Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
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 elsewhere--the police
to try and cope with the panics, and the firemen to fight the
conflagrations which everywhere began springing up. Fires, the natural
outcome of chaos; and fires, incendiary--made by criminals who took
advantage of the disaster to fatten like ghouls upon the dead. They
prowled the streets. They robbed and murdered at will.
The giant beams of the Robots carried a frigid blast for miles. By
dawn of that June 10th, the south wind was carrying from the enemy
area a perceptible wave of cold even as far as Westchester. Allen,
flying over the city, saw the devastated area clearly. Ice in the
streets--smashed vehicles--the gruesome litter of sword-slashed human
bodies. And other human bodies, plucked apart; strewn....
Alten's plane flew at an altitude of some two thousand feet. In the
growing daylight the dark prowling figures of the metal men were
plainly seen. There were no humans left alive in the captured area.
The plane dropped a bomb into Washington Square where a dozen or two
of the Robots were gathered. It missed them. The plane's pilot had not
realized that they were grouped around a projector; its red shaft
sprang up, caught the plane and clung to it. Frigid blast! Even at
that two thousand feet altitude, for a few seconds Alten and the
others were stiffened by the cold. The motor missed; very nearly
stopped. Then an intervening rooftop cut off the beam, and the plane
escaped.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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