The Greatest Works of Abraham Merritt. Abraham Merritt
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an electric flash, upon its hasp. The lid flew open. Out of it she drew three flat, oval crystals, faint rose in hue. She handed one to O’Keefe and one to me.
“Look!” she commanded, placing the third before her own eyes. I peered through the stone and instantly there leaped into sight, out of thin air — six grinning dwarfs! Each was covered from top of head to soles of feet in a web so tenuous that through it their bodies were plain. The gauzy stuff seemed to vibrate — its strands to run together like quick-silver. I snatched the crystal from my eyes and — the chamber was empty! Put it back — and there were the grinning six!
Yolara gave another sign and they disappeared, even from the crystals.
“It is what they wear, Larree,” explained Yolara, graciously. “It is something that came to us from — the Ancient Ones. But we have so few”— she sighed.
“Such treasures must be two-edged swords, Yolara,” commented O’Keefe. “For how know you that one within them creeps not to you with hand eager to strike?”
“There is no danger,” she said indifferently. “I am the keeper of them.”
She mused for a space, then abruptly:
“And now no more. You two are to appear before the Council at a certain time — but fear nothing. You, Goodwin, go with Rador about our city and increase your wisdom. But you, Larree, await me here in my garden —” she smiled at him, provocatively — maliciously, too. “For shall not one who has resisted a world of goddesses be given all chance to worship when at last he finds his own?”
She laughed — whole-heartedly and was gone. And at that moment I liked Yolara better than ever I had before and — alas — better than ever I was to in the future.
I noted Rador standing outside the open jade door and started to go, but O’Keefe caught me by the arm.
“Wait a minute,” he urged. “About Golden Eyes — you were going to tell me something — it’s been on my mind all through that little sparring match.”
I told him of the vision that had passed through my closing lids. He listened gravely and then laughed.
“Hell of a lot of privacy in this place!” he grinned. “Ladies who can walk through walls and others with regular invisible cloaks to let ’em flit wherever they please. Oh, well, don’t let it get on your nerves, Doc. Remember — everything’s natural! That robe stuff is just camouflage of course. But Lord, if we could only get a piece of it!”
“The material simply admits all light-vibrations, or perhaps curves them, just as the opacities cut them off,” I answered. “A man under the X-ray is partly invisible; this makes him wholly so. He doesn’t register, as the people of the motion-picture profession say.”
“Camouflage,” repeated Larry. “And as for the Shining One — Say!” he snorted. “I’d like to set the O’Keefe banshee up against it. I’ll bet that old resourceful Irish body would give it the first three bites and a strangle hold and wallop it before it knew it had ’em. Oh! Wow! Boy Howdy!”
I heard him still chuckling gleefully over this vision as I passed along the opal wall with the green dwarf.
A shell was awaiting us. I paused before entering it to examine the polished surface of runway and great road. It was obsidian — volcanic glass of pale emerald, unflawed, translucent, with no sign of block or juncture. I examined the shell.
“What makes it go?” I asked Rador. At a word from him the driver touched a concealed spring and an aperture appeared beneath the control-lever, of which I have spoken in a preceding chapter. Within was a small cube of black crystal, through whose sides I saw, dimly, a rapidly revolving, glowing ball, not more than two inches in diameter. Beneath the cube was a curiously shaped, slender cylinder winding down into the lower body of the Nautilus whorl.
“Watch!” said Rador. He motioned me into the vehicle and took a place beside me. The driver touched the lever; a stream of coruscations flew from the ball down into the cylinder. The shell started smoothly, and as the tiny torrent of shining particles increased it gathered speed.
“The corial does not touch the road,” explained Rador. “It is lifted so far”— he held his forefinger and thumb less than a sixteenth of an inch apart —“above it.”
And perhaps here is the best place to explain the activation of the shells or coria. The force utilized was atomic energy. Passing from the whirling ball the ions darted through the cylinder to two bands of a peculiar metal affixed to the base of the vehicles somewhat like skids of a sled. Impinging upon these they produced a partial negation of gravity, lifting the shell slightly, and at the same time creating a powerful repulsive force or thrust that could be directed backward, forward, or sidewise at the will of the driver. The creation of this energy and the mechanism of its utilization were, briefly, as follows:
(Dr. Goodwin’s lucid and exceedingly comprehensive description of this extraordinary mechanism has been deleted by the Executive Council of the International Association of Science as too dangerously suggestive to scientists of the Central European Powers with which we were so recently at war. It is allowable, however, to state that his observations are in the possession of experts in this country, who are, unfortunately, hampered in their research not only by the scarcity of the radioactive elements that we know, but also by the lack of the element or elements unknown to us that entered into the formation of the fiery ball within the cube of black crystal. Nevertheless, as the principle is so clear, it is believed that these difficulties will ultimately be overcome. — J. B. K., President, I. A. of S.)
The wide, glistening road was gay with the coria. They darted in and out of the gardens; within them the fair-haired, extraordinarily beautiful women on their cushions were like princesses of Elfland, caught in gorgeous fairy webs, resting within the hearts of flowers. In some shells were flaxen-haired dwarfish men of Lugur’s type; sometimes black-polled brother officers of Rador; often raven-tressed girls, plainly hand-maidens of the women; and now and then beauties of the lower folk went by with one of the blond dwarfs.
We swept around the turn that made of the jewel-like roadway an enormous horseshoe and, speedily, upon our right the cliffs through which we had come in our journey from the Moon Pool began to march forward beneath their mantles of moss. They formed a gigantic abutment, a titanic salient. It had been from the very front of this salient’s invading angle that we had emerged; on each side of it the precipices, faintly glowing, drew back and vanished into distance.
The slender, graceful bridges under which we skimmed ended at openings in the upflung, far walls of verdure. Each had its little garrison of soldiers. Through some of the openings a rivulet of the green obsidian river passed. These were roadways to the farther country, to the land of the ladala, Rador told me; adding that none of the lesser folk could cross into the pavilioned city unless summoned or with pass.
We turned the bend of the road and flew down that farther emerald ribbon we had seen from the great oval. Before us rose the shining cliffs and the lake. A half-mile, perhaps, from these the last of the bridges flung itself. It was more massive and about it hovered a spirit of ancientness lacking in the other spans; also its garrison was larger and at its base the tangent way was guarded by two massive structures, somewhat like blockhouses, between which it ran. Something about it aroused in me an intense curiosity.
“Where does that road lead, Rador?” I asked.
“To the one place above all of which I may not tell you, Goodwin,” he answered. And again I wondered.
We skimmed slowly out upon the great pier. Far to the left was the prismatic, rainbow curtain between the Cyclopean pillars. On the white waters graceful shells — lacustrian replicas of the Elf chariots — swam, but none was near that distant web of wonder.
“Rador — what is that?” I asked.
“It is the Veil of the Shining One!” he answered slowly.
Was the Shining One that which we named the Dweller?
“What is the Shining One?” I cried,