Lilliputian fantasy was now a pedestal of cubes surmounted by a ring of globes from which sprang a star of five arms.
The spheres began to revolve. Faster and faster they spun around the base of the crowning globe; the arms became a disc upon which tiny brilliant sparks appeared, clustered, vanished only to reappear in greater number.
The troll swept toward me. It glided. The finger of panic touched me. I sprang aside, and swift as light it followed, seemed to poise itself to leap.
“Drop it!” It was Ruth’s cry.
But, before I could let fall the pyramid I had forgotten was in my hand, the little figure touched me and a paralyzing shock ran through me. My fingers clenched, locked. I stood, muscle and nerve bound, unable to move.
The little figure paused. Its whirling disc shifted from the horizontal plane on which it spun. It was as though it cocked its head to look up at me—and again I had the sense of innumerable eyes peering at me. It did not seem menacing—its attitude was inquisitive, waiting; almost as though it had asked for something and wondered why I did not let it have it. The shock still held me rigid, although a tingle in every nerve told me of returning force.
The disc tilted back to place, bent toward me again. I heard a shout; heard a bullet strike the pigmy that now clearly menaced; heard the bullet ricochet without the slightest effect upon it. Dick leaped beside me, raised a foot and kicked at the thing. There was a flash of light and upon the instant he crashed down as though struck by a giant hand, lay sprawling and inert upon the floor.
There was a scream from Ruth; there was softly sibilant rustling all about her. I saw her leap the crevice, drop on her knees beside Drake.
There was movement on the flagging where she stood. A score or more of faintly shining, bluish shapes were marching there—pyramids and cubes and spheres like those forming the shape that stood before me. There was a curious sharp tang of ozone in the air, a perceptible tightening as of electrical tension.
They swept to the edge of the fissure, swam together, and there, hanging half over the gap was a bridge, half spanning it, a weird and fairy arch made up of alternate cube and angle. The shape at my feet disintegrated; resolved itself into units that raced over to the beckoning span.
At the hither side of the crack they clicked into place, even as had the others. Before me now was a bridge complete except for the one arc near the middle where an angled gap marred it.
I felt the little object I held pulse within my hand, striving to escape. I dropped it. The tiny shape swept to the bridge, ascended it—dropped into the gap.
The arch was complete—hanging in one flying span over the depths!
Upon it, over it, as though they had but awaited this completion, rolled the six globes. And as they dropped to the farther side the end of the bridge nearest me raised itself in air, curved itself like a scorpion’s tail, drew itself into a closer circled arc, and dropped upon the floor beyond.
Again the sibilant rustling—and cubes and pyramids and spheres were gone.
Nerves tingling slowly back to life, mazed in absolute bewilderment, my gaze sought Drake. He was sitting up, feebly, his head supported by Ruth’s hands.
“Goodwin!” he whispered. “What—what were they?”
“Metal,” I said—it was the only word to which my whirling mind could cling—“metal—”
“Metal!” he echoed. “These things metal? Metal—alive and thinking!”
Suddenly he was silent, his face a page on which, visibly, dread gathered slowly and ever deeper.
And as I looked at Ruth, white-faced, and at him, I knew that my own was as pallid, as terror-stricken as theirs.
“They were such little things,” muttered Drake. “Such little things—bits of metal—little globes and pyramids and cubes—just little things.”
“Babes! Only babes!” It was Ruth—“babes!”
“Bits of metal”—Dick’s gaze sought mine, held it—“and they looked for each other, they worked with each other—thinkingly, consciously—they were deliberate, purposeful—little things—and with the force of a score of dynamos—living, thinking—”
“Don’t!” Ruth laid white hands over his eyes. “Don’t—don’t you be frightened!”
“Frightened?” he echoed. “I’M not afraid—yes, I am afraid—”
He arose, stiffly—and stumbled toward me.
Afraid? Drake afraid. Well—so was I. Bitterly, terribly afraid.
For what we had beheld in the dusk of that dragoned, ruined chamber was outside all experience, beyond all knowledge or dream of science. Not their shapes—that was nothing. Not even that, being metal, they had moved.
But that being metal, they had moved consciously, thoughtfully, deliberately.
They were metal things with—minds!
That—that was the incredible, the terrifying thing. That—and their power.
Thor compressed within Hop-o’-my-thumb—and thinking. The lightnings incarnate in metal minacules—and thinking.
The inert, the immobile, given volition, movement, cognoscence—thinking.
Metal with a brain!
CHAPTER V
THE SMITING THING
Silently we looked at each other, and silently we passed out of the courtyard. The dread was heavy upon me. The twilight was stealing upon the close-clustered peaks. Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in irised beauty; nightfall.
As I gazed upon them I wondered to what secret place within their brooding immensities the little metal mysteries had fled. And to what myriads, it might be, of their kind? And these hidden hordes—of what shapes were they? Of what powers? Small like these, or—or—
Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side—the little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley.
I turned aside, crept through the shattered portal and looked over the haunted hollow.
Unbelieving, I rubbed my eyes; then leaped to the very brim of the bowl.
A lark had risen from the roof of one of the shattered heaps and had flown caroling up into the shadowy sky.
A flock of the little willow warblers flung themselves across the valley, scolding and gossiping; a hare sat upright in the middle of the ancient roadway.
The valley itself lay serenely under the ambering light, smiling, peaceful—emptied of horror!
I dropped over the side, walked cautiously down the road up which but an hour or so before we had struggled so desperately; paced farther and farther with an increasing confidence and a growing wonder.
