Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 132: what you’re looking at

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

134 THE METAL MONSTER sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible. | | : I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking |] felt, to touch the tablet’s rods. : A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows— | The Keeper glowed above us! In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellec- tually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it. | | One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O’Keefe and Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place almost as strange as this*; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied’ the angrily faming Shape. | Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o’-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. [ focused my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was the Keeper’s foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hya- line—yet beneath it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable, microscopic crystals, — 7 : Within these grains whose existence was more sensed thar seen glowed dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps _a yard in width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no sugges- tion of the underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be—similar to the great ovals within the Emperor’s golden zone. My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous reflection of the Emperor’s pulsing multicolored rose had each of the petals of the Jatter been clipped and squared. It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion lat- tens cee *See ‘The Moon Pool” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool,’’ GOGO .S (GO)