Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/58

58 Old Mephisto went to the table and fumbled about, returned presently with an ancient oil lamp left there by some former occupant in the near past, as well as with a shiny bit of the ancient alloy, which is as opaque to their penetrative rays as is mercury to light. As he held the lamp up to the dial, Nydia took the bit of shiny metal and held it before the screen, and the rays which it gave off were reflected by the metal toward the dial. Now she could see, and so could old Mephisto. Both looked and marveled at the meaning.

"Oh, Lord Mephisto, there are many little animals, one to each dial mark. Do you know what the meaning of that is?"

"Yes, my blind little witch, I know what that means! It means we can take any flesh and turn it into any creatures we wish with this machine. Let us try a few of the markings."

"Look, there are a whole series of the man-shaped little figures, each a little larger than the others—let us see what they turn out. After all, those winged fairy-like creatures will find it hard to be accepted in that dull life up there."

ORGETTING for a moment their troubles in wonder of the ancient magical instrument, that was not magic at all, but only the mystery of birth and growth worked out to decimal points of energy within patterns of magnetic matrix within the machine, activated by the growth-stimulating rays which the ancients had mastered, they played like children—producing from the slowly shrinking body of the horse a series of people, each of whom was more wonderful than the last.

As Nydia found at last upon the dial a drawing similar in all respects to men, and graduated in relation to the size of the others so as to make her realize that this human would be neither a giant nor a dwarf, she showed it to Mephisto with a nudge of reminder.

"There is what you are seeking. Try that on the horse, and then we will go for the mindless things upstairs."

"I wonder why the machine requires the step of melting the basic animal down to that grey substance?"

"I don't believe it does! I think we had it turned to a dial setting of some microscopic life form. Perhaps that grey substance is itself a life form—some earth microbe which they needed for their farming, and created in this way from other less useful life forms."

"You could be right. Try the new dial setting as we have it on another horse."

Nydia swung the great old ray nozzle about, and the scene on the screen changed as the ray swept about the field overhead. The only horse they could find was hitched to a hayrack, but the hay-rack was standing still—its driver asleep in the shade with his lunch by his side.

"Somebody's going to be darn surprised when they wake up," Nydia whispered to Mephisto, desiring not to wake the farmer.

"Pull the lever, let's see what this setting does? Never mind the farmer—he'll get over it and explain no matter what wonder he sees—that the sun affected him."

Nydia centered the dozing horse on the cross wires, pulled down the big lever. A soft haze immediately enveloped the horse, and a faint shimmering movement ran all over his body. Slowly, subtly, the horse changed—a startling development ran through all his frame. The legs elongated, the ears shortened, nearly disappeared, the skull broadened and the whole frame of the creature underwent a transformation, a development, an opening out of the nature of the animal—a fearful kind of flowering was evident, the end product of an age of evolution was coming to life before our eyes! Not a man, as had happened on the previous dial settings, but the ultimate horse of horses—a creature never seen by living men before stood now between the shafts! No longer horse—but a thing as far above a horse as a man is above the first lunged amphibian that crawled from the water to become the ancestor of modern man.

YDIA’S eyes shone with the wonder of what they had found. She knew that such miracles were to the ancients a part of life—an accepted thing, and from reading the ancient thought records she dreamed of doing such things, but the "how" of such wonders was always obscured on the antique records by the abstruse, difficult symbolism of their technical thought, much too deep for the modern human to hope to decipher. By some accident of their fumbling hands upon the dials, they had found the secret of evolution through speeded growth—the transformation that ages of time make upon life