There was a ringing about us--an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline.It came from the cones--and strangely was it their vocal synthesis, their voice.Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire; swift in its wake uprose others.
We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base.
The Keeper bent; angled.Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet.The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the rods some unknown symphony of power.
Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing curtains.The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves--no pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like a noose.
And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!
Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled; lost their colors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though through a funnel top.
Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones.
They did not glow as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was too slowly for me to see; the shields were motionless.Now here, now there, I saw the other rings whirl up--smaller mouths of lesser cones hidden within the body of the Metal Monster, Iknew, sucking down this magnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun.
Then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the valley of the blue poppies, the ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations--as though the force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had been caught.
Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman, anomalous Things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrust rods.
But if we forgot, we were not forgotten!
The Emperor slipped nearer; seemed to contemplate us --quizzically, AMUSED; as a man would look down upon some curious and interesting insect, a puppy, a kitten.Isensed this amusement in the Disk's regard even as Ihad sensed its soul of awful tranquillity; as we had sensed the playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, the curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley.
I felt a push--a push that was filled with a colossal, GLITTERING playfulness.
Under it I went spinning away for yards--Drake twirling close behind me.The force, whatever it was, swept out from the Emperor, but in it was no slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of the sinister.
Rather it was as though one would blow away a feather;urge gently some little lesser thing away.
The Disk watched our whirlings--with a sparkling, jeweled LAUGHTER in its pulsing radiance.
Again came the push--farther yet we spun.Suddenly before us, across the pave, shone out a twinkling trail--the wakened eyes of the cubes that formed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow.
Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the Emperor turn--his immense, oval, metallic back now black against the radiance of the cones.
Up from the narrow gleaming path--a path opened Iknew by some command--lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands; the sentient currents of magnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the Metal Hordes.They held us, thrust us along, passed us forward.Faster and faster we moved, speeding on the wake of the long-vanished metal monks.
I turned my head--the cones were already far away.
Over the tablet of limpid violet phosphorescence still hovered the planes of the Keeper; and still was the oval of the Emperor black against the radiance.
But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone--was fading out close behind us as we swept onward.
Faster and faster grew our pace.The cylindrical wall loomed close.A high oblong portal showed within it.
Into this we were carried.Before us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing upon us, had forced us completely out into the hall.
Unlike that passage, its floor lifted steeply--a smooth and shining slide up which no man could climb.A shaft, indeed, which thrust upward straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whose end or turning we could not see.Up and up it cleared its way through the City--through the Metal Monster--closed only by the inability of the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became impenetrable.
For an instant we hovered upon its threshold.But the impulse, the command, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here.Into it and up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface; lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the force that pressed out from the sides.
Up and up we went--scores of feet--hundreds--
