She watched him a little longer. Then she deliberately stooped and drew the firestone out of its sheath. She touched it to a blade of the tall grass. A little orange flame licked up, slowly quested along the blade, down to the ground and up another stem. It slipped over to another stem, and another, growing larger, hotter--Koroby stepped back from the writhing fire, her hand protectively over her face. The flames crackled at first--like the crumpling of thin paper. Then, as they widened and began climbing hand over hand up an invisible ladder, they roared. Koroby was running back toward the City now, away from the heat. The fire spread in a long line over the prairie. Above its roar came shouts from the City. The flames rose in a monstrous twisting pillar, brighter than even the dust-palled sky, lighting the buildings and the prairie. The heat was dreadful. Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking crowd. Someone grasped her roughly--she was too breathless to do more than gasp for air--and shook her violently. "You fool, you utter fool! What did you think you were doing?" Others clamored around her, reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed through the crowd, pressed her to him. "Let her alone--Let her alone, I say!" They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they swept around him, circling him--his arms flailed frantically. * * * * * The fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke, difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed. "He fell about here," he said, and began to probe the ashes with the stick. He struck something. "Here he is!" he cried. The others hurried to the spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from the people. It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery, caked with soot. "He wasn't human at all!" Yasak marvelled. "He was some kind of a toy made to look like a man--that's why he wore armor, and his face never changed expression--" "Magic!" someone cried, and backed away. "Magic!" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then conquered him. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stranger From Space, by Hannes Bok