"Well," Harry said, "it was only a matter of time. I don't see why he didn't just make a getaway. He coulda done it, easy."
They were all standing around the deactivated Myrmidon.
"But he must have been defective. You say he thought he was their king, right?" Harry shook his head. Now he'd seen it all. "Your Big Lug, now, he might believe anything. But a Myrmidon? I just don't see how a delusion like that could take hold."
"And you -" Harry pointed at the technician who'd brought the machine they'd used on the Myrmidon. "I don't care how handy it was. These things never leave the factory without an escort." The crew was taking apart the thing behind the armored shield. "Officially...." Harry looked uneasily at Gwen and Maria. "Well, this thing doesn't really exist, okay? You never saw it."
The Ferriss crew hauled the Myrmidon into a transport and locked him up. He'd be in for a whole battery of diagnostics at the factory. Then Harry and his crew spent the rest of the day hovering over the plains, picking up one Lug here, and another there, and packed them all off to the factory where they'd be reset to their default state.
They never located the last four Lugs. Either they'd managed to cover a lot of ground fast, or they'd found a way to hide in the prairie: either way, recovering ninety-six out of a hundred was a pretty good day's work.
It would have been a fantastic day's work, except that when they'd packed the last Lug in and checked the transports, they found that the Robot King was gon
 |  |
