"Just an itinerant demiurge of supergeometry riding along through space on its perfectly summed-up world;master of all celestial mechanics; its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar space and stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun."A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be but--how, if so, had he gotten that last thought? He had not seen, as we had, the orgy in the Hall of the Cones, the prodigious feeding of the Metal Monster upon our sun.
"That passed," he went on, unnoticing."I saw vast caverns filled with the Things; working, growing, multiplying.
In caverns of our Earth--the fruit of some unguessed womb? Ido not know.
"But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored lights"--again the thrill of amaze shook me--"they grew.It came to me that they were reaching out toward sunlight and the open.They burst into it--into yellow, glowing sunlight.Ours? I do not know.And that picture passed."His voice deepened.
"There came a third vision.I saw our Earth--I knew, Goodwin, indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth.But its rolling hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and polished symbols --geometric, fashioned.
"The seas were fettered, gleaming like immense jewels in patterned settings of crystal shores.The very Polar ice was chiseled.On the ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world.And on all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man.
On this Earth that had been ours were only--These.
"Visioning!" he said."Don't think that I accept them in their entirety.Part truth, part illusion--the groping mind dazzled with light of unfamiliar truths and making pictures from half light and half shadow to help it understand.
"But still--SOME truth in them.How much I do not know.But this I do know--that last vision was of a cataclysm whose beginnings we face now--this very instant."The picture flashed behind my own eyes--of the walled city, its thronging people, its groves and gardens, its science and its art; of the Destroying Shapes trampling it flat--and then the dreadful, desolate mount.
And suddenly I saw that mount as Earth--the city as Earth's cities--its gardens and groves as Earth's fields and forests--and the vanished people of Cherkis seemed to expand into all humanity.
"But Martin," I stammered, fighting against choking, intolerable terror, "there was something else.Something of the Keeper of the Cones and of our striking through the sun to destroy the Things--something of them being governed by the same laws that govern us and that if they broke them they must fall.A hope--a PROMISE, that they would NOT conquer.""I remember," he replied, "but not clearly.There WASsomething--a shadow upon them, a menace.It was a shadow that seemed to be born of our own world--some threatening spirit of earth hovering over them.
"I cannot remember; it eludes me.Yet it is because Iremember but a little of it that I say those drums may not be--taps--for us."As though his words had been a cue, the sounds again burst forth--no longer muffled nor faint.They roared; they seemed to pelt through air and drop upon us; they beat about our ears with thunderous tattoo like covered caverns drummed upon by Titans with trunks of great trees.
The drumming did not die; it grew louder, more vehement;defiant and deafening.Within the Thing under us a mighty pulse began to throb, accelerating rapidly to the rhythm of that clamorous roll.
I saw Norhala draw herself up, sharply; stand listening and alert.Under me, the throbbing turned to an uneasy churning, a ferment.
