Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 122: what you’re looking at

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

124 THE METAL MONSTER Guivering. The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even more rapid. There was.a faint, curiously oppressive humming — like the distant echo of a tempest in chaos. Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the cones were dissolving. And now they were—gone. The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance—one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of light—light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it. The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered; turned upward; the wheel began to whirl—faster—faster— Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green column of intensest light. | With prodigious speed, as compact as water, concentrate, it struck— straight out toward the face of the sun. It thrust up with the speed of light—the speed of light? A thought came to me; incrédible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery, made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count. “What’s the matter?” asked Drake. 7 “Take my glasses,” I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my tally. “Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun.” With a look of. stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have found laughable, he obeyed. © “Hold them to my eyes,” I ordered. Three minutes had gone by. There it was—that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses I could see the sun spot, high up on the northern-most limb of the sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthink- ably huge dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum, all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot of the summer of 1919—the most enormous ever re corded by astronomical science. Five minutes had gone by. Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed to the glasses. Even if that thought were true—even if that pillar of radiance were a messenger, an earth-hurled bolt fying to the sun through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and GOGO .S (GO)