CHAPTER XII. “I WILL GIVE YOU PEACE”
In our concentration upon Ventnor none of us had given thought to the passing of time, nor where we were going. We stripped him to the waist, and while Ruth massaged head and neck, Drake's strong fingers kneaded chest and abdomen. I had used to the utmost my somewhat limited medical knowledge.
We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over which had run the licking flame. The slightly purplish, cyanotic tinge of his skin had given way to a clear pallor; the skin was itself disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the point of invisibility.
I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the effects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but Ventnor's symptoms, while similar in part, presented other features unknown to me and most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head to remain, doll-like, in any position placed.
Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak.
Now, my strained attention relaxing, I began to receive and note impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air, a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of trees and water.
The light about us was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half mile away vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap between them a mile or more wide.
Through them we must have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse foliage.
There came a low whistle of astonishment from Drake; I turned. We were slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire and turquoise, swimming up from and two-thirds above and the balance still hidden within earth. It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender, milky greens of tropic shallows.
Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling down to rest.
Great trees shadowed it, unfamiliar trees among whose glossy leaves blossomed in wreaths flowers pink and white as apple-blossoms. From their graceful branches strange fruits, golden and scarlet and pear-shaped, hung pendulous.
It was an elfin palace; a goblin dwelling; such a bower as some mirthful, beauty-loving Jinn King of Jewels might have built from enchanted hoards for some well-beloved daughter of earth.
All of fifty feet in height was the blue globe, and up to a wide and ovaled entrance ran a broad and shining roadway. Along this the cubes swept and stopped.
“My house,” murmured Norhala.
The attraction that had held us to the surface of the blocks relaxed, angled through changed and assisting lines of force; the hosts of minute eyes sparkling quizzically, interestedly, at us, we gently slid Ventnor's body; lifted down the pony.
“Enter,” sighed Norhala, and waved a welcoming hand.
“Tell her to wait a minute,” ordered Drake.
He slipped the bandage from off the pony's head, threw off the saddlebags, and led it to the side of the roadway where thick, lush grass was growing, spangled with flowerets. There he hobbled it and rejoined us. Together we picked up Ventnor and passed slowly through the portal.
We stood in a shadowed chamber. The light that filled it was translucent, and oddly enough with little of the bluish quality I had expected. Crystalline it was; the shadows crystalline, too, rigid—like the facets of great crystals. And as my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that what I had thought shadows actually were none.
They were slices of semitransparent stone like pale moonstones, springing from the curving walls and the high dome, and bisecting and intersecting the chamber. They were pierced with oval doorways over which fell glimmering metallic curtains—silk of silver and gold.
I glimpsed a pile of this silken stuff near by, and as we laid our burden upon it Ruth caught my arm with a little frightened cry.
Through a curtained oval sidled a figure.
Black and tall, its long and gnarled arms swung apelike; its shoulders were distorted, one so much longer than the other that the hand upon that side hung far below the knee.
It walked with a curious, crablike motion. Upon its face were stamped countless wrinkles and its blackness seemed less that of pigmentation than the weathering of unbelievable years, the very stain of ancientness. And about neither face nor figure was there anything to show whether it was man or woman.
From the twisted shoulders a short and sleeveless red tunic fell. Incredibly old the creature was—and by its corded muscles, its sinewy tendons, as incredibly powerful. It raised within me a half sick revulsion, loathing. But the eyes were not ancient, no. Irisless, lashless, black and brilliant, they blazed out of the face's carven web of wrinkles, intent upon Norhala and filled with a flame of worship.
It threw itself at her feet, prostrate, the inordinately long arms outstretched.
“Mistress!” it whined in a high and curiously unpleasant falsetto. “Great lady! Goddess!”
She stretched out a sandaled foot, touched one of the black taloned hands, and at the contact I saw a shiver of ecstasy run through the lank body. “Yuruk—” she began, and paused, regarding us.
“The goddess speaks! Yuruk hears! The goddess speaks!” It was a chant of adoration.
“Yuruk. Rise. Look upon the strangers.”
The creature—and now I knew what it was—writhed, twisted, and hideously apelike crouched upon its haunches, hands knuckling the floor.
By the amazement in the unwinking eyes it was plain that not till now had the eunuch taken cognizance of us. The amazement fled, was replaced with a black fire of malignancy, of hatred—jealousy.
“Augh!” he snarled; leaped to his feet; thrust an arm toward Ruth. She gave a little cry, cowered against Drake.
“None of that!” He struck down the clutching arm.
“Yuruk!” There was a hint of anger in the bell-toned voice. “Yuruk, these belong to me. No harm must come to them. Yuruk—beware!”
“The goddess commands. Yuruk obeys.” If fear quavered in the words, beneath was more than a trace of a sullenness, too, sinister enough.
“That's a nice little playmate for her new playthings,” muttered Drake. “If that bird gets the least bit gay—I shoot him pronto.” He gave Ruth a reassuring hug. “Cheer up, Ruth. Don't mind that thing. He's something we can handle.”
Norhala waved a white hand; Yuruk sidled over to one of the curtained ovals and through it, reappearing almost instantly with a huge platter upon which were fruits, and a curdly white liquid in bowls of thick porcelain.
“Eat,” she said, as the gnarled black arms placed the platter at our feet.
“Hungry?” asked Drake. Ruth shook her head violently.
“I'm going out for the saddlebags,” said Drake. “We'll use our own stuff—while it lasts. I'm taking no chances on what the Yuruk lad brings—with all due respect to Norhala's good intentions.”
He started for the doorway; the eunuch blocked his way.
“We have with us food of our own, Norhala,” I explained. “He goes to get it.”
She nodded indifferently; clapped her hands. Yuruk shrank back, and out strode Drake.
“I am weary,” sighed Norhala. “The way was long. I will refresh myself—”
She stretched out a foot toward Yuruk. He knelt, unlaced the turquoise bands, drew off the sandals. Her hands sought her breast, dwelt for an instant there.
Down slipped her silken veils, clingingly, slowly, as though reluctant to unclasp her; whispering they fell from the high and tender breasts, the delicate rounded hips, and clustered about her feet in soft petalings as of some flower of pale amber foam. Out of the calyx of that flower arose the gleaming miracle of her body crowned with glowing glory of her cloudy hair.
Naked she was, yet clothed with an unearthly purity, the purity of the far-flung, serene stars, of the eternal snows upon some calm, high-flung peak, the tranquil, silver dawns of spring; protected by some spell of divinity which chilled and slew the flame of desire. A maiden Ishtar, a virginal Isis; a woman—yet with no more of woman's lure than if she had been some exquisite and breathing statue of mingled ivory and milk of pearls.
So she stood, indifferent to us who gazed upon her, withdrawn, musing, as though she had forgotten us. And that serene indifference, with its entire absence of what we term sex consciousness, revealed to me once more how great was the abyss between us and her.
Slowly she raised her arms, wound the floating tresses into a coronal. I saw Drake enter with the saddlebags; saw them drop from hands relaxing under the shock of this amazing tableau; saw his eyes widen and fill with wonder and half-awed admiration.
Now Norhala stepped out of her fallen robes and moved toward the further wall, Yuruk following. He stooped, raised an ewer of silver and began gently to pour over her shoulders its contents. Again and again he bent and filled the vessel, dipping it into a shallow basin from which came the bubbling and chuckling of a little spring. And again I marveled at the marble smoothness and fineness of her skin on which the caressing water left tiny silvery globules, gemming it. The eunuch slithered to one side, drew from a quaint chest clothes of white floss; patted her dry with them; threw over her shoulders a silken robe of blue.
Back she floated to us; hovered over Ruth, crouching with her brother's head upon her knees.
She made a motion as though to draw the girl to her; hesitated as Ruth's face set in a passion of denial. A shadow of kindness drifted through the wide, mysterious eyes; a shadow of pity joined it as she looked curiously down on Ventnor.
“Bathe,” she murmured, and pointed to the pool. “And rest. No harm shall come to any of you here. And you—” A hand rested for a moment lightly on the girl's curly head. “When you desire it—I will again give you—peace!”
She parted the curtains, and the eunuch still following, was hidden beyond them.
CHAPTER XIII. “VOICE FROM THE VOID”
Helplessly we looked at each other. Then called forth perhaps by what she saw in Drake's eyes, perhaps by another thought, Ruth's cheeks crimsoned, her head drooped; the web of her hair hid the warm rose of her face, the frozen pallor of Ventnor's.
Abruptly, she sprang to her feet. “Walter! Dick! Something's happening to Martin!”
Before she had ceased we were beside her; bending over Ventnor. His mouth was opening, slowly, slowly—with an effort agonizing to watch. Then his voice came through lips that scarcely moved; faint, faint as though it floated from infinite distances, a ghost of a voice whispering with phantom breath out of a dead throat.
“Hard—hard! So hard!” the whispering complained. “Don't know how long I can keep connection—with voice.
“Was fool to shoot. Sorry—might have gotten you in worse trouble—but crazy with fear for Ruth—thought, too, might be worth chance. Sorry—not my usual line—”
The thin thread of sound ceased. I felt my eyes fill with tears; it was like Ventnor to flay himself like this for what he thought stupidity, like him to make this effort to admit his supposed fault and crave forgiveness—as like him as that mad attack upon the flaming Disk in its own temple, surrounded by its ministers, had been so bafflingly unlike his usual cool, collected self.
“Martin,” I called, bending closer, “it's nothing, old friend. No one blames you. Try to rouse yourself.”
“Dear,” it was Ruth, passionately tender, “it's me. Can you hear me?”
“Only speck of consciousness and motionless in the void,” the whisper began again. “Terribly alive, terribly alone. Seem outside space yet—still in body. Can't see, hear, feel—short-circuited from every sense—but in some strange way realize you—Ruth, Walter, Drake.
“See without seeing—here floating in darkness that is also light—black light—indescribable. In touch, too, with these—”
Again the voice trailed into silence; returned, word and phrase pouring forth disconnected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing wave crests linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal fragments of thought swiftly 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 silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me.
He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose.
“Get up, Ruth,” he ordered. “He came back once and he'll come back again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I'm hungry.”
She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.
“Eat!” she exclaimed. “You can be hungry?”
“You bet I can—and I am,” he answered cheerfully. “Come on; we've got to make the best of it.”
“Ruth,” I broke in gently, “we'll all have to think about ourselves a little if we're to be of any use to him. You must eat—and then rest.”
“No use crying in the milk even if it's spilt,” observed Drake, even more cheerfully brutal. “I learned that at the front where we got so we'd yelp for food even when the lads who'd been bringing it were all mixed up in it.”
She lifted Ventnor's head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.
“Oh—you brute!” she whispered. “And I thought—I thought—Oh, I hate you!”
“That's better,” said Dick. “Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder you get the better you'll feel.”
For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her anger fled.
“Thanks—Dick,” she said quietly.
And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.
About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.
I watched her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and—shame.
It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for questioning had come.
“Ruth,” I said, “I know it's not necessary to remind you that we're in a tight place. Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that we can lay hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our course.
“I'm going to repeat your brother's question—what did Norhala do to you? And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?”
The blaze of interest in Drake's eyes at these questions changed to amazement at her stricken recoil from them.
“There was nothing,” she whispered—then defiantly—“nothing. I don't know what you mean.”
“Ruth!” I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. “You do know. You must tell us—for his sake.” I pointed toward Ventnor.
She drew a long breath.
“You're right—of course,” she said unsteadily. “Only I—I thought maybe I could fight it out myself. But you'll have to know it—there's a taint upon me.”
I caught in Drake's swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.
“Yes,” she said, now quietly. “Some new and alien thing within my heart, my brain, my soul. It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying block, and—he—sealed upon me when I was in—his”—again she crimsoned, “embrace.”
And as we gazed at her, incredulously:
“A thing that urges me to forget you two—and Martin—and all the world I've known. That tries to pull me from you—from all—to drift untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace. And whose calling I want, God help me, oh, so desperately to heed!
“It whispered to me first,” she said, “from Norhala—when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like—like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.
“I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies—and the life I had known only a dream—and you, all of you—even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren't—real—and you did not—matter.”
“Hypnotism,” muttered Drake, as she paused.
“No.” She shook her head. “No—more than that. The wonder of it grew—and grew. I thrilled with it. I remember nothing of that ride, saw nothing—except that once through the peace enfolding me pierced warning that Martin was in peril, and I broke through to see him clutching Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him.
“And I saved him—and again forgot. Then, when I saw that beautiful, flaming Shape—I felt no terror, no fear—only a tremendous—joyous—anticipation, as though—as though—” She faltered, hung her head, then leaving that sentence unfinished, whispered: “and when—it—lifted me it was as though I had come at last out of some endless black ocean of despair into the full sun of paradise.”
“Ruth!” cried Drake, and at the pain in his cry she winced.
“Wait,” she said, and held up a little, tremulous hand. “You asked—and now you must listen.”
She was silent; and when once more she spoke her voice was low, curiously rhythmic; her eyes rapt:
“I was free—free from every human fetter of fear or sorrow or love or hate; free even of hope—for what was there to hope for when everything desirable was mine? And I was elemental; one with the eternal things yet fully conscious that I was—I.
“It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.
“And there was music—strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not terrible to me—who was part of it. Vast chords and singing themes that rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And all—all—passionless, yet—rapturous.
“Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality—a flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this energy were—reassembling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental things, changing me fully into them.
“I felt the little tendrils touching, caressing—then came the shots. Awakening was—dreadful, a struggling back from drowning. I saw Martin—blasted. I drove the—the spell away from me, tore it away.
“And, O Walter—Dick—it hurt—it hurt—and for a breath before I ran to him it was like—like coming from a world in which there was no disorder, no sorrow, no doubts, a rhythmic, harmonious world of light and music, into—into a world that was like a black and dirty kitchen.
“And it's there,” her voice rose, hysterically. “It's still within me—whispering, whispering; urging me away from you, from Martin, from every human thing; bidding me give myself up, surrender my humanity.
“Its seal,” she sobbed. “No—HIS seal! An alien consciousness sealed within me, that tries to make the human me a slave—that waits to overcome my will—and if I surrender gives me freedom, an incredible freedom—but makes me, being still human, a—monster.”
She hid her face in her hands, quivering.
“If I could sleep,” she wailed. “But I'm afraid to sleep. I think I shall never sleep again. For sleeping how do I know what I may be when I wake?”
I caught Drake's eye; he nodded. I slipped my hand down into the medicine-case, brought forth a certain potent and tasteless combination of drugs which I carry upon explorations.
I dropped a little into her cup, then held it to her lips. Like a child, unthinking, she obeyed and drank.
“But I'll not surrender.” Her eyes were tragic. “Never think it! I can win—don't you know I can?”
“Win?” Drake dropped down beside her, drew her toward him. “Bravest girl I've known—of course you'll win. And remember this—nine-tenths of what you're thinking now is purely over-wrought nerves and weariness. You'll win—and we'll win, never doubt it.”
“I don't,” she said. “I know it—oh, it will be hard—but I will—I will—”
CHAPTER XV. THE HOUSE OF NORHALA
Her eyes closed, her body relaxed; the potion had done its work quickly. We laid her beside Ventnor on the pile of silken stuffs, covered them both with a fold, then looked at each other long and silently—and I wondered whether my face was as grim and drawn as his.
“It appears,” he said at last, curtly, “that it's up to you and me for powwow quick. I hope you're not sleepy.”
“I am not,” I answered as curtly; the edge of nerves in his manner of questioning doing nothing to soothe my own, “and even if I were I would hardly expect to put all the burden of the present problem upon you by going to sleep.”
“For God's sake don't be a prima donna,” he flared up. “I meant no offense.”
“I'm sorry, Dick,” I said. “We're both a little jumpy, I guess.” He nodded; gripped my hand.
“It wouldn't be so bad,” he muttered, “if all four of us were all right. But Ventnor's down and out, and God alone knows for how long. And Ruth—has all the trouble we have and some special ones of her own. I've an idea”—he hesitated—“an idea that there was no exaggeration in that story she told—an idea that if anything she underplayed it.”
“I, too,” I replied somberly. “And to me it is the most hideous phase of this whole situation—and for reasons not all connected with Ruth,” I added.
“Hideous!” he repeated. “Unthinkable—yet all this is unthinkable. And still—it is! And Ventnor—coming back—that way. Like a lost soul finding voice.
“Was it raving, Goodwin? Or could he have been—how was it he put it—in touch with these Things and their purpose? Was that message—truth?”
“Ask yourself that question,” I said. “Man—you know it was truth. Had not inklings of it come to you even before he spoke? They had to me. His message was but an interpretation, a synthesis of facts I, for one, lacked the courage to admit.”
“I, too,” he nodded. “But he went further than that. What did he mean by the Keeper of the Cones—and that the Things—were vulnerable under the same law that orders us? And why did he command us to go back to the city? How could he know—how could he?”
“There's nothing inexplicable in that, at any rate,” I answered. “Abnormal sensitivity of perception due to the cutting off of all sensual impressions. There's nothing uncommon in that. You have its most familiar form in the sensitivity of the blind. You've watched the same thing at work in certain forms of hypnotic experimentation, haven't you?
“Through the operation of entirely understandable causes the mind gains the power to react to vibrations that normally pass unperceived; is able to project itself through this keying up of perception into a wider area of consciousness than the normal. Just as in certain diseases of the ear the sufferer, though deaf to sounds within the average range of hearing, is fully aware of sound vibrations far above and far below those the healthy ear registers.”
“I know,” he said. “I don't need to be convinced. But we accept these things in theory—and when we get up against them for ourselves we doubt.
“How many people are there in Christendom, do you think, who believe that the Saviour ascended from the dead, but who if they saw it today would insist upon medical inspection, doctor's certificates, a clinic, and even after that render a Scotch verdict? I'm not speaking irreverently—I'm just stating a fact.”
Suddenly he moved away from me, strode over to the curtained oval through which Norhala had gone.
“Dick,” I cried, following him hastily, “where are you going? What are you going to do?”
“I'm going after Norhala,” he answered. “I'm going to have a showdown with her or know the reason why.”
“Drake,” I cried again, aghast, “don't make the mistake Ventnor did. That's not the way to win through. Don't—I beg you, don't.”
“You're wrong,” he answered stubbornly. “I'm going to get her. She's got to talk.”
He thrust out a hand to the curtains. Before he could touch them, they were parted. Out from between them slithered the black eunuch. He stood motionless, regarding us; in the ink-black eyes a red flame of hatred. I pushed myself between him and Drake.
“Where is your mistress, Yuruk?” I asked.
“The goddess has gone,” he replied sullenly.
“Gone?” I said suspiciously, for certainly Norhala had not passed us. “Where?”
“Who shall question the goddess?” he asked. “She comes and she goes as she pleases.”
I translated this for Drake.
“He's got to show me,” he said. “Don't think I'm going to spill any beans, Goodwin. But I want to talk to her. I think I'm right, honestly I do.”
After all, I reflected, there was much in his determination to recommend it. It was the obvious thing to do—unless we admitted that Norhala was superhuman; and that I would not admit. In command of forces we did not yet know, en rapport with these People of Metal, sealed with that alien consciousness Ruth had described—all these, yes. But still a woman—of that I was certain. And surely Drake could be trusted not to repeat Ventnor's error.
“Yuruk,” I said, “we think you lie. We would speak to your mistress. Take us to her.”
“I have told you that the goddess is not here,” he said. “If you do not believe it is nothing to me. I cannot take you to her for I do not know where she is. Is it your wish that I take you through her house?”
“It is,” I said.
“The goddess has commanded me to serve you in all things.” He bowed, sardonically. “Follow.”
Our search was short. We stepped out into what for want of better words I can describe only as a central hall. It was circular, and strewn with thick piled small rugs whose hues had been softened by the alchemy of time into exquisite, shadowy echoes of color.
The walls of this hall were of the same moonstone substance that had enclosed the chamber upon whose inner threshold we were. They whirled straight up to the dome in a crystalline, cylindrical cone. Four doorways like that in which we stood pierced them. Through each of their curtainings in turn we peered.
All were precisely similar in shape and proportions, radiating in a lunetted, curved base triangle from the middle chamber; the curvature of the enclosing globe forming back wall and roof; the translucent slicings the sides; the circle of floor of the inner hall the truncating lunette.
The first of these chambers was utterly bare. The one opposite held a half-dozen suits of the lacquered armor, as many wicked looking, short and double-edged swords and long javelins. The third I judged to be the lair of Yuruk; within it was a copper brazier, a stand of spears and a gigantic bow, a quiver full of arrows leaning beside it. The fourth room was littered with coffers great and small, of wood and of bronze, and all tightly closed.
The fifth room was beyond question Norhala's bedchamber. Upon its floor the ancient rugs were thick. A low couch of carven ivory inset with gold rested a few feet from the doorway. A dozen or more of the chests were scattered about and flowing over with silken stuffs.
Upon the back of four golden lions stood a high mirror of polished silver. And close to it, in curiously incongruous domestic array stood a stiffly marshaled row of sandals. Upon one of the chests were heaped combs and fillets of shell and gold and ivory studded with jewels blue and yellow and crimson.
To all of these we gave but a passing glance. We sought for Norhala. And of her we found no shadow. She had gone even as the black eunuch had said; flitting unseen past Ruth, perhaps, absorbed in her watch over her brother; perhaps through some hidden opening in this room of hers.
Yuruk let drop the curtains, sidled back to the first room, we after him. The two there had not moved. We drew the saddlebags close, propped ourselves against them.
The black eunuch squatted a dozen feet away, facing us, chin upon his knees, taking us in with unblinking eyes blank of any emotion. Then he began to move slowly his tremendously long arms in easy, soothing motion, the hands running along the floor upon their talons in arcs and circles. It was curious how these hands seemed to be endowed with a volition of their own, independent of the arms upon which they swung.
And now I could see only the hands, shuttling so smoothly, so rhythmically back and forth—weaving so sleepily, so sleepily back and forth—black hands that dripped sleep—hypnotic.
Hypnotic! I sprang from the lethargy closing upon me. In one quick side glance I saw Drake's head nodding—nodding in time to the movement of the black hands. I jumped to my feet, shaking with an intensity of rage unfamiliar to me; thrust my pistol into the wrinkled face.
“Damn you!” I cried. “Stop that. Stop it and turn your back.”
The corded muscles of the arms contracted, the claws of the slithering paws drew in as though he were about to clutch me; the ebon pools of eyes were covered with a frozen film of hate.
He could not have known what was this tube with which I menaced him, but its threat he certainly sensed and was afraid to meet. He squattered about, wrapped his arms around his knees, crouched with back toward us.
“What's the matter?” asked Drake drowsily.
“He tried to hypnotize us,” I answered shortly. “And pretty nearly did.”
“So that's what it was.” He was now wide awake. “I watched those hands of his and got sleepier and sleepier—I guess we'd better tie Mr. Yuruk up.” He jumped to his feet.
“No,” I said, restraining him. “No. He's safe enough as long as we're on the alert. I don't want to use any force on him yet. Wait until we know we can get something worth while 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.”