A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

18 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY It didn’t offend me. No, it simply scared me to see that those steel nerves of his had been warped so taut and filed so thin. I said nothing in reply. He meant killing when he said it and I did not doubt that he had sufficient justification. Though I must say that I had a bright picture of Smoky Cassidy mounted on a gallows’ scaffold with a rope around his neck and someone asking him if he had any last statement to make before leaving this sad world. Darrell took us outside again. “You know where the key is,” he said. “If so many men come that you can’t handle them, just press this button—this one here. That will give me sufficient warn- ing, and if they open the door after that—-”’ He set his jaws, I saw the glint of his teeth. “They’ll never be seen again between earth and heaven, Smoky!” said he. By thunder, he meant it, too—plain annihilation ! Then, with a mere gesture to us, he went inside the room! I heard the door mechanism purr; and Darrell was closed away from us by half a foot of solid tool- proof steel. CHAPTER 4 When the Mountain Went HAD a few moments to chat with Dr. | Franklin after that, but I couldn’t get much out of him, for he was dazed, and he still was wearing a remnant of that horrible, drowned look that I had seen on his face before. I asked him if he had any idea what Darrell meant, and he said that he had, but that he could not talk about it. “Why not?” said I. His answer was sufficiently wild to make my head buzz. He shook a hand over his head, and with a trembling forefinger he pointed to the ceiling—but I knew he didn’t mean to show me the ceiling. It was beyond it—the heavens— that he meant. “Because,” said Dr. Franklin, “it would be blasphemy to say even the names of rash fools who attempt to do what should lie only in the hand of God Almighty !” And he turned on his heel and left me. I stared after the door through which he passed for a considerable time, and then I looked around me for some way to kill time. The room I was in was by way of be- ing a waiting room; a number of maga- zines were lying on the center table. I cheered up when I spotted on one side of it a deep leather chair. I sank down into the chair and passed my hands over the magazines, In all that number there would have to be at least one detective story, and detective stories are my special meat. A dead body in the first chapter is my taste, and then suspicion all around, with the smart detective coming in when things look blackest for the innocent. Personally, I think that it’s hard to beat one of those family murders, in which the murder taint involves father, mother, brother James and sister Mary, to say nothing of the invalid old aunt. A story like that thickens the blood; I’ve gone to sleep with my light on, after read- ing one of those yarns. So I passed my hand eagerly over the magazines, my mouth set for just the particular taste I had in mind. But I was beaten from the start. Those magazines were not human. They were filled with reports of learned societies, and the only pictures they contained were of machines and gadgets twisted enough to make an octupus look as simple as a snail. I looked through them; one glance at any of them was enough. Then I slumped back into my chair and fell into the deep ways of disconnected, nervous thinking. The floor of the room was trembling— and my brain was trembling, too—with a powerful, subdued humming that came from beyond the thick steel door. I linked my thoughts with that sense and feeling of electric might at work, and I began to wonder if the time might come hei the machine was the man—and the man merely an inferior machine... The click of the door yanked me out of it, and I saw Dr. Franklin come hurry- ing back, in his dressing gown, his feet whispering over the floor in slippers. He waved to me. “I left my glasses in there, like an idiot,” said he. He went on towards the door. “You're not going in, are you?”’ said I. COMicaoo® S (C@