A score or more of faintly shining, bluish shapes were marching there--pyramids and cubes and spheres like those forming the shape that stood before me.There was a curious sharp tang of ozone in the air, a perceptible tightening as of electrical tension.
They swept to the edge of the fissure, swam together, and there, hanging half over the gap was a bridge, half spanning it, a weird and fairy arch made up of alternate cube and angle.The shape at my feet disintegrated; resolved itself into units that raced over to the beckoning span.
At the hither side of the crack they clicked into place, even as had the others.Before me now was a bridge complete except for the one arc near the middle where an angled gap marred it.
I felt the little object I held pulse within my hand, striving to escape.I dropped it.The tiny shape swept to the bridge, ascended it--dropped into the gap.
The arch was complete--hanging in one flying span over the depths!
Upon it, over it, as though they had but awaited this completion, rolled the six globes.And as they dropped to the farther side the end of the bridge nearest me raised itself in air, curved itself like a scorpion's tail, drew itself into a closer circled arc, and dropped upon the floor beyond.
Again the sibilant rustling--and cubes and pyramids and spheres were gone.
Nerves tingling slowly back to life, mazed in absolute bewilderment, my gaze sought Drake.He was sitting up, feebly, his head supported by Ruth's hands.
"Goodwin!" he whispered."What--what were they?""Metal," I said--it was the only word to which my whirling mind could cling--"metal--""Metal!" he echoed."These things metal? Metal--ALIVEAND THINKING!"
Suddenly he was silent, his face a page on which, visibly, dread gathered slowly and ever deeper.
And as I looked at Ruth, white-faced, and at him, I knew that my own was as pallid, as terror-stricken as theirs.
"They were such LITTLE THINGS," muttered Drake."Such little things--bits of metal--little globes and pyramids and cubes--just little THINGS.""Babes! Only babes!" It was Ruth--"BABES!""Bits of metal"--Dick's gaze sought mine, held it--"and they looked for each other, they worked with each other--THINKINGLY, CONSCIOUSLY--they were deliberate, purposeful--little things--and with the force of a score of dynamos--living, THINKING--"
"Don't!" Ruth laid white hands over his eyes."Don't--don't YOU be frightened!"
"Frightened?" he echoed."I'M not afraid--yes, I AMafraid--"
He arose, stiffly--and stumbled toward me.
Afraid? Drake afraid.Well--so was I.Bitterly, TERRIBLYafraid.
For what we had beheld in the dusk of that dragoned, ruined chamber was outside all experience, beyond all knowledge or dream of science.Not their shapes--that was nothing.Not even that, being metal, they had moved.
But that being metal, they had moved consciously, thoughtfully, deliberately.
They were metal things with--MINDS!
That--that was the incredible, the terrifying thing.That --and their power.
Thor compressed within Hop-o'-my-thumb--and thinking.
The lightnings incarnate in metal minacules--and thinking.
The inert, the immobile, given volition, movement, cognoscence--thinking.
Metal with a brain!
