12
AS THE LIGHT grew in size, the humming and the vibrations increased in intensity. Finally, there was sufficient illumination for him to discern his course. After a time, the brightness was so intense that he cursed at having forgotten to bring his ancient sunglasses with him.
The brightness resolved itself into a square of light. He lay on his belly and looked at the light for a long period of time, allowing his eyes to make an adjustment. He repeated this many painful times as he advanced.
The floor of the place had become smooth beneath him; the air was cool but pleasant, and free of the odors which had prevailed in the region he had recently departed.
He moved until it was immediately before him. There was nothing but the light. It was a gigantic opening onto something, but all that he could see was the yellow-white blaze; he heard a grinding, clanking and humming, as of many machines.
... Or the Great Machine.
Again, he lay prone. He crawled forward through the opening. He lay upon a ledge, and for a moment his mind could not assimilate all that was below.
It had so many gears that it would have been an interminable task to number them, some turning slowly, some rapidly, big unto small; and there were cams, drive shafts, and pulleys and pendulums-some of the pendulums twenty times his own height and slow, ponderous-and pistons and things that corkscrewed in and out of black metal sockets; and there were condensers, transformers and rectifiers; there were great blue-metal banks containing dials, switches, buttons and little lights of many colors, which constantly blinked on and off; there was the steady noise, a hum, of still further buried generators- or perhaps they were something else, possibly drawing power from the planet itself, its heat, its gravitational field, certain hidden stresses-which buzzed in his ears like a swarm of insects; there was the blue smell of ozone, reaching everywhere. There was the brilliant light coming from all the walls of the enormous cavern which housed the equipment; there was a battery of buckets which moved on guidelines above the entire complex, occasionally pausing in their courses to dump lubricants at various points; there were power cables, like snakes, that wound from one point to another, indicating nothing he could understand; there were tiny, glass-enclosed boxes, connected with the whole by means of thin wires, which contained components so minute that he could not discern their forms from where he lay. There were no fewer than a hundred elevator-type mechanisms, which constantly plunged into the depths or vanished overhead, and which paused at various levels of the machine to extrude mechanical appurtenances into portions of its mechanism; there were wide red bands of light on the farthest wall, and they flicked on and off; and his mind could not encompass all that he saw, felt, smelled and heard-though he knew that he must deal with it somehow-so that he searched for a clue for the best point of impact, seeking within that massive structure for that which would destroy it. He found titanic tools hung upon the walls, tools which could only have been wielded by giants, to service the thing-wrenches; pliers, pry bars, things-that-turned-other-things-and he knew that among them lay the thing that he required, a thing which, if properly employed, could break the Great Machine.
He crept farther forward and continued to stare. It was magnificent; there had never been anything like it before, and there never would be again.
He looked for a way down and saw a metal ladder, far off to his right. He went toward it.
The ledge narrowed, but he managed to reach the topmost rung, and from there he swung himself into position.
He began the long climb down.
Before he had reached the bottom, he heard footsteps. They were barely discernible over the sounds of the machinery, but he distinguished them and backed into a shadow.
Although the shadow did not possess its normal…
