he had been transported across millions of miles ofspace--undoubtedly to the dark star itself!
The colossal thing, indescribable, a blinding, nameless color, rippleddown the hall and stooped before a disk of silvery black. In the centerof the disk was a metal seat with a control board near-by.
"Be seated!"
Phobar sat down, the titan flicked the controls--and nothing happened.
Phobar sensed that something was radically wrong. He felt the surpriseof his gigantic companion. He did not know it then, but the fate of thesolar system hung on that incident.
"Come!"
* * * * *
Abruptly the giant stooped, and Phobar shrank back, but a flowing massof cold, insensate metal swept around him, lifted him fifty feet in theair. Dizzy, sick, horrified, he was hardly conscious of the whirlwindmotion into which the giant suddenly shot. He had a dim impression ofmachines racing by, of countless other giants, of a sudden opening inthe walls of the immense building, and then a rush across the surface ofmetal land. Even in his vertigo he had enough curiosity to marvel thatthere was no vegetation, no water, only the dull black metal everywhere.Yet there was air.
And then a city loomed before them. To Phobar it seemed a city of godsor giants. Fully five miles it soared toward space, its fantastic anglesand arcs and cubes and pyramids mazing in the dimensions of a totallyalien geometry. Tier by tier the stupendous city, hundreds of mileswide, mounted toward a central tower like the one in the building he hadleft.
Phobar never knew how they got there, but his numbed mind was atlast forced into clarity by a greater will. He stared about him. Hiscaptor had gone. He stood in a huge chamber circling to a dome faroverhead. Before him, on a dais a full thousand feet in diameter,stood--sat--rested, whatever it might be called--another monster, farlarger than any he had yet seen, like a mountain of pliant thinking,living metal. And Phobar knew he stood in the presence of the ruler.
* * * * *
The metal Cyclops surveyed him as Phobar might have surveyed an ant.Cold, deadly, dispassionate scrutiny came from something that might havebeen eyes, or a seeing intelligence locked in a metal body.
There was no sound, but inwardly to Phobar's consciousness from thepeak of the titan far above him came a command:
"What are you called?"
Phobar opened his lips--but even before he spoke, he knew that the thinghad understood his thought: "Phobar."
"I am Garboreggg, ruler of Xlarbti, the Lord of the Universes."
"Lord of the _Universes_?"
"I and my world come from one of the universes beyond the reach of yourtelescopes." Phobar somehow felt that the thing was talking to him as hewould to a new-born babe.
"What do you want of me?"
"Tell your Earth that I want the entire supply of your radium ores minedand placed above ground according to the instructions I give, by sevenof your days hence."
A dozen questions sprang to Phobar's lips. He felt again that he wasbeing treated like a child.
"Why do you want our radium ores?"
"Because they are the rarest of the elements on your scale, are absenton ours, and supply us with some of the tremendous energy we need."
"Why don't you obtain the ores from other worlds?"
"We do. We are taking them from all worlds where they exist. But we needyours also."
Raiders of the universe! Looting young worlds of the precious radiumores! Piracy on a cosmic scale!
"And if Earth refuses your demand?"
* * * * *
For answer, Garboreggg rippled to a wall of the room and pressed abutton. The wall dissolved, weirdly, mysteriously. A series of vastsilver plates was revealed, and a battery of control levers.
"This will happen to all of your Earth unless the ores are given us."
The titan closed a switch. On the first screen flashed the picture of ahuge tower such as Phobar had seen in the metal city.
Garboreggg adjusted a second control that was something like arange-finder. He pressed a third lever--and from the tower leaped asurge of terrific energy, like a bolt of lightning a quarter of a milebroad. The giant closed another switch--and on the second plate flasheda picture of New York City.
Then--waiting. Seconds, minutes drifted by. The atmosphere became tense,nerve-cracking. Phobar's eyes ached with the intensity of his stare.What would happen?
Abruptly it came.
A monstrous bolt of energy streaked from the skies, purple-blue death ina pillar a fourth of a mile broad crashed into the heart of New YorkCity, swept up and down Manhattan, across and back, and suddenlyvanished.
In fifteen seconds, only a molten hell of fused structures andincinerated millions of human beings remained of the world's first city.
Phobar was crushed, appalled, then utter loathing for this soullessthing poured through him. If only--
"It is useless. You can do nothing," answered the ruler as though it hadgrasped his thought.
"But why, if you could pick me off the Earth, do you not draw the radiumores in the same way?" Phobar demanded.
"The orange-ray picks up only loose, portable objects. We can and willtransport the radium ores here by means of the ray after they have beenmined and placed on platforms or disks."
"Why did you select me from all the millions of people on Earth?"
"Solely because you were the first apparent scientist whom our cosmotelchanced upon. It will be up to you to notify your Earth governments ofour demand."
"But afterwards!" Phobar burst out aloud. "What then?"
"We will depart."
"It will mean death to us! The solar system will be wrecked with Neptunegone and Saturn following it!"
* * * * *
Garboreggg made no answer. To that impassive, cold, inhuman thing, itdid not matter if a nation or a whole world perished. Phobar had alreadyseen with what deliberate calm it destroyed a city, merely to show himwhat power the lords of Xlarbti controlled. Besides, what guarantee wasthere that the invaders would not loot the Earth of everything theywanted and then annihilate all life upon it before they departed? YetPhobar knew he was helpless, knew that the men of Earth would be forcedto do whatever was asked of them, and trust that the raiders wouldfulfill their promise.
"Two hours remain for your stay here," came the ruler's dictum tointerrupt his line of thought. "For the first half of that period youwill tell me of your world and answer whatever questions I may ask.During the rest of the interval, I will explain some of the things youwish to learn about us."
Again Phobar felt Garboreggg's disdain, knew that the metal giantregarded him as a kind of childish plaything for an hour or two'samusement. But he had no choice, and so he told Garboreggg of the lifeon Earth, how it arose and along what lines it had developed; henarrated in brief the extent of man's knowledge, his scientificachievements, his mastery of weapons and forces and machines, his socialorganization.
When he had finished, he felt as a Stone Age man might feel in thepresence of a brilliant scientist of the thirty-fourth century. If anysign of interest had shown on the peak of the metallic lord, Phobarfailed to see it. But he sensed an intolerant sneer of ridicule inGarboreggg, as though the ruler considered these statements to be onlythe most elementary of facts.
Then, for three quarters of an hour, in the manner of one lecturing anignorant pupil, the giant crowded its thought-pictures into Phobar'smind so that finally he understood a little of the raiders and of thesudden terror that had flamed from the abysses into the solar system.
* * * * *
"The universe of matter that you know is only one of the countlessuniverses which comprise the cosmos," began Garboreggg. "In youruniverse, you have a scale of ninety-two elements, you have yourcolor-spectrum, your rays and waves of many kinds. You are subject todefinite laws controlling matter and energy as you know them.
"But we are of a differ
ent universe, on a different scale from yours, atrillion light-years away in space, eons distant in time. The naturallaws which govern us differ from those controlling you. In our universe,you would be hopelessly lost, completely helpless, unless you possessedthe knowledge that your people will not attain even in millions ofyears. But we, who are so much older and greater than you, have for solong studied the nature of the other universes that we can enter andleave them at will, taking what we wish, doing as we wish, creating ordestroying worlds whenever the need arises, coming and hurtling awaywhen we choose.
"There is no vegetable life in our universe. There is only the scale ofelements ranging from 842 to 966 on the extension of your own scale. Atthis high range, metals of complex kinds exist. There is none of whatyou call water, no vegetable world, no animal kingdom. Instead, thereare energies, forces, rays, and waves, which are food to us and
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