“It’s the only way out, apparently,” Mason said, glancing around. “Hold on! There’s something I want.”
He retrieved a bar of silvery metal, longer than his arm, that would make a formidable bludgeon. He tested it with a vicious swing that smashed the cryptic gears of a machine.
“Good! It isn’t soft or brittle. This’ll help, Alasa!”
The girl responded by picking up a smaller bar for herself. Battle-light glowed in her golden eyes. She hurried at Mason’s side, the cloak occasionally flaring to reveal the pale flesh of her thighs.
But before they reached the passage-mouth a battling horde spewed from it, struggling in insane conflict. Swiftly Mason caught the girl, drew her down out of sight. Crouching, they watched.
The Gorichen were fighting for their lives. And their enemies were—
The Deathless Ones! Icy cold crawled down Mason’s back as he saw the invaders, creatures that were unmistakably human beings, yet more alien to him than the grotesque plant-men. For the Gorichen were normal products of evolution, and the Deathless Ones, Mason sensed, were not.
They were the living dead. In their bodies dwelt life undying, forms that had once been tall and stalwart and godlike in their beauty. Even now some remnant of past splendor lingered, made dreadful by the foul corruption that had overtaken the Deathless Ones.
The name itself explained much. They were men who had conquered death—but not disease! Not—corruption!
All the hideous plagues of mankind had burst into foul ripening on the bodies of the Deathless Ones. None was whole. Loathsome gaping wounds and sores showed the flesh and bone beneath. Tatters of granulated flesh hung in ribbons from some. There were unspeakable skull-faces glaring blindly, and there were mutilations from which Mason turned away, sickened.
Man had conquered death—and, too late, had discovered his error.
The Deathless Ones seemingly could not be injured. Scores of the Gorichen would leap upon an enemy, bearing him down by their weight. And presently the pile of struggling figures would fall away, and show that at the bottom the Deathless One had been busy—feeding.
But they found the ship at last, almost by chance. Its silvery surface glowed like a flame in the gray, dull plain. It seemed hours before they reached it.
And it was empty. Murdach and Erech had vanished. There were signs of struggle, and a pool of dried blood on the floor. In the mud outside a confused track led toward the east. Frowning, Mason swung shut the door and turned to the controls.
“I can move the ship, Alasa. Maybe we can find Erech and Murdach. That spoor’s pretty clear.”
The girl wrapped her cloak more closely about her slender body. “Do so, Kent.” She found a flask of water and offered it to Mason before she drank.
Slowly the craft rose, drifted on above the waste, following the track. On the horizon a spire rose, growing taller as they advanced. It was a cyclopean crag—not the work of nature. It was too regular, Mason realized, a great cylindrical shaft that thrust itself from the gray empty plain into the gray sky, flat-topped, desolate and colossal.
“They may be in that,” Mason suggested. “See if you can find some weapons, Alasa.”
Presently the girl gave him Murdach’s egg-shaped projector. “It worked on the metal men,” she told him. “Whether it will succeed in killing living beings I do not know.”
“Well, it’s better than nothing. I still have my club.” Mason glanced down at the metal bar.
The surface of the tower was, perhaps, two miles across, and quite flat. There was an odd flickering in the air above it, and once or twice Mason caught a fugitive glimpse of bright color that flashed out from the gray desolation of the tower and was gone. In the exact center was a round, black opening, and toward this Mason lowered the ship slowly.
He landed on the rim—almost losing control of the craft in his surprise. For directly beneath him, springing out of empty nothingness, loomed a great granite boulder! It was twenty feet high, and he was slanting toward it, paralyzed with astonishment and horror. With a grating crash the ship landed.
The shock almost threw him from his feet. The boulder—was gone! He followed the direction of Alasa’s astonished gaze, turned, and saw the boulder behind the ship. Apparently they had passed through it as though it were a phantom.
Nor was this all. All around, where he had seen nothing but a flat, metallic surface from the air, was a wilderness of tumbled, riven rock. To all sides towered the great boulders, and overhead a blazing white sun glared down.
“Good lord!” Mason gasped. “We haven’t moved in time! What’s happened?”
“Magic,” Alasa said, solving the problem to her own satisfaction. “Do you think Erech and Murdach are here?”
“If they are, they flew in.” As Mason spoke he realized his guess was not too far-fetched. He had seen creatures flying in the air—perhaps the very beings that had captured the vanished pair.
“I hope Erech is not dead,” the girl murmured. “Shall we search, Kent?”
Nodding, Mason opened the port, stepped out, followed by the girl. He approached the great rock and tried to touch it. His hand passed through the brown, rugose surface as though it did not exist.
“It’s a mirage,” Mason said suddenly, with conviction. “An unbelievably perfect one! Three-dimensional! Artificially created, I’m sure. Look at your feet, Alasa.”
The girl’s slim ankles were hidden, seemingly, in gray, slate-like rock. But she stepped forward without hindrance. Mason moved to her side, felt the smooth surface of the flat tower top beneath him. He got down and felt the cold metal with his hands. Then, smiling a little, he plunged first his hand and then his head into one of the great phantom boulders, and found himself instantly in profound darkness. He heard Alasa cry out.
He moved back, and there was the white sun pouring down its non-existent, heatless rays, and all around was the tumbled wilderness of jagged rock.
“Your head,” the girl said shakily. “It—vanished!”
Mason remembered he had seen no plant or animal life on the surface of the planet. Possibly the Gorichen were the only food of the Deathless Ones…
The struggle swept away from the tunnel-mouth. With a whispered command Mason gripped Alasa’s arm, sprang out from concealment. They heard a dreadful skirling cry go up, heard feet thudding in pursuit. A hand closed on Mason’s arm; he whirled; struck out blindly with his weapon, felt unclean flesh pulp under the blow. The grip fell away and was gone.
The two humans fled up the passage, black fear pacing them.
Were there more of the monsters in the tunnel? Mason gripped the metal bar tighter at the thought. The sounds of pursuit grew fainter, but did not die away.
Slowly the couple’s speed grew less. Their hearts were throbbing painfully; their throats parched and dry. An increasing tumult from below made them increase their pace. But they could not keep it up. Once more the Deathless Ones gained.
Alasa stumbled, almost fell. Mason dragged her upright, ran on supporting her with his arm about her waist. “We ought to be near the surface now,” he told the girl, and she looked up with a quick smile.
“Soon, now, Kent…”
The pursuers came faster. Mason caught sight of a gleam of silvery daylight lancing down from overhead. The door to the outer Earth!
They reached the ladder, climbed it with frantic haste, the clamoring monsters almost within arm’s length. In the ravine Mason pointed up.
“The ladder, Alasa. I’ll hold ’em back and then come after you.”
She hesitated, and then obeyed. Mason’s inattention was almost his undoing. A talon-like hand seized his foot, almost overbalancing him. A frightful skull-face rose out of the pit, screaming with wordless, dreadful hunger. Mason sent the metal bar smashing down, sick revulsion clawing at his stomach.
Bone and brain shattered under the blow. Blindly the thing tried to crawl up, though its head was a pulped, gory horror. The mouth of the pit was choked with dozens
of the Deathless Ones, greedy for flesh to feed their avid maws, heedless of blows, pushing up and up…
Mason battered them down, till the very weight of the monsters bore them in a tangled heap to fall back into the passage. Then, gripping the bar in one hand, he ran swiftly up the ladder and rejoined Alasa on the surface.
“I’ve an idea,” he said, grinning feebly, swaying on his feet. “Those things can’t be very intelligent. The plant-men are, but—”
Mason stooped, pulled up the ladder. A group of Deathless Ones emerged from the pit, roaring menace. Spying Mason, they tried to climb the walls of the ravine, but failed. Presently a few of them set off to right and left.
“There may be another way out. We’d better scram—depart, I mean,” Mason said at Alasa’s puzzled look. “Come on.”
“But—where?”
The man scanned the dark sky. A wan Sun glowed huge and red. The Moon had vanished. A chill wind blew over a plain of wet, featureless silt.
“I don’t know. Away from the coast, anyway. If we can find Murdach and the ship…”
Silently they set out, trudging across the lonely waste, shuddering in the icy wind that rushed bleakly over the surface of a dying planet.
CHAPTER IX
Tower of the Mirage
For hours the two struggled through the sticky ooze, up the slope of a slowly rising plain. In the thin air their lungs pumped painfully. Twice Mason saw something flying overhead, vague in the distance, but he could not make out its nature. It was apparently winged, and was clearly not the time-ship.
“Yeah,” Mason nodded. “And I’ve just thought of something. That hole in the roof. We’d better be careful, or we’ll both vanish for good. There may be a stairway going down it, though.”
Trying to remember the location of the gap, he stepped forward cautiously, gripping the girl’s hand. They waded through intangible rocks that sometimes came up to their waist. It was fantastic, incredible science of an alien world.
And suddenly Mason felt a mighty throbbing that grew and pulsed all about him. The wilderness of barren rock trembled and shivered, like a painted curtain rustling in the wind, and abruptly it—changed! Like a motion-picture fading from one scene to another the panorama of rocks that seemed to stretch to the horizon grew vague and disappeared, and in its place grew another scene, a weird, alien landscape that hemmed in the pair as though they had been transported to another world.
All about them now was a tangled forest of luxuriant vegetation and the bark of the trees, as well as the leaves, the thick masses of vines, even the grass underfoot was an angry brilliant crimson. Nor was that the worst. The things were alive!
The vines writhed and swung on the trees, and the trees themselves swayed restlessly, their branches twisting in the air. No wind stirred them. They were living beings, and even the long, curiously serpentine red grass at their feet made nauseating little worm-motions.
There was no Sun—just an empty blue sky, incongruously beautiful and peaceful amid the writhing horrors that hemmed them in, the forest that was as immaterial as the phantom rocks had been.
“Wait a minute,” Mason said. He took a few steps back, for a curious theory was forming in his mind. And again came the mighty throbbing and the strange crawling and shifting of the red forest, and as he retreated it melted swiftly into the familiar wilderness of jagged rock. Alasa had vanished. Looking over his shoulder, Mason could see the time-ship beside the great boulder. He moved forward again and Alasa sprang into view, her golden eyes wide and frightened.
“Okay,” he told her. “Let’s hunt for the hole, eh?”
“Here it is, Kent. I almost fell into it. She pointed at the wormy tangle of red grass near by. Mason stared. Of course, he could not see down into the gap. The scarlet, vegetation hid it. He knelt and, overcoming his repugnance, thrust his face down through the twisting grasses. He was in empty blackness—below the ground level in the world of the red plants, Mason knew.
A curious conviction came to the man that these scenes, the strange mirages on the tower, were not merely created phantoms, but actual reflections of real worlds that exist, or did exist, or will exist in the future. He circled cautiously about the gap.
It was about twenty feet across. His fumbling hands found an incline going down into the darkness, slippery and too steep to walk upon. It went down at an angle of about forty-five degrees, as well as Mason could judge, crawling on his hands and knees and feeling there in the empty darkness.
“Kent,” the girl said with quiet urgency. “Listen!”
“Eh? What—”
Then he heard it—a harsh, very loud scratching noise. It came from the depths of the invisible shaft. It grew louder, and a sudden premonition made Mason seize Alasa’s hand and retreat swiftly. It was lucky that he did.
The thing came out of the shaft, and first they saw a bristle of waving antenna, and two huge claws jerking convulsively in empty air. It came rising inexorably out of the ground, and in a moment they saw the whole frightful being.
“An ant!” Mason heard himself whispering. “A winged ant!”
But it was a colossus. Twenty-five feet long it towered, mandibles clashing, wings outspread, rustling dryly as they clashed against the wing-cases, crawling up blindly.
The creature moved forward. It was blind, Mason guessed. No eyes were visible, but the antennae apparently took their place. The claws clicked menacingly.
Horror turned Mason cold. As the thing advanced he flung himself back, pulling Alasa with him.
“The ship!” he said unsteadily. “Come!”
The white-faced girl nodded, kept pace with him. At a venture Mason raced in the direction he thought the ship lay. His guess was wrong.
Almost immediately he heard the throbbing and saw the wavering and shifting, and then they were rushing through—nothingness! Empty fog, gray billows of thick stuff that were so turbid he was completely blinded. Thinking with lightning speed, Mason turned at right angles, dragging Alasa, and cut across in a frantic attempt to locate the ship.
He heard a clashing, a dry rustling—the giant ant, hurrying in pursuit. Madness of fear tugged at Mason’s brain. It was the quintessence of horror, wading through rocks he could not feel, racing through trees that did not exist. The ant trailed its prey by scent, or by some less familiar sense, and as it was blind the shifting three-dimensional mirages made no difference to it. They had been created, apparently, to confuse the enemies of the ant-monsters.
Mason and Alasa would be sprinting through what seemed to be a field of emeralds, glinting under a hazy sky with a low-hanging moon, when there would come the shifting and throbbing, and the panorama would fade away like the mirage it was. And in its place would come, perhaps, a vast field of frozen white, with not an object visible and a black, starless sky overhead. Once they were hurrying through a green swirl of water, with seaweed drifting by and curious creatures swimming past them—through them! A thing like a great opaque white ball, pulsating and writhing, drifted at Mason, and he leaped aside, shuddering.
Then they would hear the dry rustling, and it would be bolt, sprint, race with temples throbbing and sweat running into their eyes, till the two would be forced to fling themselves down and rest while they gasped for breath. They went zigzagging and plunging through a weird and fantastic array of alien worlds and scenes. Mason could not help flinching when a great tree or wall of ice would loom in his path, though he knew the thing was an impalpable phantom.
Then, too, there was the ever-present fear that they would plunge off the edge of the tower. What saved them was nearly their doom, for as they went racing through a curiously regular rank of thin columns, like bamboo, that stretched up to a far whiteness that was either the sky or an incredibly lofty roof, they burst suddenly into the world of living vegetation. Mason went rushing through a swaying red tree. The rasping sound of pursuit was loud in his ears—and his feet went from under him.
Letting go of Alasa’s hand, he fell heavily o
n his side, sliding down till his hips were on the polished slide that led down into the interior of the tower and the lair of the ant-monster. He kept on sliding.
Desperately, Mason gave a frantic twist and squirm that nearly broke his back; he felt Alasa’s hands pulling him to safety. The girl’s white body gleamed through the flaring cloak. Somehow, Mason scrambled to his feet, his breath a flaming agony within his lungs.
The monster was nearly on them. Remembering Murdach’s weapon, Mason clawed it out, aimed it. A thin beam sprang at the giant ant. Light crawled weirdly over the frightful head.
And the thing—died! Without a sound it dropped, though its impetus carried it forward till it slid over the brink of the abyss and vanished from sight. No sound came from below.
Trembling a little, Mason replaced the weapon. “Come on, Alasa,” he said shakily. “We’ve got to find the ship. There may be more of those devils around.”
But it was not easy to locate the vessel. The two played a weird game of blind-man’s-buff there on the top of the tower, hurrying through mirages, some they recognized, others totally unfamiliar. Some were horrible and others pleasant enough.
The worst was hurrying over a black, gelatinous substance that heaved restlessly underfoot, like the hide of some Cyclopean monster. It might have been, for all he knew, Mason thought. The black, heaving skin seemed to stretch for miles around, and sometimes the two were buried to their hips in it.
Again they were hurrying across a field of hard, frozen brown earth, with a phenomenally beautiful night sky overhead, studded with constellations and gleaming planets, entirely unfamiliar. A great comet glowed in its white glory among the stars. Then there was a surface of ice or glass, and looking down Mason could see, far below, vague and indistinct figures that seemed entirely inhuman, as far as he could make out through the cloudy crystalline substance.
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