Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 97: what you’re looking at

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

THE METAL MONSTER. sun through heavy mists of dawn. The mists faded—-miles awgy gleamed what at first. glimpse seemed indeed to de the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at its base that blackness was frozen. The sun? Reason returned to me; told ' me this globe could not be ¢hat. What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped af his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold fantom of the God of hight and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned? I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing the blackness tnrongs which we had been flying! Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And ever louder, more thunderous, became the clamor. At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like gray steel. On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss, rushed upon the disk and - took form. Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned, . inconceivably monstrous, amor- phous. For an instant it. was silhouetted against the shining sphere, poised itself— and vanished through it! Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala! It seemed to hover, to wait. “Tt’s a door, an opening!” Drake’s shout beat ‘thinly in my ears against the hurricane of sound. _ What I had thought an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and gigantic. A mile away form it as we were, it came to me that . it must be all of half that in diameter. The light streamed through it, the flam- ing colors, the lightning glare, the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The sugges- tion of sphere had been an illusien, born of 471 the darkness in which we were moving and its own luminescence. And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into the gulf! Norhala raised her hand high above her head. Up from the darkness flew an in- credible shape—like a monstrous, armored, flat-backed crab; angled spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting, greenish flafhes. .It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudmous breasts from which issued blinding flashes—sapphire blue, em- erald, green, sun-yellow. It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, stand- mg out jet-black and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of alternate enormous ‘angled arrow-pomts and funettes. Swiftly its form shifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate. Then I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new posi- tions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back. legs shortened, fitting themselves plainly to what must bea varying angle of descent beyond. And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss; It was a cor made of the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes—knew that they were jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the Conscious machine. It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant before they had been. We were high above an ocean df living light—a sea of incandescent splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose incredible waves streamed thou- sands of feet in air, flew in gigantic banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored flame—as though torn . by the talons of a mighty wind! And the place was one vast caldron of tempests; a titanic womb of the lightings! My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence took form, be- came ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes cyclopean, unnameable. They moved slowly, with an awesome de- liberateness. They shone darkly within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the lightnings! COMIC OOO SS (CO