The Collected SF & Fantasy Works. Abraham Merritt

      Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed to the glasses. Even if that thought were true — even if that pillar of radiance were a MESSENGER, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the ninety millions of miles between it and us.

      And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible? Even were it so — what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow? This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared to the target at which it was aimed.

      What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?

      And yet — and yet — a gnat’s bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature’s balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It might be — it might be —

      Eight minutes had passed.

      “Take the glasses,” I bade Drake. “Look up at the sun spot — the big one.”

      “I see it.” He had obeyed me. “What of it?”

      Nine minutes.

      The shaft, if I were right, had by now touched the sun. What was to follow?

      “I don’t get you at all,” said Drake, and lowered the glasses.

      Ten minutes.

      “What’s happening? Look at the Cones! Look at the Emperor!” gasped Drake.

      I peered down, then almost forgot to count.

      The pyramidal flame that had been the mount of Cones was shrunken. The pillar of radiance had not lessened — but the mechanism that was its source had retreated whole yards within the field of its crystal base.

      And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court.

      The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly, feebly — wearily?

      I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as though all the City were being drained of life — as though vitality were being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance; drained from it to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward.

      The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.

      Twelve minutes.

      With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant — dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me.

      The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City — its magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire.

      Duller grew the Metal Emperor’s glories.

      Fourteen minutes.

      “Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life’s going out of these Things! Going out with that ray they’re shooting.”

      Fifteen minutes.

      I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly the flaming pyramid darkened — WENT OUT.

      The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in space.

      Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former size.

      Sixteen minutes.

      All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets.

      Seventeen minutes.

      I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the sun. For a moment I saw nothing — then a tiny spot of white incandescence shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses.

      I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger — blazing with an ever increasing and intolerable intensity.

      I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.

      “I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And THAT did it — that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it’s widening! It’s widening!”

      I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake HAD seen the spot widen, change — to this day I do not know.

      To me it seemed unchanged — and yet — perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun HAD opened further —

      That the sun had winced!

      I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not — still shone the intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.

      Twenty minutes — subconsciously I had gone on counting — twenty minutes —

      About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear. In a heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose swarms of corpuscles the sun’s reflected image upon each disk shone clear — as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.

      Again the filaments of the Keeper moved — feebly. As one of the hosts of circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.

      Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire — green as the fire of green life itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.

      Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.

      For now it was a flood. Down from the immense wheel came pouring cataracts of green fires. They cascaded over the cones; deluged them; engulfed them.

      Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew. Perceptibly their volume increased — as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No — it was as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves into the structure.

      Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept. And higher and higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the whirling wheel that fed them.

      Now from the Keeper’s planes writhed the Keeper’s tangle of tentacles, uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater’s disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.

      All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life. Colossal, rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed — a prodigious vibration monstrously alive.

      “Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! Feeding on the sun!”

      Faster danced the radiant beams.