Within, the monkey-like robot waited, weapons gleaming in its finely fashioned hands. A stranger was approaching—someone who knew the Master—friend or foe, it knew not; yet something purely intuitive spoke inside it, saying "Friend!"
Darkly red and ominous, the old pile seemed untenanted when first its bloody portico spread beneath his swiftly questing feet. Fantastic, ponderous arches topping offset, fluted columns; weirdly carven facades. An architect's nightmare; a surrealistic concept of a palace in Hades; but house ne'er seemed so welcoming to a lone man against a world.
Silence broken only by the faint, thin whisper of a rising wind sweeping red dust through the trellises about the time-scarred walls, indicative of a simoon in the offing.
Advancing to the great door, he rapped sharply, then tried the latch. To his surprise it yielded. Entering the vestibule, he opened his helmet to a revivifying blast of oxygen fresh from the automatic ozone transformers, and called. The echo of his voice alone came back.
He found the library dustless and orderly. Trophies hung on the walls: mounted heads and bodies of creatures slain beneath alien suns, ghastly travesties on solarian mammals, creatures envisioned in dreams. Weapons from the far places, taken (as the labels read) at the siege of Kackijakaala in Alpha Centauri, six years distant by the fastest stellatomic.
How old, then, was Del Andres the magnificent? Man's allotted span, increased by the elimination of all disease, covers but a hundred and fifty years; yet Andres had seen and fought those years away within the vast systems of Centauri and Lalande, and he seemed still a young man, by appearance no older than Frederix's thirty years.
Aye, there were mysteries about Del Andres—rumors about a Vron princess far across space, years ago as time runs.
Intuitively Frederix moved to luxurious draperies hanging on the walls, moved them aside and a sigh came from his parted lips. The sheer, glorious, breath-taking beauty of the picture revealed stunned him! Third-dimensional it seemed, tinted with an ethereal loveliness, the supreme glory of womankind—
Haughtiness, perhaps, but the haughtiness that breeds the hope of conquest that would be rich, indeed, in its fulfillment.
He released the drapes and turned aside with a cry in his heart. Only now did he fully realize the fatalistic spirit which drove Del Andres: the devil-may-care fearlessness, the sheer recklessness, the constant hoping, perhaps, for death.