The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

radiated on each side, from a common center, four limbs that evidently served as both arms and legs since all of them were used alternately or simultaneously in locomotion and also in prehension. This type had a single cyclopean eye like a burning ruby in the middle of its silver face; and above the rounded dome of its head there were several glossy black antennae with vermicular segments, all terminating in tiny concave disks; and a short proboscis ending in a double mouth issued from the jointure of head and shoulders. There were other types, and certain unique individuals, varying monstrously in size and shape, and in the number or arrangement of their limbs and sense organs. But all of them gave the impression of artificial shells, of masks and armors, as if the entities that actuated them were unknowably domiciled within.
    “Talk about robots!” cried Roverton. “Did you ever see anything like them? Look at those copper joints that are as flexible as the joints of an acrobat. Look at those fingers or toes with seven flanges that can bend in any direction.”
    Two-score of the multifarious entities had grouped themselves around the vessel and were examining it with their single or manifold eyes. Behind the fixed inhuman expression of their metal masks, in the movements of their cunningly constructed limbs, the curiosity of an incomprehensibly alien people somehow made itself felt. And the orchestral chattering of their voices, with notes that were resonant as drums, or shrill as clarions, or sweet as lute-strings, could be heard through the sound-valves of the Alcyone. They came nearer and touched the sides of the vessel as if to determine the material of which it was made; and some of them climbed the ladder to the man-hole and inspected it closely. After a little these latter descended and seemed to be holding a serious debate with the others, as if to decide a moot point or a course of action, while all of them continued to watch the Alcyone.
    Now the crowd drew back and a number departed, to return in a few minutes bearing among them an instrument whose use defied conjecture. It was a large tripod of some antimony-type substance, supporting a revolving globe of the same material, from which issued a long, slender tube with a flaring mouth. The tube was levelled at the vessel’s man-hole; and when a lever at the side of the tripod was pressed, a thin stream of ghostly yellow light emerged from the mouth and played upon the neo-vitriolene of the man-hole’s lid. Then, as if in response to the electrical mechanism by which it was operated, the lid unscrewed; and likewise the inner door of the ether-ship, giving on the compartment where Volmar and his crew were gathered, flew open to the same mysterious agency.

    III
    A n atmosphere of humid warmth, laden as with hot-house odors of an ultra-tropical flora, flooded the vessel’s interior. Obviously there were strange elements, non-terrestrial gases in this air, for Volmar and his men began immediately to gasp for breath, and to experience a peculiar giddiness and lightheadedness. Volmar pressed the button which should have closed the outer and inner doors; but the mechanism refused to work, as if the batteries had gone dead or their force had somehow been nullified or paralyzed.
    “Quick! The respirative masks and air-tanks!” cried Volmar with a voice that fought the asphyxiating elements. These masks, covering the entire head and connected by a tube with a tank that was strapped to the shoulders, had been carried along for use in landing on alien worlds where the air might prove unfit for human respiration.
    The apparatus was quickly donned, and none too soon; for one of the men fainted, and the others had to fasten his mask. All of them felt an instantaneous relief from the symptoms of vertigo and difficult breathing.
    The act of putting on the masks had no sooner been completed, when a number of the weird multiform entities invaded the vessel one by one and