Free The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith Page A

edible by human beings were to be found on the red planet.
    “Perhaps,” said Volmar, “the Tloongs realize our need of rest and nourishment, and have brought us back to the spaceship for that reason. But I don’t think that they are going to let us depart in a hurry; something tells me that the Koum, or whatever they call him, has other intentions regarding us.”
    There was much discussion anent the unique wonders and prodigies they had witnessed. The corporeal organization of the Tloongs and their virtual immortality, their mechanical and biological masterdom, and their amazing racial and planetary history, were enough to stagger not only the human reason but also the human imagination. Then too, there was the Tloongs’ disposition toward the crew of the space-flier, the meaning of their capture and detention, and their conjectural destiny—all of which were problems that defied solution.
    Time passed in this manner; till the throng of metal-bodied beings around the flier began to disperse. Soon all of them had vanished from sight in the cupolas covering the shafts of ascent and descent. Then, abruptly as the going out of a lamp, the light faded from the ruddy sky and darkness fell upon the world. In half an hour, however, the vaulting luminescence returned as suddenly as it had departed; and some of the Tloongs re-appeared on the roof shortly afterwards. It was learned later that the half-hour of darkness was artificially induced by the use of a black ray which occluded the light; and that this time of occultation was the space required for sleep by the people of the red world.
    After eating, and after the discussion that accompanied and followed the meal, the earthlings snatched a few hours of much needed slumber. When they awoke, another delegation of the Tloongs was standing outside the space-flier and was evidently trying to attract the attention of the occupants with flashes of light projected through the ports from some sort of ray-apparatus. These flashes, they realized, had served to awaken them. This time, doubtless through consideration for the respiratory needs of the earth-men, the Tloongs had not opened the man-hole. But it was obvious that they wished their visitors to come forth again, so, donning their masks and air-tanks, Volmar and his crew complied with the signalled request.
    Their conductors took them on an air-platform to another of the great Babelian-piles, lying at a considerable distance on the shore of a bright purple sea whose environing cliffs were like builded walls. Indeed, it was afterwards learned that they were really such, and that the waters of the sea had been created, or at least replenished, by means of a chemical process.
    The building on which they now landed, and through whose various apartments they were systematically conducted, was plainly a scientific laboratory. Hundreds of the Tloongs, with the aid of unsolvably strange and recondite machinery, were engaged in all manner of mystifying labors or experiments, many of which seemed to involve the creation of protoplasm and its development into numberlessly varied forms. The earthlings shuddered at the masses of pulsing life which crawled or lumbered in crystalline cages. Some were without limbs or verifiable organs, and others were extravagantly equipped with a myriad eyes, ears, mouths, members, and sense-organs whose use was not to be apprehended by any being with so limited a range of sensation as man.
    In another section, the earth-men saw for the first time certain bodies preserved in a clear solution, which they recognized from the historic thought-pictures they had previously seen, as being the original plasmic bodies of some of the Tloongs. Later, they found out that most of these people had retained their own physical envelopes, and kept them about their households even as others might keep statues or family portraits. But some had been donated to the laboratories, where they were held as specimens for study, and