The stairway ended against another metal door.
The outlined figure of one of the mighty warrior robots was blazoned on it.
Jarl's heart pounded harder.
Shoving open the hatch, he half-fell inside and locked it, too, behind him.
He found himself now in a control room. Panels thick with dust lined three of its walls. The fourth was a single massive, transparent, plastic plate through which occupants could look out across the great hold where the robots were massed ... where brief moments before Jarl Corvett had stood face to face with hideous death.
Stumbling to it, Jarl stared down upon the smoke-smirched scene below. Flames still were leaping about the platform. Here and there, he could catch dim glimpses of primitives' hurrying figures as they ran among the metal monsters.
Overhead, the dense black smoke almost hid the roof. Eddying, slowly rising, it swirled out through the cracks and rifts in the ancient hull, up into the blazing, sunlit heat of Womar's desert sky.
Of a sudden Jarl was weak to the point of sickness. Numbly, he turned and surveyed the rest of the control room with a closer scrutiny.
Bank after bank of dials and indicators marked with strange symbols leered down at him like a host of huge blank eyes. Against the far wall, units with focussing plates like the viziscreens of his own solar system were ranged in a precise row.