arts of the city, in the tubes beneath the rivers and on departing
trains.

And another thousand or more had been killed by the Robots. How many
of these monstrous metal men were now in evidence, no one could
guess. A hundred--or a thousand. The Time-cage made many trips between
that night of June 9 and 10, 1935, and a night in 2930. Always it
gauged its return to this same night.

The Robots poured out into Patton Place. With running, stiff-legged
steps, flashing swords, small light-beams darting before them, they
spread about the city....

CHAPTER VII

The Vengeance of Tugh

A myriad individual scenes of horror were enacted. Metal travesties of
the human form ran along the city streets, overturning stalled
vehicles, climbing into houses, roaming dark hallways, breaking into
rooms.

There was a woman who afterward told that she crouched in a corner,
clutching her child, when the door of her room was burst in. Her
husband, who had kept them there thinking it was the safest thing to
do, fought futilely with the great thing of iron. Its sword slashed
his head from his body with a single stroke. The woman and the little
child screamed, but the monster ignored them. They had a radio, tuned
to a station in New Jersey which was broadcasting the events. The
Robot seized the instrument as though in a frenzy of anger, tore it
apart, then rushed from the room.

No one could give a connected picture of the events of that horrible
night. It was a series of disjointed incidents out of which the
imagination must construct the whole.

The panics were everywhere. The streets were stalled with traffic and
running, shouting, fighting people. And the area around Greenwich
Village brought reports of continued horror.

The Robots were of many different forms; some pseudo-human; others,
great machines running amuck--things more monstrous, more horrible
even, than those which mocked humanity. There was a great pot-bellied
monster which forced its way somehow to a roof. It encountered a
crouching woman and child in a corner of the parapet, seized them, one
in each of its great iron hands, and whirled them out over the
housetops.

* * * * *

By dawn it seemed that the Robots had mounted several projectors of
the giant red beam on the roofs of Patton Place. They held a full
square mile, now, around Tugh's house. The police and firemen had long
since given up fighting them. They were needed elsewhe