d will remain master only until something grown stronger wrests mastery from him — even as he wrested it from his ravening kind — as they took it from the reptiles — as did the reptiles from the giant saurians — which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic — and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn.
“Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!
“Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity — and then — hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck.
“Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure.
“And these — these —” the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man — nor does he even dream that his doors are down. These — Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals — Things that suck their strength from Belgium Jerseys the sun and whose blood is the lightning.
“The sun! The sun!” he cried. “There lies their weakness!”
The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.
“Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter — Drake. They are not invulnerable. No! The sun — strike them through the sun! Go into the city — not invulnerable — the Keeper of the Cones — strike at the Cones when — the Keeper of the Cones — ah-h-h-ah —”
We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way.
“Vulnerable — under the law — even as we! The Cones!
“Go!” he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.
“Martin! Brother,” wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a beleaguered citadel.
But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into Anthony Martial Jersey that subjective void in which he had said he floated — a lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with Joel Veltman Jersey us cut; severed from us as completely as though he Joakim Nilsson Jersey were, as he had described it, outside space.
And Drake and I looked at each other’s eyes, neither daring to be Landon Donovan Jersey first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to be the sorrowful soul.
Chapter XIV “Free! But a Monster!”
The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh intolerable crisis, Andros Townsend Jersey has been to me long one of Adnan Januzaj Jersey the most interesting phenomena of our psychology.
It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective colorati |
