The Metal Monster (4 page)

Suddenly, as if every gun in the attacking force were under single control, a terrific bombardment began. Shells from the battleships and artillery rained on that metal dome. Immense bombs were dropped by the aerial battleships and electroplanes. Projectiles of smaller caliber, from seventy-fives down to thirty-forties, rattled against that great hemisphere of gleaming metal. But not one shell or projectile so much as dented it.

This bombardment lasted for perhaps five minutes without interruption, and without any visible effect on the great dome. Then, suddenly, a thousand doors that had hitherto appeared to be a part of the solid metal, opened. From each door emerged a flying globe. Like a swarm of angry bees defending a hive, they hurtled at the attackers. Bullets rattled and shells burst against them without effect.

Two globes descended on a Nicaraguan battleship, one above the fore deck, the other near the stern. Long metal tentacles slithered down, gripping the front and rear turrets. And down these tentacles swarmed the Teks. They plunged into the turrets—down the ladders. Each Tek, as it emerged, dragged a human prisoner. One by one these prisoners were passed up into the globes. The Teks followed. The tentacles were drawn up. And the battleship, out of control, traveled aimlessly in a circle as the globes returned with their prisoners.

This scene was, at the same time, being enacted on all the other battleships. Other globes seized the aerial battleships with their powerful tentacles, boarded them, took off the men, and left them to drift unguided, or to crash. One by one the electroplanes were caught and denuded of men. The army attempted to retreat, but this was quickly prevented by a row of globes which formed on the ground, stretching across the peninsula. The Teks swarmed everywhere. Men were pulled out of the tanks—dragged away from the field pieces, or caught as they attempted to flee or hide.

All the battleships were circling erratically. There were several collisions. One- ship went down, rammed by another. Aerial battleships and electroplanes were continually crashing to the ground or falling into the Gulf and the ocean. Huge tanks, driverless, climbed the peak as far as the edge of the dome, stood up, grinding at the shimmering metal, and fell over backward, their motors roaring, to tumble down the steep slope they had climbed, and smash to masses of twisted wreckage at the bottom.

In less than thirty minutes after the bombardment began, the last globe returned to the dome. And so far as I could see, not a single one of the fighters who had attacked so valiantly by land, sea and air, was left to tell the tale.

THE scene faded. Once more I was back in the laboratory with Hax. His colorless, glass-like eyes leered at me through the huge lens.

“You see,” he said, “how hopeless it is for mankind to resist us. We are invincible.”

“You have but defeated the forces of two small nations,” I replied. “The earth has not yet begun to fight. Her scientists will find a way to defeat you.”

“Her scientists are weak-minded children, compared to the most ignorant Snals,” he said, contemptuously. “They are creatures of a lower order, fit only for slaves. And you will go now to begin your slavery with the rest.’’

Two Teks suddenly appeared behind me. Seizing my arms, they lifted me from the chair and hurried me away. As I left the laboratory the mocking laughter of Hax followed me.

The Teks took me out of the building the way I had come. One of the queer, rolling vehicles was waiting. My hands were forced down on the central rail, which glowed as if with some radioactive force. They stuck there, and try as I could, I was unable to remove them.

We passed through the gates in the wall, and threaded the city streets to a great, large structure near the cocks. A number of other similar vehicles with glowing handrails were waiting around the building. And thousands of prisoners, disembarking from arriving globes, were being herded into this building by the Teks.

Others were being driven out of another entrance I noticed that some were forced to grasp the shining hand rails, while others were bound, hand and foot, with wire, and stacked on the vehicles like cord wood. At first I saw only soldiers, sailors and airmen, wearing the uniforms of Nicaragua and Honduras. But the globes presently began to disgorge loads of civilians—-men, women and children, whites, mestizos, Indians and Negroes, evidently taken in raids on the nearby territory.

The vehicles, loaded with their human freight and each presided over by a Tek, began to form in a long line. When a train of about six hundred had been formed, we left. All traffic had evidently been stopped to let us through, for although I could see many vehicles on the other streets those through which our leader piloted us were deserted.

The vehicle in which I was riding was a half mile or so behind the one which led the procession. About half of the vehicles were loaded with the bound prisoner; and half with those held by the luminous hand rails. A load of the poor bound wretches was just ahead of me. I could hear their piteous moans. Their wrists and ankles were so tightly bound with wire that they were cut and bleeding. And those at the bottom of the pile were crushed by the weight of the ones above them.

Our train soon passed through the city, ani out upon a great metal causeway that stretched above a weird and unusual landscape of grotesque thallophytic growths. These were in orderly array, and tended by Teks. Among the cultivated plants I saw a number of varieties of gigantic slime moulds. They were cultivated in pits about twelve feet in diameter, set in rows with metal runways between them. Some of the pits contained great masses of naked, polynuclear protoplasm—the plasmodia which would later develop into adult slime moulds.

As we passed along through these fields I noticed that, from time to time, one of the cars containing the bound human beings was shunted off the causeway and along one of the tracks which ran between the plasmodium pits. Watching one of these as we sped past, I saw the Tek lift a bound human being and hurl his helpless victim into one of the pits. At the next pit he stopped and repeated the process. The grim prophecy of Hax was already coming to pass.

The men who were fastened on the vehicle on which I rode numbered about twenty. There were five naval officers, five seamen, eight Indians and two Negroes. The man just ahead of me wore the uniform of a lieutenant.

"What did they do to you in the round building, Senor Lieutenant?” I asked him in Spanish.

“We were given a test to see if we could control those metal creatures, senor,” he replied. “Those who could not pass the test—many of them women and children— were bound with wire. It is horrible. What are they doing with them?”

I told him. He ground his teeth and cursed luridly. Presently he asked:

“And what will they do with the rest of us?”

“As long as we can serve,” I replied, “we’ll probably be slaves. After that, food for the plasmodia.”

Of the six hundred vehicles that left the city, about three hundred drew up before a great, dome-like building. The others, with their wire-bound victims, had been shunted away to the slime mould farms.

A great circular door opened in the apparently solid wall of the building. The Tek who presided over our vehicle shut off the current in the rail, releasing our hands. Then we were herded into the building with the others— whites, mestizos, Indians and Negroes, men and women, mixed indiscriminately.

The first room in which we found ourselves was an immense lobby which encircled the building. This room proved to be the living and sleeping quarters of the Snal workers, whose places we human slaves were to take. While one-half of the workers labored in the inner rooms, the other half slept and took recreation in this apartment. Their bunks were metal cylinders about three feet in diameter and seven feet long, stacked three rows high along the outer wall. They contained no padding or covers, and were as private as gold-fish bowls. The tired workers, without bothering to disrobe, crawled into them and stretched out on the cold metal when ordered to do so by their overseers. They crawled out again to receive their meagre rations and to resume work when their sleep period had elapsed.

The overseers wore round, pointed helmets and complete . suits of scale-armor made from a dull-surfaced, dark brown metal. Their weapons were paralyzing ray tubes, like that which Zet had used on me, and queer, double-edge weapons, the blades of which looked like two meat-axes welded together, back to back, with handles about eighteen inches in length hooked at the end to hang from their belts; they carried slender metal rods about eight feet in length, the pointed ends of which continually glowed at a red heat.

WE were forced to disrobe and don the coarse aprons. In each apron were two pockets, one of which contained a glass flask and the other a shallow bowl. As fast as we donned our slave raiment, we were driven in single file past a counter, where we were issued water in our flasks and a thick, jet black porridge, which I afterward learned was made from the spores of a species of slime mould, in our bowls. It had a rank, musty flavor, and I could not stomach it at first, but as it was the only food given us, we had to eat it or starve. Most of us eventually got so we could consume the portions served us, although I doubt if anyone really learned to like the stuff.

After we had been given our garments and rations, we were herded into the immense central control room. The floor of this room rose in circular concentric terraces conforming to the contour of the domed roof above, and ending in a small round platform occupied by the chief overseer, who could thus look down on the entire workroom.

Set against the faces of the terraces were curved tables. Twenty workers were seated at each table, gazing into their control globes and gripping their electrodes. Each table was presided over by an armed and armored overseer, who gazed into a large globe mounted on a tripod, in which he could watch the collective activities of the Teks controlled by his workers. A worker, caught shirking or making an error, was punished by a searing touch from the red-hot point of the overseer’s long rod.

I was assigned to a seat between two Snal workers, and noticed that this arrangement was maintained with the other slaves—first a Snal, then a human slave. The young lieutenant who had ridden on the same vehicle with me was seated just beyond the Snal at my right.

At a sharp command from the overseer, I grasped my controls and gazed into my globe. I instantly found myself a Tek, operating a gigantic mechanical shovel that was scooping up what looked like white sand from the floor and walls of a huge pit and dropping it into vehicles with globe-wheels and hopper-shaped bodies. These vehicles, each operated by one Tek, moved past in a steady stream as fast as I filled them with the white sand. One immense shovelful sufficed to fill each vehicle.

Other Teks labored nearby with similar mechanical shovels. The vehicles, I noticed, were all moving toward a great structure some distance away, from which columns of smoke or vapor were rising, and from which, at times, lurid flashes of light gave a blood-orange tint to the surrounding landscape and to the vapors that floated beneath the great vault, high overhead.

It dawned on me that this white sand must be a metallic ore—a salt of some metal—and that the building to which it was being taken was a smelter or refinery.

As I sat there working, it seemed that I developed the faculty of being two places at once—thinking two sets of thoughts at the same time. Objectively, I sat and worked in the control room. Subjectively, I operated the mechanical shovel. It was like playing a piano and singing at the same time—or perhaps more like singing an air and playing a violin obbligato. Doing two things at once, one objectively, the other subjectively, yet conscious of doing both.

The Snals had permitted me to retain my wrist chronometer, though my radiophone was taken from me. They had learned its use when Art Reeves had sacrificed his life to warn me—all to no avail.

The chronometer showed that our day was divided into two periods of about ten hours each—a work period and a rest period. The work period lasted for ten solid hours without intermission, nor were we permitted to take our hands from the electrodes even for an instant during that period. When the work period was finished, the second shift of workers was ready to take our places. We were then issued water and black porridge, and permitted to roam about in our living quarters for about an hour. At the end of the hour, however, we were peremptorily ordered into our sleeping cylinders for eight hours. We were then ordered out, fed and watered, and at the end of another hour, marched into the control room to relieve the shift that had been working while we slept and rested.

The division in which I worked, labored unremittingly at digging and loading a seemingly endless desert of white ore. I learned from workers in other divisions that some of them were engaged in smelting the ore, some in building metal cities and warehouses, others in building flying globes, and still others in transporting materials and prisoners through the streets of the subterranean cities and along the metal causeways that connected them.

With the aid of my chronometer I kept careful track of the outer world time.

Within two weeks after my arrival, every worker Snal in the building had been replaced by a human slave. The only Snals remaining were the armed and armored overseers.

I often thought of Dolores Monteiro as I had last seen her, shuddering before Zet, the slimy emperor of the nether world, and wondered what had become of her. She was a lovely creature, and unspoiled, despite the adulation she had always received.

Although certainly not human, Zet greatly resembled a human being in form. He had spoken of an experiment—an attempt at crossing the races. And I feared that the beauty of this girl might have tempted him to force her into his own seraglio. The thought was revolting. And the uncertainty was almost as maddening as the definite knowledge would have been.

During the hours after and before the sleeping periods, I used to walk around the building, scanning the faces of all the white females. At the end of a month I was still looking for her, but looking hopelessly.