Kimball's right shoe caught in a burrow and he fell again. This time
the expected shock came late; evidently he had been on the brink of a
pit of some sort, for his shoulders slammed against the hard ground
with an unexpected impact, and he slewed down a long decline. He lay at
the bottom for an indefinite period--neither time nor distance had any
meaning in this blackness--and then got up again.
Through the steady, muted roaring which had been in his ears ever
since he had dropped from the torus coil, a roaring like the sound in
a seashell, multiplied to the point of madness, a leathery muttering
sound began to grow. He yanked his flashlight from the belt-clip and
shot a cone of light upward.
He was rewarded with a ululating, deafening scream, and something
winged and huge sheared off from the beam. The muttering of the wings
faded again, and with it went a sticky blubbering, like the crying of
an idiot child. Sick at his stomach, he pumped a shot after it, and was
surprised to hear it scream again.
That would hold them for a while. They weren't very cautious about the
automatic, for they seemed to expect that he would score a hit with it
only by rare chance; but they hated the flashlight. They'd not try that
dive-bombing stunt on him soon again.
He could hear them settling around the rim of the pit. Deliberately he
lit a cigarette. For a second he could see the bulky, pasty bodies and
the blinded heads arching above him; then they all whispered with agony
and drew away out of sight. Even the dim coal of the burning fag was
too much for them.
But before long the batteries of the flashlight would be drained, the
cigarettes gone, the matches exhausted. When that time came, Kimball
knew, he would be torn to tatters, but it didn't bother him much now.
He had been almost unconscious with fatigue when the badly-adjusted
master machine had dumped him into this nightmare; but the beasts,
savage though they were, had been curious. For a while they had
questioned him with very little hostility, and had aroused his interest
enough to give him second--or had it been twenty-second?--wind. Their
upsetting version of telepathy, which projected subtly different
emotional states instead of ideas, had awakened him thoroughly.
He had just realized that he had arrived _inside_ the Earth, probably
in a space-negative state to boot, when he had felt the urge for a
cigarette....
He sighed and stood up. There was no way to tell how long he had been
in this midnight universe, but if he could only stick it out until a
full twenty-four hours were up, the master machine would act on him
again. The faulty windings of its coils would prevent it from returning
him to the abandoned grocery as it was supposed to do--but at least it
would throw him out of _this_ black, demon-haunted universe.
At his movement, the beasts rustled eagerly back to the rim of the
pit, scarcely audible in the mass echo which was as natural to the
hollow world as air. He turned on the flashlight, pointing it at the
ground--he did not care to hear them all scream at once. There was a
thundering flurry of wings above him; then silence.
Doggedly, he began to climb. _Keep moving_, he thought, _you can sleep
in your next universe--wherever that'll be_.
The beasts wheeled patiently.
* * * * *
Andreson lay tasting the sensation of being dead for several minutes
before he realized that he was hardly even jarred. His eyes were open,
but nothing he could see made sense to him. There was no sign of Atel.
Lying flat on his back, he looked stupidly upward at a column of soft
light that seemed to reach miles into the air, ending in glowing
haze. The rock dome had vanished, and in its place was a pattern of
gigantic, garish stalactites.