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 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!”