"Come, Bari!"
The phantom took my hand, drew my arm out of the silver loops.
"Your body is about to die, I know," she said. "But it has vital power enough for this last task. For the secret you gave me can aid us. Follow me!"
Her hand was suddenly cool and real in mine. She tugged again, and I stepped toward her, out of those metal coils—as easily as if they had turned to smoke.
I could see again! The dark-gleaming mirror beneath; the white robots sprawled upon it; the lax, twisted forms of Verel and Kel. I could see the woman beside me—the dark wealth of her red-glinting hair, the wide violet eyes of Dona and Dondara.
"We must hasten, Bari," she urged anxiously. "Or he will drop your body and the Stone into the mirror. Not even the power you gave me can reach him from outside the universe!"
We turned toward Malgarth, towering in the red gloom beyond that ebon film. His giant body swayed back in grotesque triumph, and the vast blue masses of his compound eyes were fixed upon something behind us.
Suddenly, queerly, as the hand of the woman tightened on mine, I was no longer Barry Horn. I was the Bari Horn that the legend had made me. All the knowledge that had gone into the building of Malgarth was a reservoir that I could tap.
Before me, strangely, just as I had seen it in that crystal-domed laboratory, was the brain of Malgarth. Black, vast, deeply convoluted, floating in a transparent tank. I saw the little pale spot upon its blackness. I knew the structural weakness in the synthetic brain, that I, Bari Horn, had been laboring to correct—and, at the urging of Dondara Keradin, had left uncorrected.