Outside, the beasts pushed between them, separated them, and then roughly flung them to the ground. Then, deliberately—and apparently under the orders of one of their own number, who stood back and made noises at the rest—the animals ripped off every article of their clothing. The red-bearded man was numb with horror, but the other man screamed.
The thing that dazed the red-bearded man, then, was the manner of the beasts. They showed no ferocity, though they looked ferocious enough. They were businesslike and matter-of-fact, like animals going through a well-rehearsed trick. They released the stripped men.
Their leader looked at the other captive’s broken arm and turned its head to the man with the spear. The beast made more specific sounds. The man with the broken arm was—somehow it was clear—the subject of a comment or a question. The man with the spear shrugged.
The beasts—the ruhks—tore the man with the broken arm to bits. It was hard for the red-bearded man, telling this to Dick, to convey the horror of their matter-of-factness. The beasts killed his fellow-prisoner and devoured him without snarlings, without competition, as men would have divided a new-killed steer. Then, still matter-of-factly, they closed around the red-bearded man and herded him before them.
The red-bearded man had been marched for miles, with the beasts around him and the man with the spear ignoring him. Once the read-beard was sick, from sheer horror and fear. The beasts drove him on with bared fangs.
In the end he arrived at a slave pen, the crudest possible shed of logs within a palisade. He was turned into it. There were other humans there, men and women denned together on straw in a structure in all essentials a stable for domestic animals. They were themselves domestic animals, they told him. They had been of all possible walks of life originally. Each had been through the same experience—of falling into a cage-trap, of being stripped by the ruhks who came to herd them to the slave-pen, of being driven like captured wild animals, and of being treated thereafter as beasts of burden.
Dick interrupted, here, to demand if Nancy had been brought to that slave-pen. The red-beard swore that she had not. No new prisoner had been brought to the slave-pen for much longer than three days.
Because they had hands, the red-beard went on, they were driven by the ruhks’ to harness horses, to plow-fields, to perform all the necessary tasks of the production of food and the gathering of fuel. The spear-armed man gave orders. The ruhks saw to it that the slaves carried them out. Some of the food and a little of the fuel they were allowed to keep and use. Most went to the river-shore, to boats rowed by men in chains, which took them elsewhere. They were guarded in the slave-pen by ruhks. When sent on errands, like the red-beard and the other man Dick had seen, a ruhk accompanied them. At such times they were subject to their four-footed guards. But the man with the spear was not their master. He was their overseer. Their master—or masters, they did not know which—lived in a palace on the other side of the river. What they knew of the palace they had learned from a slave sent to labor with them, brought to their pen across the river in one of the boats rowed by men in chains. What he told them, shivering, was not pleasant. And in a matter of days he was given to the ruhks.
The sun sank down among the giant trees on Manhattan Island as this tale unfolded. Sundown drew near. Then the red-beard drew rein.
“Here,” he said bitterly, “You get out here. I’m a slave. I couldn’t go back to livin’ like a human again. I’ll go on an’ tell my story. I’ll say my ruhk told me to wait an’ went off, an’ I waited till I got scared I’d be hunted as a runaway, so I started on an’ I seen him an’ another ruhk layin’ in the road dead. That’s all I’ll tell ‘em.”
“That’s right,” said Dick grimly.
The red-bearded man drove on, chuckling to himself.
Dick ground his teeth as the horse and cart went out of sight in the gathering darkness. He had started wrong. It had seemed quite logical to plunge into the Other World after Nancy, and to force some inhabitant to lead him to her. The primitiveness of what he’d seen from the top of the Empire State Building had made him feel that the Other World would be all savagery. It was savagery, to be sure! But was not a kind he prepared for.
The ruhks, alone, made his original plan sheer suicide. They had obviously been the dominant species on this planet when some ancient Egyptian magician first stepped through a doorway of his own making to this world. Intelligence alone would have ensured their dominance, but they could not use tools to rise above the cultural grade of pure savagery. When the first Egyptians appeared, undoubtedly they strove to prey upon them. Undoubtedly they failed. And somehow—Dick could not imagine a process offhand—somehow an unholy compact had been arrived at. It continued until this day. With the master race to provide shelter and security and luxuries they could not contrive for themselves, it would be a mutually admirable compact which made them loyal slave-guards. That such a compact would be kept was not wholly reasonable, but Dick had to accept the apparent fact. They would not be domesticated, like dogs. They would feel no reverence for humanity as such. But as slave-guards they would have reasonable outlet for beastly instincts of cruelty. And the masters of this world would value them highly. While they were loyal, no slave revolt could possibly succeed nor any slave hope to run away.
They and their masters would surely apply every trick five thousand years had developed, to track down and destroy the one man who had entered their world without being enslaved. As for Nancy—It was still true that no person or object which had disappeared with an accompanying tale of quicksilver had ever been seen again.
Dick tried not to think of what was Nancy’s most probable fate. He fanned the sick hatred that had been growing all during the red-beard’s tale. Among the things Sam Todd had provided him with was a compass with luminous dial. Dick set out doggedly to find his way through the night by its means.
~ * ~
A girl vanished in Paris. A prominent commissar disappeared in Prague. Two workmen, weaving their way home tipsily from a wineshop in Madrid, dropped utterly out of sight. There was a disappearance of cheeses in Belgium, of wine in Bordeaux and Athens and Malaga. A dahabeah lost half its cargo of dates in mid-Nile, and its crew saw quicksilver in the hold and dived howling overboard. In Damascus a shop in the Street of the Goldsmiths missed a bit of tapestry thickly interspersed with gold thread. In Baghdad a flask of attar of roses vanished into thin air. A sweetshop in London was robbed of its most expensive confections. A farmer lost two mules in Maryland. In Philadelphia a trusted employee seemed to evaporate under the most suspicious of circumstances; his accounts were correct to the last penny. In Denver a schoolboy did not come home from high school, in New Orleans the father of eight children disappeared, in Antofagasta a beautiful young girl vanished. ^
Over a very large part of the Earth, things which men had made and treasured, people whom others cared for and depended on, ceased to exist as far as the normal world was concerned. But nobody considered that anything requiring a new explanation had occurred; such things had been happening for five thousand years. Nobody thought to look for any common factor linking them. Nobody at all thought of the possibility of another world, beside this one in hyperspace and identical with it save in flora and fauna and population. Among all the two and a quarter billion humans on Earth, only Sam Todd and Maltby even guessed at such a thing.
Instantly after Dick Blair vanished in a pool of quicksilver, the taxi driver turned back his head and blinked. Three men had been in the cab. Now there were two.
“Hey!” said the taxi driver. “What happened to the other guy?”
“He got out,” said Sam briefly. He rolled up the sheet of metal foil and looked at Maltby, sunk in sleep. “Now go back to where we came from.”
The driver looked at him dubiously, and turned back to the wheel.
Sam reflected unhappily as the cab went uptown again. He re-examined the preparations that had been made for Dick’s adventure. He was dissatisfied. The need for speed was gre
at, of course, and of course since Nancy had gone into the Other World somebody had to go after her as quickly as possible. But still things were wrong.
He piled Maltby out of the cab at his house. He dragged him to his apartment and dumped him on his bed. Then he picked up the little copper-alloy window that Dick had used for his preliminary survey of the Other World. He remembered the location Dick had assigned to the villa, which must be in some sense the headquarters of the local interdimensional thieves. He went downstairs and got a taxicab and started for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Huddled back in the cab, he glued his eye to the little peephole. As an experience, that ride was unique. The cab followed straight streets and traffic lanes in normal New York. But Sam Todd’s eyesight traveled in a straight line through jungle, a jungle of giant trees through which his vision seemed to float eerily. He saw brushwood of unknown varieties, and deep, shadowed glades where there was no undergrowth but only a carpet of rotted leaves. Once he came out into a tiny natural clearing and saw a relatively small tree, barely forty feet high, with foliage which was not green at all, but heliotrope; the other trees seemed to shrink from it as if its vicinity were poisonous. There were occasional glimpses of trails cut through the forest, but they were rare, and once Sam saw a wooden cage, rotting away, which had no meaning to him.
But then the taxicab seemed to leave the earth and soar upward, and he jerked his eye away from the metal window and saw that it was actually sweeping up the ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge.
In the Other World there was, of course, no bridge at all, so that Sam looked down from the viewpoint of a bird in flight. He saw the river which was the counterpart of the East River flowing beneath him. He saw the great brick villa on the gently sloping farther shore. He saw a galley—propelled by many oars—pulling away from a small dock, and he saw a luxurious, old-fashioned carriage with four horses moving back toward the villa with trotting four footed forms running beside it.
Then the taxi soared down from the crest of the bridge, and trees rose to engulf it, and Sam winced as his eye at the peephole told him he was about to crash into great masses of foliage.
Presently the taxicab stopped by the Navy Yard. He paid the driver and got out. He was excited, now, because he’d seen signs of more than untouched wilderness. He stuffed the window in his pocket and walked a block. Then he put the peephole to his eye again. He saw a garden, plainly artificial and plainly watered and tended with the prodigal use of labor. He stood still, gazing. When he lowered the peephole, he saw three children and a fat woman staring at him suspiciously. He hastily put away the bit of metal and walked on.
He went into a tiny confectionery store and into the phone booth. He dropped in a coin and dialed at random. In the privacy of the booth he looked into the Other World while the voice of a telephone operator exasperatedly told him over and over that there was no such exchange and would he please hang up the receiver. But he was seeing walkways of smooth marble leading through fancifully trained foliage, and fountains, and statuary, and—
He saw a slave. The slave was utterly unkempt, with uncombed beard and hair, with no garment save a loin-cloth. But he wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He worked busily at the fertilization of a vine of climbing roses which was a veritable blanket of blooms. He finished that task and walked seemingly within a yard of Sam Todd in a telephone booth in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn. As he passed, Sam saw ghastly scars upon his body. Some were the marks of lashes, and some were the marks of teeth.
There was somebody tapping on the glass of the phone booth door with a coin. Sam confusedly put the peephole in his pocket and went out. The woman who had tapped said acidly:
“When a person can’t get their number, it’s a pity they won’t let somebody else use the phone!”
The street outside was incredible. Sam had just seen enough of the Other World to make his own seem unreal. As he looked at dingy store-fronts, he seemed to see the wraiths of flowers and fountains and intricately trimmed shrubbery in the midst of shops and delicatessens. He had an idea of the location of the villa now, though. He oriented himself carefully and walked toward the place where the villa should be in the other cosmos.
A great, warehouse-like building blocked his way. But there was an office-building of sorts nearby. There was a phone booth in its untidy lobby. He took refuge in the booth and again surveyed the Other World.
He was within yards of the villa—which was gigantic— and within feet of a terrace where a little girl played with a kitten. She was a rather thin little girl, with delicate features, dressed in a healthily brief garment Sam could not identify. She treated the kitten with the extravagant affection normal in six-year-olds. But within two yards of her stood two giant, wolf-like creatures, watching her. A little distance back stood six men in knee-length robes, with swords and shields in an antique style, and highly incongruous automatic pistols in holsters at their waists. Behind them again there was an elderly woman with a worried air, and behind her a row of young girls with bare feet and arms, each of them carrying a toy.
The six-year-old played absorbedly, but presently dropped the kitten with a sigh of quaintly adult weariness and then clapped her hands. The kitten darted away. Instantly there was movement all about. The two wolf-like creatures moved nearer to the child. The worried-looking woman gave agitated, inaudible commands. The line of young girl slaves moved forward. As each drew near to the child, the wolf-like creatures regarded her coldly. Each slave, in turn, knelt and offered the toy she carried. The six-year-old contemplated them solemnly and waved them aside one by one. There was a girl with a swollen face, as if she had been struck a violent blow. She offered a squirming puppy. It was waved away. Extraordinarily elaborate dolls were offered. Every conceivable device for the amusement of a six-year-old girl was offered for approval by the row of slave girls who knelt abjectly, trembling, in their turns.
The child graciously accepted a mechanical toy of sheet-tin, brightly-colored. It was of the sort which is sold in five-and-ten-cent stores. The slave wound it and put it before the child. She backed away. The wolf-creatures moved back to their former positions. The child solemnly watched the toy perform its jerky, mechanical antics.
Then one of the wolf-creatures snarled suddenly. Its eyes were fixed upon Sam Todd’s tiny copper-and-bismuth window. The beast flung itself before the child. There was swirling, rushing movement, and the child had been caught up swiftly and was being raced away.
Sam blinked and drew back. He assured himself of his safety and turned to stare in all directions through the peephole.
In the Other World more beasts were racing into view. There must have been fifty of them who came boiling up from somewhere, fangs bared and snarling. Men appeared, racing, buckling on pistol-belts over their robes.
Then there was stillness. Sam was bewildered. He turned the peephole in every direction. In the Other World, the spot from which he looked out was the exact center of a circle of snarling beasts and cold-eyed men, who held weapons ready.
Then he swallowed. The peephole was evidently visible in that other world. They didn’t know that nothing could be shoved through it. They were prepared to fight—but he could not guess what they expected to happen next.
Then an extraordinary device came into view. It was thin and spidery and skeleton-like. It moved upon eight slender, shining wheels. A man in a robe ran panting beside it. He wore extraordinary goggles which should have blinded him. There was a curious, light, jointed girder at the forefront of the spidery device, and a large disk at its end. That disk could be set at any angle and moved in any direction by the girder. The man in the goggles shouted, but Sam could not hear him. The armed men, though, pointed. The spidery vehicle swerved straight at him.
For a moment he looked out of his phone booth. Everything about him seemed normal and commonplace and slightly dingy. But he felt hunted. Then he saw a tiny, a trivial oddity. The open door of the office building showed bright against the daylit street. Against that
lighted background Sam Todd saw two small opaque specks in midair. They moved toward him, undulating up and down like the eyes or the goggles of a man running. In a flash of cold horror he understood everything.
The spidery vehicle carried a disk which was a portable doorway between worlds. The rest of the device was simply a carrier for that doorway, so that it could be pushed or pulled. The man in the goggles could see in both worlds as Sam could. And with the swinging, movable disk he could seize anything on Earth as a man may net a goldfish in a globe from which it cannot escape. He could take anything or anyone away from Earth into the Other World forever. And against this, Sam had no defense.
He flung open the phone booth and bolted. There was but one way to flee—to the open, blessed, asphalted street of Brooklyn, with its trucks and cars and hydrants and dusty shop windows. He had to plunge straight toward the space the goggled man occupied in the Other World. He probably had to run through the very substance of that man and his device. But, gasping, he rushed.
6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Page 17