World machines!
Sight of them, by any living being, must have set in the heart an intolerable pain.
"What good could come of such a fearful triumph?" whispered the grim Saturnian, standing dark and gaunt above his control bars. "The machines are dead. Their power is only the counterfeit of life. And no life can grow from death."
He steered our invisible-painted craft toward gigantic Meldoon. We studied its war-torn surface through the telescreen.
"Yonder!" whispered Kel Aran. "A city that yet stands! Perhaps Verel will be there!"
His trembling fingers set the dials, and the beleaguered metropolis grew clear upon the screen. A city vaster and more splendid than Earth had ever seen. The many-colored pylons of it towered from nine low hills. It was surrounded with a double wall: one of cyclopean masonry and an outer barrier of pale green flame.
Beyond the flame, filling the wide flat valley that embraced the hills, crowded the robot hordes. Thronged about their ponderous machines of war were grotesque black-and-red metal monsters, of a thousand strange designs.
"Look!" Kel Aran bent toward the telescreen. "The winged ones! One more deadly trick of Malgarth's."
So we first glimpsed the New Robots. There had been none like them in a million years. Their tapered, stream-lined bodies, their graceful wings, were all of silver-white metal. They were beautiful as the Old Robots were ugly. In the smooth swift freedom of their movements was something far different from the clumsy mechanical penderosity of the old technomatons. Something—vital.