The New Humans

Chapter 21

Straight for two hundred yards and then left, appeared on the ball. Ash got up, started walking and counted his steps. He arrived then on a platform at least two hundred yards long and ten yards wide. All the way along, set into the ground, there were spheres half a man tall which, judging from the reddish color, were made of copper. He began walking along the platform, being careful where he put his feet. He passed close to one of the spheres. There were engravings on it, halfway between letters and numbers and almost erased by time.

Ash looked up. The ceiling roiled with electrical charges that made a popping sound.

Let's hope none of these falls on my head.

He had just finished formulating that thought when one of the bolts plummeted as if aimed at him. Ash screamed and jumped as far away as he could. The bolt connected with the ground and produced a jet of light that blinded him. Thunder burst less than five feet from him, splitting his eardrums.

As he regained his sight, Ash realized the lightning had struck a copper sphere which was now being enveloped in continuous charges.

The force of the charges seemed to increase. The crackling became even more intense and frequent. Ash tottered away from the sphere feeling the force of the shock. Then the electricity moved to the top of the ball, swelling into a kind of ball at the top as the lower part spread open and two elongated protuberances emerged.

A few seconds later, the tangle of electrical charges looked like a man's torso, as though a ghost was trying to emerge from the sphere. It had no face, but Ash had the impression it was looking at him. The monster then leapt out of the sphere toward the floor, as if it was diving into water. As it hit the floor, the human form dispersed and transformed itself into a long bolt of lightning that hurtled across the ground towards Ash. He tried to flee, but before he could take one step the lightning reached him and then changed direction without striking him. Ash turned around briefly and saw that it was going to hit another copper sphere on the pathway. As had happened previously, this time too it formed an electric halo around the sphere.

Of course, thought Ash. Metal attracts electricity.

He kept moving. Meanwhile, the monster had taken on a new human form, and the whole torso had emerged from the sphere ready to pursue him. In front of him, just to his right, Ash saw another sphere, so he moved it so that it stood between him and his pursuer. The electric monster launched itself in pursuit, but as Ash expected, it crashed into the sphere. He continued to run, and every time he found a sphere, he gave it a push so that it slowed down the monster's run. The strategy seemed to work because, even though the monster ran much faster than him, it always ended up deviating and losing ground.

Ash had at least fifty yards to travel where there were no spheres. At the end of the walkway he spied what looked like a huge canary cage. He would be protected inside a structure like that. He made a final dash with all the breath he had left. The electric monster was at his ankles. Ash jumped into the cage, turned around quickly and closed the door as the monster reached the cage and shrouded it in electricity. He took his hands off the metal just in time. An arm of electricity tried to grab him, but he backed away to the far end of the cage.

The electricity stayed outside the structure, however. Ash thought back to a physics exam he had written some time ago; this was a Faraday cage. There was no magnetic field inside it; therefore, electricity could not touch him.

Ash found himself in the middle of a spectacle of lights and thunderbolts. The electric shocks ran along the bars of the cage, like squirrels running on the branches of a tree, and emitted continuous bursts of light like the flash of a camera. The continuous rasping acted as the soundtrack.