ble; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex;
a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional
chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the
Keeper's hands and these only could be masters of its incredible
intricacies. No Disk--not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on
it, draw out its chords of power.

But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could
release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves?
And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant
cubes--that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.

There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae
between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses
released by the Keeper's coilings passed through the Metal People of
the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the
shields?

That WAS unthinkable--unthinkable because if so this mechanism was
superfluous.

The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that
the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the
thought of any of its units.

There was some gap here--a gap that the grouped consciousness could not
bridge without other means. Clearly that was true--else why the tablet,
why the Keeper's travail?

Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the
sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy
in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying
to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher
units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced
as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the
possible.

I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I
felt, to touch the tablet's rods.

A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and
scarlet shadows--

The Keeper glowed above us!

In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick
decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have
been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous
nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the
shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated
rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.

One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O'Keefe and Lakla,
t