leading
to star-shaped open plots, from which in turn branched out ways to other
stellate areas; ways reaching, after many such steps, to the towering
inner walls of the metropolis. The outer walls, still loftier and even
more massive ramparts of sullen gray-green metal, formed a seamless,
jointless barrier against an utterly indescribable foe; a barrier whose
outer faces radiated constantly a searing, coruscating green emanation.
Metal alone could not long have barred that voracious and implacably
relentless enemy, but against that lethal green emanation even that
ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back, impotent.
Writhing and crawling, loathesomely palpitant with an unspeakable
exuberance of foul and repellent vigor, possible only to such
meteorological conditions as obtained there, it threw its most
hideously prolific growths against that radiant wall in vain.

The short, zig-zag lanes, the ways, and the seven-pointed areas
were paved with a greenish glass. This pavement was intended solely
to prevent vegetable growth and carried no traffic whatever, since few
indeed of the Vorkuls have ever been earth-bound and all traffic was in
the air. The principal purpose of the openings was to separate, and
thus to render accessible by air, the mighty buildings which, level
upon level, towered upward, with airships hovering at or anchored to
doorways and entrances at every level. Buildings, entrances, everything
visible--all replicated, reiterated, repeated infinite variations in
the one theme, that of the septenate stelliform.

Color ran riot; masses varied from immense blocks of awe-inspiring
grandeur to delicate tracery of sheerest gossamer; lights flamed and
flared in wide bands and in narrow, flashing pencils--but in all,
through all, over all, and dominating all was the Seven-Pointed Star.

In and almost filling the space, at least a mile in width,
between the inner and the outer walls were huge, seven-sided
structures--featureless, squat, forbidding heptagons of dull green
metal. No thing living was to be seen in that space. Its pavement was
of solid metal and immensely thick, and that metal, as well as that of
the walls, was burned and blackened and seared as though by numberless
exposures to intolerable flame. In a lower compartment of one of these
enormous heptagons Vortel Kromodeor, First Projector Officer, rested
before a gigantic and complex instrument board. He was at ease--his huge
wings folde