Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/72

722 His hand flashed up for the wild cast—and froze in midair, gripping the ax! He could not throw the weapon!

The veins on David's neck corded with tremendous effort, but his arm and shoulder muscles would not obey his will.

"You fool!" scorned the cold accents of the Master. "Did you not think that I could read your intention in your mind, that I could hold your arms powerless by my will as easily as your legs? Do you think me a stupid, blundering creature of flesh and blood like yourself? Look, human, and see!"

The light-mists drifted swiftly away from the seat of the Master as he spoke. There on the metal throne before the great crystal of throbbing light, he sat unveiled.

David felt his brain reeling as he stared. He heard a choking of horror from Christa.

The Master was a metal robot—a mechanical creature of coppery metal, formed like a horrible travesty of humanity, with metal arms, legs and cylindrical body, and a bulbous metal head or braincase out of which two glittering, unwinking eye lenses watched them.

"God, a robot!" cried David. "A machine, created by somebody"

"And a machine greater far than its creators!" came the cold voice of the Master.

There was a strange note of pride in the robot's chill accents. It was as though it was speaking, out of that resonator mouth below its eyes, not to the transfixed David and Christa but to itself.

"Yes, they were men like you who created me," he was saying, "though men wiser far than you in the craft and skill of science. Long, long ago that was, long ago in ancient Atlantis whose fertile continent stood here in the sea where now only this little island stands, and where the races of men had readied their highest civilization.

"The scientists of Atlantis had built many wonderful mechanisms, some of them completely automatic and self-sustaining in operation. And they dreamed finally of creating a machine with brain and mind.

"I was that machine. There in Atlantis, ages past, I was born in the laboratories of the greatest scientists. My body was easy to build, but for decades they worked on the metal brain they meant to give me.

"That brain, when they finished it, was incomparably more complex in its metal neurone structure than is the human brain. Because of that, it could receive and classify an incomparably greater number of thought-patterns. That meant that I had the capacity for infinitely greater knowledge and memory than any human.

"The scientists instructed me, proud of my progress. But very soon I had learned all that they could teach me, and as I passed beyond them in knowledge and power, they began to realize that they had created a being greater than themselves."

There was a brooding note of undying hate in the metallic voice of the robot.

"I became great in power in Atlantis, the final oracle in all problems. To the populace I was a god, and as such I was worshipped and had my temple. Power I loved, not for its own sake, but only because it enabled me to continue my quest for new knowledge.

"Then the Atlantean scientists who had created me regretted their work, and wished to destroy me. They aroused the populace against me and attacked my temple with the most powerful weapons they could muster. I repelled them, but they attacked me again. At last I grew weary of their harrying, and I resolved to destroy all Atlantis and its people, ex-