Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 196: what you’re looking at

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

198 THE METAL MONSTER “Burned out!” said Drake. “Every damned one of them—burned out. What were they, after all? A lot of living dynamos. Dynamotors— rather. And all of a sudden they had too much juice turned on. Bang © went their insulations—whatever they were. | “Bang went they. Burned out—short circuited. I don’t pretend to know why or how. Nonsense! I do know. The cones were some kind of immensely concentrated force—electric, magnetic; either or both or more. I myself believe that they were. probably solid—in a way of speak- ing—coronium. a ‘If about twenty of the greatest scientists the world has ever known are right, coronium is—well, call it curdled energy. The electric poten- tiality of Niagara in a pin point of dust of yellow fire. All right—they or it lost control. Every pin point swelled out into a Niagara. And as it did so, it expanded from a controlled dust dot to an uncontrolled cataract—in other words, its energy was unleashed and undammed. “Very well—what followed? What had to follow? Every living bat- tery of block and globe and spike was super-charged and went— blooey. The valley must have been some sweet little volcano while that short circuiting was going on. All right—let’s go down and see what it did to your unclimbable slide and unscalable walls, Ventnor. I’m not sure we won't be able to get out that way.” Oo “Come on; everything’s ready,” Ruth was calling; her summoning blocked any objection we might have raised to Drake’s argument. It was no dryad, no distressed pagan clad maid we saw as we passed back into the room of the pool. In knickerbockers and short skirt, prim anc self-possessed, rebellious curls held severely in place by close-fitting. cap and slender feet stoutly shod, Ruth hovered over the steaming ket- tle swung above the spirit lamp. | And she was very silent as we hastily broke fast. Nor when we had finished did she go to Drake. She clung close to her brother and beside him as we set forth down the roadway, through the rain, toward the ledge between the cliffs where the veils had shimmered. Hotter and hotter it grew as we advanced; the air steamed like a Turkish bath. The mists clustered so thickly that at last we groped for- ward step by step, holding to each other. a | “No use,” gasped Ventnor. “We couldn’t see. We'll have to turn back.” “Burned out!” said Dick. “Didn’t I tell your The whole valley was a volcano. And with that deluge falling in it—why wouldn’t there be a fog? It’s why there is a fog. We'll have to wait until it clears.” We trudged back to the blue globe. All that day the rain fell. Throughout the few remaining hours of daylight we wandered over the house of Norhala, examining its most GOGO .S (GO)