om them the
whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.

My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was
motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They
were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned
us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our
clothing.

There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of
vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the
latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, high
square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs
beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.

Holding us so the Keeper studied us.

The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. But
here was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth had
described as emanating from the Metal Emperor. Powerful it was, without
doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones of
revolt, something incomplete and struggling. Within the disharmonies I
seemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battling
against itself.

Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles winding about us like slender
strands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more and
more difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat and
tightening--tightening.

I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my head
toward him, could not speak. Was this then to be our end?

The strangling clutch relaxed, the mass of the tentacles lessened. I was
conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.

Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating past
us--beating down the Keeper's. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me.
I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawn
away.

Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk--the Metal Emperor!

He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper--and even as I swung I saw
the Keeper's multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily
and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.

And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense
tranquillity, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an
unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to
be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss. I struggled against
it,