Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/73

Rh cept for the land on which my temple stood.

"In a single night, I did the thing. For long I had gathered my powers and on that night I unchained them, and they smote down into the earth's structure far beneath the continent of Atlantis, and touched off great earth-faults that I knew existed there in the depths. And in that one night, all the continent of Atlantis and all its people sank downward and the sea crashed over the land and hid it for ever.

"All but one small portion of the continent, the portion around my temple! That did not sink, for I had provided against that, setting up certain radiated forces which sustain that small bit of land as an island above the waves. That great crystal of blue fire which you see behind me, man from outside, is the source of the radiation which still upholds the island. Were it not for that crystal's radiation, the slender pinnacle of rock which bears up this island must have collapsed long ago.

"Also there is a force mingled in the crystal's radiation which refracts light around the island, keeping it invisible to the outside world, so that I will not be annoyed by the curiosity of the barbarian races of men. Occasionally ships have crashed onto my invisible island as yours did, and men have gained its shore. I have suffered them to live down there in their wretched village because I sometimes need their bodies for my researches."

glittering lens-eyes of the Master seemed to muse upon the stricken Christa and upon David, still standing petrified with his ax upraised.

"Man from outside, why do I speak of these things to you who can little understand them?" asked the robot. "It is for only one reason—it is because I am lonely.

"Yes, I, the child of old Atlantis, long more and more for contact with a mind equal to my own. I have resolved to create one, a metal brain as intelligent as mine. That is the purpose that engages me, and it is upon issues connected with that purpose that I am experimenting upon the bodies of humans like you and this girl."

"Not upon Christa's body—no!" shouted David hoarsely.

"Do you think to frighten me by mouthing futile threats?" asked the robot calmly. "Man from outside, you humans begin to weary me. I think it is well that the girl go now to the laboratories, where you will follow in due course."

Christa uttered a heart-torn cry. "David, good-bye"

"No, you're not going there!" David cried. He was making tremendous mental effort to free his arm from the hypnotic grip of the Master, to hurl his ax. But the Master's super-hypnotism held him powerless.

Across David's brain seared a lightning expedient, a thought that he suppressed as soon as he was aware of it. He desperately began to think, to think a lie.

He began to think of stirrings in the dim ocean depths below where wrecked Atlantis lay entombed, of mighty scientists emerging from tight chambers where they had lain sleeping, and not dead. He thought of them vowing vengeance upon the robot they had created, of assembling great weapons, of sending him, David Russell, ahead as a spy upon the robot.

The Master read the lie in David's mind and for a moment was deceived by it. For the robot leaped wildly upright.

"Then they of Atlantis are not all dead!" cried the metallic voice. "They come again against me"