Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find--but I had looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so frightful as was this. “Burned out!” muttered Drake. “Short-circuited and burned out! Like a dynamo--like an electric light!” “Destiny!” said Ventnor. “Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!” We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain. For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of the Pit. Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them, crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until under wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud. And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake's theory of the destruction was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet--or, rather, a prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had been activated. Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have likened to energy-made material, it was certainly akin to electromagnetic energies. When, in the cataclysm, that force was diffused there had been created a magnetic field of incredible intensity; had been concentrated an electric charge of inconceivable magnitude. Discharging, it had blasted the Monster--short-circuited it, and burned it out. But what was it that had led up to the cataclysm? What was it that had turned the Metal Monster upon itself? What disharmony had crept into that supernal order to set in motion the machinery of disintegration? We could only conjecture. The cruciform Shape I have named the Keeper was the agent of destruction--of that there could be no doubt. In the enigmatic organism which while many still was one and which, retaining its integrity as a whole could dissociate manifold parts yet still as a whole maintain an unseen contact and direction over them through miles of space, the Keeper had its place, its work, its duties. So too had that wondrous Disk whose visible and concentrate power, whose manifest leadership, had made us name it emperor. And had not Norhala called the Disk--Ruler? What were the responsibilities of these twain to the mass of the organism of which they were such important units? What were the laws they administered, the laws they must obey? Something certainly of that mysterious law which Maeterlinck has called the spirit of the Hive--and something infinitely greater, like that which governs the swarming sun bees of Hercules' clustered orbs. Had there evolved within the Keeper of the Cones--guardian and engineer as it seemed to have been--ambition? Had there risen within it a determination to wrest power from the Disk, to take its place as Ruler? How else explain that conflict I had sensed when the Emperor had plucked Drake and me from the Keeper's grip that night following the orgy of the feeding?