The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say--but now, almost touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet tenuous, dense and unsubstantial. Again the thought came to me--they were force made visible; energy made concentrate into matter. We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered; the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just watched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the substance itself I do not know. Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a scant nine feet from its rim. Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T, glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might have been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It was a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones. It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops of some of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal and metal--as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and matter. The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex; a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the Keeper's hands and these only could be masters of its incredible intricacies. No Disk--not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on it, draw out its chords of power. But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves? And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant cubes--that under it they lay as well I did not doubt. There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses released by the Keeper's coilings passed through the Metal People of the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the shields? That WAS unthinkable--unthinkable because if so this mechanism was superfluous. The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the thought of any of its units. There was some gap here--a gap that the grouped consciousness could not bridge without other means. Clearly that was true--else why the tablet, why the Keeper's travail?