The Collected SF & Fantasy Works. Abraham Merritt

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.”

      CHAPTER XVI

      CONSCIOUS METAL!

       Table of Contents

      “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