Hundreds, perhaps, of the city’s masters had been in view from the moment they came on the roof, greenish hemispherical domes drifting above the confusion of black metal, dark tentacles dangling.
All had been far away, insignificant by comparison with their works.
But now one had lifted abruptly over the point of the conical roof.
Giles Habibula dived for the hole through which they had emerged.
He stuck; before the others could help him the Medusa was overhead.
The sheer size of it was shocking.
Those in the distance had been tiny by comparison only.
Its green dome, wet and slowly palpitating, was twenty feet through, the hanging, ophidian tentacles twice that in length.
It was infinitely horrible.
Vast, bulging mass, gelatinous and slimy, translucently green.
Scores of hanging tentacles, slowly writhing— efficient and quite beautiful, no doubt, in the eyes of their owner.
Gorgon’s eyes!
Long, ovoid wells of purple flame.
All pupil, rimmed with tattered black membrane.
Mirrors of a cold and ruthless wisdom, old when the very Earth was new.
John Star was not in fact turned to stone. Yet the sheer, elemental horror of that purple stare set off some primeval fear-response. It paralyzed his limbs with tingling cold, slowed his heart, stopped his breath, drenched him with sweat of terror.
Fear-numbed, they stood motionless, until the tentacles had whipped about them, snatched thorn-daggers from their nerveless hands, and pulled Giles Habibula like a cork from the hole.
They were lifted, vainly fighting the hard thin tentacles.
“My mortal wine———” panted Giles Habibula.
It dropped from his pocket.
Like a plummet it fell into the chasm below; it fell two thousand feet.
“My blessed bottle of wine!”
And he sobbed in the coiling ropes.
Moving by what force they did not know, by what amazing conquest of gravitation, the creature swept aloft with them, above the titanic black disorder of the city, toward—John Star noted it with a certain grim satisfaction—toward the central citadel.
They fought the fear that numbed them.
“Something about that brain,” gasped Jay Kalam, even as they were borne away.
“Powers that we can’t guess. Makes you feel pretty futile.”
It carried them into the stupendous building, through a door opening on sheer space, five thousand feet up.
Through a colossal green-lit hall. It stuffed them through a rectangular opening in the floor, dropped them without ceremony.
Sprawling in a black-walled room, twenty feet square, they found beside them a man—or what had been a man.
Emaciated, ragged, it was sleeping on its face, breathing with long, rasphig snores.
John Star shook it, after the Medusa had vanished from above the locked grating overhead, woke it.
Stark, feverish terror stared from red eyes in a pallid, haggard face.
It uttered a shrill, hoarse scream of agonized terror; clawed in wild, blind insanity of fear at John Star’s hand. And John Star himself cried out, for the thing was Eric Ulnar. The handsome, insolent officer who would have been Emperor of the System, become this twisted and pitiful wreck!
“Leave me be!
Leave me be!”
The voice was thinner and wilder than anything human.
“I’ll do what you want!
I’ll do anything!
I’ll make her tell the secret!
I’ll kill her if you want!
But I can’t stand any more!
Leave me be!”
“We won’t hurt you!”
John Star tried to soothe the quivering thing, shocked as he was by the import of its cries.
“We’re men.
We won’t harm you.
I’m John Ulnar. You know me. We won’t hurt you.”
“John Ulnar?”
Red, fevered eyes stared, wild with a sudden, frantic hope.