. If THIS were true, then those pillars in the vast hall, its towering walls — all this City was one living Thing!
Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient, mobile — intelligent!
A Metal Monster!
Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It HAD watched us!
That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes Parajumpers Jakke Last Minute of the living block which formed the City’s cliff.
A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!
No secret mechanism then — back darted my mind to that first terror — had closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little Things. None had opened the way for, had closed the Canada Goose Menn Hybridge Jakke way behind, the coursing spheres. It had been done by the conscious action of the conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous thinking pile!
I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering truth came to us. I know we started to run once more, side by side, gripping like frightened children each other’s hands. Parajumpers Männer ORSO Billig Then Drake stopped.
“By all the HELL of this place,” he said, solemnly, “I’ll run no more. After all — we’re men. If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who made me I’ll run from them no more. I’ll die standing.”
His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed and twinkled upon us.
“Who could have believed it?” he muttered, half to himself. “A living city of them! A living nest of them; a prodigious living nest of metal!”
“A nest?” I caught the word. What did it suggest? That was it Zdeno Chara Pelipaita — the nest of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this more wonderful, more unbelievable than that — the city of ants which was formed by their living bodies precisely as this was of the bodies of the Cubes?
How had Beebe phrased it —“the home, the nest, the hearth, the nursery, the bridal suite, the kitchen, the bed and board of the army ants.” Built of and occupied by those blind and Herre Parajumpers Gobi Parka dead and savage little insects which by the guidance of smell alone carried on the most intricate operations, the most complex activities. Nothing here was stranger than that, I reflected — if once one could rid the mind of the paralyzing influence of the Moncler Bresle Suomi shapes of the Metal Things. Whence came the stimuli that moved THEM, the stimuli to which THEY reacted?
* William Beebe, Atlantic Monthly, October, Parajumers Heavy Jersey Barbara Dam Jakke 1919.
Well then — whence and how came the orders to which the ANTS responded; that bade them open THIS corridor in their nest, close THAT, form this chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other?
Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was |
