Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/71

Rh He passed on through them, into a huge vaulted corridor.

David's legs took him on down that corridor. Somewhere in this building the Master was drawing David to him, controlling his body by super-hypnotic force. He passed other halls and corridors, all flooded with pale, misty blue luminescence, holding weird instruments and mechanisms of unfathomable purpose. Then he emerged into a colossal domed central hall.

He stared with fascinated, stupefied eyes as he was drawn forward. At the center of this mighty chamber poised a ten-foot crystal sphere inside which pulsed a throbbing core of living azure fire, like a miniature, misty blue sun.

In front of this titan crystal of pulsing light was a throne-like metal chair he could just glimpse through a shroud of concealing light-mists. And he glimpsed or sensed someone, something, sitting upon that metal throne. Facing the throne stood

"Christa!" cried David hoarsely.

The girl stood, a wild terror frozen upon her face, her slim, childish body silhouetted against the blue light.

She turned at David's cry, tried to run toward him but could not move, rooted by the same force that was drawing him stiffly forward. Anguish had leaped into her eyes at sight of him.

"David!" she uttered in a sobbing cry. "You came after me—came to your doom"

He was beside her now. And there, without command of his own brain, his stiff strides suddenly stopped. He tried to step to Christa and take her in his arms, but could not. He could only reach out with one hand, and touch her trembling, cheek.

She stared ahead once more, horror unveiled in her eyes. David turned his head and looked forward to what she stared at, that metal throne whose base could just be glimpsed through the curling blue light-mists that surrounded it.

gripped his ax tighter. Yet he felt utterly helpless, powerless, standing with the girl before that shrouded throne and before the colossal crystal of throbbing light.

Out of the light-mists around the throne spoke the voice of the Master, a metallic voice of chill, measured accents.

"Man from outside, you interest me," the passionless, cold voice of the Master told David. "You tried to do what no other here ever tried to do, attack me in revolt. I am sorry now I did not call you here sooner—I meant in any case to call you and your friends because of your childish attempt to escape the island."

David tried to keep his voice steady. "You can do what you want with me," he told the Master. "I know that. But I will submit willingly, gladly, if you will allow the girl to go."

"No, David!" cried Christa. "I share your fate! If you die, I die!"

The Master's metallic voice told them, "Your argument is purposeless. My will rules here and not yours—it rules even your own bodies, as you have learned. My actions are not to be disturbed by your tiny clamor. It is my intention to use the body of this girl at once as material for certain interesting experiments which I have long been performing on humans whom I called from the village. As for you, man who dared attack me, you will have the same fate, a little later."

"You're not going to use Christa's body for your experiments," said David in a thick, hoarse voice. "You're not!"

He was slowly, stealthily, raising the heavy ax. If he could throw it, if he could hurl it into the shrouding mists at the thing on the metal throne