But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves? And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant cubes—that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.
There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses released by the Keeper's coilings passed through the Metal People of the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the shields?
That WAS unthinkable—unthinkable because if so this mechanism was superfluous.
The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the thought of any of its units.
There was some gap here—a gap that the grouped consciousness could not bridge without other means. Clearly that was true—else why the tablet, why the Keeper's travail?
Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible.
I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I felt, to touch the tablet's rods.
A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows—
The Keeper glowed above us!
In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.