iend again?

* * * * *

There was a pause of seconds as I walked on and on; came then an
earth-shattering crash that flung me to the ground. The visors had
caught the picture of me! I picked myself up, bruised and sore, but
otherwise unharmed. I started to run.

The sky was a blaze of zooming planes that hurled destruction on the
land below. Far off could be heard the rumbling roar of hurrying
machines--tractors, diggers, disintegrators, levelers, all the mighty
mobile masses of metal that man's brain had conceived--all hurrying
forward in massed attack to seek out and destroy their creators,
obedient to the will of a master machine, immobile, pressing buttons
in the Central Control System.

The night resolved itself into a weird phantasmagoric nightmare for
me, a gigantic game of hide-and-seek, in which I was "it." Gasping,
choking, flung to earth and stunned by ear-shattering explosions,
staggering up somehow, ducking to avoid being crushed beneath the
ponderous treads of metal monsters that plunged uncannily for me,
sobbing aloud in terror, swerving just in time from in front of a
swinging crane, instinctively side-stepping just as a pale violet ray
swept into nothingness all before it--I must have been delirious, for
I retain only the vaguest memory of the horror.

And all the time the guiding search-rays biased down upon the torn and
shattered fields, and the disintegrator, unnoticed in the vast uproar,
steadily kept up its deadly work.

At last, in my delirium and terror, I heard a great rending and
tearing. I looked up, and a tractor just missed me as it rolled by on
swishing treads. But that one glance was enough. The ice cap was
moving, flowing forward, a thousand-foot wall of ice! Great billowing
clouds of steam spurted from innumerable cracks. The deed had been
done! The world was saved for mankind!

Summoning the last ounce of strength, I set off on a steady run for
the shelter of the rock cave, to be out of the way when the final
smash-up came.

* * * * *

I was not pursued. The ponderous machines, thousands of them, were
hastily forming into solid ranks directly in front of the tottering
glacier wall. The master machine had seen its impending fate in the
visors, and was organizing a defense.

Even in my elation, I could not but feel unwilling admiration for this
monstrous thing of metal and quartz, imbued with an intelligence that