The oblong that was the upper half of the cruciform Shape extended now at right angles to the horizontal arms. It hovered, a rectangle forty feet long, as many feet over the floor at the base of the crystal pedestal. It bent again, this time from the hinge that held the outstretched arms to the base. And now it was a huge truncated cross, a T-shaped figure, hovering only twenty feet above the pave. Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles; serpentine, whiplike. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the overhanging planes. Something there was beneath them--something like an immense and luminous tablet. The tentacles were moving over it--pressing here, thrusting there, turning, pushing, manipulating-- A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks quivering. The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even more rapid. There was a faint, curiously oppressive humming--like the distant echo of a tempest in chaos. Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the cones were dissolving. And now they were--gone. The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance--one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of light--light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it. The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered; turned upward; the wheel began to whirl--faster--faster-- Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green column of intensest light. With prodigious speed, as compact as water, CONCENTRATE, it struck--straight out toward the face of the sun. It thrust up with the speed of light--the speed of light? A thought came to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery, made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count. “What's the matter?” asked Drake. “Take my glasses,” I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my tally. “Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun.” With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have found laughable, he obeyed. “Hold them to my eyes,” I ordered. Three minutes had gone by.