Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 129: what you’re looking at

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

A.. MERRITT 131 “They’re building out the base,” whispered Drake. “The Cones got so big they have to give them more room.” | “Magnetism,” I whispered in return. “Electricity—they drew down from the sun spot. And it was more than that—I saw the Cones grow under it. It fed them as it fed the Hordes—but the Cones grew. It was as though the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance.” “And if we hadn’t been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with — it would have done for us,” he said. _ We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the long and writhing tentacles. | | _ At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly glistening material. ‘The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the incandescences. a There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the ped- estal. Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, ter- rific heat—yet the Keeper’s workers seemed impervious to it. As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the tentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame through which the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drove through, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it, certainly. _ A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Una- ware of us they seemed, or—if aware, then indifferent. More rapid became their movements, the glassy ingots streaming through the float- ing braziers with hardly a pause in their passing. Abruptly, as though switched, the incandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal, the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes. Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the.dim glow- ing of the cones—sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fill with a mysterious, granitic life, seem. to be praying priests of stone, so about these gathered hierophantic illusion. They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed; the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs. Two by two with measured pace, solemnly the cubes glided off into the encircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind ECOMC OOO (GO)