like,
bat-like, the creatures squirmed, crawled, and flew; each covered with a
dankly oozing yellow hide and each motivated by twin common impulses--to
kill and insatiably and indiscriminately to devour. Over this reeking
wilderness Roger drove his vessel, untouched by its disgusting, its
appalling ferocity and horror.

"There should be intelligence, of a kind," he mused, and swept the
surface of the planet with an exploring beam. "Ah, yes, there is a city,
of sorts," and in a few minutes the outlaws were looking down upon a
metal-walled city of roundly conical buildings.

Inside these structures and between and around them there scuttled
formless blobs of matter, one of which Roger brought up into his vessel
by means of a tractor ray. Held immovable by the beam it lay upon the
floor, a strangely extensile, amoeba-like metal-studded mass of leathery
substance. Of eyes, ears, limbs, or organs it apparently had none, yet
it radiated an intensely hostile aura; a mental effluvium concentrated
of rage and of hatred.

"Apparently the ruling intelligence of the planet," Roger commented.
"Such creatures are useless to us; we can build robots in half the time
required for their subjugation and training. Still, it should not be
permitted to carry back what it may have learned of us." As he spoke the
adept threw the peculiar being out into the air and dispassionately
rayed it out of existence.

"That thing reminds me of a man I used to know, back in Penobscot."
Penrose was as coldly callous as his unfeeling master. "The
evenest-tempered man in town--mad all the time!"

Eventually Roger found a location which satisfied his requirements of
raw materials, and made a landing upon that unfriendly soil. Sweeping
beams denuded a great circle of life, and into that circle leaped
robots. Robots requiring neither rest nor food, but only lubricants and
power; robots insensible alike to that bitter cold and to that noxious
atmosphere.

But the outlaws were not to win a foothold upon that inimical planet
easily, nor were they to hold it without effort. Through the weird
vegetation of the circle's bare edge there scuttled and poured along a
horde of the metal-studded men--if "men" they might be called--who,
ferocity incarnate, rushed the robot line. Mowed down by hundreds, still
they came on; willing, it seemed to expend any number of lives in order
that one living creature might once touch a robot with one out-thrust
metallic stud. Whe