tal? Metal--ALIVE AND THINKING!"

Suddenly he was silent, his face a page on which, visibly, dread
gathered slowly and ever deeper.

And as I looked at Ruth, white-faced, and at him, I knew that my own was
as pallid, as terror-stricken as theirs.

"They were such LITTLE THINGS," muttered Drake. "Such little
things--bits of metal--little globes and pyramids and cubes--just little
THINGS."

"Babes! Only babes!" It was Ruth--"BABES!"

"Bits of metal"--Dick's gaze sought mine, held it--"and they looked for
each other, they worked with each other--THINKINGLY, CONSCIOUSLY--they
were deliberate, purposeful--little things--and with the force of a
score of dynamos--living, THINKING--"

"Don't!" Ruth laid white hands over his eyes. "Don't--don't YOU be
frightened!"

"Frightened?" he echoed. "I'M not afraid--yes, I AM afraid--"

He arose, stiffly--and stumbled toward me.

Afraid? Drake afraid. Well--so was I. Bitterly, TERRIBLY afraid.

For what we had beheld in the dusk of that dragoned, ruined chamber was
outside all experience, beyond all knowledge or dream of science. Not
their shapes--that was nothing. Not even that, being metal, they had
moved.

But that being metal, they had moved consciously, thoughtfully,
deliberately.

They were metal things with--MINDS!

That--that was the incredible, the terrifying thing. That--and their
power.

Thor compressed within Hop-o'-my-thumb--and thinking. The lightnings
incarnate in metal minacules--and thinking.

The inert, the immobile, given volition, movement,
cognoscence--thinking.

Metal with a brain!

CHAPTER V. THE SMITING THING

Silently we looked at each other, and silently we passed out of the
courtyard. The dread was heavy upon me. The twilight was stealing upon
the close-clustered peaks. Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple
mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in
irised beauty; nightfall.

As I gazed upon them I wondered to what secret place within their
brooding immensities the little metal mysteries had fled. And to what
myriads, it might be, of their kind? And these hidden hordes--of what
shapes were they? Of what powers? Small like these, or--or--

Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side--the
little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its
colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley.

I turned aside, crept through the shattered portal and looked over