Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE METAL MONSTER. Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her vic- iously by one bare, lovely shoulder. ‘Give her back to me, I say!” he cried. ‘“‘ Give her back to me, damn you!” The woman’s eyes grew — awful! of the distended pupils the strange stars blazed; upon her face was something of the goddess outraged. Her lips parted—- opening, I knew in one quick panic-filled moment, to summon her familiars. I felt the shadow of the wings of tragedy! ‘No! No—WNorhala! No, Martin!” the veils of calmness that had shrouded Ruth had broken, too; swiftly the girl we knew looked out from them. She struck down his hands, threw herself between the two, arms outstretched. _ - “For God’s sake, Ventnor!” Drake caught his arms, held them tight; “ that’s not the way to save her, man!” Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing. Never until then had I real- ‘ized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth. And the woman saw it, too, even though dimly; envisioned it humanly. For under the shock of human passion that which I thought then as utter- ly unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul—I use the popular - word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to mankind — stirred, awak- ened. Wrath fled from her knitted brows; her eyes dropping to the girl, lost their dread- fulness; softened. She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded. upon him; within their depths a half-troubled interest, a questioning, trembled. A smile dawned upon the exquisite face, humanizing it, transfiguring it, touching with tenderness the sweet and _ sleeping mouth—as a hovering dream the lips of a slumbering maid. And on the face of Ruth, as upon a mirror, I watched that same slow, understanding, tenderness reflected! ‘““Come,”’ she said, and led the way ‘through the sparkling curtains. As she passed, an arm around Ruth’s neck, I saw the marks of Ventnor’s fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring It like—a blasphemy! For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty, fantastic, within Out 473 the scintillant shadows; then followed has- tily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well- being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of my con- stant contact with the abnormal; that had, indeed, enabled me to bear the ever-in- creasing weight of the aberrant. Striving to classify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we stepped out of the curtainings. CHAPTER XIX. THE METAL EMPEROR. E, stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green va- porous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained, com- pact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far closer spun.. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder.uprose, and in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed, faint- ly, the brighter stars; knew by this it opened into the free air. All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands—like rings of a hollow piston. They were, in color, rep- licas of that I had glimpsed before our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the. in- credible city had lowered. And they were in motion, spinning smoothly, almost it seemed with the velocity of light! Only one swift glance I gave them,. my eyes held by a most extraordinary—edifice —altar—machine? I could find no word for it—then. ) Its base was a scant hundred yards from | where we had paused and concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by hundreds of thick rods of the same material. Up from it lifted the—structure, a thing of glistening greenish cones and spinning COL ElOO® Colin