y that he had to step down from a flat disk a dozen yards
across. By some power, some tremendous discovery that he could not
understand, he had been transported across millions of miles of
space--undoubtedly to the dark star itself!

The colossal thing, indescribable, a blinding, nameless color, rippled
down the hall and stooped before a disk of silvery black. In the center
of the disk was a metal seat with a control board near-by.

"Be seated!"

Phobar sat down, the titan flicked the controls--and nothing happened.

Phobar sensed that something was radically wrong. He felt the surprise
of his gigantic companion. He did not know it then, but the fate of the
solar system hung on that incident.

"Come!"

* * * * *

Abruptly the giant stooped, and Phobar shrank back, but a flowing mass
of cold, insensate metal swept around him, lifted him fifty feet in the
air. Dizzy, sick, horrified, he was hardly conscious of the whirlwind
motion into which the giant suddenly shot. He had a dim impression of
machines racing by, of countless other giants, of a sudden opening in
the walls of the immense building, and then a rush across the surface of
metal land. Even in his vertigo he had enough curiosity to marvel that
there was no vegetation, no water, only the dull black metal everywhere.
Yet there was air.

And then a city loomed before them. To Phobar it seemed a city of gods
or giants. Fully five miles it soared toward space, its fantastic angles
and arcs and cubes and pyramids mazing in the dimensions of a totally
alien geometry. Tier by tier the stupendous city, hundreds of miles
wide, mounted toward a central tower like the one in the building he had
left.

Phobar never knew how they got there, but his numbed mind was at
last forced into clarity by a greater will. He stared about him. His
captor had gone. He stood in a huge chamber circling to a dome far
overhead. Before him, on a dais a full thousand feet in diameter,
stood--sat--rested, whatever it might be called--another monster, far
larger than any he had yet seen, like a mountain of pliant thinking,
living metal. And Phobar knew he stood in the presence of the ruler.

* * * * *

The metal Cyclops surveyed him as Phobar might have surveyed an ant.
Cold, deadly, dispassionate scrutiny came from something that might have
been eyes, or a seeing intelligence locked in a metal body.

There was no sound, b