“I moved one of those mighty muscles of light and the answering movement of my earth-body was a great quake on the other side of earth! Another of my muscles twitched and an avalanche crashed somewhere else on earth! I paid no attention whatever to the verminous tiny things dwelling upon my body, often annihilated in hordes by my earth-body movements.
“And I, the Earth-Brain, and my great earth-body, were not stationary but moving! My great body was racing at awful speed through vast leagues of infinite space! Far off across those immensities of space I was aware of other living earths, other planets, some larger and some smaller than I, but each living in the same vast way as I lived, each with its own great Brain!
“Yes, and from those other living earths there came to me across the void messages, communication. I, Clark Landon, could not even dimly comprehend the nature of that communication which I, the Earth-Brain, carried on. But it was constant and unbroken, a strange speaking of living earth to earth across the void, an exchange of thoughts, of purpose—
“For purpose there was in the way in which I and those other mighty Brains moved our planet-bodies through space. It was not by mere blind chance, haphazardly, that we moved, but consciously, deliberately, carrying out together some vast purposeful design. Circling and moving with superhuman exactness, a colossal, geometrical march of vast living earth-things through space!
“And even as I, Clark Landon, thus seemed to share the superhuman viewpoints and purposes of the Earth-Brain that held us, so did I share dimly its attitude toward ourselves. In one part of my intelligence I was still Clark Landon, held with Travis and Skeel helpless by a thing of mystery and terror. But in another part of my mind I was the Earth-Brain, inspecting these three tiny parasites who had dared penetrate my brain-chamber.
“For I, the Earth-Brain, had never bothered in one way or another with the numberless verminous parasites that dwelt on my earth-body, except that when any had dared approach the mountain at my body’s top that held encased myself, I had warned and driven them back by movements and tremors of my body.
“But these three had not been driven back but had come on with insane temerity until they had penetrated this dwelling-chamber of mine where none of their kind ever had penetrated before. And I, the Earth-Brain, had found their audacity so unprecedented and unexpected that I had grasped these three insect-things, was examining them!
“In so much did I, Clark Landon, share somehow the Earth-Brain’s thoughts as those thoughts beat like tangible force through us. And I was aware, even as Travis and Skeel and I struggled vainly against the light-tentacle’s grip, of the Earth-Brain’s desire to inspect one of us more closely. I was not surprised when another light-tentacle whipped out from its base and grasped Skeel, raised him high in the air close beside the Earth-Brain, Travis and I still held by the first tentacle on the floor.
“Travis and I ceased our struggles, watched in a sort of paralysis of terror as Skeel was raised high beside the Earth-Brain. The glowing light of the great ovoid seemed to beat out through him as the tentacle turned him this way and that like a helpless puppet.
“The Earth-Brain was examining him, I knew, for there still held me that curious duality of mind in which I was at the same time Clark Landon and the Earth-Brain. Even as I, Landon, watched from below my comrade Skeel, I, the Earth-Brain, was inspecting curiously this tiny thing I held and concerning which I was casually interested.
“It was I, the Earth-Brain, who shot forth from myself another light-tentacle to grasp this tiny living thing. And then suddenly with a red crash of horror I was no longer the Earth-Brain at all but was Clark Landon, screaming wildly with Travis and shaking impotent little hands up at the Earth-Brain. For with those two tentacles it had casually torn Skeel’s living body into halves!
“The tentacles held the two torn red things of broken flesh and bone that a moment before had been Herbert Skeel closer to the Earth-Brain’s towering ovoid. The Earth-Brain was inspecting them, as calmly and dispassionately as a man might tear apart an insect and examine its interior structure.
“‘Skeel!’ Travis was screaming raggedly over the unceasing soft roar. ‘The thing’s killed Skeel!’
“‘It’s vivisected him!’ I cried. ‘I’ll kill the damned thing—I’ll kill it!’
“I was struggling insanely to reach the automatic in my belt, but held in the light-tentacle’s grasp with Travis, I could not move my arms an inch.
“The Earth-Brain still was examining the broken body of Skeel. The great ovoid’s changing colours still raced and swam, its roar of merged sounds unceasing and its mighty will still flooding tangibly through us and giving us that queer sense of identity with the Earth-Brain. But that sense was overwhelmed in me now by my wild fury at seeing Skeel, the comrade of Travis and myself for so long, slain so terribly before our eyes.
“Travis and I were mouthing wild threats at the towering ovoid. The Earth-Brain paid no more attention to us than might a man to the waving antennae of ants beneath his feet. It broke the halves of Skeel’s body into smaller pieces. After a moment’s inspection it dropped these red fragments, and the two tentacles that had held them shot down towards Travis and me!
“They grasped Travis and swung him up toward the Earth-Brain’s side as Skeel had been swung, to vivisect him as Skeel had been vivisected. The other tentacle of light still held me on the floor. But in the moment Travis had been taken by the two, the grip of it upon me had perforce for an instant loosened, and in that instant I had ripped my pistol from my belt. Now as Travis was raised toward the Earth-Brain I aimed in a flash and fired a stream of steel-jacketed bullets up into the Earth-Brain’s mighty ovoid of light.
“It was in the sheer madness of insane fury that I shot thus into the Earth-Brain, for I had no conscious hope of hurting in the least that terrific thing of tangible light and force in which its intelligence was embodied. But certain it is that even unconsciously I had no expectation of the cataclysmic reactions that took place the instant after my bullets tore into the Earth-Brain’s ovoid of light.
“The Earth-Brain flamed pure crimson instantly, the crimson of leaping hell-fires and raging holocausts, the red of a superhuman, stupendous wrath. Colossal anger emanated from it at the same moment like a wave of destroying force, and as that cosmic wrath swept through me I knew that I had committed blackest sin against the universe in daring to attack the brain of the living earth-body upon which dwelt I and all my tiny race!
“And as the Earth-Brain blazed blinding crimson in rage, all its great tentacles or light-muscles whipped and twisted in a wild convulsion of insensate wrath! Travis was flung against the cavern’s wall and smashed into red pulp by the impact; I was hurled as wildly and struck not the cavern wall but the mouth of the tunnel down which we had come, and all earth seemed shaking with a tremendous grinding roar of shifting rock as the tentacles running down from the Earth-Brain into it convulsed.
“The Earth-Brain had for the moment gone mad with sheer rage and its earth-body was shaking and quaking in that mad spasm. I staggered to my feet. The mountain, the great cavern and the tunnel in whose mouth I was standing, were rocking about me like a leaf in the wind. The Earth-Brain, in its mad excess of rage at having been attacked, had for the moment even forgotten me, who had dared make that attack, and was reacting in an insensate convulsion of fury that was shaking the whole upper part of its earth-body, the whole polar region!
“I stumbled away from that awful spectacle of the Earth-Brain’s crimson-flaming ovoid of light, up into the tunnel. It was mindless terror that made me struggle up the tunnel whose terrific shakings flung me this way and that. I knew that in a moment when the Earth-Brain’s first wild rage subsided it would remember me and its vengeance would crash upon me.