Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 128: what you’re looking at

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

130° THE METAL MONSTER me out of my body into unimaginable depths of blackness. Something: was hurling me out into those cold depths of space that alone ‘could darken the fires that encircled me—the fires of which I was becoming a. art. , . I felt myself leap outward—outward and outward—into—oblivion, CHAPTER XXI Phantasmagoria Metallique EARILY I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High above me was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding shields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky of night. | | Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I strug- _gied to rise. “Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady—and quiet. How are you feeling?” “Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?” | “We weren’t used to the show,” he said. “We got all fed up at the orgy. Too much magnetism—we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical indigestion. Sh-h—look ahead of you.” : Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone at the base of one of the crater’s walls. As my gaze swept away I noted. with a curious relief that the tiny eye-pdints were no longer sparkling with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more. , | : Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incan- descences. They were both rayless and strangely—lightless; they threw no shadows nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each: of these curious lumingsities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes—the Things that now I knew for the opened -cubes. They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height. They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc of the immense pedestal—and now I saw that the lights were a few feet closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle silvery-gray and metallic. GOGO .S (GO)