LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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