“I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And THAT did it—that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it's widening! It's widening!”
I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake HAD seen the spot widen, change—to this day I do not know.
To me it seemed unchanged—and yet—perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun HAD opened further—
That the sun had winced!
I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not—still shone the intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.
Twenty minutes—subconsciously I had gone on counting—twenty minutes—
About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear. In a heart-beat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose swarms of corpuscles the sun's reflected image upon each disk shone clear—as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.
Again the filaments of the Keeper moved—feebly. As one of the hosts of circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.
Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire—green as the fire of green life itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.
Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.