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'll ever be 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 I am mad, 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 find Two."
"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 the Skylark lay. 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 raising Skylark 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 the Skylark, 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. They could trace 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.
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 swing past it and down, around onto level footing, on this loose end of chain—like this, see?" and they were once more in the control room of Skylark 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.