LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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