She leapt catlike at the Earthman, sweeping him back from the silver brink. He struggled with her.
"Help me, Barihorn!" he gasped. "We must take her! Malgarth—She doesn't know herself."
Shouts had answered the girl. White warning rays hissed above us. I saw two more squads rushing down upon us, beside the first. I tried to help Kel Aran drag the girl into the pool. But her slim white arms had a maniac strength. She picked us both up, carried us back again from the silver rim.
"Strong!" Kel was gasping. "She's strong as a robot!" A choking sob of startled horror. "She is—"
Then I saw the appalling thing. Struggling to get his feet on the ground again, Kel had caught the red curls of her hair. And the hair had come off! Her head had come off—all the outside of it.
For all her white beauty had been a painted mask.
Still her red-scratched, naked body had all its loveliness. But the thing on its shoulders was the compact metal brain-case of a robot, its weird eye-lenses glittering with a cold and triumphant green.
Chilled with a startled horror, I struggled against those binding arms, so far stronger than any arms of flesh.
"I see it now!" came the despairing gasp of Kel Aran. "This was all a trap of Malgarth's. And the bait was not Verel, but her robot simulacrum!"
We were suddenly flung down upon the dead-white grass. Scores of men stood around us, in the light of the flaming palace, covering us with bright weapons. And the hideous robot-head, glittering eerily on the white-curved shoulders of Verel Erin, began to laugh like a machine gone mad.