Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 59: what you’re looking at

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

A.. MERRITT 61 _ Iturned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them—crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface—and weirdly enough like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them. As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that whatever their activation, their life, they were metal. There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a metal as finely grained as it. Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth—the sur- faces were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being close to the surface and still infinite distances away. | And they were like—what was it they were like?—it.came to me with a distinct shock. _ | They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the clear gray heavens of Norhala’s eyes. I crept beside Drake, struck him with. my head. “Can’t move,” I shouted. “Can’t lift my hands. Stuck fast—like a fly— just as you said.” “Drag ’em over your knees,” he cried, bending to me. “It slides ’em out of the attraction.” Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it. | “No use, Doc.” The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face. “You'll have to keep praying till the power’s turned off. Nothing here you can slide your knees on.” ; I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles. “Can you see them ahead, Walter—Ruth and the woman?” Ventnor turned his anxious eyes toward me. , I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing. It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage—as a projectile does in air—we piled before us a thick wave of the mists which streaming along each side, .closing in behind, ob- d all that lay around. | Yet I had, oersistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was ECOMC OOO (GO)