The low ceiling too close to the top of his mane to be comfortable but he had traversed that same walkway many times before to be bothered by it now.Memory and just a tad spark of instinct led him through the hall -- at the end he was greeted by a sturdy, panel door.Its bell did not work but even that was not a surprise.He had to knock in code.Three fast knocks, three slow knocks, three fast knocks again.

He stopped and stepped back.For breathless moments the world was an eerie silence, punctuated by the mechanistic tickings of unfathomable inventions.And then footsteps -- a dull and heavy gait -- that came to the door from behind it, closer and closer, faster and faster.The patter ended and the turning of locks began -- the thick, oak barrier creaked open.

An image formed itself out of the slant of light that poured into the passageway.

“Dr. Algernon,” a gruff voice spoke.

Recognizing the visitor at once, the mysterious man of the house pulled the door back all the way and let him in.“Lord Phaeton,” he said in answer, bowing his head in a display of reverence.

The Lord of the Thundercats embraced the half-man, half-tiger -- he and the doctor rubbed the sides of their faces together.

“I should have called, but I could not wait,” the lion said, drawing back.

The half-breed’s face remained unchanged -- a Beethoven-esque countenance of untamed character.He had once been a nobleman, but when his homo sapien nature had at last begun to show he had been quickly and unapologetically banished from decent society by the snobbish blue-bloods.“You came at a most fortunate time,” he said, in ultra formalism.“I was just about to call you, in fact.”He shut the door in a swift move to the side and, with his free hand, pointed his guest to the spiral staircase in the back of the foyer.

A small, square window at the top edge of the wall was the only source of ambient light, weak though it was.

As the two headed up the helical steps, the outcast began to speak:“I have made several, important discoveries very recently.”In the upper level he showed the lion into a macarbe scene, painted by stocked shelves outlying a morgue of ancient technology, mangled by time, mounts and piles of Jagga-only-knew-what that were covered by thick, sooty canvass sheets.Spider webs, quivering spider webs.A large arachnid spun its was down from the ceiling while the doctor continued his lecture -- he clasped it with his thumb and forefinger and popped it to a red, gooey death.“It began ten years ago when a cemetery was unearthed by,” he paused to choose his word carefully, “undesirables while they mined for coal.It was no ordinary burial grounds.”He pulled back a tarp then turned on a small bulb that hung nakedly above.

“What are these things?” Phaeton asked in shock as he looked upon the entangled mass.He had stepped back into the surrounding darkness.

“Berbils.”

“Berbils?”The lion thought back to his schooldays -- it had been that long since he had heard that word.“They all --”

“Died out, that’s right.Their extinction happened long before all this,” he waved his finger about, pointing upward.“The Wollos, too, did not survive.Apparently, the electromagnetic radiation of our machines -- even back then -- was too strong and overwhelmed their delicate biology.”He paused and rubbed the fur around his neck.“Strange that the humans were spared that fate -- as if they had been conditioned to it.”His mind, too, stopped for a moment of contemplation, perplexed by how the pre-civilized Amazonians had gained immunity to the effects of the --

“But that was ten years ago?”Phaeton, like all cats, had a profound sense of curiosity.

“Yes, yes,” Algernon returned to reality.“I used that time to study their bodies but I was making little progress, until just a few months ago, that is.”He grabbed from the mass of corpses what appeared to be an arm and brought to the brighter shadows where the lion could better examine it.“Robotic.A bizarre mixture of the organic and the technical, just like the old legends said.”

“I don’t believe it,” he grinned, “that you would listen to ancient folklore.Before I’ll know it you’ll be saying snarfs were real, too.”

“But they were, my liege, they just returned to their home planet!”

The enshadowed pair exchanged a quick laugh.

“No, I’m serious,” he pulled back the flap of withered, soil-encrusted hide that covered the elbow joint of the severed appendage.Wires and electric cords dangled from the wound.“The evidence of our own senses cannot be denied.They are machines, that much I knew from the moment I first studied them.How they lived is a question that took a decade to answer -- and now I have it.”He let the arm drop over the knotted mass of crushed, distorted Berbil remains.“Who ever built them was a genius -- but short-sided and fundamentally flawed.Thus it was up to me to perfect what had been left raw and incomplete.Come.”He patted the lion of the shoulder, directing him toward yet another door.He turned off the hot, glowing light bulb with a pull of its metal chain.

The new chamber was a laboratory so large that it took over the vast majority of the old house’s volume.Long, thin windows, perched high on the walls, bathed the room in fresh sunlight and gave the area an air of imposing invincibility.Phaeton was at once startled by the flashing of arching sparks but Algernon was unmoved, already used to the electric coils on the floor, upright and next to a raised platform.

“Do not be afraid of the future, my lord -- I give you my greatest creation!”He raised his hands over his head -- his mane of red and black, balding in spots where his human scalp had begun to show -- his hands curled erratically, his long fingers bent arthritically.He pulled on a cable that hung down from the ceiling and at once the electrical devices in the chamber came to life.

The floor vibrated to an unseen generator’s hum.The conical coils of bare wire swayed and, though bolted in place, they seemed drawn to each other, bending toward each other, coming closer and closer with every pulsating throb.Streams of blue plasma snaked through the air to the raised platform -- only then was it evident that something rested atop that elevated level.

The lion covered his eyes in horror and looked away as if the whole, wide world had come to an end.

The thing that was only visible for brief flashes began to move.Slowly, sluggishly.Up from its crouched position, it unfolded its legs, pressed its metallic fists on the plate upon which it rested and pulled itself up.A head arched back revealing a torso and then the cackling of the machines stopped, plunging the laboratory into a state of oppressing silence.

“For Jagga’s sake, what is that?”

“A robotic man-machine, sire, perfect and unerring,” the tiger spoke, wild-eyed.

Phaeton stepped closer, despite his reservations.The creation -- what ever it was -- was about as tall as the average man.The face was skeletal but retained the normal features: two eyes, an orifice for a nose, a cheek-less jaw with exposed ‘teeth.’The chest was a network of wires and gears and boxed components that housed specialized mechanisms.The arms and legs and their extreme appendages had an unerringly realistic anatomic form.

Its fingers flexed in unison to its master’s -- then quickly assumed Algernon’s pose as well.

“See, do you see?Second after second, its thoughts, its movements become more secure, more lifelike.Give me a day and I’ll give you a robot that NO ONE can mistake for a machine.”

The Lord of the Thundercats looked into the machine’s eyes -- it’s glowing red eyes.

The doctor clasped the lion’s shoulders.“Did I not say you were fortunate to have come today?Think about it -- what would we need living workers for?”

A flash came to Phaeton’s eyes, it was the spark of divine inspiration and as the half-breed’s words sunk in, a feral grin came to his face.