They stood watching in silence while the grey cloud flowed forward with increasing speed until it was nearly within reaching distance of the castle. Far off, across the valley, the lights of Brann’s walls watched like eyes. Miller spoke impatiently.
“Aren’t you going to do anything? Can’t you stop the thing?”
“I could. But I want to see what new ideas Brann has incorporated into this. It’s better to know than to guess. If I destroy this he’ll just send another. I’m going to let it try the gate.”
The cloud flowed up to the outer wall … paused … seemed to be considering the massive glass barrier before it. Then the lattices rearranged, glittering. A finger of greyness reached out, seeped through the crack between gate and wall.
Metal groaned in the quiet of the night. That tiny pseudopod was expanding with monstrous force. The gate shivered, crumpled—gave way.
Radiant shimmers of color flared down from the walls upon the cloudy thing as Llesi’s batteries went into action at last. In his own brain Miller could feel Llesi’s tense watchfulness as he waited to see how the creature would meet them.
Its latticework heart shifted like a kaleidoscope. The clouds thickened, grew dark. It shrank—expanded again—and moved on into the castle, a wreathed thing of velvety blackness that swallowed up the attacking lights and ignored them.
Now they lost sight of it but they could hear, partly through the vibrations of the castle walls themselves and partly through the confused mental cries of the people below them, the progress the machine was making. A transparent wall gave way before it and the crash of the collapse sent a terrible, ringing music all through the castle. There was the silent voiceless cry of a man caught in its unimaginable grip—a cry that shivered up to an unbearable peak in the brains of all who heard, and then went silent with a suddenness that made the listeners reel.
Orelle seized Miller’s arm in a tight grip. “Come with me,” she said. “Hurry!”
She was half-running as she led the way through the dark castle which was yet so clearly visible to the sight. The confusing halls were strange to him but before they reached their goal Miller was leading the way, Llesi in his brain sending out the mental orders that guided him, so that the corridors and doors and sloping glass ramps seemed to swing around and to fly open before him without the need of knowledge on his part.
There was pandemonium below. Miller could feel the tension in Llesi’s mind and in Orelle’s as they raced toward the breached wall of their fortress. Llesi was unsure.
“Maybe this is the one,” he said, half to himself, as the translucent walls spun past. “Maybe this one we can’t fight.”
More than one wall had been breached by the time they reached the scene of the fight. The castle was filled with the jangling, musical crashes of shattered glass and the cries—some of them vocal cries now—of the defenders. But from the attacking machine itself no sound came.
Miller saw it through jagged walls and over the heads of the castle’s men—a great coagulated cloud, velvet-soft and iron-hard, the colored lights of the defenders’ strange weapons beating upon it in vain. There were colors in the weapons such as Miller had never seen.
“Photon showers,” Llesi told him briefly. “Very high-frequency light waves with an energy increase great enough to utilize the mass of the light. Those latticed patterns would be smashed by the impact—if we could reach them.
“When you deal with anything as delicate as this you need a delicate weapon. The lattices would be impervious to heavy weapons but the mass of light itself could crush the patterns if I had some way to penetrate the cloud.”
“The photons should do it,” Orelle said in a worried voice. “Always before—”
“Brann has something new this time.”
The cloud rolled on. Through the shattered walls they saw it engulf the men in its path, moving like a velvet-soft juggernaut that crushed all before it. It pressed its misty surface against another wall—there was a surging all through the mass and, briefly, a pattern of clouded lights glimmered deep in the smoky bulk.
The castle rang with the jangled music of another falling wall.
“It’s making straight for the Power,” Orelle said, quietly now. “Llesi, you’ve got to stop it.”
Miller felt in his own brain Llesi’s rapid, orderly thoughts, marshalling the facts and measuring against them his varied resources. Then, decisively, he spoke.
“We must get to the Power first. I can stop it but we’ll have to hurry.”
To Miller it seemed as if the castle spun around him again as, in obedience to the orders in his brain, he whirled and ran with Orelle at his heels. The corridors opened up before them, unfamiliar pathways looking strangely familiar to the double vision in his mind. Another wall smashed into ringing fragments behind them as they ran.
With his new night-sight Miller could see a long way through the translucent walls of the glass castle. Lights had been kindled through the building now so that the glimmers, far and near, reflecting beyond intervening barriers, made the whole castle glow bewilderingly.
But ahead of them, growing larger as they neared, was one part of the building that even this new sight could not penetrate. It was a great cube whose walls gave back the vision opaquely, as it loomed before them.
Orelle pushed past him as they reached it, spread both hands flat upon the dark surface. It parted before her, melting away as the other walls melted to admit entry, and she pressed through into the hidden room. Miller followed her, his brain spinning with his own curiosity and the complicated planning of Llesi who shared it.
Afterward Miller could never remember clearly what he had seen in that great dark room. He had only an impression in retrospect of an immense number of delicate shining things that might have been instruments—of countless rows of containers over which
