The Metal Monster Part 33

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 cl.u.s.tered, 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 s.p.a.ce 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...o...b..; 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 t.i.tans ablaze with enchanted h.o.a.rds. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.ds 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 s.p.a.ce 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 p.r.o.ne 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.