THE METAL GIANTS (6)
By:
July 4, 2026
Edmond Hamilton’s The Metal Giants, which features an atom-powered metal brain that constructs a rampaging army of 300-foot-tall robots, first appeared in the December 1926 issue of Weird Tales. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9.
When Lanier stumbled into Detmold’s farmhouse, early in the second day after the massacre of Stockton, he could only half understand that he had finally found the object of his hours of searching. After that seeming eternity of wandering wildly through the forest, he was very near collapse. Even after his brain had cleared enough to recognize that this was the place that had been described to him, he took but little interest. In the kitchen of the house he found canned food, and after wolfing some of this he flung himself on a couch and slept heavily for all of that day and night, not waking until near noon of the third day.
But he woke with mind clear and alert, and feeling immensely hungry. After another sketchy meal from tins, he began to prowl about the house. And to his dismay, he found that there was no sign of Detmold’s having occupied the place, for weeks at least.
The furniture of the house was very simple, and it was in the condition to be expected when kept by a careless bachelor. A single large room had been converted into a laboratory, but even this was in great disorder and had evidently been stripped of most of its apparatus. There were many unmistakable signs of Detmold’s residence in the place, but none that would indicate how long before he had deserted it.
But in the laboratory, by chance, he found Detmold’s diary, a thick, canvas-covered book tossed to one side of a table. Lanier glanced into it idly, then with startled interest, and an hour later was still reading intently.
For in it he found explanation, and found, too, greater fear. Now, for the first time, he saw clearly the monstrous horror that had been loosed on the world, saw it in its most terrible aspect.
The diary began with the events immediately previous to Detmold’s departure from Juston, and seemed to be kept as a record of his various experiments, references to many of which Lanier could not understand. On the day of his ousting from the university, he had made some very vitriolic comments in the little book concerning the officials of Juston, and their general asininity. He also spoke of the place where he intended to carry on his experiments, an old farmhouse outside of Stockton, a half forgotten inheritance. And when he had gone there, fitting the place up as a laboratory, he had done so under the name of Foster, in order to escape the unwelcome attention of prying reporters.
There were a number of gaps in the diary’s entries, but on the whole, the story it told was quite continuous. He had found a place where he could work in peace, and had centered his time and effort on the metal brain, constantly striving to improve it. And as the months passed, he had made vast, progress with the thing. Though the basic principle of it was the same, he had made it much larger, had made the ramifications of its atomic organism far more complex, with a corresponding increase in the thing’s mental power. Instead of a crude, single lens, he had furnished it with two large, all-seeing eyes, one on each side of its oval case. He had added an ear for the perception of sound, a super-microphone that caught the smallest sounds and, translating them into electrical impulses, flashed them to the central, conscious brain. And after months of weary trials, he had been able to furnish the brain with arms or members, two small, hollow limbs of flexible metal that projected from each end of the brain-case, being actuated by a chain of electro-magnets inside, so that the brain, by sending the correct electrical current through these magnets, could twist the arms about at its pleasure.
There came a page where the diary was spotted and hard to understand, where Detmold’s mind had out-leaped his pen in his exultation. Gradually Lanier made out that he had perfected a method which made it unnecessary to produce the actuating electric-vibrations outside the brain. Instead, he had found a way to produce these vibrations inside of the very brain-stuff itself, inside of its atomic structure, constantly and automatically. He had achieved this by a manipulation of electrons, a tampering with the innermost secrets of matter. How he had accomplished this stupendous feat was not explained, for he had confided but few technical secrets to the diary. But by virtue of this discovery, the metal brain became, for the first time, wholly independent of anything outside itself, quite self-sufficient and almost, one could say, living.
And from that point forward, the pages of the little book were records of wonder. Detmold wrote always of the brain’s leaping intelligence, its growing power to differentiate between the sensations it received, its deft handling of objects and instruments. And later, of teaching it to read, of starting with children’s picture-books and working on with models and printed words, until finally it could read books, and evidently understand them, at least partly. It was significant, he noted, that while it would read, with unvarying attention, any scientific work, it rejected completely all fiction, poetry, and other imaginative literature, preferring facts. It made him realize, he wrote, the limitations of the thing. It had intelligence, yes, but not human intelligence, for all it had been constructed by a human. And it was for this reason that he gave up his efforts to communicate with the thing. Evidently it did not understand his spoken words, and when he wrote numberless messages and held them for it to see, it made no response. He began to understand that the thing had no point of contact, no common ground, with himself, except in the realm of science.
So he took another course and taught it to handle experiments, to duplicate the simple experiments he performed before it, which it did with ease. Apparently it showed astounding ability along these lines, and could perform highly complex experiments in chemistry and physics without a single error, unhumanly perfect. And finally a day came when his triumph was complete, for the brain performed successfully an experiment that had baffled Detmold himself, as well as all other experimenters. The creature was proving itself greater than its creator.
He wrote that as he watched the flexible, snakelike metal arms flashing about with beaker and test-tube and burner, unerringly, swiftly, he realized that he had constructed an intelligence that was more than human. A mind that was far greater than man’s, aided as it was by cold, ruthless reasoning power, precise, perfect memory, and quite unswayed by the thousand and one emotions that affect human intelligence, untroubled by love and hate and fear and joy and sorrow.
Detmold’s triumph was complete, and he could return to the mocking world with the metal brain, as he had planned. But the three years of strain and solitude and toil, and this sudden realization of his hopes, were too much for him, and he was stricken with sudden sickness, while he was making one of his infrequent visits to Stockton. For a short time he was cared for at the hospital there, then was taken to Pittsburgh for a necessary operation, which was neatly and successfully performed, but which kept him in a Pittsburgh hospital for more than a month. And back in the house in the hills, the metal brain, conscious, reasoning, planning…
This much Lanier learned from entries farther on in the diary. But the first note after that gap of weeks is one of sudden dismay. Detmold had returned, eager to get back to his precious experiment, and had walked into his house to find the laboratory in confusion and the metal brain missing. There were signs of work there, sawed pieces of steel and smashed test-tubes, but no indication of the location of the brain.
From the disjointed entries in the diary, he seemed to have been almost mad with anxiety and rage, for if the thing had been stolen from him, he alone knew the impossibility of replacing it, without years of work. So for days he ranged the forest in search, and on a morning early in June he stumbled on the thing he sought, hidden far back within the hills.
In a circle some hundreds of feet across, trees and shrubs and grass had been cleared away, and the ground stamped down hard and smooth, forming a great clearing, surrounded by a high embankment of earth. And in this circle there was extraordinary activity. Watching from the top of the embankment, he noted first a small, solid-looking machine directly beneath him, constructed of shining, unfamiliar metal. It looked very much like an old-fashioned pump, without the handle, having a spout at its top from which poured a thin stream of molten, gleaming metal, falling into black molds beneath, and solidifying instantly. This small, pumplike structure seemed to be sunken into the earth for an unguessable distance, but the source of the molten metal was a mystery to the wondering Detmold, as also was the use it was intended to serve.
But as he looked about, that, at least, became clearer. For on the farther side of the circle, a half dozen machines were busy with large lengths of shining metal, similar to those in the molds, fastening them together. And it was these latter busy mechanisms that were even greater mysteries to him for the moment.
They were simply shining globes of the omnipresent metal, perhaps five feet in diameter, provided with six long tentacles or arms, many yards in length, twisting, flexible, busy holding and fastening and tightening, accomplishing an incredible amount of work as he watched. They resembled large octopuses of shining metal, but except for the arms that projected from the globes, were entirely featureless. Those twisting, tapering arms held his attention. They were like — they were like the arms that he had provided the metal brain! As that thought flashed over him, he turned his gaze and saw the brain itself, near the right side of the circle.
The brain — but different. For it moved, possessed the power of motion in any direction, instead of being set on a table, as he had made it. Even as he stared, it seemed to glimpse him, and glided smoothly toward him, across the clearing, its great weight of metal being suspended above the ground six inches or more by some unknown, unguessed force.
Over it came until it stood motionless beneath that part of the embankment on which Detmold was standing. A black, oval case, more than a yard its greater length, eerily suspended above the ground, contemplating him with its dark lens.
And as Detmold stared back, the explanation of all flashed over him and he cried aloud. He saw that the metal brain had never been stolen from him, that it had, in his absence, discovered a method by which it could move about in that unearthly fashion, and, using that method, and using the tools it had stolen from him, and its own vaulting intelligence, had come to this place and constructed those machines that were working its will. And it was doing — what? Constructing what? Those great lengths of metal on which the tentacle-machines worked, that device that sucked molten metal from the earth itself, all for what?
According to the broken account in the diary he must have stared at the thing for minutes, realizing at last what a monster he had created and set free. Then one of the brain’s twisting arms dipped down behind it, and instantly he caught the suggestion of sudden peril, of nearing death, and leaped back behind the embankment. As he did so, he glimpsed the metal arm flashing up with a small globe in its grasp, from which a cloud of yellow gas sprang toward him. He was already over the embankment and the gas touched only a small part of his left hand, but it stung intensely. When he stopped to inspect, the hand, a mile away, he was amazed to see that where the gas had touched, the bones of the hand were quite dissolved, without wound or break of skin, leaving two fingers partly boneless and hurting intensely.
And all of the time he stumbled homeward, one word beat through his dazed mind like the stroke of a mighty bell — a word that seemed to be written in letters of flame before his eyes: “Frankenstein.”
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
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