Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 124: what you’re looking at

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

126 THE METAL MONSTER With a nerve-racking crash. one of the laden beams fell; dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the ~ horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant—dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me. The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City —its magnetic life, draining into the shaft’of green fire. | Duller, grew the Metal Emperor’s glories. Fourteen minutes. =. “Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life’s going out of these Things! Goin out with that ray they’re shooting.” | _ Fifteen minutes. I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly the flaming pyramid darkened—went out. The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in space. Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former size. Sixteen minutes. All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets. Seventeen minutes. | | I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to. the sun. For a moment I saw nothing—then a tiny spot of white in- candescence shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of. radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses. I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger—blazing with an ever increasing and intolerable intensity. _ [handed the glasses to Drake, silently. “I see it!” he muttered. “T see it! And that did it—that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it’s widening! It’s widening!” I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake had seen the spot widen, change—to this day I do not know. To me it seemed unchanged—and yet—perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun Aad opened further— That the sun had winced! I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not—still shone the. intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough, that was for me. GOGO .S (GO)