A group of officials stood in one of the palace's lower corridors. As they came hastily up to Tina, I suddenly had a contempt for these men who governed a city in which neither they nor anyone else did any work. In this time of bloodshed, all these inmates of the palace had stayed safely within its walls, knowing that it was well fortified and that within a few hours help would doubtless come.
"The _Micrad_ is coming with the long-range deranger," Tina told them briefly. After a moment they hastened away upstairs and I heard one of them shouting:
"The revolt is over! Within an hour we will have all the accursed Robots inert. The _Micrad_ can sweep all the city with her ray!"
The death of Alent, the guard in the tunnel to the Robot cavern, had been discovered by the palace officials, and another guard was there now in his place. Migul had not passed him, this guard told us. But there had been an interim when the gate was open. Had Migul returned here and gone back to Mary?
We reached the cavern of machinery. It was dim and deserted, as before. We came to the door of Mary's room. It was standing half open!
Mary was gone! The couch was overturned, with its coving and pillows strewn about. The room showed every evidence of a desperate struggle. On the floor the great ten-foot length of Migul lay prone on its back. A small door-porte in its metal side was open; the panel hung awry on hinges half ripped away. From the aperture a coil and grid dangled half out in the midst of a tangled skein of wires.
We bent over the Robot. It was not quite inert. Within its metal shell there was a humming and a faint, broken rasping. The staring eye-sockets showed wavering beams of red; the grid of tiny wires back of the parted lips vibrated with a faint jangle.
I bent lower. "Migul, can you hear me?" I asked.
Would it respond? My heart sent a fervent prayer that this mechanical thing--the product of man's inventive genius through a thousand years--would have a last grasp of energy to answer my appeal.
It spoke. "I hear you." They were thin, jangled tones, crackling and hissing with interference.
"What happened, Migul? Where is the girl?" I asked.
"Tugh--did this--to me. He took the girl."
"Where? Migul, where did he take her? Do you know?"