Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/71

Rh Over me were the multiple eyes of a strange ray mechanism. From a mass of weird glass eyes goggling at me came a myriad of tiny colored little light rays. Busy, moving little beams they were, moving flickeringly, in little jerks, but moving on steadily—across my back, across and back, over my body!

Each of the tiny rays made a strange crawling sensation within me as if a million microscopic ants were tearing at each cell those little beams touched. It was as though the moving little lights were alive with terrible intelligent life of a microscopic kind that was working a strange metamorphosis within me.

At a little distance, obscured by the bent form of Tanil whom I recognized easily in spite of her mask, was a similar contrivance to the one suspended over me, though of much smaller size.

The thing struck an eerie freezing fear into me, for there was also a duplicate operating table, and upon it a smaller thing, a thing I could see was a replica of myself! It was like seeing in a reducing mirror, but brother, that was no mirror, that was real!

Tanil came, glanced at me. Seeing my open eyes, she touched me soothingly on the cheek. I suppose I looked hysterical or had my mouth ready to sound like a steam whistle. That's the way I felt!

Somehow, this Tanil was entirely too smooth an article, or there was a weasel in the henhouse I had not seen yet. I knew I was being made a chump someway and would probably wake up dead.

Then a needle pricked my arm, and I saw Kyra's eyes, weird over the white mask as ever I imagined them to be in my dreams, bending over me, counting my pulse, taking my temperature—or was she?

I didn't know, I was asleep, and Kyra's face was still there, as it has been so many times in my dreams.

As the blackness blotted out even Kyra's image, a voice in my mind asked curiously—a voice I couldn't tell from my own, but was it me?—Where did Tanil obtain this witch's lore? In what forgotten store of terrible wisdom had she obtained this weird, too-complex machine she had placed over me; which I had seen was reproducing me in miniature upon another table? Or was she only another tool like Kyra, and not the boss at all? Or were my senses fooling me, and all this not as it seemed? Or is it modern science she is using, there in that reproduction mechanism, no witch's lore at all? Some secret development of modern science strange to me that she had learned and applied in a new way. Or was it all but more of my dreams about "Kyra," and I would wake up again in my dingy rooms and go back to work perfecting my life-battery so that men would accept it, allow it to help with their daily labor?

But, darn it, there was something terribly alien and ancient about that machine. It did not look like anything I had ever seen.

Sleep was stronger than my curiosity. I really blacked out. But I remember vaguely that those little rays were still sweeping back and forth over my body with their terrible crawling sensation tearing inside my body, as if each cell was being scraped off with a microscopic wire brush.

AWOKE, with a blissful languor in all my limbs. I found myself on Tanil's couch, the two muscular guards standing where they had been when I first entered, but the looks on their frozen pusses didn't do me any good. I was lying on the couch, and my head was in Tanil's lap. It seemed incongruous to me that the creature whom I feared, who was so mysterious and powerful to my inner eyes, should be holding my head like a girl holds a lover on a picincpicnic [sic].

Kyra was fussing with a drink mixer, presently handed me a cocktail. I drank it. It revived me plenty! I sat up.

Somehow I didn't want any more physical contact with Tanil than I could help. She was a witch in more ways than one, and I didn't want her hooks in my emotional responses too strongly till I knew whether my fears or my desires were correct about her. I looked at her accusingly.

"Just what were you doing with that nightmare of a ray-machine, and why did you drug me?"

Tanil glittered a row of bright, regular teeth at me and turned her body in a sinuous motion that brought all those devastating little movements of the covering flesh over her muscles that her transparent gown only served to decorate.

"I was making a doll of you. What do you think? I make dolls of all my friends!"

"What for?"

"You will learn about that, and I hope