y 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 spend any number of lives in order
that one living creature might once touch a robot with one outthrust
metallic stud. Whenever that happened there was a flash of lightning,
the heavy smoke of burning insulation, grease, and metal, and the robot
went down out of control. Recalling his remaining automatons, Roger sent
out a shielding screen, against which the defenders of their planet
raged in impotent fury. For days they hurled themselves and their every
force against that impenetrable barrier, then withdrew: temporarily
stopped, but by no means acknowledging defeat.

Then while Roger and his cohorts directed affairs from within their
comfortable and now sufficiently roomy vessel, there came into being
around it an industrial city of metal peopled by metallic and insensate
mechanisms. Mines were sunk, furnaces were blown in, smelters belched
forth into the already unbearable air their sulphurous fumes, rolling
mills and machine shops were built and were equipped; and as fast as new
enterprises were completed additional robots were ready to man them. In
record time the heavy work of girders, members, and plates was well
under way; and shortly thereafter light, deft, multi-fingered mechanisms
began to build and to install the prodigious amount of precise machinery
required by the vastness of the structure.

As soon as he was sure that he would be completely free for a
sufficient length of time, Roger-Gharlane assembled, boiled down and
concentrated, his every mental force. He probed then, very gently, for
whatever it was that had been and was still blocking him. He found
it--synchronized with it--and in the instant hurled against it the
fiercest thrust possible for his Eddorian mind to generate: a bolt whose
twin had slain more than one member of Eddore's Innermost Circle; a bolt
whose energies, he had previ