The patrol pilot was trying again to reassure the girl, with a show of truculent bravado this time. He hoped that truculence would make his words sound true, as though he had a trump card up his sleeve, or something.
"All right in the end, Harwich?" the fat printer chuckled wickedly. "Well, the end's pretty close. In another minute you'll be too tortured to do anything but scream. Right now I'm thinking and wishing. Look, the automatons are getting that agony tripod ready again!"
It was true. Metal tentacles were whipping about, adjusting the torture rods to touch Harwich's and Paul Arnold's skulls again.
Everything will be all right! That statement was a mocking memory to the patrol pilot now. An empty, rash challenge to the man whose petty ego yearned to control even the solar system.
Harwich had never felt so completely helpless in his life before, not even when he had been suffocating out there on the deserts of the Forbidden Moon. If he could only somehow knock Bayley out of that little, pillared structure that served as a receiver for telepathic orders to the machines; if only he could replace him there for a second, then everything might be very, very different! But Harwich was held helpless to the pavement of the tower room. His massive muscles were useless against machine might!
Direct argument—an attempt to make Bayley see the narrowness and lack of originality in his colossal ambitions—he knew was equally futile. Bayley was stubborn and shallow and greedy. Besides, he would never admit that he was wrong, even if he felt the truth of it!
So Harwich felt utterly checkmated on every side. The clanging out there, the building of the space fleet, mocked him. The rustle of wheels in that huge pyramid coordinator mocked him. All the Aladdin-like miracles of the Forbidden Moon mocked him, pointing out his impotence to do anything, now.
He even wondered savagely why that great coordinator mechanism, with all its terrific powers, didn't revolt against the dominance of the puny human being that mastered it. But, of course, it would have no desire to revolt. It had no desires of any kind, no capacity for happiness or misery, no consciousness even. It was no more alive, no more sentient, than an adding machine. Only infinitely more complex. It invented things and it directed lesser mechanisms only by the rolling of the wheels and the surge of energy inside it. And it responded to telepathic control of whomever was there to give it, just as a space ship might respond to whomever was at its throttle.
Still, there had to be some way out of this mess! Harwich knew it wasn't just Clara and Paul and himself that were in danger. It was everything he knew and respected. Freedom. Liberty. Unless he and his companions were able to do something, a Dark Age would come, surely. An age of machines, ruled by a madman.
The rod of the torture instrument was touching his skull. In just another moment the agony would begin. But what was Paul Arnold muttering beside him?