Terror out of the past
Date: 2025-02-22T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Adventure stories

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Terror out of the past

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Title: Terror out of the past

Author: Raymond Z. Gallun

Illustrator: Julian S. Krupa

Release date: February 22, 2025 [eBook #75441]

Language: English

Original publication: Chicago, IL: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1940

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75441

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TERROR OUT OF THE PAST ***

Terror out of the Past

By Raymond Z. Gallun

Perry Wilcox descends into the earth to solve
the secret of an incredibly ancient civilization.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories March 1940.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"Rod!" Perry Wilcox shouted above the sound of bracewires singing in the slipstream: "In the name of Mathuselah! Look! there!"

Doctor Roderick Murgatroyd's shrewd old eyes probed swiftly along the line of Perry's pointing arm. For a moment he couldn't get it at all—couldn't see what hundreds of airmen, flying over this place during the past three or four decades, had missed entirely. But then, as Perry circled the plane around in a steep bank, it came over the old adventurer-scientist gradually.

There was a humping configuration of those hills down there—faint in outline as an old footprint in a rainwashed garden. It couldn't have been noticed from the ground in a million years, and even from this altitude it was as vague in outline as the memory of a dream.

The hills below looked like a gigantic Indian Mound, a mile in extent, and perfectly though dimly triangular. Regularly placed along its straight sides, were humps—foggy nodules—suggesting somehow the ruins of massive turrets, lying buried beneath layer on layer of repeated glacial silt.

Rod Murgatroyd began to cuss, half to relieve his feelings and half as though to drive away the possibility that he and Perry were mistaken.

"By the nine gods!" he roared back through the propstream. "It's a fortress, Perry! You can almost see the battlements! But who in the name of the Cyclops could have built it? And when? And what in heck are we gonna do about it, Perry?..." Murgatroyd's voice was almost a whine of eagerness at the end.

Perry Wilcox was grinning broadly. "Do?" he returned, knowing that Rod had already passed the obvious answer and was planning far ahead. "What are you asking me that for? It ain't much of a riddle, is it?" He swung the plane into the wind, and began the glide toward Schroeder's hayfield.

Forty-eight hours afterwards, behind a high board fence, erected for secrecy—that is, as much secrecy as they could hope to achieve in surroundings that knew them well—the small crew they had assembled was busy. A heavy diesel motor pounded steadily, driving a rotary drill that was digging deep into the side of a low knoll.

For weeks the work went on. Five separate shafts were sunk into the ground, the first four of them reaching down to the solid stratum of fire rock, below the lowest and oldest fossil levels. From the depths of those first four shafts the drill brought up pieces of stone, some of which had angular corners, like carven blocks. And there were great lumps of rust too, that might have been reenforcing bars of steel. Thus the mystery deepened, taking on qualities of nervous unrest and expectancy.

And then, far down in the fifth shaft, the spinning diamond points of the drill snarled into a new medium. An hour later, in the summer dusk, Roderick Murgatroyd stood shifting a few ounces of muck, brought up from the excavation, back and forth between his palms. Most of it was grey volcanic stuff, but mingled with it were long shreds of metal, scored out by the drillpoints. The metal was as soft and pliable as lead, but it possessed a very considerable tensile strength. Tests had already proved that it was lead, alloyed with certain rare-earth elements, probably to increase its toughness, and to render it immune to the ravages of time.

"It's true, Perry," Murgatroyd said very quietly to the younger man beside him. "Truer than we could have quite understood before. Metal down there shows that. A carefully prepared alloy, such as only a very well developed metallurgical science could have produced. A layer, or a shell. Or maybe just a block. We don't know yet.

"Yes, we're on the right trail, Perry, even if it does look like a wild trail! Only yesterday the drill brought up fossils of an undisturbed stratum belonging to the Jurassic Period, the Age of Reptiles many millions of years ago! That means, Perry—" and the old Scotch-American's voice was still more vibrant and tense—"that means that this lead alloy was made and put into place before—long before—the time of the dinosaurs. In fact, if we are to judge from the stratum immediately surrounding the metal, it is contemporary with the Carboniferous Era or Coal Period. That's the point, Perry. There weren't any men on this planet at that time. And there weren't going to be any men for ages and ages. At least not Earth men...."

Perry Wilcox nodded, controlling his own taut nerves. They were right at the edge of a staggering discovery, he was sure. It might break any minute, now, or any hour. The drill machinery still vibrated, boring into that mass of metal deep in the ground. The pumps, sucking seepage water out of the excavation, still throbbed. The two men's ears were tuned to the sound of the machinery. Any shift or change in the regular beat of the drill would have a story to tell. Thus they waited, as night began to fall, slowly but surely.

They hadn't heard the soft purr of an expensive automobile on the roadway beyond the fence, at the foot of the slope. But now the sounds of a brief, angry argument at the gate, some hundred yards away, drew their startled, nervous attention. With so much that was unknown and unhintable pending, this was hardly the time to receive visitors of any kind, certainly not hostile visitors with ideas of their own.

Uneasily, Wilcox and Murgatroyd turned to face a group of people hurrying toward them across the intervening area of the fenced enclosure. One was a trusted workman, left to guard the gate. But the others—there were four men and a girl—had been able to overrule the guard's refusal to admit them.

Of the four men, three were burly, massive specimens with the scars of many combats marking their coarse features. The fourth was slender and bent, maybe fifty. His head was entirely bald, his cheeks had withered lines in them, and his squinted piggish eyes held a look of secretive, hungry searching.

Murgatroyd and Wilcox had no trouble recognizing this uninvited guest, who clearly was the master mind of the intruding group. All the world knew Lyman Kerwin, whose colossal fortune had thrust dominance-seeking tentacles into most of the key industries of America. Path of Progress, Rod's and Perry's outfit, had tangled with him once. They'd taken newsreel pictures of the collapse of one of the gigantic but poorly constructed power and irrigation dams which he had built in one of the western states. Hundreds of people had been killed, and thousands had been rendered homeless by a disaster traceable to materials and workmanship far less costly than specified. Only Kerwin's money, fixing a corrupt court, had enabled him to escape the consequences of criminal misrepresentation.

Seeing Kerwin, and the inquiring speculative glances he cast about the enclosure, Doctor Murgatroyd's pointed red face suddenly darkened with fury, chagrin, and something like a nameless, nervous panic.

"Thunder of Jupiter!" he whispered hoarsely. "That polecat would have to barge in now—now, of all times! We might have known it, Perry! But you just wait till I sail into him! The dirty—"

Perry silenced the old scientist with a poke in the ribs. "You keep still," he ordered. "Just make believe you're bossing the drill crew."

The young man advanced slowly a few steps toward the intruders. He didn't grin or scowl. He just kept his face straight, ready to meet Kerwin in whatever manner the latter might ask for by his actions or words. Perry did notice the girl in the party, though—briefly. She was walking beside Kerwin. Chestnut curls peeped from beneath an odd little hat. There was a sprinkling of freckles across her tanned, earnest face. Perry knew her slightly. She was Lyssa Arthurs, better known as Troubles, reporter for a paper in the neighboring town of Brenton. Cute, plucky kid, but she seemed a little self-conscious now. And evidently she had strange tastes in company. Perry dismissed her presence with a curt nod that could hardly have been called a greeting.

When he spoke, Kerwin didn't allow a lot of room for doubt as to his attitude, in spite of the veiled terms he used.

"Hello, Wilcox!" he hailed volubly in a rich voice that was in sharp contrast with his cadaverous appearance. "I thought I'd call, since you and the Professor are always doing such interesting things. What's up? Boring for oil or something?"

Perry kept silent, waiting for Kerwin to talk a little more.

"You might as well answer my question, Wilcox," the financier urged. "I'll find out anyway, you know."

"Maybe they're diggin' a road down to China, Chief," one of Kerwin's bodyguards offered with dry and slightly sinister humor. "Or a nice, deep hole to bury themselves in."

Before Perry could speak there was an interruption. The sound of the drill nearby, busy in the dusk, changed abruptly. There was a grating, hollow noise from far underground. Then the whine of machinery racing without resistance. Out of the pipe which ejected the muck and chipped stone and metal shreds brought up from the drilling, there came a gurgling puff, as of air trapped in a subterranean cavern, and under slightly higher pressure than that of the surface, being suddenly released from confinement.

Workmen leaped to throw out the clutch of the big diesel. Old Rod Murgatroyd began to swear excitedly, for it was clear what had happened. The drill had broken through the metal at last. It had reached a hollow space down there. A room, a chamber, perhaps, which the shell of lead alloy was meant to protect.

Perry Wilcox felt his pulses racing wildly. The presence of Kerwin could not spoil his sense of victory. In the evening air around him there was suddenly a faint, musty odor, like that of an old cellar, but with a distinctive quality all its own.

Perry saw the workmen step back from the machinery, as if they didn't know quite what to do or say. And he could tell, too, that the sudden cessation of movement, and that noisome smell, indescribably suggestive of a time that was dead for incredible eons, had had its effect on Lyman Kerwin. Kerwin's lips dangled loosely, and his eyes had lost a lot of their squint. His face was sweaty, and paler than usual.

"You asked what was up, Kerwin," Perry growled at last. "Well, so far we've tried to keep our work here dark so we could get the first investigations completed without interference. But I guess there's no use to stall. You said you'd find out anyway, and you're right—whatever good that'll do you. I think everybody'll get the story in a few days, or even hours. I suppose somebody tipped you off about what we were doing—somebody who lives around here." Perry grinned crookedly at the girl, Lyssa Arthurs, as he made this half accusation.

"But it doesn't matter," he went on. "You saw what just happened, Kerwin. We've evidently reached something with the drill. I don't know what—yet. But it's terribly old, Kerwin. And get this—there's metal down there—a perfectly balanced alloy as old as the Carboniferous fossils! Yes, it's pretty big, Kerwin! And liable to be—dangerous! Why, hell, even that cellar stench that came up from down there might actually be poisonous! It might contain microscopic spores that, in contact with human lungs, could grow and kill. Spores from the past, Kerwin. Sealed up and kept alive through the ages. Of course it's a thin possibility, but who can say? Do you still want to hang around, Kerwin?"

The latter's retreat was just a trifle too quick for good poise, and the sudden fury of his expression wasn't good form either.

"Rot, Wilcox!" he half stammered and half roared as he backed away. "You're talking rot!"

Perry could almost feel sorry for him at that moment. Full of hypochondriac fear, inspired by nothing but the slenderest of chances, Kerwin was trying to mask his cowardice by a show of scorn.

But Perry could feel sorrier for Lyssa Arthurs. Troubles, she was called. And she looked regular, all right.... But why was she hanging around with Kerwin?

Now Kerwin made a nervous, jerking sign to his henchmen.

"Come on, boys," he said. "We might as well leave these fools to their silly grubbing."

Even the three pug-uglies looked a bit sheepish at the hasty departure their boss led them into.

Workmen were grinning and chuckling as Perry turned about, and old Rod Murgatroyd's red face was alight with amusement and satisfaction.

"You sure told that ninny where to dump himself, pal," he complimented, his blue eyes seeming to twinkle even in the dusk.

Perry's answering smile was brief. He glanced toward the fence, from beyond which came the sounds of Kerwin's car speeding away along the concrete road.

"Only," Murgatroyd added, sobering, "I don't think we're through with our playmate yet, Perry. You've got him doubly sore at us now, for making him ridiculous. And he's not so scared that he won't do his damnedest to get even—if nothing else. And—glory but it would be tough to have him mixing in with something really colossal, wouldn't it? What we've got here could be good for all humanity—it could be neutral, or it could be bad. We don't know. But good or bad, depend on Kerwin to make it the latter, if he gets the chance!"

Perry shrugged ruefully. "Yeah," he said. "That means we've got to work quick, Rod. One of us has got to go down there into the bore on a cable—find out just what we're up against in that quarter. Then there'll still be time to see if we can get digging options on the surrounding country—if it turns out to be advisable. Kerwin can't very well beat us to that, anyway. Now who'll it be that goes down there first?"

Perry Wilcox drew a nickel from his pocket. He flipped it dexterously into the air, caught it and slapped it onto the back of his other hand.

"Buffalo!" old Rod called.

Perry raised his palm to reveal a shiny Indian head. "I win," he remarked, grinning.

CHAPTER II

Mystery Below Ground

Lights were snapped on in the gathering darkness. Long lengths of drill-shaft were pulled out of the boring, whose dark maw hid the unknown.

Perry put on a coverall garment of rubberized silk. Over his face he fitted an oxygen mask, and to his shoulders he attached several oxygen bottles. The air blow, after so many countless ages of stagnation, would probably be unbreathable. And though Perry had meant merely to unnerve Kerwin when he had mentioned the possibility of some kind of contamination, one could not quite be sure. It was best to have one's body encased in a sealed garment.

When he had completed his preparations, there was even a small toolkit at his hip. Attached to an elbow there was a powerful electric lamp, fitted with a long cord by means of which it could draw power from the generator here on the surface. And there was a small phone incorporated into his headgear. With the phone, like a subsea diver, he could maintain communication with Rod and the rest of the crew here above ground. And of course he had his motion picture camera—strapped across his chest.

With a stout steel cable fastened under his armpits, Perry clambered over the edge of the boring, and was lowered below. The trip down—nearly three hundred feet—was uneventful. The stillness in the narrow shaft, scarcely wider than his shoulders, deepened with the depth of his descent. There was only the scraping of his kit against the rough walls, and the sleepy trickle of seepage water.

He reached the punctured metal barrier at last, and passed through it. Two feet thick, the shell was. A moment later his feet touched a solid floor, wet with the water that had dribbled down through the opening.

"I'm here, Rod," Perry called into the phone. "At the bottom."

It was a moment before the older man answered, and in this interval Perry heard disquieting sounds from the phones over his ears—sounds from the surface, which seemed so infinitely far away to him now. Automobile motors racing. Voices in much larger numbers than those of the small drill crew. And to Perry Wilcox came a conviction of pending trouble.

Then Murgatroyd spoke: "We've got company up here, Perry," he said, a note of anxiety in his tone. "A lot of curious people from Brenton. Sight-seers rushing to a fire, so to speak. Kerwin couldn't think of anything dirtier to do to gum up the works for us, so he spread the news around that something was up out here. Naturally I've got a whole crowd on my hands. We're trying to keep 'em outside the fence. Of course they ought to be harmless enough, really; but damn it, I wish they'd go someplace else! What do you see down there?"

Perry had his electric lamp blazing at full now. On his chest, his camera, driven by a little spring motor, was turning. And he was staring about him intently, to grasp the character of his surroundings. He began to talk—to describe what he saw and felt.

"I'm in a passage, Rod," he said. "It slants down. Its alloy walls are all bent and crumpled. It must have been the movement of the ground through the ages that did that. Gosh, Rod, but you can feel the length of eternity here! It's written in these tunnel walls, Rod. The way they're bent and rebent. I can understand now why they were made of something tough and pliable, like this lead alloy. It's twisted everywhere, but unbroken. They—whoever built this place—must have known pretty well what they were doing—whatever their purpose was...."

Perry advanced slowly down the slope of the tunnel, cautiously drawing his descent cable and his telephone and electric cords after him.

He reached a room of heroic dimensions, walled with the same grey alloy as the tunnel. The Stygian gloom that obscured it parted before the intense white path of his lamp.

There were tall metal boxes, like packing cases for heavy machinery, arranged in rows on the buckled and humped pavement of the chamber—metal boxes, each with a closed and perhaps hermetically sealed door. And near the farther wall was a machine—an engine or something—that displayed a gigantic, dusty fly-wheel. The walls, at a head-high level, were covered with something crystalline, like glass; though where it had bent it had bent like metal—not shattering as a brittle substance would have done. Behind those crystal panes were compartments, housing queer, complicated devices. They looked a little like astronomical or surveying instruments, Perry thought. Were they perhaps instruments for the navigation of interplanetary or interstellar space?

Seeing charts traced on the walls above the compartments that protected this array of apparatus—charts dotted with winking, diamond-bright bits of glass, which must represent scattered suns of the void—he was half sure that his guess was right. The charts were marked with countless interlocking lines and circles, which might be the geometric equivalent of latitude and longitude, applied not to the navigation of the ocean, but to the limitless, three-dimensional reaches of the cosmos.

This much Perry Wilcox was able to note, before his eager inspection was interrupted. In the heavy stillness there was a rustling whisper, which penetrated easily the thin, rubberized fabric of his hoodlike mask. The sound swiftly built itself up into a regular, soft rhythm. Perry spoke a few warning words about this development into his phone, and described briefly the room he was in. Meanwhile he stared ahead, ready in every taut nerve and muscle to leap out of danger, yet eager to see what it was that caused the disturbance.

His lamp beam focused on the engine near the opposite wall. Its fly-wheel was turning, maybe after half a billion years of motionless waiting in this sealed vault. But why? How?

Perry bounced back a step, icy fingers of dread tickling his flesh. "On your marks up there, Rod," he said tensely into his phone. "I can't tell what kind of a show it is I've started; but you may have to yank me up in a hurry!"

The engine was whizzing now, ancient dust spraying from its fly-wheel. For a few seconds there were no more developments, except that Perry noticed the decorative frieze around the high, shadowy ceiling. Human faces carved in the metal. They smiled down on the young man mysteriously.

Then there was a soft clank in the far distance, muffled apparently by the turn of many passages, and echoed back and forth by crumpled, vaulted ceilings and walls. The sound might have been that of a door opening, or the rattling of chains. Perry was beginning to feel very much like beating a hasty retreat; but he waited a trifle longer.

There came, then, a ponderous, soft thudding, growing nearer. It wasn't till the impression of the sound clicked into a groove in his mind, establishing itself as identical with the regular thud-thud of great, running, elastic-shod feet, entirely inhuman in their note, that he concluded that discretion was the better part of valor.

He had farther to return than he realized. And his electric and telephone cords, his hoist cable, hampered him.

"Draw in the slack of my rig," he shouted into his phone. "And for Pete's sake, if you love me, set the hoist winch going when I tell you!"

He got beneath the bore that penetrated the tunnel roof okay. But the thudding was catching up on him fast. "Up!" he yelled. "Quick!"

It seemed a century before he felt the reassuring tug of the cable under his arms. He had a chance to look back once into the Stygian darkness that concealed a reawakening and incredible ancientness. There a little red light wavered and hurtled nearer.

Perry's feet left the metal pavement. He heard a hiss, like escaping steam, just as he was drawn up into the narrow bore. Something clanked and scraped beneath him, like claws raking at his retreat. And the hissing continued.

He thought he could relax then, a little. But as he was pulled farther up the bore he felt heat burning through his rubberized silk coverall. It was just a harmless warmth at first, but it increased to a burning sensation about his legs. It made him dizzy and sick, and clouded his brain.

He heard Rod Murgatroyd yelling at him through the phone: "What's the matter, Perry? What's up?" And behind the voice of his friend there was the murmur of many other voices. The sightseers from Brenton. They didn't have any business being there; but if anything happened—if they got hurt—it was his and Rod's fault. Even though Kerwin, or someone under Kerwin's orders, had tipped them off for mere malice.

"Back!" Perry yelled. "Order everybody back! When you pull me up, Rod, don't touch me without gloves! And breathe cautiously. Gas, I think. Some kind of corrosive gas...."

The rest, for a while, was like a bad dream to Wilcox. He became aware of stars overhead, and of wind. He was up in the open air once more. Nearby, Herkett, one of the drill crew, was swearing at the inquisitive onlookers, trying to send them on their way. Some were retreating. Others, held by a kind of fascination, still crowded forward against the fence, and met Herkett's blasphemous pleas with boos, or ignored them with a kind of self-conscious indifference.

Perry was sick with that intense, burning pain in his right leg. To keep his senses was a struggle. He heard noises from within the Earth—like ragged drumbeats that made the ground shake. Something unknown, crescendoing on to a preplanned purpose. Hands touched him—Rod's hands, covered with thick gloves. Car headlights flared all around in the night, mingling confusingly with the chaos of voices. Perry's rubber-silk outer garment was crumbling away from him like rotten rags. It had been eaten by a virulently active gaseous chemical, all right. Like combustion, the activity had evolved heat. He was still alive only because he was wearing an oxygen mask.

He tried to stand, clinging to Rod's shoulders; but the burnt leg, which might still put him in danger of death by an unknown chemical poison, would not bear his weight. He sank down to one knee while Rod tore the remnants of rotted rubber and cloth from his leg, and smeared an unguent on the ragged, blistered injury.

"I'll get him to a doctor," someone was saying from very close by. "You can't tell. That's apt to be very dangerous. A physician will know better what to do."

It wasn't till then that Perry saw who it was that was holding the first aid kit. Lyssa Arthurs, the girl who had been with Kerwin and his boys. But she'd come back, somehow. Looking up into the confusing medley of light and shadow, Perry saw her curly chestnut hair blowing in the wind. She looked a little bedraggled, and her lips were pursed very tight.

"Okay!" old Rod snapped, for this moment might involve the question of life and death for his friend, and there was no time to question the connections of this girl, who had been helpful. "Come on, you!" he added, grasping Perry's arm. "You're out of action for a while!"

Perry Wilcox was too dazed to think of all the reasons why he didn't want to be taken away from the scene of action now, and why he didn't want to go with anyone associated with Lyman Kerwin. So his stubborn protests were mostly those of a hard man of action, clinging obstinately to the habit of wanting to be where things were happening.

"Can't leave, Rod!" he grumbled like a great obstinate, drunken child. "Everybody's in danger of—God knows what. Gotta stay with you, Rod...." His words were muffled by his mask.

A moment Murgatroyd hesitated, then his balled fist shot out and caught Perry on the chin with stunning force.

What he'd seen of Troubles Arthurs in the last few seconds made the old scientist like her a lot. But since she was tied up with Kerwin someway, he couldn't trust her entirely with the custody of his pal. So he said:

"Thanks, kid. Otto, here, will go along to help."

Almost as an afterthought, Rod unsnapped the motion picture camera from Perry's chest. Its record of a mystery would be safer in his keeping.

Otto, one of the drill crew, a great, blond bear of a man, picked Perry up and followed the girl through the throng to her car. In a moment it was speeding away toward Brenton.

But it hadn't gone far before the sounds of a fresh disturbance issued from the enclosure it had recently quitted. To the thudding from beneath the Earth, was added a droning note, faint but infinitely far-reaching. It was like the drone of a solitary electric generator in a deserted powerhouse at night. And there was a puffing noise from the direction of the enclosure. Voices waxed to screams. First of plain terror; then some of them changed to yelps of agony.

The reviving Perry half rose in the back seat of the speeding car. Then Otto, with all the good intentions in the world followed Murgatroyd's original example, hit Perry on the chin, and told the frightened girl up ahead to drive faster.

Meanwhile, safe in a hotel room in Brenton, a man sat at a writing table and waited. Lyman Kerwin had just received a phone call. One couldn't tell, yet, what was happening. But Kerwin's mind was quick and cold and ruthless. And somewhere in all this he saw a lot to his advantage—if he played his cards right.

CHAPTER III

A War Against Machines

It was many hours later before the doctors at the Brenton hospital knew that Wilcox was out of danger. The gas that had burnt him was a little like mustard gas in its action, though more virulent; and it had narcotic properties that could function through a burn. With the danger from poison past, the injury was small.

But it was still more hours before Wilcox came out of the daze that had slipped over him. The immediate cause of his awakening from heavy slumber, was the roar of a squadron of airplanes, passing over the hospital roof.

He sat up dizzily. In the distance he could hear a muted mutter and clank. Then a series of heavy explosions. He looked about, noticing only subconsciously that he was in a hospital ward. His gaze settled immediately on the nearest window. Weakly he climbed out of bed and limped and staggered toward it.

The view extended for miles to the north, across the little city, and across the hills and woods and fields beyond. Everything he could see had the look of a place in close proximity to the no-man's-land of a great war. Lorries, loaded with troops, were moving in the streets. Tanks roared. Supply trucks, most of them pulling guns, moved in a ragged stream.

Perry's face went haggard and drawn as he looked for the airplanes he had heard. Far up, he saw three. Huge bombers in the clear air. Clusters of black specks trailed down from them—bombs released from the racks. And in the hills beneath there were geysers of flying earth, followed by dull concussions.

Then unseen, hurtling vengeance touched each of the planes in succession. From somewhere in the sylvan terrain beneath, there were three faint pops. A second later, one of the bombers dissolved into a silvery cloud—duralumin and steel. It was the same with the other two planes. They fell apart as though all the cohesive force of the metals from which they were made was suddenly disrupted. The men aboard them hadn't a chance.

Perry Wilcox gulped painfully as his eyes searched the wooded hills, trying to orient things so that he could tell just where Murgatroyd's and his fenced enclosure had been. He couldn't see the fence. It was too far off and was hidden by the trees. But he did see a ragged line of peculiar upjutting earthworks. It appeared to follow the contour of the mounted mystery that he had first observed from the air. Shells from man-made cannon splashed against it.

Just for a moment a gleaming colossus reared its hunched bulk behind the barrier. It glistened in the late afternoon sunshine as it seemed to take a look about; then like a lizard retreating into its hole, it slid back, from view. But behind it there were sounds like the working of great forges. Columns of smoke puffed up, dyed with the red of molten metal.

His attention was attracted to something else. Beyond the partly raised window, and across the street, he could hear a radio in one of the houses there. He bent forward tautly, straining his ears to listen. The voice was unpleasantly familiar:

"The latest newsflashes give us little hope. Our attacking forces are being beaten back, or destroyed. But we have great resources. We must be brave. The enemy is a strange one. We must amass more men, conscript money for war materials. Billions of dollars. That is our hope, our one chance. We must have a strong central government. That means the absolute leadership of one man. Obedience must be the key. My whole resources are at the disposal of the nation. We will triumph! We must! The Murgatroyd-Wilcox Horror will thus be destroyed. Be strong, friends. Be strong. That is all for now...."

Before the brief, artfully worded speech was half delivered, Perry Wilcox knew a good deal of what was spoken between its treacherous lines. The rich, semi-hysterical voice, seemingly overflowing with holy patriotism, had been unmistakable. Lyman Kerwin. But before Perry had time quite to digest this knowledge, someone called from behind him:

"Hey, fella, you're supposed to be in bed!"

Perry swung about, startled, forgetful of his injured leg. He confronted cool dark eyes with a quiet, half smiling challenge in them. It was Lyssa Arthurs again. Perry was glad to see her for a second, then he remembered.

"Well, what do you want?" he blurted sullenly.

"I've signed up for emergency work, and I was put in charge of this ward," she responded frankly, making a plain effort to avoid a painful clash of personalities.

But Wilcox was in no mood to take the hint. "Yeah?" he grunted. "Well, I seem to remember that it was you who brought me here to the hospital. For that, thanks! Otherwise, why don't you go hang around Kerwin some more? He's ambitious and capable! He can do things for an up and coming newspaper woman like you! Why I just heard him make the nicest, smuggest little speech you ever could imagine—over the radio. All about conscripting more money and men, and putting the country under the absolute control of one leader—himself, of course—to fight what he calls the Murgatroyd-Wilcox Horror. But I can see through him as though he was glass! He controls most of the munitions plants on the continent. The money'll go to him!

"But that's penny-pickings! He talks about absolute obedience. Sure! With himself as boss! Kerwin talks smooth. There's only one thing I can't understand about him. He's as yellow as a hyena. How he can find the nerve to talk fight now, is more than I can see!"

The girl regarded Perry coolly, after he had finished. "I'll be kinder than you've been to me, Mr. Wilcox," she said at last. "It's the privilege of all sincere science to explore the unknown. You and Mr. Murgatroyd did just that when you dug into those hills. You had no idea what would happen. But the result is your responsibility. As for my being with Kerwin—it's not your business, of course, but I may not have enjoyed that myself. It happens he owns most of the Brenton Herald, for which I work. He asked me to come along with him to visit the site of your excavations, and I couldn't very well refuse. It happens too, that I didn't tell him that you were digging there, in case you're accusing me of that. But there are plenty of sources from which he could have gotten information to arouse his curiosity. You are well known, and people are curious. But of course all this petty explanation of mine can't mean much now."

Perry bit his lip, feeling briefly sorry that he'd openly connected Lyssa Arthurs with the Kerwin outfit. But he was by no means ready to trust her either.

The rumble of shells, exploding miles off, beat into his mind. There was a mysterious hiss, followed by the screams of dying men. Perry winced. It was logical of course that soldiers should be sent to attack whatever it was out there; but he was sure that Kerwin must have some special knowledge about the enigma up his sleeve, or else he'd never have the guts to be delivering radio lectures that didn't say anything about running away.

"I don't know enough!" he groaned aloud. "I was put out of action too quick to see just what took place at the excavation. I can't judge—"

Suddenly he grasped the girl by the shoulders. "Where's Murgatroyd?" he grated. "Does anybody know?"

Troubles Arthurs stayed cool, in spite of his fury. "Why yes," she said. "He's here." She nodded toward a hospital bed against the wall.

Perry staggered toward the inert form which lay there. Rod, his head swathed in bandages, was completely unrecognizable. His features were covered.

"Gas, same as hit me?" Wilcox asked the girl.

"No," she whispered. "Some kind of beam of concentrated heat waves. It's his eyes, mostly."

"How long was he out there?" Perry questioned. "What I mean is, how long did he stay in action before he got hurt?"

"About two hours, I think," the girl responded. "He helped with the first civilian wounded, managing to stay clear of the gas himself. There was an explosion afterward. And out of the hole blown in the ground the machines—they're like strange robots—began to emerge. That was at ten o'clock the night before last. Mr. Murgatroyd was brought in at eleven o'clock, so he must have been active for half an hour after the explosion."

Perry had heard enough. He bent over the bed of his friend and touched his shoulder. "Hey, Rod!" he called. "Hey, this is Perry! Wake up, you old son-of-a-gun!" Perry's vision was misted.

Murgatroyd groaned and stirred. When he spoke, however, he seemed lucid, his mind clearing after the long siege of unconsciousness, caused by his head injury. "Hello, fella," he muttered, turning his face toward the sound of Perry's voice as though trying to peer through the bandages that covered his damaged eyes.

"Rod," the young man whispered. "I want you to concentrate—try to remember. We've got a big job that's our personal concern. But it's more than that. It's a danger concerning the whole country—maybe the whole world. Just what kind of an enemy is out there, Rod? Those robots. What are they? Is anybody controlling them? Or do they think for themselves? Do you know anything about them, Rod? Anything at all?"

The old Scotch-American's lips moved, almost hidden in the swathing of cloth. "I guess it should—be all right," he said at last. "I guess it's kind of—funny. Machines—think? Some might, but these—don't. They can do things—perfectly. Like a machine that rifles a gun barrel or predicts the tides. They're made that way. But these robots are just refined machines—acting almost human, sure! They'd almost fool you.

"They see, they hear—in a way. They come toward you, aiming and firing explosive slugs, or sending out beams of concentrated heat. But we stopped a few of those robots with shells. Just adding-machine stuff inside, Perry. Cams and rods and wires, like our inventors would build, only a lot more wonderful and complicated. No soul could be in that, Perry. No real consciousness. No ambition....

"Professor Vince had the wrecks hauled off—copped them for examination. I guess he knows a lot now, Perry. He tried to talk me into giving him your camera, with the pictures you took down in the bore, too, Perry. But I sent the camera to the rear with one of our men....

"As for the robots, they may be under some kind of centralized radio control, of course. But even that can't be—real brains. It hasn't the judgment. Any little trick, like stepping out of the path of an automaton chasing you, and staying perfectly still, fools 'em. They go right on past you. And you can pull the same stunt again and again. But they're still hellish."

Old Rod paused, panting with the effort of his long explanation. Then he went on: "So that means—there's nobody at the helm, Perry. The whole business just goes on by itself. And it is pretty awe inspiring and wonderful at that—so damned wonderful you'd want to cheer, if it wasn't so deadly—when a bunch of men makes an attack against it. The thing to do is not to attack, anyway for a few days. We'd learn more, then. Those robots are guardians of some kind, Perry. It's a hunch of mine...."

Suddenly the old man half rose in the bed, as if the expressing of his own thoughts had startled him. "That's the whole crazy irony of the situation, Perry!" he cried. "Men out there, dying—and on the other side—potential progress, inspiration, miracles! The key to a new era! We've got to do something—Perry—now!"

For a second Roderick Murgatroyd looked like a magnificent, blinded seer. Then he dropped back onto the bed, fainting into a coma of fatigue. Perry touched the old man's hand with a brief pressure of comradeship.

But at the same moment Wilcox was thinking fast to correlate his new information. Rod had spoken of Professor Vince. Vince, a shy, moon-faced little man, was a noted professor of physics at Kerwin University. Vince, then, was one of Lyman Kerwin's stooges. What Vince learned from examining the wrecked automatons, Kerwin would promptly find out. Perry was sure he understood the setup at last.

Kerwin knew, somehow, that what he called the Murgatroyd-Wilcox Horror was of little danger to himself, if he kept out of the battle zone! He was only using it as a means to his own ends. Power. Complete control of the nation. Free access to the inventions this marvelous archeological discovery might reveal!

It was all too clear.

Instantly Perry's plan was formulated. His injury was really superficial, now that the effect of the poison was gone. Exertion would work the stiffness out of his leg. But he glanced in frustrated exasperation at the pajamas he was wearing. A second later he was tugging at the door of the closet in the corner of the ward.

"Doggone! Where's my rig?" he was grumbling, as he clawed at the piled contents of the closet—mostly clothing of the wounded that had not been damaged by corrosive gas or heat.

He found his oxygen mask and tanks at last. Quite indiscriminately he seized a shirt and a pair of trousers, and yanked them on over his pajamas. Shoes were similarly selected and donned. Then he hurried toward the door of the room.

Lyssa Arthurs barred his way here, her lips firm though smiling. Her dark eyes had a roguish glint that admired and challenged. She looked like a courageous small boy standing up for his rights, that way, Perry thought with a strange pang.

"I'm responsible for the patients in this ward," she said pertly. "Where do you think you're going, Mister?"

Perry shoved her unceremoniously aside. "Places," he grunted almost good-humoredly. "You said before that I had responsibilities."

He rushed down the hall. In thirty seconds he was out in the street, with the bustle of behind-the-lines activity around him. He dodged ahead of trucks and tanks on his way to the river.

Once, from a radio in a house he passed, he heard the rich, high voice of Lyman Kerwin, exhorting, commanding, praising himself in subtle terms, using fear as a means to power:

"All my resources are at the disposal of the nation to combat the Murgatroyd-Wilcox Horror. The response has been good to our appeal for money. But it must be better. Better! We are pitted against something incredible—something that possesses many unknown weapons. The women and children of America must be protected...."

Perry Wilcox growled. And almost simultaneously a youth hurled a rock at him, shouting: "There he is! There's Wilcox, one of the two mugs who started all the trouble!"

A gang was after Perry then, pelting stones; and he knew that Kerwin's propaganda had already achieved a very considerable success.

But he didn't stop to argue. He just ran on, limping a little. He reached the powerhouse dam. There he paused briefly to don his oxygen mask and tanks. Then he leaped into the swirling water, and sank into its concealing depths. He didn't try really to swim. He made only a few strokes to keep himself righted, and safely beneath the surface. The current was swift, and it flowed in the proper direction. He had air to breathe. There was nothing much to do but wait.

Dusk began to settle. Perry heard guns on the banks of the stream, and shouts and cries, as he drifted invisible through the human battle lines. Presently, looking through the goggles of his air-tight oxygen mask, he saw light around him, then darkness, then light again. It was the regular play of a great searchbeam from up there on the hills. And there were noises too, now loud and near. At least he'd come this far without being detected.

Clinging to a rock of the river bottom, he waited a little till it got darker. Then, still being careful to keep well beneath the surface of the water, he swam toward the shore.

He came up in the reeds at the river's edge, and peered cautiously toward the low bluffs. He had to duck his head again, before he saw anything but humping, moving shapes, and part of a great, half-restored battlement; for the search beam, swinging majestically and regularly back and forth, swept blindingly toward him.

But there were regular intervals between each successive blaze of light; and these allowed him to observe. Little, gleaming robots, walking like human beings on broad, elastic-shod feet, and provided with metal arms, were rebuilding the battlemented wall with limestone quarried from the hillside. They worked with perfect efficiency, raising blocks into place, and applying a kind of mortar with spatulate-ended arms. But their movements for each operation were always identical, betraying not intellect but standardized mechanical perfection.

And it was the same with the other machines and weapons. A gun—it didn't look so very different from a familiar artillery piece, except for its complex breech-loading mechanism, fired intermittently, without any crew to operate it. Watching, Perry concluded that its sighting and firing apparatus must be stimulated by certain sounds, movements, and lights, out there where the soldiers were entrenched. For when he heard a shout from the rear, or saw a cannon flash, or troops advancing from the trenches, there was always a volley of small, screaming shells, the latter directed with a precise, cold accuracy, that must depend on the spiritless exactness of instruments. And the result was massacre.

Heat beam projectors, lensed boxes in their webwork supports, seemed to operate under the same kinds of stimuli, turning their faint, barely visible spears of heatwaves toward sudden light, noise, or movement. Searchlights swept the sky, probably drawn by motor sounds. And if they located a plane, the movement of its light-enveloped form was enough to attract the high-angling muzzles of slender guns that fired with soft pops, but reduced duralumin to powder. The aiming was always perfect.

When the search beam was turned away from him, Perry got cautiously out of the water and dashed for the nearest bush. He crouched behind it, as the beam swept past him like a great eye. Then higher, to another bush. And so he advanced. Once, because he stumbled, he was caught in the open; but he threw himself flat and waited, cursing his clumsiness. But the blazing glare passed him, and no blasting death followed. Perhaps camera eyes had photographed his inert form; but mechanical, adding-machine brains had not enough reasoning powers to recognize him as an interloper, as long as he did not move. Perry breathed with relief, and continued his intermittent climb at each brief moment of darkness.

Near the top, however, it didn't look so simple. He was hiding in a clump of tall weeds, face to face with those guns—and nobody knew what other deadly devices. He was stumped as to how he should try to advance further. Make a rush? There was a pretty good chance of getting past the guns that way, as far as he could tell by visual inspection; but surely there'd be something there, in the narrow gaps between the guns—something to kill him, or at least detect his presence! It made his flesh crawl; but need gave his wits a sharper edge. He had to get through, somehow!

He searched the line of fantastic, flame-spewing weapons avidly. A hundred yards away there was a small break in it, where an aerial bomb, dropped by one of the planes, had struck. The crater still smoked with the vapors of the explosive. If there was any detecting device there, any taut-stretched wire, or anything that would bring some death machine into play at his accidental touch, it would be shattered, now, and still unrepaired.

Scrambling from bush to bush during intervals of darkness, as before, he got to the break in the line, and through it safely. Thus, he looked at last over the hilltops, and down into the area enclosed by that great, mounded rectangle.

It was a queer, contrasting scene. Familiar farm buildings stood out in the weird illumination. But everywhere there were mounds of earth and deep pits. From some of the latter, red-lit smoke trailed up toward the stars. Massive things, not unlike army tanks, moved in circles, as if pacing beats, and there was the muffled clang of what could be buried factories. The old fortress had come to life once more, resurrecting itself from its bed of Carboniferous slumber. It was a camp, bristling with strange armaments and bustling with activity.

CHAPTER IV

Into the Robot's Lair

Perry lay prone in the high grass. He was panting and tired, and he felt a little sick again. He knew that whatever chances he had of accomplishing any good here, would be diminished if he waited. There were dozens of ways of getting uselessly killed. So far he hadn't encountered any of that corrosive gas, but hisses, and distant human screams from the flats along the river, told him that it was being used. And though he had his oxygen mask, his clothing and skin could be eaten away and his blood poisoned. Two bombers burst overhead, their powdered wreckage silvery in paths of searchlights. Perry knew he might even be destroyed by the weapons of his own countrymen.

Wilcox slipped stealthily past the great robot gun.

So his gaze settled feverishly on the nearest opening in the ground. It wasn't far away, and its depths were lost in darkness. But twice he saw crawling mechanical things emerge from it. It must lead, then, toward the heart of the mystery he was trying to probe.

At the next opportunity, he made a dash for the pit. He lost his balance in the loose soil at its edge, and tumbled to its bottom. But except for a few scratches, he was unhurt. He picked himself up and hurried down a steep passage. Except for lights far ahead, it was dark as Erebus. But he advanced as rapidly as he could, his purpose only to explore, and to take advantage of opportunity, if it came.

Once he heard the growl of machinery, as a great crawling automaton came down the passage, moving in his direction. The headlamp threw him into full view. And there was no place to hide. But remembering what Rod Murgatroyd had told him about these automatons, and making use, too, of his own experience with them, Perry flung himself against the crumpled alloy wall and froze rigid as stone, his heart thumping madly.

The robot stopped. Its mechanical eyes must have seen his movement. Perhaps the delicate maze of wheels and cams and instruments, which was all it had for a brain, had responded to the stimulus of his moving form, and was forced, by the way it was planned and built, to wait and search for other evidence of a hostile presence. But finding none, the robot whirred on. As it passed Perry, he felt the heat of its driving mechanism. Through a quartz glazed spyhole in its flank, he saw a white, blazing globe within it—perhaps a mass of material throwing off atomic energy.

Perry's lips, sweat-daubed behind his mask, curved in a haggard smile at his oddly miraculous escape. He continued on his way.

He had an odd, tense idea of being followed by something that was not quite mechanical. Behind him, in the darkness, and even above the confined din of the factories, he thought he heard, now and then, the patter and slither of footsteps.

And so he hurried on, along the main tunnel, reaching at last a faintly lighted, circular compartment.

In the center of the room a vat, a hundred and fifty feet across, was sunk into the floor. Its cone-shaped interior was full of a greenish liquid, and was covered over by an immense sealing disk of glass. There were grids, like colossal battery plates, in the liquid. Bus-bars, penetrating beneath the sealed edges of the glass disk, attached the grids to an apparatus standing at the vat's circular rim. The apparatus resembled an electrical transformer.

Just for a moment Perry was able to look. Then the light in the chamber began to fade.

There came a rattle of opening doors as the light died completely. He tried to hold perfectly still, as he heard the soft, heavy footfalls of great robot-guardians released. He should be able to fool them too, by keeping perfectly quiet.

Now, again, he heard those lighter footfalls, that had seemed to be following him. They advanced to the entrance of the chamber. Instantly there was an answering rush of elastic-shod feet. And then a woman's scream!

Perry was petrified for a moment of utter consternation. Then he rushed toward the sound of the scuffle there in the weird dark. The slithering of his own feet betrayed him. There was a clanking rush in the gloom. Cold metal claws closed firmly about his shoulders. He struggled. The oxygen mask was scraped from his face. But the gripping members held him firm at last, and he desisted in his futile efforts to escape.

"Who's there?" he growled, panting.

"It's me—Troubles," came the answer, half sobbing.

Perry Wilcox was stunned. "How did you get here?"

"Same way you did," the girl choked. "When you ran away from the hospital, I sent an orderly to follow you, and bring you back. He didn't get to you; but he saw you dive off the dam with the oxygen mask on. When he told me, I guessed right away what you were trying to do. So—I got leave, found myself a mask in the operating room, and—tagged after you."

"In the name of sense, what for?" Perry demanded.

"For a lot of good reasons—Mister!" she said more decisively. "I used to be an ambitious newspaper woman, for one thing—always hunting up trouble and hoping for a scoop. You can believe it's that way, if you want to. Or you can believe that I'm the little girl that used to keep clippings of all the Wilcox-Murgatroyd exploits, and that you're still my hero—if you're conceited and crazy enough. I don't care!"

It was a torrent of words that would have startled Perry Wilcox if he wasn't so amazed already, here in this dark hole of a place, with metal monsters clutching him.

"Okay—Troubles," he stammered.

The robots restraining him were motionless. Nearby there were hollow clankings. Trying to catch the significance of the sounds, Perry was sure that the cover of the great vat was being raised. Cold prickles raced over his body. What was it that would happen now?

Lyssa Arthurs was talking again, out of the dark. "Perry," she said more gently, though just as intensely as before. "Just when I started out it came over the radio that Kerwin was appointed Provisional Director of Defense. And—and there's danger that the hospital will be stormed by a mob—to get Murgatroyd."

Before he could answer, Perry felt his feet hoisted from the floor. He was swung in metal arms, then tossed free. He flew through the air. Warm fluid closed about him. It was like water, only it stung his flesh—made his nerve-ends numb.

He heard the girl give a startled, involuntary cry, as she too splashed into the strangely energized fluid in the great vat. Automatically he tried to swim toward her; but the numbness was quickly creeping over his nerves and muscles. He could hardly move.

His voice was hoarse with half paralysis when he choked: "Keep your courage, Troubles...."

Perry's head went beneath the fluid. His brain was spinning. He thought he heard a click of switches being turned on. The numbness increased suddenly, like a jolt of electricity. But he managed to hold his breath. He had a curious sensation of shrinking, of being pressed together.

He emerged at last from unconsciousness, knowing at least that he was alive. He was coughing, as though his lungs had been partly full of fluid. His head ached intolerably, and his heart was laboring like a rusty engine.

He sat up on the wet surface on which he sprawled, and tried to look about. His vision was blurred at first, and he squinted to focus his eyes. He looked around a square room, one end of which was open. Its walls were like rough, black glass. Behind him was a dark opening, like a door, from which, judging from the wetness around him, he had recently been ejected, along with a considerable quantity of fluid.

He saw the girl, Lyssa Arthurs, sprawled beside him. Worriedly, Perry scrambled over to her. She was still unconscious, though breathing raggedly. Her rubber oxygen mask was intact, except for the metal and glass parts, which were curiously pitted and malformed. By some unknown transformation the oxygen tanks strapped to her shoulders, were similarly distorted and useless. They were full of holes, and had lost their compressed content. Perry had parted with his mask during his scuffle with the robots, and now his tanks had broken loose from his shoulders somewhere too. He noticed that even the metal buttons of his shirt were rough and out of shape.

He ripped the useless, ill-fitting mask from Troubles' face, unfastened the crooked buckles that held the oxygen flasks in place, and applied artificial respiration.

Meanwhile he searched his surroundings. What had been done to Troubles and himself, and where had they been taken? He looked again toward the open end of the compartment. Beyond was a gigantic, beautiful cavern, apparently many miles in extent. It was walled with coarse, jagged glass. Through a system of lenses in its azure roof, light was streaming down. It must be artificial, but it was just about like reddish sunlight. The floor of the cavern was like a beautiful, wild valley, crowded with strange, exotic trees and plants; and white buildings peeped through the foliage.

What had happened looked almost simple to Perry Wilcox then. He and Troubles had merely passed down through the vat, to a vast, habitable, artificially excavated cavern below. But he couldn't accept this idea, somehow. It was too simple. And there was an elusive strangeness, disquieting and hard to identify, about everything he saw and felt. It was more than just the oddity of the vegetation and the buildings.

After a minute, Lyssa Arthurs sighed and tried to rise. She looked about, confusedly. "Where are we?" she demanded.

"Your guess is as good as mine, Troubles," Perry returned, awedly. "But we must be at the final center of things—at the place the robots up there were meant to guard. Whatever that may be."

They rested several minutes, not saying much. Then Troubles arose shakily. "Come on. Let's explore, fella," she urged.

Perry supported her unsteady steps as they walked out of the open-ended chamber. The ground around them was covered with a kind of coarse, shaggy moss. Trees, formed like oversized bushes, reared up over them, bearing strange fruits. The light which came from above, was warm, like sunshine.

"Kind of like a heaven here, isn't it?" the girl asked.

Perry grinned, though his head still ached. "What are you trying to do, pull my leg?—talking that kind of bunk!" he growled.

"Only it's so still and deserted-looking," Lyssa went on. "There's not a path anywhere. And look! That building!"

They had passed through a grove. Near them was a long structure of white stone. But it was like a ruin. Its rows of windows, with their carved decorations, some of them human figures, were sightless and empty, except for intruding masses of coarse, vinelike plants. Once, from its appearance, the building might have been a gigantic apartment house, teeming with inhabitants. And there were others like it, near, and far off on the high slopes of the cavern. But all had that same tenantless aspect.

Perry and Troubles were moving along a street of what might have been a village. At the farther end of the street was a domed edifice of glass of different colors.

And at the crest of the dome, standing firmly on a stubby cylinder which was evidently meant to represent some sort of ship, was the golden figure of a man, clad in flowing robes. The face of the colossus was stern and kindly as he stared off into the distance as if somewhere there he watched for the realization of a hope. The great staff he clutched, rested on his pedestal and rose straight upward to join with the roof of the cavern, above.

There was a steep stairway leading down to the sunken grounds of the domed edifice. Lyssa, hurrying ahead on still unsteady legs, and looking up too intently at the golden image above, lost her balance and pitched forward on the steep slant. She tumbled the full length of it. Perry gave a shout of concern and leaped after her, sure that she must have at least broken some bones.

But she got up quite nimbly and promptly. "Stumble bum!" she muttered, frowning. And then in a new and different kind of tone: "Perry—that was funny, wasn't it? I'm not hurt at all!" There was wonder in her dark eyes.

He was puffing with relief, but was startled, too. "Yeah, I see!" he said. "It's stranger than the desertion, here. I landed light myself. It was as though the air was holding me back—partly. As though it has a higher resistance, or something! But that's looney!"

They walked into the temple. The atmosphere there was cool and moist. Glass pillars, spiral in form, loomed in the shadows. Lyssa and Perry looked around intently, as if searching for the answer to a riddle.

In an indented portion of the blue grass floor, there was a cluster of spherical globes, crystal clear. They were maybe three inches in diameter.

Idly, yet with an odd and very significant thought lurking in the back of her mind, Lyssa kicked at one of the globes with her rough shoe. Immediately it broke, coalescing liquidly with several of its neighbors to form a slightly flattened ovoid. It was like a huge drop of quicksilver in shape.

Lyssa was thinking deeply, but then Perry got her off the track. "Look, Troubles!" he shouted. "The air resistance really is higher here!"

She turned her eyes toward where he pointed. Light shafted into the room through the high, arching entrance. Surrounding semi-darkness brought out the phenomenon plainly. Motes were floating in the path of the light. And long, fibrous things, like lint. Only the motes were as large as grains of sand, and the crooked strings of lint were as thick as lead pencils!

"The air resistance would have to be higher, or the rate of its molecular motion and bombardment would have to be a lot swifter than usual, to support such big particles," said Perry. "But how can that be? It seems the same old familiar air!" He halted, a startled scowl crinkling his sunbleached eyebrows. "Say!" he drawled at last, mounting incredulity in his tone. "Say!..."

Sensing that he was at the last barrier of the riddle that had begun with his discovery of the great triangular outline in Minnesota hills, he studied the glass walls around him. In the depths of their colored substance, he could see large bubbles, and flaws of exaggerated size. Then his gaze fell on the liquid, globular things that Troubles had kicked. They looked exactly as though it was ordinary water that composed them—as though they were dewdrops—except for their huge dimensions.

"That's the funny thing we noticed, but couldn't quite place," Lyssa offered. "That dew. That dust in the air. The flaws in glass. Such stuff is all bigger than it should be, Perry. But what does that mean?"

Perry was thinking as fast and as hard as he could, then, trying to put together all the puzzling pieces of his recent experience. Most significant was the odd, tightening, shrinking sensation, he had felt, after the automatons had tossed him into the vat of liquid.

"Troubles," he said very slowly. "I—think—I've—got—it! We've—been—reduced—in—size! We're Lilliputians, maybe an inch high, now! This cavern isn't the huge thing it seems to us. Comparatively, it's a toy cavern. The buildings are toy buildings; though they naturally seem gigantic to us, because we're so small too. But dew and dust, relying on universal physical laws of nature, remain normally—big!"

"But, Perry," she asked in the same awed tone he had used. "Is that possible—that we've been shrunken, and still remain alive afterward?"

"Why not?" he questioned in response. "Everything is practically the same—really—just scaled down.[1] Every cell in our bodies must have been correspondingly shrunken, of course, so that there are as many cells now as in the beginning. Otherwise we wouldn't be—ourselves. If there weren't somewhere near the normal number of grey cells in our brains, for instance, we'd lose our reasoning powers.

"We were thrown into the vat. Energy worked on us, drawing substance away from each living cell—fat, protein, sugar, water—and the cell-walls shrank, and we shrank with them. Our excess body substance was perhaps absorbed by the green fluid, maybe being preserved for a reversal of the process—a return to normal size. Only judging from what happened to our metal buttons and things, the trick doesn't work out very well for inorganic substances."

Perry halted, recalling something significant. "Remember how you fell down those stairs up there, without being hurt at all, Troubles?" he questioned. "That you weren't hurt is part of the relativity of being small. Take a mouse and drop him from a high place, and his injury doesn't amount to much. Drop a man from the same height, and he gets all smashed up."[2]

Lyssa Arthurs seemed to muse for a moment. "Yes," she said. "I see.... Whoever built the fortress must have built this miniature cavern before they reduced their size, since this building is constructed all in one piece, and not of blocks cemented together. And you wouldn't expect little people to do that very readily. Then they came down through the vat apparatus. But why, Perry? Why did they want to be small? What advantage was there in it? Who were they?"

Overhead, in the arching dome, Perry Wilcox noticed a picture. An ocean washing a jagged shore. It looked just like a modern ocean. Only, in the gorges between the jagged volcanic bluffs, there were bizarre, fernlike trees, such as had existed in the Terrestrial Carboniferous Period.

"I think," he said, "these people came from another planet. That ship looks like a space ship."

"Do you really think so?"

"Yes, and it was a tough world for a raw bunch of colonists," Perry went on. "So it was probably easier for them to make a small world of their own. One they thought they could regulate and control. Only—there was something wrong with it. That's why they're extinct."

"I guess you're right, Perry," the girl offered. "They built the fortress. It was their first encampment, within which they could make their preparations. Then, when they were ready to become small, they covered it over to hide it. The automatons were sealed up, with special apparatus to make them active—if there was danger—if some snooper came around. For instance you, Perry. Our being sent down here, was part of the plan too—captives or guests. Only the little people who were supposed to receive us, have disappeared."

It was obviously true. The valley of the cavern looked deserted to its farthest, verdure-clad reaches. The buildings, peeping white through the green, were skeletally silent. There was no sound.

The desolation got on Perry Wilcox's nerves. The vast futility of the mechanical debacle going on above. A dream that had soured. A science of miracles that had followed a Will-o'-the-Wisp to a dead end. And then Perry thought of something that changed his mood.

"They must have had a way to control the robots from here, Troubles," he said. "Everything else is too perfectly arranged for it to be otherwise. They wouldn't just lock themselves down here, blind to the upper world, would they? There must be a control room somewhere. And logically it should be in this building, since it's the most important-appearing one in the place."

CHAPTER V

Nemesis from the Tiny

Perry and Lyssa found what they were searching for at last, after climbing a long, spiral stairs. The chamber was round, and was above the dome of the temple, just beneath the representation of the space ship and the golden statue of that ancient leader. The disk-shaped door was fastened by a great hasp that was disengaged easily.

Wheels, meters, switches, charts. Never before had Perry Wilcox seen such a staggering array. His heart sank. Could he ever master such a complex arrangement in time to do any good—to stop the robots and that vast, senseless conflict above? He tugged at one wheel. It turned a very little, and a meter needle nearby jumped, showing that the apparatus was still effective. But there the wheel stuck. It was locked by a slight film of corrosion. Though things in this control room were marvelously preserved, considering their titanic age, they had not been protected by a time-defying vacuum.

Perry's face went sober and tired. "Even if these are the right controls," he said, "it would take me a week and a lot of oil and brain work to loosen 'em up and figure 'em out so I could turn off hell up above."

Then his gaze centered on a mirror nearby. It was part of a periscope arrangement which evidently communicated with the surface, its upper end cleared of encumbering earth by the robots.

In the mirror was visible the slope of a hill, bright in after noon sunshine. A solid array of army tanks were creeping up it laboriously. Behind them, guns blazed. But down upon those attackers was pouring a hail of death—of sharper, more violent explosions—that wiped out two and three of the tanks at a time. Beyond, the plain was being filled with a miasmic fog of death—corrosive gas. Still, the tanks came on, each with its load of brave young men. Wave on wave, to destruction.

Perry stood watching for several moments. Viewed from the distance, the tanks looked hardly bigger than they would have, had he been normal size. His position was sort of a joke. He was standing where a general from another planet should have stood while directing his guardian robot army. But he was helpless.

"Kerwin is still at it," Perry remarked at last, his voice so matter-of-fact that it was startling.

He was thinking bitterly of many things. Of the way plans were made, hopefully, till they became faith. And then the disillusion of miscarried results—of fact. Like this buried utopia. Its creators had worked for its realization. They had achieved it, but they had vanished. Like himself, and like Rod Murgatroyd. Rod, blinded, but talking with hollow magnificence, of a strange heritage. Path of Progress. The inspiration of a more ancient science to spur mankind on. Oh, it sounded good, but it was all—screwy!

Wilcox blew up at last. "With Kerwin in control, Rod's probably already dead—lynched by a mob!" he said. "And here we are, down here, a couple of helpless peewees! I suppose we could go back to normal size—back the same way we came here. There are controls there in the entrance chamber. But what good would that do? We'd still be peewees!"

But Troubles was of a somewhat different attitude. "Maybe inch-high peewees like us have advantages at that," she said significantly. "Look, fella."

She was pointing to a slender, graceful object that rested in a metal frame over their heads. It was very like an airplane, with short, stubby wings. But instead of propellers it had rocket nozzles. Wheels on its bottom, clung to a helical guide rail that spiraled upward inside a great, vertical tube that must find its way to the surface somewhere. Apparently the tube was the inside of the staff held by the golden colossus above. And the staff penetrated the cavern's roof.

"Naturally, being as advanced in science as they were, those old people would keep something to get about with, wouldn't they?" Troubles questioned, as she climbed up the ladder to the craft's cabin entrance.

Opening the door was a difficult thing; but Perry bounded up the rungs and was helping her. He was ready to take his chances too, in spite of his talk.

The door opened under the hammering pressure of his calloused palm. There was space inside for two or three people to lie prone. The controls were not unfamiliar. There was a joystick, and a second lever which must take the place of rudder pedals.

Perry was wiggling, the control. They were stiff but not immovable. With an eye of a practiced airman, he noted what they did to the tail and wing fins. So far, so good. He turned a small valve on the dash. There was a creaky, rhythmic sputter from behind. Evidently there was still fuel in the tanks. In response to the brief rocket thrust, the craft rolled a little way up the spiral guide rail. Then back to norm as Perry returned the throttle to its original position.

"So what?" he said with a shrug. "Nothing funny about finding this crate here. It's made of the same kind of evidently almost uncorrodable metals as the instruments here in the control room. So it should last forever. And the old-timers must have longed for the great outdoors sometimes. That's logical enough. But there isn't the sign of a weapon—nothing we could use to attack a giant. And Kerwin is a giant, now, in relation to us!"

"How about bluff?" Troubles questioned, dimples of exasperation showing at the corners of her mouth. "Come on, bonehead. Quit stalling! Haven't you got any imagination at all?"

Wilcox grinned at her, startled and admiring. Her attitude gave him a lifting sense of adventure. "Okay!" he drawled. "Funny, though—I used to think you were a friend of Kerwin's. Of course, you could be trying to pull a fast one yet, I suppose!"

"And I could knock that pug schnozzle of yours flatter than it is, for that crack!" Troubles returned. "Come on! Let's see action—if you're good enough to get any out of this thing!"

Perry opened the throttle. A little at first, then more and more. Speed was built up. It became a dizzy whirl. Around and around that spiral track, up and up....

Lyman Kerwin sat in his office, topping the great Kerwin Building at Chicago. Glass surrounded him—thick, green-tinted, bullet-proof glass. Above him, beyond the metal-ribbed sky-panes of his eyrie, the star blinked. Lyman Kerwin was studying the notes of the speech he was going to deliver in five minutes.

Thoughts went racing through his fevered brain. Thoughts of satisfaction and triumph. Here he was like a god, far up above the rabble. What did it matter if a lot of them hated him, and mistrusted his motives? They were afraid of what it was out there, not so many hundreds of miles to the north-west. He'd see that they remained frightened, as long as it was necessary.

They didn't know what he knew—what the poor fool, Professor Vince, had found out—that the enemy were only machines, awesome in their powers, but incapable of organized thought. Someday, when Vince had learned more for him, and when there'd been enough fighting to give him full control of the country, those robots would doubtless provide him with a means of keeping his power in hand, even of extending it.

Lyman Kerwin arose from his chair and strode to the paneled cabinet in the corner. He entered the cabinet and snapped on the brilliant lights on either side of him. Facing him was a radio microphone and a pair of lensed, television eyes. He had only to close a switch to make himself visible and audible to the waiting world.

Above him was a mirror. Kerwin admired himself in it. He knew he wasn't handsome—in any ordinary way, at least. It would be better, of course, if he were young. But he looked like a master. He looked clever. Yes, he was clever! A genius! And his new, black uniform was slick, becoming the role he must play. There was a badge on the coat lapel. U.S. in black blocked letters, against a red background. And at the center, in a gold star that was like a small, bright halo of glory, his own initials in black—L.K. The badge was his own idea, and the jeweler had wrought skillfully.

It was almost time for the speech, now. Kerwin turned about to get his notes. He stopped in chagrin. The papers on his desk were burning merrily! How they had become ignited, he couldn't imagine, since he hadn't been smoking. It was unnerving. The first wave of fright went through his cowardly soul as he bounded forward to brush the burning papers to the floor, and stamp out the flames.

He hadn't seen the tiny, two-inch thing, like a miniature plane in shape and function, that had come down through the ventilator above. While his back was turned, it had darted toward the papers. Its atomic rocket blasts, blue and almost invisible, yet terrifically hot, had touched the litter on the desk. Now the minute intruder clung, inactive, by means of anchoring claws, to the wallward side of an urn of flowers atop a bookcase.

Kerwin shrugged his hunched, sloping shoulders. "I don't need the notes," he thought, trying to reassure himself—trying to drive the nameless, uncanny fear out of his heart.

He walked to the television cabinet and snapped the switches. It was time to broadcast.

"My friends," he began. "Today we have started the big push against the Murgatroyd-Wilcox Horror. It may be that hundreds of thousands of men must die in the battle to hold this terrible enemy in check. But this cannot be helped. I have tried to do my part. I appreciate the great honor that has been bestowed upon me in making me Director of Defense. But for efficiency, I cannot go on in this manner. There is too much bickering among people who are not sincerely fighting for the welfare of humanity. I must have the means to command, and if necessary, silence these individuals. I must have full control of all the nation's resources. In this emergency, not a moment must be wasted in friction—in lack of cooperation. I have—"

Kerwin's small eyes were beginning to shine, but he stopped abruptly.

Very near to him, he heard a tiny voice speaking. Its tones were like the tinkling of minute flakes of glass. It was an impossible voice, and yet a vaguely familiar one. Though it seemed close—almost at his shoulder—still it seemed, too, to be shouted from a great distance:

"Interesting speech, Kerwin! Well planned! You've reached the crucial point in your scheme, huh? All right! Go on! Don't hesitate!"

But Lyman Kerwin's words had broken off. He half turned. Then he remembered his audience—millions of people observing his every move by means of television. He didn't dare show any fear or disconcertion, now! The rabble must believe in him. But a cold dew of terror was breaking out on his bald pate and skinny cheeks.

"I have—I think—proved my worth," he continued, stammering into the microphone. "I must not be hampered by—by the President of the United States, and by—Congress. I—" Kerwin's voice was becoming a thin squeak.

"What's the matter, Kerwin?" came taunting words in those thready, elfin, confident tones. "Got stage fright or something? Don't act like that! Pull yourself together! People will start laughing at you, first thing you know!"

"I—" the crooked financier gurgled, struggling to go on with his oratory from where he had left off; but nervousness seemed to have strangled him.

And the unseen, pixy speaker went on: "Come now, Kerwin!" he was chided. "This won't do at all! You're a big man, you know! You've sent thousands of youth to their deaths already—just for your own glory. You can't let everybody know you've got a yella streak a yard wide.... No, stop! Don't go turning off those switches! It happens we could kill you in a split second. On the second thought, maybe it's just as well folks see what goes on here. You wouldn't want anybody to be misled, would you? There, that's better! Don't shiver so much. Don't turn. Just stay where you are....

"That's probably a real good microphone you've got there, Kerwin. It'll probably pick up even my voice, so everybody can hear it. I'm not exactly just the voice of your conscience, you see. Nor am I so easily ignored. By now many men know what you're up to, Kerwin. They know about those robots—that they're only mechanical things intended for defense. They've learned this fact in the front lines. But you've been clever enough to keep them there, where they'd be killed quickly. But we know more about this so-called 'Murgatroyd-Wilcox Horror' than you or your scientists do, Kerwin. Because we've been—and so to speak still are—on the inside!

"There's just one thing for me to say to the world, Kerwin. There isn't time, right at this moment, for complete explanations. But I think many people will anticipate my suggestion—that the army be withdrawn to a distance of half a mile from its present entrenchments. I do not think it will be attacked there. If we are given ten days to work—Miss Lyssa Arthurs, late of the Brenton Herald, and myself, Perry Wilcox—I think the trouble will be cleared up."

The little voice took on a sharper edge, as it addressed itself more directly to the financier: "You can turn around now, Kerwin. I guess it's the end, huh? They've seen you, they've got your number. They've heard me talk. Maybe they're wondering what it's all about. Maybe they're scared and uncertain. But one thing's sure—you're through. You're a yellow fake, Kerwin...."

Slowly the financier pivoted on rubbery legs. His now bulging eyes saw nothing but the great room, which was to have been the focus of his empire.

Quivering with a horror that was part nameless and partly born of the knowledge that he was an exposed enemy of society who could never escape, Kerwin backed along the wall. He reached a window, and tugged at its fastenings for air.

He gave a start as a low hiss sounded near him. Looking back, he saw a little dartlike thing, spitting blue flame, and swinging close. It had an ugly, alien look. He ducked it, screaming. With wild clawings in which no reason remained, except to escape that devilish, hissing unknown, he climbed to the window sill. There he toppled briefly, babbling:

"I didn't mean it! No! Don't!..."

A moment later he pitched, with a wail of terror, toward the street far below.

This time he hadn't heard two faint tinkly voices, shouting a belated warning. Perry and Troubles hadn't meant to frighten him to this extreme.

The plane flew back, alighting before the microphone, and in the path of those television lenses. Two little doll-like beings descended from the craft. For ten minutes Perry Wilcox talked, telling what had happened; and the world saw and heard. Then he and his companion returned to the plane. With a hiss it flew toward the ventilator in the ceiling. And the city below, hummed in wonder.

There were some doubts, of course; but the big push was stopped. A week later, the army, watching from its new, rearward trenches, saw a sudden cessation of motion on the citadel they faced. Most of the gleaming Titans there, stood still in their tracks, as though frozen in the morning sunshine.

Perry Wilcox and Lyssa Arthurs were pulled, inert, from the vat of green liquid by attendant robots left active for the purpose. They had submitted to the reversal of the process of decreased size, and now they were normal again. After an hour they awoke. They passed through the exit tunnel, and out into the open air. They climbed down the silent slopes beyond the ramparts.

They reached the ragged, battered river flats, strewn with wreckage and dotted with silent metal giants. Then someone hailed them. A tank, piloted by a soldier, pulled close. Its turret opened, and a head was thrust out. Perry saw a new Windsor tie, new checkered shirt, a thin face, a bit blistered, and red hair, singed short—only, there was a bandage over the eyes.

"Rod!" Perry gasped. "I thought—"

Old Roderick Murgatroyd laughed. "I know," he chuckled. "You thought Kerwin's roustabouts lynched me. But when they stormed the hospital, I wasn't there! Fooled 'em. Sneaked off. Then some newshounds cornered me. But never mind that! See! I've got my newsreel rig!" He was clutching the small camera strapped around his neck as he continued plaintively: "I want to take some pictures, Perry. Darn, I can't wait for my eyes to get better! Show me what's good. Path of Progress has made its greatest hit. We've got to carry on, Perry...."

Wilcox' face was suddenly pained. But he kept his voice brisk. "Sure we've got to carry on, Rod!" he enthused. "Hurry up and get out of that tin wagon! There's at least a hundred battle automatons standing here around us!"

"Hang the automatons," said the old scientist, jumping down lithely with the guidance of Perry's hand. "I want a picture of you, first!"

"That means Troubles too, then," Perry shot back. "I think you'll be buying wedding presents before very long!"

"Jupiter! That's swell! Now, let's see.... Just where are you?"

"Right here, Rod!" Lyssa said briskly, a small, unnoticeable catch in her gay tone. "Standing close together. Shoot!"

They let him take his time, fumbling eagerly but clumsily with his camera. And from his enthusiasm they drew many thoughts. He was a little like the leader of those people from interstellar space, who had built themselves a lovely, forbidden paradise in the small—a paradise that native Earth men would never colonize, though there might soon be found many uses even for the ionic science that had made it possible. Exploration of places that full-size men could never reach. A miniature secret service, perhaps.

The golden statue on the crest of the Pantheon, down there. Old Rod belonged to that same class—an idealist. Nor could Perry Wilcox scoff now, for he was one himself.

In the silence, Rod Murgatroyd's camera mechanism worked. In the background, above the scarred slope, smoke arose silently from the vent of a subterranean factory.

This was old Rod's moment of triumph. So Perry and Troubles could not tell him that his eyes were gone.

[1] Judging from the vat in which Perry and Troubles were reduced, the apparatus attached to it, and the sensations of being in that green fluid, it would seem that the process of reduction is partly electrical. Perhaps similar to electroplating—the drawing away of substance from one electrode, and its transfer, in the form of ions, to the opposite electrode. Each cell in Perry's and Troubles' bodies, and in their clothing, could have been reduced that way. This isn't so startling when reduced to prime factors. The human body is simply chemicals. So are clothes. And life may be electrical in itself.—Ed.

[2] For a given shape and density of material, the smaller an object the higher the proportionate resistance it offers to the air. This is because, in relation to its bulk, a small object has a greater surface area than a large one. Hence, relatively more friction. Thus, in air, a mouse might be expected to fall slightly slower than a man.

But this is not the most important reason why small objects are not as easily damaged by proportionate forces as large objects. Take the model of an ocean liner. It seems very firm and rigid. Build a full-size ship under the same specifications—same steel, same relative thicknesses and lengths. If it was possible to pick such a ship up from either end, it would be in danger of breaking in two under its own weight!

Small objects are relatively stronger. In order to make a full-size ship as strong as its model, the strength of the materials used would have to be increased in proportion.—Ed.

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- Terror out of the Past

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