It was two hundred yards away—a Titanic smooth upright cylinder of metal, the polished surface crawling and flowing with violet flame, with the great incredible serpent-like beam of green rising from the top.
It was astounding—in the strangeness of its aspect, and in its inexplicable suggestion of alien intelligence! But how could there be intelligence in metal?
And then I saw the men about it!
Two of the vast silver spheres were stopped on the ground below the cylinder, oddly dwarfed by its vast height. And about them were men! They were the green slaves—the Sleepers of Mutron! Their bodies were naked but for tattered scraps of cloth. Fastened upon their backs by the cruel metal clamps, they bore the strange prisms!
But those bars of metal were not blue like the one we had taken from the dead man! They shone with the same mysterious violet radiance as the Titanic monostyle. They were parts of it—akin to it!
The men moved like sleepers, or like machines, as I felt that I was moving—as if their wills were dead! They toiled in tireless haste, without confusion. Many were carrying burdens. And it seemed that some were polishing the surface of the cylinder, or applying some luminous substance to it. Near the ground they were quite plainly visible, clinging to its surface like flies, and toiling furiously. Higher up on the colossal cylinder they were but dancing black specks within the violet flame!
The ground about was pitted with shell holes from my bombardment, and at one side I saw the twisted wreck of the great machine I had struck. It is possible that I had hit the great cylinder itself, but it might have received the fire of the biggest gun in Christendom with little injury.
In two minutes more I had been drawn to within fifty yards of that vast shining column of metal. Then the force of fear that had seized my body permitted it to stop, and I stood still. That awful twisting beam of green flame reached out of the top of the thing, and bent down over me! It touched me!
