Dora and I had no chance to see young Johnny Blair again. Nor the Martian woman, Setta. At one of the rim pressure-exits, three of the Physicals stood waiting with us. Then we felt the big disc settle with a bump to the ground. The exit door slid open and our captors pushed us out.
The new world. Its strangely heavy air choked me a little at first, and made my head reel. I could feel that the gravity was less than Earth, but not much so because of the immense density of the planet. A babble of muffled sound was audible as human voices greeted us. In the weird darkness of dim tubelights, a fringe of staring captive humans showed on the rocks nearby. But Physicals like little policemen paced in front of them, keeping them away.
Along a descending rocky path Dora and I were shoved until in a moment the violet sheen of the barrage at the house of the Monster loomed ahead. Then we went through one of the slit openings under the dome-like roof. And presently we stopped at a luminous waist-high railing; and in a lurid violet-yellow glow, we stared down at the giant thing which was spread here before us!
The circular area inside here seemed about fifty feet in diameter and was depressed ten feet below us. A violet-yellow luminescence suffused it so that for a moment it was a blur. Then gradually it clarified and we saw the Supreme One! Its flat, intricate body was a quivering, palpitating, luminous mass of tissue spread in a great fifty foot circle. A Thing fifty feet in diameter, and perhaps three feet thick. For a moment I thought that it was lying flat on the rocks. Then I saw that it was suspended a foot or two in the air with a violet curtain or radiance connecting it to the solidity of the ground.
A rooted monster! Incapable of locomotion it spread here, with radiance like roots, through which doubtless it was drawing from the ground its sustenance, its life. Electric sustenance, of course. Weird life-force, animating its nerve-ganglia, replenishing its living tissue. Intricate electronic streams of nourishment which in a human body are blood-streams. A life-force of indescribable chemistry, drawn through its electronic roots from the planet itself.
An amazing Being. Glowing, multiple brain-lobes were like a score of transparent heads with luminous threads of what could have been nerve tissue connecting them; an intricate network of ganglia in a tangle everywhere through the palpitating body-tissue. Other organs, indescribable, unnamable, were crimson and violet glowing blobs. I could see the streams of nourishment swiftly circulating from one to the other—huge transparent arteries of fluorescence, threading out into veins and tiny capillaries. And in the center of the body-mass, a giant eye on a flexible stem, huge organ of sight with spectral colors darting like fire within it, was glaring at us.
All that I saw with my first swift awed gaze. Then other details were apparent. A dozen globes of what could have been transparent muscle were rhythmically palpitating, like huge hearts pumping the strange current through this Thing to keep it alive. And then I saw that under the central giant eye there was the orifice for a voice and another for hearing.
An awesome rooted monster. The only living thing on its barren little world until the humans came, a pseudo-solidity of roof and walls; a radiance which streamed from the monster itself. And now in the lurid dimness I could see faint streams like the threads of an aura emanating from the different sections of the monster. Little cables of vibrations, infinitely long, perhaps as unsubstantial as a human thought. In the darkness here beside Dora and me, a dozen of the little Physicals were ranged. Parts of the monster. I saw it now—saw those evanescent threadlike streams from the circle of quivering tissue—each thread ending in one of the Physicals. The pathways of transmission for orders from the central Being to its seemingly detached physical parts.
Thoughts are so swift! I suppose Dora and I stood there gazing for no more than a minute. The monster for that minute was silent; the round central eye, as big as my head, gazed with appraisement. I heard Dora suck in her breath with terror as she mutely stared. Both of us, clutching at each other. And a weird feeling swept me. It was as though I was gazing at a living thing of vast immensity. The power of thought here, immense, vast and unfathomable to me who was just a human. It gave me a feeling of my own futility, so that in the presence of this Being I stood cringing. Unutterably helpless; small, and terrified.