Chapter XXI.

       Phantasmagoria Metallioue

       Table of Contents

      Wearily I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High above me was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding shields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky of night.

      Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled to rise.

      “Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady — and quiet. How are you feeling?”

      “Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?”

      “We weren’t used to the show,” he said. “We got all fed up at the orgy. Too much magnetism — we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical indigestion. Sh-h — look ahead of you.”

      Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone at the base of one of the crater’s walls. As my gaze swept away I noted with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.

      Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences. They were both rayless and strangely — lightless; they threw no shadows nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes — the Things that now I knew for the opened cubes.

      They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height. They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc of the immense pedestal — and now I saw that the lights were a few feet closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle silvery-gray and metallic.

      “They’re building out the base,” whispered Drake. “The Cones got so big they have to give them more room.”

      “Magnetism,” I whispered in return. “Electricity — they drew down from the sun spot. And it was more than that — I saw the Cones grow under it. It fed them as it fed the Hordes — but the Cones grew. It was as though the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance.”

      “And if we hadn’t been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it would have done for us,” he said.

      We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the long and writhing tentacles.

      At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the incandescences.

      There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal. Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific heat — yet the Keeper’s workers seemed impervious to it.

      As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the tentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame through which the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drove through, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it, certainly.

      A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Unaware of us they seemed, or — if aware, then indifferent. More rapid became their movements, the glassy ingots streaming through the floating braziers with hardly a pause in their passing. Abruptly, as though switched, the incandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal, the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes.

      Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowing of the cones — sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fill with a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone, so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.

      They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed; the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs.

      Two by two with measured pace, solemnly the cubes glided off into the encircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind them other scores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hidden arcs.

      Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over it the slim shaft holding the serene flame.

      Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmed flambeau of their worship. Angled metal monks of some god of metal, carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy of Holies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man — nor cared to know.

      Grotesque — yes. But would that I had the power to crystallize in words the underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Monster when disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; the incredulous, amazed lurking always close behind the threshold of the mind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow.

      Smaller, dimmer waned the lights — they were gone.

      We crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Without speaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward the cones.

      As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the walls, was built of the bodies of the Metal