In dread miracle, she spoke. Articulation was difficult and the sound seemed to come from immense distances. The tones were soulless, a rippling sibilance of sounds and half-accented syllables, the words a meaningless babel upon his ears. She spoke in whispers, softly murmuring, ecstatic....
In his brain images formed, alien, untranslatable.
He saw the ancient city at the height of its power. Streets thronged with a strange people, in form the product of a variant evolution. This was their city, their temple. Here they housed a god-thing, slimy, monstrous, a being of their own creation, blending within itself something of both protoplasmic matter and living energy. Here in the temple it lived and was worshipped by strange rites and awful sacrifice.
Then came a whirlwind of war. The race of creators and worshippers vanished, destroyed with their enemies when the atomic weapons of both races burst the bounds, sweeping in fiery wrath over seas and continents until the planet lay bare and smoldering. The race died, but their god-thing lived.
Deep within the sacred fountain of its temple, the slime-being lay dormant. But the ravening atomic fires had touched off a vein of almost pure uranium beneath the city. Something of that atomic fire still lingered, spreading slowly through the mass, reacting like a slow pile, half-alive, partially radioactive. Through the ages, the element fissioned, emitting low-degree heat and some radiant energy. In its pit of slow incubation, the god-thing developed, wakened to new life, grew in strength and diabolical intelligence.
In time it wearied of passive existence, hungered after more power and freedom of movement. Bursting its bonds, it rose into the well, whence it hurled forth impulses, urgent, hypnotic, angry and summoning. With promises and deceits it lured the forest, called to itself the more mobile plants, enslaved the green living things.
Of itself, it gave to them new strength and intelligence, made of them more mobile beings. It roused them to fantastic development and stirred to life their latent dreams of green conquest. By complex symbiosis, it bound them to itself, made willing servants and worshippers of them. The forest had become a vast, single, interdependent community.
The woman-thing—its voice—had strayed within the precincts of its dread power. She, also, had been lured, overpowered, enslaved. Partially absorbed by the god-being, wholly dependent, the woman had become a nympthon, a temple handmaiden, little more than a decoration, existing solely by its whim.
The voice died away. Unconscious of sound, Alston sensed the images fading from his mind.
Standing boldly on the pedestal, Alston reached upward to tear and strike at the horror on the veil. Shrieking, he assailed the monstrous thing which was neither plant nor woman, alternating words and blows. Hate seethed in his brain, hate and pain and grief. He cried out and hurled himself savagely, lusting to destroy.