by Harl Vincent
Bert's arm with painful force. "My home!" hegroaned. "Understand, Earthling? This was my home, these my wife andchildren--destroyed through my folly. Destroyed, I say, in ancientdays. And by my accursed hand--when the metal monsters came."
There was madness in the Wanderer's glassy stare, the madness of atortured soul within. Bert began to fear him.
"We should leave," he said. "Why torment yourself with such memories?My friends...."
"Have patience, Earthling. Don't you understand that I sinned and amtherefore condemned to this torment? Can't you see that I _must_unburden my soul of its ages-old load, that I must revisit the sceneof my crime, that others must see and know? It is part of mypunishment, and you, perforce, must bear witness. Moreover, it is tohelp your friends and your world that I bring you here. Behold!"
* * * * *
A man was coming out of the observatory, a tall man with bronzed skinand raven locks. It was the Wanderer himself, the Wanderer of thepast, as he had been in the days of his youth and happiness.
The woman by the pool had risen from her seat and was advancingeagerly toward her mate. Bert saw that the man hardly glanced in herdirection, so intent was he upon an object over which he stood. Theobject was a shimmering bowl some eight or ten feet across, which wasmounted on a tripod near the observatory, and over whose metallicsurface a queer bluish light was playing.
It was a wordless pantomime, the ensuing scene, and Bert watched inamazement. This woman of another race, another age, another plane, waspleading with her man. Sobbing soundlessly, wretchedly. And the manwas unheeding, impatient with her demonstrations. He shoved her asideas she attempted to interfere with his manipulations of some elaboratemechanical contrivance at the side of the bowl.
And then there was a sudden roaring vibration, a flash of lightleaping from the bowl, and the materialization of a spherical vesselthat swallowed up the man and vanished in the shaft of light like amoth in the flame of a candle.
At Bert's side, the Wanderer was a grim and silent figure, misty andunreal when compared with those material, emotion-torn beings of therooftop. The woman, swooning, had wilted over the rim of the bowl, andthe two boys with their strange amphibious pet splashed out from thepool and came running to her, wide-eyed and dripping.
The Wanderer touched a lever and again there was the sensation as of agreat page turned across the vastness of the universe. All was hazyand indistinct outside the sphere that held them, with a rushing blurof dimly gray light-forms. Beneath them remained only the brightoutline of the bowl, an object distinct and real and fixed in space.
"It was thus I left my loved ones," the Wanderer said hollowly. "Infanatical devotion to my science, but in blind disregard of thosethings which really mattered. Observe, O Man-Called-Bert, that thebowl is still existent in infra-dimensional space--the gateway I leftopen to Urtraria. So it remained while I, fool that I was, exploredthose planes of the fifth dimension that were all around us though wesaw and felt them not. Only I had seen, even as your friend Tom hasseen. And, like him, I heeded not the menace of the things I hadwitnessed. We go now to the plane of the metal monsters. Behold!"
* * * * *
The sphere shuddered to the increased power of its hidden motors andanother huge page seemed to turn slowly over, lurching sickeningly asit came to rest in the new and material plane of existence. Here, Bertunderstood now, the structure of matter was entirely different. Atomswere comprised of protons and electrons whirling at differentvelocities and in different orbits--possibly some of the electrons inreverse direction to those of the atomic structure of matter inUrtraria. And these coexisted with those others in the same relativeposition in time and in space. Ages before, the thing had happened,and he was seeing it now.
They were in the midst of a forest of conical spires whose sides wereof dark glittering stuff that reminded Bert of the crystals ofcarborundum before pulverizing for commercial use. A myriad of deepcolors were reflected from the sharply pointed piles in the light ofa great cold moon that hung low in the heavens above them.
In the half light down there between the circular bases of the cones,weird creatures were moving. Like great earthworms they moved,sluggishly and with writhing contortions of their many-jointed bodies.Long cylindrical things with glistening gray hide, like armor plateand with fearsome heads that reared upward occasionally to reveal thesingle flaming eye and massive iron jaws each contained. There wereriveted joints and levers, wheels and gears that moved as thecreatures moved; darting lights that flashed forth fromtrunnion-mounted cases like the searchlights of a battleship of Earth;great swiveled arms with grappling hooks attached. They weremechanical contrivances--the metal monsters of which the Wanderer hadspoken. Whether their brains were comprised of active living cells orwhether they were cold, calculating machines of metallic parts, Bertwas never to know.
"See, the gateway," the Wanderer was saying. "They are investigating.It is the beginning of the end of Urtraria--all as it occurred in thedim and distant past."
He gripped Bert's arm, pointing a trembling finger, and his face was aterrible thing to see in the eery light of their sphere.
* * * * *
A sharply outlined circle of blue-white appeared down there in themidst of the squirming monsters. The sphere drifted lower and Bert wasable to see that a complicated machine was being trundled out from anarched doorway in the base of one of the conical dwellings. It wasmoved to the edge of the light circle which was the bowl on thatrooftop of Urtraria. The same bowl! A force area like that used by TomParker, an area existent in many planes of the fifth dimensionsimultaneously, an area where the various components of wave motionmerged and became as one. The gateway between planes!
The machine of the metal monsters was provided with a huge lens and areflector, and these were trained on the bowl. Wheels and levers ofthe machine moved swiftly. There came an orange light from within thatwas focused upon lens and reflector to strike down and mingle with thecold light of the bowl. A startling transformation ensued, for theentire area within view was encompassed with a milky diffusedbrightness in which two worlds seemed to intermingle and fuse. Therewere the rooftops of the city in Urtraria and its magnificent domes, atransparent yet substantial reality superimposed upon the gloomy cityof cones of the metal monsters.
"Jupiter!" Bert breathed. "They're going through!"
"They are, Earthling. More accurately, they did--thousands of them;millions." Even as the Wanderer spoke, the metal monsters werewriggling through between the two planes, their enormous bodies movingwith menacing deliberation.
On the rooftops back in Urtraria could be seen the frantic, fleeingforms of humanlike beings--the Wanderer's people.
There was a sharp click from the control panel and the scene wasblotted out by the familiar maze of geometric shapes, the whirling,dancing light-forms that rushed madly past over the vast arch whichspanned infinity.
* * * * *
"Where were you at the time?" asked Bert. Awed by what he had seen andwith pity in his heart for the man who had unwittingly let loose thehorde of metal monsters on his own loved ones and his own land, hestared at the Wanderer.
The big man was standing with face averted, hands clutching the railof the control panel desperately. "I?" he whispered. "I was roamingthe planes, exploring, experimenting, immersed in the pursuits thatwent with my insatiable thirst for scientific data and the broadeningof my knowledge of this complex universe of ours. Forgetting myresponsibilities. Unknowing, unsuspecting."
"You returned--to your home?"
"Too late I returned. You shall see; we return now by the same route Ithen followed."
"No!" Bert shouted, suddenly panicky at thought of what might behappening to Joan and Tom in the land of the Bardeks. "No,Wanderer--tell me, but don't show me. I can imagine. Seeing thoseloathsome big worms of iron and steel, I can well visualize what theydid. Come now, have a heart, man; take me t
o my friends before...."
"Ah-h!" The Wanderer looked up and a benign look came to take theplace of the pain and horror which had contorted his features. "It iswell, O Man-Called-Bert. I shall do as you request, for I now see thatmy mission has been well accomplished. We go to your friends, and fearyou not that we shall arrive too late."
"Your--your mission?" Bert calmed immediately under the spell of theWanderer's new mood.
"My mission throughout eternity, Earthling--can't you sense it?Forever and ever I shall roam infra-dimensional space, watching andwaiting for evidence that a similar catastrophe might be visited onanother land where warm-blooded thinking humans of similar mold to myown may be living out their short lives of happiness ornear-happiness. Never again shall so great a calamity come to mankindanywhere if it be within the
