The Metal Monster Read online

  We picked our way among the debris to a wide crumbling stairway, crept up it, Ruth flitting ahead. We came out opposite one of the eye-like apertures. Black against it, perched high upon a pile of blocks, I recognized the long, lean outline of Ventnor, rifle in hand, gazing intently up the ancient road whose windings were plain through the opening. He had not heard us.

  "Martin," called Ruth softly.

  He turned. A shaft of light from a crevice in the gap's edge struck his face, flashing it out from the semidarkness of the corner in which he crouched. I looked into the quiet gray eyes, upon the keen face.

  "Goodwin!" he shouted, tumbling down from his perch, shaking me by the shoulders. "If I had been in the way of praying—you're the man I'd have prayed for. How did you get here?"

  "Just wandering, Mart," I answered. "But Lord! I'm sure GLAD to see you."

  "Which way did you come?" he asked, keenly. I threw my hand toward the south.

  "Not through that hollow?" he asked incredulously.

  "And some hell of a place to get through," Drake broke in. "It cost us our ponies and all my ammunition."

  "Richard Drake," I said. "Son of old Alvin—you knew him, Mart."

  "Knew him well," cried Ventnor, seizing Dick's hand. "Wanted me to go to Kamchatka to get some confounded sort of stuff for one of his devilish experiments. Is he well?"

  "He's dead," replied Dick soberly.

  "Oh!" said Ventnor. "Oh—I'm sorry. He was a great man."

  Briefly I acquainted him with my wanderings, my encounter with Drake.

  "That place out there—" he considered us thoughtfully. "Damned if I know what it is. Thought maybe it's gas—of a sort. If it hadn't been for it we'd have been out of this hole two days ago. I'm pretty sure it must be gas. And it must be much less than it was this morning, for then we made an attempt to get through again—and couldn't."

  I was hardly listening. Ventnor had certainly advanced a theory of our unusual symptoms that had not occurred to me. That hollow might indeed be a pocket into which a gas flowed; just as in the mines the deadly coal damp collects in pits, flows like a stream along the passages. It might be that—some odorless, colorless gas of unknown qualities; and yet—

  "Did you try respirators?" asked Dick.

  "Surely," said Ventnor. "First off the go. But they weren't of any use. The gas, if it is gas, seems to operate as well through the skin as through the nose and mouth. We just couldn't make it—and that's all there is to it. But if you made it—could we try it now, do you think?" he asked eagerly.

  I felt myself go white.

  "Not—not for a little while," I stammered.

  He nodded, understandingly.

  "I see," he said. "Well, we'll wait a bit, then."

  "But why are you staying here? Why didn't you make for the road up the mountain? What are you watching for, anyway?" asked Drake.

  "Go to it, Ruth," Ventnor grinned. "Tell 'em. After all—it was YOUR party you know."

  "Mart!" she cried, blushing.

  "Well—it wasn't ME they admired," he laughed.

  "Martin!" she cried again, and stamped her foot.

  "Shoot," he said. "I'm busy. I've got to watch."

  "Well"—Ruth's voice was uncertain—"we'd been hunting up in Kashmir. Martin wanted to come over somewhere here. So we crossed the passes. That was about a month ago. The fourth day out we ran across what looked like a road running south.

  "We thought we'd take it. It looked sort of old and lost—but it was going the way we wanted to go. It took us first into a country of little hills; then to the very base of the great range itself; finally into the mountains—and then it ran blank."

  "Bing!" interjected Ventnor, looking around for a moment. "Bing—just like that. Slap dash against a prodigious fall of rock. We couldn't get over it."

  "So we cast about to find another road," went on Ruth. "All we could strike were—just strikes."

  "No fish on the end of 'em," said Ventnor. "God! But I'm glad to see you, Walter Goodwin. Believe me, I am. However—go on, Ruth."

  "At the end of the second week," she said, "we knew we were lost. We were deep in the heart of the range. All around us was a forest of enormous, snow-topped peaks. The gorges, the canyons, the valleys that we tried led us east and west, north and south.

  "It was a maze, and in it we seemed to be going ever deeper. There was not the SLIGHTEST sign of human life. It was as though no human beings except ourselves had ever been there. Game was plentiful. We had no trouble in getting food. And sooner or later, of course, we were bound to find our way out. We didn't worry.

  "It was five nights ago that we camped at the head of a lovely little valley. There was a mound that stood up like a tiny watch-tower, looking down it. The trees grew round like tall sentinels.

  "We built our fire in that mound; and after we had eaten, Martin slept. I sat watching the beauty of the skies and of the shadowy vale. I heard no one approach—but something made me leap to my feet, look behind me.

  "A man was standing just within the glow of firelight, watching me."

  "A Tibetan?" I asked. She shook her head, trouble in her eyes.

  "Not at all." Ventnor turned his head. "Ruth screamed and awakened me. I caught a glimpse of the fellow before he vanished.

  "A short purple mantle hung from his shoulders. His chest was covered with fine chain mail. His legs were swathed and bound by the thongs of his high buskins. He carried a small, round, hide-covered shield and a short two-edged sword. His head was helmeted. He belonged, in fact—oh, at least twenty centuries back."

  He laughed in plain enjoyment of our amazement.

  "Go on, Ruth," he said, and took up his watch.

  "But Martin did not see his face," she went on. "And oh, but I wish I could forget it. It was as white as mine, Walter, and cruel, so cruel; the eyes glowed and they looked upon me like a—like a slave dealer. They shamed me—I wanted to hide myself.

  "I cried out and Martin awakened. As he moved, the man stepped out of the light and was gone. I think he had not seen Martin; had believed that I was alone.

  "We put out the fire, moved farther into the shadow of the trees. But I could not sleep—I sat hour after hour, my pistol in my hand," she patted the automatic in her belt, "my rifle close beside me.

  "The hours went by—dreadfully. At last I dozed. When I awakened again it was dawn—and—and—" she covered her eyes, then: "TWO men were looking down on me. One was he who had stood in the firelight."

  "They were talking," interrupted Ventnor again, "in archaic Persian."

  "Persian," I repeated blankly; "archaic Persian?"

  "Very much so," he nodded. "I've a fair knowledge of the modern tongue, and a rather unusual command of Arabic. The modern Persian, as you know, comes straight through from the speech of Xerxes, of Cyrus, of Darius whom Alexander of Macedon conquered. It has been changed mainly by taking on a load of Arabic words. Well—there wasn't a trace of the Arabic in the tongue they were speaking.

  "It sounded odd, of course—but I could understand quite easily. They were talking about Ruth. To be explicit, they were discussing her with exceeding frankness—"

  "Martin!" she cried wrathfully.

  "Well, all right," he went on, half repentantly. "As a matter of fact, I had seen the pair steal up. My rifle was under my hand. So I lay there quietly, listening.

  "You can realize, Walter, that when I caught sight of those two, looking as though they had materialized from Darius's ghostly hordes, my scientific curiosity was aroused—prodigiously. So in my interest I passed over the matter of their speech; not alone because I thought Ruth asleep but also because I took into consideration that the mode of polite expression changes with the centuries—and these gentlemen clearly belonged at least twenty centuries back—the real truth is I was consumed with curiosity.

  "They had got to a point where they were detailing with what pleasure a certain mysterious person whom they seemed to regard with much fear and respect would co
ntemplate her. I was wondering how long my desire to observe—for to the anthropologist they were most fascinating—could hold my hand back from my rifle when Ruth awakened.

  "She jumped up like a little fury. Fired a pistol point blank at them. Their amazement was—well—ludicrous. I know it seems incredible, but they seemed to know nothing of firearms—they certainly acted as though they didn't.

  "They simply flew into the timber. I took a pistol shot at one but missed. Ruth hadn't though; she had winged her man; he left a red trail behind him.

  "We didn't follow the trail. We made for the opposite direction—and as fast as possible.

  "Nothing happened that day or night. Next morning, creeping up a slope, we caught sight of a suspicious glitter a mile or two away in the direction we were going. We sought shelter in a small ravine. In a little while, over the hill and half a mile away from us, came about two hundred of these fellows, marching along.

  "And they were indeed Darius's men. Men of that Persia which had been dead for millenniums. There was no mistaking them, with their high, covering shields, their great bows, their javelins and armor.

  "They passed; we doubled. We built no fires that night—and we ought to have turned the pony loose, but we didn't. It carried my instruments, and ammunition, and I felt we were going to need the latter.

  "The next morning we caught sight of another band—or the same. We turned again. We stole through a tree-covered plain; we struck an ancient road. It led south, into the peaks again. We followed it. It brought us here.

  "It isn't, as you observe, the most comfortable of places. We struck across the hollow to the crevice—we knew nothing of the entrance you came through. The hollow was not pleasant, either. But it was penetrable, then.

  "We crossed. As we were about to enter the cleft there issued out of it a most unusual and disconcerting chorus of sounds—wailings, crashings, splinterings."

  I started, shot a look at Dick; absorbed, he was drinking in Ventnor's every word.

  "So unusual, so—well, disconcerting is the best word I can think of, that we were not encouraged to proceed. Also the peculiar unpleasantness of the hollow was increasing rapidly.

  "We made the best time we could back to the fortress. And when next we tried to go through the hollow, to search for another outlet—we couldn't. You know why," he ended abruptly.

  "But men in ancient armor. Men like those of Darius." Dick broke the silence that had followed this amazing recital. "It's incredible!"

  "Yes," agreed Ventnor, "isn't it. But there they were. Of course, I don't maintain that they WERE relics of Darius's armies. They might have been of Xerxes before him—or of Artaxerxes after him. But there they certainly were, Drake, living, breathing replicas of exceedingly ancient Persians.

  "Why, they might have been the wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes come to life. I mention Darius because he fits in with the most plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did it rather thoroughly. There wasn't much sympathy for the vanquished in those days. And it's entirely conceivable that a city or two in Alexander's way might have gathered up a fleeting regiment or so for protection and have decided not to wait for him, but to hunt for cover.

  "Naturally, they would have gone into the almost inaccessible heart of the high ranges. There is nothing impossible in the theory that they found shelter at last up here. As long as history runs this has been a well-nigh unknown land. Penetrating some mountain-guarded, easily defended valley they might have decided to settle down for a time, have rebuilt a city, raised a government; laying low, in a sentence, waiting for the storm to blow over.

  "Why did they stay? Well, they might have found the new life more pleasant than the old. And they might have been locked in their valley by some accident—landslides, rockfalls sealing up the entrance. There are a dozen reasonable possibilities."

  "But those who hunted you weren't locked in," objected Drake.

  "No," Ventnor grinned ruefully. "No, they certainly weren't. Maybe we drifted into their preserves by a way they don't know. Maybe they've found another way out. I'm sure I don't know. But I DO know what I saw."

  "The noises, Martin," I said, for his description of these had been the description of those we had heard in the blue valley. "Have you heard them since?"

  "Yes," he answered, hesitating oddly.

  "And you think those—those soldiers you saw are still hunting for you?"

  "Haven't a doubt of it," he replied more cheerfully. "They didn't look like chaps who would give up a hunt easily—at least not a hunt for such novel, interesting, and therefore desirable and delectable game as we must have appeared to them."

  "Martin," I said decisively, "where's your pony? We'll try the hollow again, at once. There's Ruth—and we'd never be able to hold back such numbers as you've described."

  "You feel strong enough to try it?"

  CHAPTER IV.

  METAL WITH A BRAIN

  The eagerness, the relief in his voice betrayed the tension, the anxiety which until now he had hidden so well; and hot shame burned me for my shrinking, my dread of again passing through that haunted vale.

  "I certainly DO." I was once more master of myself. "Drake—don't you agree?"

  "Sure," he replied. "Sure. I'll look after Ruth—er—I mean Miss Ventnor."

  The glint of amusement in Ventnor's eyes at this faded abruptly; his face grew somber.

  "Wait," he said. "I carried away some—some exhibits from the crevice of the noises, Goodwin."

  "What kind of exhibits?" I asked, eagerly.

  "Put 'em where they'd be safe," he continued. "I've an idea they're far more curious than our armored men—and of far more importance. At any rate, we must take them with us.

  "Go with Ruth, you and Drake, and look at them. And bring them back with the pony. Then we'll make a start. A few minutes more probably won't make much difference—but hurry."

  He turned back to his watch. Ordering Chiu-Ming to stay with him I followed Ruth and Drake down the ruined stairway. At the bottom she came to me, laid little hands on my shoulders.

  "Walter," she breathed, "I'm frightened. I'm so frightened I'm afraid to tell even Mart. He doesn't like them, either, these little things you're going to see. He likes them so little that he's afraid to let me know how little he does like them."

  "But what are they? What's to fear about them?" asked Drake.

  "See what you think!" She led us slowly, almost reluctantly toward the rear of the fortress. "They lay in a little heap at the mouth of the cleft where we heard the noises. Martin picked them up and dropped them in a sack before we ran through the hollow.

  "They're grotesque and they're almost CUTE, and they make me feel as though they were the tiniest tippy-tip of the claw of some incredibly large cat just stealing around the corner, a terrible cat, a cat as big as a mountain," she ended breathlessly.

  We climbed through the crumbling masonry into a central, open court. Here a clear spring bubbled up in a ruined and choked stone basin; close to the ancient well was their pony, contentedly browsing in the thick grass that grew around it. From one of its hampers Ruth took a large cloth bag.

  "To carry them," she said, and trembled.

  We passed through what had once been a great door into another chamber larger than that we had just left; and it was in better preservation, the ceiling unbroken, the light dim after the blazing sun of the court. Near its center she halted us.

  Before me ran a two-feet-wide ragged crack, splitting the floor and dropping down into black depths. Beyond was an expanse of smooth flagging, almost clear of debris.

  Drake gave a low whistle. I followed his pointing finger. In the wall at the end whirled two enormous dragon shapes, cut in low relief. Their gigantic wings, their monstrous coils, covered the nearly unbroken surface, and these CHIMERAE were the shapes upon the upthrust blocks of the haunted roadway.

  In Ruth's gaze I read a nameless fear, a half shuddering fascination.

  B
ut she was not looking at the cavern dragons.

  Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed to be a raised and patterned circle in the dust-covered floor. Not more than a foot in width, it shone wanly with a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though, I thought, it had been recently polished. Compared with the wall's tremendous winged figures this floor design was trivial, ludicrously insignificant. What could there be about it to stamp that dread upon Ruth's face?

  I leaped the crevice; Dick joined me. Now I could see that the ring was not continuous. Its broken circle was made of sharply edged cubes about an inch in height, separated from each other with mathematical exactness by another inch of space. I counted them—there were nineteen.

  Almost touching them with their bases were an equal number of pyramids, of tetrahedrons, as sharply angled and of similar length. They lay on their sides with tips pointing starlike to six spheres clustered like a conventionalized five petaled primrose in the exact center. Five of these spheres—the petals—were, I roughly calculated, about an inch and a half in diameter, the ball they enclosed larger by almost an inch.

  So orderly was their arrangement, so much like a geometrical design nicely done by some clever child that I hesitated to disturb it. I bent, and stiffened, the first touch of dread upon me.

  For within the ring, close to the clustering globes, was a miniature replica of the giant track in the poppied valley!

  It stood out from the dust with the same hint of crushing force, the same die cut sharpness, the same METALLIC suggestion—and pointing toward the globes were the claw marks of the four spreading star points.

  I reached down and picked up one of the pyramids. It seemed to cling to the rock; it was with effort that I wrenched it away. It gave to the touch a slight sensation of warmth—how can I describe it?—a warmth that was living.

  I weighed it in my hand. It was oddly heavy, twice the weight, I should say, of platinum. I drew out a glass and examined it. Decidedly the pyramid was metallic, but of finest, almost silken texture—and I could not place it among any of the known metals. It certainly was none I had ever seen; yet it was as certainly metal. It was striated—slender filaments radiating from tiny, dully lustrous points within the polished surface.