by Anthology
No secret mechanism then--back darted my mind to that first terror--had closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little Things. None had opened the way for, had closed the way behind, the coursing spheres. It had been done by the conscious action of the conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous thinking pile!
I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering truth came to us. I know we started to run once more, side by side, gripping like frightened children each other's hands. Then Drake stopped.
"By all the HELL of this place," he said, solemnly, "I'll run no more. After all--we're men. If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who made me I'll run from them no more. I'll die standing."
His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed and twinkled upon us.
"Who could have believed it?" he muttered, half to himself. "A living city of them! A living nest of them; a prodigious living nest of metal!"
"A nest?" I caught the word. What did it suggest? That was it--the nest of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this more wonderful, more unbelievable than that--the city of ants which was formed by their living bodies precisely as this was of the bodies of the Cubes?
How had Beebe* phrased it--"the home, the nest, the hearth, the nursery, the bridal suite, the kitchen, the bed and board of the army ants." Built of and occupied by those blind and dead and savage little insects which by the guidance of smell alone carried on the most intricate operations, the most complex activities. Nothing here was stranger than that, I reflected--if once one could rid the mind of the paralyzing influence of the shapes of the Metal Things. Whence came the stimuli that moved THEM, the stimuli to which THEY reacted?
* William Beebe, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1919.
Well then--whence and how came the orders to which the ANTS responded; that bade them open THIS corridor in their nest, close THAT, form this chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other?
Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was moving with increased speed; that my body was fast growing lighter.
Simultaneously with this recognition I felt myself lifted from the floor of the corridor and levitated with considerable rapidity forward; looking down I saw that floor several feet below me. Drake's arm wound itself around my shoulder.
"Closing up behind us," he muttered. "They're putting us--out."
It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate progress. Had decided to--give us a lift. Rearward it was shutting. I noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together.
Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly, weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously pleasant, languorous--what was that word Ruth had used?--ELEMENTAL--and free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening even as behind us it was closing.
All around us the little eye points twinkled and-- laughed.
There was no danger here--there could be none. Deeper and deeper dropped my mind into the depths of that alien tranquillity. Faster and faster we floated--onward.
Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet; stood and leaned back against a smooth wall.
The corridor had ended and--had shut us out from itself.
"Bounced!" exclaimed Drake.
And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that would better describe my own feelings.
We were BOUNCED out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of time.
CHAPTER XX
VAMPIRES OF THE SUN
It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.
And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion; its soul.
Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield's device, was a blinding flower of flame-- the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules' captured stars. And each of these prisoned the image of our sun.
A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.
Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones; bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their spiked hosts.
They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them. The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.
This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal, even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great Disk. But it was in size to that as--as Leviathan to a minnow. From it streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate in the vestments of substance.
Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal People.
In colossal animate cheveau-de-frise of hundred-foot girders they thrust themselves out from the curving walls --walls, I knew, as alive as they!
From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters--spheres and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan's mace with spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned joists.
Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands; grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns.
They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.
In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us--now hiding by, now revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the Cones.
And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders, stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols.
They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably beautiful--crystalline, geometric always.
Abruptly their movement ceased--so abruptly that the stoppage of all the ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence.
An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal People draped the vast cup.
Pillared it as though it were a temple.
Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine.
Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.
"The Metal Emperor!" breathed Drake.
On they swept until they reached
the base of the Cones. They paused at the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.
There was a flashing as of a meteor bursting. The globe had opened into that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala and Ruth.
I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire, studding its golden zone, the mystic rose of pulsing, petal flame, the still core of incandescent ruby that was the heart of that rose.
Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this--Thing; bowing before its beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!
A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick, half frightened glance at Drake. He was crouching dangerously close to the lip of the ledge, hands clasped and knuckles white with the intensity of his grip, eyes rapt, staring--upon the verge of worship even as I had been.
"Drake!" I thrust my elbow into his side brutally. "None of that! Remember you're human! Guard yourself, man --guard yourself!"
"What?" he muttered; then, abruptly: "How did you know?"
"I felt it myself," I answered: "For God's sake, Dick-- hold fast to yourself! Remember Ruth!"
He shook his head violently--as though to be rid of some clinging, cloying thing.
"I'll not forget again," he said.
He huddled down once more close to the edge of the shelf; peering over. No one of the Metal People had moved; the silence, the stillness, was unbroken.
Now the flanking pyramids shot forth into twin stars, blazing with violet luminescences. And one by one after them the ten lesser spheres expanded into flaming orbs; beautiful they were, but far less glorious than that Disk of whom they were the counselors?--ministers?--what?
Still there was no movement among all the arrased, girdered, pillared hosts.
There came a little wailing; far away it was and far. Nearer it drew. Was that a tremor that passed through the crowded crater? A quick pulse of--eagerness?
"Hungry!" whispered Drake. "They're HUNGRY!"
Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place. And now I caught it--a quick and avid pulsing.
"Hungry," whispered Drake again. "Like a lot of lions with the keeper coming along with meat."
The wailing was below us. I felt, not a quiver this time, but an unmistakable shock pass through the Horde. It throbbed--and passed.
Into the field of our vision, up to the flaming Disk rushed an immense cube.
Thrice the height of a tall man--as I think I have noted before--when it unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power I call the Metal Emperor.
Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some indefinable way BRUTAL, its square bulk blotted out the Disk's effulgence; shrouded it. And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater. The violet fires of the flanking stars pulsed out--watchfully, threateningly.
For only an instant the darkening block loomed against the Disk; blackened it.
There came another meteor burst of light. Where the cube had been was now a tremendous, fiery cross--a cross inverted.
Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for its--FACE--was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk, and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars.
Eighty feet at least in height, this cruciform shape stood. It flamed and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires were none of those leaping, multicolored glories that were the Metal Emperor's; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant sapphire; no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars.
All angry, smoky reds and ochres the cross blazed forth--and in its lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel, something--nearer to earth, closer to man.
"The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!" muttered Drake. "I begin to get it--yes--I begin to get-- Ventnor!"
Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater. And as swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence.
The Keeper turned--I saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back. I drew out my little field-glasses, focussed them.
The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disk, its courtiers, its stellated guardians. As it went by they swung about with it; ever facing it.
And now at last was clear a thing that had puzzled greatly--the mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk, pyramid a four-pointed star and --as I had glimpsed in the play of the Little Things about Norhala, could see now so plainly in the Keeper--the blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.
The Metal People were hollow!
Hollow metal--boxes!
In their enclosing sides dwelt all their vitality--their powers--themselves!
And those sides were--everything that THEY were!
Folded, the oval disk became the sphere; the four points of the star, the square from which those points radiated; shutting became the pyramid; the six faces of the cubes were when opened the inverted cross.
Nor were these flexible, mobile walls massive. They were indeed, considering the apparent mass of the Metal Folk, most astonishingly fragile. Those of the Keeper, despite its eighty feet of height, could not have been more than a yard in thickness. At the edges I thought I could see groovings; noted the same appearances at the outlines of the Stars. Seen sidewise, the body of the Metal Emperor showed as a convexity; its surface smooth, with a suggestion of transparency.
The Keeper was bending; its oblong upper plane dropping forward as though upon a hinge. Lower and lower this flange bent--in a grotesque, terrifying obeisance; a horrible mockery of reverence.
Was this mountain of Cones then actually a shrine--an idol of the Metal People--their God?
The oblong that was the upper half of the cruciform Shape extended now at right angles to the horizontal arms. It hovered, a rectangle forty feet long, as many feet over the floor at the base of the crystal pedestal. It bent again, this time from the hinge that held the outstretched arms to the base. And now it was a huge truncated cross, a T-shaped figure, hovering only twenty feet above the pave.
Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles; serpentine, whiplike. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the overhanging planes.
Something there was beneath them--something like an immense and luminous tablet. The tentacles were moving over it--pressing here, thrusting there, turning, pushing, manipulating--
A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks quivering.
The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even more rapid. There was a faint, curiously oppressive humming--like the distant echo of a tempest in chaos.
Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the cones were dissolving.
And now they were--gone.
The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance--one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of light--light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it.
The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered; turned upward; the wheel began to whirl--faster--faster--
Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green column of intensest light.
With prodigious speed, as compact as water, CONCENTRATE, it struck--straight out toward the face of the sun.
It thrust up with the speed of light--the speed of light? A thought came to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is uniformly seventy to the
minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery, made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count.
"What's the matter?" asked Drake.
"Take my glasses," I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my tally. "Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun."
With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have found laughable, he obeyed.
"Hold them to my eyes," I ordered.
Three minutes had gone by.
There it was--that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses I could see the sun spot, high up on the northern-most limb of the sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum, all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot of the summer of 1919--the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical science.
Five minutes had gone by.
Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed to the glasses. Even if that thought were true--even if that pillar of radiance were a MESSENGER, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the ninety millions of miles between it and us.
And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible? Even were it so--what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow? This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared to the target at which it was aimed.
What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?
And yet--and yet--a gnat's bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature's balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It might be-- it might be--
Eight minutes had passed.
"Take the glasses," I bade Drake. "Look up at the sun spot--the big one."