by Eando Binder
The catapults thumped, slinging blocks of hard ice upon the attackers. The latter stood their ground, setting up giant catapults of their own. Great bombs of hard, crushing ice arced into the village, cracking through walls and ceilings. The attackers were numerous, the besieged few. Perhaps this was the final assault of a long series of battles. The patched village crumbled, and the defenders were decimated under the bombardment
York knew that hours had passed. He had watched with a fascinated wonder. In what way did this little battle, in a ten-mile patch of winter-world under a dome, fit in with the general mystery?
And then York saw the finale. From the distance, where they had been concealed by a mound of snow, came a group of naked hypno-beasts! No extreme of environment seemed to bother them. They passed among the victorious attackers, who advanced robotlike into the village. This was hypnosis control on a large scale. The hypno-beasts had directed an army of the bird people against the bird people's own kind! The beast-masters browsed through the village, probing their tentacles into dead bird-men, feeding well of victims killed by their own brethren.
York ground his teeth in loathing and rage at the hypno-beasts. Surely in all the two universes, there could not be a more revolting, dangerous form of life. For a mad moment he beat with his gauntleted fists at the transparent wall that separated him from the monsters, as though to charge in and challenge them. The shell felt as solid and unshakable as foot-thick steel.
"Tony, control yourself!"
York relaxed. "Vera, there's some answer to this. I won't give up. I'm going to the next dome—and the next—"
Three days passed. York again went sleepless and without food, drawing on the super-vitality with which the elixir of immortality had endowed him. He visited a dozen more domes.
In those dozen domes were the environments of a dozen different worlds. The creatures who roamed within ranged from wormlike crustaceans to great, scaly dinosaurian forms. Intelligence reposed in anything, from a dog-sized spider to a ten-foot high mammoth.
In one dome, blobs of liquid life were held together by thin skins. Rolling through a noisome, swampy purgatory, they devoured everything after spraying out a vicious poison whose touch was fatal.
Most of the intelligence levels were low, held back by inhibiting environments. But in one dome, tailed and fine-fingered beings had mastered a great science. Here too was civil war, with most of -the beings dominated by the hypno-beasts, slowly conquering the rest.
The hypno-beast was in every dome! It was the sole common denominator of the baffling mystery. But what could be the purpose of the builders?
Trudging to the next dome, a queer phenomenon overtook York. With the suddenness of a dream ending, the flimsy life forms of the planet faded away. York watched the horizons melt down, as all the vegetation went to seed, dried to brittle dust. He looked up. The Cepheid sun had passed, its maximum. Temperature was declining rapidly, and the short "winter" was approaching.
In the space of a few hours, the planet's surface was bare, wind-swept, as he had first seen it. He was on a high knoll, and when he looked around, he gasped. Within his range of vision now were dozens—no, hundreds—of the domes, in all directions. They marched down the horizons as -though beyond them were hundreds more.
York was suddenly struck by something vaguely familiar in the sight. He squinted his eyes so the wide sweep of the planet below and the sky above were narrowed.
"Vera!" he telepathed excitedly. "I think I know now, partially. This is like a vast laboratory. Those domes are bell jars, in some stupendous series of experiments. The dome builders are the scientists. The creatures within are guinea pigs of this macro-cosmic research!"
"That sounds logical, Tony," Vera returned. "But for what purpose? And why should there be hypno-beasts in every dome?"
York pondered.
"The answer might be simpler than we suspect. The builders must be super-scientists, greater than any we've yet met. I am not excluding the Three Eternals and ourselves. They have roamed all through this universe, carrying back 'samples' of various worlds. Like biologists breeding cultures of mice or fruit-flies, they are carrying out a tremendous observation of hundreds of life forms. This must have taken centuries. The purpose behind it must be something vital to them. What can it be? Hundreds of life forms from all over their universe, pitted against the frightful hypno-beasts—"
"From our Universe, too!" interposed. Vera. "I remember that winter-world of sixty-one Cygni clearly. The one under the third dome you visited was from there. Tony, what does it all mean?'
York had now approached the next dome.
He glanced in Again he gazed upon an alien scene. Leafy green trees dotted a woodland sward of rich emerald grass. The air above was blue, Puffs of soft clouds drifted' down from an apparatus at the dome's peak.
Not far beyond, a field 'of golden grain rippled as a warm breeze rustled over it. Several four-legged, horned and hoofed bovine creatures grazed on the grasses beside a brook that wound through sylvan glades. Little bright-coloured birds piped from high branches, though York heard no sound through the transparent shell. A red-furred animal crept forward and suddenly leaped. A startled white-furred creature bounded away like a rabbit—
"Tony, don't you recognize it?" Vera's psychic voice was tense, as she read his transmitted description. "It's our own Earth!"
4
YORK jerked violently. He had been staring impersonally, as he had at all the other alien environments, without realizing it was shockingly familiar. The blind spot in his brain had suddenly been dissolved.
"Vera, you're right!" His telepathic voice was a whisper. "It's a ten-mile section of our own native world, down to the last blade of grass. Good Lord, if there are Earth people here and hypno-beasts also—"
Abruptly York's whole perspective changed. Before he had been scientifically fascinated, altruistically enraged at the dominance of the hypno-beast in each dome over races with which he felt no kinship. Now the hot blood pounded in his veins. In here must be his own people, his own kind. The . race that had given him birth. The people with whom, though he was half a god above them, he felt the ties of blood brotherhood.
"The builders!" he shouted aloud in his suit, stunning his own ears. "Where are they? I must find them. They can't do this—"
He broke off. Something within the dome had caught his eye.
A man and a girl emerged from the shadowy forest, scaring away what York now recognized as a fox and a rabbit. They peered carefully in all directions and then advanced into the field, toward the cows. The man carried two empty buckets. Over his shoulder was slung a rifle like weapon, and in his belt was an unsheathed knife. Both were dressed in hides and woollens. The setting was pastoral, very near to the ancient pioneering days of America in the remote nineteenth century.
York knew nothing of those days personally. Earth for two thousand years had advanced to a much more scientific civilization. But the scene struck chords of aching kinship. This was a part of Earth, no matter if from a far past, and those two were his own people. If he could talk with them, they might explain this incredible mystery.
He pounded on the glass of the dome with his gauntlets and shouted, hoping to attract their attention. They were within a few hundred feet, but they took no notice. York desisted. Perhaps the dome was so polarized that they could see nothing but a blank gray wall.
York watched.
The couple reached the cows. The girl began milking, while the young man stood on guard, peering about cautiously. But gradually he became lax. His eyes wandered toward the girl herself. He spoke to her, smiling, and she smiled back. At times they laughed and he bent over once to touch her hair.
The love of a man and a maid— It was here too, under this prisonlike dome, on an alien world, in an utterly strange universe.
-"Tony, it's wonderful and it's horrible," Vera said."Wonderful that love can survive any twist of space and time,_ but horrible that these two have been taken from
their home world. Do ,you suppose the builders watch somewhere, through some instrument, as if at ants?"
"Hush!"
York spied a slinking form among a patch of trees at the edge of the pasture. It was another man. He had unslung his rifle. He was kneeling now, taking aim for the man beside the girl.
York pressed his face against the dome glass and searched back of the man. He saw it suddenly, the pink-skinned, oily bulk of a hypno-beast. The man kneeling and shooting was under the beast's dominance, ready to kill at his bidding!
York screamed in warning. Then, realizing the uselessness of that, he concentrated on hurling a. powerful telepathic warning. In all his wanderings throughout the universe, he had never yet heard of a substance that could stop the super-penetrative radiations of thought. But the dome did. His psychic vibrations rebounded with such force that they stunned his mind like a sledge-blow.
Yet perhaps the tiniest of thought impulses wormed through. The young man beside the girl turned uneasily, gripping the stock of his rifle. That move saved him for the time being. The shot ripped through the air from the ambusher, grazed his shoulder. Instantly he ducked, shouting to the girl. She flung herself flat in the grass, overturning the milk. The two cows lumbered away, lowing in fright at the sharp report. York filled in the sound sequences in his own mind.
Flat on his stomach, the young man unlimbered his rifle and cautiously raised his head, searching for his enemy. A puff of smoke from behind a bush and a shot that grazed over him gave him the clue. He fired back. A dozen shots were exchanged. One or the other was marked for death.
York ground his teeth when a shot from the attacker struck. In agony the young man doubled up, forming a better target. A second shot mercilessly crashed through his head. He sprawled out in death. The girl leaped up and flung herself on the body, weeping. Then she sprang to her feet and ran, as the victor came racing up, evidently to capture her alive.
Blindly the girl ran toward the dome shell. The man had cut her off from the concealing forest. Back of them the hypno-beast, who had instigated the tragedy, waddled up to the corpse. It occupied itself with its vampirish meal, as its brothers had over and over again in the other domes.
The girl was trapped. She ran to the dome wall and beat against it with her tiny fists, screaming. York moved to the spot. He saw her clearly, but she obviously saw nothing beyond the wall. She did not see that York stood there nearly mad with helplessness and fury. He could not answer the girl's pitiful cries for help.
She turned her back to the shell as the man came up. He was young, too, not vicious in appearance at all. But behind his youthful features was the mark of mental slavery. He was the living zombie of the hypno-beast He spoke to her, and his face was strangely gentle.
York, no more than ten feet away outside the wall, was able to read their lips.
"Mara, why do you run from me? You loved me once. Come with me to our village."
"Yes, I loved you once," returned the girl, looking at him in pity rather than fear. "But now you are a slave of the Beasts. And you killed Jorel ruthlessly."
"But only at the command of my master. I did not want to." His eyes were pained and pleading. "Forgive me, Mara, and come to live with me. You did not love' Jorel. What else have we to look forward to, save a little happiness, in this tiny world of ours?"
The girl's eyes blazed. "Why did you not kill the beast, Master? Look, he squats there, unsuspecting. Shoot him!" "I cannot!" The man shook his head.
"Mantar—for me!"
He looked at her and suddenly his face grew determined. Whirling, he flung up the rifle, taking aim at the feeding bulk a hundred yards away. It was a large target. He couldn't miss. York's heart leaped in hope, as the girl's must have,
But before a shot rang out, the beast's serpentine neck twisted. Its saucer eyes turned hypnotically on them, as though it kept mental tab on its slave. Mantar made a tremendous effort to press the trigger. His whole body trembled. But, with a groan he lowered the weapon. The girl attempted to seize it, to do it herself. Now Mantar, under dominance, resisted her.
"I cannot," he said wearily. "I've tried before. All of us at the slave village have tried before. We cannot break that horrible power the Beasts have over our minds." He turned to the girl. "Mara, run! You are of the fortunate ones who Can resist.. Run for the forest. I think I can resist my master's mental command long enough to let you escape. Hurry!"
He gave her a push. But the girl turned back, and flung her arms around his neck.
"I can't. I still love you, Mantar. I will give you what happiness I can I will go with you."
"No, Mara. It means slavery. Go, please."
But the girl clung to him. Then it was too late. The Beast left its ghoulish feast and advanced. Arm in arm, the pair walked toward it, to return with it to the slave village. On their young faces was written the bitterness of their chained lives under this dome lighted by an alien Cepheid sun.
York turned away as if from an, unreal drama on some dream. stage. Tears of helpless rage misted his eyes. Two thousand years of travel and observation among many civilizations had not made him callous to the fundamental decencies of life.
"It's awful, Vera," he said dully. "If I were in my own Universe, I'd blast down this dome on the spot and wipe those Beasts out to the last cell. Here I'm helpless even to get in." A determined note rang in his psychic tone. "But I will get in. I'll come back to the ship and conquer this universe's science laws, no matter how long it takes. And then--"
He was interrupted.
Over the bulge of the glass dome appeared a small ovoid ship. It swept down swiftly, darting back and forth as though searching. Instantly wary, York stood stock-still. Movement would betray him.
But the occupant of the craft seemed to spy him. It dropped down lightly and landed a dozen yards away. A hatch opened and a figure stepped out. In its hand glinted what could only be a weapon.
"Tony, what's wrong?"
"Silence, Vera," shot back York. "Don't contact me again unless you get my signal. On your life!"
Obediently no telepathic sound came from Vera.
York transferred his attention to the visitor. He was a travesty of a man, with spindly legs and arms, thin flat-chested body, and delicate tentacular fingers. Sharp, shrewd features --peered inquisitively. Wearing no space-suit, he seemed perfectly at home in the bitter cold that York could not have survived for a minute. He breathed the hydrocarbonous air without discomfort. The forehead was low, topped by feathery hair, but the cranium in back bulged grotesquely. Intellect supreme reposed there.
"Who are you?" he demanded, in the universal language of telepathy. He answered himself. "You are obviously one of the J-X-Seventy-seven creatures. Earthmen, you are called. I was up in the conditioning apparatus when I thought I heard a powerful telepathic shout, and came to investigate. How did you get out of the dome?"
The being's canny eyes looked at York suspiciously.
"Or did you come from Earth? A ship from Earth was recently intercepted. I thought I heard you exchange a telepathic message with someone. Have you an accomplice? Where is your ship?"
Staccato, peremptory questions, they were just like those shot at the Three Eternals, before they were destroyed.
York faced a dilemma, greater than any before. If he revealed the true story, the ship would be found, Vera captured. Both would then be helpless. York would have no chance to piece out the new science of this universe. He would have no future chance to face them, armed and powerful. These thoughts that flashed through his mind, he willed in a closed circuit, so the alien would not hear. There was only one solution.
"I have no ship," he returned in broadcast telepathy, knowing Vera would also hear. "I was in the dome. I built this space-suit, hoping to escape. Somehow, a few minutes ago, the dome wall where I sought an opening suddenly weakened and I fell through. I don't understand it. It, simply happened."
York held his breath, Only one thing made the thin story plausible
. The dome must be an energy shell, not a matter shell. This York knew from the fact that his telepathy had MA penetrated it. Matter was utterly transparent to thought. Therefore, if at times the energy shell could conceivably weaken in spots, one might fall through.
The being eyed him closely, suspiciously, but also with a certain disdain. It was not worth his continued attention.
"Come," he said. "Back you go. You won't be lucky enough to fall out a second time."
He extracted a queer, flaring-ended instrument from his belt and trained it on the section of the dome wall nearest them. Some force sprayed out' in a six-foot circle, neutralizing the dome force. A push sent York through, along with a rush of hydrocarbonous air.
When he turned, he saw only a dull gray wall, blocking off all view of the outside world.
5
HE TURNED. He was within the dome, in the transplanted patch of Earth. He knew no more than before of the scheme behind it all. But some of the people here might furnish clues.
He stepped forward eagerly. Only one thing bothered him —his completely severed connection with Vera. Within himself he prayed that she would not foolishly wander from the ship and into danger.
For now he knew that danger supreme lurked behind all this.
He walked a hundred feet before he thought of removing his suit. He slung it over his shoulder and went on. He drew in deep lungfuls of air that had all the peculiar tang and sweetness of Earth's atmosphere. The builder-scientists had done a remarkable job of duplicating the Earth environment. It was pleasantly warm.
For a while, wandering through a cool forest in which birds sang and squirrels chattered, York lost himself in a pleasant sense of well-being, after the irksome period in the clumsy space-suit.
The sleep that he had long denied himself conquered him. He lay down in a soft patch of grass, passing off into restful slumber.
He awoke at a soft touch on his cheek.
Startled, he looked up into the face of a girl. It was a lovely face whose blue eyes and warm smile seemed meant only for him. The girl sat beside him, apparently having been there for quite a while.