 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 bagatellies we felt in that tremendous place, the weird luminaries gleaming above like garlands of frozen suns, the enigmatic host of animated 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, then down to widely separate groups, to stragglers, then ceased. The hall was empty of them. As far as the eye could reach the column 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 looks 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, good one. 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 a 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 gleamed, cross-like, upon the back of that combined four upon which we had followed Norhalla. 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 column tall, with their buttercup radiance. They were still and unwinking, not discs, 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 the 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 the same astonishing abruptness. Sometimes only one larger it might be than that which had gone, sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, core-cust-raised impinging. What could they be, I wondered? How fixed, and what the source of their light, products of the electromagnetic 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 change the light-producing points of contact. Wireless lights. If so, here was an idea that human science might elaborate, if ever we return to. Now which way, drake broke in upon my musing. The haul had ended. We stood before a blank wall, vanishing into the soft mist, 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 façade 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, Tarly, 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. On 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, per force, we trudged. Its brilliancy grew greater. A few paces away from it we stopped. The yellow luminescent 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 a saffron lambency. Then I saw that this was splashed with tiny flashes of the jewel fires. Little lances and javelin thrust of burning emeralds and rubies. Darding gem-hard flames rose scarlet and pale sapphire. Quick flares of violet. Into my sight through the iris-crocused mists swam the radiant body of Norhalla. 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 froliced about her in scores of swiftly forming, swiftly changing goblin shapes. They circled her feet in shining, elfin rings. Then, opening into flaming discs and stars, shard up and spun about with white miracle of her body and great girdles of multicolored living fires. Mingled with disc and star, were tiny crosses gleaming with sullen, deep crimsums and smoky orange. A flash of blue incandescence and a slender pillard shape leaped from the floor becoming a cornet. A whirling flashing halo toward which streamed up the flaming tendrils 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 and hid her in a coruscating cloud. I saw an exquisite arm thrust itself from the clinging, wave gaily. Saw her glorious head emerge from the incredible, deceiving 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. Norhalla was gone, blotted out from our sight. Gong, 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 and scrolled 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 misly, luminous distances, three abreast and filling the quarter 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, Mother Drake. No place to run. There are a 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 two-score yards away. The globe 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 with wrath. The insolent devils, he raised clenched fist. The insolent domineering devils. We stared after them. Was the passage growing narrower? Closing. Even as I gazed I saw its 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. It is 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 what other inexorable, dreadful closing was continuing, threatening to crush us between these walls like flies in a vice 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 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 cord or 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 roved by the living bodies of the metal people themselves. Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the conscious, coordinated 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 formic carry, 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 nor hala 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 conscious action of the conscious things of those 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 baby 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 baby 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? Well then, whence and how came the orders to which the ants responded, that bade them this corridor in their nest, closed that, formed this chamber, fill that one, was one more mysterious than the other? Breaking into my current 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 the 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. Whereward it was shuttering, I noted with interest how accurately this motion kept paced 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. Lengorius, what was the word Ruth had used? Elemental and free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and floor to reach down from us from the roof. It was slumberlessly even and effortless. I saw then advance of us the living corridor was opening even as behind as 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 arms into the depths of that alien tranquility. Faster and faster we floated. Onward. Abruptly ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The force holding us with drew its grip. I felt solidity at beneath my feet. Stood and leaned back against a smooth wall. The corridor had ended. 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 spreading the most amazing, the most extraordinary, fantastic scene upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of time. It was a crater, a half a 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, inglaring sky in whose centre 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 pendant, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules captured stars, and each of these present 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 combs, bristling, prodigious, tear upon tear, thicket upon thicket, phalanx upon phalanx, they climbed, up and up, pyramidically, they flung their spiked host. 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 one green disk 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 the other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great disk, but it was in size to that as a 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. Halfway between the crater-lip and the floor began the hordes of the metal people. In colossal animates chavoda-free of hundred-foot girders, they thrust themselves out from the curving walls, walls I knew, as alive as they. From these rub-dignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters, spheres and cubes, studded us thickly with the pyramids as ever tightened mace with spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped, pendulous. Coppices of slender columns of this old globes sprang up to meet the festoon 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 harasses they swayed in front of us, now hiding by, now revealing through their quick silver interweavings the mounts of the cones. Unsteadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes, gliding up cable and pillar, building out still further the living girders, stringing themselves among 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, unutterly beautiful, crystalline, geometric always. Abruptly their movement ceased, so abruptly that the stoppage of all the ordered turmoil had the quality of an appalling silence. An unimaginable tapestry bedied with the incredible broidery the metal people draped the vast cup, pillid 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 stardust 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 splendour of dual fires, before which had floated Norhala and Ruth. I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire studding its golden zone, the mystic rows of pulsing petal flame, the still core of incandescent ruby that was the heart of that rose. Strangely, I felt my own heart veer towards this thing, bowing before its beauty and its strength, almost worshipping. A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick half-rightened 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 wrapped, 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 shot 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 lecispheres expanded into flaming orbs, beautiful they were, but far less glorious than that disk of whom they were the counsellors, ministers, what? Still there was no movement among the aroused-girded pillid 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. There, 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 the meat. The wailing was below us. I felt not a quiver this time, but an unmistakable shock passed 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 crimson's and scarlets, with sullen orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires were none of these leaping multicoloured glories that were the metal emperors, 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 there 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 began to get it. Yes, I began to get ventnor. Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing, shook the crater, and swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence. The keeper turned. I saw its paleolustrous blue metallic back. I drew out my little field glasses, focused them. The cross slipped sideways past the disk, its courtiers, its delated 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. Foldered 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 appearance at the outline of the stars, seen sideways 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? They're 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, whip-like, silvery white. They were dyed with the scarlet and orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes. Reflected though sullen and angry gleamings, vermitious, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the overhanging plains. 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 discs 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 mounts of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance, one tremendous pallid flame of which the spire was the tong. Out from the disc'd 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 discs wavered, turned upward, the wheel began to whirl faster and faster. Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky, leaped a thick pale green column of intense 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 the 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 sunspot, high upon the northernmost limb of the sun, an unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases. An unthinkably huge dynamo, pouring its floods of electromagnetism 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 sunspot 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-hilled 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 aimed. What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces? And yet, and yet, and that'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 sunspot, 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 the 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 splendours, and fainter still were the violet luminescence 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 troop, and to sway. Twelve minutes. With a nerve-wracking 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 walls were dimmed, vacant, dying, something of that hellish loneliness that demonic desire for emulation 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 ember's glories. Fourteen minutes. Godwin cried drake, the life's going out of these things, going out with that raider 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 thunderbolt, 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 discs 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! Godwin! There was a panic in his cry. Godwin! 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 sunspot 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 the 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, barrel pale and barrel clear. In a heartbeat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring, through whose swarms of corpuscles the sun's reflected image upon each disc shone clear, as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine. Again the filaments of the keeper moved, feebly. As one of the host's circling shields shifted downward, brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast thickening mists. Abruptly, and again as one, the discs began to revolve. From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlates below them, flashed out a stream of green fire, green as the fire of green life itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounting, rushing, dazzling eons, the great rays struck a cross, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones, set it whirling. Over it I saw form, a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapours. Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the cluster spinning discs 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, and gulfed 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. Co-left 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 discs 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 and 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 interwoven, crossed and mingled, and where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs, perpetent 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, outblazed his splendours, jubilant, his golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with the sun flames, the wondrous rose was a racing, lambant miracle. Up snapped the keeper, towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows, no longer wrathful or solemn. The place dripped radiance. Was filling like a chrysanthemum 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 fatinated eyes upon the crater. Now from every side broke a tempest of gemfires, from every girder and column, from every arras, pendant 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, a blaze with enchanted hordes. It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which imprisoned hosts of the jins 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 odd 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 circlates, 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 emotions 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, deluding 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'd 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 flash linked tempests of lightnings, bolt upon javelin bolts 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 multicoloured electric incandescences. The crater was threaded with the lightnings of the metal people, was broided 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 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 clamour had grown stupendous, destroying, like armoured gods roaring at swordplay in a hundred valhallas, like the war drums of battling universe, like the smightings 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 in a radiant nimbus was growing. I thought I saw Nahala 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 FANTASMAGORIA METALIO 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 only 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. Shhh! 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 paledly 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 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 appelled 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 sunspot, 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 to 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 menheirs of Stonehenge fill with 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, their 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, shattering 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 corpses, merging through the 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 spoke, flaunting itself in the heavens, yet have 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 grain 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 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 disc, not even the emperor, no star shape could play upon it, draw out its cords of power. But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming cross alone could release its hidden meanings, make 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, a kin, and a fashion to the sending keys of the wireless? Were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was unfolded, command, spellers out of a supermorse 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 and 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 ochrus 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 Lachla, the handmaiden out to what we believed soul destroying death, in a place almost as strange as this. Footnotes see the moon-pool and conquest of the moon-pool. Another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming shape. Compared to it we were as a pair of hop of my thumbs to the giant. Had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. I focused 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 his 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 travelled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of 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 smouldering, ruborous reflection of the emperor's pulsing multi-coloured rose at each of the petals of the latter been clipped and squared. It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion latticeings. 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, wand 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 from just beneath it, like eyes. And over all its height, the striated octagons clustered. I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to me, as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the lattice heart of the square peddled rose, our flight was checked. There for an instant we hung. Then the octagonal cymbals stirred, unfolded like buds. They were the nests of the keeper's tentacles and out from them the whip-like tendrils uncoiled. Shot out and writhed toward us. My skin flinched from their touch. My body held in the unseen grip was motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They were like flexible strands of glass. Their smooth tips questioned us, passing through our hair, searching our faces writhing over our clothing. There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the lattice nucleus and thromped back whence it had come. The huge high square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame. The diamond organs beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange-red vapor. Holding us so, the keeper studied us. The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. But here was none of the vast serene and elemental calm that Ruth had described as emanating from the metal emperor. Powerful it was without doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience overtones of revolt, and something incomplete and struggling. Within the disharmonies I seemed to sense a fetter-to-force striving for freedom, energy battling against itself. Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles, winding about us like slender strands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more and more difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat and tightening, tightening. I heard drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my head toward them, could not speak. Was this then to be our end? The strangling clutch relaxed. The mass of the tentacles lessened. I was conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform thing that held us. Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating past us, beating down the keepers. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me. I felt myself picked up from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air, and drawn away. Drake, beside me, I hung now before the shining disk, the metal emperor. He it was who had plucked us from the keeper, and even as I swung I saw the keeper's multitudinous serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests. And out of the disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense tranquility, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an unthinkable cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss. I struggled against it desperately, striving in study of the disk to erect a barrier of preoccupation against the power pouring from it. A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their regard. They were limpid, pollucid as gems whose giant replicas they seemed to be. The surface of the disk ringed about by the aria to zodiac in which the nine ovals shone. Was a maze of geometric symbols traced in the lines of living gemfires. Infinitely complex, those patterns and infinitely beautiful. An infinite number of symmetric forms in which I seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes, the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty that are the marvels of the radiolaria, nature's own miraculous book of the soul of mathematical beauty. The flashing peddled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame. Silently we floated there while the disk looked at us, and as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture of it all came to me, two men swinging like motes in mid-air, on one side the flickering scarlet and orange cruciform shape, on the other side the radiant disk, behind the two mannequins the pallid mount of the bristling cones, and high above the wand circle of the shields. There was a ringing about us, an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline, it came from the cones, and strangely it was their vocal synthesis, their voice. Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire, swift in its wake up rose others. We slid gently down, stood swaying at the disk's base. The keeper bent, angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the rod some unknown symphony of power. Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora. Changed to vast billowing curtains, the faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones swung upward. A light began to stream from the cones themselves. No pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens, like a noose. And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it. Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flames swirled. Lost their colors became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though through a funnel-top. Down poured the radiant corpuscles bathing the cones. They did not glow as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was too slowly for me to see. The shields were motionless. Now here, now there, I saw the other rings whirl up, smaller mouths of lesser cones hidden within the body of the metal monster. I knew, sucking down this magnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun, then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the valley of the blue poppies. The ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations, as though the force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had been caught. Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman, anomalous things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrust rods. But if we forgot, we were not forgotten. The emperor slipped nearer, seemed to contemplate us quizzically, amused, as a man would look down upon some curious and interesting insect, a puppy, a kitten. I sensed this amusement in the disc's regard even as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquillity, as we had sensed the playful malice in the eye-stars of the living corridor, the curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley. I felt a push, a push that was filled with a colossal, glittering playfulness. Under it I went spinning away for yards, drake twirling close behind me. The force whatever it was swept out from the emperor, but in it was no slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of the sinister. Rather it was as though one would blow away a feather, urge gently some little lesser thing away. The disc watched our whirlings with a sparkling, jeweled laughter in its pulsing radiance. Again came the push farther yet we spun. Suddenly before us, across the pave, shone out a twinkling trail, the wakened eyes of the cubes that formed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow. Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the emperor turn, his immense oval metallic back now black against the radiance of the cones. Up from the narrow gleaming path a path opened I knew by some command, lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands, the sentient currents of magnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the metal hordes. They held us, thrust us along, passed us forward. Faster and faster we moved, speeding on the wake of the long vanished metal monks. I turned to my head, the cones were already far away. Over the tablet of limpid, violet phosphorescence still hovered the planes of the keeper, and still was the oval of the emperor black against the radiance. But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone, was fading out close behind us as we swept onward. Faster and faster grew our pace, the cylindrical wall loomed close. A high oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Before us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which closing upon us had forced us completely out into the hall. Unlike that passage its floor lifted steeply a smooth and shining slide up which no man could climb, a shaft indeed which thrust upward straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees, and whose end or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way through the city, through the metal monster, closed only by the inability of the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became impenetrable. For an instant we hovered upon its threshold, but the impulse, the command that had carried us thus far, was not to stop here. Into it and up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface, lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the force that pressed out from the sides. Up and up we went, scores of feet, hundreds. End of chapter twenty-one. Chapter twenty-two of The Metal Monster. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Lucy LaFaro. The Metal Monster by Abraham Merritt. Chapter twenty-two. The ensorcelled chamber. Goodwin. Drake broke the silence. Desperately he was striving to keep his fear out of his voice. Goodwin, this isn't the way to get out. We're going up, farther away all the time from the, the gates. What can we do? My anxiety was no less than his, but my realisation of our helplessness was complete. If we only knew how to talk to these things, he said, if we could only have left the disc, no we wanted to get out. Damn it, Goodwin, it would have helped us. Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke the truth. The Emperor meant no harm to us. In fact, in speeding us away, I was not at all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well. There was that about the Keeper. Still, up we sped along the shaft. I knew we must now be above the level of the valley. We've got to get back to Ruth, Goodwin. Night! And what may have happened to her? Drake Boy. I dropped into his own colloquialism. We're up against it. We can't help it. And remember, she's there in Nohalla's home. I don't believe, I honestly don't believe, Dick, that there's any danger as long as she remains there. And Vent Nohalla ties her fast. That's true, he said more hopefully. That's true. And probably Nohalla is with her by now. I don't doubt it, I said gifily. An idea came to me. I half-believed it myself. And another thing, there's not an action here that's purposeless. We're being driven on by the command of that thing we call the Metal Emperor. It means us no harm. Maybe, maybe, this is the way out. Maybe so, he shook his head doubtfully. But I'm not sure. Maybe that long push was just to get us away from there. And it strikes me that the impulse has begun to weaken. We're not going anywhere near as fast as we were. I had not realised it, but our speed was slackening. I looked back. Hundreds of feet behind us fell the slide. An unpleasant chill went through me. Should the magnetic grip upon us relax, withdraw nothing could stop us from falling back along that incline to be broken like eggs at its end. That our breaths would be snuffed out by the terrific descent long before we reached that end with scant comfort. There are other passages opening up along this shaft, Draxseed. I'm not for trusting the Emperor too far. He has other things on his metallic mind, you know. The next one we get to, let's try to slip into, if we can. I had noticed there had been openings along the ascending shaft, corridors running apparently transversely to its angled way. Slower and slower became our pace. A hundred yards above I glimpsed one of the apertures. Could we reach it? Slower and slower we arose. Now the gap was but a yard off, but we were motionless. We're tottering. Draxseed's arms wrapped round me. With a tremendous effort he hurled me into the portal. I dropped at its edge, writhed swiftly around, saw him slipping, slipping down, thrust my hands out to him. He caught them. There came a wrench that tortured my arm sockets as though wracked, but he held. Slowly arrived back into the passage, dragging up his almost dead weight. His head appeared, his shoulders. There was a convulsion of the long body, and he lay before me. For a minute or two we lay, flat upon our backs resting. I sat up. The passage was broad, silent, apparently as endless as that from which we had just escaped. Along it, above us, under it, the crystalline eyes were dim. It showed no sign of movement. Yet, had it done so, there was nothing we could do save drop down the annihilating slant. Drake arose. I'm hungry, he said, and I'm thirsty. I move that we eat and drink and, approximately, be merry. He slung aside the haversack. From it we took food from the canteens we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking, infrequently, and, thank the eternal law, that some called God for that. Some crisis in which speech seems not only petty, but when against it the mind rebels as a nauseous thing. This was such a time. At last I drew myself to my feet. Let's be going, I said. The corridor stretched straight before us. Along it we paced. How far we walked I do not know. Mile upon mile it seemed. It broadened abruptly into a vast hall. And this hall was filled with the metal hordes. It was a gigantic workshop of them. In every shape, in every form, they sieved and toiled about it. Upon its floor were heaps of shining oars, mounds of flashing gems, piles of ingots, metallic and crystalline. High and low throughout flamed the egg-shape incandescences, floating furnaces, both great and small. Before one of these forges close to us stood a metal thing. Its body was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes. Upon the top was a hollow square, formed of even lesser blocks. Blocks hardly larger than the little things themselves. In the centre of the open rectangle was another shaft. Its top, a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube. From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each tipped by a tetrahedron. They moved freely, slipping about upon their curved points of contact. And like a dozen little thinking hammers, the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thinnable shaped objects, which they thrust alternately into the winking Brezia, then laid upon the central block to shape. A goblin workman, the thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon, and so busy with its forgings. There were scores of these animate machines. They paid no slightest heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the immense workshop as we could. We passed a company of other shapes which stood two by two and close together. Their tops wide, spinning wheels through which the tendrils of an open globe fed translucent, colourless ingots. The substance, it seemed to me, of which no hallowed shadowy walls were made. The crystals of which the bars that built out the base of the cones were formed. The ingots passed between the whirling faces. Emerged from them as slender, long cylinders were seized as they slipped down by the crouching block, whose place, as it glided away, was instantly taken by another. In many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward unguessable ends, the composite animate mechanisms laboured, and all the place was filled with a goblin bustle. Trollish racketings, ringing of gnomish anvils, clanging of cobalt forgers, a clamorous cavern, filled with metal nibblungeons. We came to the opening of another passage, a doorway piercing the walls of the workshop. Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous. Into it we stepped, climbed onward, it seemed interminably. Far ahead of us at last appeared the outline of its further entrance, silhouetted against and filled with a brighter luminosity. We drew near, stopped cautiously, at its threshold, peering out. Well, it was that we had hesitated, before us was open space, an abyss in a body of the metal monster. The corridor opened into it like a window, thrusting out our heads. We saw an unbroken wall, both above and below. Half a mile away was its opposite side. Over this pit was a misty sky, and not more than a thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip of it, the cornices of this chasm within the city. Far, far beneath us we watched the hordes throw themselves across the abyss in webs of curving arches and girder straight bridges. Gigantic we knew these spans must be, yet dwarfed to slender footways by distance. Over them moved hurrying companies. From them came flashings, glitterings, prismatic sun golden, plutonic scarlets, molten blues, javelins of coloured light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes and pyramids, crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of the mysterious workshops. And as they passed the bridges swaying up, coiled and thrust themselves from sight through openings that closed behind them, ever as they passed, close on their going whipped out other spans so that always across that abyss a sentient shifting web was hung. We drew back stared into each other's wide face, panic swept through me in quick alternate pulse of ice and fire, for crushingly no longer to be denied came certainty that we were lost within the mazes of this incredible city, lost in the body of the metal monster which that city was. There was a sick despair in my heart as we turned and slowly made our way back along the sloping corridor. A hundred yards perhaps we had gone in silence before we stopped, gazing stupidly at an opening in the wall beside us. The portal had not been there when we had passed. Of that I was certain. It's opened since we went by, whispered Drake. We peered through it. The passage was narrow, its pave led downward. For a moment we hesitated, the same foreboding in both our minds, and yet among the perils that crowded in upon us what choice had we? There could be no more danger there than here. Both ways were alive, both obedient to impulses over which we had no more control and no more way of predetermining than mice in some complex man-made trap. Furthermore this shaft also ran downward, and although its pitch was less it did not therefore drop as quickly toward that level we sought, and wherein lay the openings of escape into the outer valley. It fell at right angles to the corridor through which we had come. We knew that to retrace our steps now would but take us back to the forges, and thence to the hall of the cones, and the certain peril waiting for us there. We stepped into this opened way. For a little distance it ran straightly, then turned and sloped gently upward, and a little distance more we climbed. Then suddenly not a hundred yards from us gushed out a flood of soft radiance opalescent filled with pearly glimmerings and rosy shadows of light. It was as though a door had opened into some world of luminescence. From it the lambent torrent poured, billowed down upon us. In its wake came music, if music, the mighty harmonies, the sonorous chords, the crystalline themes, and the linked chaplet of notes that were like spiraling of tiny golden starbells could be named. Toward source of light and sound we moved. Nor could we have halted, nor withdrawn had we willed. The radiance drew us to it as the sun, the water drop, and irresistibly the sweet unearthly music called. Closer we came, it was a narrow alcove from which sound and light poured. Into it we crept, and went no further. We peered into a vast and columnous vault, a limitless temple of light, high up in it strewn manifold, danced and shone soft orbs like tender suns. No pale gilt luminaries of frozen rays were these. Effulgent, jubilant, they flamed, orbs red as wine of rubies, that jins of alcherès pressed from his enchanted vineyards of jewels, twin orbs rosy white as breasts of pampered Babylonian maids, orbs of pulsing opalescences, and orbs of the murmuring green of bursting buds of spring, crocaster orbs and orbs of royal coral, suns that throbbed with singing rays of wetted rose and pearl, and of sapphires and topazes amorous, orbs born of cool virginal dawns, and of imperial sunsets, and orbs that were the tuliped fruit of mating rainbows of fire. They danced, these countless areoles, they swung and threaded in radiant coral patterns, in linked harmonies of light, and as they danced, their gay rays caressed and bathed myriads of the metal folk open beneath them. Under the rays of the jewel fires of disc and star and cross lept and pulsed and danced to the same bright rhythm. We sought the source of the music, a tremendous thing of shimmering crystal pipes, like some colossal organ. Out of the radiance around it great flames gathered shook into sight, with streamings and penonings, in bannerais and bandrolls lept upon the crystal pipes, and merged within them. And as the pipes drank them the flames changed into sound. Throbbing bass vials of roaring vernal winds, diapasins of waterfall and torrents, these had been flames of emerald, flaming trumpetings of desire that had been great streamers of scarlet, rose flames that had dissolved into echoes of fulfillment, diamond burgeonings that melted into silver symphonies, like mist and tangled plades, transmuted into melodies, chameleon harmonies to which the strange suns danced. And now I saw, realising with a clutch of indescribable awe, with a sense of inexplicable profanation, the secret of this ensorcelled chamber. Within every pulsing rose of iris'd fire that was the heart of a disc, from every rubrous clipped rose of a cross, and from every rage purple petaling of a star, there nestled a tiny disc, a tiny cross, a tiny star, luminous and cymbal'd, even as those that cradled them. The metal babes building like crystals from hearts of radiance beneath the play of jok'n'd orbs. Incredible blossomings of crystal and of metal, whose lullabies and cradle songs were singing symphonies of flame. It was the birth chamber of the city, the womb of the metal monster. Abruptly the walls of the niche sparkled out, the glittering eye-points regarding us with the most disquieting suggestion of sentinels who, slumbering, had been caught unaware. And now awakening challenged us. Swiffly the niche closed, so swiftly that barely had we time to spring over its threshold into the corridor. The corridor was awake, alive. The power darted out, gripped us, up it swept us, and on, far away a square of light appeared, grew quickly larger. Framed in it was the amethystine burning of the great ring that girdled the encircling cliffs. I turned my head. Behind us the corridor was closing. Now the opening was so close that through it I could see the vast panorama of the valley. The wall behind us touched us, pushed us on. We thrust ourselves against it despairingly, as well might flies have tried to press back a moving mountain. Resistingly inexorably we were pressed forward. Now we cowered within a yard-deep niche. Now we trembled upon a foot-wide ledge. Shuddering, gasping, we glared down the sheer drop of the city's wall. The smooth and glimmering scarf fell thousands of feet straight to the valley floor, and there were no merciful mists to hide. What awaited us there? No mists anywhere. In that brief, agonised glance, every detail of the pit was disclosed with an abnormal clarity. We tottered on the brink. The ledge melted. Down, down we plunged. Locked in each other's arms, hurtling to the shattering death, so far below. End of Chapter Twenty-Two