XII.
They had stopped beside a metal grill, in front of which was poised another hyperman, his propeller tail idling slowly. He had thought that he was to be Seaton's jailer, and as he swung the barred gate open he engaged the Terrestrial's escort in optical conversation—a conversation which gave Seaton the mere instant of time for which he had been waiting.
"So these are the visitors from outer space, whose bodies are so much denser than solid metal?" he asked curiously. "Have they given you much trouble?"
"None at all. I touched that one only once, and this one, that you are to keep here, wilted at only the third step of force. The orders are to keep them under control every minute, however. They are stupid, senseless brutes, as is of course to be expected from their mass and general make-up. They have not given a single sign of intelligence of even the lowest order, but their strength is apparently enormous, and they might do a great deal of damage if allowed to break away from the trident."
"All right; I'll hold him constantly until I am relieved," and the jailer, lowering his own trident, extended a long, tentacular arm toward the grooved and knobbed shaft of the one whose teeth were already imbedded in Seaton's tissues.
Seaton had neither perceived nor sensed anything of this conversation, but he was tense and alert; tight-strung to take advantage of even the slightest slackening of the grip of the grappling fingers of the controller. Thus in the bare instant of the transfer of control from one weird being to the other he acted—instantaneously and highly effectively.
With a twisting leap he whirled about, wrenching himself free from the punishing teeth of the grapple. Lightning hands seized the shaft and swung the weapon in a flashing arc. Then, with all the quickness of his highly trained muscles and with all the power of his brawny right arm, Seaton brought the controller down full upon the grotesque head of the hyperman.
He had given no thought to the material character of weapon or of objective; he had simply wrenched himself free and struck instinctively, lethally, knowing that freedom had to be won then or never. But he was not wielding an Earthly club or an Osnomian bar; nor was the flesh opposing him the solid substance of a human and three-dimensional enemy.
At impact the fiercely driven implement flew into a thousand pieces, but such was the power behind it that each piece continued on, driving its relentless way through the tenuous body substance of the erstwhile guard. That body subsided instantly upon the floor, a shapeless and mangled mass of oozing, dripping flesh. Weaponless now, holding only the shattered butt of the ex-guard's trident, Seaton turned to confront the other guard who, still holding Margaret helpless, was advancing upon him, wide-open trident to the fore.
He hurled the broken stump; then, as the guard nimbly dodged the flying missile, he leaped to the barred door of the cell. He seized it and jerked mightily; and as the anchor bolts of the hinges tore out of the masonry he swung the entire gate in a full-sweeping circle. Through the soft body the interlaced bars tore, cutting it into ghastly, grisly dice, and on, across the hall, tearing into and demolishing the opposite wall.
"All right, Peg, or did he shock you?" Seaton demanded.
"All right, I guess—he didn't have time, to do much of anything."
"Fine, let's snap it up, then. Or wait a minute, I'd better get us a couple of shields. We've got to keep them from getting those stingarees into us again—as long as we can keep them away from us we can do about as we please around here, but if they ever get hold of us again it'll be just too bad."
While Seaton was speaking he had broken away and torn out two great plates or doors of solid metal, and, handing one of them to his companion, he went on: "Here, carry this in front of you and we'll go places and do things."
But in that time, short as it was, the alarm had been given, and up the corridor down which they must go was advancing a corps of heavily armed beings. Seaton took one quick step forward, then, realizing the impossibility of forcing his way through such a horde without impalement, he leaped backward to the damaged wall and wrenched out a huge chunk of masonry. Then, while the upper wall and the now unsupported ceiling collapsed upon him, their fragments touching his hard body lightly and bouncing off like so many soft pillows, he hurled that chunk of material down the hall and into the thickest ranks of the attackers.
Through the close-packed phalanx it tore as would a plunging tank through massed infantry, nor was it alone. Mass after mass of rock was hurled as fast as the Earthman could bend and straighten his mighty back, and the hypermen broke ranks and fled in wild disorder.
For to them Seaton was not a man of flesh and blood, lightly tossing pillows of eiderdown along a corridor, through an assemblage of wraithlike creatures. He was to them a monstrous being, constructed of something harder, denser, and tougher than any imaginable metal. A being driven by engines of unthinkable power, who stood unharmed and untouched while masses of stone, brickwork, and structural steel crashed down upon his bare head. A being who caught those falling masses of granite and concrete and hurled them irresistibly through rank after rank of flesh-and-blood men.
"Let's go, Peg!" Seaton gritted. "The way's clear now, I guess—we'll show those horse-faced hippocampuses that what it takes to do things, we've got!"
Through the revolting, reeking shambles of the corpse-littered corridor they gingerly made their way. Past the scene of the battle, past intersection after intersection they retraced their course, warily and suspiciously at first. But no ambush had been laid—the hypermen were apparently only too glad to let them go in peace—and soon they were hurrying along as fast as Margaret could walk.
They were soon to learn, however, that the denizens of this city of four-dimensional space had not yet given up the chase. Suddenly the yielding floor dropped away beneath their feet and they fell, or, rather, floated, easily and slowly downward. Margaret shrieked in alarm, but the man remained unmoved and calm.
"'Sall right, Peg," he assured her. "We want to go clear down to the bottom of this dump, anyway, and this'll save us the time and trouble of walking down. All right; that is, if we don't sink into the floor so deep when we hit that we won't be able to get ourselves out of it. Better spread out that shield so you'll fall on it—it won't hurt you, and it may help a lot."
So slowly were they falling that they had ample time in which to prepare for the landing; and, since both Seaton and Margaret were thoroughly accustomed to weightless maneuvering in free space, their metal shields were flat beneath them when they struck the lowermost floor of the citadel. Those shields were crushed, broken, warped and twisted as they were forced into the pavement by the force of the falling bodies—as would be the steel doors of a bank vault upon being driven broadside on, deep into a floor of solid concrete.
But they served their purpose; they kept the bodies of the Terrestrials from sinking beyond their depth into the floor of the hyperdungeon. As they struggled to their feet, unhurt, and saw that they were in a large, cavernous room, six searchlightlike projectors came into play, enveloping them in a flood of soft, pinkish-white light.
Seaton stared about him, uncomprehending, until he saw that one of the hypermen, caught accidentally in the beam, shriveled horribly and instantly into a few floating wisps of luminous substance which in a few seconds disappeared entirely.
"Huh! Death rays!" he exclaimed then. "'Sa good thing for us we're essentially three-dimensional yet, or we'd probably never have known what struck us. Now let's see—where's our river? Oh, yes; over this way. Wonder if we'd better take these shields along? Guess not, they're pretty well shot—we'll pick us up a couple of good ones on the way, and I'll get you a grill like this one as a good club, too."
"But there's no door on that side!" Margaret protested.
"We should fret a lot about that—we'll roll our own as we go along."
His heavy boot crashed against the wall before them, and a section of it fell outward. Two more kicks and they were through, hurrying along passages which Seaton knew led toward the buried river, breaking irresistibly through solid walls whenever the corridor along which they were moving angled away from his chosen direction.
Their progress was not impeded. The hyperbeings were willing—yes, anxious—for their unmanageable prisoners to depart and made no further attempts to bar their path. Thus the river was soon reached.
The airship in which they had been brought to the hypercity was nowhere to be seen, and Seaton did not waste time looking for it. He had been unable to understand the four-dimensional controls even while watching them in operation, and he realized that even if he could find the vessel the chance of capturing it and of escaping in it was slight indeed. Therefore, throwing an arm around his companion, he leaped without ado into the speeding current.
"But, Dick, we'll drown!" Margaret protested. "This stuff must be altogether too thin for us to swim in—we'll sink like rocks!"
"Sure we will, but what of it?" he returned. "How many times have you actually breathed since we left three-dimensional space?"
"Why, thousands of times, I suppose—or, now that you mention it, I don't really know whether I'm breathing at all or not—but we've been gone so long—Oh, I don't believe that I really know anything!"
"You aren't breathing at all," he informed her then. "We have been expending energy, though, in spite of that fact, and the only way I can explain it is that there must be fourth-dimensional oxygen or we would have suffocated long ago. Being three-dimensional, of course we wouldn't have to breathe it in for the cells to get the benefit of it—they can grab it direct. Incidentally, that probably accounts for the fact that I'm hungry as a wolf, but that'll have to wait until we get back into our own space again."
True to Seaton's prediction, they suffered no inconvenience as they strode along upon the metaled pavement of the river's bottom, Seaton still carrying the bent and battered grating with which he had wrought such havoc in the corridor so far above.
Almost at the end of the tunnel, a sharklike creature darted upon them, dreadful jaws agape. With his left arm Seaton threw Margaret behind him, while with his right he swung the four-dimensional grating upon the monster of the deeps. Under the fierce power of the blow the creature became a pulpy mass, drifting inertly away upon the current, and Seaton stared after it ruefully.
"That particular killing was entirely unnecessary, and I'm sorry I did it," he remarked.
"Unnecessary? Why, it was going to bite me!" she cried.
"Yeah, it thought it was, but it would have been just like one of our own real sharks trying to bite the chilled-steel prow off of a battleship," he replied. "Here comes another one. I'm going to let him gnaw on my arm, and see how he likes it."
On the monster came with a savage rush, until the dreadful, outthrust snout almost touched the man's bare, extended arm. Then the creature stopped, dead still in mid-rush, touched the arm tentatively, and darted away with a quick flirt of its powerful tail.
"See, Peg, he knows we ain't good to eat. None of these hyperanimals will bother us—it's only these men with their meat hooks that we have to fight shy of. Here's the jump-off. Better we hit it easylike—I wouldn't wonder if that sandy bottom would be pretty tough going. I think maybe we'd better take to the beach as soon as we can."
From the metaled pavement of the brilliantly lighted aqueduct they stepped out upon the natural sand bottom of the open river. Above them was only the somberly sullen intensity of velvety darkness; a darkness only slightly relieved by the bluely luminous vegetation upon the river's either bank. In spite of their care they sank waist-deep into that sand, and it was only with great difficulty that they fought their way up to the much firmer footing of the nearer shore.
Out upon the margin at last, they found that they could make good time, and they set out downstream at a fast but effortless pace. Mile after mile they traveled, until, suddenly, as though some universal switch had been opened, the ghostly radiance of all the vegetation of the countryside disappeared in an instant, and utter and unimaginable darkness descended as a pall. It was not the ordinary darkness of an Earthly night, nor yet the darkness of even an Earthly dark room; it was indescribably, completely, perfect darkness of the total absence of every ray of light, unknown upon Earth and unknowable to Earthly eyes.
"Dick!" shrieked Margaret. "Where are you?"
"Right here, Peg—take it easy," he advised, and groping fingers touched and clung. "They'll probably light up again. Maybe this is their way of having night. We can't do much, anyway, until it gets light again. We couldn't possibly find the Skylark in this darkness; and even if we could feel our way downriver we'd miss the island that marks our turning-off point. Here, I feel a nice soft rock. I'll sit down with my back against it and you can lie down, with my lap for a pillow, and we'll take us a nap. Wasn't it Porthos, or some other one of Dumas' characters that said, 'He who sleeps, eats'?"
"Dick, you're a perfect peach to take things the way you do." Margaret's voice was broken. "I know what you're thinking of, too. Oh, I do hope that nothing has become of them!" For she well knew that, true and loyal friend though Seaton was, yet his every thought was for his beloved Dorothy, presumably still in Skylark Two—just as Martin Crane came first with her in everything.
"Sure they're all right, Peg." An instantly suppressed tremor shook his giant frame. "They're figuring on keeping them in the Lark until they raise her, I imagine. If I had known as much then as I know now they'd never have got away with any of this stuff—but it can't be helped now. I wish I could do something, because if we don't get back to Two pretty quick it seems as though we may snap back into our own three dimensions and land in empty space. Or would we, necessarily? The time coördinates would change, too, of course, and that change might very well make it obligatory for us to be back in our exact original locations in the Lark at the instant of transfer, no matter where we happen to be in this hyperspace-hypertime continuum. Too deep for me—I can't figure it. Wish Mart was here, maybe he could see through it."
"You don't wish so half as much as I do!" Margaret exclaimed feelingly.
"Well, anyway, we'll pretend that Two can't run off and leave us here. That certainly is a possibility, and it's a cheerful thought to dwell on while we can't do anything else."
They fell silent. Now and again Margaret dozed, only to start awake at the coughing grunt of some near-by prowling hyperdenizen of that unknown jungle, but Seaton did not sleep. He did not even half believe in his own hypothesis of their automatic return to their space ship; and his vivid imagination insisted upon dwelling lingeringly upon every hideous possibility of their return to three-dimensional space outside their vessel's sheltering walls. And that same imagination continually conjured up visions of what might be happening to Dorothy—to the beloved bride who, since their marriage upon far distant Osnome, had never before been separated from him for so long a time. He had to struggle against an insane urge to do something, anything; even to dash madly about in the absolute blackness of hyperspace in a mad attempt—doomed to certain failure before it was begun—to reach Skylark Two before she should vanish from four-dimensional space.
Thus, while Seaton grew more and more tense momently, more and ever more desperately frustrate, the abysmally oppressive hypernight wore illimitably on. Creeping—plodding—d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g endlessly along; extending itself fantastically into the infinite reaches of all eternity.
