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 the _Skylark_. 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 went _past_--not _through_--the spherical arenak
shell of _Skylark Two_ and 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 the _Skylark_ was 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 old _Skylark_ back 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 the _Skylark_ leaves. 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 it _is_ flat 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, I _do_ hope that he leaves me
with you!"