The Metal Monster

by Abraham Grace Merritt

  Hypnotic! I sprang from the lethargy closing upon me. In one quick side glance I saw Drake's head nodding—nodding in time to the movement of the black hands. I jumped to my feet, shaking with an intensity of rage unfamiliar to me; thrust my pistol into the wrinkled face.

  "Damn you!" I cried. "Stop that. Stop it and turn your back."

  The corded muscles of the arms contracted, the claws of the slithering paws drew in as though he were about to clutch me; the ebon pools of eyes were covered with a frozen film of hate.

  He could not have known what was this tube with which I menaced him, but its threat he certainly sensed and was afraid to meet. He squattered about, wrapped his arms around his knees, crouched with back toward us.

  "What's the matter?" asked Drake drowsily.

  "He tried to hypnotize us," I answered shortly. "And pretty nearly did."

  "So that's what it was." He was now wide awake. "I watched those hands of his and got sleepier and sleepier—I guess we'd better tie Mr. Yuruk up." He jumped to his feet.

  "No," I said, restraining him. "No. He's safe enough as long as we're on the alert. I don't want to use any force on him yet. Wait until we know we can get something worth while by doing it."

  "All right," he nodded, grimly. "But when the time comes I'm telling you straight, Doc, I'm going the limit. There's something about that human spider that makes me itch to squash him—slowly."

  "I'll have no compunction—when it's worth while," I answered as grimly.

  We sank down again against the saddlebags; Drake brought out a black pipe, looked at it sorrowfully; at me appealingly.

  "All mine was on that pony that bolted," I answered his wistfulness.

  "All mine was on my beast, too," he sighed. "And I lost my pouch in that spurt from the ruins."

  He sighed again, clamped white teeth down upon the stem.

  "Of course," he said at last, "if Ventnor was right in that—that disembodied analysis of his, it's rather—well, terrifying, isn't it?"

  "It's all of that," I replied, "and considerably more."

  "Metal, he said," Drake mused. "Things of metal with brains of thinking crystal and their blood the lightnings. You accept that?"

  "So far as my own observation has gone—yes," I said. "Metallic yet mobile. Inorganic but with all the quantities we have hitherto thought only those of the organic and with others added. Crystalline, of course, in structure and highly complex. Activated by magnetic-electric forces consciously exerted and as much a part of their life as brain energy and nerve currents are of our human life. Animate, moving, sentient combinations of metal and electric energy."

  He said:

  "The opening of the Disk from the globe and of the two blasting stars from the pyramids show the flexibility of the outer—plate would you call it? I couldn't help thinking of the armadillo after I had time to think at all."

  "It may be"—I struggled against the conviction now strong upon me—"it may be that within that metallic shell is an organic body, something soft—animal, as there is within the horny carapace of the turtle, the nacreous valves of the oyster, the shells of the crustaceans—it may be that even their inner surface is organic—"

  "No," he interrupted, "if there is a body—as we know a body—it must be between the outer surface and the inner, for the latter is crystal, jewel hard, impenetrable.

  "Goodwin—Ventnor's bullets hit fair. I saw them strike. They did not ricochet—they dropped dead. Like flies dashed up against a rock—and the Thing was no more conscious of their striking than a rock would have been of those flies."

  "Drake," I said, "my own conviction is that these creatures are absolutely metallic, entirely inorganic—incredible, unknown forms. Let us go on that basis."

  "I think so, too," he nodded; "but I wanted you to say it first. And yet—is it so incredible, Goodwin? What is the definition of vital intelligence—sentience?

  "Haeckel's is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus, that can react to a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?"

  "Vaguely," I said.

  "Lillie," he went on, "proved that under the electric current and other exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically indigestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also, he found, it could acquire disease and die.

  "Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness. It was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than man, and that its immobility is only apparent. (Le Bon in 'Evolution of Matter,' Chapter eleven.)

  "Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the direction of the magnetic force.

  "When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion."

  "But it is not conscious motion," I objected.

  "Ah, but how do you know?" he asked. "If Jacques Loeb* is right, that action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference between them.

  "Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he's right, then I'm a buttercup—but that's neither here nor there. Loeb—all he did was to restate destiny, one of humanity's oldest ideas, in the terms of tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.

  "Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel's three tests—it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution, which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original experience—exactly as it is in the iron."

  * Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New

  York, "The Mechanistic Conception of Life."

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CONSCIOUS METAL!

  "Granted," I acquiesced. "We now come to their means of locomotion. In its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against the force of gravitation. Man's walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth's face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric—magnetic vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again, Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of the current.

  "Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern rapidly and he seems to be flying. We have none of the awkward fallings and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.

  "I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.

  "Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to
admit the vibrations of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a series of leaps—just as we do when the motion-picture operator slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of stumbles.

  "Very well—so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomenon which the human mind cannot conceive as possible; therefore intellectually we still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human thought cannot encompass which it need fear."

  "Metallic," he said, "and crystalline. And yet—why not? What are we but bags of skin filled with certain substances in solution and stretched over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of that primeval jelly which Gregory * calls Protobion came after untold millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too, the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering wonder of the mother-of-pearl.

  * J. W. Gregory, F.R.S.D.Sc., Professor of Geology,

  University of Glasgow.

  "Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think not."

  "Not materially," I answered. "No. But there remains—consciousness!"

  "That," he said, "I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of—how did he put it?—a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got—glimpses—Goodwin, but I cannot understand."

  "We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these Things metallic, Dick," I replied. "But that does not necessarily mean that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being metal, they must be of crystalline structure.

  "As Gregory has pointed out, crystals and what we call living matter had an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat but hunger.

  "The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions—yet they do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.

  "Instead, they bud—give birth, in fact—to smaller ones, which increase until they reach the size of the preceding generation. And like the children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely as their progenitors!

  "Very well, then—we arrive at the conception of a metallically crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and the amoeba—the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the amoeba and the inert jelly of the Protobion?

  "As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the ants—that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the 'Spirit of the Hive.' It is shown in their groupings—just as the geometric arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline intelligence.

  "I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement or work without apparent communication having passed between the units, there is nothing more remarkable than the swarming of a hive of bees where also without apparent communication just so many waxmakers, nurses, honey-gatherers, chemists, bread-makers, and all the varied specialists of the hive go with the old queen, leaving behind sufficient number of each class for the needs of the young queen.

  "All this apportionment is effected without any means of communication that we recognize. Still it is most obviously intelligent selection. For if it were haphazard all the honeymakers might leave and the hive starve, or all the chemists might go and the food for the young bees not be properly prepared—and so on and so on."

  "But metal," he muttered, "and conscious. It's all very well—but where did that consciousness come from? And what is it? And where did they come from? And most of all, why haven't they overrun the world before this?

  "Such development as theirs, such an evolution, presupposes aeons of time—long as it took us to drag up from the lizards. What have they been doing—why haven't they been ready to strike—if Ventnor's right—at humanity until now?"

  "I don't know," I answered, helplessly. "But evolution is not the slow, plodding process that Darwin thought. There seem to be explosions—nature will create a new form almost in a night. Then comes the long ages of development and adjustment, and suddenly another new race appears.

  "It might be so of these—some extraordinary conditions that shaped them. Or they might have developed through the ages in spaces within the earth—there's that incredible abyss we saw that is evidently one of their highways. Or they might have dropped here upon some fragment of a broken world, found in this valley the right conditions and developed in amazing rapidity. * They're all possible theories—take your pick."

  * Professor Svante Arrhenius's theory of propagation of life

  by means of minute spores carried through space. See his

  "Worlds in the Making."—W.T.G.

  "Something's held them back—and they're rushing to a climax," he whispered. "Ventnor's right about that—I feel it. And what can we do?"

  "Go back to their city," I said. "Go back as he ordered. I believe he knows what he's talking about. And I believe he'll be able to help us. It wasn't just a request he made, nor even an appeal—it was a command."

  "But what can we do—just two men—against these Things?" he groaned.

  "Maybe we'll find out—when we're back in the city," I answered.

  "Well," his old reckless cheerfulness came back to him, "in every crisis of this old globe it's been up to one man to turn the trick. We're two. And at the worst we can only go down fighting a little before the rest of us. So, after all, whatEVER the hell, WHAT the hell."

  For a time we were silent.

  "Well," he said at last, "we have to go to the city in the morning." He laughed. "Sounds as though we were living in the suburbs, somehow, doesn't it?"

  "It can't be many hours before dawn," I said. "Turn in for a while, I'll wake you when I think you've slept enough."

  "It doesn't seem fair," he protested, but sleepily.

  "I'm not sleepy," I told him; nor was I.

  But whether I was or not, I wanted to question Yuruk, uninterrupted and undisturbed.

  Drake stretched himself out. When his breathing showed him fast asleep indeed, I slipped over to the black eunuch and crouched, right hand close to the butt of my automatic, facing him.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  YURUK

  "Yuruk," I whispered, "you love us as the wheat field loves the hail; we are as welcome to you as the death cord to the condemned. Lo, a door opened into a land of unpleasant dreams you thought sealed, and we came through. Answer my questions truthfully and it may be that we shall return through that door."

  Interest welled up in the depths of the black eyes.

  "There is a way from here," he muttered. "Nor does it pass through—Them. I can show it to you."

  I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot across the wrinkled face.

  "Where does that way lead?" I asked. "There were those who sought us; men clad in armor with javelins and arrows. Does your way lead to them, Yuruk?"

  For a time he hesitated, the lashless lids half closed.

  "Yes," he said sullenly. "The way leads to them; to the
ir place. But will it not be safer for you there—among your kind?"

  "I don't know that it will," I answered promptly. "Those who are unlike us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have taken and slain us. Why is it not better to remain with them than to go to our kind who would destroy us?"

  "They would not," he said "If you gave them—her." He thrust a long thumb backward toward sleeping Ruth. "Cherkis would forgive much for her. And why should you not? She is only a woman."

  He spat—in a way that made me want to kill him.

  "Besides," he ended, "have you no arts to amuse him?"

  "Cherkis?" I asked.

  "Cherkis," he whined. "Is Yuruk a fool not to know that in the world without, new things have arisen since long ago we fled from Iskander into the secret valley? What have you to beguile Cherkis beyond this woman flesh? Much, I think. Go then to him—unafraid."

  Cherkis? There was a familiar sound to that. Cherkis? Of course—it was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into this—Cherkis. And Iskander? Equally, of course—Alexander. Ventnor had been right.

  "Yuruk," I demanded directly, "is she whom you call goddess—Norhala—of the people of Cherkis?"

  "Long ago," he answered; "long, long ago there was trouble in their city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis. I fled with her who was the mother of the goddess. There were twenty of us; and we fled here—by the way which I will show you—"

  He leered cunningly; I gave no sign of interest.

  "She who was the mother of the goddess found favor in the sight of the ruler here," he went on. "But after a time she grew old and ugly and withered. So he slew her—like a little mound of dust she danced and blew away after he had slain her; and also he slew others who had grown displeasing to him. He blasted me—as he was blasted—" He pointed to Ventnor.

  "Then it was that, recovering, I found my crooked shoulder. The goddess was born here. She is kin to Him Who Rules! How else could she shed the lightnings? Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came to Iskander's mother in the form of a great snake? Well? At any rate the goddess was born—shedder of the lightnings even from her birth. And she is as you see her.