XIII.
As suddenly as the hyperland had become dark it at last became light. There was no gradual lightening, no dawning, no warning—in an instant, blindingly to eyes which had for so long been straining in vain to detect even the faintest ray of visible light in the platinum-black darkness of the hypervoid, the entire countryside burst into its lividly glowing luminescence. As the light appeared Seaton leaped to his feet with a yell.
"Yowp! I was never so glad to see a light before in all my life, even if it is blue! Didn't sleep much either, did you, Peg?"
"Sleep? I don't believe that I'lleverbe able to sleep again! It seemed as though I was lying there for weeks!"
"It did seem long, but time is meaningless to us here, you know."
The two set out at a rapid pace, down the narrow beach beside the hyperstream. For a long time nothing was said, then Margaret broke out, half hysterically:
"Dick, this is simply driving me mad! I think probably Iammad, already. We seem to be walking, yet we aren't, really; we're going altogether too fast, and yet we don't seem to be getting anywhere. Besides, it's taking forever and ever—"
"Steady, Peg! Keep a stiff upper lip! Of course we really aren't walking, in a three-dimensional sense, but we're getting there, just the same. I'd say that we were traveling almost half as fast as that airship was, which is a distinctly cheerful thought. And don't try to think of anything in detail, because equally of course we can't understand it.
"And as for time, forget it. Just remember that, as far as we are concerned, this whole episode is occupying only a thousandth of a second of our own real time, even if it seems to last a thousand years.
"And, above all, get it down solid that you're not nutty—it's just that everything else around here is. It's like that wild one Sir Eustace pulled on me that time, remember? 'I say, Seaton, old chap, the chaps hereabout seem to regard me as a foreigner. Now really, you know, they should realize that I am simply alone in a nation of foreigners.'"
Margaret laughed, recovering a measure of her customary poise at Seaton's matter-of-fact explanations and reassurance, and the seemingly endless journey went on. Indeed, so long did it seem that the high-strung and apprehensive Seaton was every moment expecting the instantaneous hypernight again to extinguish all illumination long before they came within sight of the little island, with its unmistakably identifying obelisk of reddish stone.
"Woof, but that's a relief!" he exploded at sight of the marker. "We'll be there in a few minutes more—here's hoping it holds off for those few minutes!"
"It will," Margaret said confidently. "It'll have to, now that we're so close. How are you going to get a line on those three peaks? We cannot possibly see over or through that jungle."
"Easy—just like shooting fish down a well. That's one reason I was so glad to see that tall obelisk thing over there—it's big enough to hold my weight and high enough so that I can see the peaks from its top. I'm going to climb up it and wigwag you onto the line we want. Then we'll set a pole on that line and crash through the jungle, setting up back-sights as we go along. We'll be able to see the peaks in a mile or so, and once we see them it'll be easy enough to findTwo."
"But climbing Cleopatra's Needle comes first, and it's straight up and down," Margaret objected practically. "How are you going to do that?"
"With a couple of hypergrab-hooks—watch me!"
He wrenched off three of the bars of his cell grating and twisted them together, to form a heavy rod. One end of this rod he bent back upon itself, sharpening the end by squeezing it in his two hands. It required all of his prodigious strength, but in his grasp the metal at last, slowly, flowed together in a perfect weld and he waved in the air a sharply pointed hook some seven feet in length. In the same way he made another, and, with a word to the girl, he shot away through the almost intangible water toward the island.
He soon reached the base of the obelisk, and into its rounded surface he drove one of his hyperhooks. But he struck too hard. Though the hook was constructed of the most stubborn metal known to the denizens of that strange world, the obelisk was of hyperstone and the improvised tool rebounded, bent out of all semblance and useless.
It was quickly reshaped, however, and Seaton went more gently about his task. He soon learned exactly how much pressure his hooks would stand, and also the best method of imbedding the sharp metal points in the rock of the monument. Then, both hooks holding, he drove the toe of one heavy boot into the stone and began climbing.
Soon, however, his right-hand hook refused to bite; the stone had so dulled the point of the implement that it was useless. After a moment's thought Seaton settled both feet firmly and, holding the shaft of the left-hand hook under his left elbow, bent the free end around behind his back. Then, both hands free, he essayed the muscle-tearing task of squeezing that point again into serviceability.
"Watch out, Dick—you'll fall!" Margaret called.
"I'll try not to," he called back cheerfully. "Took too much work and time to get up this far to waste it. Wouldn't hurt me if I did fall—but you might have to come over and pull me out of the ground."
He did not fall. The hook was repointed without accident and he continued up the obelisk—a human fly walking up a vertical column. Four times he had to stop to sharpen his climbers, but at last he stood atop the lofty shaft. From that eminence he could see not only the three peaks, but even the scene of confused activity which he knew marked the mouth of the gigantic well at whose bottom theSkylarklay. Margaret had broken off a small tree, and from the obelisk's top Seaton directed its placing as a transit man directs the setting of his head flag.
"Left—'way left!" His arm waved its hook in great circles. "Easy now!" Left arm poised aloft. "All right for line!" Both arms swept up and down, once. A careful recheck—"Back a hair." Right arm out, insinuatingly. "All right for tack—down she goes!" Both arms up and down, twice, and the feminine flagman drove the marker deep into the sand.
"You might come over here, Peg!" Seaton shouted, as he began his hasty descent. "I'm going to climb down until my hooks get too dull to hold, and then fall the rest of the way—no time to waste sharpening them—and you may have to rally 'round with a helping hand."
Scarcely a third of the way down, one hook refused to function. A few great plunging steps downward and the other also failed—would no longer even scratch the stubborn stone. Already falling, Seaton gathered himself together, twisted bars held horizontally beneath him, and floated gently downward. He came to ground no harder than he would have landed after jumping from a five-foot Earthly fence; but even his three-ply bars of hypermetal did not keep him from plunging several feet into that strangely unsubstantial hyperground.
Margaret was there, however, with her grating and her plate of armor. With her aid Seaton struggled free, and together they waded through the river and hurried to the line post which Margaret had set. Then, along the line established by the obelisk and the post, the man crashed into the thick growth of the jungle, the woman at his heels.
Though the weirdly peculiar trees, creepers, and bamboolike shoots comprising the jungle's vegetation were not strong enough to bar the progress of the dense, hard, human bodies, yet they impeded that progress so terribly that the trail-breaker soon halted.
"Not so good this way, Peg," he reflected. "These creepers will soon pull you down, I'm afraid; and, besides, we'll be losing our line pretty quickly. What to do? Better I knock out a path with this magic wand of mine, I guess—none of this stuff seems to be very heavy."
Again they set out; Seaton's grating, so bent and battered now that it could not be recognized as once having been the door of a prison cell, methodically sweeping from side to side; a fiercely driven scythe against which no hyperthing could stand. Vines and creepers still wrapped around and clung to the struggling pair; shattered masses drifted down upon them from above, exuding in floods a viscous, gluey sap; and both masses of broken vegetation and floods of adhesive juices reënforced and rendered even more impassible the already high-piled wilderness of débris which had been accumulating there during time unthinkable.
Thus hampered, but driven to highest effort by the fear of imminent darkness and consequent helplessness, they struggled indomitably on. On and on; while behind them stretched an ever-lengthening, straight, sharply cut streak of blackness in the livid hyperlight of the jungle.
Seaton's great mass and prodigious strength enabled him to force his way through that fantastically inimical undergrowth without undue difficulty, but the unremitting pull and drag of the attacking vines eventually wore down the woman's much slighter physique.
"Just a minute, Dick!" She stopped, strength almost spent. "I hate to admit that I can't stand the pace, especially since you are doing all the real work, as well as wading through the same mess that I am, but I don't believe that I can go on much longer without a rest."
"All right—" Seaton began, but broke off, staring ahead. "No; keep on coming one minute more, Peg—three more jumps and we're through."
"I can go that much farther, of course. Lead on, MacDuff!" and they struggled on.
Seaton had spoken truly. In a few more steps they broke out of the thick growth of the jungle and into the almost-palpable darkness of a great, roughly circular area which had been cleared of the prolific growth. In the center of this circle could be seen the bluely illuminated works of the engineers who were raisingSkylark Two. The edge of the great well was surrounded by four-dimensional machinery; and that well's wide apron and its towering derricks were swarming with hypermen.
"Stay behind me, Peg, but as close as you can without getting hit," the man instructed his companion after a hasty but comprehensive study of the scene. "Keep your shield up and have your grating in good swinging order. I'll be able to take care of most of them, I think, but you want to be ready to squash any of them that may get around me or who may rush us from behind. Those stickers of theirs are bad medicine, girl, and we don't want to take any chances at all of getting stuck again."
"I'll say we don't!" she agreed feelingly, and Seaton started off over the now unencumbered ground. "Wait a minute, Dick—where are you, anyway? I can't see you at all!"
"That's right, too. Never thought of it, but there's no light. The glimmer of those plants is pretty faint, at best, and doesn't reach out here at all. We'd better hold hands, I guess, until we get close to the works out there so that we can see what we're doing and what's going on."
"But I've got only two hands—I'm not a hippocampus—and they're both full of doors and clubs and things. But maybe I can carry this shield under my arm, it isn't heavy—there, where are you, anyway?"
Seeking hands found each other, and, hand in hand, the two set out boldly toward the scene of activity so starkly revealed in the center of that vast circle of darkness. So appalling was the darkness that it was a thing tangible—palpable. Seaton could not see his companion, could not see the weapons and the shield he bore, could not even faintly discern the very ground upon which he trod. Yet he plunged forward, almost dragging the girl along bodily, eyes fixed upon the bluely gleaming circle of structures which was his goal.
"But Dick!" Margaret panted. "Let's not go so fast; I can't see a thing—not even my hand right in front of my eyes—and I'm afraid we'll bump into something—anything!"
"We've got to snap it up, Peg," the man replied, not slackening his pace in the slightest, "and there's nothing very big between us and theSkylark, or we could see it against those lights. We may stumble over something, of course, but it'll be soft enough so that it won't hurt us any. But suppose that another night clamps down on us before we get out there?"
"Oh, that's right; it did come awfully suddenly," and Margaret leaped ahead; dread of the abysmally horrible hypernight so far outweighing her natural fear of unseen obstacles in her path that the man was hard put to it to keep up with her. "Suppose they'll know we're coming?"
"Maybe—probably—I don't know. I don't imagine they can see us, but since we cannot understand anything about them, it's quite possible that they may have other senses that we know nothing about. They'll have to spot us mighty quick, though, if they expect to do themselves any good."
The hypermen could not see them, but it was soon made evident that the weird beings had indeed, in some unknown fashion, been warned of their coming. Mighty searchlights projected great beams of livid blue light, beams which sought eagerly the human beings—probing, questing, searching.
As he perceived the beams Seaton knew that the hypermen could not see without lights any better than he could; and, knowing what to expect, he grinned savagely into the darkness as he threw an arm around Margaret and spoke—or thought—to her.
"One of those beams'll find us pretty quick, and they may send something along it. If so, and if I yell jump, do it quick. Straight up; high, wide, and handsome—jump!"
For even as he spoke, one of the stabbing beams of light had found them and had stopped full upon them. And almost instantly had come flashing along that beam a horde of hypermen, armed with peculiar weapons at whose use the Terrestrials could not even guess.
But also almost instantly had Seaton and Margaret jumped—jumped with the full power of Earthly muscles which, opposed by only the feeble gravity of hyperland, had given their bodies such a velocity that to the eyes of the hypermen their intended captives had simply and instantly disappeared.
"They knew we were there, all right, some way or other—maybe our mass jarred the ground—but they apparently can't see us without lights, and that gives us a break," Seaton remarked conversationally, as they soared interminably upward. "We ought to come down just about where that tallest derrick is—right where we can go to work on them."
But the scientist was mistaken in thinking that the hypermen had discovered them through tremors of the ground. For the searching cones of light were baffled only for seconds; then, guided by some sense or by some mechanism unknown and unknowable to any three-dimensional intelligence, they darted aloft and were once more outlining the fleeing Terrestrials in the bluish glare of their livid radiance. And upward, along those illuminated ways, darted those living airplanes, the hypermen; and this time the man and the woman, with all their incredible physical strength, could not leap aside.
"Not so good," said Seaton, "better we'd stayed on the ground, maybe. Theycouldtrace us, after all; and of course this air is their natural element. But now that we're up here, we'll just have to fight them off; back to back, until we land."
"But how can we stay back to back?" asked Margaret sharply. "We'll drift apart at our first effort. Then they'll be able to get behind us and they'll have us again!"
"That's so, too—never thought of that angle, Peg. You've got a belt on, haven't you?"
"Yes."
"Fine! Loosen it up and I'll run mine through it. The belts and an ankle-and-knee lock'll hold us together and in position to play tunes on those sea horses' ribs. Keep your shield up and keep that grating swinging and we'll lay them like a carpet."
Seaton had not been idle while he was talking, and when the attackers drew near, vicious tridents outthrust, they encountered an irresistibly driven wall of crushing, tearing, dismembering, and all-destroying metal. Back to back the two unknown monstrosities floated through the air; interlaced belts holding their vulnerable backs together, gripped legs holding their indestructibly dense and hard bodies in alignment.
The hypermen encountered an irresistibly driven wall of crushing, tearing, dismembering and all-destroying metal.
The hypermen encountered an irresistibly driven wall of crushing, tearing, dismembering and all-destroying metal.
The hypermen encountered an irresistibly driven wall of crushing, tearing, dismembering and all-destroying metal.
For a time the four-dimensional creatures threw themselves upon the Terrestrials, only to be hurled away upon all sides, ground literally to bits. For Margaret protected Seaton's back, and he himself took care of the space in front of him, to right and to left of them, above and below them; driving the closely spaced latticework of his metal grating throughout all that space so viciously and so furiously that it seemed to be omnipresent as well as omnipotent.
Then, giving up hope of recapturing the specimens alive, the hyperbeings turned upon them their lethal beams. Soft, pinkly glowing beams which turned to a deep red and then flamed through the spectrum and into the violet as they were found to have no effect upon the human bodies. But the death rays of the hypermen, whatever the frequency, were futile—the massed battalions at the pit's mouth were as impotent as had been the armed forces of the great hypercity, whose denizens had also failed either to hold or to kill the supernatural Terrestrials.
During the hand-to-hand encounter the two had passed the apex of their flight; and now, bathed in the varicolored beams, they floated gently downward, directly toward the great derrick which Seaton had pointed out as marking their probable landing place. In fact, they grazed one of the massive corner members of the structure; but Seaton interposed his four-dimensional shield and, although the derrick trembled noticeably under the impact, neither he nor Margaret was hurt as they drifted lightly to the ground.
"Just like jumping off of and back into a feather bed!" Seaton exulted, as he straightened up, disconnected the hampering belts, and guided Margaret toward the vast hole in the ground, unopposed now save for the still-flaring beams. "Wonder if any more of them want to argue the right of way with us? Guess not."
"But how are we going to get down there?" asked Margaret.
"Fall down—or, better yet, we'll slide down those chains they've already got installed. You'd better carry all this junk, and I'll kind of carry you. That way you won't have to do anything—just take a ride."
Scarcely encumbered by the girl's weight, Seaton stepped outward to the great chain cables, and hand under hand he went down, down past the huge lifting cradles which had been placed around the massive globe of arenak.
"But we'll go right through it—there's nothing to stop us in this dimension!" protested Margaret.
"No, we won't; and yes, there is," Seaton replied. "We swingpastit and down, around onto level footing, on this loose end of chain—like this, see?" and they were once more in the control room ofSkylark Two.
There stood Dorothy, Crane, and Shiro, exactly as they had left them so long before. Still held in the grip of the tridents, they were silent, immobile; their eyes were vacant and expressionless. Neither Dorothy nor Crane gave any sign of recognition, neither seemed even to realize that their loved ones, gone so long, had at last returned.
XIV.
Seaton's glance leaped to his beloved Dorothy. Drooping yet rigid she stood there, unmoving, corpselike. Accustomed now to seeing four-dimensional things by consciously examining only their three-dimensional surfaces, he perceived instantly the waxen, utterly inhuman vacuity of her normally piquant and vivacious face—perceived it, and at that perception went mad.
Clutching convulsively the length of hyperchain by which he had swung into the control room he leaped, furious and elementally savage.
So furious was his action that the chain snapped apart at the wall of the control room; so rapid was it that the hyperguard had no time to move, nor even to think.
That guard had been peacefully controlling with his trident the paralyzed prisoner. All had been quiet and calm. Suddenly—in an instant—had appeared the two monstrosities who had been taken to the capital. And in that same fleeting instant one of the monsters was leaping at him. And ahead of that monster there came lashing out an enormous anchor chain, one of whose links of solid steel no ordinary mortal could lift; an anchor chain hurtling toward him with a velocity and a momentum upon that tenuous hyperworld unthinkable.
The almost-immaterial flesh of the hyperman could no more withstand that fiercely driven mass of metal than can a human body ward off an armor-piercing projectile in full flight. Through his body the great chain tore; cutting, battering, rending it into ghastly, pulpily indescribable fragments unrecognizable as ever having been anything animate. Indeed, so fiercely had the chain been urged that the metal itself could not stand the strain. Five links broke off at the climax of the chain's black-snakelike stroke, and, accompanying the bleeding scraps of flesh that had been the guard, tore on past the walls of the space ship and out into the hypervoid.
The guard holding his tridents in Crane and Shiro had not much more warning. He saw his fellow obliterated, true; but that was all he lived to see, and he had time to do exactly nothing. One more quick flip of Seaton's singularly efficient weapon and the remains of that officer also disappeared into hyperspace. More of the chain went along, this time, but that did not matter. Dropping to the floor the remaining links of his hyperflail, Seaton sprang to Dorothy, reaching her side just as the punishing trident, released by the slain guard, fell away from her.
She recovered her senses instantly and turned a surprised face to the man, who, incoherent in his relief that she was alive and apparently unharmed, was taking her into his arms.
"Why, surely, Dick, I'm all right—how could I be any other way?" she answered his first agonized question in amazement. She studied his worn face in puzzled wonder and went on: "But you certainly are not. What has happened, dear, anyway; and how could it have, possibly?"
"I hated like sin to be gone so long, Dimples, but it couldn't be helped." Seaton, in his eagerness to explain his long absence, did not even notice the peculiar implications in his wife's speech and manner. "You see, it was a long trip, and we didn't get a chance to break away from those meat hooks of theirs until after they got us into their city and examined us. Then, when we finally did break away, we found that we couldn't travel at night. Their days are bad enough, with this thick blue light, but during the nights there's absolutely no light at all, of any kind. No moon, no stars, no nothing—"
"Nights! What are you talking about, Dick, anyway?" Dorothy had been trying to interrupt since his first question and had managed at last to break in. "Why, you haven't been gone at all, not even a second. We've all been right here, all the time!"
"Huh?" ejaculated Seaton. "Are you cuckoo, Red-Top, or what—"
"Dick and I were gone at least a week, Dottie," Margaret, who had been embracing Crane, interrupted in turn, "and it was awful!"
"Just a minute, folks!" Seaton listened intently and stared upward. "We'll have to let the explanations ride a while longer. I thought they wouldn't give up that easy—here they come! I don't know how long we were gone—it seemed like a darn long time—but it was long enough so that I learned how to mop up on these folks, believe me! You take that sword and buckler of Peg's, Mart. They don't look so hot, but they're big medicine in these parts. All we've got to do is swing them fast enough to keep those stingaroos of theirs out of our gizzards and we're all set. Be careful not to hit too hard, though, or you'll bust that grating into forty pieces—it's hyperstuff, nowhere near as solid as anything we're used to. All it'll stand is about a normal fly-swatting stroke, but that's enough to knock any of these fan-tailed humming birds into an outside loop. Ah, they've got guns or something! Duck down, girls, so we can cover you with these shields; and, Shiro, you might pull that piece of chain apart and throw the links at them—that'll be good for what ails them!"
The hypermen appeared in the control room, and battle again was joined. This time, however, the natives did not rush to the attack with their tridents; nor did they employ their futile rays of death. They had guns, shooting pellets of metal; they had improvised crossbowlike slings and catapults; they had spears and javelins made of their densest materials, which their strongest men threw with all their power. But pellets and spears alike thudded harmlessly against four-dimensional shields—shields once the impenetrable, unbreakable doors of their mightiest prison—and the masses of metal and stone vomited forth by the catapults were caught by Seaton and Crane and hurled back through the ranks of the attackers with devastating effect. Shiro also was doing untold damage with his bits of chain and with such other items of four-dimensional matter as came to hand.
Still the hypermen came pressing in, closer and closer. Soon the three men were standing in a triangle, in the center of which were the women, their flying weapons defining a volume of space to enter which meant hideous dismemberment and death to any hypercreature. But on they came, willing, it seemed, to spend any number of lives to regain their lost control over the Terrestrials; realizing, it seemed, that even those supernaturally powerful beings must in time weaken.
While the conflict was at its height, however, it seemed to Seaton that the already tenuous hypermen were growing even more wraithlike; and at the same time he found himself fighting with greater and greater difficulty. The lethal grating, which he had been driving with such speed that it had been visible only as a solid barrier, moved more and ever more slowly, to come finally to a halt in spite of his every effort.
He could not move a muscle, and despairingly he watched a now almost-invisible warden who was approaching him, controlling trident outthrust. But to his relieved surprise the hyperforceps did not touch him, but slitheredpast himwithout making contact; and hyperman and hyperweapon disappeared altogether, fading out slowly into nothingness.
Then Seaton found himself moving in space. Without volition he was floating across the control room, toward the switch whose closing had ushered the Terrestrials out of their familiar space of three dimensions and into this weirdly impossible region of horror. He was not alone in his movement. Dorothy, the Cranes, and Shiro were all in motion, returning slowly to the identical positions they had occupied at the instant when Seaton had closed his master switch.
And as they moved, theychanged. TheSkylarkherself changed, as did every molecule, every atom of substance, in or of the spherical cruiser of the void.
Seaton's hand reached out and grasped the ebonite handle of the switch. Then, as his entire body came to rest, he was swept by wave upon wave of almost-unbearable relief as the artificial and unnatural extension into the fourth dimension began to collapse. Slowly, as had progressed the extrusion into that dimension, so progressed the de-extrusion from it. Each ultimate particle of matter underwent an indescribable and incomprehensible foreshortening; a compression; a shrinking together; a writhing and twisting reverse rearrangement, each slow increment of which was poignantly welcome to every outraged unit of human flesh.
Suddenly seeming, and yet seemingly only after untold hours, the return to three-dimensional space was finished. Seaton's hand drove through the remaining fraction of an inch of its travel with the handle of the switch; his ears heard the click and snap of the lightning-fast plungers driving home against their stop blocks—the closing of the relay switches had just been completed. The familiar fittings of the control room stood out in their normal three dimensions, sharp and clear.
Dorothy sat exactly as she had sat before the transition. She was leaning slightly forward in her seat—her gorgeous red-bronze hair in perfect order, her sweetly curved lips half parted, her violet eyes widened in somewhat fearful anticipation of what the dimensional translation was to bring. She was unchanged—but Seaton!
He also sat exactly as he had sat an instant—or was it a month?—before; but his face was thin and heavily lined, his normally powerful body was now gauntly eloquent of utter fatigue. Nor was Margaret in better case. She was haggard, almost emaciated. Her clothing, like that of Seaton, had been forced to return to a semblance of order by the exigencies of interdimensional and intertime translation, and for a moment appeared sound and whole.
The translation accomplished, however, that clothing literally felt apart. The dirt and grime of their long, hard journey and the sticky sap of the hyperplants through which they had fought their way had of course disappeared—being four-dimensional material, all such had perforce remained behind in four-dimensional space—but the thorns and sucking disks of the hypervegetation had taken toll. Now each rent and tear reappeared, to give mute but eloquent testimony to the fact that the sojourn of those two human beings in hyperland had been neither peaceful nor uneventful.
Dorothy's glance flashed in amazement from Seaton to Margaret, and she repressed a scream as she saw the ravages wrought by whatever it was that they had gone through.
But Seaton's first thought was for the bodiless foes whom they might not have left behind. "Did we get away, Mart?" he demanded, hand still upon the switch. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went on: "We must've made it, though, or we'd've been dematerialized before this. Three rousing cheers! We made it—we made it!"
For several minutes all four gave way to their mixed but profound emotions, in which relief and joy predominated. They had escaped from the intellectuals; they had come alive through hyperspace!
"But Dick!" Dorothy held Seaton off at arm's length and studied his gaunt, lined face. "Lover, you look actually thin."
"Iamthin," he replied. "We were gone a week, we told you. I'm just about starved to death, and I'm thirstier even than that. Not being able to eat is bad; but going without water is worse, believe me! My whole insides feel like a mess of desiccated blotters. Come on, Peg; let's empty us a couple of water tanks."
They drank; lightly and intermittently at first, then deeply.
At last Seaton put down the pitcher. "That isn't enough, by any means; but we're damp enough inside so that we can swallow food, I guess. While you're finding out where we are, Mart, Peg and I'll eat six or eight meals apiece."
While Seaton and Margaret ate—ate as they had drunk, carefully, but with every evidence of an insatiable bodily demand for food—Dorothy's puzzled gaze went from the worn faces of the diners to a mirror which reflected her own vivid, unchanged self.
"But I don't understand it at all, Dick!" she burst out at last. "I'mnot thirsty, nor hungry, and I haven't changed a bit. Neither has Martin; and yet you two have lost pounds and pounds and look as though you had been pulled through a knot hole. It didn't seem to us as though you were away from us all. You were going to tell me about that back there, when we were interrupted. Now go ahead and explain things, before I explode. What happened, anyway?"
Seaton, hunger temporarily assuaged, gave a full but concise summary of everything that had happened while he and Margaret were away from theSkylark. He then launched into a scientific dissertation, only to be interrupted by Dorothy.
"But, Dick, it doesn't sound reasonable that all that couldpossiblyhave happened to you and Peggy without our even knowing that any time at all had passed!" she expostulated. "We weren't unconscious or anything, were we, Martin? We knew what was going on all the time, didn't we?"
"We were at no time unconscious, and we knew at all times what was taking place around us," Crane made surprising but positive answer. He was seated at a visiplate, but had been listening to the story instead of studying the almost-sheer emptiness that was space. "And since it is a truism of Norlaminian psychology that any lapse of consciousness, of however short duration, is impressed upon the consciousness of a mind of even moderate power, I feel safe in saying that for Dorothy and me, at least, no lapse of time did occur or could have occurred."
"There!" Dorothy exulted. "You've got to admit that Martin knows his stuff. How are you going to get around that?"
"Search me—wish I knew." Seaton frowned in thought. "But Mart chirped it, I think, when he said 'for Dorothy and me, at least,' because for us two time certainly lapsed, and lapsed plenty. However, Mart certainlydoesknow his stuff; the old think tank is full of bubbles all the time. He doesn't make positive statements very often, and when he does you can sink the bank roll on 'em. Therefore, since you were both conscious and time did not lapse—for you—it must have been time itself that was cuckoo instead of you. It must have stretched, or must have been stretched, like the very dickens—for you.
"Where does that idea get us? I might think that their time was intrinsically variable, as well as being different from ours, if it was not for the regular alternation of night and day—of light and darkness, at least—that Peg and I saw, and which affected the whole country, as far as we could see. So that's out.
"Maybe they treated you two to a dose of suspended animation or something of the kind, since you weren't going anywhere—Nope, that idea doesn't carry the right earmarks, and besides it would have registered as such on Martin's Norlaminianly psychological brain. So that's out, too. In fact, the only thing that could deliver the goods would be a sta—but that'd be a trifle strong, even for a hyperman, I'm afraid."
"What would?" demanded Margaret. "Anything that you would call strong ought to be worth listening to."
"A stasis of time. Sounds a trifle far-fetched, of course, but—"
"But phooey!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Now youareraving, Dick!"
"I'm not so sure of that, at all," Seaton argued stubbornly. "They really understand time, I think, and I picked up a couple of pointers. It would take a sixth-order field—That's it, I'm pretty sure, and that gives me an idea. If they can do it in hypertime, why can't we do it in ours?"
"I fail to see how such a stasis could be established," argued Crane. "It seems to me that as long as matter exists time must continue, since it is quite firmly established that time depends upon matter—or rather upon the motion in space of that which we call matter."
"Sure—that's what I'm going on. Time and motion are both relative. Stop all motion—relative, not absolute motion—and what have you? You have duration without sequence or succession, which is what?"
"That would be a stasis of time, as you say," Crane conceded, after due deliberation. "How can you do it?"
"I don't know yet whether I can or not—that's another question. We already know, though, how to set up a stasis of the ether along a spherical surface, and after I have accumulated a little more data on the sixth order it should not be impossible to calculate a volume-stasis in both ether and sub-ether, far enough down to establish complete immobility and local cessation of time in gross matter so affected."
"But would not all matter so affected assume at once the absolute zero of temperature and thus preclude life?"
"I don't think so. The stasis would be sub-atomic and instantaneous, you know; there could be no loss or transfer of energy. I don't see how gross matter could be affected at all. As far as I can see it would be an absolutely perfect suspension of animation. You and Dot lived through it, anyway, and I'm positive that that's what they did to you. And I still say that if anybody can do it, we can."
"'And that,'" put in Margaret roguishly, "as you so feelingly remark, 'is a cheerful thought to dwell on—let's dwell on it!'"
"We'll do that little thing, too, Peg, some of these times; see if we don't!" Seaton promised. "But to get back to our knitting, what's the good word, Mart—located us yet? Are we, or are we not, heading for that justly famed distant Galaxy of the Fenachrone?"
"We are not," Crane replied flatly, "nor are we heading for any other point in space covered by the charts of Ravindau's astronomers."
"Huh? Great Cat!" Seaton joined the physicist at his visiplate, and made complete observations upon the few nebulae visible.
He turned then to the charts, and his findings confirmed those of Crane. They were so far away from our own Galaxy that the space in which they were was unknown, even to those masters of astronomy and of intergalactic navigation, the Fenachrone.
"Well, we're not lost, anyway, thanks to your cautious old bean." Seaton grinned as he stepped over to an object-compass mounted upon the plane table.
This particular instrument was equipped with every refinement known to the science of four great Solar Systems. Its exceedingly delicate needle, swinging in an almost-perfect vacuum upon practically frictionless jeweled bearings, was focused upon the unimaginable mass of the entire First Galaxy, a mass so inconceivably great that mathematics had shown—and even Crane would have stated as a fact—that it would affect that needle from any point whatever, however distant, in universal space.
Seaton actuated the minute force which set the needle in motion, but it did not oscillate. For minute after minute it revolved slowly but freely, coming ultimately to rest without any indication of having been affected in the least by any external influence. He stared at the compass in stark, unbelieving amazement, then tested its current and its every other factor. The instrument was in perfect order and in perfect adjustment. Grimly, quietly, he repeated the oscillatory test—with the same utterly negative result.
"Well, that is eminently, conclusively, definitely, and unqualifiedly that." He stared at Crane, unseeing, his mind racing. "The most sensitive needle we've got, and she won't even register!"
"In other words, we are lost." Crane's voice was level and calm. "We are so far away from the First Galaxy that even that compass, supposedly reactive from any possible location in space, is useless."
"But I don't get it, at all, Mart!" Seaton expostulated, paying no attention to the grim meaning underlying his friend's utterance. "With the whole mass of the Galaxy as its object of attachment that needle absolutely will register from a distance greater than any possible diameter of the super-universe—" His voice died away.
"Go on; you are beginning to see the light," Crane prompted.
"Yeah—no wonder I couldn't plot a curve to trace those Fenachrone torpedoes—our fundamental assumptions were unsound. The fact simply is that if space is curved at all, the radius of curvature is vastly greater than any figure as yet proposed, even by the Fenachrone astronomers. We certainly weren't out of our own space a thousandth of a second—more likely only a couple of millionths—do you suppose that there really are folds in the fourth dimension?"
"That idea has been advanced, but folds are not strictly necessary, nor are they easy to defend. It has always seemed to me that the hypothesis of linear departure is much more tenable. The planes need not be parallel, you know—in fact, it is almost a mathematical certainty that they arenotparallel."
"That's so, too; and that hypothesis would account for everything, of course. But how are—"
"Whatareyou two talking about?" demanded Dorothy. "We simply couldn't have come that far—why, theSkylarkwas stuck in the ground the whole time!"
"As a physicist, Red-Top, you're a fine little beauty-contest winner." Seaton grinned. "You forget that with the velocity she had, theLarkcouldn't have been stopped within three months, either—yet she seemed to stop. How about that, Mart?"
"I have been thinking about that. It is all a question of relative velocities, of course; but even at that, the angle of departure of the two spaces must have been extreme indeed to account for our present location in three-dimensional space."
"Extreme is right; but there's no use yapping about it now, any more than about any other spilled milk. We'll just have to go places and do things; that's all."
"Go where and do what?" asked Dorothy pointedly.
"Lost—lost in space!" Margaret breathed.
As the dread import of their predicament struck into her consciousness she had seized the arm rests of her chair in a spasmodic clutch; but she forced herself to relax and her deep brown eyes held no sign of panic.
"But we have been lost in space before, Dottie, apparently as badly as we are now. Worse, really, because we did not have Martin and Dick with us then."
"'At-a-girl, Peg!" Seaton cheered. "We may—be lost—guess we are, temporarily, at least—but we're not licked, not by seven thousand rows of apple trees!"
"I fail to perceive any very solid basis for your optimism," Crane remarked quietly, "but you have an idea, of course. What is it?"
"Pick out the Galaxy nearest our line of flight and brake down for it." Seaton's nimble mind was leaping ahead. "TheLark'sso full of uranium that her skin's bulging, so we've got power to burn. In that Galaxy there are—theremustbe—suns with habitable, possibly inhabited, planets. We'll find one such planet and land on it. Then we'll do with our might what our hands find to do."
"Such as?"
"Along what lines?" queried Dorothy and Crane simultaneously.
"Space ship, probably—Two'sentirely too small to be of any account in intergalactic work," Seaton replied promptly. "Or maybe fourth-, fifth- and sixth-order projectors; or maybe some kind of an ultra-ultra radio or projector. How do I know, from here? But there's thousands of things that maybe we can do—we'll wait until we get there to worry about which one to try first."
XV.
Seaton strode over to the control board and applied maximum acceleration. "Might as well start traveling, Mart," he remarked to Crane, who had for almost an hour been devoting the highest telescopic power of number six visiplate to spectroscopic, interferometric, and spectrophotometric studies of half a dozen selected nebulae. "No matter which one you pick out we'll have to have quite a lot of positive acceleration yet before we reverse to negative."
"As a preliminary measure, might it not be a good idea to gain some idea as to our present line of flight?" Crane asked dryly, bending a quizzical glance upon his friend. "You know a great deal more than I do about the hypothesis of linear departure of incompatible and incommensurable spaces, however, and so perhaps you already know our true course."
"Ouch! Pals, they got me!" Seaton clapped a hand over his heart; then, seizing his own ear, he led himself up to the switchboard and shut off the space drive, except for the practically negligible superimposed thirty-two feet per second which gave to theSkylark'soccupants a normal gravitational force.
"Why, Dick, how perfectly silly!" Dorothy chuckled. "What's the matter? All you've got to do is to—"
"Silly, says you?" Seaton, still blushing, interrupted her. "Woman, you don't know the half of it! I'm just plain dumb, and Mart was tactfully calling my attention to the fact. Them's soft words that the slatlike string bean just spoke, but believe me, Red-Top, he packs a wicked wallop in that silken glove!"
"Keep still a minute, Dick, and look at the bar!" Dorothy protested. "Everything's on zero, so we must be still going straight up, and all you have to do to get back somewhere near our own Galaxy is to turn it around. Why didn't one of you brilliant thinkers—or have I overlooked a bet?"
"Not exactly. You don't know about those famous linear departures, but I do. I haven't that excuse—I simply went off half cocked again. You see, it's like this: Even if those gyroscopes could have retained their orientation unchanged through the fourth-dimensional translation, which is highly improbable, that line wouldn't mean a thing as far as getting back is concerned.
"We took one gosh-awful jump in going through hyperspace, you know, and we have no means at all of determining whether we jumped up, down, or sidewise. Nope, he's right, as usual—we can't do anything intelligently until he finds out, from the shifting of spectral lines and so on, in what direction we actually are traveling. How're you coming with it, Mart?"
"For really precise work we shall require photographs of some twenty hours' exposure. However, I have made six preliminary observations, as nearly on rectangular coördinates as possible, from which you can calculate a first-approximation course which will serve until we can obtain more precise data."
"All right! Calcium H and calcium K—Were they all type G?"
"Four of them were of type G, two were of type K. I selected the H and K lines of calcium because they were the most prominent individuals appearing in all six spectra."
"Fine! While you're taking your pictures I'll run them off on the calculator. From the looks of those shifts I'd say I could hit our course within five degrees, which is close enough for a few days, at least."
Seaton soon finished his calculations. He then read off from the great graduated hour-space and declination-circles of the gyroscope cage the course upon which the power bar was then set, and turned with a grin to Crane, who had just opened the shutter for his first time exposure.
"We were off plenty, Mart," he admitted. "The whole gyroscope system was rotated about ninety degrees minus declination and something like plus seven hours' right ascension, so we'll have to forget all our old data and start out from scratch with the reference planes as they are now. That won't hurt us much, though, since we haven't any idea where we are, anyway.
"We're heading about ten degrees or so to the right of that nebula over there, which is certainly a mighty long ways off from where I thought we were going. I'll put on full positive and point ten degrees to the left of it. Probably you'd better read it now, and by taking a set of observations, say a hundred hours apart, we can figure when we'll have to reverse acceleration.
"While you're doing that I thought I'd start seeing what I could do about a fourth-order projector. It'll take a long time to build, and we'll need one bad when we get inside that Galaxy. What do you think?"
"I think that both of those ideas are sound," Crane assented, and each man bent to his task.
Crane took his photographs and studied each of the six key nebulae with every resource of his ultrarefined instruments. Having determined theSkylark'scourse and speed, and knowing her acceleration, he was able at last to set upon the power bar an automatically varying control of such a nature that her resultant velocity was directly toward the lenticular nebula nearest her former line of flight.
That done, he continued his observations at regular intervals—constantly making smaller his limit of observational error, constantly so altering the power and course of the vessel that the selected Galaxy would be reached in the shortest possible space of time consistent with a permissible final velocity.
And in the meantime Seaton labored upon the projector. It had been out of the question, of course, to transfer to tinyTwothe immense mechanism which had made ofThreea sentient, almost a living, thing; but, equally of course, he had brought along the force-band transformers and selectors, and as much as possible of the other essential apparatus. He had been obliged to leave behind, however, the very heart of the fifth-order installation—the precious lens of neutronium—and its lack was now giving him deep concern.
"What's the matter, Dickie? You look as though you had lost your last friend." Dorothy intercepted him one day as he paced about the narrow confines of the control room, face set and eyes unseeing.
"Not quite that, but ever since I finished that fourth-order outfit I've been trying to figure out something to take the place of that lens we had inThree, so that I can go ahead on the fifth, but that seems to be one thing for which there is absolutely no substitute. It's like trying to unscrew the inscrutable—it can't be done."
"If you can't get along without it, why didn't you bring it along, too?"
"Couldn't."
"Why?" she persisted.
"Nothing strong enough to hold it. In some ways it's worse than atomic energy. It's so hot and under such pressure that if that lens were to blow up in Omaha it would burn up the whole United States, from San Francisco to New York City. It takes either thirty feet of solid inoson or else a complete force-bracing to stand the pressure. We had neither, no time to build anything, and couldn't have taken it through hyperspace even if we could have held it safely."
"Does that mean—"
"No. It simply means that we'll have to start at the fourth again and work up. I did bring along a couple of good big faidons, so that all we've got to do is find a planet heavy enough and solid enough to anchor a full-sized fourth-order projector on, within twenty light-years of a white dwarf star."
"Oh, is that all? You two'll do that, all right."
"Isn't it wonderful the confidence some women have in their husbands?" Seaton asked Crane, who was studying through number six visiplate and the fourth-order projector the enormous expanse of the strange Galaxy at whose edge they now were. "I think maybe we'll be able to pull it off, though, at that. Of course we aren't close enough yet to find such minutiae as planets, but how are things shaping up in general?"
"Quite encouraging! This Galaxy is certainly of the same order of magnitude as our own, and—"
"Encouraging, huh?" Seaton broke in. "If such a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist as you are can permit himself to use such a word as that, we're practically landed on a planet right now!"
"And shows the same types and varieties of stellar spectra," Crane went on, unperturbed. "I have identified with certainty no less than six white dwarf stars, and some forty yellow dwarfs of type G."
"Fine! What did I tell you?" exulted Seaton.
"Now go over that again, in English, so that Peggy and I can feel relieved about it, too," Dorothy directed. "What's a type-G dwarf?"
"A sun like our own old Sol, back home," Seaton explained. "Since we are looking for a planet as much as possible like our own Earth, it is a distinctly cheerful fact to find so many suns so similar to our own. And as for the white dwarfs, I've got to have one fairly close to the planet we land on, because to get in touch with Rovol I've got to have a sixth-order projector; to build which I've first got to have one of the fifth order; for the reconstruction of which I've got to have neutronium; to get which I'll have to be close to a white dwarf star. See?"
"Uh-huh! Clear and lucid to the point of limpidity—not." Dorothy grimaced, then went on: "As for me, I'm certainly glad to see those stars. It seems that we've been out there in absolutely empty space for ages, and I've been scared a pale lavender all the time. Having all these nice stars around us again is the next-best thing to being on solid ground."
At the edge of the strange Galaxy though they were, many days were required to reduce the intergalactic pace of the vessel to a value at which maneuvering was possible, and many more days passed into time before Crane announced the discovery of a sun which not only possessed a family of planets, but was also within the specified distance of a white dwarf star.
To any Earthly astronomer, whose most powerful optical instruments fail to reveal even the closest star as anything save a dimensionless point of light, such a discovery would have been impossible, but Crane was not working with Earthly instruments. For the fourth-order projector, although utterly useless at the intergalactic distances with which Seaton was principally concerned, was vastly more powerful than any conceivable telescope.
Driven by the full power of a disintegrating uranium bar, it could hold a projection so steadily at a distance of twenty light-years that a man could manipulate a welding arc as surely as though it was upon a bench before him—which, in effect, it was—and in cases in which delicacy of control was not an object, such as the present quest for such vast masses as planets, the projector was effective over distances of many hundreds of light-years.
Thus it came about that the search for a planetiferous sun near a white dwarf star was not unduly prolonged, andSkylark Twotore through the empty ether toward it.
Close enough so that the projector could reveal details, Seaton drove projections of all four voyagers down into the atmosphere of the first planet at hand. That atmosphere was heavy and of a pronounced greenish-yellow cast, and through it that fervent sun poured down a flood of livid light upon a peculiarly dead and barren ground—but yet a ground upon which grew isolated clumps of a livid and monstrous vegetation.
"Of course detailed analysis at this distance is impossible, but what do you make of it, Dick?" asked Crane. "In all our travels, this is only the second time we have encountered such an atmosphere."
"Yes; and that's exactly twice too many." Seaton, at the spectroscope, was scowling in thought. "Chlorin, all right, with some fluorin and strong traces of oxides of nitrogen, nitrosyl chloride, and so on—just about like that one we saw in our own Galaxy that time. I thought then and have thought ever since that there was something decidedly fishy about that planet, and I think there's something equally fishy about this one."
"Well, let's not investigate it any further, then," put in Dorothy. "Let's go somewhere else, quick."
"Yes, let's," Margaret agreed, "particularly if, as you said about that other one, it has a form of life on it that would make our grandfather's whiskers curl up into a ball."
"We'll do that little thing; we haven't gotThree'sequipment now, and without it I'm no keener on smelling around this planet than you are," and he flipped the projection across a few hundred million miles of space to the neighboring planet. Its air, while somewhat murky and smoky, was colorless and apparently normal, its oceans were composed of water, and its vegetation was green. "See, Mart? I told you something was fishy. It's all wrong—a thing like that can't happen even once, let alone twice."
"According to the accepted principles of cosmogony it is of course to be expected that all the planets of the same sun would have atmospheres of somewhat similar composition," Crane conceded, unmoved. "However, since we have observed two cases of this kind, it is quite evident that there are not only many more suns having planets than has been supposed, but also that suns capture planets from each other, at least occasionally."
"Maybe—that would explain it, of course. But let's see what this world looks like—see if we can find a place to sit down on. It'll be nice to live on solid ground while I do my stuff."
He swung the viewpoint slowly across the daylight side of the strange planet, whose surface, like that of Earth, was partially obscured by occasional masses of cloud. Much of that surface was covered by mighty oceans, and what little land there was seemed strangely flat and entirely devoid of topographical features.
The immaterial conveyance dropped straight down upon the largest visible mass of land, down through a towering jungle of fernlike and bamboolike plants, halting only a few feet above the ground. Solid ground it certainly was not, nor did it resemble the watery muck of our Earthly swamps. The huge stems of the vegetation rose starkly from a black and seething field of viscous mud—mud unrelieved by any accumulation of humus or of débris—and in that mud there swam, crawled, and slithered teeming hordes of animals.
"What perfectly darn funny-looking mud puppies!" Dorothy exclaimed. "And isn't that the thickest, dirtiest, gooiest mud you ever saw?"
"Just about," Seaton agreed, intensely interested. "But those things seem perfectly adapted to it. Flat, beaver tails; short, strong legs with webbed feet; long, narrow heads with rooting noses, like pigs; and heavy, sharp incisor teeth. But they live on those ferns and stuff—that's why there's no underbrush or dead stuff. Look at that bunch working on the roots of that big bamboo over there. They'll have it down in a minute—there she goes!"
The great trunk fell with a crash as he spoke, and was almost instantly forced beneath the repellant surface by the weight of the massed "mud puppies" who flung themselves upon it.
"Ah, I thought so!" Crane remarked. "Their molar teeth do not match their incisors, being quite Titanotheric in type. Probably they can assimilate lignin and cellulose instead of requiring our usual nutrient carbohydrates. However, this terrain does not seem to be at all suitable for our purpose."
"I'll say it doesn't. I'll scout around and see if we can't find some high land somewhere, but I've got a hunch that we won't care for that, either. This murky air and the strong absorption lines of SO2 seem to whisper in my ear that we'll find some plenty hot and plenty sulphurous volcanoes when we find the mountains."
A few large islands or small continents of high and solid land were found at last, but they were without exception volcanic. And those volcanoes were not quiescent. Each was in constant and furious eruption.
"Well, I don't see any place around here either fit to live in or solid enough to anchor an observatory onto," Seaton concluded, after he had surveyed the entire surface of the globe. "I think we'd better flit across to the next one, don't you, folks?"
Suiting action to word, he shot the beam to the next nearest planet, which chanced to be the one whose orbit was nearest the blazing sun, and a mere glance showed that it would not serve the purposes of the Terrestrials. Small it was, and barren: waterless, practically airless, lifeless; a cratered, jagged, burned-out ember of what might once have been a fertile little world.
The viewpoint then leaped past the flaming inferno of the luminary and came to rest in the upper layers of an atmosphere.
"Aha!" Seaton exulted, after he had studied his instruments briefly. "This looks like home, sweet home to me. Nitrogen, oxygen, some CO2, a little water vapor, and traces of the old familiar rare gases. And see the oceans, the clouds, and the hills? Hot dog!"
As the projection dropped toward the new world's surface, however, making possible a detailed study, it became evident that there was something abnormal about it. The mountains were cratered and torn; many of the valleys were simply desolate expanses of weathered lava, tuff, and breccia; and, while it seemed that climatic conditions were eminently suitable, of animal life there was none.
And it was not only the world itself that had been outraged. Near a great inland lake there spread the ruins of what had once been a great city; ruins so crumbled and razed as to be almost unrecognizable. What had been stone was dust, what had been metal was rust; and dust and rust alike were now almost completely overgrown by vegetation.
"Hm-m-m!" Seaton mused, subdued. "Therewasa near-collision of planet-bearing suns, Mart; and that chlorin planet was captured. This world was ruined by the strains set up—but surely they must have been scientific enough to have seen it coming? Surely they must have made plans so thatsomeof them could have lived through it?"
He fell silent, driving the viewpoint hither and thither, like a hound in quest of a scent. "I thought so!" Another ruined city lay beneath them; a city whose buildings, works, and streets had been fused together into one vast agglomerate of glaringly glassy slag, through which could be seen unmelted fragments of strangely designed structural members. "Those ruins are fresh—that was done with a heat ray, Mart. But who did it, and why? I've got a hunch—wonder if we're too late—if they've killed them all off already?"
Hard-faced now and grim, Seaton combed the continent, finding at last what he sought.
"Ah, I thought so!" he exclaimed, his voice low but deadly. "I'll bet my shirt that the chlorins are wiping out the civilization of that planet—probably people more or less like us. What d'you say, folks—do we declare ourselves in on this, or not?"
"I'll tell the cockeyed world—I believe that we should—By all means—" came simultaneously from Dorothy, Margaret, and Crane.
"I knew you'd back me up. Humanityüber alles—homo sapiensagainst all the vermin of the universe! Let's go,Two—do your stuff!"
AsTwohurtled toward the unfortunate planet with her every iota of driving power, Seaton settled down to observe the strife and to see what he could do. That which lay beneath the viewpoint had not been a city, in the strict sense of the word. It had been an immense system of concentric fortifications, of which the outer circles had long since gone down under the irresistible attack of the two huge structures of metal which hung poised in the air above. Where those outer rings had been there was now an annular lake of boiling, seething lava. Lava from which arose gouts and slender pillars of smoke and fume; lava being volatilized by the terrific heat of the offensive beams and being hurled away in flaming cascades by the almost constant detonations of high-explosive shells; lava into which from time to time another portion of the immense fortress slagged down—put out of action, riddled, and finally fused by the awful forces of the invaders.
Even as the four Terrestrials stared in speechless awe, an intolerable blast of flame burst out above one of the flying forts and down it plunged into the raging pool, throwing molten slag far and wide as it disappeared beneath the raging surface.
"Hurray!" shrieked Dorothy, who had instinctively taken sides with the defenders. "One down, anyway!"
But her jubilation was premature. The squat and monstrous fabrication burst upward through that flaming surface and, white-hot lava streaming from it in incandescent torrents, it was again in action, apparently uninjured.