"To-morrow morning," the cold, clear voice went on, "every unit of the American navy will float in Great Salt Lake."
"To-morrow morning," the cold, clear voice went on, "every unit of the American navy will float in Great Salt Lake."
"To-morrow morning," the cold, clear voice went on, "every unit of the American navy will float in Great Salt Lake."
"To-morrow I shall treat similarly the navies of Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the other maritime nations. I shall deal then with the naval bases of the world and with the military forces and their fortifications.
"I have already taken steps to abate the nuisance of certain widely known criminals and racketeers who have been conducting, quite openly and flagrantly, a reign of terror for profit. Seven of those men have already died, and ten more are to die to-night. Your homes shall be safe from the kidnaper; your businesses shall be safe from the extortioner and his skulking aid, the dynamiter.
"In conclusion, I tell you that the often-promised new era is here; not in words, but in actuality. Good-by until to-morrow."
DuQuesne flashed his projection down into Brookings' office. "Well, Brookings, that's the start. You understand now what I am going to do, and you know that I can do it."
"Yes. You undoubtedly have immense power, and you have taken exactly the right course to give us the support of a great number of people who would ordinarily be bitterly opposed to anything we do. But that talk of wiping out gangsters and racketeers sounded funny, coming from you."
"Why should it? We are now beyond that stage. And, while public opinion is not absolutely necessary to our success it is always a potent force. No program of despotism, however benevolent, can expect to be welcomed unanimously; but the course I have outlined will at least divide the opposition."
DuQuesne cut off his forces and sat back at the controls, relaxed, his black eyes staring into infinity. Earth was his, to do with as he wished; and he would soon have it so armed that he could hold it against the universe. Master of Earth! His highest ambition had been attained—or had it? The world, after all, was small—merely a mote in space. Why not be master of the entire Galaxy? There was Norlamin to be considered, of course—
Norlamin!
Norlamin would not like the idea and would have to be pacified.
As soon as he got the Earth straightened out he would have to see what could be done about Norlamin.
X.
"Dick!" Dorothy shrieked, flashing to Seaton's side; and, abandoning his fruitless speculations, he turned to confront two indescribable, yet vaguely recognizable, entities who had floated effortlessly into the control room of theSkylark. Large they were, and black—a dull, lusterless black—and each was possessed of four huge, bright lenses which apparently were eyes. "Dick! What are they, anyway?"
"Life, probably; the intelligent, four-dimensional life that Mart fully expected to find here," Seaton answered. "I'll see if I can't send them a thought."
Staring directly into those expressionless lenses the man sent out wave after wave of friendly thought, without result or reaction. He then turned on the power of the mechanical educator and donned a headset, extending another toward one of the weird visitors and indicating as clearly as he could by signs that it was to be placed back of the outlandish eyes. Nothing happened, however, and Seaton snatched off the useless phones.
"Might have known they wouldn't work!" he snorted. "Electricity! Too slow—and those tubes probably won't be hot in less than ten years of this hypertime, besides. Probably wouldn't have been any good, anyway—their minds would of course be four-dimensional, and ours most distinctly are not. There may be some point—or rather, plane—of contact between their minds and ours, but I doubt it. They don't act warlike, though; we'll simply watch them a while and see what they do."
But if, as Seaton had said, the intruders did not seem inimical, neither were they friendly. If any emotion at all affected them, it was apparently nothing more nor less than curiosity. They floated about, gliding here and there, their great eyes now close to this article, now that; until at last they floatedpastthe arenak wall of the spherical space ship and disappeared.
Seaton turned quickly to his wife, ready to minister again to overstrained nerves, but much to his surprise he found Dorothy calm and intensely interested.
"Funny-looking things, weren't they, Dick?" she asked animatedly. "They looked just like highly magnified chess knights with four hands; or like those funny little sea horses they have in the aquarium, only on a larger scale. Were those propellers they had instead of tails natural or artificial—could you tell?"
"Huh? What're you talking about? I didn't see any such details as that!" Seaton exclaimed.
"I couldn't, either, really," Dorothy explained, "until after I found out how to look at them. I don't know whether my method would appeal to a strictly scientific mind or not. I can't understand any of this fourth-dimensional, mathematical stuff of yours and Martin's, anyway, so when I want to see anything out here I just pretend that the fourth dimension isn't there at all. I just look at what you call the three-dimensional surface and it looks all right. When I look at you that way, for instance, you look like my own Dick, instead of like a cubist's four-dimensional nightmare."
"You have hit it, Dorothy." Crane had been visualizing four-dimensional objects as three-dimensional while she was speaking. "That is probably the only way in which we can really perceive hyperthings at all."
"Itdoeswork, at that!" Seaton exclaimed. "Congratulations, Dot; you've made a contribution to science—but say, what's coming off now? We're going somewhere."
For theSkylark, which had been floating freely in space—a motion which the senses of the wanderers had long since ceased to interpret as a sensation of falling—had been given an acceleration. Only a slight acceleration, barely enough to make the floor of the control room seem "down," but any acceleration at all in such circumstances was to the scientists cause for grave concern.
"Nongravitational, of course, or we couldn't feel it—it'd affect everything about the ship alike. What's the answer, Mart, if any?" Seaton demanded. "Suppose that they've taken hold of us with a tractor ray and are taking us for a ride?"
"It would appear that way. I wonder if the visiplates are still practical?" Crane moved over to number one visiplate and turned it in every direction. Nothing was visible in the abysmal, all-engulfing, almost palpable darkness of the absolute black outside the hull of the vessel.
"It wouldn't work, hardly," Seaton commented. "Look at our time here—we must be 'way beyond light. I doubt if we could see anything, even if we had a sixth-order projector—which of course we haven't."
"But how about our light inside here, then?" asked Margaret. "The lamps are burning, and we can see things."
"I don't know, Peg," Seaton replied. "All this stuff is 'way past me. Maybe it's because the lights are traveling with us—no, that's out. Probably, as I intimated before, we aren't seeing things at all—just feeling them, some way or other. That must be it, I think—it's sure that the light-waves from those lamps are almost perfectly stationary, as far as we're concerned."
"Oh, there's something!" Dorothy called. She had remained at the visiplate, staring into the impenetrable darkness. "See, it just flashed on! We're falling toward ground of some kind. It doesn't look like any planet I ever saw before, either—it's perfectly endless and it's perfectly flat."
The others rushed to the plates and saw, instead of the utter blackness of a moment before, an infinite expanse of level, uncurving hyperland. Though so distant from it that any planetary curvature should have been evident, they could perceive no such curvature. Flat that land was, and sunless, but apparently self-luminous; glowing with a strong, somewhat hazy, violet light. And now they could also see the craft which had been towing them. It was a lozenge-shaped affair, glowing fiercely with the peculiarly livid "light" of the hyperplanet; and was now apparently exerting its maximum tractive effort in a vain attempt to hold the prodigious mass ofSkylark Twoagainst the seemingly slight force of gravitation.
"Must be some kind of hyperlight that we're seeing by," Seaton cogitated. "Must be sixth or seventh-order velocity, at least, or we'd be—"
"Never mind the light or our seeing things!" Dorothy interrupted. "We are falling, and we shall probably hit hard. Can't you do something about it?"
"Afraid not, Kitten." He grinned at her. "But I'll try it—Nope, everything's dead. No power, no control, no nothing, and there won't be until we snap back where we belong. But don't worry about a crash. Even if that ground is solid enough to crash us, and I don't think it is, everything out here, including gravity, seems to be so feeble that it won't hurt us any."
Scarcely had he finished speaking when theSkylarkstruck—or, rather, floated gently downward into the ground. For, slight as was the force of gravitation, and partially counteracted as well by the pull of the towing vessel, the arenak globe did not even pause as it encountered the apparently solid rock of the planet's surface. That rock billowed away upon all sides as theSkylarksank into it and through it, to come to a halt only after her mass had driven a vertical, smooth-sided well some hundreds of feet in depth.
Even though the Osnomian metal had been rendered much less dense than normal by its extrusion and expansion into the fourth dimension, yet it was still so much denser than the unknown material of the hyperplanet that it sank into that planet's rocky soil as a bullet sinks into thick jelly.
"Well, that's that!" Seaton declared. "Thinness and tenuosity, as well as feebleness, seem to be characteristics of this hypermaterial. Now we'll camp here peacefully for a while. Before they succeed in digging us out—if they try it, which they probably will—we'll be gone."
Again, however, the venturesome and impetuous chemist was wrong. Feeble the hypermen were, and tenuous, but their curiosity was whetted even sharper than before. Derricks were rigged, and slings; but even before the task of hoisting theSkylarkto the surface of the planet was begun, two of the peculiar denizens of the hyperworld were swimming down through the atmosphere of the four-dimensional well at whose bottom the Earth vessel lay. Past the arenak wall of the cruiser they dropped, and into the control room they floated.
"But I do not understand it at all, Dick," Crane had been arguing. "Postulating the existence of a three-dimensional object in four-dimensional space, a four-dimensional being could of course enter it at will, as your fingers entered that tobacco can. But since all objects here are in fact and of necessity four-dimensional, that condition alone should bar any such proceeding. Therefore, since you actuallydidtake the contents out of that can without opening it, and since our recent visitors actuallydidenter and leave our vessel at will, I can only conclude that we must still be essentially three-dimensional in nature, even though constrained temporarily to occupy four-dimensional space."
"Say, Mart, that's a thought! You're still the champion ground-and-lofty thinker of the universe, aren't you? That explains a lot of things I've been worrying myself black in the face about. I think I can explain it, too, by analogy. Imagine a two-dimensional man, one centimeter wide and ten or twelve centimeters long; the typical flatlander of the classical dimensional explanations. There he is, in a plane, happy as a clam and perfectly at home. Then some force takes him by one end and rolls him up into a spiral, or sort of semisolid cylinder, one centimeter long. He won't know what to make of it, but in reality he'll be a two-dimensional man occupying three-dimensional space.
"Now imagine further that we can see him, which of course is a pretty tall order, but necessary since this is a very rough analogy. We wouldn't know what to make of him, either, would we? Doesn't that square up with what we're going through now? We'd think that such a thing was quite a curiosity and want to find out about it, wouldn't we? That, I think, explains the whole thing, both our sensations and the actions of those sea horses—huh! Here they are again. Welcome to our city, strangers!"
But the intruders made no sign of understanding the message. They did not, could not, understand.
The human beings, now using Dorothy's happily discovered method of dimensional reduction, saw that the hypermen did indeed somewhat resemble overgrown sea horses—the hippocampus of Earthly zoölogy—but sea horses each equipped with a writhing, spinning, air-propeller tail and with four long and sinuous arms, terminating in many dexterous and prehensile fingers.
Using Dorothy's method of dimensional reduction, Seaton and the Cranes saw that the hypermen did indeed somewhat resemble overgrown sea horses.
Using Dorothy's method of dimensional reduction, Seaton and the Cranes saw that the hypermen did indeed somewhat resemble overgrown sea horses.
Using Dorothy's method of dimensional reduction, Seaton and the Cranes saw that the hypermen did indeed somewhat resemble overgrown sea horses.
Each of those hands held a grappling trident; a peculiar, four-dimensional hyperforceps whose insulated, interlocking teeth were apparently electrodes—conductors of some hyperequivalent of our Earthly electricity. With unmoved, expressionless "faces" the two visitors floated about the control room, while Seaton and Crane sent out wave after wave of friendly thought and made signs of friendship in all the various pantomimic languages at their command.
"Look out, Mart, they're coming this way! I don't want to start anything hostile, but I don't particularly like the looks of those toad-stabbers of theirs, and if they start any funny business with them maybe we'd better wring their fishy little necks!"
But there was to be no neck-wringing—then. Slight of strength the hypermen were, and of but little greater density than the thin air through which they floated so easily; but they had no need of physical strength—then.
Four tridents shot out, and in a monstrously obscure fashion reachedpastclothing, skin, and ribs; seizing upon and holding firmly, but painlessly and gently, the vital nervous centers of the human bodies. Seaton tried to leap to the attack, but even his quickness was of no avail—even before he moved, a wave of intolerable agony surged throughout his being, ceasing only and completely when he relaxed, relinquishing his pugnacious attempt. Shiro, leaping from the galley with cleaver upraised, was similarly impaled and similarly subdued.
Then a hoisting platform appeared, and Seaton and Margaret were forced to board it. They had no choice; the first tensing of the muscles to resist the will of the hyperman was quelled instantly by a blast of such intolerable torture that no human body could possibly defy it for even the slightest perceptible instant of time.
"Take it easy, Dot—Mart," Seaton spoke rapidly as the hoist started upward. "Do whatever they say—no use taking much of that stuff—until Peg and I get back. We'll get back, too, believe me! They'llhaveto take these meat hooks out of us sometime, and when they do they'll think a cyclone has broken loose."
XI.
Raging but impotent, Seaton stood motionless beside his friend's wife upon the slowly rising lift; while Crane, Dorothy, and Shiro remained in the control room of theSkylark. All were helpless, incapable alike of making a single movement not authorized by their grotesque captors. Feeble the hypermen were, as has been said; but at the first tensing of a human muscle in revolt there shot from the insulated teeth of the grappling hypertrident such a terrific surge of unbearably poignant torture that any thought of resistance was out of the question.
Even Seaton—fighter by instinct though he was, and reckless as he was and desperate at the thought of being separated from his beloved Dorothy—had been able to endure only three such shocks. The unimaginable anguish of the third rebuke, a particularly vicious and long-continued wrenching and wringing of the most delicate nerve centers of his being, had left him limp and quivering. He was still furious, still bitterly humiliated. His spirit was willing, but he was physically unable to drive his fiendishly tortured body to further acts of rebellion.
Thus it was that the improvised elevator of the hypermen carried two docile captives as it wentpast—notthrough—the spherical arenak shell ofSkylark Twoand up the mighty well which the vessel had driven in its downward plunge. The walls of that pit were glassily smooth; or, more accurately, were like slag: as though the peculiarly unsubstantial rock of the hyperplanet had been actually melted by the force of the cruiser's descent, easy and gradual as the fall had seemed to the senses of the Terrestrials.
It was apparent also that the hypermen were having difficulty in lifting the, to them, tremendous weight of the two human bodies. The platform would go up a few feet, then pause. Up and pause, up and pause; again and again. But at last they reached the top of the well, and, wretched as he was, Seaton had to grin when he perceived that they were being lifted by a derrick, whose overdriven engine, attended though it was by a veritable corps of mechanics, could lift them only a few feet at a time. Coughing and snorting, it ran slower and slower until, released from the load, it burst again into free motion to build up sufficient momentum to lift them another foot or so.
And all about the rim of that forty-foot well there were being erected other machines. Trusses were rising into the air, immense chains were being forged, and additional motors were being assembled. It was apparent that theSkylarkwas to be raised; and it was equally evident that to the hypermen that raising presented an engineering problem of no small magnitude.
"She'll be right here when we get back, Peg, as far as those jaspers are concerned," Seaton informed his companion. "If they have to slip their clutches to lift the weight of just us two, they'll have one sweet job getting the oldSkylarkback up here. They haven't got the slightest idea of what they're tackling—they can't begin to pile enough of that kind of machinery in this whole part of the country to budge her."
"You speak as though you were quite certain of our returning," Margaret spoke somberly. "I wish that I could feel that way."
"Sure I'm certain of it," Seaton assured her. "I've got it all figured out. Nobody can maintain one hundred per cent vigilance forever, and as soon as I get back into shape from that last twisting they gave me, I'll be fast enough to take advantage of the break when it comes."
"Yes; but suppose it doesn't come?"
"It's bound to come sometime. The only thing that bothers me is that I can't even guess at when we're due to snap back into our own three-dimensional space. Since we couldn't detect any motion in an ether wave, though, I imagine that we'll have lots of time, relatively speaking, to get back here before theSkylarkleaves. Ah! I wondered if they were going to make us walk to wherever it is they're taking us, but I see we ride—there comes something that must be an airship. Maybe we can make our break now instead of later."
But the hyperman did not relax his vigilance for an instant as the vast, vague bulk of the flier hovered in the air beside their elevator. A port opened, a short gangplank shot out, and under the urge of the punishing trident the two human beings stepped aboard. A silent flurry ensued among the weird crew of the vessel as its huge volume sank downward under the unheard-of mass of the two captives, but no opportunity was afforded for escape—the gripping trident did not relax, and at last the amazed officers succeeded in driving their motors sufficiently to lift the prodigious load into the air of the hyperplanet.
"Take a good, long look around, Peg, so that you can help find our way back," Seaton directed, and pointed out through the peculiarly transparent wall of their conveyance. "See those three peaks over there, the only hills in sight? Our course is about twelve or fifteen degrees off the line of the right-hand two—and there's something that looks like a river down below us. The bend there is just about on line—see anything to mark it by?"
"Well, there's a funny-looking island, kind of heart-shaped, with a reddish-colored spire of rock—see it?"
"Fine—we ought to be able to recognize that. Bend, heart-island, red obelisk on what we'll call the upstream end. Now from here, what? Oh, we're turning—going upstream. Fine business! Now we'll have to notice when and where we leave this river, lake, or whatever it is."
They did not, however, leave the course of the water. For hundreds of miles, apparently, it was almost perfectly straight, and for hours the airship of the hypermen bored through the air only a few hundred feet above its gleaming surface. Faster and faster the hypership flew onward, until it became a whistling, yelling projectile, tearing its way at a terrific but constant velocity through the complaining air.
But while that which was beneath them was apparently the fourth dimensional counterpart of an Earthly canal, neither water nor landscape was in any sense familiar. No sun was visible, nor moon, nor the tiniest twinkling star. Where should be the heavens there was merely a void of utter, absolute black, appalling in its uncompromising profundity. Indeed, the Terrestrials would have thought themselves blind were it not for the forbidding, Luciferean vegetation which, self-luminous with a ghastly bluish-violet pseudo-light, extended outward—flat—in every direction to infinity.
"What's the matter with it, Dick?" demanded Margaret, shivering. "It's horrible, awful, unsettling. Surely anything that is actually seen must be capable of description? But this—" Her voice died away.
"Ordinarily, three-dimensionally, yes; but this, no," Seaton assured her. "Remember that our brains and eyes, now really pseudo-fourth-dimensional, are capable of seeing those things as they actually are; but that our entities—intelligences—whatever you like—are still three-dimensional and can neither comprehend nor describe them. We can grasp them only very roughly by transposing them into our own three-dimensional concepts, and that is a poor subterfuge that fails entirely to convey even an approximate idea. As for that horizon—or lack of it—it simply means that this planet is so big that it looks flat. Maybe itisflat in the fourth dimension—I don't know!"
Both fell silent, staring at the weird terrain over which they were being borne at such an insane pace. Along its right line above that straight watercourse sped the airship, a shrieking arrow; and to the right of the observers and to left of them spread, as far as the eye could reach, a flatly unbroken expanse of the ghostly, livid, weirdly self-luminous vegetation of the unknowable hyperworld. And, slinking, leaping, or perchance flying between and among the boles and stalks of the rank forest growth could be glimpsed fleeting monstrous forms of animal life.
Seaton strained his eyes, trying to see them more clearly; but owing to the speed of the ship, the rapidity of the animals' movements, the unsatisfactory illumination, and the extreme difficulty of translating at all rapidly the incomprehensible four-dimensional forms into their three-dimensional equivalents, he could not even approximate either the size or the appearance of the creatures with which he, unarmed and defenseless, might have to deal.
"Can you make any sense out of those animals down there, Peg?" Seaton demanded. "See, there's one just jumped out of the river and seemed to fly into that clump of bamboolike stuff there. Get any details?"
"No. What with the poor light and everything being so awful and so distorted, I can hardly see anything at all. Why—what of them?"
"This of 'em. We're coming back this way, and we may have to come on foot. I'll try to steal a ship, of course, but the chance that we'll be able to get one—or to run it after we do get it—is mighty slim. But assuming that we are afoot, the more we know about what we're apt to go up against the better we'll be able to meet it. Oh, we're slowing down—been wondering what that thing up ahead of us is. It looks like a cross between the Pyramid of Cheops and the old castle of Bingen on the Rhine, but I guess it's a city—it seems to be where we're headed for."
"Does this water actually flow out from the side of that wall, or am I seeing things?" the girl asked.
"It seems to—your eyes are all right, I guess. But why shouldn't it? There's a big archway, you notice—maybe they use it for power or something, and this is simply an outfall—"
"Oh, we're going in!" Margaret exclaimed, her hand flashing out to Seaton's arm.
"Looks like it, but they probably know their stuff." He pressed her hand reassuringly. "Now, Peg, no matter what happens, stick to me as long as you possibly can!"
As Seaton had noticed, the city toward which they were flying resembled somewhat an enormous pyramid, whose component units were themselves mighty buildings, towering one above and behind the other in crenelated majesty to an awe-inspiring height. In the wall of the foundation tier of buildings there yawned an enormous opening, spanned by a noble arch of metaled masonry, and out of this gloriously arched aqueduct there sprang the stream whose course the airship had been following so long. Toward that forbidding opening the hypership planed down, and into it she floated slowly and carefully.
Much to the surprise of the Terrestrials, however, the great tunnel of the aqueduct was not dark. Walls and arched ceiling alike glowed with the livid, bluish-violet ultra-light which they had come to regard as characteristic of all hyperthings, and through that uncanny glare the airship stole along. Once inside the tunnel its opening vanished—imperceptible, indistinguishable from its four-dimensional, black-and-livid-blue background.
Unending that tunnel stretched before and behind them. Walls and watery surface alike were smooth, featureless, and so uniformly and weirdly luminous that the eye could not fix upon any point firmly enough to determine the rate of motion of the vessel—or even to determine whether it was moving at all. No motion could be perceived or felt and the time-sense had long since failed. Seaton and Margaret may have traveled in that gigantic bore for inches or for miles of distance; for seconds or for weeks of hypertime; they did not then and never did know. But with a slight jar the hypership came to rest at last upon a metallic cradle which had in some fashion appeared beneath her keel. Doors opened and the being holding the tridents, who had not moved a muscle during the, to the Terrestrials, interminable journey, made it plain to them that they were to precede him out of the airship. They did so, quietly and without protest, utterly helpless to move save at the behest of their unhuman captor-guide.
Through a maze of corridors and passages the long way led. Each was featureless and blank, each was lighted by the same eerie, bluish light, each was paved with a material which, although stone-hard to the hypermen, yielded springily, as yields a soft peat bog, under the feet of the massive Terrestrials. Seaton, although now restored to full vigor, held himself rigorously in check. Far from resisting the controlling impulses of the trident he sought to anticipate those commands.
Indeed, recognizing the possibility that the captor might be aware, through those electrical connections, of his very ideas, he schooled his outward thoughts to complete and unquestioning submission. Yet never had his inner brain been more active, and now the immense mentality given him by the Norlaminians stood him in good stead. For every doorway, every turn, every angle and intersection of that maze of communicating passageways was being engraved indelibly upon his brain, he knew that no matter how long or how involved the way, he could retain his orientation with respect to the buried river up which they had sailed.
And, although quiescent enough and submissive enough to all outward seeming, his inner brain was keyed up to its highest pitch, eager to drive Seaton's gigantic and instantaneously reacting muscles into outbursts of berserk fury at the slightest lapse of the attention of the wielder of the mastering trident.
But there was no such lapse. The intelligence of the hyperman seemed to be concentrated in the glowing tips of the forceps and did not waver for an instant, even when an elevator into which he steered his charges refused to lift the immense weight put upon it.
A silent colloquy ensued, then Seaton and Margaret walked endlessly up a spiral ramp. Climbed, it seemed, for hours, their feet sinking to the ankles into the resilient material of the rock-and-metal floor, while their alert guardian floated effortlessly in the air behind them, propelled and guided by his swiftly revolving tail.
Eventually the ramp leveled off into a corridor. Straight ahead, two aisles—branch half right—branch half left—first turn left—third turn right—second doorway on right. They stopped. The door opened. They stepped into a large, officelike room, thronged with the peculiar, sea-horselike hypermen of this four-dimensional civilization. Everything was indescribable, incomprehensible, but there seemed to be desks, mechanisms, and tier upon tier of shelf-like receptacles intended for the storage of they knew not what.
Most evident of all, however, were the huge, goggling, staring eyes of the creatures as they pressed in, closer and closer to the helplessly immobile bodies of the man and the woman. Eyes dull, expressionless, and unmoving to Earthly, three-dimensional intelligences; but organs of highly intelligible, flashing language, as well as of keen vision, to their possessors.
Thus it was that the very air of the chamber was full of speech and of signs, but neither Margaret nor Seaton could see or hear them. In turn the Earthman tried, with every resource at his command of voice, thought, and pantomime, to bridge the gap—in vain.
Then strange, many-lensed instruments were trundled into the room and up to the helpless prisoners. Lenses peered; multicolored rays probed; planimeters, pantographs, and plotting points traced and recorded every bodily part; the while the two sets of intelligences, each to the other so foreign, were at last compelled to acknowledge frustration. Seaton of course knew what caused the impasse and, knowing the fundamental incompatibility of the dimensions involved, had no real hope that communication could be established, even though he knew the hypermen to be of high intelligence and attainment.
The natives, however, had no inkling of the possibility of three-dimensional actualities. Therefore, when it had been made plain to them that they had no point of contact with their visitors—that the massive outlanders were and must remain unresponsive to their every message and signal—they perforce ascribed that lack of response to a complete lack of intelligence.
The chief of the council, who had been conducting the examination, released the forces of his mechanisms and directed his flashing glance upon the eyes of the Terrestrials' guard, ordering him to put the specimens away.
"—and see to it that they are watched very carefully," the ordering eye concluded. "The Fellows of Science will be convened and will study them in greater detail than we have been able to do here."
"Yes, sir; as you have said, so shall it be," the guard acknowledged, and by means of the trident he guided his captives through a high-arched exit and into another labyrinth of corridors.
Seaton laughed aloud as he tucked Margaret's hand under his arm and marched along under the urge of the admonishing trident.
"'Nobody 'ome—they ain't got no sense,' says his royal nibs. 'Tyke 'em awye!'" he exclaimed.
"Why so happy all of a sudden, Dick? I can't see very much change in our status."
"You'd be surprised." He grinned. "There's been a lot of change. I've found out that they can't read our thoughts at all, as long as we don't express them in muscular activity. I've been guarding my thoughts and haven't been talking to you much for fear they could get my ideas some way. But now I can tell you that I'm going to start something pretty quick. I've got this trident thing pretty well solved. This bird's taking us to jail now, I think, and when he gets us there his grip will probably slip for an instant. If it does he'll never get it back, and we'll be merrily on our way."
"To jail!" Margaret exclaimed. "But suppose they put us—I hope they put us in the same cell!"
"Don't worry about that. If my hunch is right it won't make a bit of difference—I'll have you back before they can get you out of sight. Everything around here is thin almost to the point of being immaterial, you know—you could whip an army of them in purely physical combat, and I could tear this whole joint up by the roots."
"A la Samson? I believe that you could, at that." Margaret smiled.
"Yeah; or rather, you can play you're Paul Bunyan, and I'll be Babe, the big blue ox. We'll show this flock of prop-tailed gilliwimpuses just how we gouged out Lake Superior to make a he-man's soup bowl!"
"You make me feel a lot better, Dick, even if I do remember that Babe was forty-seven ax handles across the horns." Margaret laughed, but sobered quickly. "But here we are—oh, Idohope that he leaves me with you!"
XII.
They had stopped beside a metal grill, in front of which was poised another hyperman, his propeller tail idling slowly. He had thought that he was to be Seaton's jailer, and as he swung the barred gate open he engaged the Terrestrial's escort in optical conversation—a conversation which gave Seaton the mere instant of time for which he had been waiting.
"So these are the visitors from outer space, whose bodies are so much denser than solid metal?" he asked curiously. "Have they given you much trouble?"
"None at all. I touched that one only once, and this one, that you are to keep here, wilted at only the third step of force. The orders are to keep them under control every minute, however. They are stupid, senseless brutes, as is of course to be expected from their mass and general make-up. They have not given a single sign of intelligence of even the lowest order, but their strength is apparently enormous, and they might do a great deal of damage if allowed to break away from the trident."
"All right; I'll hold him constantly until I am relieved," and the jailer, lowering his own trident, extended a long, tentacular arm toward the grooved and knobbed shaft of the one whose teeth were already imbedded in Seaton's tissues.
Seaton had neither perceived nor sensed anything of this conversation, but he was tense and alert; tight-strung to take advantage of even the slightest slackening of the grip of the grappling fingers of the controller. Thus in the bare instant of the transfer of control from one weird being to the other he acted—instantaneously and highly effectively.
With a twisting leap he whirled about, wrenching himself free from the punishing teeth of the grapple. Lightning hands seized the shaft and swung the weapon in a flashing arc. Then, with all the quickness of his highly trained muscles and with all the power of his brawny right arm, Seaton brought the controller down full upon the grotesque head of the hyperman.
He had given no thought to the material character of weapon or of objective; he had simply wrenched himself free and struck instinctively, lethally, knowing that freedom had to be won then or never. But he was not wielding an Earthly club or an Osnomian bar; nor was the flesh opposing him the solid substance of a human and three-dimensional enemy.
At impact the fiercely driven implement flew into a thousand pieces, but such was the power behind it that each piece continued on, driving its relentless way through the tenuous body substance of the erstwhile guard. That body subsided instantly upon the floor, a shapeless and mangled mass of oozing, dripping flesh. Weaponless now, holding only the shattered butt of the ex-guard's trident, Seaton turned to confront the other guard who, still holding Margaret helpless, was advancing upon him, wide-open trident to the fore.
He hurled the broken stump; then, as the guard nimbly dodged the flying missile, he leaped to the barred door of the cell. He seized it and jerked mightily; and as the anchor bolts of the hinges tore out of the masonry he swung the entire gate in a full-sweeping circle. Through the soft body the interlaced bars tore, cutting it into ghastly, grisly dice, and on, across the hall, tearing into and demolishing the opposite wall.
"All right, Peg, or did he shock you?" Seaton demanded.
"All right, I guess—he didn't have time, to do much of anything."
"Fine, let's snap it up, then. Or wait a minute, I'd better get us a couple of shields. We've got to keep them from getting those stingarees into us again—as long as we can keep them away from us we can do about as we please around here, but if they ever get hold of us again it'll be just too bad."
While Seaton was speaking he had broken away and torn out two great plates or doors of solid metal, and, handing one of them to his companion, he went on: "Here, carry this in front of you and we'll go places and do things."
But in that time, short as it was, the alarm had been given, and up the corridor down which they must go was advancing a corps of heavily armed beings. Seaton took one quick step forward, then, realizing the impossibility of forcing his way through such a horde without impalement, he leaped backward to the damaged wall and wrenched out a huge chunk of masonry. Then, while the upper wall and the now unsupported ceiling collapsed upon him, their fragments touching his hard body lightly and bouncing off like so many soft pillows, he hurled that chunk of material down the hall and into the thickest ranks of the attackers.
Through the close-packed phalanx it tore as would a plunging tank through massed infantry, nor was it alone. Mass after mass of rock was hurled as fast as the Earthman could bend and straighten his mighty back, and the hypermen broke ranks and fled in wild disorder.
For to them Seaton was not a man of flesh and blood, lightly tossing pillows of eiderdown along a corridor, through an assemblage of wraithlike creatures. He was to them a monstrous being, constructed of something harder, denser, and tougher than any imaginable metal. A being driven by engines of unthinkable power, who stood unharmed and untouched while masses of stone, brickwork, and structural steel crashed down upon his bare head. A being who caught those falling masses of granite and concrete and hurled them irresistibly through rank after rank of flesh-and-blood men.
"Let's go, Peg!" Seaton gritted. "The way's clear now, I guess—we'll show those horse-faced hippocampuses that what it takes to do things, we've got!"
Through the revolting, reeking shambles of the corpse-littered corridor they gingerly made their way. Past the scene of the battle, past intersection after intersection they retraced their course, warily and suspiciously at first. But no ambush had been laid—the hypermen were apparently only too glad to let them go in peace—and soon they were hurrying along as fast as Margaret could walk.
They were soon to learn, however, that the denizens of this city of four-dimensional space had not yet given up the chase. Suddenly the yielding floor dropped away beneath their feet and they fell, or, rather, floated, easily and slowly downward. Margaret shrieked in alarm, but the man remained unmoved and calm.
"'Sall right, Peg," he assured her. "We want to go clear down to the bottom of this dump, anyway, and this'll save us the time and trouble of walking down. All right; that is, if we don't sink into the floor so deep when we hit that we won't be able to get ourselves out of it. Better spread out that shield so you'll fall on it—it won't hurt you, and it may help a lot."
So slowly were they falling that they had ample time in which to prepare for the landing; and, since both Seaton and Margaret were thoroughly accustomed to weightless maneuvering in free space, their metal shields were flat beneath them when they struck the lowermost floor of the citadel. Those shields were crushed, broken, warped and twisted as they were forced into the pavement by the force of the falling bodies—as would be the steel doors of a bank vault upon being driven broadside on, deep into a floor of solid concrete.
But they served their purpose; they kept the bodies of the Terrestrials from sinking beyond their depth into the floor of the hyperdungeon. As they struggled to their feet, unhurt, and saw that they were in a large, cavernous room, six searchlightlike projectors came into play, enveloping them in a flood of soft, pinkish-white light.
Seaton stared about him, uncomprehending, until he saw that one of the hypermen, caught accidentally in the beam, shriveled horribly and instantly into a few floating wisps of luminous substance which in a few seconds disappeared entirely.
"Huh! Death rays!" he exclaimed then. "'Sa good thing for us we're essentially three-dimensional yet, or we'd probably never have known what struck us. Now let's see—where's our river? Oh, yes; over this way. Wonder if we'd better take these shields along? Guess not, they're pretty well shot—we'll pick us up a couple of good ones on the way, and I'll get you a grill like this one as a good club, too."
"But there's no door on that side!" Margaret protested.
"We should fret a lot about that—we'll roll our own as we go along."
His heavy boot crashed against the wall before them, and a section of it fell outward. Two more kicks and they were through, hurrying along passages which Seaton knew led toward the buried river, breaking irresistibly through solid walls whenever the corridor along which they were moving angled away from his chosen direction.
Their progress was not impeded. The hyperbeings were willing—yes, anxious—for their unmanageable prisoners to depart and made no further attempts to bar their path. Thus the river was soon reached.
The airship in which they had been brought to the hypercity was nowhere to be seen, and Seaton did not waste time looking for it. He had been unable to understand the four-dimensional controls even while watching them in operation, and he realized that even if he could find the vessel the chance of capturing it and of escaping in it was slight indeed. Therefore, throwing an arm around his companion, he leaped without ado into the speeding current.
"But, Dick, we'll drown!" Margaret protested. "This stuff must be altogether too thin for us to swim in—we'll sink like rocks!"
"Sure we will, but what of it?" he returned. "How many times have you actually breathed since we left three-dimensional space?"
"Why, thousands of times, I suppose—or, now that you mention it, I don't really know whether I'm breathing at all or not—but we've been gone so long—Oh, I don't believe that I really knowanything!"
"You aren't breathing at all," he informed her then. "We have been expending energy, though, in spite of that fact, and the only way I can explain it is that there must be fourth-dimensional oxygen or we would have suffocated long ago. Being three-dimensional, of course we wouldn't have to breathe it in for the cells to get the benefit of it—they can grab it direct. Incidentally, that probably accounts for the fact that I'm hungry as a wolf, but that'll have to wait until we get back into our own space again."
True to Seaton's prediction, they suffered no inconvenience as they strode along upon the metaled pavement of the river's bottom, Seaton still carrying the bent and battered grating with which he had wrought such havoc in the corridor so far above.
Almost at the end of the tunnel, a sharklike creature darted upon them, dreadful jaws agape. With his left arm Seaton threw Margaret behind him, while with his right he swung the four-dimensional grating upon the monster of the deeps. Under the fierce power of the blow the creature became a pulpy mass, drifting inertly away upon the current, and Seaton stared after it ruefully.
"That particular killing was entirely unnecessary, and I'm sorry I did it," he remarked.
"Unnecessary? Why, it was going to bite me!" she cried.
"Yeah, itthoughtit was, but it would have been just like one of our own real sharks trying to bite the chilled-steel prow off of a battleship," he replied. "Here comes another one. I'm going to let him gnaw on my arm, and see how he likes it."
On the monster came with a savage rush, until the dreadful, outthrust snout almost touched the man's bare, extended arm. Then the creature stopped, dead still in mid-rush, touched the arm tentatively, and darted away with a quick flirt of its powerful tail.
"See, Peg, he knows we ain't good to eat. None of these hyperanimals will bother us—it's only these men with their meat hooks that we have to fight shy of. Here's the jump-off. Better we hit it easylike—I wouldn't wonder if that sandy bottom would be pretty tough going. I think maybe we'd better take to the beach as soon as we can."
From the metaled pavement of the brilliantly lighted aqueduct they stepped out upon the natural sand bottom of the open river. Above them was only the somberly sullen intensity of velvety darkness; a darkness only slightly relieved by the bluely luminous vegetation upon the river's either bank. In spite of their care they sank waist-deep into that sand, and it was only with great difficulty that they fought their way up to the much firmer footing of the nearer shore.
Out upon the margin at last, they found that they could make good time, and they set out downstream at a fast but effortless pace. Mile after mile they traveled, until, suddenly, as though some universal switch had been opened, the ghostly radiance of all the vegetation of the countryside disappeared in an instant, and utter and unimaginable darkness descended as a pall. It was not the ordinary darkness of an Earthly night, nor yet the darkness of even an Earthly dark room; it was indescribably, completely, perfect darkness of the total absence of every ray of light, unknown upon Earth and unknowable to Earthly eyes.
"Dick!" shrieked Margaret. "Where are you?"
"Right here, Peg—take it easy," he advised, and groping fingers touched and clung. "They'll probably light up again. Maybe this is their way of having night. We can't do much, anyway, until it gets light again. We couldn't possibly find theSkylarkin this darkness; and even if we could feel our way downriver we'd miss the island that marks our turning-off point. Here, I feel a nice soft rock. I'll sit down with my back against it and you can lie down, with my lap for a pillow, and we'll take us a nap. Wasn't it Porthos, or some other one of Dumas' characters that said, 'He who sleeps, eats'?"
"Dick, you're a perfect peach to take things the way you do." Margaret's voice was broken. "I know what you're thinking of, too. Oh, Idohope that nothing has become of them!" For she well knew that, true and loyal friend though Seaton was, yet his every thought was for his beloved Dorothy, presumably still inSkylark Two—just as Martin Crane came first with her in everything.
"Sure they're all right, Peg." An instantly suppressed tremor shook his giant frame. "They're figuring on keeping them in theLarkuntil they raise her, I imagine. If I had known as much then as I know now they'd never have got away with any of this stuff—but it can't be helped now. I wish I could do something, because if we don't get back toTwopretty quick it seems as though we may snap back into our own three dimensions and land in empty space. Or would we, necessarily? The time coördinates would change, too, of course, and that change might very well make it obligatory for us to be back in our exact original locations in theLarkat the instant of transfer, no matter where we happen to be in this hyperspace-hypertime continuum. Too deep for me—I can't figure it. Wish Mart was here, maybe he could see through it."
"You don't wish so half as much as I do!" Margaret exclaimed feelingly.
"Well, anyway, we'll pretend thatTwocan't run off and leave us here. That certainly is a possibility, and it's a cheerful thought to dwell on while we can't do anything else."
They fell silent. Now and again Margaret dozed, only to start awake at the coughing grunt of some near-by prowling hyperdenizen of that unknown jungle, but Seaton did not sleep. He did not even half believe in his own hypothesis of their automatic return to their space ship; and his vivid imagination insisted upon dwelling lingeringly upon every hideous possibility of their return to three-dimensional space outside their vessel's sheltering walls. And that same imagination continually conjured up visions of what might be happening to Dorothy—to the beloved bride who, since their marriage upon far distant Osnome, had never before been separated from him for so long a time. He had to struggle against an insane urge to do something, anything; even to dash madly about in the absolute blackness of hyperspace in a mad attempt—doomed to certain failure before it was begun—to reachSkylark Twobefore she should vanish from four-dimensional space.
Thus, while Seaton grew more and more tense momently, more and ever more desperately frustrate, the abysmally oppressive hypernight wore illimitably on. Creeping—plodding—d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g endlessly along; extending itself fantastically into the infinite reaches of all eternity.