Lewis brought his knee up into the Guard's face as he bent over, sank another one into the soft belly, kicked the Guard in the crotch, stamped on his booted foot, came back and ran forward again, driving his shoulder again into the Guard's belly. The Guard's feet hit the bottom step, he smashed into the boards, and his helmet flew off as his head thudded on the stanchion. The Guard just shook his shaven head, started to get up heavily, reaching again for his stungun, his face expressionless. Lewis heard footsteps pounding around the corner, slashing on gravel. More Guards. Dehumanized and insensitive, they were almost as invulnerable as so many robots-- He turned, ran past Betty Seton, stilly lying there with only a thin housecoat around her, not laughing now, but looking suddenly sober and horrified. "Betty!" She stared up at him. A block away he could hear the Guards coming and he kept on running. He yelled back. "Get a jeep. Get Brogarth, Cardoza, Nemerov, anybody. We're breaking out of here." "Where?" he heard her yelling after him as he went around the corner. He glanced back around the corner and saw the herd of mechanized human beings slogging toward him. "Near the gate," Lewis said. He ran toward the Pit. He ran down the steps, into the console room and looked into the lenticular disc where a ghostly blue radiance shadowed the walls. "We're going to do ourselves some good after all, Monster," Lewis said tightly. He gripped the controls and sent the Monster its last set of orders. It hurled tons of drone plane motors into the shielding walls, and its huge mandibles ripped open the shielding and peeled it away like a food canister. Smoke began to boil. Flames crackled in blue arcs. Steel beams crumbled like wax. Globs of concrete fell in a cloud of dust swirling debris. Lewis grabbed the intercom, dialed the Commander's office. No answer. He got through the exchange and got the Commander's apartment. He heard a drunken whine and behind that the drunken depraved laughter of officers and their wives and the sound of bongo drums. "The Monster's breaking out of the Pit," Lewis said. "It's shooting out more than enough deadly radioactivity to kill all of you if you don't get the hell out and get out fast." "What, what's that?" "If you think I'm having a nightmare," Lewis continued, "take a look out the window, Commander." Lewis dropped the intercom. The Monster could go quite a distance before it stopped, its remote control radius probably not exceeding three miles. The Monster went out of the Pit, taking walls and flooring with it. The entire structure trembled, beams fell, ceilings crumbled, and the Monster went through the smoking debris like a juggernaut.