Then I saw the appalling thing. Struggling to get his feet on the ground again, Kel had caught the red curls of her hair. And the hair had come off! Her head had come off--all the outside of it. For all her white beauty had been a painted mask. Still her red-scratched, naked body had all its loveliness. But the thing on its shoulders was the compact metal brain-case of a robot, its weird eye-lenses glittering with a cold and triumphant green. Chilled with a startled horror, I struggled against those binding arms, so far stronger than any arms of flesh. "I see it now!" came the despairing gasp of Kel Aran. "This was all a trap of Malgarth's. And the bait was not Verel, but her robot simulacrum!" We were suddenly flung down upon the dead-white grass. Scores of men stood around us, in the light of the flaming palace, covering us with bright weapons. And the hideous robot-head, glittering eerily on the white-curved shoulders of Verel Erin, began to laugh like a machine gone mad. "Look!" A new despair choked Kel Aran. "It was not even the Stone!" He pointed back to the pool's white rim. I saw that the great jewel had fallen there, and shattered. The fragments had no fire. I knew that it had not been the Dondara Stone, but only a mockery of glass. That appalling mechanical laughter rang louder in our ears, maddening. XIX THE ROBOT AND THE EMPEROR The blood-red dawn of Ledros grew more ghastly bright. Still, across the dead-white gardens, the fired palace burned like the funeral pyre of the Galactic Empire. Stripped of weapons, Kel Aran and I were now manacled together. A full hundred of the Emperor's guardsmen, in their trim red-and-yellow, waited watchfully about us. A little squad of men, behind us, were gingerly lowering a bright metal cylinder into the silver-walled pool where the _Barihorn_ lay hidden, at the end of an insulated cable. The Earthman looked from them to me, with a hopeless shrug. He jerked his bare yellow head wearily toward the sky, and I saw the dim mile-long bulk of a Galactic Guard cruiser floating lazily above, the pale red cone of the repulsor-flare spread from her stern. "An ato-converter bomb." His whisper was dull, lifeless. "They mean to blow our comrades up before there's any warning. And the space cruiser's waiting, in case they try to get away." I thought of the three men under the pool. The tall grave Saturnian waiting alertly by the controls, no doubt. Scrawny little Rogo Nug standing by the converters, probably chewing _goona-roon_ the while. Big Zerek Oom in his galley, perhaps seeking ease from the long strain of waiting from his hoarded bottle. Doomed. And we, captured, had no way to warn them. "Setsi--" Kel was whispering. "If she were here--" "The sandbat?" I demanded. "What happened to her?"