assembled by some subtle faculty of the mind as they fell into a coherent, incredible message.
“Group consciousness—gigantic—operating within our sphere—operating also in spheres of vibration, energy, force—above, below one to which humanity reacts—perception, command forces known to us—but in greater degree—cognizant, manipulate unknown energies—senses known to us—unknown—can’t realize them fully—impossible cover, only impinge on contact points akin to our senses, forces—even these profoundly modified by additional ones—metallic, crystalline, magnetic, electric—inorganic with every power of organic—consciousness basically same as ours—profoundly changed by differences in mechanism through which it finds expression—difference our bodies—theirs.
“Conscious, mobile—inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer—see more clearly—see—” the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of despair—“No! No—oh, God—no!”
Then clearly and solemnly:
“And God said: let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up the thread once more—but clearly further on. Something we had missed between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to articulate. The whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence.
“Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same centuries, and centuries upon centuries before them, found earth a garden and grave—and all these countless gods and goddesses only phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal forces man’s instinct has always warned him are ever in readiness to destroy. That do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his resistance weakens—the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and turns its will and strength against itself—”
A little pause; then came these singular sentences:
“Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself godlike among the stars.”
And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on:
“Dominion over all the earth? Yes—as long as man is fit to rule; no longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts.
“For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it? For a breath—for a cloud’s passing. And will remain master only until something grown stronger wrests mastery from him—even as he wrested it from his ravening kind—as they took it from the reptiles—as did the reptiles from the giant saurians—which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic—and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn.
“Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!
“Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity—and then—hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck.
“Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure.
“And these—these—” the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man—nor does he even dream that his doors are down. These—Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals—Things that suck their strength from the sun and whose blood is the lightning.
“The sun! The sun!” he cried. “There lies their weakness!”
The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.
“Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter—Drake. They are not invulnerable. No! The sun—strike them through the sun! Go into the city—not invulnerable—the Keeper of the Cones—strike at the Cones when—the Keeper of the Cones—ah-h-h-ah—”
We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way.
“Vulnerable—under the law—even as we! The Cones!
“Go!” he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.
“Martin! Brother,” wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a beleaguered citadel.
But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated—a lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside space.
And Drake and I looked at each other’s eyes, neither daring to be first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to be the sorrowful soul.
CHAPTER XIV
“FREE! BUT A MONSTER!”
The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology.
It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration—the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed in the late war.
Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle—the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death.
And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation—shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.
On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts—or so he thinks.
Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and man’s little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.
But they are home to him!
Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.
I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember how, when Drake at last broke the
