, at once.

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