Volmar and his crew watched it in a fascinated silence, as the ether-ship drove on and the strange planet became an ever-swelling globe. Its mystery grew with its apparent bulk, for there were no geographical or geological markings, no indications of seas or sea-beds, of mountains or hills, of valleys or elevations or depressions of any kind. It was an unbroken expanse of glowing red that dazzled the eyes and left an after-image of changing colors. It was somehow suggestive of heated metal, and also gave the impression of an artificial rather than a natural body.
The space-voyagers had approached many planets in their journeying; they had even landed on a number; and they knew the limitless variations of planetary development. They had found worlds that were shrouded with mist or snow, with clouds or ice, or were belted with auroral flames or seas of burning bitumen. They had found ocean-covered worlds where gigantic algae towered like forests above incalculable leagues of water; they had seen others that were riven from pole to pole with typhonian fissures and chasms, where etiolated fungi large as hillocks grew in the sunless river-bottoms; they had seen still others that were lob-sided with their burden of colossal mountains. But they had never before encountered a world that in any way resembled this.
“What do you make of it, Captain?” queried Jasper.
“I don’t know.” Volmar’s slow, deliberate voice was frankly puzzled. “Fly nearer—as near as you can.”
The Alcyone dipped in a long spiral descent toward the monotonous ball that was now directly beneath. Soon it hung above the gleaming surface at an elevation of less than a mile. The red world was larger than Mars, though it lacked the dimensions of the Earth or Venus. But as far as the eye could see its horizons were perfectly smooth and level, and its plains were like a sheet of some luminous and deeply tinted copperish metal. The eyes of Volmar and his men were almost blinded with its glare. However, their approach to the weird orb had not occasioned any rise in the temperature of the space-vessel’s interior; so evidently the first impression of glowing heat was erroneous.
“Still nearer—but be careful. We don’t know what it is, or what properties it may possess.”
The Alcyone descended until it almost skimmed the ruddy plain. Now it could be seen that the surface was apparently made of innumerable tiny darting sparks and coruscations, interweaving like a dance of fiery atoms at a speed which the eye could hardly follow.
“It must be some new form of matter,” suggested Roverton. “It looks like a million quintrillions of red-hot filings chasing each other in a field of magnetic force.”
“Perhaps.” Volmar was studying the strange surface intently; and it seemed to him that directly below the vessel the gyrations of the dazzling particles were becoming slower, and that many of them disappeared and did not return to visibility. Then, with incredible suddenness, a deep and yawning pit revealed itself below the Alcyone, forming a circular shaft in the unknown substance. At the same time the ether-ship pitched violently downward, though Jasper had not moved the clutch that should have held it perfectly level and motionless in space. It sank dizzily into the shaft, as if all the gears and engines and levitative mechanisms had become utterly powerless. Jasper switched on the full force of the electromagnetic turbines, and sought to reverse the descent, but all in vain. The vessel shook and trembled as though it were fighting some irresistible power that drew it nadir-ward; but it continued to fall at an undiminished rate between the red walls of the shaft. A second more, and it plunged into a vast open space, where a world of glaring light, of kaleidoscopically various forms and colors, leapt up to meet it like a reeling and ever-broadening mosaic.
II
The transition from the outer sky to this internal gulf beneath the glowing red surface had occupied merely a few moments; and only men of supreme nervous alertness and presence of mind could have adjusted themselves in any degree to a situation so extraordinary. Jasper still strove to arrest the Alcyone’s descent, while the others watched with a swift cognizance of all apparent detail the world toward which they were falling with headlong velocity. Then, turning from it to gaze upward, they saw that the unknown fiery substance was arched above them from horizon to horizon like the cope of some unnatural metallic heaven. The sudden shaft that had formed to admit them was no longer visible; and the vault presented an unbroken expanse, pouring down a blinding, fulgurating luster, though no sun was now discernible.
The vessel was helpless in the grip of the mysterious ultragravitational force that still dragged it downward. The roar of the fulminating engines, the response of the tightened brakes and the drawn levers, all served to attest that the machinery was in perfect order, and was struggling against a power such as never before had been encountered. Volmar and his crew resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable crash; and all the events of their intersidereal voyage were marshalled before them in a crowded flash that was virtually simultaneous with the thought-image of its disastrous end.
However, they were still able to note with astronomic interest the unknown world that surged toward them in geometric mazes of widening forms and spreading zones of color. There were belts that suggested water, there were others that gave the impression of a many-tinted vegetation, and still others denotive of a mineraloid character, like immense plots of ground with pavements of silver and cinnabar and lapis lazuli. And at intervals of many leagues on the great plain, colossal architectural piles upreared themselves to the zenith; and each separate edifice was vaster far than any terrene city.
The ether-ship was falling directly upon one of these piles, whose level diamond-shaped roof was outstretched below in multiform and labyrinthine patterns of a hundred hues, like parterres and flower-beds. The headlong descent began to slacken gently at an elevation of three or four miles, the vessel drifted down with a buoyant ease, it landed and was brought to rest as skillfully and adroitly as if Jasper himself had guided it.
Volmar and his men peered through the ports on a scene that was no less unbelievable than indescribable. They had come down on a vacant space at the center of the diamond roof, which reached away for a half-mile in every direction, and was seemingly made of some mineral substance unknown to terrene geology—a highly metallic stone with striations of black and yellow and bluish green. The roof was laid out like a garden with concentric rows of bizarre plants, all of which were either set in basins of fretted stone or were standing rootlessly on the bare pavement; and was crowded with living and moving creatures no less bizarre than the plants, who began immediately to collect around the Alcyone.
Volmar was almost startled out of his habitual ascetic reserve as he studied these beings; and the others exclaimed with frank amazement. The beings resembled a multitude of forms and types; and all of them were either clothed in shards of metal or else possessed bodies that were radically different in their biological composition from any that the vessel’s crew had ever seen. They glittered and shone in the glaring light with a myriad hues and lusters redoubled by the intricate irregular facets into which their surfaces were divided. The commonest type among them was perhaps five feet tall, with a perfectly spherical head which was joined without a neck to a triangular body that radiated on each side, from a common center, four limbs that evidently served as both arms and legs since all of them were used alternately or simultaneously in locomotion and also in prehension. This type had a single cyclopean eye like a burning ruby in the middle of its silver face; and above the rounded dome of its head there were several glossy black antennae with vermicular segments, all terminating in tiny concave disks; and a short proboscis ending in a double mouth issued from the jointure of head and shoulders. There were other types, and certain unique individuals, varying monstrously in size and shape, and in the number or arrangement of their limbs and sense organs. But all of them gave the impression of artificial shells, of masks and armors, as if the entities that actuated them were unknowably domiciled within.