that was certain; she must stay here with her brother. She would be safer in Norhala’s home than where we were going, of course, and yet to leave her was most distressing. After all, I wondered, was there any need of both of us taking the journey; would not one do just as well?
Drake could stay–
“No use of putting all our eggs in one basket,” I broached the subject. “I’ll go down by myself while you stay and help Ruth. You can always follow if I don’t turn up in a reasonable time.”
His indignation at this proposal was matched only by her own.
“You’ll go with him, Dick Drake,” she cried, “or I’ll never look at or speak to you again!”
“Good Lord! Did you think for a minute I wouldn’t?” Pain and wrath struggled on his face. “We go together or neither of us goes. Ruth will be all right here, Goodwin. The only thing she has any cause to fear is Yuruk–and he’s had his lesson.
“Besides, she’ll have the rifles and her pistols, and she knows how to use them. What d’ye mean by making such a proposition as that?” His indignation burst all bounds.
Lamely I tried to justify myself.
“I’ll be all right,” said Ruth. “I’m not afraid of Yuruk. And none of these Things will hurt me–not after–not after–” Her eyes fell, her lips quivered, then she faced us steadily. “Don’t ask me how I know that,” she said quietly. “Believe me, I do know it. I am closer to–them than you two are. And if I choose I can call upon that alien strength their master gave me. It is for you two that I fear.”
“No fear for us,” Drake burst out hastily. “We’re Norhala’s little playthings. We’re tabu. Take it from me, Ruth, I’d bet my head there isn’t one of these Things, great or small, and no matter how many, that doesn’t by this time know all about us.
“We’ll probably be received with demonstrations of interest by the populace as welcome guests. Probably we’ll find a sign–‘Welcome to our City’–hung up over the front gate.”
She smiled, a trifle tremulously.
“We’ll come back,” he said. Suddenly he leaned forward, put his hands on her shoulders. “Do you think there is anything that could keep me from coming back?” he whispered.
She trembled, wide eyes searching deep into his.
“Well,” I broke in, a bit uncomfortably, “we’d better be starting. I think as Drake does, that we’re tabu. Barring accident there’s no danger. And if I guess right about these Things, accident is impossible.”
“As inconceivable as the multiplication table going wrong,” he laughed, straightening.
And so we made ready. Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew; our pistols we decided to carry as Drake put it, “for comfort.” Canteens filled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments, including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit–all these packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broad shoulders.
I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.
We were ready for our journey.
Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surface resembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fifty feet wide and now, in daylight, glistened faintly as though overlaid with some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way that stopped at the threshold of Norhala’s door.
Diminishing through the distance, it stretched straight as an arrow onward and vanished between perpendicular cliffs which formed the frowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon the coursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistiness checked the gaze.
Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings of Norhala’s house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion of an hour-glass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gateway forming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at a wider angle.
This upper part of the hour-glass was filled with a park-like forest. It was closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs.
How, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me pierce them? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had not found and followed it?
The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more than a mile wide. Norhala’s house stood in its center; and it was like a garden, dotted with flowering and fragrant lilies and here and there a tiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala’s dwelling seemed less to rest upon the ground than to emerge from it; as though its basic curvatures were hidden in the earth.
What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of the lacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously, incredibly beautiful it was–an immense bubble of froth of molten sapphires and turquoises.
We had not time to study its beauties. A few last instructions to Ruth, and we set forth down the gray road. Hardly had we taken a few steps when there came a faint cry from her.
“Dick! Dick–come here!”
He sprang to her, caught her hands in his. For a moment, half frightened it seemed, she considered him.
“Dick,” I heard her whisper. “Dick–come back safe to me!”
I saw his arms close about her, hers tighten around his neck; black hair touched the silken brown curls, their lips met, clung. I turned away.
In a little time he joined me; head down, silent, he strode along beside me, utterly dejected.
A hundred more yards and we turned. Ruth was still standing on the threshold of the house of mystery, watching us. She waved her hands, flitted in, was hidden from us. And Drake still silent, we pushed on.
The walls of the gateway were close. The sparse vegetation along the base of the cliffs had ceased; the roadway itself had merged into the smooth, bare floor of the canyon. From vertical edge to vertical edge of the rocky portal stretched a curtain of shimmering mist. As we drew nearer we saw that this was motionless, and less like vapor of water than vapor of light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms of crystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it; the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm–as though bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge the shining particles from position.
We passed within it–side by side.
Instantly I knew that whatever these veils were, they were not moisture. The air we breathed was dry, electric. I was sensible of a decided stimulation, a pleasant tingling along every nerve, a gaiety almost light-headed. We could see each other quite plainly, the rocky floor on which we trod as well. Within this vapor of light there was no ghost of sound; it was utterly empty of it. I saw Drake turn to me, his mouth open in a laugh, his lips move in speech–and although he bent close to my ear, I heard nothing. He frowned, puzzled, and walked on.
Abruptly we stepped into an opening, a pocket of clear air. Our ears were filled with a high, shrill humming as unpleasantly vibrant as the shriek of a sand blast. Six feet to our right was the edge of the ledge on which we stood; beyond it was a sheer drop into space. A shaft piercing down into the void and walled with the mists.
But it was not that shaft that made us clutch each other. No! It was that through it uprose a colossal column of the cubes. It stood a hundred feet from us. Its top was another hundred feet above the level of our ledge and its length vanished in the depths.
And its head was a gigantic spinning wheel, yards in thickness, tapering at its point of contact with the cliff wall into a diameter half that of the side closest the column, gleaming with flashes of green flame and grinding with tremendous speed at the face of the rock.
Over it, attached to the cliff, was a great vizored hood of some pale yellow metal, and it was this shelter that cutting off the vaporous light like an enormous umbrella made the pocket of clarity in which we stood, the shaft up which sprang the pillar.
All along the length of that column as far as we could see the myriad tiny eyes of the Metal People shone out upon us, not twinkling mischievously, but–grotesque as this may seem, I cannot help it–wide with surprise.
Only an instant longer did the great wheel spin. I saw the screaming rock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it had received some message, abruptly its motion now ceased.
It tilted; looked down upon us!
I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smaller pyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemed to be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as the Shrine of the Cones.
The column was bending; the wheel approaching.
Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We were shrouded in their silences. Step by step we went on, peering for the edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled face stealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might step too close to the unseen verge.
Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; we passed out of them–
A chaos of sound beat about us. The clanging of a million anvils; the clamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thunder; the roarings of a thousand hurricanes. The prodigious bellowings of the Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light.
Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of Force. Stunned, nay BLINDED, by it, we covered ears and eyes.
As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence. Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that humming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds.
We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had clutched them.
Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis–the appallingly beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy, and its alien terror.
The Domain of the Metal Monster–it was filled like a chalice with Its will; was the visible expression of that will.
We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immense pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at the upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean that it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length. Five hundred feet below was the pit’s floor. Gone were the clouds of light that had obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear; every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness.
First the eyes rested upon a broad band of fluorescent amethyst, ringing the entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thousand feet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell the curtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors.
But now I saw that all of these veils were not motionless like those through which we had just passed. To the northwest they were pulsing like the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swift iridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these were ordered, geometric–like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flying swiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back.
From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering not two miles away from us.
Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, it reared full five thousand feet on high!
How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitous walls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, I estimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyes like a blow; its shadow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It was overpowering –dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante saw rising up from another pit.
It was a metal city, mountainous.
Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should have been blind, that vast oblong face–but it was not blind. From it radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden sense higher than sight.
It was a metal city, mountainous and–AWARE.
About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portals swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations coming and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns about the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.
From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in which it lay. Its floor was plaquelike, a great plane smooth as though turned by potter’s wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace; level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing –no tree nor bush, meadow nor covert.
It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it was mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered–
The surging of the Metal Hordes.
There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless host. They marched and countermarched in battalions, in regiments, in armies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes like mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving about each other with incredible rapidity–like scores of great pyramids crowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vivid flashes, lightning bright– on their wake the rolling echoes of faraway thunder.
Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamed and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like fiery whirling disks.
Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape and reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons–then lift in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.
Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear suggestion of drill, of maneuver.
And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious; instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.
But always this patterning was ordered, always COHERENT. As though it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world message.
Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments traced by some mathematical God!
Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in Arabic.
It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course two broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges–even from that distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline murmurings.
Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a river; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.
I looked upward–up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses, swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower with countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.
Up they thrust–domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.
Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the immense pallid baroques of the snow fields.
Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring of flashing amethyst with its aural mists. Between them lay the vast and patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement. Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the Seeing City.
Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmic spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic, lapidescent and–
Conscious!
Down from the ledge where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by which, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of at least forty-five degrees; its surface was smooth and polished.
Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemed to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in.
I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands; saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him–through the force that held us. A block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment. Under us, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched. There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves upon another surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of the cubes, dropping below, five hundred feet to the valley’s floor a column of which the block that held us was the top.
Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the Grinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been its scout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape had sought us out through the mists, its messenger had caught us, delivered us to it.
The pillar leaned over–bent like that shining pillar that had bridged for us, at Norhala’s commands, the abyss. The floor of the valley arose to meet us. Further and further leaned the pillar. Again there was a rapid shifting of us to another surface of the crowning cube. Fast now swept up toward us the valley floor. A dizziness clouded my sight. There was a little shock, a rolling over the Thing that had held us–
We stood upon the floor of the Pit.
And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we had ridden downward came score upon score of the cubes. They broke from it, disintegrating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinkling at us from their deep sparkling points of eyes.
Helplessly we gazed at those who circled around us. Then suddenly I felt myself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block. Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched me. Then like a human ball it tossed me to another. I caught a glimpse of Drake’s tall figure drifting through the air.
The play became more rapid, breathtaking. It was play; I recognized that. But it was perilous play for us. I felt myself as fragile as a doll of glass in the hands of careless children.
I was tossed to a waiting cube. On the ground, not ten feet from me, was Drake, swaying dizzily. Suddenly the cube that held me tightened its grip; tightened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon its surface. Before I dropped, Drake’s body leaped toward me as though drawn by a lasso. He fell at my side.
Then pursued by scores of the Things and like some mischievous boy bearing off the spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight for an open portal. A blaze of incandescent blue flame blinded me; again as the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me–a skeleton form. Swiftly flesh melted back upon him, clothed him.
The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raised us, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it. And it sped away.
All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on high burned the pale-gilt suns. Between its colossal columns streamed thousands of the Metal Folk; no longer hurriedly, but quietly, deliberately, sedately.
We were within the City–even as Ventnor had commanded.
CHAPTER XIX
THE CITY
THAT WAS ALIVE
Close beside us was one of the cyclopean columns. We crept to it; crouched at its base opposite the drift of the Metal People; strove, huddled there, to regain our shaken poise. Like bagatelles we felt in that tremendous place, the weird luminaries gleaming above like garlands of frozen suns, the enigmatic hosts of animate cubes and spheres and pyramids trooping past.
They ranged in size from shapes yard-high to giants of thirty feet or more. They paid no heed to us, did not stop; streaming on, engrossed in whatever mysterious business was summoning them. And after a time their numbers lessened; thinned down to widely separate groups, to stragglers; then ceased. The hall was empty of them.
As far as the eye could reach the columned spaces stretched. I was conscious once more of that unusual flow of energy through every vein and nerve.
“Follow the crowd!” said Drake. “Do you feel just full of pep and ginger, by the way?”
“I am aware of the most extraordinary vigor,” I answered.
“Some weird joint,” he mused, looking about him. “Wonder if they have any windows? This whole place looked solid to me–what I could see of it. Wonder if we’ll get up against it for air? These Things don’t need it, that’s sure. Wonder–“
He broke off staring fascinatedly at the pillar behind us.
“Look here, Goodwin!” There was a tremor in his voice. “What do you make of THIS?”
I followed his pointing finger; looked at him inquiringly.
“The eyes!” he said impatiently. “Don’t you see them? The eyes in the column!”
And now I saw them. The pillar was a pale metallic blue, in color a trifle darker than the Metal Folk. All within it were the myriads of tiny crystalline points that we had grown to know were the receptors of some strange sense of sight. But they did not sparkle as did those others; they were dull, lifeless. I touched the surface. It was smooth, cool–with none of that subtle, warm vitality that pulsed through all the Things with which I had come in contact. I shook my head, realizing as I did so what a shock the incredible possibility he had suggested had given me.
“No,” I said. “There is a resemblance, yes. But there is no force about this–stuff; no life. Besides, such a thing is utterly incredible.”
“They might be–dormant,” he suggested stubbornly. “Can you see any mark of their joining–if they ARE the cubes?”
Together we scanned the pillar minutely. The faces seemed unbroken, continuous; there was no trace of those thin and shining lines that marked the juncture of the cubes when they had clicked together to form the bridge of the abyss or that had gleamed, crosslike, upon the back of the combined four upon which we had followed Norhala.
“It’s a sheer impossibility. It’s madness to think such a thing, Drake!” I exclaimed, and wondered at my own vehemence of denial.
“Maybe,” he shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe–but –well–let’s be on our way.”
We strode on, following the direction the Metal Folk had gone. Clearly Drake was still doubtful; at each pillar he hesitated, scanning it closely with troubled eyes.
But I, having determinedly dismissed the idea, was more interested in the fantastic lights that flooded this columned hall with their buttercup radiance. They were still and unwinking; not disks, I could see now, but globes. Great and small, they floated motionless, their rays extending rigidly and as still as the orb that shed them.
Yet rigid as they were there was nothing about either rays or orbs that suggested either hardness or the metallic. They were vaporous, soft as St. Elmo’s fire, the witch lights that cling at times to the spars of ships, weird gleaming visitors from the invisible ocean of atmospheric electricity.
When they disappeared, as they did frequently, it was instantaneously, completely, with a disconcerting sleight-of-hand finality. I noted, though, that when they did vanish, immediately close to where they had been other orbs swam forth with that same astonishing abruptness; sometimes only one, larger it might be than that which had gone; sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, crocused rays impinging.
What could they be, I wondered–how fixed, and what the source of their light? Products of electro-magnetic currents and born of the interpenetration of such streams flowing above us? Such a theory might account for their disappearance, and reappearance, shiftings of the flows that changed the light producing points of contact. Wireless lights? If so here was an idea that human science might elaborate if ever we returned to–
“Now which way?” Drake broke in upon my musing. The hall had ended. We stood before a blank wall vanishing into the soft mists hiding the roof of the chamber.
“I thought we had been going along the way They went,” I said in amazement.
“So did I,” he answered. “We must have circled. They never went through THAT unless–unless–” He hesitated.
“Unless what?” I asked sharply.
“Unless it opened and let them through,” he said. “Have you forgotten those great ovals–like cat’s eyes that opened in the outer walls?” he added quietly.
I HAD forgotten. I looked again at the wall. Certainly it was smooth, lineless. In one unbroken, shining surface it rose, a facade of polished metal. Within it the deep set points of light were duller even than they had been in the pillars; almost indeed indistinguishable.
“Go on to the left,” I said none too patiently. “And get that absurd notion out of your head.”
“All right.” He flushed. “But you don’t think I’m afraid, do you?”
“If what you’re thinking were true, you’d have a right to be,” I replied tartly. “And I want to tell you I’D be afraid. Damned afraid.”
For perhaps two hundred paces we skirted the base of the wall. We came abruptly to an opening, an oblong passageway fully fifty foot wide by twice as high. At its entrance the mellow, saffron light was cut off as though by an invisible screen. The tunnel itself was filled with a dim grayish blue luster. For an instant we contemplated it.
“I wouldn’t care to be caught in there by any rush,” I hesitated.
“There’s not much good in thinking of that now,” said Drake, grimly. “A few chances more or less in a joint of this kind is nothing between friends, Goodwin; take it from me. Come on.”
We entered. Walls, floor and roof were composed of the same substance as the great pillars, the wall of the outer chamber; filled like them with dimmed replicas of the twinkling eye points.
“Odd that all the places in here are square,” muttered Drake. “They don’t seem to have used any spherical or pyramidal ideas in their building–if it is a building.”
It was true. All was mathematically straight up and down and across. It was strange–still we had seen little as yet.
There was a warmth about this passageway we trod; a difference in the air of it. The warmth grew, a dry and baking heat; but stimulative rather than oppressive. I touched the walls; the warmth did not come from them. And there was no wind. Yet as we went on the heat increased.
The passageway turned at a right angle, continuing in a corridor half its former dimensions. Far away shone a high bar of pale yellow radiance, rising like a pillar of light from floor to roof. Toward it, perforce, we trudged. Its brilliancy grew greater.
A few paces away from it we stopped. The yellow luminescence streamed through a slit not more than a foot wide in the wall. We were in a cul-de-sac for the opening was not wide enough for either Drake or me to push through. Through it with the light gushed the curious heat enveloping us.
Drake walked to the opening, peered through. I joined him.
At first all that I could see was a space filled with the saffron lambency. Then I saw that this was splashed with tiny flashes of the jewel fires; little lances and javelin thrusts of burning emeralds and rubies; darting gem hard flames rose scarlet and pale sapphire; quick flares of violet.
Into my sight through the irised, crocus mist swam the radiant body of Norhala!
She stood naked, clad only in the veils of her hair that glowed now like spun silk of molten copper, her strange eyes wide and smiling, the galaxies of tiny stars sparkling through their gray depths.
And all about her swirled a countless host of the Little Things!
From them came the gem fires piercing the aureate mists. They played and frolicked about her in scores of swiftly forming, swiftly changing, goblin shapes. They circled her feet in shining, elfin rings; then opening into flaming disks and stars, shot up and spun about the white miracle of her body in great girdles of multi-colored living fires. Mingled with disk and star were tiny crosses gleaming with sullen, deep crimsons and smoky orange.
A flash of blue incandescence and a slender pillared shape leaped from the floor; became a coronet, a whirling, flashing halo toward which streamed up the flaming tendrilings of her tresses. Other halos circled her arms and breasts; they spun like bracelets about the outstretched arms.
Then like a swiftly rushing wave a host of the Little Things thrust themselves up, covered her, hid her in a coruscating cloud.
I saw an exquisite arm thrust itself from their clinging, wave gaily; saw her glorious head emerge from the incredible, the seething draperies of living jewels. I heard her laughter, sweet and golden and far away.
Goddess of the Inexplicable! Madonna of the Metal Babes!
The Nursery of the Metal People!
Norhala was gone, blotted out from our sight! Gone too were the bar of light and the chamber into which we had been peering. We stared at a smooth, blank wall. With that same ensorcelled swiftness the wall had closed even as we had stared through it; closed so quickly that we had not seen its motion.
I gripped Drake; shrank with him into the farthest corner–for on the other side of us the wall was opening. First it was only a crack; then rapidly it widened. There stretched another passageway, luminous and long; far down it we glimpsed movement. Closer that movement came, grew plainer. Out of the mistily luminous distances, three abreast and filling the corridor from side to side, raced upon us a company of the great spheres!
Back we cowered from their approach–back and back; arms outstretched, pressing against the barrier, flattening ourselves against the shock of the destroying impact menacing.
“It’s all up,” muttered Drake. “No place to run. They’re bound to smash us. Stick close, Doc. Get back to Ruth. Maybe I can stop them!”
Before I could check him, he had leaped straight in the path of the rushing globes, now a scant twoscore yards away.
The globes stopped–halted a few feet from him. They seemed to contemplate us, astonished. They turned upon themselves, as though consulting. Slowly they advanced. We were pushed forward and lifted gently. Then as we hung suspended, held by that force which always I can liken only to myriads of tiny invisible hands, the shining arcs of their backs undulated beneath us.
Their files swung around the corner and marched down the passage by which we had come from the immense hall. And when the last rank had passed from under us we were dropped softly to our feet; stood swaying in their wake.
A curious frenzy of helpless indignation shook me, a rage of humiliation obscuring all gratitude I should have felt for our escape. Drake’s eyes blazed wrath.
“The insolent devils!” He raised clenched fists. “The insolent, domineering devils!”
We stared after them.
Was the passage growing narrower–closing? Even as I gazed I saw it shrink; saw its walls slide silently toward each other. I pushed Drake into the newly opened way and sprang after him.
Behind us was an unbroken wall covering all that space in which but a moment before we had stood!
Is it to be wondered that a panic seized us; that we began to run crazily down the alley that still lay open before us, casting over our shoulders quick, fearful glances to see whether that inexorable, dreadful closing was continuing, threatening to crush us between these walls like flies in a vise of steel?
But they did not close. Unbroken, silent, the way stretched before us and behind us. At last, gasping, avoiding each other’s gaze, we paused.
And at that very moment of pause a deeper tremor shook me, a trembling of the very foundations of life, the shuddering of one who faces the inconceivable knowing at last that the inconceivable–IS.
For, abruptly, walls and floor and roof broke forth into countless twinklings!
As though a film had been withdrawn from them, as though they had awakened from slumber, myriads of little points of light shone forth upon us from the pale-blue surfaces–lights that considered us, measured us–mocked us.
The little points of living light that were the eyes of the Metal People!
This was no corridor cut through inert matter by mechanic art; its opening had been caused by no hidden mechanisms! It was a living Thing–walled and floored and roofed by the living bodies–of the Metal People themselves.
Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed these mighty walls.
An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic, communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the formicary, animated every unit of them.
A greater realization swept us. If THIS were true, then those pillars in the vast hall, its towering walls–all this City was one living Thing!
Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient, mobile–intelligent!
A Metal Monster!
Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It HAD watched us!
That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes of the living block which formed the City’s cliff.
A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!
No secret mechanism then–back darted my mind to that first terror–had closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little Things. None had opened the way for, had closed the way behind, the coursing spheres. It had been done by the conscious action of the conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous thinking pile!
I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering truth came to us. I know we started to run once more, side by side, gripping like frightened children each other’s hands. Then Drake stopped.
“By all the HELL of this place,” he said, solemnly, “I’ll run no more. After all–we’re men. If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who made me I’ll run from them no more. I’ll die standing.”
His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed and twinkled upon us.
“Who could have believed it?” he muttered, half to himself. “A living city of them! A living nest of them; a prodigious living nest of metal!”
“A nest?” I caught the word. What did it suggest? That was it–the nest of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this more wonderful, more unbelievable than that–the city of ants which was formed by their living bodies precisely as this was of the bodies of the Cubes?
How had Beebe* phrased it–“the home, the nest, the hearth, the nursery, the bridal suite, the kitchen, the bed and board of the army ants.” Built of and occupied by those blind and dead and savage little insects which by the guidance of smell alone carried on the most intricate operations, the most complex activities. Nothing here was stranger than that, I reflected–if once one could rid the mind of the paralyzing influence of the shapes of the Metal Things. Whence came the stimuli that moved THEM, the stimuli to which THEY reacted?
* William Beebe, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1919.
Well then–whence and how came the orders to which the ANTS responded; that bade them open THIS corridor in their nest, close THAT, form this chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other?
Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was moving with increased speed; that my body was fast growing lighter.
Simultaneously with this recognition I felt myself lifted from the floor of the corridor and levitated with considerable rapidity forward; looking down I saw that floor several feet below me. Drake’s arm wound itself around my shoulder.
“Closing up behind us,” he muttered. “They’re putting us–out.”
It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate progress. Had decided to–give us a lift. Rearward it was shutting. I noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together.
Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly, weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously pleasant, languorous–what was that word Ruth had used?–ELEMENTAL–and free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening even as behind us it was closing.
All around us the little eye points twinkled and– laughed.
There was no danger here–there could be none. Deeper and deeper dropped my mind into the depths of that alien tranquillity. Faster and faster we floated–onward.
Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet; stood and leaned back against a smooth wall.
The corridor had ended and–had shut us out from itself.
“Bounced!” exclaimed Drake.
And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that would better describe my own feelings.
We were BOUNCED out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of time.
CHAPTER XX
VAMPIRES OF
THE SUN
It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.
And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion; its soul.
Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield’s device, was a blinding flower of flame– the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules’ captured stars. And each of these prisoned the image of our sun.
A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.
Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones; bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their spiked hosts.
They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them. The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.
This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal, even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great Disk. But it was in size to that as–as Leviathan to a minnow. From it streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate in the vestments of substance.
Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal People.
In colossal animate cheveau-de-frise of hundred-foot girders they thrust themselves out from the curving walls –walls, I knew, as alive as they!
From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters–spheres and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan’s mace with spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned joists.
Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands; grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns.
They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.
In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us–now hiding by, now revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the Cones.
And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders, stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols.
They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably beautiful–crystalline, geometric always.
Abruptly their movement ceased–so abruptly that the stoppage of all the ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence.
An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal People draped the vast cup.
Pillared it as though it were a temple.
Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine.
Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.
“The Metal Emperor!” breathed Drake.
On they swept until they reached the base of the Cones. They paused at the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.
There was a flashing as of a meteor bursting. The globe had opened into that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala and Ruth.
I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire, studding its golden zone, the mystic rose of pulsing, petal flame, the still core of incandescent ruby that was the heart of that rose.
Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this–Thing; bowing before its beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!
A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick, half frightened glance at Drake. He was crouching dangerously close to the lip of the ledge, hands clasped and knuckles white with the intensity of his grip, eyes rapt, staring–upon the verge of worship even as I had been.
“Drake!” I thrust my elbow into his side brutally. “None of that! Remember you’re human! Guard yourself, man –guard yourself!”
“What?” he muttered; then, abruptly: “How did you know?”
“I felt it myself,” I answered: “For God’s sake, Dick– hold fast to yourself! Remember Ruth!”
He shook his head violently–as though to be rid of some clinging, cloying thing.
“I’ll not forget again,” he said.
He huddled down once more close to the edge of the shelf; peering over. No one of the Metal People had moved; the silence, the stillness, was unbroken.
Now the flanking pyramids shot forth into twin stars, blazing with violet luminescences. And one by one after them the ten lesser spheres expanded into flaming orbs; beautiful they were, but far less glorious than that Disk of whom they were the counselors?–ministers?–what?
Still there was no movement among all the arrased, girdered, pillared hosts.
There came a little wailing; far away it was and far. Nearer it drew. Was that a tremor that passed through the crowded crater? A quick pulse of–eagerness?
“Hungry!” whispered Drake. “They’re HUNGRY!”
Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place. And now I caught it–a quick and avid pulsing.
“Hungry,” whispered Drake again. “Like a lot of lions with the keeper coming along with meat.”
The wailing was below us. I felt, not a quiver this time, but an unmistakable shock pass through the Horde. It throbbed–and passed.
Into the field of our vision, up to the flaming Disk rushed an immense cube.
Thrice the height of a tall man–as I think I have noted before–when it unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power I call the Metal Emperor.
Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some indefinable way BRUTAL, its square bulk blotted out the Disk’s effulgence; shrouded it. And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater. The violet fires of the flanking stars pulsed out–watchfully, threateningly.
For only an instant the darkening block loomed against the Disk; blackened it.
There came another meteor burst of light. Where the cube had been was now a tremendous, fiery cross–a cross inverted.
Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for its–FACE–was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk, and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars.
Eighty feet at least in height, this cruciform shape stood. It flamed and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires were none of those leaping, multicolored glories that were the Metal Emperor’s; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant sapphire; no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars.
All angry, smoky reds and ochres the cross blazed forth–and in its lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel, something–nearer to earth, closer to man.
“The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!” muttered Drake. “I begin to get it–yes–I begin to get– Ventnor!”
Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater. And as swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence.
The Keeper turned–I saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back. I drew out my little field-glasses, focussed them.
The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disk, its courtiers, its stellated guardians. As it went by they swung about with it; ever facing it.
And now at last was clear a thing that had puzzled greatly–the mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk, pyramid a four-pointed star and –as I had glimpsed in the play of the Little Things about Norhala, could see now so plainly in the Keeper–the blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.
The Metal People were hollow!
Hollow metal–boxes!
In their enclosing sides dwelt all their vitality–their powers–themselves!
And those sides were–everything that THEY were!
Folded, the oval disk became the sphere; the four points of the star, the square from which those points radiated; shutting became the pyramid; the six faces of the cubes were when opened the inverted cross.
Nor were these flexible, mobile walls massive. They were indeed, considering the apparent mass of the Metal Folk, most astonishingly fragile. Those of the Keeper, despite its eighty feet of height, could not have been more than a yard in thickness. At the edges I thought I could see groovings; noted the same appearances at the outlines of the Stars. Seen sidewise, the body of the Metal Emperor showed as a convexity; its surface smooth, with a suggestion of transparency.
The Keeper was bending; its oblong upper plane dropping forward as though upon a hinge. Lower and lower this flange bent–in a grotesque, terrifying obeisance; a horrible mockery of reverence.
Was this mountain of Cones then actually a shrine–an idol of the Metal People–their God?
The oblong that was the upper half of the cruciform Shape extended now at right angles to the horizontal arms. It hovered, a rectangle forty feet long, as many feet over the floor at the base of the crystal pedestal. It bent again, this time from the hinge that held the outstretched arms to the base. And now it was a huge truncated cross, a T-shaped figure, hovering only twenty feet above the pave.
Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles; serpentine, whiplike. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the overhanging planes.
Something there was beneath them–something like an immense and luminous tablet. The tentacles were moving over it–pressing here, thrusting there, turning, pushing, manipulating–
A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks quivering.
The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even more rapid. There was a faint, curiously oppressive humming–like the distant echo of a tempest in chaos.
Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the cones were dissolving.
And now they were–gone.
The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance–one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of light–light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it.
The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered; turned upward; the wheel began to whirl–faster–faster–
Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green column of intensest light.
With prodigious speed, as compact as water, CONCENTRATE, it struck–straight out toward the face of the sun.
It thrust up with the speed of light–the speed of light? A thought came to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery, made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count.
“What’s the matter?” asked Drake.
“Take my glasses,” I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my tally. “Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun.”
With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have found laughable, he obeyed.
“Hold them to my eyes,” I ordered.
Three minutes had gone by.
There it was–that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses I could see the sun spot, high up on the northern-most limb of the sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum, all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot of the summer of 1919–the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical science.
Five minutes had gone by.
Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed to the glasses. Even if that thought were true–even if that pillar of radiance were a MESSENGER, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the ninety millions of miles between it and us.
And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible? Even were it so–what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow? This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared to the target at which it was aimed.
What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?
And yet–and yet–a gnat’s bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature’s balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It might be– it might be–
Eight minutes had passed.
“Take the glasses,” I bade Drake. “Look up at the sun spot–the big one.”
“I see it.” He had obeyed me. “What of it?”
Nine minutes.
The shaft, if I were right, had by now touched the sun. What was to follow?
“I don’t get you at all,” said Drake, and lowered the glasses.
Ten minutes.
“What’s happening? Look at the Cones! Look at the Emperor!” gasped Drake.
I peered down, then almost forgot to count.
The pyramidal flame that had been the mount of Cones was shrunken. The pillar of radiance had not lessened– but the mechanism that was its source had retreated whole yards within the field of its crystal base.
And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court.
The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly, feebly–wearily?
I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as though all the City were being drained of life–as though vitality were being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance; drained from it to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward.
The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.
Twelve minutes.
With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant–dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me.
The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City–its magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire.
Duller grew the Metal Emperor’s glories.
Fourteen minutes.
“Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life’s going out of these Things! Going out with that ray they’re shooting.”
Fifteen minutes.
I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly the flaming pyramid darkened–WENT OUT.
The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in space.
Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former size.
Sixteen minutes.
All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets.
Seventeen minutes.
I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the sun. For a moment I saw nothing–then a tiny spot of white incandescence shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses.
I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger –blazing with an ever increasing and intolerable intensity.
I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.
“I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And THAT did it–that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it’s widening! It’s widening!”
I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake HAD seen the spot widen, change–to this day I do not know.
To me it seemed unchanged–and yet–perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun HAD opened further–
That the sun had winced!
I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not– still shone the intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.
Twenty minutes–subconsciously I had gone on counting– twenty minutes–
About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear. In a heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose swarms of corpuscles the sun’s reflected image upon each disk shone clear–as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.
Again the filaments of the Keeper moved–feebly. As one of the hosts of circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.
Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire–green as the fire of green life itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.
Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.
For now it was a flood. Down from the immense wheel came pouring cataracts of green fires. They cascaded over the cones; deluged them; engulfed them.
Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew. Perceptibly their volume increased–as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No–it was as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves into the structure.
Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept. And higher and higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the whirling wheel that fed them.
Now from the Keeper’s planes writhed the Keeper’s tangle of tentacles, uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater’s disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.
All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life. Colossal, rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed–a prodigious vibration monstrously alive.
“Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! Feeding on the sun!”
Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiralling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.
Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life.
A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Out blazed his splendors–jubilant. His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle.
Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows–no longer wrathful or sullen.
The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrisom with radiance.
Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed.
I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated eyes upon the crater.
Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires. From every girder and column, from every arras, pendent and looping, burst diamond glitterings, ruby luminescences, lanced flames of molten emerald and sapphires, flashings of amethyst and opal, meteoric iridescences, dazzling spectrums.
The hollow was a cave of some Aladdin of the Titans ablaze with enchanted hoards. It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which imprisoned hosts of the Jinns of Light beat sparkling against their crystal walls to escape.
I thrust the fantasies from me. Fantastic enough was this reality–globe and pyramid and cube of the Metal People opening wide, bathing in, drinking from the radiant maelstrom that faster and ever faster swirled about them.
“Feeding!” It was Drake’s awed voice. “Feeding on the sun!”
The circling shields were raising themselves, lifting themselves higher above the crater-lip. Into the crowded cylinder came now only the rays from the high circlets, the streams from the huge wheel above the still growing cones.
Up and up the shields rose, but by what mechanism raised I could not see. Their motion ceased; in all their thousands they turned. Over the City’s top and out into the oval valley they poured their torrents of light; flooding it, deluging it even as they had this pit that was the City’s heart. Feeding, I knew, those other Metal Hordes without.
And as though in answer, sweeping down upon us through the circles of open sky, a clamor poured.
“If we’d but known!” Drake’s voice came to me, thin and unreal through the tumult. “It’s what Ventnor meant! If we had got down there when they were so weak–if we could have handled the Keeper–we could have smashed that plate that works the Cones! We could have killed them!”
“There are other Cones,” I cried back to him.
“No,” he shook his head. “This is the master machine. It’s what Ventnor meant when he said to strike through the sun. And we’ve lost the chance–“
Louder grew the hurricane without; and now within began its mate. Through the mists flashed linked tempests of lightnings. Bolt upon javelin bolt, and ever more thickly; lightnings green as the mists themselves; lightning bolts of destroying violets, searing scarlets; tearing chains of withering yellows, globes of exploding multicolored electric incandescences.
The crater was threaded with the lightnings of the Metal People; was broidered with them; was a Pit woven with vast and changing patterns of electric flame.
What was it that Drake had said? That if but we could have known we could have destroyed these–Things– Destroyed–Them? Things that could thrust their will and power up through ninety million miles of space and suck from the sun the honey of power! Drain it and hive it within these great mountains of the cones!
Destroy Things that could feed their own life into a machine to draw back from the sun a greater life– Things that could forge of their strength a spear which, piercing the side of the sun, sent gushing back upon them a tenfold, nay, a thousandfold strength!
Destroy this City that was one vast and living dynamo feeding upon the magnetic life of earth and sun!
The clamor had grown stupendous, destroying–like armored Gods roaring at sword play in a hundred Valhallas; like the war drums of battling universe; like the smitings of warring suns.
And all the City was throbbing, beating with a gigantic pulse of life–was fed and drunken with life. I felt that pulsing become my own; I echoed to it; throbbed in unison. I saw Drake outlined in flame; that around me a radiant nimbus was growing.
I thought I saw Norhala floating, clothed in shouting, flailing fires. I strove to call out to her. By me slipped the body of Drake; lay flaming at my feet upon the narrow ledge.
There was a roaring within my head–louder, far louder, than that which beat against my ears. Something was drawing me forth; drawing me out of my body into unimaginable depths of blackness. Something was hurling me out into those cold depths of space that alone could darken the fires that encircled me–the fires of which I was becoming a part.
I felt myself leap outward–outward and outward– into–oblivion.
CHAPTER XXI
PHANTASMAGORIA
METALLIOUE.
Wearily I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High above me was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding shields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky of night.
Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled to rise.
“Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady–and quiet. How are you feeling?”
“Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?”
“We weren’t used to the show,” he said. “We got all fed up at the orgy. Too much magnetism–we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical indigestion. Sh-h–look ahead of you.”
Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone at the base of one of the crater’s walls. As my gaze swept away I noted with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.
Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences. They were both rayless and strangely–lightless; they threw no shadows nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes–the Things that now I knew for the opened cubes.
They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height. They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc of the immense pedestal–and now I saw that the lights were a few feet closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle silvery-gray and metallic.
“They’re building out the base,” whispered Drake. “The Cones got so big they have to give them more room.”
“Magnetism,” I whispered in return. “Electricity–they drew down from the sun spot. And it was more than that– I saw the Cones grow under it. It fed them as it fed the Hordes–but the Cones grew. It was as though the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance.”
“And if we hadn’t been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it would have done for us,” he said.
We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the long and writhing tentacles.
At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the incandescences.
There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal. Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific heat–yet the Keeper’s workers seemed impervious to it.
As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the tentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame through which the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drove through, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it, certainly.
A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Unaware of us they seemed, or–if aware, then indifferent. More rapid became their movements, the glassy ingots streaming through the floating braziers with hardly a pause in their passing. Abruptly, as though switched, the incandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal, the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes.
Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowing of the cones–sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fill with a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone, so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.
They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed; the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs.
Two by two with measured pace, solemnly the cubes glided off into the encircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind them other scores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hidden arcs.
Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over it the slim shaft holding the serene flame.
Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmed flambeau of their worship. Angled metal monks of some god of metal, carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy of Holies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man –nor cared to know.
Grotesque–yes. But would that I had the power to crystallize in words the underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Monster when disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; the incredulous, amazed lurking always close behind the threshold of the mind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow.
Smaller, dimmer waned the lights–they were gone.
We crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Without speaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward the cones.
As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the walls, was built of the bodies of the Metal People; and, like the walls, they were dormant, filmed eyes oblivious to our passing. Closer we crept–were only a scant score of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystal foundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor. The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses, merging through distance into apparent solidity.
Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was.
I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling above it–then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them, shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.
Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the misty breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them. Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little, if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth’s bulk, flaunting itself in the Heavens–yet if transported to our world so light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans. The Cones towered above me–close, so close.
The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say– but now, almost touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet tenuous, dense and unsubstantial.
Again the thought came to me–they were force made visible; energy made concentrate into matter.
We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered; the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just watched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the substance itself I do not know.
Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a scant nine feet from its rim.
Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T, glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might have been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It was a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones.
It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops of some of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal and metal–as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and matter.
The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex; a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the Keeper’s hands and these only could be masters of its incredible intricacies. No Disk–not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on it, draw out its chords of power.
But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves? And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant cubes–that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.
There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses released by the Keeper’s coilings passed through the Metal People of the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the shields?
That WAS unthinkable–unthinkable because if so this mechanism was superfluous.
The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the thought of any of its units.
There was some gap here–a gap that the grouped consciousness could not bridge without other means. Clearly that was true–else why the tablet, why the Keeper’s travail?
Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible.
I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I felt, to touch the tablet’s rods.
A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows–
The Keeper glowed above us!
In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.
One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O’Keefe and Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place almost as strange as this*; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming Shape.
* See “The Moon Pool” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool.”
Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o’-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was the Keeper’s foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline –yet beneath it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable, microscopic crystals.
Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be–similar to the great ovals within the Emperor’s golden zone.
My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous reflection of the Emperor’s pulsing multicolored rose had each of the petals of the latter been clipped and squared.
It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a curve nor arching.
Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations–like–it came to me–immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.
Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds stared down upon us