the lights were extinguished. There was only the light of the sparks—crackling showers; pin-points of bursting stars high in the air, and on the ground.
Screams sounded. A spark-shower in an instant was over all the scene. Just a second when the running men and girls were stumbling, dropping, electrocuted by the free-electron, high voltage of the sparks that leaped at them. Sparks like living things in a torrent surging down the slope, blighting the running, naked little creatures. Blighting everything.
Tork, destroying his world.
With an eerie scream he turned his almost exhausted weapon upon his village. The houses shook, crackled with sparks, glowed with interference heat. The thatch roofs burst into puffs of flame. Then the fused, glowing walls collapsed. Rumbles, grinding little crashes of tumbling metal, mingling with the crackling, hissing of the sparks, every spark a million-volt exploding charge.
I HAD leaped to one side, crawled on the ground and then was up again with the first pyrotechnic shower going over me. And then I came to the side of the platform. Tork's weapon, suddenly dark, exhausted in his hand, went silent. With a wild, maniacal laugh he threw it away. From behind the platform a figure leaped up upon it—a man, seizing Doris. . . Blake! My heart pounded with a rush of thankfulness as I jumped up and Tork saw me; rushed for me.
Our bodies collided, with my arms around him. Weird, ghastly combat. What was this? My gouging fingers clutched his face. Weird smooth feeling—his skin, so queer. Then I struck him. Gripped his shoulder. It seemed to break. In that second his shirt tore. I saw where the flesh of his shoulder had split apart. Bloodless. His flesh? The substance there showed a reinforcement of wire mesh!
Man of the year 6,000. A man? The weird truth rushed at me, with memory of my own vague gropings, and what Rhadana had almost told me. Not a human man. Synthetic; built, moulded in a laboratory. Supreme product of man's inventive, scientific genius at the peak of man's skill—this Thing, cast with such ghastly irony in the fashion of a human. A Thing, made only to be a slave. And Tork had seen his chance to ape his human masters.
I had cast him off with a gasp of numbed astonishment. And as I stared at him, saw him partly smashed by my clutching grip, he gazed back at me. That same weird look he had given me in the house a while ago—his look of fear at me, a human master!
He felt it now, his helplessness. And with a wild scream he jumped from the platform, scrambled to a nearby rock. For a second he poised, with the gas-clouds rolling at him and the lurid glare painting him. Stood poised, gazing at the wreck of his little Empire. Balanced on the rock, fifty feet above us—and then head down, he dove. His body splattered on the rocks, ghastly, twitching, broken thing. The turgid green gas of the electronic fire rolled over it.
We ran through the choking clouds, Blake and I half carrying Doris; leaping over the dead and dying, passing the crumpled, wrecked little village—running for the time-ship. At its door I paused to look back; stood for an instant with my arm around Doris as we gazed.
The spots of light were dulling into little red glows. The heavy gas-clouds were settling—a great green-yellow, sodden shroud of death, so that under it Tork's Empire was gone.
