Then they died.
"Stop!" The word exploded from Vilbis's lips. He stared at the cooked flesh that had been his captors. Then his eyes lifted to the jagged hole in the bulkhead.
"You fools!" he spat. His lips curled with cold anger. "Where do you hope to get two other humans now?"
The demobilization station trailed the Earth, a million and a half miles behind and in the same orbit around the Sun. It was shaped like a thick disc. At the moment there were five ships resting against one surface of the station. Three of them were warships. One was a Federation ship. The fifth was a giant freighter with SURPLUS JUNK CO. painted on it in bold blue letters.
Each of the five ships was attached to the space station underneath its hulk by short airlocks containing elevators. These led down into the station where air pressure was kept at fifteen pounds.
Inside the station, robots were emerging from the elevators leading to the three warships. The robots were all identical except for their Id numbers across their metallic chests. Arms and legs of metal rods and joints in almost exact duplication of human bones, torso shaped like a metal box, short neck joint supporting a head that was little more than two four inch glass lenses, two rod-microphones, and a small voice box.
The emerging robots moved at orders snapped by a human and marched toward a building fifty yards away, where they lined up at attention and became motionless.
Two humans moved swiftly down the line, behind the lined up robots. At each robot one of them twisted a copper-colored disk in the robot's back, carefully drew out a cylinder eight inches long and four inches in diameter, and handed the cylinder to the other, who lowered it into a plastic case. These cylinders were the brains of the robots. They were destined for the Federal ship—and storage until the next war.
While the robot brain was being lowered into its plastic storage case by the one man, the first lifted the now demobilized robot body and placed it on a cart, already stacked high with similar bodies. The immediate destination of these bodies was the junk company freighter.