but in a single voice replied:
“Thou hast spoken!”
“So be it then!” said the King. “Now that it is decided, I shall say the name of the being that has driven us to this; I heard it upon ascending the throne. Is it not man?”
“Thou hast spoken!” replied the council.
Inhiston then turned to the Great Abstractionist:
“Do you your duty!”
The latter answered:
“I hear and I obey!”
Whereupon he uttered The Word, whose vibrations descended by rifts of air into the bosom of the planet; and then the jasper heavens cracked, and ere the faces of the falling towers could reach the ground, all seventy-seven Argentican cities yawned open into seventy-seven white craters, and amid the splitting plates of the continents crushed by branching fire the Silverines perished, and the great sun shone no longer on a planet, but on a ball of black clouds, which dwindled slowly, swept by a gale of oblivion. The void, having been pushed back by radiation harder than stone, converged now into a single quivering spark, and that spark died. The shock waves, after traveling seven days, reached a place where spaceships black as night were waiting.
“It is done!” said the creator of the monsters, who kept watch, to his comrades. “The kingdom of the Silverines Has ceased to be. We can move on.” The darkness at the stem of their vessels blossomed into flame and off they sped on the trail of vengeance. The Universe is infinite and has no bounds, but their hatred also has no bounds, and any day, at any hour, it can overtake us too.
The White Death
Aragena was a planet built up on the inside, because its ruler, Metameric—who in the equatorial plane extended three hundred and sixty degrees and thereby encircled his kingdom, being not only its lord but also its shield—wishing to protect his devoted subjects, the Enterites, against cosmic invasion, forbade the moving of anything whatever, even of the smallest pebble, upon the surface of the globe. Therefore the continents of Aragena lay wild and barren, and only the ax-blows of lightning hewed its flint mountain ridges, while meteors carved the land with craters. But ten miles beneath the surface unfolded a region of exuberant industry; the Ententes, hollowing out their mother planet, filled its interior with crystal gardens and cities of silver and gold; they raised up, inside-out, houses in the shape of dodecahedrons and icosahedrons, and also hyperboloid palaces, in whose shining cupolas you could see yourself magnified twenty thousand times, as in a hall of giants—for the Enterites were fond of splendor and geometry, and were topnotch builders besides. With a system of pipes they pumped light into the heart of the planet, filtering it now through emeralds, now diamonds, and now rubies, and thanks to this they had their choice of dawn, or noon, or rosy dusk; and so enamored were they of their own forms, that their whole world served them as a mirror. They had vehicles of crystal, set in motion by the breath of heated gases, windowless, since entirely transparent, and while they traveled they beheld themselves reflected in the walls of palaces and temples as marvelously multiple projections, gliding, touching, iridescent. They even had their own sky, where in webs of molybdenum and vanadium flashed spinels and rock crystal, which they cultivated in fire.
The hereditary and at the same time perpetual ruler was Metameric, for he possessed a cold, beautiful and many-membered frame, and in the first of his members resided the mind; when that grew old, after thousands of years, when the crystal networks had been worn away from much administrative thinking, its authority was taken over by the next member, and thus it went, for of these he had ten billion. Metameric himself descended from the Aurigens, whom he had never seen, and all he knew of them was that when they were faced with doom at the hands of certain dreadful beings—beings that engaged in cosmonautics and for it
“Thou hast spoken!”
“So be it then!” said the King. “Now that it is decided, I shall say the name of the being that has driven us to this; I heard it upon ascending the throne. Is it not man?”
“Thou hast spoken!” replied the council.
Inhiston then turned to the Great Abstractionist:
“Do you your duty!”
The latter answered:
“I hear and I obey!”
Whereupon he uttered The Word, whose vibrations descended by rifts of air into the bosom of the planet; and then the jasper heavens cracked, and ere the faces of the falling towers could reach the ground, all seventy-seven Argentican cities yawned open into seventy-seven white craters, and amid the splitting plates of the continents crushed by branching fire the Silverines perished, and the great sun shone no longer on a planet, but on a ball of black clouds, which dwindled slowly, swept by a gale of oblivion. The void, having been pushed back by radiation harder than stone, converged now into a single quivering spark, and that spark died. The shock waves, after traveling seven days, reached a place where spaceships black as night were waiting.
“It is done!” said the creator of the monsters, who kept watch, to his comrades. “The kingdom of the Silverines Has ceased to be. We can move on.” The darkness at the stem of their vessels blossomed into flame and off they sped on the trail of vengeance. The Universe is infinite and has no bounds, but their hatred also has no bounds, and any day, at any hour, it can overtake us too.
The White Death
Aragena was a planet built up on the inside, because its ruler, Metameric—who in the equatorial plane extended three hundred and sixty degrees and thereby encircled his kingdom, being not only its lord but also its shield—wishing to protect his devoted subjects, the Enterites, against cosmic invasion, forbade the moving of anything whatever, even of the smallest pebble, upon the surface of the globe. Therefore the continents of Aragena lay wild and barren, and only the ax-blows of lightning hewed its flint mountain ridges, while meteors carved the land with craters. But ten miles beneath the surface unfolded a region of exuberant industry; the Ententes, hollowing out their mother planet, filled its interior with crystal gardens and cities of silver and gold; they raised up, inside-out, houses in the shape of dodecahedrons and icosahedrons, and also hyperboloid palaces, in whose shining cupolas you could see yourself magnified twenty thousand times, as in a hall of giants—for the Enterites were fond of splendor and geometry, and were topnotch builders besides. With a system of pipes they pumped light into the heart of the planet, filtering it now through emeralds, now diamonds, and now rubies, and thanks to this they had their choice of dawn, or noon, or rosy dusk; and so enamored were they of their own forms, that their whole world served them as a mirror. They had vehicles of crystal, set in motion by the breath of heated gases, windowless, since entirely transparent, and while they traveled they beheld themselves reflected in the walls of palaces and temples as marvelously multiple projections, gliding, touching, iridescent. They even had their own sky, where in webs of molybdenum and vanadium flashed spinels and rock crystal, which they cultivated in fire.
The hereditary and at the same time perpetual ruler was Metameric, for he possessed a cold, beautiful and many-membered frame, and in the first of his members resided the mind; when that grew old, after thousands of years, when the crystal networks had been worn away from much administrative thinking, its authority was taken over by the next member, and thus it went, for of these he had ten billion. Metameric himself descended from the Aurigens, whom he had never seen, and all he knew of them was that when they were faced with doom at the hands of certain dreadful beings—beings that engaged in cosmonautics and for it
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