Back she floated to us; hovered over Ruth, crouching with her brother's head upon her knees.

She made a motion as though to draw the girl to her; hesitated as Ruth's face set in a passion of denial. A shadow of kindness drifted through the wide, mysterious eyes; a shadow of pity joined it as she looked curiously down on Ventnor.

"Bathe," she murmured, and pointed to the pool. "And rest. No harm shall come to any of you here. And you—" A hand rested for a moment lightly on the girl's curly head. "When you desire it—I will again give you—peace!"

She parted the curtains, and the eunuch still following, was hidden beyond them.



CHAPTER XIII. "VOICE FROM THE VOID"

Helplessly we looked at each other. Then called forth perhaps by what she saw in Drake's eyes, perhaps by another thought, Ruth's cheeks crimsoned, her head drooped; the web of her hair hid the warm rose of her face, the frozen pallor of Ventnor's.

Abruptly, she sprang to her feet. "Walter! Dick! Something's happening to Martin!"

Before she had ceased we were beside her; bending over Ventnor. His mouth was opening, slowly, slowly—with an effort agonizing to watch. Then his voice came through lips that scarcely moved; faint, faint as though it floated from infinite distances, a ghost of a voice whispering with phantom breath out of a dead throat.

"Hard—hard! So hard!" the whispering complained. "Don't know how long I can keep connection—with voice.

"Was fool to shoot. Sorry—might have gotten you in worse trouble—but crazy with fear for Ruth—thought, too, might be worth chance. Sorry—not my usual line—"

The thin thread of sound ceased. I felt my eyes fill with tears; it was like Ventnor to flay himself like this for what he thought stupidity, like him to make this effort to admit his supposed fault and crave forgiveness—as like him as that mad attack upon the flaming Disk in its own temple, surrounded by its ministers, had been so bafflingly unlike his usual cool, collected self.

"Martin," I called, bending closer, "it's nothing, old friend. No one blames you. Try to rouse yourself."

"Dear," it was Ruth, passionately tender, "it's me. Can you hear me?"

"Only speck of consciousness and motionless in the void," the whisper began again. "Terribly alive, terribly alone. Seem outside space yet—still in body. Can't see, hear, feel—short-circuited from every sense—but in some strange way realize you—Ruth, Walter, Drake.

"See without seeing—here floating in darkness that is also light—black light—indescribable. In touch, too, with these—"

Again the voice trailed into silence; returned, word and phrase pouring forth disconnected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing wave crests linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal fragments of thought swiftly assembled by some subtle faculty of the mind as they fell into a coherent, incredible message.

"Group consciousness—gigantic—operating within our sphere—operating also in spheres of vibration, energy, force—above, below one to which humanity reacts—perception, command forces known to us—but in greater degree—cognizant, manipulate unknown energies—senses known to us—unknown—can't realize them fully—impossible cover, only impinge on contact points akin to our senses, forces—even these profoundly modified by additional ones—metallic, crystalline, magnetic, electric—inorganic with every power of organic—consciousness basically same as ours—profoundly changed by differences in mechanism through which it finds expression—difference our bodies—theirs.

"Conscious, mobile—inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer—see more clearly—see—" the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of despair—"No! No—oh, God—no!"

Then clearly and solemnly:

"And God said: let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up the thread once more—but clearly further on. Something we had missed between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to articulate. The whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence.

"Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same centuries, and centuries upon centuries before them, found earth a garden and grave—and all these countless gods and goddesses only phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal forces man's instinct has always warned him are ever in readiness to destroy. That do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his resistance weakens—the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and turns its will and strength against itself—"

A little pause; then came these singular sentences:

"Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself godlike among the stars."

And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on:

"Dominion over all the earth? Yes—as long as man is fit to rule; no longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts.

"For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it? For a breath—for a cloud's passing. And will remain master only until something grown stronger wrests mastery from him—even as he wrested it from his ravening kind—as they took it from the reptiles—as did the reptiles from the giant saurians—which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic—and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn.

"Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!

"Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity—and then—hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck.

"Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure.

"And these—these—" the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, "over the Threshold, within the House of Man—nor does he even dream that his doors are down. These—Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals—Things that suck their strength from the sun and whose blood is the lightning.

"The sun! The sun!" he cried. "There lies their weakness!"

The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.

"Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter—Drake. They are not invulnerable. No! The sun—strike them through the sun! Go into the city—not invulnerable—the Keeper of the Cones—strike at the Cones when—the Keeper of the Cones—ah-h-h-ah—"

We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way.

"Vulnerable—under the law—even as we! The Cones!

"Go!" he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.

"Martin! Brother," wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a beleaguered citadel.

But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated—a lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside space.

And Drake and I looked at each other's eyes, neither daring to be first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to be the sorrowful soul.



CHAPTER XIV. "FREE! BUT A MONSTER!"

The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology.

It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration—the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed in the late war.

Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle—the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death.

And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation—shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.

On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts—or so he thinks.

Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and man's little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.

But they are home to him!

Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.

I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me.

He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose.

"Get up, Ruth," he ordered. "He came back once and he'll come back again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I'm hungry."

She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.

"Eat!" she exclaimed. "You can be hungry?"

"You bet I can—and I am," he answered cheerfully. "Come on; we've got to make the best of it."

"Ruth," I broke in gently, "we'll all have to think about ourselves a little if we're to be of any use to him. You must eat—and then rest."

"No use crying in the milk even if it's spilt," observed Drake, even more cheerfully brutal. "I learned that at the front where we got so we'd yelp for food even when the lads who'd been bringing it were all mixed up in it."

She lifted Ventnor's head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.

"Oh—you brute!" she whispered. "And I thought—I thought—Oh, I hate you!"

"That's better," said Dick. "Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder you get the better you'll feel."

For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her anger fled.

"Thanks—Dick," she said quietly.

And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.

About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.

I watched her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and—shame.

It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for questioning had come.

"Ruth," I said, "I know it's not necessary to remind you that we're in a tight place. Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that we can lay hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our course.

"I'm going to repeat your brother's question—what did Norhala do to you? And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?"

The blaze of interest in Drake's eyes at these questions changed to amazement at her stricken recoil from them.

"There was nothing," she whispered—then defiantly—"nothing. I don't know what you mean."

"Ruth!" I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. "You do know. You must tell us—for his sake." I pointed toward Ventnor.

She drew a long breath.

"You're right—of course," she said unsteadily. "Only I—I thought maybe I could fight it out myself. But you'll have to know it—there's a taint upon me."

I caught in Drake's swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.

"Yes," she said, now quietly. "Some new and alien thing within my heart, my brain, my soul. It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying block, and—he—sealed upon me when I was in—his"—again she crimsoned, "embrace."

And as we gazed at her, incredulously:

"A thing that urges me to forget you two—and Martin—and all the world I've known. That tries to pull me from you—from all—to drift untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace. And whose calling I want, God help me, oh, so desperately to heed!

"It whispered to me first," she said, "from Norhala—when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like—like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.

"I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies—and the life I had known only a dream—and you, all of you—even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren't—real—and you did not—matter."

"Hypnotism," muttered Drake, as she paused.

"No." She shook her head. "No—more than that. The wonder of it grew—and grew. I thrilled with it. I remember nothing of that ride, saw nothing—except that once through the peace enfolding me pierced warning that Martin was in peril, and I broke through to see him clutching Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him.

"And I saved him—and again forgot. Then, when I saw that beautiful, flaming Shape—I felt no terror, no fear—only a tremendous—joyous—anticipation, as though—as though—" She faltered, hung her head, then leaving that sentence unfinished, whispered: "and when—it—lifted me it was as though I had come at last out of some endless black ocean of despair into the full sun of paradise."

"Ruth!" cried Drake, and at the pain in his cry she winced.

"Wait," she said, and held up a little, tremulous hand. "You asked—and now you must listen."

She was silent; and when once more she spoke her voice was low, curiously rhythmic; her eyes rapt:

"I was free—free from every human fetter of fear or sorrow or love or hate; free even of hope—for what was there to hope for when everything desirable was mine? And I was elemental; one with the eternal things yet fully conscious that I was—I.

"It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.

"And there was music—strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not terrible to me—who was part of it. Vast chords and singing themes that rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And all—all—passionless, yet—rapturous.

"Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality—a flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this energy were—reassembling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental things, changing me fully into them.

"I felt the little tendrils touching, caressing—then came the shots. Awakening was—dreadful, a struggling back from drowning. I saw Martin—blasted. I drove the—the spell away from me, tore it away.

"And, O Walter—Dick—it hurt—it hurt—and for a breath before I ran to him it was like—like coming from a world in which there was no disorder, no sorrow, no doubts, a rhythmic, harmonious world of light and music, into—into a world that was like a black and dirty kitchen.

"And it's there," her voice rose, hysterically. "It's still within me—whispering, whispering; urging me away from you, from Martin, from every human thing; bidding me give myself up, surrender my humanity.

"Its seal," she sobbed. "No—HIS seal! An alien consciousness sealed within me, that tries to make the human me a slave—that waits to overcome my will—and if I surrender gives me freedom, an incredible freedom—but makes me, being still human, a—monster."

She hid her face in her hands, quivering.

"If I could sleep," she wailed. "But I'm afraid to sleep. I think I shall never sleep again. For sleeping how do I know what I may be when I wake?"

I caught Drake's eye; he nodded. I slipped my hand down into the medicine-case, brought forth a certain potent and tasteless combination of drugs which I carry upon explorations.

I dropped a little into her cup, then held it to her lips. Like a child, unthinking, she obeyed and drank.

"But I'll not surrender." Her eyes were tragic. "Never think it! I can win—don't you know I can?"

"Win?" Drake dropped down beside her, drew her toward him. "Bravest girl I've known—of course you'll win. And remember this—nine-tenths of what you're thinking now is purely over-wrought nerves and weariness. You'll win—and we'll win, never doubt it."

"I don't," she said. "I know it—oh, it will be hard—but I will—I will—"



CHAPTER XV. THE HOUSE OF NORHALA

Her eyes closed, her body relaxed; the potion had done its work quickly. We laid her beside Ventnor on the pile of silken stuffs, covered them both with a fold, then looked at each other long and silently—and I wondered whether my face was as grim and drawn as his.

"It appears," he said at last, curtly, "that it's up to you and me for powwow quick. I hope you're not sleepy."

"I am not," I answered as curtly; the edge of nerves in his manner of questioning doing nothing to soothe my own, "and even if I were I would hardly expect to put all the burden of the present problem upon you by going to sleep."

"For God's sake don't be a prima donna," he flared up. "I meant no offense."

"I'm sorry, Dick," I said. "We're both a little jumpy, I guess." He nodded; gripped my hand.

"It wouldn't be so bad," he muttered, "if all four of us were all right. But Ventnor's down and out, and God alone knows for how long. And Ruth—has all the trouble we have and some special ones of her own. I've an idea"—he hesitated—"an idea that there was no exaggeration in that story she told—an idea that if anything she underplayed it."

"I, too," I replied somberly. "And to me it is the most hideous phase of this whole situation—and for reasons not all connected with Ruth," I added.

"Hideous!" he repeated. "Unthinkable—yet all this is unthinkable. And still—it is! And Ventnor—coming back—that way. Like a lost soul finding voice.

"Was it raving, Goodwin? Or could he have been—how was it he put it—in touch with these Things and their purpose? Was that message—truth?"

"Ask yourself that question," I said. "Man—you know it was truth. Had not inklings of it come to you even before he spoke? They had to me. His message was but an interpretation, a synthesis of facts I, for one, lacked the courage to admit."

"I, too," he nodded. "But he went further than that. What did he mean by the Keeper of the Cones—and that the Things—were vulnerable under the same law that orders us? And why did he command us to go back to the city? How could he know—how could he?"

"There's nothing inexplicable in that, at any rate," I answered. "Abnormal sensitivity of perception due to the cutting off of all sensual impressions. There's nothing uncommon in that. You have its most familiar form in the sensitivity of the blind. You've watched the same thing at work in certain forms of hypnotic experimentation, haven't you?

"Through the operation of entirely understandable causes the mind gains the power to react to vibrations that normally pass unperceived; is able to project itself through this keying up of perception into a wider area of consciousness than the normal. Just as in certain diseases of the ear the sufferer, though deaf to sounds within the average range of hearing, is fully aware of sound vibrations far above and far below those the healthy ear registers."

"I know," he said. "I don't need to be convinced. But we accept these things in theory—and when we get up against them for ourselves we doubt.

"How many people are there in Christendom, do you think, who believe that the Saviour ascended from the dead, but who if they saw it today would insist upon medical inspection, doctor's certificates, a clinic, and even after that render a Scotch verdict? I'm not speaking irreverently—I'm just stating a fact."

Suddenly he moved away from me, strode over to the curtained oval through which Norhala had gone.

"Dick," I cried, following him hastily, "where are you going? What are you going to do?"

"I'm going after Norhala," he answered. "I'm going to have a showdown with her or know the reason why."

"Drake," I cried again, aghast, "don't make the mistake Ventnor did. That's not the way to win through. Don't—I beg you, don't."

"You're wrong," he answered stubbornly. "I'm going to get her. She's got to talk."

He thrust out a hand to the curtains. Before he could touch them, they were parted. Out from between them slithered the black eunuch. He stood motionless, regarding us; in the ink-black eyes a red flame of hatred. I pushed myself between him and Drake.

"Where is your mistress, Yuruk?" I asked.

"The goddess has gone," he replied sullenly.

"Gone?" I said suspiciously, for certainly Norhala had not passed us. "Where?"

"Who shall question the goddess?" he asked. "She comes and she goes as she pleases."

I translated this for Drake.

"He's got to show me," he said. "Don't think I'm going to spill any beans, Goodwin. But I want to talk to her. I think I'm right, honestly I do."

After all, I reflected, there was much in his determination to recommend it. It was the obvious thing to do—unless we admitted that Norhala was superhuman; and that I would not admit. In command of forces we did not yet know, en rapport with these People of Metal, sealed with that alien consciousness Ruth had described—all these, yes. But still a woman—of that I was certain. And surely Drake could be trusted not to repeat Ventnor's error.

"Yuruk," I said, "we think you lie. We would speak to your mistress. Take us to her."

"I have told you that the goddess is not here," he said. "If you do not believe it is nothing to me. I cannot take you to her for I do not know where she is. Is it your wish that I take you through her house?"

"It is," I said.

"The goddess has commanded me to serve you in all things." He bowed, sardonically. "Follow."

Our search was short. We stepped out into what for want of better words I can describe only as a central hall. It was circular, and strewn with thick piled small rugs whose hues had been softened by the alchemy of time into exquisite, shadowy echoes of color.

The walls of this hall were of the same moonstone substance that had enclosed the chamber upon whose inner threshold we were. They whirled straight up to the dome in a crystalline, cylindrical cone. Four doorways like that in which we stood pierced them. Through each of their curtainings in turn we peered.

All were precisely similar in shape and proportions, radiating in a lunetted, curved base triangle from the middle chamber; the curvature of the enclosing globe forming back wall and roof; the translucent slicings the sides; the circle of floor of the inner hall the truncating lunette.

The first of these chambers was utterly bare. The one opposite held a half-dozen suits of the lacquered armor, as many wicked looking, short and double-edged swords and long javelins. The third I judged to be the lair of Yuruk; within it was a copper brazier, a stand of spears and a gigantic bow, a quiver full of arrows leaning beside it. The fourth room was littered with coffers great and small, of wood and of bronze, and all tightly closed.

The fifth room was beyond question Norhala's bedchamber. Upon its floor the ancient rugs were thick. A low couch of carven ivory inset with gold rested a few feet from the doorway. A dozen or more of the chests were scattered about and flowing over with silken stuffs.

Upon the back of four golden lions stood a high mirror of polished silver. And close to it, in curiously incongruous domestic array stood a stiffly marshaled row of sandals. Upon one of the chests were heaped combs and fillets of shell and gold and ivory studded with jewels blue and yellow and crimson.

To all of these we gave but a passing glance. We sought for Norhala. And of her we found no shadow. She had gone even as the black eunuch had said; flitting unseen past Ruth, perhaps, absorbed in her watch over her brother; perhaps through some hidden opening in this room of hers.

Yuruk let drop the curtains, sidled back to the first room, we after him. The two there had not moved. We drew the saddlebags close, propped ourselves against them.

The black eunuch squatted a dozen feet away, facing us, chin upon his knees, taking us in with unblinking eyes blank of any emotion. Then he began to move slowly his tremendously long arms in easy, soothing motion, the hands running along the floor upon their talons in arcs and circles. It was curious how these hands seemed to be endowed with a volition of their own, independent of the arms upon which they swung.

And now I could see only the hands, shuttling so smoothly, so rhythmically back and forth—weaving so sleepily, so sleepily back and forth—black hands that dripped sleep—hypnotic.

Hypnotic! I sprang from the lethargy closing upon me. In one quick side glance I saw Drake's head nodding—nodding in time to the movement of the black hands. I jumped to my feet, shaking with an intensity of rage unfamiliar to me; thrust my pistol into the wrinkled face.

"Damn you!" I cried. "Stop that. Stop it and turn your back."

The corded muscles of the arms contracted, the claws of the slithering paws drew in as though he were about to clutch me; the ebon pools of eyes were covered with a frozen film of hate.

He could not have known what was this tube with which I menaced him, but its threat he certainly sensed and was afraid to meet. He squattered about, wrapped his arms around his knees, crouched with back toward us.

"What's the matter?" asked Drake drowsily.

"He tried to hypnotize us," I answered shortly. "And pretty nearly did."

"So that's what it was." He was now wide awake. "I watched those hands of his and got sleepier and sleepier—I guess we'd better tie Mr. Yuruk up." He jumped to his feet.

"No," I said, restraining him. "No. He's safe enough as long as we're on the alert. I don't want to use any force on him yet. Wait until we know we can get something worth while by doing it."

"All right," he nodded, grimly. "But when the time comes I'm telling you straight, Doc, I'm going the limit. There's something about that human spider that makes me itch to squash him—slowly."

"I'll have no compunction—when it's worth while," I answered as grimly.

We sank down again against the saddlebags; Drake brought out a black pipe, looked at it sorrowfully; at me appealingly.

"All mine was on that pony that bolted," I answered his wistfulness.

"All mine was on my beast, too," he sighed. "And I lost my pouch in that spurt from the ruins."

He sighed again, clamped white teeth down upon the stem.

"Of course," he said at last, "if Ventnor was right in that—that disembodied analysis of his, it's rather—well, terrifying, isn't it?"

"It's all of that," I replied, "and considerably more."

"Metal, he said," Drake mused. "Things of metal with brains of thinking crystal and their blood the lightnings. You accept that?"

"So far as my own observation has gone—yes," I said. "Metallic yet mobile. Inorganic but with all the quantities we have hitherto thought only those of the organic and with others added. Crystalline, of course, in structure and highly complex. Activated by magnetic-electric forces consciously exerted and as much a part of their life as brain energy and nerve currents are of our human life. Animate, moving, sentient combinations of metal and electric energy."

He said:

"The opening of the Disk from the globe and of the two blasting stars from the pyramids show the flexibility of the outer—plate would you call it? I couldn't help thinking of the armadillo after I had time to think at all."

"It may be"—I struggled against the conviction now strong upon me—"it may be that within that metallic shell is an organic body, something soft—animal, as there is within the horny carapace of the turtle, the nacreous valves of the oyster, the shells of the crustaceans—it may be that even their inner surface is organic—"

"No," he interrupted, "if there is a body—as we know a body—it must be between the outer surface and the inner, for the latter is crystal, jewel hard, impenetrable.

"Goodwin—Ventnor's bullets hit fair. I saw them strike. They did not ricochet—they dropped dead. Like flies dashed up against a rock—and the Thing was no more conscious of their striking than a rock would have been of those flies."

"Drake," I said, "my own conviction is that these creatures are absolutely metallic, entirely inorganic—incredible, unknown forms. Let us go on that basis."

"I think so, too," he nodded; "but I wanted you to say it first. And yet—is it so incredible, Goodwin? What is the definition of vital intelligence—sentience?

"Haeckel's is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus, that can react to a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?"

"Vaguely," I said.

"Lillie," he went on, "proved that under the electric current and other exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically indigestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also, he found, it could acquire disease and die.

"Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness. It was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than man, and that its immobility is only apparent. (Le Bon in 'Evolution of Matter,' Chapter eleven.)

"Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the direction of the magnetic force.

"When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion."

"But it is not conscious motion," I objected.

"Ah, but how do you know?" he asked. "If Jacques Loeb* is right, that action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference between them.

"Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he's right, then I'm a buttercup—but that's neither here nor there. Loeb—all he did was to restate destiny, one of humanity's oldest ideas, in the terms of tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.

"Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel's three tests—it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution, which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original experience—exactly as it is in the iron."

* Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New York, "The Mechanistic Conception of Life."



CHAPTER XVI. CONSCIOUS METAL!

"Granted," I acquiesced. "We now come to their means of locomotion. In its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against the force of gravitation. Man's walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth's face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric—magnetic vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again, Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of the current.

"Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern rapidly and he seems to be flying. We have none of the awkward fallings and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.

"I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.

"Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to admit the vibrations of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a series of leaps—just as we do when the motion-picture operator slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of stumbles.

"Very well—so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomenon which the human mind cannot conceive as possible; therefore intellectually we still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human thought cannot encompass which it need fear."

"Metallic," he said, "and crystalline. And yet—why not? What are we but bags of skin filled with certain substances in solution and stretched over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of that primeval jelly which Gregory * calls Protobion came after untold millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too, the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering wonder of the mother-of-pearl.

* J. W. Gregory, F.R.S.D.Sc., Professor of Geology, University of Glasgow.

"Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think not."

"Not materially," I answered. "No. But there remains—consciousness!"

"That," he said, "I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of—how did he put it?—a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got—glimpses—Goodwin, but I cannot understand."

"We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these Things metallic, Dick," I replied. "But that does not necessarily mean that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being metal, they must be of crystalline structure.

"As Gregory has pointed out, crystals and what we call living matter had an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat but hunger.

"The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions—yet they do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.

"Instead, they bud—give birth, in fact—to smaller ones, which increase until they reach the size of the preceding generation. And like the children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely as their progenitors!

"Very well, then—we arrive at the conception of a metallically crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and the amoeba—the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the amoeba and the inert jelly of the Protobion?

"As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the ants—that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the 'Spirit of the Hive.' It is shown in their groupings—just as the geometric arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline intelligence.

"I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement or work without apparent communication having passed between the units, there is nothing more remarkable than the swarming of a hive of bees where also without apparent communication just so many waxmakers, nurses, honey-gatherers, chemists, bread-makers, and all the varied specialists of the hive go with the old queen, leaving behind sufficient number of each class for the needs of the young queen.

"All this apportionment is effected without any means of communication that we recognize. Still it is most obviously intelligent selection. For if it were haphazard all the honeymakers might leave and the hive starve, or all the chemists might go and the food for the young bees not be properly prepared—and so on and so on."

"But metal," he muttered, "and conscious. It's all very well—but where did that consciousness come from? And what is it? And where did they come from? And most of all, why haven't they overrun the world before this?

"Such development as theirs, such an evolution, presupposes aeons of time—long as it took us to drag up from the lizards. What have they been doing—why haven't they been ready to strike—if Ventnor's right—at humanity until now?"

"I don't know," I answered, helplessly. "But evolution is not the slow, plodding process that Darwin thought. There seem to be explosions—nature will create a new form almost in a night. Then comes the long ages of development and adjustment, and suddenly another new race appears.

"It might be so of these—some extraordinary conditions that shaped them. Or they might have developed through the ages in spaces within the earth—there's that incredible abyss we saw that is evidently one of their highways. Or they might have dropped here upon some fragment of a broken world, found in this valley the right conditions and developed in amazing rapidity. * They're all possible theories—take your pick."

* Professor Svante Arrhenius's theory of propagation of life by means of minute spores carried through space. See his "Worlds in the Making."—W.T.G.

"Something's held them back—and they're rushing to a climax," he whispered. "Ventnor's right about that—I feel it. And what can we do?"

"Go back to their city," I said. "Go back as he ordered. I believe he knows what he's talking about. And I believe he'll be able to help us. It wasn't just a request he made, nor even an appeal—it was a command."

"But what can we do—just two men—against these Things?" he groaned.

"Maybe we'll find out—when we're back in the city," I answered.

"Well," his old reckless cheerfulness came back to him, "in every crisis of this old globe it's been up to one man to turn the trick. We're two. And at the worst we can only go down fighting a little before the rest of us. So, after all, whatEVER the hell, WHAT the hell."

For a time we were silent.

"Well," he said at last, "we have to go to the city in the morning." He laughed. "Sounds as though we were living in the suburbs, somehow, doesn't it?"

"It can't be many hours before dawn," I said. "Turn in for a while, I'll wake you when I think you've slept enough."

"It doesn't seem fair," he protested, but sleepily.

"I'm not sleepy," I told him; nor was I.

But whether I was or not, I wanted to question Yuruk, uninterrupted and undisturbed.

Drake stretched himself out. When his breathing showed him fast asleep indeed, I slipped over to the black eunuch and crouched, right hand close to the butt of my automatic, facing him.



CHAPTER XVII. YURUK

"Yuruk," I whispered, "you love us as the wheat field loves the hail; we are as welcome to you as the death cord to the condemned. Lo, a door opened into a land of unpleasant dreams you thought sealed, and we came through. Answer my questions truthfully and it may be that we shall return through that door."

Interest welled up in the depths of the black eyes.

"There is a way from here," he muttered. "Nor does it pass through—Them. I can show it to you."

I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot across the wrinkled face.

"Where does that way lead?" I asked. "There were those who sought us; men clad in armor with javelins and arrows. Does your way lead to them, Yuruk?"

For a time he hesitated, the lashless lids half closed.

"Yes," he said sullenly. "The way leads to them; to their place. But will it not be safer for you there—among your kind?"

"I don't know that it will," I answered promptly. "Those who are unlike us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have taken and slain us. Why is it not better to remain with them than to go to our kind who would destroy us?"

"They would not," he said "If you gave them—her." He thrust a long thumb backward toward sleeping Ruth. "Cherkis would forgive much for her. And why should you not? She is only a woman."

He spat—in a way that made me want to kill him.

"Besides," he ended, "have you no arts to amuse him?"

"Cherkis?" I asked.

"Cherkis," he whined. "Is Yuruk a fool not to know that in the world without, new things have arisen since long ago we fled from Iskander into the secret valley? What have you to beguile Cherkis beyond this woman flesh? Much, I think. Go then to him—unafraid."

Cherkis? There was a familiar sound to that. Cherkis? Of course—it was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into this—Cherkis. And Iskander? Equally, of course—Alexander. Ventnor had been right.

"Yuruk," I demanded directly, "is she whom you call goddess—Norhala—of the people of Cherkis?"

"Long ago," he answered; "long, long ago there was trouble in their city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis. I fled with her who was the mother of the goddess. There were twenty of us; and we fled here—by the way which I will show you—"

He leered cunningly; I gave no sign of interest.

"She who was the mother of the goddess found favor in the sight of the ruler here," he went on. "But after a time she grew old and ugly and withered. So he slew her—like a little mound of dust she danced and blew away after he had slain her; and also he slew others who had grown displeasing to him. He blasted me—as he was blasted—" He pointed to Ventnor.

"Then it was that, recovering, I found my crooked shoulder. The goddess was born here. She is kin to Him Who Rules! How else could she shed the lightnings? Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came to Iskander's mother in the form of a great snake? Well? At any rate the goddess was born—shedder of the lightnings even from her birth. And she is as you see her.

"Cleave to your kind! Cleave to your kind!" Suddenly he shrilled. "Better is it to be whipped by your brother than to be eaten by the tiger. Cleave to your kind. Look—I will show you the way to them."

He sprang to his feet, clasped my wrist in one of his long hands, led me through the curtained oval into the cylindrical hall, parted the curtainings of Norhala's bedroom and pushed me within. Over the floor he slid, still holding fast to me, and pressed against the farther wall.

An ovoid slice of the gemlike material slid aside, revealing a doorway. I glimpsed a path, a trail, leading into a forest pallid green beneath the wan light. This way thrust itself like a black tongue into the boskage and vanished in the depths.

"Follow it." He pointed. "Take those who came with you and follow it."

The wrinkles upon his face writhed with his eagerness.

"You will go?" panted Yuruk. "You will take them and go by that path?"

"Not yet," I answered absently. "Not yet."

And was brought abruptly to full alertness, vigilance, by the flame of rage that filled the eyes thrust so close.

"Lead back," I directed curtly. He slid the door into place, turned sullenly. I followed, wondering what were the sources of the bitter hatred he so plainly bore for us; the reasons for his eagerness to be rid of us despite the commands of this woman who to him at least was goddess.

And by that curious human habit of seeking for the complex when the simple answer lies close, failed to recognize that it was jealousy of us that was the root of his behavior; that he wished to be, as it would seem he had been for years, the only human thing near Norhala; failed to realize this, and with Ruth and Drake was terribly to pay for this failure.

I looked down upon the pair, sleeping soundly; upon Ventnor lost still in trance.

"Sit," I ordered the eunuch. "And turn your back to me."

I dropped down beside Drake, my mind wrestling with the mystery, but every sense alert for movement from the black. Glibly enough I had passed over Dick's questioning as to the consciousness of the Metal People; now I faced it knowing it to be the very crux of these incredible phenomena; admitting, too, that despite all my special pleading, about that point swirled in my own mind the thickest mists of uncertainty. That their sense of order was immensely beyond a man's was plain.

As plain was it that their knowledge of magnetic force and its manipulation were far beyond the sphere of humanity. That they had realization of beauty this palace of Norhala's proved—and no human imagination could have conceived it nor human hands have made its thought of beauty real. What were their senses through which their consciousness fed?

Nine in number had been the sapphire ovals set within the golden zone of the Disk. Clearly it came to me that these were sense organs!

But—nine senses!

And the great stars—how many had they? And the cubes—did they open as did globe and pyramid?

Consciousness itself—after all what is it? A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us? The inexplicable governor of the city of the body of which these myriads of cells are the citizens—and created by them out of themselves to rule?

Is it what many call the soul? Or is it a finer form of matter, a self-realizing force, which uses the body as its vehicle just as other forces use for their vestments other machines? After all, I thought, what is this conscious self of ours, the ego, but a spark of realization running continuously along the path of time within the mechanism we call the brain; making contact along that path as the electric spark at the end of a wire?

Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything—man and rock, metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the limitations of that which animates, and in essence the same in all. If so, then this problem of the life of the Metal People ceased to be a problem; was answered!

So thinking I became aware of increasing light; strode past Yuruk to the door and peeped out. Dawn was paling the sky. I stooped over Drake, shook him. On the instant he was awake, alert.

"I only need a little sleep, Dick," I said. "When the sun is well up, call me."

"Why, it's dawn," he whispered. "Goodwin, you ought not to have let me sleep so long. I feel like a damned pig."

"Never mind," I said. "But watch the eunuch closely."

I rolled myself up in his warm blanket; sank almost instantly into dreamless slumber.



CHAPTER XVIII. INTO THE PIT

High was the sun when I awakened; or so, I supposed, opening my eyes upon a flood of daylight. As I lay, lazily, recollection rushed upon me.

It was no sky into which I was gazing; it was the dome of Norhala's elfin home. And Drake had not aroused me. Why? And how long had I slept?

I jumped to my feet, stared about. Ruth nor Drake nor the black eunuch was there!

"Ruth!" I shouted. "Drake!"

There was no answer. I ran to the doorway. Peering up into the white vault of the heavens I set the time of day as close to seven; I had slept then three hours, more or less. Yet short as that time of slumber had been, I felt marvelously refreshed, reenergized; the effect, I was certain, of the extraordinarily tonic qualities of the atmosphere of this place. But where were the others? Where Yuruk?

I heard Ruth's laughter. Some hundred yards to the left, half hidden by a screen of flowering shrubs, I saw a small meadow. Within it a half-dozen little white goats nuzzled around her and Dick. She was milking one of them.

Reassured, I drew back into the chamber, knelt over Ventnor. His condition was unchanged. My gaze fell upon the pool that had been Norhala's bath. Longingly I looked at it; then satisfying myself that the milking process was not finished, slipped off my clothes and splashed about.

I had just time to get back in my clothes when through the doorway came the pair, each carrying a porcelain pannikin full of milk.

There was no shadow of fear or horror on her face. It was the old Ruth who stood before me; nor was there effort in the smile she gave me. She had been washed clean in the waters of sleep.

"Don't worry, Walter," she said. "I know what you're thinking. But I'm—ME again."

"Where is Yuruk?" I turned to Drake bruskly to smother the sob of sheer happiness I felt rising in my throat; and at his wink and warning grimace abruptly forebore to press the question.

"You men pick out the things and I'll get breakfast ready," said Ruth.

Drake picked up the teakettle and motioned me before him.

"About Yuruk," he whispered when he had gotten outside. "I gave him a little object lesson. Persuaded him to go down the line a bit, showed him my pistol, and then picked off one of Norhala's goats with it. Hated to do it, but I knew it would be good for his soul.

"He gave one screech and fell on his face and groveled. Thought it was a lightning bolt, I figure; decided I had been stealing Norhala's stuff. 'Yuruk,' I told him, 'that's what you'll get, and worse, if you lay a finger on that girl inside there.'"

"And then what happened?" I asked.

"He beat it back there." He grinned, pointing toward the forest through which ran the path the eunuch had shown me. "Probably hiding back of a tree."

As we filled the container at the outer spring, I told him of the revelations and the offer Yuruk had made to me.

"Whew-w!" he whistled. "In the nutcracker, eh? Trouble behind us and trouble in front of us."

"When do we start?" he asked, as we turned back.

"Right after we've eaten," I answered. "There's no use putting it off. How do you feel about it?"

"Frankly, like the chief guest at a lynching party," he said. "Curious but none too cheerful."

Nor was I. I was filled with a fever of scientific curiosity. But I was not cheerful—no!

We ministered to Ventnor as well as we could; forcing open his set jaws, thrusting a thin rubber tube down past his windpipe into his gullet and dropping through it a few ounces of the goat milk. Our own breakfasting was silent enough.

We could not take Ruth with us upon our journey; that was certain; she must stay here with her brother. She would be safer in Norhala's home than where we were going, of course, and yet to leave her was most distressing. After all, I wondered, was there any need of both of us taking the journey; would not one do just as well?

Drake could stay—

"No use of putting all our eggs in one basket," I broached the subject. "I'll go down by myself while you stay and help Ruth. You can always follow if I don't turn up in a reasonable time."

His indignation at this proposal was matched only by her own.

"You'll go with him, Dick Drake," she cried, "or I'll never look at or speak to you again!"

"Good Lord! Did you think for a minute I wouldn't?" Pain and wrath struggled on his face. "We go together or neither of us goes. Ruth will be all right here, Goodwin. The only thing she has any cause to fear is Yuruk—and he's had his lesson.

"Besides, she'll have the rifles and her pistols, and she knows how to use them. What d'ye mean by making such a proposition as that?" His indignation burst all bounds.

Lamely I tried to justify myself.

"I'll be all right," said Ruth. "I'm not afraid of Yuruk. And none of these Things will hurt me—not after—not after—" Her eyes fell, her lips quivered, then she faced us steadily. "Don't ask me how I know that," she said quietly. "Believe me, I do know it. I am closer to—them than you two are. And if I choose I can call upon that alien strength their master gave me. It is for you two that I fear."

"No fear for us," Drake burst out hastily. "We're Norhala's little playthings. We're tabu. Take it from me, Ruth, I'd bet my head there isn't one of these Things, great or small, and no matter how many, that doesn't by this time know all about us.

"We'll probably be received with demonstrations of interest by the populace as welcome guests. Probably we'll find a sign—'Welcome to our City'—hung up over the front gate."

She smiled, a trifle tremulously.

"We'll come back," he said. Suddenly he leaned forward, put his hands on her shoulders. "Do you think there is anything that could keep me from coming back?" he whispered.

She trembled, wide eyes searching deep into his.

"Well," I broke in, a bit uncomfortably, "we'd better be starting. I think as Drake does, that we're tabu. Barring accident there's no danger. And if I guess right about these Things, accident is impossible."

"As inconceivable as the multiplication table going wrong," he laughed, straightening.

And so we made ready. Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew; our pistols we decided to carry as Drake put it, "for comfort." Canteens filled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments, including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit—all these packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broad shoulders.

I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.

We were ready for our journey.

Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surface resembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fifty feet wide and now, in daylight, glistened faintly as though overlaid with some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way that stopped at the threshold of Norhala's door.

Diminishing through the distance, it stretched straight as an arrow onward and vanished between perpendicular cliffs which formed the frowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon the coursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistiness checked the gaze.

Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings of Norhala's house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion of an hour-glass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gateway forming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at a wider angle.

This upper part of the hour-glass was filled with a park-like forest. It was closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs.

How, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me pierce them? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had not found and followed it?

The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more than a mile wide. Norhala's house stood in its center; and it was like a garden, dotted with flowering and fragrant lilies and here and there a tiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala's dwelling seemed less to rest upon the ground than to emerge from it; as though its basic curvatures were hidden in the earth.

What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of the lacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously, incredibly beautiful it was—an immense bubble of froth of molten sapphires and turquoises.

We had not time to study its beauties. A few last instructions to Ruth, and we set forth down the gray road. Hardly had we taken a few steps when there came a faint cry from her.

"Dick! Dick—come here!"

He sprang to her, caught her hands in his. For a moment, half frightened it seemed, she considered him.

"Dick," I heard her whisper. "Dick—come back safe to me!"

I saw his arms close about her, hers tighten around his neck; black hair touched the silken brown curls, their lips met, clung. I turned away.

In a little time he joined me; head down, silent, he strode along beside me, utterly dejected.

A hundred more yards and we turned. Ruth was still standing on the threshold of the house of mystery, watching us. She waved her hands, flitted in, was hidden from us. And Drake still silent, we pushed on.

The walls of the gateway were close. The sparse vegetation along the base of the cliffs had ceased; the roadway itself had merged into the smooth, bare floor of the canyon. From vertical edge to vertical edge of the rocky portal stretched a curtain of shimmering mist. As we drew nearer we saw that this was motionless, and less like vapor of water than vapor of light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms of crystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it; the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm—as though bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge the shining particles from position.

We passed within it—side by side.

Instantly I knew that whatever these veils were, they were not moisture. The air we breathed was dry, electric. I was sensible of a decided stimulation, a pleasant tingling along every nerve, a gaiety almost light-headed. We could see each other quite plainly, the rocky floor on which we trod as well. Within this vapor of light there was no ghost of sound; it was utterly empty of it. I saw Drake turn to me, his mouth open in a laugh, his lips move in speech—and although he bent close to my ear, I heard nothing. He frowned, puzzled, and walked on.

Abruptly we stepped into an opening, a pocket of clear air. Our ears were filled with a high, shrill humming as unpleasantly vibrant as the shriek of a sand blast. Six feet to our right was the edge of the ledge on which we stood; beyond it was a sheer drop into space. A shaft piercing down into the void and walled with the mists.

But it was not that shaft that made us clutch each other. No! It was that through it uprose a colossal column of the cubes. It stood a hundred feet from us. Its top was another hundred feet above the level of our ledge and its length vanished in the depths.

And its head was a gigantic spinning wheel, yards in thickness, tapering at its point of contact with the cliff wall into a diameter half that of the side closest the column, gleaming with flashes of green flame and grinding with tremendous speed at the face of the rock.

Over it, attached to the cliff, was a great vizored hood of some pale yellow metal, and it was this shelter that cutting off the vaporous light like an enormous umbrella made the pocket of clarity in which we stood, the shaft up which sprang the pillar.

All along the length of that column as far as we could see the myriad tiny eyes of the Metal People shone out upon us, not twinkling mischievously, but—grotesque as this may seem, I cannot help it—wide with surprise.

Only an instant longer did the great wheel spin. I saw the screaming rock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it had received some message, abruptly its motion now ceased.

It tilted; looked down upon us!

I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smaller pyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemed to be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as the Shrine of the Cones.

The column was bending; the wheel approaching.

Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We were shrouded in their silences. Step by step we went on, peering for the edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled face stealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might step too close to the unseen verge.

Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; we passed out of them—

A chaos of sound beat about us. The clanging of a million anvils; the clamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thunder; the roarings of a thousand hurricanes. The prodigious bellowings of the Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light.

Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of Force. Stunned, nay BLINDED, by it, we covered ears and eyes.

As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence. Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that humming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds.

We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had clutched them.

Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis—the appallingly beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy, and its alien terror.

The Domain of the Metal Monster—it was filled like a chalice with Its will; was the visible expression of that will.

We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immense pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at the upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean that it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length. Five hundred feet below was the pit's floor. Gone were the clouds of light that had obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear; every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness.

First the eyes rested upon a broad band of fluorescent amethyst, ringing the entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thousand feet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell the curtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors.

But now I saw that all of these veils were not motionless like those through which we had just passed. To the northwest they were pulsing like the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swift iridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these were ordered, geometric—like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flying swiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back.

From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering not two miles away from us.

Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, it reared full five thousand feet on high!

How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitous walls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, I estimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyes like a blow; its shadow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It was overpowering—dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante saw rising up from another pit.

It was a metal city, mountainous.

Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should have been blind, that vast oblong face—but it was not blind. From it radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden sense higher than sight.

It was a metal city, mountainous and—AWARE.

About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portals swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations coming and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns about the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.

From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in which it lay. Its floor was plaquelike, a great plane smooth as though turned by potter's wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace; level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing—no tree nor bush, meadow nor covert.

It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it was mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered—

The surging of the Metal Hordes.

There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless host. They marched and countermarched in battalions, in regiments, in armies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes like mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving about each other with incredible rapidity—like scores of great pyramids crowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vivid flashes, lightning bright—on their wake the rolling echoes of faraway thunder.

Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamed and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like fiery whirling disks.

Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape and reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons—then lift in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.

Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear suggestion of drill, of maneuver.

And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious; instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.

But always this patterning was ordered, always COHERENT. As though it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world message.

Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments traced by some mathematical God!

Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in Arabic.

It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course two broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges—even from that distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline murmurings.

Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a river; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.

I looked upward—up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses, swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower with countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.

Up they thrust—domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.

Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the immense pallid baroques of the snow fields.

Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring of flashing amethyst with its aural mists. Between them lay the vast and patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement. Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the Seeing City.

Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmic spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic, lapidescent and—

Conscious!

Down from the ledge where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by which, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of at least forty-five degrees; its surface was smooth and polished.

Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemed to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in.

I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands; saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him—through the force that held us. A block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment. Under us, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched. There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves upon another surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of the cubes, dropping below, five hundred feet to the valley's floor a column of which the block that held us was the top.

Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the Grinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been its scout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape had sought us out through the mists, its messenger had caught us, delivered us to it.

The pillar leaned over—bent like that shining pillar that had bridged for us, at Norhala's commands, the abyss. The floor of the valley arose to meet us. Further and further leaned the pillar. Again there was a rapid shifting of us to another surface of the crowning cube. Fast now swept up toward us the valley floor. A dizziness clouded my sight. There was a little shock, a rolling over the Thing that had held us—

We stood upon the floor of the Pit.

And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we had ridden downward came score upon score of the cubes. They broke from it, disintegrating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinkling at us from their deep sparkling points of eyes.

Helplessly we gazed at those who circled around us. Then suddenly I felt myself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block. Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched me. Then like a human ball it tossed me to another. I caught a glimpse of Drake's tall figure drifting through the air.

The play became more rapid, breathtaking. It was play; I recognized that. But it was perilous play for us. I felt myself as fragile as a doll of glass in the hands of careless children.

I was tossed to a waiting cube. On the ground, not ten feet from me, was Drake, swaying dizzily. Suddenly the cube that held me tightened its grip; tightened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon its surface. Before I dropped, Drake's body leaped toward me as though drawn by a lasso. He fell at my side.

Then pursued by scores of the Things and like some mischievous boy bearing off the spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight for an open portal. A blaze of incandescent blue flame blinded me; again as the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me—a skeleton form. Swiftly flesh melted back upon him, clothed him.

The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raised us, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it. And it sped away.

All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on high burned the pale-gilt suns. Between its colossal columns streamed thousands of the Metal Folk; no longer hurriedly, but quietly, deliberately, sedately.

We were within the City—even as Ventnor had commanded.



CHAPTER XIX. THE CITY THAT WAS ALIVE

Close beside us was one of the cyclopean columns. We crept to it; crouched at its base opposite the drift of the Metal People; strove, huddled there, to regain our shaken poise. Like bagatelles we felt in that tremendous place, the weird luminaries gleaming above like garlands of frozen suns, the enigmatic hosts of animate cubes and spheres and pyramids trooping past.

They ranged in size from shapes yard-high to giants of thirty feet or more. They paid no heed to us, did not stop; streaming on, engrossed in whatever mysterious business was summoning them. And after a time their numbers lessened; thinned down to widely separate groups, to stragglers; then ceased. The hall was empty of them.

As far as the eye could reach the columned spaces stretched. I was conscious once more of that unusual flow of energy through every vein and nerve.

"Follow the crowd!" said Drake. "Do you feel just full of pep and ginger, by the way?"

"I am aware of the most extraordinary vigor," I answered.

"Some weird joint," he mused, looking about him. "Wonder if they have any windows? This whole place looked solid to me—what I could see of it. Wonder if we'll get up against it for air? These Things don't need it, that's sure. Wonder—"

He broke off staring fascinatedly at the pillar behind us.

"Look here, Goodwin!" There was a tremor in his voice. "What do you make of THIS?"

I followed his pointing finger; looked at him inquiringly.

"The eyes!" he said impatiently. "Don't you see them? The eyes in the column!"

And now I saw them. The pillar was a pale metallic blue, in color a trifle darker than the Metal Folk. All within it were the myriads of tiny crystalline points that we had grown to know were the receptors of some strange sense of sight. But they did not sparkle as did those others; they were dull, lifeless. I touched the surface. It was smooth, cool—with none of that subtle, warm vitality that pulsed through all the Things with which I had come in contact. I shook my head, realizing as I did so what a shock the incredible possibility he had suggested had given me.

"No," I said. "There is a resemblance, yes. But there is no force about this—stuff; no life. Besides, such a thing is utterly incredible."

"They might be—dormant," he suggested stubbornly. "Can you see any mark of their joining—if they ARE the cubes?"

Together we scanned the pillar minutely. The faces seemed unbroken, continuous; there was no trace of those thin and shining lines that marked the juncture of the cubes when they had clicked together to form the bridge of the abyss or that had gleamed, crosslike, upon the back of the combined four upon which we had followed Norhala.

"It's a sheer impossibility. It's madness to think such a thing, Drake!" I exclaimed, and wondered at my own vehemence of denial.

"Maybe," he shook his head doubtfully. "Maybe—but—well—let's be on our way."

We strode on, following the direction the Metal Folk had gone. Clearly Drake was still doubtful; at each pillar he hesitated, scanning it closely with troubled eyes.

But I, having determinedly dismissed the idea, was more interested in the fantastic lights that flooded this columned hall with their buttercup radiance. They were still and unwinking; not disks, I could see now, but globes. Great and small, they floated motionless, their rays extending rigidly and as still as the orb that shed them.

Yet rigid as they were there was nothing about either rays or orbs that suggested either hardness or the metallic. They were vaporous, soft as St. Elmo's fire, the witch lights that cling at times to the spars of ships, weird gleaming visitors from the invisible ocean of atmospheric electricity.

When they disappeared, as they did frequently, it was instantaneously, completely, with a disconcerting sleight-of-hand finality. I noted, though, that when they did vanish, immediately close to where they had been other orbs swam forth with that same astonishing abruptness; sometimes only one, larger it might be than that which had gone; sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, crocused rays impinging.

What could they be, I wondered—how fixed, and what the source of their light? Products of electro-magnetic currents and born of the interpenetration of such streams flowing above us? Such a theory might account for their disappearance, and reappearance, shiftings of the flows that changed the light producing points of contact. Wireless lights? If so here was an idea that human science might elaborate if ever we returned to—

"Now which way?" Drake broke in upon my musing. The hall had ended. We stood before a blank wall vanishing into the soft mists hiding the roof of the chamber.

"I thought we had been going along the way They went," I said in amazement.

"So did I," he answered. "We must have circled. They never went through THAT unless—unless—" He hesitated.

"Unless what?" I asked sharply.

"Unless it opened and let them through," he said. "Have you forgotten those great ovals—like cat's eyes that opened in the outer walls?" he added quietly.

I HAD forgotten. I looked again at the wall. Certainly it was smooth, lineless. In one unbroken, shining surface it rose, a facade of polished metal. Within it the deep set points of light were duller even than they had been in the pillars; almost indeed indistinguishable.

"Go on to the left," I said none too patiently. "And get that absurd notion out of your head."

"All right." He flushed. "But you don't think I'm afraid, do you?"

"If what you're thinking were true, you'd have a right to be," I replied tartly. "And I want to tell you I'D be afraid. Damned afraid."

For perhaps two hundred paces we skirted the base of the wall. We came abruptly to an opening, an oblong passageway fully fifty foot wide by twice as high. At its entrance the mellow, saffron light was cut off as though by an invisible screen. The tunnel itself was filled with a dim grayish blue luster. For an instant we contemplated it.

"I wouldn't care to be caught in there by any rush," I hesitated.

"There's not much good in thinking of that now," said Drake, grimly. "A few chances more or less in a joint of this kind is nothing between friends, Goodwin; take it from me. Come on."

We entered. Walls, floor and roof were composed of the same substance as the great pillars, the wall of the outer chamber; filled like them with dimmed replicas of the twinkling eye points.

"Odd that all the places in here are square," muttered Drake. "They don't seem to have used any spherical or pyramidal ideas in their building—if it is a building."

It was true. All was mathematically straight up and down and across. It was strange—still we had seen little as yet.

There was a warmth about this passageway we trod; a difference in the air of it. The warmth grew, a dry and baking heat; but stimulative rather than oppressive. I touched the walls; the warmth did not come from them. And there was no wind. Yet as we went on the heat increased.

The passageway turned at a right angle, continuing in a corridor half its former dimensions. Far away shone a high bar of pale yellow radiance, rising like a pillar of light from floor to roof. Toward it, perforce, we trudged. Its brilliancy grew greater.

A few paces away from it we stopped. The yellow luminescence streamed through a slit not more than a foot wide in the wall. We were in a cul-de-sac for the opening was not wide enough for either Drake or me to push through. Through it with the light gushed the curious heat enveloping us.

Drake walked to the opening, peered through. I joined him.

At first all that I could see was a space filled with the saffron lambency. Then I saw that this was splashed with tiny flashes of the jewel fires; little lances and javelin thrusts of burning emeralds and rubies; darting gem hard flames rose scarlet and pale sapphire; quick flares of violet.

Into my sight through the irised, crocus mist swam the radiant body of Norhala!

She stood naked, clad only in the veils of her hair that glowed now like spun silk of molten copper, her strange eyes wide and smiling, the galaxies of tiny stars sparkling through their gray depths.

And all about her swirled a countless host of the Little Things!

From them came the gem fires piercing the aureate mists. They played and frolicked about her in scores of swiftly forming, swiftly changing, goblin shapes. They circled her feet in shining, elfin rings; then opening into flaming disks and stars, shot up and spun about the white miracle of her body in great girdles of multi-colored living fires. Mingled with disk and star were tiny crosses gleaming with sullen, deep crimsons and smoky orange.

A flash of blue incandescence and a slender pillared shape leaped from the floor; became a coronet, a whirling, flashing halo toward which streamed up the flaming tendrilings of her tresses. Other halos circled her arms and breasts; they spun like bracelets about the outstretched arms.

Then like a swiftly rushing wave a host of the Little Things thrust themselves up, covered her, hid her in a coruscating cloud.

I saw an exquisite arm thrust itself from their clinging, wave gaily; saw her glorious head emerge from the incredible, the seething draperies of living jewels. I heard her laughter, sweet and golden and far away.

Goddess of the Inexplicable! Madonna of the Metal Babes!

The Nursery of the Metal People!

Norhala was gone, blotted out from our sight! Gone too were the bar of light and the chamber into which we had been peering. We stared at a smooth, blank wall. With that same ensorcelled swiftness the wall had closed even as we had stared through it; closed so quickly that we had not seen its motion.

I gripped Drake; shrank with him into the farthest corner—for on the other side of us the wall was opening. First it was only a crack; then rapidly it widened. There stretched another passageway, luminous and long; far down it we glimpsed movement. Closer that movement came, grew plainer. Out of the mistily luminous distances, three abreast and filling the corridor from side to side, raced upon us a company of the great spheres!

Back we cowered from their approach—back and back; arms outstretched, pressing against the barrier, flattening ourselves against the shock of the destroying impact menacing.

"It's all up," muttered Drake. "No place to run. They're bound to smash us. Stick close, Doc. Get back to Ruth. Maybe I can stop them!"

Before I could check him, he had leaped straight in the path of the rushing globes, now a scant twoscore yards away.

The globes stopped—halted a few feet from him. They seemed to contemplate us, astonished. They turned upon themselves, as though consulting. Slowly they advanced. We were pushed forward and lifted gently. Then as we hung suspended, held by that force which always I can liken only to myriads of tiny invisible hands, the shining arcs of their backs undulated beneath us.

Their files swung around the corner and marched down the passage by which we had come from the immense hall. And when the last rank had passed from under us we were dropped softly to our feet; stood swaying in their wake.

A curious frenzy of helpless indignation shook me, a rage of humiliation obscuring all gratitude I should have felt for our escape. Drake's eyes blazed wrath.

"The insolent devils!" He raised clenched fists. "The insolent, domineering devils!"

We stared after them.

Was the passage growing narrower—closing? Even as I gazed I saw it shrink; saw its walls slide silently toward each other. I pushed Drake into the newly opened way and sprang after him.

Behind us was an unbroken wall covering all that space in which but a moment before we had stood!

Is it to be wondered that a panic seized us; that we began to run crazily down the alley that still lay open before us, casting over our shoulders quick, fearful glances to see whether that inexorable, dreadful closing was continuing, threatening to crush us between these walls like flies in a vise of steel?

But they did not close. Unbroken, silent, the way stretched before us and behind us. At last, gasping, avoiding each other's gaze, we paused.

And at that very moment of pause a deeper tremor shook me, a trembling of the very foundations of life, the shuddering of one who faces the inconceivable knowing at last that the inconceivable—IS.

For, abruptly, walls and floor and roof broke forth into countless twinklings!

As though a film had been withdrawn from them, as though they had awakened from slumber, myriads of little points of light shone forth upon us from the pale-blue surfaces—lights that considered us, measured us—mocked us.

The little points of living light that were the eyes of the Metal People!

This was no corridor cut through inert matter by mechanic art; its opening had been caused by no hidden mechanisms! It was a living Thing—walled and floored and roofed by the living bodies—of the Metal People themselves.

Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed these mighty walls.

An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic, communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the formicary, animated every unit of them.

A greater realization swept us. If THIS were true, then those pillars in the vast hall, its towering walls—all this City was one living Thing!

Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient, mobile—intelligent!