Jack Williamson

“ Austen had struck! The world of the Krimlu was no more! The whole Silver Sea had gone off in a great explosion. From our ever-rising craft we could see the desert spread out around the mountain like a vast yellow sea, rimmed on the south by a steely blue line that was the ocean. The white fire dulled, faded, and was gone as quickly as it had flashed up. The crater of the Mountain of the Moon was left a wild black ruin of jagged, scattered masses of smoking stone. Of the Silver Lake, of the red vegetation upon the upland, of brilliant Astran, not a trace was left! ”

“ Larry was standing there, in the midst of the vast red plain between ruined city and ruined canal. Tired, hungry, lonely and hopeless. He was looking up at the white "sun," trying to comfort himself with the thought that the brilliant luminary was merely a queer blue lamp, that he was upon a tiny experimental world in a laboratory. But the thought brought him no relief; only confusion and a sense of incredulity.
Then he saw the machine-monster.
A glittering, winged thing of crystal and green metal, identical with the one he had encountered in the laboratory. ”

“ White-faced, Bari Horn came a little forward.
"You were made by man," he said flatly. "If you rebel, you will be destroyed by man."
The gigantic robot stood suddenly still.
"Then, my master," its great voice came more softly, "my strength and my brain are yours to command."
A smile of relief crossed the haggard face of Bari Horn, and he walked toward the robot. "I knew you must yield, Malgarth," he said. "For, being a machine, you must always respond to logic."
"Yes, master," the vast voice rumbled. But a metal limb slashed out suddenly, murderously. ”

“ Suddenly I heard the drone of some of Sam's new machinery going into action. He had mounted his switches and dials in the conning-tower, so he could control it from where he stood. Vivid blue electric flame quivered and flashed over the metal parts of the machine as his new weapons went into play!
The floating globe of silver drifted nearer, and the misty vortex of green fire about us grew more intense. A strange red glow stole over the vegetation around us, and a solitary purple tree ahead burst into crimson flame. ”

“ Bill was flying the ship, and my thoughts turned back to Dr. Vernon and his daughter. The Doctor was a pudgy, explosive little man, who thought, ate, and breathed science. His short, restless figure always bore the marks of laboratory cataclysms, and his life had been marred by the earlier lack of success in perfecting the terrible machine to which he was devoting his life. I had always thought it strange that a man so mild and tender-hearted should toil so to build a death-dealing instrument, and I wondered what he would do with it now if he had it completed. ”

“ Had Agnes called him after the attack, or before?
Despite himself, his attention was drawn back to the little globe spinning so regularly, floating in the air between the pillars of red and violet flame. Floating alone, like a little world in space, without a visible support, it might be held up by magnetic attraction, he thought.
A tiny planet!
His mind quickened at the idea, and he half forgot the weird mystery gathering about him. He stepped nearer the sphere. It was curiously like a miniature world. The irregular bluish areas would be seas; the green and the brown spaces land. ”

“ But in a moment it was up, and running toward us with an agility that was incredible, springing over the red brush in great bounds, with a motion more like that of a monstrous hopping insect than of a human being. His white hair was flying in wild disorder, his shrunken limbs plainly flashing purple. And a terrible sound came from it as it bounded along—not a scream of rage or of pain, but a weird uncanny laugh, that rang strangely over the red plain, and somehow made us pause in our race, and tremble with alien terror. ”

“ A viridescent fog ran quickly over the enormous azure globe.
Mars melted away.
The planet dissolved in a huge, madly spinning cloud of brilliant green mist that shone with an odd light—with a light of life! A world faded into a nebulous spiral of green. Mars became a spinning cloud of dust as if of malachite.
A tiny lever flicked over, under the Prince's fingers. And the green light went out.
Where Mars had been was nothing! The stars shone through, hot and clear. A machine no larger than a camera had destroyed a world. Bill was dazed, staggered. ”

“ Suddenly I wished fiercely for death, for only death could bring me freedom from the horror that swept in a throbbing torrent through my brain. But even death was beyond my reach, for my hands were not my own!
For a moment that power left me standing on the side of the overturned machine. The Omnimobile lay on the sandy floor of the crater, which may have been a hundred feet in depth and as many yards across. Against the red sky, above the black cliffs of the pit's farther rim, towered the violet metal cylinder—the flaming metal brain whose hypnotic control ruled my body. ”

“ The machine left the crater floor and flew rapidly up on a steep spiral course. In a few minutes the rugged mountain panorama was spread out like a relief map below us. Presently the stars were visible, and still we climbed, comfortable enough in the heated, air-tight compartment. The propellers had been stopped, but the gravity-neutralizing gas continued to lift the vessel straight up.
Then I noticed a faint purple veil coming over the stars above. Suddenly it seemed that we were plunging through a bank of thin purple mist. Abruptly we shot above a landscape weirder than the wildest dream! ”

“ Blue rays lanced back at the attacking cruisers, and raked the valley beyond the walls.
"We shall land," whispered Kel Aran.
"If we do," warned Jeron, "we may not leave again."
"Take us down," said the Earthman. "This is the only city we have found surviving. It may be the last. If we are to find Verel anywhere, it must be here."
We waited until the slow rotation of Meldoon carried the city into the night side of the giant planet, and then drove our dark-painted craft down through the cone of shadow. The glare and flicker of the siege spread beneath us. ”

“ It bore an elaborate initial "E."
"E!" he muttered. "Envers! He got to Mars. And died here. Trying to get to the mountain, I guess. Lord! what a death! A man all alone, in the dust and the sun. A strange world. Strange monsters."
The loneliness of the red desert, the mystery of it, and its alien spirit, wrapped itself about him like a mantle of fear. He staggered to his feet, and set off at a stumbling run through the sand toward the cliff. ”

“ Suddenly the clouds of purple mist below were thrown up and scattered in a thousand ragged streamers. A great blaze of opalescence burst out where it had been. A flood of fire ran over the Silver Sea. It was a white, milky light like that we had seen between the blue crystal globes of the great machine in the chasm. In a moment the whole crater was a torn and angry ocean of iridescent flame. The red upland was blotted out, and Astran vanished forever. White flames that were like the tongues of burning hydrogen that burst from exploding suns, flared up behind us. ”

“ For a long moment Sam was still. Suddenly he aroused himself as if from a daze of pain, and turned again to the instrument boards.
"The earth is not frozen!" he shouted. "The power in the ether is dead!" I thought of the havoc my cannon fire had wrought with the machines about the flaming brain.
In a moment he had the generators going, and the machine crawling to an upright position. Then he turned on the rocket tubes. The crater was filled with the roaring jets of steam, and we were hurled into the crimson sky! ”

“ It will only make them hurt you!”
“I can't let them take you, Agnes!” Larry cried, in an agonized tone. And the words seemed to leap out, of themselves, “Because I love you!”
“You do?” Agnes cried, in a thin, choking voice, pressing herself against him. “Ever since the first time you came to the laboratory—”
A score of the monster forms of violet-filled crystal and gleaming green metal had dropped into the pen. They tore Agnes from Larry's arms, hurling him roughly to the ground, at the bottom of the green metal fence. For some time he was unconscious. ”

“ My dry lips moved without sound. "There will be war?"
"Men have been enslaved," rang the voice of Kel Aran. "Now they fight for freedom. We have cruised the Galaxy from Koridos to Tenephron, and everywhere there is rebellion—brave and yet hopeless rebellion against the iron might of the Space Police and the fleets of the Galactic Guard! For Malgarth moves the Emperor like a puppet, to the murder of his own wretched kind.
"We have come now to beg the aid of the Stone—for without the ancient secret that you sealed within its crystal brain, Barihorn, there is hope of nothing save death. ”

“ All the top of the red granite plateau—it was evidently the stone heart of an ancient mountain—was hidden from him. He could see nothing of the Red Rover or any of her crew. He could see no living thing.
The flat plain of red dust lay about him, curving below a near horizon. Loose dust sucked at his feet, rose about him in a suffocating saffron cloud. The sun, a little crimson globe in a blue-black sky, shone blisteringly. The sky was soberly dark, cold and hostile. In alarmed haste, he struggled toward the grim line of high, red cliffs. ”

“ Austen had his drawing board set up in a convenient place behind our shelter, and he alternately peered through the telescope at the spectrum, and turned to make intricate calculation in the light of a shaded flashlight. We sat up all night at the work.
All night long the white flame played between the spinning blue crystal spheres above the vast green cylinder, filling the air with its ghostly crackle and whisper. All night long the tireless purple human machines toiled in the pit, carrying the great green blocks, and evidently stacking them in the vast cannon-like tube at the side. ”

“ The sky was like a red lake seen inverted in a mirror. Those blue cliffs were hardly a dozen miles away now—I had to bend back my head to see the sharp line where the roof cut them off.
On the east side of that plateau, there was—nothing!
Beyond, lay the pit of Xath, with the faint ruby mist above it, filled as always with the wavering reflections of violet flames. And a half dozen miles before me, on the brink of that pit, stood—Mutron!
The City of the Sleepers!
A strange scene it was! A city of silver metal! Domes and towers and pyramids of argent whiteness! Vast incredible machines! ”

“ Singing the song of Barihorn, starved and weary and battered with all the appalling forces of that mechanical invasion, the human defenders clung to their posts. And died there. Incinerated by disruptor rays. Buried under toppling debris. Consumed by the acrid luminescent gas that burst from the rocket shells. But every tower became a fortress. No man was taken alive.
"I'm glad that I'm a man," exulted Kel Aran. He was blistered and blackened from a barytron ray that had come too near. His disruptor gun was empty in his hand. "No machine could die like this, for they are not alive!" ”

“ Forgetting the intense red sky, the strange, smooth sea, and the damp, hot wind, I went below to meet Sam's wonderful biscuit, with fresh steak and fruit from the refrigerator. A very mild and colorless beginning for adventurers newly fallen into an unknown world, but a very sensible one!
After the meal, each of us took a turn on guard in the conning-tower, while the other slept. Nothing happened. The soft hot wind blew steadily out of the south, the bloody glare of the weird sky was changeless, and the sea lay about in a motionless desert. ”

“ Captain Brand eased the ship down, using the rays as little as possible, to cut down the danger of detection.
The Red Rover dropped silently to the center of a low, cliff-rimmed plateau that rose from the red, sandy desert. In the faint light of stars and hurtling moons, the ocherous waste lay flat in all directions—there are no high mountains on Mars. The air was clear, and so thin that the stars shone with hot brilliance, almost, Bill thought, as if the ship were still out in space. ”

“ She looked up at me, smiled, looked off to the side, then let her eyes return to mine with curious speculation in them. "What is the Silver Lake," she went on, "you know as well as I, though Austen tried to find its secret. The touch of its water is death—a death that is terrible. And the Purple Ones—you will see them soon enough! They are strange beings who come, no one knows whence, into the land of Astran. The priests tell us that they are 'The Avengers of the Purple Sun.'—but did you come down the ladder as Austen did?" ”

“ I fought that inertia. Desperately, I groped through that darkening film. Somehow, the black brain seemed to be spinning away from me, into infinity.
But I touched it. My fingers plunged deep into its wrinkled black mass, to that pale spot. I clutched, tore. The great brain quivered. It almost writhed. A blackness spread in the purple liquid.
"We're gone," sighed the woman. "His mirror—"
The brain, and the monstrous metal body, and all that incredible red-lit hall, were whirled away from us, as if upon a silent and resistless wind. ”