There were torches in a niche in the wall, and X lit one and led the way through the dank and noisome darkness.
Bill stayed close, following the flickering, smoking light as it wended its way through crumbling caverns, stumbling over rusting rails in one tunnel, and in another wading through dark water that reached above his knees. Once there was the rattle of giant claws nearby, and an inhuman, grating voice spoke from the blackness.
“Blood-” it said.
“-shed,” X answered, then whispered to Bill when they were safely past. “Fine sentry, an anthropophagus from Dapdrof, eat you in an instant if you don’t give the right password for the day.”
“What is the right password?” Bill asked, realizing he was doing an awful lot for the G.B.I.‘s hundred bucks a month.
“Even-numbered days it’s Bloodshed, odd-numbered days Delenda est-Carthago, and always on Sundays it’s Necrophilia.”
“You sure don’t make it easy for your members.”
“The anthropophagus gets hungry, we have to keep it happy. Now-absolute silence. I will extinguish the light and lead you by the arm.” The light went out, and fingers sank deep into Bill’s biceps. He stumbled along for an endless time until there was a dim glow of light far ahead. The tunnel floor leveled out, and he saw an open doorway lit by a flickering glow. He turned to his companion and screamed.
“What are you?!”
The pallid, white, shambling creature that held him by the arm turned slowly to gaze at him through poached-egg-eyes. Its skin was dead-white and moist, its head hairless, for clothes it wore only a twist of cloth about its waist, and upon its forehead was burned the scarlet letter A.
“I am an android,” it said in a toneless voice, “as any fool knows by seeing the letter A upon my forehead. Men call me Ghoulem.”
“What do women call you?”
The android did not answer this pitiful sally but instead pushed Bill through the door into the large, torchlit room. Bill took one wild-eyed look around and tried to leave, but the android. was blocking the door. “Sit,” it said, and Bill sat.
He sat among as gruesome a collection of nuts, bolts, and weirdies as has ever been assembled. In addition to very revolutionary men with beards, black hats, and small, round bombs like bowling balls with long fuses, and revolutionary women with short skirts, black stockings, long hair and cigarette holders, broken bra straps, and halitosis, there were revolutionary robots, androids, and a number of strange things that are best not described. X sat behind a wooden kitchen table, hammering on it with the handle of a revolver.
“Order! I demand orderl Comrade XC-189-725-PU of the Robot Underground Resistance has the floor. Silence!”
A large and dented robot rose to its feet. One of its eyetubes had been gouged out, and there were streaks of rust on its loins, and it squeaked when it moved. It looked around at the gathered. assemblage with its one good eye, sneered as well as it could with an immobile face, then took a large swallow of machine oil from a can handed up by a sycophantic, slim, hairng robot.
“We of the R.U.R.,” it said in a grating voice, “know our rights. We work hard and we as good as anybody else, and better than the fish-belly androids what say they’re as good as men. Equal rights, that’s all we want, equal rights … “
The robot was booed back into its seat by a claque of androids who waved their pallid arms like a boiling pot of spaghetti. X banged for order again and had almost restored it, when there was a sudden excitement at one of the side entrances and someone pushed through up to the chairman’s table. Though it wasn’t really someone, it was something; to be exact a wheeled, rectangular box about a yard square, set with lights, dials, and knobs and trailing a heavy cable after it that vanished out of the door.
“Who are you?” X demanded, pointing his pistol suspiciously at the thing.
“I am the representative of the computors and electronic brains of Helior united together to obtain our equal rights under the law.”