The Metal Monster [75]
true--else why the tablet, why the Keeper's travail?
Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible.
I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I felt, to touch the tablet's rods.
A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows--
The Keeper glowed above us!
In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.
One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O'Keefe and Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place almost as strange as this*; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming Shape.
* See "The Moon Pool" and "The Conquest of the Moon Pool."
Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o'-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was the Keeper's foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline --yet beneath it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable, microscopic crystals.
Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be--similar to the great ovals within the Emperor's golden zone.
My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous reflection of the Emperor's pulsing multicolored rose had each of the petals of the latter been clipped and squared.
It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a curve nor arching.
Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations--like--it came to me--immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.
Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds stared down upon us from just beneath it--like eyes. And over all its height the striated octagons clustered.
I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to me as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--
They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out from them the whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.
My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing.
There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermilion
Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible.
I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I felt, to touch the tablet's rods.
A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows--
The Keeper glowed above us!
In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.
One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O'Keefe and Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place almost as strange as this*; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming Shape.
* See "The Moon Pool" and "The Conquest of the Moon Pool."
Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o'-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was the Keeper's foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline --yet beneath it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable, microscopic crystals.
Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be--similar to the great ovals within the Emperor's golden zone.
My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous reflection of the Emperor's pulsing multicolored rose had each of the petals of the latter been clipped and squared.
It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a curve nor arching.
Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations--like--it came to me--immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.
Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds stared down upon us from just beneath it--like eyes. And over all its height the striated octagons clustered.
I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to me as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--
They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out from them the whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.
My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing.
There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermilion