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.”“You don’t think this, do you?”“No, I don’t.I don’t think machines have a capacity for evil.But the city is no place to stay and I am leaving it, right now.Are you coming, Edward?”“You lead the way.I’ll be right behind you.”“Now wait a minute!” stormed the Brigadier.“You can’t desert me now.Not when we are on the brink.”“The brink of what?” asked Jurgens.“The brink of finding the answer we seek.”“It’s not here,” said Jurgens.“The machines may be a part of it, but they’re not all of it and you can’t get the solution from them.”The Brigadier sputtered at him, but no words came out.His face was puffed and red with anger and frustration.Then suddenly his sputtering stopped and he shouted at them.“We’ll see about that! I’ll show you.I’ll show all of you!”As he shouted at them he leaped forward, running down the walkway, straight between the two banks of machines.Jurgens took two quick steps in pursuit, struggling to get solid footing with his crutch on the smoothness of the metal walkway.Moving deliberately, Lansing kicked the crutch out from under him and sent the robot sprawling.The Brigadier still was running.He was far down the walkway when suddenly he sparkled all along his entire body.The sparkle flared for a small fraction of a second and the Brigadier was gone.Blinded by the flare, they all stood stockstill, horrified.Jurgens, using the crutch to pull himself erect, scrambled to his feet.“I think,” he told Lansing, “that I must thank you for my life.”“I told you, long ago,” said Lansing, “that if you ever tried another stupid trick, I’d clobber you with whatever was at hand.”“I can’t see him,” said Sandra.“The Brigadier’s not there.”Mary directed a flashlight beam down the walkway.“Neither can I,” she said.“The beam doesn’t carry far enough.”“I think it does,” said Jurgens.“The Brigadier is gone.”“But it wasn’t that way with us,” Mary said to Lansing.“Our bodies stayed behind.”“We weren’t as far down the walkway as the general was.”“That may be it,” she said.“You spoke of the machines being able to take over the body as well as the mind.I told you it would be impossible.Maybe I was wrong.”“Two of us gone,” said Sandra.“The Parson and the Brigadier.”“The Brigadier may come back,” said Lansing.“Somehow I don’t think so,” said Mary.“There was a lot of energy involved.The Brigadier could very well be dead.”“You can say this for him,” said Jurgens.“He went out in a blaze of glory.No! No! I’m sorry.I apologize.I did not mean that; I should not have said it.”“You’re forgiven,” Lansing said.“You just beat another one of us to saying it.”“Now what?” asked Sandra.“What do we do now?”“That’s a problem,” Mary told her.“Edward, do you have any kind of hunch that he’ll be coming back? As we came back.”“No hunch.Since we came back, I thought…”“But this was different.”“The damn fool,” said Lansing.“The poor, pitiful damn fool.The leader to the end.”They stood, huddled together, looking down the walkway in all its emptiness.The cat eyes glowed, the machines kept up their crooning.“Maybe we should wait awhile,” said Mary, “before we leave the city.”“I think we should,” said Jurgens.“If he does come back, he’ll need us,” Sandra said.“Edward,” Mary asked, “what do you think?”“That we should wait,” he said.“At a time like this, we can’t desert the man.I can’t imagine he’ll come back, but if he should…”They moved their camp into the alley, near the stairs that went down into the cavern where the machines sang softly to themselves.Each night the lonesome beast came out on the hills above the city and cried out its bitterness and lostness.On the morning of the fourth day, after consulting the map that might have represented this part of the world, they left the city and found the westward continuation of the road they’d walked to reach it.EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON they reached the summit of the hills that ringed in the city and entered a grotesque world of erosion carving
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