The A. Merritt Megapack

by Abraham Merritt

  Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles; serpentine, whiplike. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the overhanging planes.

  Something there was beneath them—something like an immense and luminous tablet. The tentacles were moving over it—pressing here, thrusting there, turning, pushing, manipulating—

  A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks quivering.

  The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even more rapid. There was a faint, curiously oppressive humming—like the distant echo of a tempest in chaos.

  Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the cones were dissolving.

  And now they were—gone.

  The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance—one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of light—light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it.

  The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered; turned upward; the wheel began to whirl—faster—faster—

  Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green column of intensest light.

  With prodigious speed, as compact as water, concentrate, it struck—straight out toward the face of the sun.

  It thrust up with the speed of light—the speed of light? A thought came to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery, made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Drake.

  “Take my glasses,” I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my tally. “Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun.”

  With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have found laughable, he obeyed.

  “Hold them to my eyes,” I ordered.

  Three minutes had gone by.

  There it was—that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses I could see the sun spot, high up on the northern-most limb of the sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum, all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot of the summer of 1919—the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical science.

  Five minutes had gone by.

  Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed to the glasses. Even if that thought were true—even if that pillar of radiance were a messenger, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the ninety millions of miles between it and us.

  And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible? Even were it so—what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow? This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared to the target at which it was aimed.

  What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?

  And yet—and yet—a gnat’s bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature’s balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It might be—it might be—

  Eight minutes had passed.

  “Take the glasses,” I bade Drake. “Look up at the sun spot—the big one.”

  “I see it.” He had obeyed me. “What of it?”

  Nine minutes.

  The shaft, if I were right, had by now touched the sun. What was to follow?

  “I don’t get you at all,” said Drake, and lowered the glasses.

  Ten minutes.

  “What’s happening? Look at the Cones! Look at the Emperor!” gasped Drake.

  I peered down, then almost forgot to count.

  The pyramidal flame that had been the mount of Cones was shrunken. The pillar of radiance had not lessened—but the mechanism that was its source had retreated whole yards within the field of its crystal base.

  And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court.

  The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly, feebly—wearily?

  I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as though all the City were being drained of life—as though vitality were being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance; drained from it to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward.

  The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.

  Twelve minutes.

  With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant—dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me.

  The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City—its magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire.

  Duller grew the Metal Emperor’s glories.

  Fourteen minutes.

  “Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life’s going out of these Things! Going out with that ray they’re shooting.”

  Fifteen minutes.

  I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly the flaming pyramid darkened—went out.

  The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in space.

  Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former size.

  Sixteen minutes.

  All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets.

  Seventeen minutes.

  I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the sun. For a moment I saw nothing—then a tiny spot of white incandescence shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses.

  I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger—blazing with an ever increasing and intolerable intensity.

  I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.

  “I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And that did it—that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it’s widening! It’s widening!”

  I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake had seen the spot widen, change—to this day I do not know.

  To me it seemed unchanged—and yet—perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun had opened further—

  That the sun had winced!

  I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not—still shone the intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.

  Twenty minutes—subconsciously I had gone on counting—twenty minutes—

  About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl c
lear. In a heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose swarms of corpuscles the sun’s reflected image upon each disk shone clear—as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.

  Again the filaments of the Keeper moved—feebly. As one of the hosts of circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.

  Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire—green as the fire of green life itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.

  Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.

  For now it was a flood. Down from the immense wheel came pouring cataracts of green fires. They cascaded over the cones; deluged them; engulfed them.

  Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew. Perceptibly their volume increased—as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No—it was as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves into the structure.

  Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept. And higher and higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the whirling wheel that fed them.

  Now from the Keeper’s planes writhed the Keeper’s tangle of tentacles, uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater’s disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.

  All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life. Colossal, rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed—a prodigious vibration monstrously alive.

  “Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! Feeding on the sun!”

  Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiralling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.

  Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life.

  A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Out blazed his splendors—jubilant. His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle.

  Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows—no longer wrathful or sullen.

  The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrisom with radiance.

  Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed.

  I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated eyes upon the crater.

  Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires. From every girder and column, from every arras, pendent and looping, burst diamond glitterings, ruby luminescences, lanced flames of molten emerald and sapphires, flashings of amethyst and opal, meteoric iridescences, dazzling spectrums.

  The hollow was a cave of some Aladdin of the Titans ablaze with enchanted hoards. It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which imprisoned hosts of the Jinns of Light beat sparkling against their crystal walls to escape.

  I thrust the fantasies from me. Fantastic enough was this reality—globe and pyramid and cube of the Metal People opening wide, bathing in, drinking from the radiant maelstrom that faster and ever faster swirled about them.

  “Feeding!” It was Drake’s awed voice. “Feeding on the sun!”

  The circling shields were raising themselves, lifting themselves higher above the crater-lip. Into the crowded cylinder came now only the rays from the high circlets, the streams from the huge wheel above the still growing cones.

  Up and up the shields rose, but by what mechanism raised I could not see. Their motion ceased; in all their thousands they turned. Over the City’s top and out into the oval valley they poured their torrents of light; flooding it, deluging it even as they had this pit that was the City’s heart. Feeding, I knew, those other Metal Hordes without.

  And as though in answer, sweeping down upon us through the circles of open sky, a clamor poured.

  “If we’d but known!” Drake’s voice came to me, thin and unreal through the tumult. “It’s what Ventnor meant! If we had got down there when they were so weak—if we could have handled the Keeper—we could have smashed that plate that works the Cones! We could have killed them!”

  “There are other Cones,” I cried back to him.

  “No,” he shook his head. “This is the master machine. It’s what Ventnor meant when he said to strike through the sun. And we’ve lost the chance—”

  Louder grew the hurricane without; and now within began its mate. Through the mists flashed linked tempests of lightnings. Bolt upon javelin bolt, and ever more thickly; lightnings green as the mists themselves; lightning bolts of destroying violets, searing scarlets; tearing chains of withering yellows, globes of exploding multicolored electric incandescences.

  The crater was threaded with the lightnings of the Metal People; was broidered with them; was a Pit woven with vast and changing patterns of electric flame.

  What was it that Drake had said? That if but we could have known we could have destroyed these—Things—Destroyed—Them? Things that could thrust their will and power up through ninety million miles of space and suck from the sun the honey of power! Drain it and hive it within these great mountains of the cones!

  Destroy Things that could feed their own life into a machine to draw back from the sun a greater life—Things that could forge of their strength a spear which, piercing the side of the sun, sent gushing back upon them a tenfold, nay, a thousandfold strength!

  Destroy this City that was one vast and living dynamo feeding upon the magnetic life of earth and sun!

  The clamor had grown stupendous, destroying—like armored Gods roaring at sword play in a hundred Valhallas; like the war drums of battling universe; like the smitings of warring suns.

  And all the City was throbbing, beating with a gigantic pulse of life—was fed and drunken with life. I felt that pulsing become my own; I echoed to it; throbbed in unison. I saw Drake outlined in flame; that around me a radiant nimbus was growing.

  I thought I saw Norhala floating, clothed in shouting, flailing fires. I strove to call out to her. By me slipped the body of Drake; lay flaming at my feet upon the narrow ledge.

  There was a roaring within my head—louder, far louder, than that which beat against my ears. Something was drawing me forth; drawing me out of my body into unimaginable depths of blackness. Something was hurling me out into those cold depths of space that alone could darken the fires that encircled me—the fires of which I was becoming a part.

  I felt myself leap outward—outward and outward—into—oblivion.

  CHAPTER XXI

  PHANTASMAGORIA METALLIOUE

  Wearily I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High above me was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding shields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky of night.

  Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled to rise.

  “Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady—and quiet. How are you feeling?”

  “Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?”

  “We weren’t used to
the show,” he said. “We got all fed up at the orgy. Too much magnetism—we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical indigestion. Sh-h—look ahead of you.”

  Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone at the base of one of the crater’s walls. As my gaze swept away I noted with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.

  Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences. They were both rayless and strangely—lightless; they threw no shadows nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes—the Things that now I knew for the opened cubes.

  They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height. They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc of the immense pedestal—and now I saw that the lights were a few feet closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle silvery-gray and metallic.

  “They’re building out the base,” whispered Drake. “The Cones got so big they have to give them more room.”

  “Magnetism,” I whispered in return. “Electricity—they drew down from the sun spot. And it was more than that—I saw the Cones grow under it. It fed them as it fed the Hordes—but the Cones grew. It was as though the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance.”

  “And if we hadn’t been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it would have done for us,” he said.

  We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the long and writhing tentacles.

  At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the incandescences.