Chapter 21: Phantasmagoria Metallique

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.

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 menhirs of Stonehenge fill with a 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 there 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-shuddering 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 copses, merging through 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’s bulk, flaunting itself in the Heavens--yet if 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 green 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 it 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 Disk--not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on it, draw out its chords of power.

But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, made 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 akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse 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 it 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 ochreous 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 Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place almost as strange as this *; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming Shape.

* See “The Moon Pool” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool.”