Adventure stories; Science fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
Broader and broader the great turning world was growing as we slanted
down toward it, until it lay like a tremendous dark shield beneath us,
filling all the heavens below. As our ships sank still lower toward it,
speed swiftly slackening, we began to make out details on its surface,
to make out what seemed to be a vast mass of palely shining structures,
towers and walls and vast, terraced buildings that glowed all with pale
blue light, indescribably ghostly in appearance as they soared into
the dusky, crimson light of the three encircling suns. Here and there
through the masses of these blue-shining structures ran streets, narrow
openings in which swarmed great masses of the writhing serpent-people.
And as I gazed down upon this tremendous city, upon the countless
glowing structures of pale blue light that made it up, my astonishment
at what I saw broke from me in a startled cry.
"This city!" I exclaimed. "Its buildings are of vibrations like the
great wall around their universe!"
A city of vibrations! A mighty city that covered apparently all this
giant planet, and yet whose every structure was built, not of matter
but of etheric-vibrations that were matter-resistant like the great
wall, vibrations infinitely more lasting and impenetrable than any
matter, and projected upward at will into buildings of any shape or
size. Here and there in the mighty city, even as we sped down over it,
we could see buildings vanishing instantaneously, could see other
mighty buildings springing as instantly into being, all of the same
pale blue light, reared or destroyed instantly by snapping on or off
the vibrations that were projected upward to form them!
Now, as our ships slanted down over the vast mass of pale-glowing
structures that stretched from horizon to horizon, I saw that ahead and
beneath there lay amid those structures a mighty circular clearing,
scores of miles in diameter and paved smoothly with the same pale blue
force as the city's buildings and streets. In this vast circle, ranged
regularly in long rows, rested thousands upon countless thousands of
gleaming oval space-ships, in all stages of completion. Over and among
them, swarming ceaselessly through them and toiling to complete them,
moved mighty hordes of the serpent-creatures, armed with great tools
of strange design, the thunderous clamor of their work coming up to
us through the great planet's air. It was the immense workshop of
the serpent-races that lay beneath us, I knew, in which their hordes
labored ceaselessly to complete the mighty fleet that was to carry them
through the void to our universe!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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