Part 5

Morning had probably come to the outside world. Gascon, wan and weary, stepped back and mopped his brow with a shirt sleeve. Tom-Tom spoke from where he sat cross-legged on the bench beside the controls.

"Is he pretty much in shape, Gaspipe?"

"As much as you ever were, Tom-Tom. If you are right, and this machine gave you life, it will give him life, too."

"I can't wait for my man Friday. Get him over and lay him on the slab."

The metal man was too heavy to lift, but Gascon's hours of work had provided his joints with beautiful balance. An arm around the tanklike waist was enough to support and guide. The weight shifted from one big shovel-foot to the other and the massive bulk actually walked to the table-like slab in the midst of the wheels and tubes, and Gascon eased it down at full length. Now Tom-Tom approached, bringing a spongy-looking object on a metal tray, an amorphous roundness that sprouted copper wires in all directions. He slid it into the open top of the robot's bucketlike head.

"That's a brain for Friday," explained Tom-Tom. "Not as complex as mine, but made the same way. He'll have simple reactions and impulses. A model servant."

Simple reactions—and Tom-Tom had sprung up from his birthcouch to kill the man who brought him to life. Gascon's hands trembled ever so slightly as he connected the brain wires to terminals that did duty as nerves. Tom-Tom himself laid a plate over the orifice and stuck it down with a soldering iron.

"My own brain's armored inside this wooden skull," he commented. "No bullet or axe could reach it. And nobody can hurt the brain of Friday here unless they get at him from above. He's pretty tall to get at from above, eh, Gaspipe?"

"That's right," nodded Gascon, and in his mind rose a picture of the big metal thing bending down, exposing that vulnerable soldered patch. Tom-Tom and he clamped the leads to wrists, ankles and neck.

"Get back to the wall, Gaspipe," commanded Tom-Tom bleakly, and Gascon obeyed. "Now watch. And don't move, or I'll set Friday on you when he wakes up."

Gascon sat down on a long, low bench next to the open door. Tom-Tom noticed his position, and lifted the gun he had carried into the chamber.

"Don't try to run," he warned, "or I'll drill you—maybe in the stomach. And you can lie there and die slowly. When you die there'll be nobody to help Shanny yonder in her little hole in the wall."

"I won't run," promised Gascon. And Tom-Tom switched on more power.

Sparks, a shuddering roar, a quickening of all parts of the machine. The shining hulk on the slab stirred and quivered, like a man troubled by dreams. Tom-Tom gave a brief barking laugh of triumph, brought the mechanism to a howling crescendo of sound and motion, then abruptly shut it down to a murmur.

"Friday! Friday!" he called.

Slowly the metal giant sat up in its bonds.

The bucket-head, with its vacant eyes now gleaming as yellow as Tom-Tom's, turned in that direction. Then, with unthinkable swiftness, the big metal body heaved itself erect, ripping free of the clamps that had been fastened upon it. Up rose two monstrous hands, like baseball gloves of jointed iron. There was a clashing, heavy-footed charge.

Sitting still as death, Gascon again recalled to mind what Tom-Tom had said, what he had heard at medical school.

Tom-Tom gave a prolonged yell, and threw up the gun to fire. The explosions rattled and rolled in the narrow confinement of the room. Bullets spattered the armor-plated breast of the oncoming giant. One knocked away a gleaming eye. The towering thing did not falter in its dash. Tom-Tom tried to spring down too late. The big hands flashed out, and had him.

Gascon, now daring to move, dragged the bench across the doorway. From a corner he caught up a heavy wrought-iron socket lever, as long as a walking stick and nearly as thick as his wrist. All the while he watched, over his shoulder, a battle that was not all one-sided.

After his final effort to command the newly animated giant, Tom-Tom had not made a sound. He concentrated on freeing himself from the grip that had fastened upon him. Both his wooden hands clutched a single finger, strained against it. Gascon saw, almost as in a ridiculous dream, that immense finger bending backward, backward, and tearing from its socket. But the other fingers kept their hold. They laid Tom-Tom on the floor, a great slab of a foot pinned him there. The two metal hands began to pluck him to pieces, and to throw the pieces away.

First an arm in a plaid sleeve flew across the room—an arm ripped from Tom-Tom's little sleeve, an arm that still writhed and wriggled, its fingers opening and closing. It fell among the wheels that still turned, jamming them. Sparks sprang up with a grating rattle. Then a flame of blueness. Gascon turned his back toward the doorway that he had blocked with the bench, to see the thing out.

With a wanton fury, the victorious ogre of metal had shredded Tom-Tom's body, hurling the pieces in all directions. To one side, the machinery was putting forth more flame and more. The blaze licked up the wall. The giant straightened his body at last, holding in one paw the detached head of its victim. The jaws of Tom-Tom snapped and moved, as though he was trying to speak.

"Look this way!" roared Gascon at the top of his voice.

The creature heard him. Its head swiveled doorward. It stared with one gleaming eye and one empty black socket. Gascon brandished the socket lever over his head, as though in challenge, then turned and sprang over the bench into the dark corridor.

A jangling din as the thing rushed after him. Hands shot out to clutch. Its shins struck the bench violently, the feet lost their grip of the floor, and the clumsy structure plunged forward and down, with a noise like an automobile striking a stone wall. For a moment the huge head was just at Gascon's knee.

He struck. The solder-fastened patch flew away under the impact of his clubbed lever-bar like a driven golf ball. The cranium yawned open, and he jabbed the bar in. Something squashed and yielded before his prodding—the delicate artificial brain. Then the struggling shape at his feet subsided. From one relaxing hand rolled something round—the head of Tom-Tom.

It still lived, for the eyes rolled up to glare at Gascon, the jaws snapped at his toe. He kicked the thing back through the door, into the growing flames. The fire was bright enough to show him the way back along the corridor. He did not know how Tom-Tom had arranged the panel to open and close, nor did he pause to find out. Heavy blows of the bar cleared him a way.

Out in the office, he fairly sprang to the desk, located the button on its top, and pressed it. A moment later, Shannon was staring out at him through her grating.

"Ben!" she gasped. "Are you all right? Tom-Tom—"

"He's finished," Gascon told her. "This whole business is finished." With his lever he managed to rip the grating from its fastenings, and then dragged Shannon forth. She clung to him like a child awakened from a nightmare.

"Come, we're getting out."

In the second corridor he stooped, searched the pockets of the senseless triangle-faced one and secured the keys to the car outside. Then he shook the fellow back to semi-consciousness.

"This house is on fire!" Gascon shouted. "Get your pal upstairs on his feet, and get out of here."

Leaving the fellow standing weakly, Gascon and Shannon got into the open and into the car. Driving along the street, they heard the clang of fire-engines, heading for the now angry fire.

Shannon said one thing: "Ben, how much can we tell the police?"

"It isn't how much we can tell them," replied Gascon weightily. "It's how little."

When Autumn returned, Ben Gascon was on the air again after all. His sponsors feared that his marriage to Shannon Cole might damage their popularity as co-stars, but radio fans showed quite the opposite reaction. Gascon introduced a fresh note in the form of a new dummy, which he named Jack Duffy, a green-horn character with a husky voice instead of a shrill one and rural humor instead of cocktail-hour repartee.

Sometimes people asked what had become of Tom-Tom; but Gascon always managed to change the subject, and eventually Tom-Tom was forgotten.