A great homesickness for the world, and my fellow men came over me. Then I heard a strange humming behind me, and a slight metallic clatter. I turned around in apathetic curiosity.
A Strange Duel
And I came face to face with a monster so utterly strange and weirdly terrible that the very shock of it almost unseated my wandering reason. But so completely had my interests and hopes in life been severed, so near was I to the great divide of death, that I was past emotion of any kind. At first I looked on the thing with a curious lack of interest, as the soul of one newly dead might look with numbed faculties on his new habitation. But as I looked upon it, an icy current of fear stole over me like the creeping cold of the north, and clasped me to its frozen breast. I had met so many horrors that I had begun to think myself immune to terror. But I had met no such thing as that.
I knew that it was an intelligent, a sentient being. But it was not human, not a thing of flesh and blood at all. It was a machine! Or, rather, it was in a machine, for I felt far more of it than I saw—a will, a cold and alien intellect, a being, malefic, inhuman, inscrutable. It was a thing that belonged, not in the present earth, but in the tomb of the unthinkable past, or beyond the wastes of interstellar space, amid the inconceivable horrors of unknown spheres.
There was a bright, gleaming globe, three feet in diameter, lit with vivid flowing fires of violet and green. A strange swirling mist of brilliant points of many colored lights danced madly about it—a coruscating fog of iridescent fire—moving, flickering, in an incredible rhythm.
That unearthly thing rested upon a frame of metal. It was the head of a metallic monster. It was set on an oblong box of white metal, to which were attached six long-jointed metal limbs. The being stood nine feet high, at least. It was standing on three of the limbs and holding my rifle, which I had left where I had been lying, turning it and feeling of it with a cluster of slender, finger-like tentacles on the end of the metal arm. It was working the mechanism of the gun, and apparently looking at it, though it had no eyes that I could see.
Suddenly the gun went off, throwing up the sand between me and the monster. With a grotesquely half-human attitude of alarmed surprise, the being dropped the gun and sprang back like a gigantic spider. The motion freed me from my paralysis of horror, and I started backing cautiously around the boulder, afraid to run. As I moved it sprang forward and a slender tube of white metal, in one of the tentacled hands, was suddenly pointed toward me. As the monster moved, there was a humming sound from it, and little jets of purple gas hissed from holes in the sides of the box-like body.
I drew my automatic and fired at the metal tube. I must have made an unusually fortunate shot, for the object was carried out of the metal grasp, and fell spinning on the sand. On the instant, I turned and ran toward another great boulder, as large as a railroad locomotive, that lay fifty yards to the north. As I ran I heard the clatter and whirring of the mechanical being. I paused at the edge of the rock and took a last glimpse back.
The monster was holding the little tube in one of its limbs, and apparently adjusting it with another. Then it suddenly extended the thing toward me. I dived behind the rock. And a bright ray of orange light shot past the boulder—a beam like that which had come from the being in the door of the rocket-ship. Then I knew that here was an entity of the same kind as the one I had destroyed that night—one of the ruling intelligences of the crater, the Krimlu.