"The damn thing's hot," he said.
Doc Braddon, still looking stunned, asked Ernest: "What did the doll say to them before it destroyed them?"
"It was a sort of law-enforcing robot. They told me about it. A kind of custodian the Masters left behind to keep things in line." Ernest stared dully at the empty chairs.
"It said:
"You hid, and I
Now bid you die!"
Rosco toyed with the ash tray in which he'd put the disk. "There's a clue to the Masters right in this gadget," he said. "Maybe it's simply a servo-mechanism that was set once and has been functioning automatically ever since. But on the other hand it may still be linked directly to the Masters."
"Good point," the skipper said. "Give it a run-through for what it's worth. If it does give us a line on where they got to, I'll ask the Flagship for permission to track them down."
Doc Braddon said to Ernest: "You said the Masters were godlike. You're not implying anything supernatural?"
"No. That was the androids' view, not mine. As a race of almost-people created in a laboratory they naturally held their creators in a certain awe. They hoped for liberation, and even tried to do something about it; but they knew it was futile. The Masters built them so they'd turn to dust if they misbehaved and when they left they fixed it so the vibrations of any spaceship other than their own would do the same thing—presumably so their creations wouldn't fall into other hands. The sad thing is that the almost-people knew it. One of their verses went: