TABLE of CONTENTS

THE LANSON SCREEN

CHILDREN OF TOMORROW

SEVEN OUT OF TIME

THE GREAT DOME ON MERCURY

TOMORROW

WHEN THE SLEEPERS WOKE

THE LANSON SCREEN

CHAPTER 1

Harry Osborn, First Lieutenant U. S. Army Air Corps, banked his wide-winged bombing plane in blue-gray billowing of twilight ground-haze. A faint smile lifted the corners of his lips as he glanced overside, saw a train crawl along shining rails and come to a halt. Brown dots appeared from the passenger car behind its locomotive and clustered in ordered confusion about the other oblong that completed the train's complement.

What appeared from his altitude to be a rather large pocket-handkerchief slid from the car and spread out on the grass. A metal tube glittered in the sun, came into motion, swivelling to the east. It looked like a cap-pistol, but Osborn knew it to be an eighteen-inch railroad gun.

He slanted down through lambent air. The terrain below was flat, lushly green. It was entirely vacant save at the very center of its five-mile sweep of marsh. Here a small hut was visible in the middle of a hundred-yard area ringed by a water-filled moat.

Two manikins stood before the structure. One was clothed in o.d., the other in black. The civilian's tiny arms gesticulated, and he went into the house. The army man moved sharply into an automobile and sped in the direction of the waiting artillery train.

"Five minutes to zero, Harry." The voice of Jim Raynes, his observer, sounded in the pilot's earphones, "What's the dope?"

"Target practice, Jim. We're to spot for the railroad gun and then we're to bomb. The target is--Good Lord!"

The plane wabbled with Osborn's sudden jerk on its stick, steadied. "Harry!" Raynes exclaimed. "What is it, Harry?"

"The target's that house down there. There's a man inside it. I saw him go in."

"The hell! What's the big idea?"

"Search me. There's no mistake though. Orders say 'absolute secrecy is to be maintained by all participants in this maneuver as to anything they may observe...'"

"Maybe it's an execution. Something special. Maybe--"

"'...and this order is to be obeyed to the letter no matter what the apparent consequences,'" Osborn finished. "General Darius Thompson signed it personally, not 'by direction.' Tie that, will you?"

"I can't. But--it's orders."

Osborn levelled out, got his eyes focussed on the astounding target.

Suddenly there was nothing within the watery circle. Not blackness, or a deep hole, or anything similarly startling but understandable. It was as if a blind spot had suddenly developed in his own visual organs so that he could not see what there was at that particular point, although the wide green expanse of the swampy plain was elsewhere clear and distinct.

A key scraped in the door of a third-floor flat on Amsterdam Avenue. Junior's two-year-old legs betrayed him and he sprawled headlong on the threadbare rug in the little foyer.

John Sims bent to his first-born, tossed him into the air, caught him and chuckled at the chubby, dirt-grimed face. He'd been tired as the devil a moment before. But now--

June Sims was flushed from the heat of the kitchen range, but her black hair was neat and a crisply ironed housedress outlined her young slim figure. Junior was a warm bundle against her breasts as she kissed John.

"You're early, dear. I'm glad."

"Me too. What's for supper?"

"Pot roast." June's hazel eyes danced. "Johnny, mother phoned. She's going to come over tomorrow night to take care of Junior so that we can go out and celebrate your birthday."

"That's right! Tomorrow is May ninth!"

"Yes. Listen, I have it all planned. 'Alone With Love' is playing at the Audubon. We'll see that, and then splurge with chow mein. I've saved two dollars out of the house money just for that."

"You have! Maybe you'd better get yourself a hat. I saw an ad--"

"Nothing doing. We're going to celebrate! You go downtown." And so on, and on...

"They're starting, Harry."

Raynes' businesslike crispness somewhat eased Lieutenant Osborn's feeling that something uncanny was happening down there and his hand was steady as he jerked the stick to cope with the bump of the big gun's discharge. A dirt mushroom sprouted in the field.

"Short, two-tenths. Right, four point three," Jim intoned, correcting the range.

A white panel on the ground acknowledged his message. The cannon fired again and slid back in the oil-checked motion of its recoil.

"Over a tenth. Center."

The target was bracketed, the next try must be a hit. Harry banked, levelled out. The brown dots that were the gunners jerked about feverishly, reloading. Whatever it was that obscured his vision of the shack would be smashed in a moment now.

The gunners were clear. The pilot saw an officer's arm drop in signal to fire. Yellow light flickered from the big rifle. Osborn imagined he saw the projectile arc just under his plane. His eye flicked to where that house should be.

And nothing happened! No geyser of dirt to show a miss, no dispersal of that annoying blind spot. Had the gun misfired?

Wait? What was that black thing gliding in mid-air, sliding slowly, then more rapidly toward the ground? The shell that could pierce ten inches of armor was incredibly falling along what seemed the surface of an invisible hemisphere.

It reached the grass and exploded with the contact. The earth it threw up spattered against--nothing. Why hadn't the shell exploded on contact with whatever had stopped it? What was going on down there?

"I--I can't make a report, sir." There was a quiver in Jim's phlegmatic voice. Even his aplomb had now been pierced. "I think it would have been a hit, but--"

Again and again the great gun fired. Osborn and Raynes, got the signal to go ahead, dropped five three-hundred-pound bombs point-blank on the mysterious nothingness. The area around the circular canal was pitted. excavated, scarred as No Man's Land had never been.

Aviation Lieutenant Harry Osborn flew back to Mitchell Field in the gathering dusk. His young head was full of dizzy visions. Armies, cities, a whole nation blanketed from attack by invisibility. Spheres of nothingness driving deep into enemy territory, impregnable.

It was good to be alive, and in the old uniform, on this eighth day of May in 1937.

CHAPTER 2

In the tea room of the Ritz-Plaza, the violins of Ben Donnie's orchestra sobbed to the end of a melodic waltz. Anita Harrison-Smith fingered a tiny liqueur glass nervously.

"I'm afraid, Ted. What if he suspects, and--"

The long-fingered hand of the man whose black eyes burned so into hers fisted on the cloth.

"Afraid. That has been always the trouble with you, Nita. You have always been afraid to grasp happiness. Well, I can't make you do it. But I've told you that I'm sick of this hole-and-corner business. If you don't come with me tomorrow, as we have planned, I go alone. You will never see me again."

The woman's face went white and she gasped.

"No! I couldn't bear that. I'll come, Ted. I'll come."

Van Norden's sharp, dark features were expressionless, but there was faint triumph in the sly purr of his voice.

"Have you got it straight? The Marechal Fock sails at midnight tomorrow from Pier 57, foot of West Fifteenth Street. You must get away from the Gellert dance not later than eleven-thirty. I'll meet you at the pier, but if there is a slip-up remember that your name is Sloane. Anita Sloane. I have everything ready, stateroom, passports, trunks packed with everything you can possibly need. You have nothing to do but get there. Whether you do or not I'll sail. And never come back."

"I'll be there," she breathed.

"Good girl. Tomorrow is the ninth. By the nineteenth we will be in Venice."

General Darius Thompson stood at the side of his olive-green Cadillac and looked at his watch. The bombing plane was a vanishing sky-speck just above the horizon, the railroad-gun had chugged back toward its base. He was alone under the loom of that sphere of nothingness against which the army's most powerful weapons had battered in sheer futility. It existed. It was real. Unbelievably.

A man was in the doorway of the flimsy but that had been the target of the shells. Quarter-inch lenses made his bulging eyes huge; his high-domed head was hairless and putty-colored; his body was obscenely fat. Professor Henry Lanson gave one the impression that he was somehow less than human, that he was a slug uncovered beneath an overturned rock. But his accession to the Columbia University faculty had been front-page news and the signal for much academic gloating.

"Well?" From gross lips the word plopped into the warm air like a clod into mud. "What do you think now, my dear General? Against my Screen your biggest shells were as puffballs. Yes? Your most gigantic bombs as thistledown. You thought me utterly insane when I insisted on remaining within." The scientist grinned, humorlessly. "What do you think now?"

Thompson shook his grizzled head, as if to rid it of a nightmare. "You took an awful chance. Suppose it had cracked."

"Cracked! In the name of Planck cannot you understand that the Lanson Screen is not matter that can crack?" The other spread veined, pudgy hands. "It is the negation of all energy, a dimensionless shell through which energy cannot penetrate. And since matter is a form of energy--" The physicist checked himself, shrugged. "But what's the use? I cannot expect you to understand. Besides myself there are perhaps a dozen in the world who could comprehend, and none is an American. Enough for you to know that I had to be inside to operate the B machine that cut the negative force the A apparatus set up. From outside it could not be done. The Screen would have remained forever and you would not be convinced there had been no effect of your bombardment within it."

"Could you not have managed some remote control device, some way of working your B machine from outside?"

"Lord, but you military men are stupid!" the physicist burst out exasperatedly. "Don't you understand yet that once the Lanson Screen is erected all within is, as absolutely cut off from the rest of the universe as if it were a different space, a different dimension? Nothing can penetrate within--electricity, wireless, the cosmic rays, the sun's radiations. Nothing!"

"Then if a city were covered by it, as you suggest, there would be no means of communication with the outside?"

"That is correct."

"If knowledge of this were universal there could be no more war." Thompson's gray eyes lifted and met the other's. A momentary silence intervened while a message flashed between these two so diverse characters. Then the general went on. "But if it were the exclusive property of a single nation that nation could become master of the world."

Lanson nodded. His voice betrayed knowledge of the rapprochement established in that single, long glance. "If I published my results I should gain very little from it. But if I sell it to one power it is worth almost anything I choose to demand. That is why I have worked at it alone. That is why I have never set the details down on paper, to be stolen. After I have sold the invention to you secrecy will be your concern, but till you meet my terms all knowledge of how I produce the effect remains here in my brain." Lanson tapped his clifflike brow. "Here and nowhere else."

"After we purchase it you might still sell your device to others."

"With a million dollars in hand I shall have no temptation to do so. No one could want, or use, more. That is one reason why you should be willing to recommend its payment."

The general shrugged. "I can get it for you when I am convinced that you can veil an entire city as you did this one small house. It seems to me impossible, or so tremendous a task, requiring such huge installations, such vast power, that it would be forbiddingly costly."

The physicist's grating, short laugh was contemptuous. "I'll shield New York for you with the same machine I used here, with the same power storage batteries not larger than those in your car. Their energy is needed, for only an instant, to start the complex functioning of forces whose result you have just witnessed. I'll erect a screen for you about Manhattan Island, an ellipsoid as high and as deep as the least axis of the enclosing rivers. Will that satisfy you?"

"If you can do it, and I cannot blast through, it will. When can you--get ready?"

"As soon as I can move my machines to the required location, and set them up. Tomorrow night, if you wish."

"Very well. What help do you require?

"Only an army truck to convey my apparatus, and, since I will use the rivers as a delimiting guide for the screen, a place near the water to set it up."

The general was eager now, eager as the other. "I'll order a truck out here at once. And there is an army pier at West One Hundred and Thirtieth Street that you can use. I'll see that it is made ready for you."

CHAPTER 3

Midnight of May eighth, 1937. An army truck noses into the Holland Tunnel. On its flat bed are two tarpaulin-covered bulks, machinery of some sort. Its driver is crowded against his wheel by the rotund form of a blackclad civilian whose chins hang in great folds on his stained shirt and whose bulging eyes glow with a strange excitement behind thick lenses. The truck comes out on Hudson Street and turns north.

Tenth Avenue is alive as puffing trains bring the city's food for tomorrow. A herd of bewildered cattle file into an abattoir. West End Avenue's apartment houses are asleep. Under the Riverside Viaduct a milk plant is alight and white tank trucks rumble under its long canopy. At One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street the army van waits for a mile-long refrigerator car, loaded with fruit from California, to clear the tracks it must cross. The way is cleared. The truck thunders across cobbles and steel, vanishes within the dark maw of a silent pier.

Two blocks eastward a lighted subway train crawls out on its trestle for a breath of air, pauses fleetingly, dives underground again like a monstrous serpent seeking its burrow. Above the southward course of that burrow midtown Broadway is a streak of vari-colored illumination, exploding into frantic coruscation and raucous clamor at Forty-seventh Street. Crowds surge on sidewalks, in shrieking cabs, private cars; pleasure seekers with grim, intent faces rushing to grills, night clubs; rushing home, rushing as if life must end before they can snatch enough of it from greedy Time. Blare of the latest swing tune sets the rhythm for them from a loud-speaker over the garish entrance of a so-called music store.

Time writes its endless tale in letters of fire drifting along a mourning band around Time's own tower.

MARKET CLOSES STRONG TWO POINTS UP PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES RECOVERY ACCOMPLISHED CHAMPION CONFIDENT OF VICTORY FRIDAY HITLER DEFIES LEAGUE POLICE WILL SMASH DOCK RACKET SAYS VALENTINE GIANTS WIN....

There is no Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on that slender wall for sonme prophet to read.

Felix Hammond knots the gold sash rope of his black silk dressing gown. His satin slippers make no sound as they cross the thick pile of the glowing Kermanshah on the floor of his study to a darkly brooding Italian Renaissance secretary. He fumbles in the drawer for a silent moment, pulls out a book whose tooled-leather cover should be in some museum. He sits down, opens the book.

Minuscular, neat writing fills page after page. Hammond reads an entry. Something that might be a smile flits across his ascetic countenance. His bloodless lips wince at another item. He riffles the sheets rapidly to the first blank space, reaches for a fountain pen and starts writing.

May 8: Wednesday. Another day gone. I confess I do not know why I continue this diary, except, it may be, that it serves as a reminder of the utter futility of life. There are, however, certain scarlet pages, and lavender ones also, that still have the power to titillate emotions I thought long atrophied. I wonder if anyone save I will ever read them.

Aloysia opened in her new show tonight. I have just come from the theatre. She wanted me to join the supper Stahlbaum is giving the company, but I declined with thanks--thanks that I was in a position to decline. Time was that I should have leaped at the invitation, but I no longer need to share her with others. Her part suits her--Norton has given her fully two-thirds of the lines and she trails languid sensuality across the stage to her heart's content. I noticed that she used that trick with the mouth she first developed for my benefit. It was lost on the rabble...

CHAPTER 4

Eleven p.m., Thursday, May ninth, 1937.

Item: June Sims hangs on her husband's arm as they exit from the Audubon Theatre. Her eyes sparkle with happiness. She sighs tremulously. Then: "Johnny. Maybe we'd better call up and see if Junior is all right before we go eat."

Item: Anita Harrison-Smith peers over the shoulder of her black-coated dance partner with narrowed eyes. The florid-faced, heavy man in the alcove they are just passing is her husband. His companion is Rex Cranston, president of the A.P.& C.

Without hearing she knows their talk is of debentures, temporary reactions, resistance points on Cumulative Index graphs. Howard Harrison-Smith has forgotten Anita exists, will remain oblivious of her till she comes for him to take her home.

Her small red lips set in a firmer line. He has a long wait ahead of him tonight.

Item: Aloysia Morne lets her ermine cape slide into Felix Hammond's deft hands. He bends and kisses her where a shoulder no less white than the snowy fur melts into the perfect column of her neck. She turns with studied grace, and her throaty voice reproduces the deepest note of a 'cello.

"Do you know, Felix, this lovely place of yours is more home to me than my own so-grand rooms." Hammond smiles thinly, and does not answer.

Item: In the dim light of a decrepit pier jutting into the Hudson Professor Henry Lanson is more than ever like a gigantic larva as he putters about a grotesque combination of steel rods and glittering, lenticular copper bowls out of which a brass cylinder points telescopelike at the zenith.

An arm-thick cable crawls over the pier's frayed boards, and coils over their edge to the water. Lanson turns and checks connections on another, smaller machine.

Far across the Hudson's black surface loom the Palisades. A dash of yellow luminance zigzags against their ebony curtain, a trolley climbing to where an amusement park is an arabesque of illumination against the overcast sky.

To the right the cables of George Washington Bridge dip, twin catenaries of dotted light, and rise again. A red spark and a green one are the apices of moire, chromatic ribbons rippling across the water to the pier head from the deeper shadow of an army launch.

Braced vertically, five feet behind that pierhead, is a whitewashed steel plate. This is the target for the automatic rifle that will be fired from that bobbing launch as a first trial of the Lanson Screen's efficacy.

Other tests will follow, later. But General Thompson will not yet chance firing artillery into Manhattan.

Henry Lanson calls, in his voice without resonance, "Ready, General. Ten minutes for the first try."

From across the water Thompson snaps, "Ready. Go ahead."

Lanson lumbers back to his machine, thrusts at a lever. There is no sound, no vibration. Suddenly the river, the Palisades, disappear. The amusement park is gone, the inverted necklaces of pearly light that mark the bridge cables. There is no sky. Lanson looks at his wrist watch.

"Ten minutes," he chuckles. "He couldn't get through in ten thousand years."

He is very sure of himself, this man. But perhaps there is a minute residuum of doubt in his mind. After all, he has never experimented with so vast an extension of his invention's power. He thuds to the steel target, puts one doughy paw against it, leans out to view its riverward surface. Will there be any flecks of black on it to show the impact of the bullets that are being fired at it?

Is he warned by a sound, a creak? One cannot know. At any rate he is too obese, too ponderous, to avoid catastrophe. Under his leaning weight the steel plate rips from flimsy braces. Falls.

Its edge thuds against the physicist's head, knocks him down, crushes his skull.

Professor Henry Lanson's brain, and its secrets, are a smear of dead protoplasm mixed with shattered bone and viscous blood.

CHAPTER 5

Eleven-twenty-eight p.m., Thursday, May ninth, 1937.

The lights are dim in Foo Komg's pseudo-Oriental establishment. John Sims spoons sugar into a hot teapot.

"I'm going to make a lawyer out of Junior," he says slowly. "He'll go to Dartmouth for his academic course and then to Harvard. He won't have to start working right out of high school like I did."

John is reminded of the days before June belonged to him by the setting, by the dreamy light in her eyes.

"Let's walk down Broadway," he says, "when we get through here." That is what they used to do when all the glittering things in the store windows did not seem quite as unattainable as they did now.

"No, Johnny. I want to go home. I have a queer feeling there's something wrong. Mother isn't so young any more, and she's forgotten what to do if a child is croupy or anything."

"Silly. Nothing's wrong."

"Take me home, hon."

"Oh, all right." Petulantly. "It's just like you to spoil things..."

Anita Harrison-Smith slips out of the side door of the old Gellert Mansion on East Sixty-first Street. She signals a taxi.

"Pier Fifty-seven." Her violet eyes are deep, dark pools and a visible pulse throbs in her temple...

Nobody looks at the sky. Nobody ever looks at the sky in New York. Nobody knows the sky has suddenly gone black, fathomless.

CHAPTER 6

Later:

"Nita!"

"Ted, I--"

"You did come! Here, driver, what's the fare?"

The cab circles in Fifteenth Street, vanishes eastward. Van Norden takes the woman's arm.

"Have any trouble getting away?"

"No." She is quivering. "Hurry, darling. Let's get on board before anyone sees us."

"There's some trouble. Fog or something. The pier doors are closed, but the officials say they'll be open again directly. They won't sail without us."

"Look, Ted, it is a heavy fog. Why, you can't see the river from here. Even the other end of the ship is hidden. But there isn't any haze here. Queer. The ship seems to be cut in half; it's quite distinct up to a certain point, then there just isn't anything more. It's black, not gray like fog ought to be."

"Let's go in that little lunch wagon till we can get aboard. Nobody will look for us in there."

"Let's. I'm afraid, Ted. I'm terribly afraid..."

Nobody looks at the sky except General Darius Thompson, bobbing in a little launch on the Hudson. He is staring at vacancy where New York had been a quarter hour before. Up the river the cables of the great Bridge come out of nothingness, dip, and rise to the western shore.

Toward the Bay there is nothing to show where the metropolis should be. No light, no color. Nothing. Sheer emptiness. He looks at the radiant figures on his watch once more.

"Wonder what's keeping the old fool," he growls. "He should have dissipated the screen five minutes ago."

The night is warm, but General Thompson shivers suddenly, an appalling speculation beats at his mind, but he will not acknowledge it. He dares not.

A hundred yards from Thompson, in another space, a device of steel and copper and brass stands quiescent over the unmoving body of the one man who knew its secret.

Into the dim recesses of the army pier a dull hum penetrates, the voice of a million people going about their nightly pursuits, unaware, as yet, of doom.

In his cubicle on the hundred and ninetieth floor of New York University's Physics Building, Howard Cranston watched the moving needle of his Merton Calculator with narrowed eyes. If the graph that was slowly tracing itself on the result-sheet took the expected form, a problem that had taxed the ingenuity of the world's scientists for sixty years would be solved at last.

The lanky young physicist could not know it, but the electrically operated "brain" was repeating in thirty minutes calculations it had taken Henry Lanson three years to perform, two generations before. His own contribution had been only an idea, and knowledge of the proper factors to feed into the machine.

A red line curved on the co-ordinate sheet, met a previously drawn blue one. A bell tinkled, and there was silence in the room.

Breath came from between Cranston's lips in a long sigh. Curiously, he felt no elation.

He crossed the room slowly, and looked out through the glassite-covered aperture in the south wall. Just below, elevated highways were a tangles maze in the afternoon sun, and helicopters danced like a cloud of weaving midges. But Cranston neither heard nor saw them. His gaze was fixed farther away, down there where a curious cloud humped against the horizon, a cloud that was a challenging piling of vacancy; something that existed, that occupied space, yet was nothing.

Beyond it he could see the shimmering surface of New York Bay, and rising from it a tall white shaft. At the apex of that shaft a colossal figure faced him. It was a gigantic woman of bronze, her head bowed, her hands pressed to her heavy breasts that agonized in frustration. The Universal Mother stood in eternal mourning over the visible but unseen grave of millions.

"It might be dangerous," Howard Cranston muttered. "The gases of the decomposed bodies--there was no way for them to escape. Before I start building the machine I must find out. Carl Langdon will know."

He turned away. "But first I'll draw it up. It's simple enough--will take less than a week to build."

The design that presently took pictured form under Howard Cranston's flying fingers was strangely like that which sixty years ago Henry Lanson had called his B machine. But there was a difference. This one could be used from outside the Screen.

With the aid of this, by expanding the radius to include the original barrier, it would be a simple matter to destroy the hemiobloid of impenetrable force that was a city's tomb, to release the force which Lanson had set up.

CHAPTER 7

Rand Barridon's flivver-plane settled before a graceful small structure of metal and glass. He swung his rather square body out of the fuselage, crunched up the gravel path.

The door opened, irislike, as he stepped into the beam of the photoray. Somewhere inside a deep-toned gong sounded, and tiny pattering feet made a running sound. "Daddy! Daddy's home!"

Blond ringlets were an aureole around tiny Rob's chubby face. The father bent to him, tossed him in the air, caught him dexterously. Ruth Barridon appeared, taller than her husband, her countenance a maturer, more feminine replica of the boy's. Rob was a warm bundle against her breasts as her lips met Rand's. "You're late, hon. Supper's been ready twenty minutes."

"I know. We were talking about what they found down there." He gestured vaguely to the south. "One of the fellows flew down last night. They wouldn't let him land. But he saw enough, hovering on the five thousand foot level, to keep him awake all night."

Ruth paled, shuddered. "What an awful thing it must have been. You know, nobody ever thought much about it. The cloud had been there all our lives and it really didn't seem to mean anything. But seeing all those buildings where people just like us once lived and worked, seeing those..."

"Afterward, dear." Ruth caught the signal of the man's eyes to the quietly listening child and stopped. "I'm hungry. Let's get going."

The soft glow of artificial daylight in the Barridon living room is reflected cozily from its walls of iridescent metal. Rand stretches himself, yawns. "What's on tap tonight, hon?"

"We're staying home for a change."

"I thought this was Matilda's night."

"It is. But Mrs. Carter asked me to change with her, she had something on. And I would rather stay home. There's a new play by Stancourt. I think they call it 'Alone with Love.' Fred Barrymore is taking the lead."

"That gigolo--I can't see what you women find in him!"

"Rand! That's just a pose. You know darn well you turn him on every time."

"Oh, all right. But let's get the magazine viewcast first. They always have something interesting." He crosses the room, touches an ornamental convolution on the wall. A panel slides noiselessly sideward, revealing a white screen. A switch clicks, the room dims, the screen glows with an inner light. Rand twirls a knob.

The wall-screen becomes half of an oval room, hung with gray draperies, gray-carpeted. There is a small table in the room, behind it show the legs and back of a chair. Like the furniture in the Barridons' own place, table and chair are of lacquered metal, but these are gray. The drapes part, a tall man comes through. His face is long, pinched, his blond hair bristles straight up from his scalp, and his brown eyes are grave. The impact of a strong personality reaches out from the televised image, vibrant with a stagy dominance even over the miles of space intervening between actuality and reproduction.

"Oh, it's Grant Lowndes," Ruth breathes. "I love him!"

"Shhh." Barridon is intent. "Shhh."

The Radio Commission's premier reader moves with practiced grace. An adept at building up interest in trivialities by pantomimed portentousness, Lowndes is weaving a spell about his far-flung audience that will assure him concentrated attention. As he sinks into the seat his eyes stare from the screen with hypnotic penetration. He places a book on the table before him. Its covers are of tooled leather, but there is a smudge of green mould across them concealing the design. He opens it.

The pages are yellow, frayed-edged. Faded handwriting is visible; minuscular. An old diary, perhaps, picked up from some dusty second-hand display.

"Good evening, friends." His voice is mellow, warming, vibrant with a peculiar tensity. Ruth's tiny, stifled gasp is a tribute to its art. "The manufacturers of General Flyers Helioplanes have honored me tonight with a great privilege and a sad task. I bring to you a voice from the past, a voice long silent, speech from a throat long mouldered into dust, thoughts from a brain whose very molecules are one with the snows of yesteryear. I bring to you the palpitant, living agony of the greatest catastrophe the world has ever known." His eyes drop to the volume on the lectern, and his slim, white hand presses down upon its face.

"My colleagues of the viewcast service have informed you of the rending of the veil that sixty-two years ago cut off Manhattan Island from the world. They have brought into your homes the awful vision of dead buildings; dead streets strewn with twisted skeletons. You have, I am sure, tried to picture what must have happened there in the tragic days till eternal silence fell and the entombed city had become a vast necropolis. Today, my friends, the searchers found an account of one man's experience, a painstakingly written chronicle of that time. General Flyers is sponsoring the presentation to you of this human, pitiful tale. I will quote from the diary."

CHAPTER 8

May 9, Thursday: It is four in the morning. Aloysia came here with me from the theatre... I have just returned from escorting her to the place where she resides. She does not call it home--that name she reserves for these rooms. "Home, Felix," she said, "is the place where happiness dwells." I recognized that, it is a line from one of her earlier appearances. Her mind is a blotter, seizing the thoughts, the ideas, the mental images of others and becoming impregnated with them. No. Molding itself to them. Perhaps that is the secret of her arts--dramatic and amatory.

I am restless, uneasy. There is a peculiar feeling in the air, a vague sense of impending catastrophe. Even the recollection of the past few hours with her does not drive it away...

I thought music might fit my mood. But the radio is out of gear. Tonight nothing but silence. Strangely enough the police talk was roaring in. There seems to be some trouble along the waterfront...

It ought to be getting on to dawn, but it is still pitch dark outside. There isn't any breeze. The sky is absolutely black. I have never seen anything like it in New York. Clouds at night always reflect the glow of the city lights. And if there are no clouds there should be stars, a moon. Can there be a storm coming down on the big city--a tornado? That would explain the way I feel.

May 10, Friday: There has been no daylight today. The only illumination is artificial. Somehow that seems the worst of what has happened to the city. For something has happened. Manhattan is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. Nobody, nothing can get in or out. There have been no trains at Grand Central or Penn Station, the subway is operating only within the borders of Manhattan Island.

I have been driving around with Aloysia all day. In spite of the darkness things went on very much as usual in the morning--children went to school, toilers to their work. It dawned only gradually that more than half the staffs in offices and stores had not shown up. Those who do not live in Manhattan. At noon the newspapers came out with scare headlines. Every bridge out of the city is closed off by the veil of--what can I call it? Every pier. A cover has shut down over us as if Manhattan were a platter on which a planked steak was being brought from the kitchen of the Ritz Plaza. Even the telephone and telegraph have been affected.

By three in the afternoon the whole city was in the streets. My car was forced to move at a crawl. There was no sign of fear, though. The general consensus was that the phenomenon was something thrilling, a welcome break in the humdrum of daily existence. The mayor's proclamation, in the newspapers and over the few radio stations located within the city, seemed quite superfluous. He urged the people to be calm. Whatever it was that had shut us in was only temporary, it would vanish of itself or a way would be found to get rid of it. He has appointed a committee of scientists from Columbia and the City Colleges to investigate and make plans. The best of them all, however, is unavailable. Henry Lanson. He was found crushed to death on a Hudson River pier, killed in some obscure experiment.

Aloysia left me in time for the evening performance. The theaters and movie houses are crowded--they have had the best day in their history.

At ten o'clock tonight I went to take a drink of water. None ran from the tap. I called the superintendent and he said the mains had been shut off. There was no longer any pressure. Police orders are that water is to be used only for drinking and cooking. It is being pumped from the main by fire engines stationed at the hydrants and a rationing system has been devised. I have two or three cases of Perrier--they should be sufficient for my needs till this thing is over. There is plenty of wine and Scotch, but I have no desire for alcohol.

CHAPTER 9

May 11, Saturday: The darkness still continues. No milk was delivered this morning. Prices for food have begun to go up. There is very little fresh meat to be had, practically no vegetables or fruits. Evaporated milk is being sold at a dollar a can. I am afraid the children are going to suffer a great deal...

CHAPTER 10

May 12, Sunday: Church was packed. There have been several riots in the poorer sections of the city. Grocery stores were raided, a warehouse gutted. The militia has been called out, and all stocks of food taken over by the authorities for rationing.

Aloysia has just appeared, bag and baggage. She says she feels safe only here. I am going out to see what is going on.

Two p.m.: There is no longer any water in the system! The lakes in Central Park are being emptied, the fluid taken to breweries and distilleries nearby, where the water is being filtered and chlorinated. The little thus obtained, and canned fruit juices, furnish the only drink for children. Adults are drinking beer and wine.

My car was stopped by a detail of national guardsmen in uniform. No gasoline engines are to be run any longer. There is no escape for the carbon monoxide fumes being generated, and they are poisoning the atmosphere. There already have been several deaths from this cause.

A fire started in an apartment house on Third Avenue. It was extinguished by chemicals. I wonder how long that will be efficacious?

I thought I was fairly well stocked up for at least a week. But with Aloysia here, her maid and my own man, my stock of food and drinkables is rapidly disappearing. For the first time I have sent Jarvis out to the food depots, with an affidavit setting forth the size of my "family," my residence, etc. I understand that each adult is being allotted one can of meat or vegetables, and one pint of water, per day.

Three p.m.: All house lights have been turned off to conserve coal. I am writing by candle. Street lighting is still maintained. There has been no gas since the Darkness fell, the plant being in Astoria. As my own kitchen has an electric range this did not impress me, but I understand those not so taken care of had been displaying remarkable ingenuity. Several families had upended electric laundry irons and used those as grills. That is ended now. However, there is so little to cook that the lack of heat hardly brings added hardship.

Jarvis has not yet returned.

Midnight: From my window I can overlook quite a large portion of the city. A vast black pall rests over us, relieved only by the network of glowing lamps outlining the streets. Even these seem to be growing dimmer.

My valet, Jarvis, is still among the missing. He has been with me for ten years. I thought him loyal, honest. He was honest with respect to money. I have trusted him with large sums and never found him faithless. But money is worth nothing today, while food...

Stress reveals the inner nature of the human animal. I met the Harrison-Smiths today, walking along Park Avenue in the foreboding restlessness that is keeping all New York on the sidewalks. The usually iron-visaged banker presented a countenance whose color matched the clammy hue of a dead fish's belly. His heavy jowls were dewlaps quivering with fear. Even while we talked his eyes clung to his wife, who was erect, a bright white flame in the Darkness. Her eyes were answering the appeal in his. She had strength enough for both, and was keeping him from collapse by sheer, silent will. The gossips, this winter, were buzzing about Anita and Ted Van Norden, the wastrel who reminds me so much of my own youth. There could not have been any truth in the rumors.

CHAPTER 11

May 13, Monday: Noon, I went out at five this morning to take my place in the long line at the food station. I have just returned with my booty. One can of sardines and a six-ounce bottle of soda--to maintain three adults twenty-four hours! On my way back I saw a man, well-dressed, chasing an alley cat. He caught it, killed it with a blow of his fist, and stuffed it in a pocket.

The air is foul with stench. A white hearse passed me, being pushed by men on foot. Someone told me that Central Park is being used as a burying ground.

I stopped to watch the passing hearse near a National Guardsman, a slim young chap whose uniform did not fit him very well. He spoke to me. "That's the worst of this thing, sir, what it's doing to children." Under his helmet his eyes were pits of somber fire. "Just think of the babies without milk. The canned stuff gave out today. My own kid is sick in bed; he can't stand the junk we've been giving him. June--that's my wife--is clean frantic."

I wanted to comfort him, but what, was there to say? "How old is your youngster?" I asked.

"Junior is two. And a swell brat! You ought to hear him talk a mile a minute. He's going to be a lawyer when he grows up."

I listened to him for a while, then made some excuse and got away. I had to or he would have seen that my eyes were wet.

Later: Aloysia has slept all day. All the windows in the apartment are open, but the air is heavy, stifling. It is difficult to move, to breathe. The shell that encloses us is immense, but eventually the oxygen in the enclosed air must be used up. Then what?

Unless relief comes soon death will be beforehand, the mass death of all the teeming population of this island. One must face that. Just what form will it take? Starvation, thirst, asphyxiation? Queer. I, who have so often babbled of the futility of life, do not want to die. It is--unpleasant--to contemplate utter extinction, the absolute end of self. I wish I believed in immortality--in some sort of future life. Even to burn eternally in hell would be better than simply--to stop.

There is a red glow to the south. Is it a thinning of the Darkness?

The city seems hushed with all traffic noise stopped. But another sound has replaced it. A high-pitched murmur, not loud, but omnipresent, insistent. I have just realized what it is. Children crying. Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, hungry children--thirsty children...

CHAPTER 12

May 14, Tuesday: The clock says it is morning. It is not dark outside any more. A red light suffuses the scene, the light of the gigantic flame that has enveloped all the lower end of the Island. There is no wind. The conflagration is spreading very slowly, but it is coming inexorably. Overhead are vast rolling billows of smoke, edged with scarlet glare. Below there is a turbulent sea of human beings. The roar of the fire, pent-in and reverberant, mingles with the crash of breaking glass, the rattle of rifle shots, a growling animal-like sound that is the voice of the mob. They are engaged in a carnival of destruction, a blind, mad venting of protest against the doom that has overtaken them. I had a dog once that was run over by some fool in a truck. When I went to pick it up it snarled and sank its teeth in my hand. That is like those people down there. They do not know what has hurt them, but they must hurt someone in return.

Where they find the strength to fight I do not know. I can scarcely move. My tongue fills my mouth. It is almost impossible to breathe.

Aloysia has just called me. It was the ghost of a word, her "Felix." In a moment I shall go in to her and lie down beside her.

Grant Lowndes looks up from the book.

"That is all," he says simply. "In an inner room of the apartment where this was found the searchers discovered two skeletons on the mouldering ruin of a bed, a man's and a woman's.

"General Flyers bids you good night. I shall be with you again at this same hour on Friday."

He turns and goes slowly out through the gray curtains. The diary remains on the little gray table. Shadows close in from the edges of the screen, concentrating light within their contracting circle. The book is the last thing visible. That, too, is gone...

There is silence in the living room for a long minute. Rand Barridon reaches to the radiovisor switch, clicks it off. The screen is blankly white in the glow of the room light.

"You know," Barridon says slowly. "The city wasn't all burned up. Guess the fire burned up all the oxygen and put itself out. That was what killed the people too."

Ruth sighs tremulously. "Rand, I was thinking about that one thing he said, about that soldier that was worried about his sick little boy. Just think if anything like that were to happen to our Rob."

"Say, I noticed that too. The fellow had a good idea. That's what we're going to make of the kid, a lawyer. Big money and not too much hard work. We'll send him to Dartmouth first, and then to Harvard. A fellow was telling me they've got the best law school in the country."

THE END

CHILDREN OF TOMORROW

Chapter I: NIGHT WINGS

"Dikar," Marilee said, low-voiced.

"Of all the day between sunrise and sunrise, I am most happy in this quiet hour just before bedtime." Lying on the grass beside him, the warmth of her love enfolded Dikar like the warmth of the fire behind them and the scent of her in his nostrils was sweet and clean as the breath of the woods that enclosed the wide, long clearing. "I am so happy that I'm afraid," Marilee went on. "Something out there in the night hates to see me so happy."

Dikar's great paw tightened on the slim, small hand of his mate, but he said nothing. "I'm afraid," Marilee's gray eyes widened, "that someday it will take you away from me, and leave me all empty."

Dikar's high forehead was deeply lined with thought, his lips pressed tightly together within his blond, silken beard. From the logs on the Fire Stone the crackling flames leaped high, reaching always for the leafy canopy a giant oak held above them, never quite touching it. The ruddy light of the flames filled the clearing, from the long Boys' House on one side to the Girls' House on the other, from the Fire Stone at this end to the table and benches under the pole-upheld roof of the eating place at the other. The light played on the brown, strong limbs of the Boys of the Bunch, on the slender bodies of the Girls, as they walked slowly or lay, like Dikar and Marilee, in pairs on the grass, murmuring.

Over the clearing the purple-black Mountain hung, and the forest enclosed the clearing with night. The forest was silent with its own queer silence that is made up of countless little noises; the piping of insects, the chirp of nesting birds, the scurry of small beasts in the brush, the babble of streamlets hurrying to leap over the edge of the Drop.

Dikar thought of the Drop, of how its high wall of riven rock completely circled the Mountain, so barren of foothold that no living thing could hope to scale it unaided. He thought of the tumbled stones below the Drop, stones big as the Boys' House and bigger, and of how the water of the streamlets foamed white and angry between the stones, and of how beneath stones and water slept the Old Ones who brought the Bunch to the Mountain in the Long-Ago Time of Fear that none of the Bunch remembered clearly, most not at all.

"Dikar!" As Marilee's head rolled to him, a gap formed in the rippling mantle of her soft, brown hair and a round, naked shoulder peeped through. "You won't let it take you away from me, will you? Will you, Dikar?"

Beyond the tumbled stones, as far as Dikar could see from the topmost bough of the tallest tree on top of the Mountain, stretched the far land where they lived from whom the Old Ones had hidden the Bunch on this Mountain.

"Why don't you answer me, Dikar?" There was sharpness in Marilee's voice. "Don't you hear me? Dikar! What are you thinking about?"

Dikar smiled slowly, his blue eyes finding Marilee. "I am boss of the Bunch, Marilee," he rumbled. "And I've a lot to think about. You know that."

"Yes," she whispered. "I know. But sometimes you could think about me."

"I do. Always." Dikar loosed his hand from Marilee's and, sliding it under her supple waist, drew her close to his great body. "Whatever else I think about, I am always thinking about you too." The trouble within him was a little eased as he looked into her bright and lovely face. "Do I have to tell you that?"

"No," she murmured, nesting warm against him. "You don't have to tell me." She sighed with contentment. Her eyelids drooped drowsily, but Dikar's remained open as his gaze returned to the Boys and the Girls in the clearing.

All the Boys had grown in the long years since the Old Ones brought them here, their cheeks and chins fuzzed, their flat muscles banding torsos naked save for small aprons of green twigs split and plaited. Slim the Girls had grown, slim as the white birches in the woods, and graceful as the fawns that bedded in the forest.

Their loose hair fell rippling and silken to their ankles but as they moved Dikar glimpsed lean flanks, firm thighs brushed by short skirts woven from reeds, ever-deepening breasts hidden by circlets woven of leaves for the unmated, of gay flowers for each who had taken a Boy as mate.

Near the middle of the clearing three or four of the younger Boys knelt, playing with small, round stones the game called aggies. They were beardless as yet, their faces rashed with small pimples, and as they argued about the game their voices were now deep as Dikar's own, now broke into thin squeals.

Abruptly their chatter hushed, and then one of them was on his feet, was running towards where Dikar lay. He was Jimlane, thin-faced, puny, but keenest-eared of all the Bunch.

Dikar put Marilee out of his arms and was rising when Jimlane got to him. "I hear one, Dikar!" the kid gasped. "It's far away, but I hear it."

"Shut up, everybody!" the boss called aloud. "Listen."

There was no sound in the clearing, save for the crackle of the fire. For a long time Dikar heard no sound except the crackle of the flames behind him, the tiny noises from the woods. And then there was another sound, so faint that he was not quite certain he heard it. In the star-prickled sky, it was a buzz like the buzz of a bee although no bee flies at night.

"There!" Jimlane pointed. Where he pointed a star moved, a sparkle of light like a star. "See it?"

"I see it," Dikar said, quietly. Then, more loudly but just as calmly. "Out the fire, Bunch. Quick."

They came running toward him, the Boys and the Girls, and past him into the edge of the woods and then out again, and now each had in his hands a birch bark bucket of earth. Marilee snatched a burning stick from the fire and darted with it into the woods, and the others threw earth on the fire, till the flames flickered and were gone, and the clearing was dark as the forest.

Dikar stared into the sky.

The buzzing was louder now, and nearer. The dot of light came nearer and nearer, moving among the stars, and about it the stars blotted out, and shone again behind it, and now Dikar could make out a black shape in the sky.

"In the houses, Bunch," he ordered, and he heard swift movement in the darkness, the padding of many feet. He was alone, standing under the canopy of the great oak, with the hot smell of burned wood in his nostrils and of baking earth.

The noise in the sky was no longer a buzz but a great roaring and the black shape was very distinct now; its spread wings, its long body, the yellow light at its very tip. Like a bird, it was, but larger than any bird. Its wings lay flat and without motion, like a soaring bird's, but no bird soared so long without wing flap, no bird soared so straight. It was a plane and there were men in it, and it was flying straight toward the Mountain. At the height it flew, it would just clear the tall tree that stood on the tip of the Mountain.

The roar of the plane beat at Dikar. The plane was almost overhead now and Dikar was afraid.

Dikar was afraid as he was in the dream that so often came to him in his sleep, dream of the dark Time of Fear when was a very little boy called Dick Carr, and the sky over the city would fill with screaming of sirens, and he would run hand in hand with his mother to crouch in the subway, the ground heaving and rolling under their feet. A dream it was, but also a memory so vague Dikar could not be sure which was memory, which dream. But this was no dream, this rattling thunder that clubbed at him out of the sky.

"It will go by," he said to himself. "They always go by."

Every once in awhile a plane would fly over the Mountain. At the first sound of it the Bunch would hide--if at night, first outing the fire. The Bunch knew, not quite knowing how, what the planes were, but they were not afraid of the planes. They hid from them because it was one of the musts the Old Ones had left, and the musts of the Old Ones must be obeyed.

No more than the rest of the Bunch Dikar had been afraid of the planes until the day not long ago when he had gone down into the far land from which they came.

Dikar had gone far and wide that day, a shadow flitting through the fields and the woods, a silent shadow none saw; but who had seen white men and women huddled within fences of thorn-covered wire, had seen them beaten by yellow men till the blood ran. He had seen a thing, dried and gray, swing from a tall pole at the end of a rope, and the rags that fluttered about the thing had told him it once had been a man. He had seen white men and women working, thin and sunken-eyed and so weak they could hardly stand; when they fell, had seen them lashed to work again by men dressed in green, black men with yellow faces.

Dikar had seen many terrible things that day, and he had learned how terrible they were who ruled the far land that had seemed so pleasant from his perch on the Mountain's tallest tree.

It was they who rode in the planes, and Dikar knew what it would mean to the Bunch if they found out the Bunch lived on the Mountain, and this was why Dikar was afraid when there was a roar in the sky and a plane flew overhead. But this plane was now hidden from Dikar by the oak's canopy, and the roar in the sky was lessening.

"It's gone by," he said to himself, "like they always--" The roar in the sky was loud again, the plane, lower now was again blotting out the stars--A white light blazed in the sky, a great white light like the sun! It floated down, making the woods green, filling the clearing with brightness!

Terror was ice in Dikar's veins.

This too was out of his dream, a white light floating down out of the sky, a noise like hundreds of sticks rattling along a hundred fences, screams and crashes, the screams of kids who were fleeing a destroyed city, the crashes of the trucks in which they fled. The truck in which was eight-year-old Dick Carr, in which were Mary Lee and the other kids who now were the Bunch, rocking to a halt on a tree-roofed side road. The two Old Ones stiff with terror on the front seat of the truck...

That white light floating down, showed only an empty clearing, weather-grayed houses about which there was no sign of life. The light was fading. The black plane was turning again to its course, was blotting the stars no longer, itself was blotted by the purple-dark Mountain. The roar in the sky became the buzz of a monstrous bee. Dikar wiped cold sweat from his forehead with the edge of his hand.

From the plane, held high by the tall forest and steep slope, they had seen nothing of life in the blaze of their white light and they had flown away. But why had they turned back? Why had they lit the clearing with their white light? Always before the planes had flown straight on, over the Mountain.

The bee-buzz in the sky faded to nothingness. The shrilling of insects in the woods began again. Dikar cupped hands about his mouth and called, "Come out. Come out wherever you are."

Forms began to come out of the doors of the houses. Dikar turned to face the woods. "Come out, Marilee," he called through his cupped hands. "M-a-a-arilee."

His shout rolled away into the purple-dark woods, seeking the cave where Marilee hid with the burning stick that must light the fire again, as was her job when a plane came in the night. "M-a-a-rilee." Behind Dikar the Bunch chattered, but no light from Marilee's flaming stick moved among the black tree trunks.

"Ma-a-rilee," Dikar called again, sending his shout into the whispering night of the woods. The woods sent his shout back to him. "Ma-arilee," hollow and mocking, and that was all the answer that came to his shout.

Chapter II: TO FIGHT NO-FAIR

Breath pulled in between Dikar's teeth and he was lunging past the oak's enormous bole, plunging into the dark woods. Earth was cold and wet to the soles of his feet. Cold, wet-earth smell was in his nostrils and the green smell of the woods and the smell of mouldering leaves and of the pale things that overnight grew among the leaves. Faintly in his nostrils, too, was the sharp tang of smoke, and that could only be from the stick Marilee had carried off to the cave.

Even to Dikar's eyes, keen as they were, there was no light here, but he moved swiftly, never stumbling, avoiding tree trunks and bushes with the sure deftness of the small woods creatures, no more aware than they how he did so. The ground lifted under his feet, and then there was no longer ground under his feet but rock.

Dikar stopped, sensing walls about him, a roof above him, and so knowing he was in the cave he sought. "Marilee," he called into the sightless blackness. "Marilee. Where are you?"

No answer came. But in his nostrils the smoke-tang he'd followed was sharp, so Dikar knew that Marilee had been here. In his nostrils was the warm, sweet smell of his mate, so that Dikar knew she was still here, somewhere in this blackness-filled cave.

He started moving again, slowly, groping with his feet in the dark. And his feet found her, found her form outstretched on the cave's rocky floor, unmoving even when his feet thudded against her.

"Marilee!" Dikar choked and went to his knees beside Marilee, gathered her into his arms.

She stirred in his arms! "Dikar." Breath gusted from Dikar's great chest at that uncertain murmur, breath he did not know till now had been caught in his chest, "Oh, Dikar."

"What happened to you, Marilee? What-?"

"I--Someone sprang on me from behind, just as I reached the cave and hit me! Dikar! The fire stick! Where-?"

"Not here. Or if here, gone out. No. Not here. Even if gone out its smell would be stronger--"

"The fire, Dikar!" Sudden terror in Marilee's voice, of life without fire, of food without fire to cook, of winter without fire to warm. She was out of his arms and on her feet. "I've lost the fire, Dikar."

Dikar whirled out of the cave, was running through the woods, Marilee at his side. They burst out of the woods into the clearing and Dikar was shouting, "Get the dirt off the fire logs, everybody. Quick."

Dikar went on without stopping, darting to the door of the Boys' House, into it. He lifted an axe from its pegs on the wall, was out in the open again, was running toward where the Bunch were scooping earth off the piled logs on the Fire Stone.

He shoved through the Boys and Girls, made out, by the dim light of the stars, a log they had uncovered, black, lifeless. His axe swept up, smashed down.

Chunk!

The log split open. Red' sparks flew, stinging Dikar's legs. He did not feel them. He was staring at the redness from which they had flown, the glowing red heart of the log that still had life in it, the life of the fire, the life of the Bunch. "Dry leaves," he commanded. "Bring dry leaves. Quick! Bring dry twigs. Billthomas! Halcross! Build up the fire. Fredalton! Take this axe and split up one of those logs into little sticks."

Dikar watched Billthomas put dry leaves on the glowing redness, watched the leaves take flame from the log's heart. Watched Halross feed little dry twigs to the leaves and the twigs catch flame from the leaves, and the sticks from the twigs. The fire grew again on the Fire Stone, and the light of the fire grew again in the clearing, but Dikar's forehead was deep-lined and his eyes were no longer blue, and in the darkness of them was a red light that did not come from the fire.

Dikar's eyes moved over the red-lit faces of the Bunch that stood about the Fire Stone watching the fire grow again; and his eyes seemed to ask a question of each face and pass on. They came to one face, and stayed on it, Dikar's brow-lines deepening.

That face was chunk-jawed, black-stubbled, the eyes too small, too closely set, but what held Dikar's gaze was the odd, leering grin that sat on the thick lips.

Tomball had had little to grin about since the day Dikar had returned from the far land and ended Tomball's short time as boss, forcing him to confess to the Bunch how he had tricked his way to being boss in place of Dikar. Why, then, was he grinning now?

"Do you think it was he who hit me?" Marilee whispered in Dikar's ear, "and ran away with the fire stick?"

"Who else of the Bunch would do a thing like that?"

"But why should he, Dikar? He's smart enough to know that if we lost the fire it would be as bad for him as for the rest of us."

"That's what I don't--Wait! I've got a hunch. Look. Walk along with me like we were just talking about nothing important. Laugh a little, you know, and hold on to my arm."

Marilee's fingers were cold on Dikar's arm, but her laugh rippled like a little stream running over pebbles in its bed. They walked slowly away from the fire reached the shadowy edge of the woods, were closed around by the forest darkness.

"Now!" Dikar said, and he was flitting through the forest night, Marilee a silent shadow behind him. It was like her to stay close behind, like her to ask no questions as he ran through the woods to the cave again.

At the cave-mouth Dikar stopped a moment, sniffing the air. "Yes," he said, more to himself than to Marilee. "I can still smell the smoke of the fire-stick. The wet night air holds smells a long time." Then he was moving again, following the sharp tang of smoke in the air, following it away from the cave and away from the clearing.

The scent-trail led him downhill. Soon the laugh of a streamlet came to his ears and then Dikar pushed through tangling bushes and came out into starlight on the edge of the brook that he heard. The smoke smell was very strong here--

"Look, Marilee!" Dikar pointed to a black something at, his feet, half in, half out of the water. "Here is your fire stick." He squatted to it.

"He brought it here to put it in the water," Marilee said, squatting beside him.

"'No," Dikar answered, his voice a growl deep in his chest. "No. He slipped on a wet stone and fell, and the water outed it. See. Here are the marks of his knees on the bank. But he brought it here because this was the nearest open place in the woods, the nearest place where its light could be seen from the sky."

"From the sky? Dikar! What do you mean?"

"I mean that I know now why the plane turned back." Even in the dimness Marilee could see that Dikar's face was hard and still, his lips tight and gray. "If he hadn't slipped and dropped the stick in the water, so that they were not sure they'd seen--" Dikar stood up. "Come," he said, grimly.

When they came again into the clearing, it was filled once more with the wavering light of the fire and everything was as it had been before Jimlane had heard the plane. Dikar paused beside the Fire Stone, stood there straddle-legged and glowering, a muscle twitching in his cheek.

Marilee laid finger tips on Dikar's arm. "There's Tomball," she whispered. "Talking to Bessalton down there near the eating place."

Dikar's gaze moved to where she had said. Bessalton was boss of the Girls and tallest of them, her cloak of hair black as deepest night, her legs long and slender, her hips wide. Tomball was heavy-built beside her, bulging arms hanging loose almost to his knees, great chest black-matted, his belly black with matted hair. Black-haired was Tomball, and squat. He was strongest of the Bunch, and there was shrewdness in him too, a shrewdness Dikar already had learned to fear.

The little muscle twitched in Dikar's cheek. "Marilee," he said, low-toned. "Find Jimlane and Billthomas, and tell them to come to me first chance they can without anyone seeing them."

She slipped away. Dikar watched her, slim and lovely, the fire's red light caressing her, and there was pain in his arms and his chest, sweet pain of the knowing that she was his.

Tomball too watched Marilee, small eyes following her, thick lips a little parted. Seeing this Dikar felt a tightness in his neck and across the back of his shoulders. His hands closed into fists. If he wasn't boss of the Bunch!

Dikar's hands opened and lifted, cupping around his mouth. "Ho Bunch!" he called through his cupped hands.

The talk in the clearing stopped, and the strollers turned to him. "Bedtime, Bunch," Dikar shouted. "A good sleep and happy dreams to you all."

"A good sleep to you, Dikar!" they cried to him, but Tomball did not cry Dikar a good sleep as he went toward the Boys' House with the others of the mateless Boys, while the mateless Girls went toward the Girls' House, and the mated pairs went hand in hand past the end of the eating place and into the dark woods behind. Dikar saw Marilee waiting for him by the eating place, but he did not go to her till Steveland and Halross, pimply-faced youngsters whose turn it was to stay awake the night and watch the fire, had taken their places on the smooth bench-rock near the Fire Stone.

"Be sure that one of you stays always awake," he told them. "Be sure to listen always for the sound of a plane in the sky. If you hear one wake the Bunch right away to out the fire."

"Yes, Dikar," Steveland said, his blue eyes wide. "We get you. A good sleep, Dikar."

"A quiet night to you both," Dikar said and went to join Marilee and go with her to the little house in the woods behind the eating place that, when they took each other for mates, he had built from logs to be theirs and theirs alone.

"Dikar," Marilee said, her eyes puzzled in the ruddy dusk that sifted through to her from the fire. "Why didn't you tell the Bunch about Tomball's hitting me and taking the fire stick to where the plane could see it? Why didn't you punish him for it?"

"Would it be fair, Marilee, to say to the Bunch that it was Tomball, when we do not know that it was? Would it be fair to punish him for doing it, when we do not know that he did it?"

"But we do know!"

"No, Marilee. We do not. You saw nothing and I saw nothing that would make us sure it was him. Or did you see something--something you have not told me?"

She stopped, Dikar stopped, looking at her face on which the dim red light fell leaving the rest of her in shadow, thinking how lovely her face was, the red light tangled in the cloudy softness of her hair, her gray eyes grave and thoughtful, her small mouth puckered.

"No-o," Marilee breathed at last. "No, I saw nothing that would make me sure it was Tomball. But I am sure, and you are sure, because we know that Tomball is the only one of the Bunch who would do a thing like that. Look, Dikar. Tomball wants to be boss, and if he cannot be boss of the Bunch he would destroy the Bunch, and he would stop at nothing to do it. You know all that as well as I do."

Sadness came into Dikar's face, and trouble in his eyes. "Yes, Marilee, I know that as well as you do. Tomball has always wanted to be boss, and when he couldn't get to be boss by fighting fair he fought no fair, and now that he knows he can't get to be boss by fighting either fair or no fair, he would destroy the Bunch rather than have me or anyone but him be boss. But it would not be right for me to fight him any other way than fair."

"Why, Dikar? If Tomball wants to destroy the Bunch, it seems to me it would be right for you to fight him any way you can, fair or no fair. Why isn't it?"

The lines were back in Dikar's forehead. Very clearly he knew the answer to what Marilee asked, but it was very hard to think of how to say it in words. "Look, Marilee," he cried. "When we were littler we played lots of games, and we always picked someone for umpire to see that everybody played according to the rules of the game, because if there were no rules there would be no game. Remember?"

"Yes, Dikar. I remember."

"Now sometimes the umpire himself would be no fair, letting one side break the rules. And then the other side would break the rules too, and pretty soon the game would bust up because with all the rules broken there was no game any more. Right?"

"Yes. But I don't see--"

His gesture stopped her.

"You will in a minute. Look. The life of the Bunch is no game, but it is lived according to rules, because if there were no rules, if every one of the Bunch did just as he or she wanted to, all the time, there would be no Bunch. Now, I don't think you or anybody else would say that if we hadn't lived all these years as a Bunch; sharing what we had, sharing the work, each doing what he can do best, all helping one another; any but the strongest of us would be alive and happy today. Would you?"

"No. We are all alive and happy after the long years here on the Mountain because we have helped each other."

"And played fair with each other. You call me boss and obey me, but you really obey the rules the Old Ones left us and the rules the Bunch has made for themselves, and all I am is an umpire to see that everybody obeys the rules, to see that everybody plays fair. Now, suppose I played no fair myself. Suppose, whenever I felt like it, I broke the rules. What would happen?"

She answered slowly:

"Everybody else would break the rules too. I see. Because if the umpire is no fair, all the ones playing the game feel it's all right to be no fair too."

"Exactly. And pretty soon there would be no rules any more, and the Bunch would bust up. If Tomball is trying to destroy the Bunch, I've got to fight him. But if I fight him no fair, that will destroy the Bunch, sooner or later, much more surely than anything Tomball could do, or anything they who live in the far land can do. Now do you understand, Marilee?"

"I understand," Marilee said. And then she cried, "But you've got to do something, Dikar! You can't let him--" She stopped short, twisted to a noise in the brush behind her. "Dikar! There's somebody-!"

Dikar thrust her behind him. "Who's there?" he demanded, his neck thickening. "Who is it?"

Shadows moved in the shadows of the brush, where the red light from the fire could not reach.

Chapter III: THE GUN ON THE ROOF

"Who's there?" Dikar cried again, and then the shadows were coming out into the light, and they were Jimlane and Billthomas.

"Marilee told us you wanted us," Jimlane said. "We waited till everyone was asleep in the Boys' House."

"Did anyone see you come here?"

"No. They were all asleep."

"All right," Dikar said. "Listen, Jimlane and Billthomas. I have a job for you, but I am not going to order you to do it. I'm going to ask you to."

"We'll do it, Dikar," Billthomas said. He was shorter than Jimlane, yellow-haired, blue-eyed, his skin as smooth as any of the Girls', his movements as graceful. "We'll do anything you ask us."

"Anything at all," Jimlane agreed.

"Wait, youngsters," Dikar warned, "You may not be so ready to promise that when you hear what it is. I hate asking you to do it, but it needs to be done, for the good of the Bunch. It won't be easy. You may be hurt doing it, you may even be killed. Nobody but Marilee and me will know that you're doing it."

Two pairs of bright eyes were fixed on his face. "If it's for the Bunch, we'll do it," Jimlane said. "Whatever it is. Tell us what you want us to do, Dikar."

"Before I tell you, you must promise, cross your hearts and hope to die, that you will say nothing about it to anyone. Whether you will do it or not, you will always keep silent."

"Cross my heart and hope to die," Billthomas said solemnly. "I will say nothing." Jimlane said the same and then the two spat over their left shoulders to show that they could never take back what they had said.

"Now listen," Dikar said when they had done that. "The job is to watch Tomball, by day and by night. You sleep in the Boys' House with him, and I'll always make sure to put you on the same jobs with him, so that part ought to be easy.

"If he slips off any time, day or night, by himself, I want you to follow him without his knowing it. Do you think you can do that?"

"We once followed a deer all day," Jimlane said, "All over the Mountain, and it never knew we was anywheres near."

"I know that," Dikar nodded. "And that's why I picked you to ask first to do this job. I also know you two are champeens of the Bunch at shooting with bonarrers, an' that's another part of the job."

The eyes of the youngsters widened, but they said nothing.

Dikar went on. "Keep your bonarrers near you all the time, and if Tomball does go off by himself, take 'em along. If you see him start to make a fire where it can be seen from the sky, or from the kind of woods that will make a smoke go up through the tops of the trees, shoot him in the legs, right away, and out the fire. If he starts to go out of the woods to the edge of the Drop, in the daytime when they who live in the far land might see him, shoot him in the legs and drag him back. Stop him if he does anything else that might show Them that someone lives here on the Mountain. Do you get me?"

"We get you, Dikar." Billthomas looked puzzled. "But all those things are Must-Nots of the Old Ones. Why do we need to shoot him to stop him from doing them? If he tries to, the Old Ones would wake from their sleep under the rocks at the bottom of the Drop and strike him down. He wouldn't dare to do 'em, and if he tried, the Old Ones wouldn't let him."

"Look, Billthomas." Dikar put his hand on the kid's shoulder. "Do you remember the time when the Bunch stoned me away from the clearing and made Tomball boss?"

"And you came back with a little gun that made a noise and killed our fawn, and you made the Bunch listen to you while you proved why we shouldn't have stoned you away. And then you threw the gun up on the roof of the Boys' House and fought Tomball who should be boss, and licked him. Sure I remember."

"Well, between the time I was stoned away and the time I came back, I went to the edge of the Drop, and I climbed down the Drop to the rocks under which the Old Ones sleep. That is the most terrible of all the Must-Nots of the Old Ones, but they didn't wake from their sleep, and they didn't strike me down. Nothing happened to me. I went into the far land, and I came back, and the Old Ones did nothing to me."

"You went into the far land," Jimlane repeated in awed tones. "Dikar! Did you see Them?"

"I saw Them, Jimlane, an' I saw many things that made me know how very terrible it would be if they found out the Bunch lives on the Mountain. But the Old Ones did nothin' to stop me. The Old Ones sleep under the rocks, Jimlane, an' under the water that foams over the rocks, an' they cannot awaken to stop Tomball from lettin' Them who live in the far land know that the Bunch is here on the Mountain."

"But Dikar!" Billthomas broke out. "Tomball wouldn't do anythin' like that!"

"I hope not," Dikar answered slowly. "Honest Injun, I hope that he wouldn't. But I must be sure, an' I'm askin' you two to help me be sure--No wait," he said as he saw their mouths start to open. "Before you answer I want you to remember how strong Tomball is, an' how he said he would kill you, Jimlane, that time when you wanted to tell the Bunch why they were wrong in stonin' me away, an' how afraid of him you were, that time. I want you youngsters to think of that before you say that you will do this job."

"I've thought about it, Dikar." Jimlane stood very straight in the firelight. "I won't say I'm not afraid of Tomball, but afraid or not, I will watch him, an' I will do my best to stop him from doin' anythin' that will hurt the Bunch."

"Me too, Dikar," Billthomas said his voice clear and steady, his eyes steady as Dikar's own. "I am afraid of Tomball, but I will do this job the best I can."

"Good kids," Dikar said. Something had him by the throat, so that it was hard to say it, and he could not answer when the Boys wished him and Marilee a good sleep and slipped away, their naked young bodies ruddy one moment in the firelight, then merged with the noiseless dark.

"Oh Dikar," Marilee's soft voice said in his ear. "They're so young. Are you right in what you are doin'?"

"I don't know," Dikar sighed. "I don't know, Marilee." And then he said, "It is a hard job to be boss of the Bunch. A dreadful hard job."

Her hand reached up to his cheek, her cool fingers touched it, lightly, "A hard job, Dikar," she said softly. "But it is night, an' just past these bushes is our little house, an' there you are not boss of the Bunch but my mate..."

He drew her close to him, her softness close against the hardness of his body. He looked into her eyes, and then his head sank and his lips found hers.

A little later they knelt by their bed of pine boughs covered with a white blanket of rabbit fur. "Now I lay me down to sleep," they said together. "An, should I die before I wake..."

What was it like to die, Dikar wondered. He had seen death, of course, a deer killed by his arrow, a squirrel stiff and glazed-eyed under last year's leaves. What was it like to lie stiff like that, never seeing again the flaming colors of the sunrise, the shimmer of sunlight on water, never feeling again the coolness of the wind on one's skin, the warm touch of the rain? "God bless the Bunch," he said, along with Marilee. "God bless Marilee..."

Marilee rose but Dikar stayed on his knees. He heard the piping of the insects outside the little house, the peep of the nesting birds, the whisper of the trees. They were trying to tell him something, but he could not quite make out what it was.

"Poor Dikar," Marilee said. "You're so tired you've fallen asleep on your knees."

"No," Dikar said, rising, nor could he sleep, even with Marilee in his arms, their cover of rabbit-fur warm over him. Something was troubling him. Something that he must do, and he could not think what it was.

He lay wide-eyed, watching the open door of the little house grow pale with the light of the moon that was rising over the Mountain, watching the leaf shadows dance in the pale moonlight. With the moon a wind rose in the forest and the rustle of the treetops was louder, and bough-tips tapped on the roof--

The roof! That was it! Billthomas had spoken of the little gun Dikar had taken from one of them down in the far land, a black faced one, and had thrown up on the roof of the Boys' House and forgotten. Dikar had seen what that small thing could do, and Tomball had seen what it could do. Dikar must get it. Now. Tonight. Get it and hide it...

Marilee stirred in her sleep as Dikar slowly took his arms from about her. She muttered something, but she did not awaken. Dikar stole, more silent than the shadows, through the woods, reached a tree whose boughs overhung the Boys' House, swung himself up into those boughs and from them to the roof of Boys' House.

The moonlight was bright on that roof, every crack in its gray boards, every mark of them, distinct. There were faded, dried leaves on it, broken twigs...

But no gun.

Chapter IV: THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE

The sun struck brightness through Dikar's eyelids and though the night had held very little sleep for him, he was instantly awake. He flung out his arm to waken Marilee--found only the fur of the bed-covering!

He rolled over. She wasn't there beside him. She wasn't anywhere in the little house. Dikar was on his feet, his eyes wide, his heart bumping his ribs. The door of the house darkened and Marilee stood there.

"Marilee!" Dikar exclaimed. "I thought--What's the matter?" She had hold of the doorpost, as if to hold herself up by it. There was green under the bronze of her skin and her forehead was wet with sweat. "Marilee!" Dikar made the single long stride that took him to her. "What's wrong with you?"

"Wrong?" Her eyes refused to meet his. "Nothin', Dikar." She laughed, but it was not the merry tinkle that her laugh always was. "Listen, sleepyhead. The Boys are already on their way to the bathing pool." Gay shouts, the threshing of many bodies through the brush, came to him. "Go quick, or they'll be through before you have rubbed the sand from your eyes."

"Marilee." Dikar's hand was on her shoulder. "What-?" She jerked free of his hold, faced him, her lips tight and white.

"Go, you fool!" she yelled at him and thrust past him into the house, threw herself on the bed. "Let me alone."

Dikar stared at her, unbelieving. Never before had she yelled at him in anger, never before had her morning smile failed him. She lay face down, unmoving.

"Marilee," Dikar named her. "If I've done somethin' to make you angry at me, I ask your pardon, but what have I done?"

"Nothin'." He could hardly hear her. "You have done nothin'," she sobbed. "But please go, Dikar. Please leave me alone."

Dikar turned slowly away, heard his name called from outside. "Comin'," he answered red-bearded Johnstone, who called from the little house where he lived with Annjordan, "Last one in the bathing pool's a yellow belly."

They ran through the dew-sprinkled greenery, downhill to where a stream leaped from a ledge into a shining pool that foamed with the flashing limbs, the brown torsos of the Boys of the Bunch.

Dikar dived low into the icy water, swam to the opposite bank, stood up, shaking his head to clear his sight, the shining drops spattering about him. He saw Tomball, squat and shaggy under the foaming waterfall, saw Jimlane swimming nearby. Dikar dived again, swam under water to where the drooping, slender boughs of a willow dipped into the pool and made a screen behind which he came up unseen.

The Boys' House was empty when Dikar went into it by the door away from the clearing, He darted to Tomball's bed, lifted the coverings from it, pressed hands on grass-filled bag under them. There was no hard lump inside the bag. He looked under the cot--a darkening of the light straightened him, whipped him around.

Tomball stood spraddle-legged just inside the open door from the woods. His hands were stretching a bow taut, and laid across the bow was a stone-pointed hunting arrow that could kill a deer--or a Boy.

"Got you," Tomball grunted, his eyes, small and red, hating Dikar. "This is Fredalton's bonarrer. Nobody saw me leave the bathing pool just like nobody except me saw you, an' I'll be back there before they find you." The head of the arrow was pulled back to the curve of the bow's wood. Dikar's muscles tightened to dodge the arrow, but he knew he could not hope--

Whang!

Tomball's arrow was broken in two parts, was clattering to the floor! Dikar threw himself headlong down the length of the Boys' House, tripped over the bow that Tomball had flung in his path. Thrust at the floor to get up and saw another arrow quivering in the wall toward the clearing, saw Tomball dive out of the door toward the woods, got to that door only in time to see Tomball vanish in the brush.

Dikar shook his head to clear it of its stunned surprise that he was still alive, that Tomball's arrow had broken at the exact moment it was loosed at him.

"Dikar!" Billthomas, slender brown body wet-shining, face gray-white, was suddenly there in front of him. "He didn't hurt you?" There was a bow in his one hand, the other reached out to Dikar. "He didn't-?"

"No, Billthomas," Dikar said, guessing now the meaning of that second arrow. "Thanks to you." His voice was steady enough, but inside him he was shaking, knowing suddenly how close he had been to death. "That was as fine a shot as ever was made on the Mountain."

Billthomas' blue eyes shone with the praise. "It was nothin', Dikar. The sun was on Tomball's bonarrer through the other door, makin' it a good mark, an' I was only ten paces away. Any of the Boys could have hit it."

"How did you come here, just in time?"

"Carlberger ducked Jimlane," Billthomas answered. "While he was under Tomball got to shore. I saw him from the other end of the pool an' I followed, I stopped to pick up my bonarrer where I'd hidden it near by, like you told us to last night. That let Tomball get out of sight, but I tracked him. When I got to the edge of the woods he was already in here, was pullin' tight his bow. But why're we wastin' time? I'll call the Bunch to hunt him down--"

"No!" Dikar commanded. "No, Billthomas. I will not have the Bunch know that one of them has tried to kill an other. For then there will be only two things left for the Bunch to do. Either they must stone him from the clearing; an' that will make certain of his hate for the Bunch, with no hope that he will ever change; or they must kill him, which is worse. That the Bunch shall kill one of themselves coldly and with thought before, is more dreadful than that Tomball should have tried to kill me, excited an' angry."

"But, Dikar-?"

"But nothin'! This is a thing I will take care of myself, in my own way, an' it will remain a secret between you an' me. You will not call the Bunch." Dikar said sharply, his eyes commanding. "You will call Jimlane only. The two of you must track Tomball an' keep him always in sight, but you will not let him know you are around unless he does one of the things I talked about last night, or unless he tries again to hurt one of the Bunch. If that should happen, stop him, but hurt him as little as you can help, an' tell me about it. Get me?"

"I get you, Dikar."

"Then call Jimlane, an' get busy."

"Yes, Dikar." Billthomas was gone into the woods and Dikar heard the trill of a lark from where Billthomas had vanished, three times, and from far off he heard the answering three trills of a lark, and he knew that Billthomas had called Jimlane, and that there would not be a moment from now on that Tomball would not be under the eyes of the two youngsters. But Dikar's forehead was furrowed and his heart heavy within him as he turned to pluck Billthomas' arrow from the wall and the pieces of Tomball's arrow from the floor, and went out into the woods to hide them.

It was queer, he thought, how he had talked to Billthomas the way he did just now, without thinking about what he was going to say beforehand. It was as if someone else had talked with his voice, someone much wiser than he was.

It was queer, too, how he knew now that what he had said was the right thing to say. How he knew now, sure as that his name was Dikar, that what he was doing was the best thing for the Bunch.

And for Tomball too. After what had happened Tomball would stay away from the Bunch, afraid of what Dikar would do if he came back. The youngsters would be watching him, but Tomball wouldn't know that. He would think he was alone on the Mountain, and he would learn what it meant to be alone, as Dikar had, and he would learn what it meant to be one of the Bunch and have a place in its life.

After awhile Dikar would send Tomball word by Jimlane or Billthomas that he need not be afraid to come back, and when he did come back he would be ready to take his place in the life of the Bunch, and he would give Dikar and the Bunch no more trouble.

That was what Dikar hoped would happen.

The Boys came back, shouting and happy, from their morning swim in their bathing pool, and the Girls came back to the clearing from their pool on the other side of the clearing, and they all ate breakfast at the long table of the eating place.

Marilee came to sit beside Dikar when breakfast was all on the table. Dikar looked sharply at her, but her color was all right now, her eyes bright again. She didn't say anything about what had happened in the morning, and Dikar didn't say anything about it, only too glad to forget about it and to let her forget.

It was Steveland who first said something about Tomball and Jimlane and Billthomas not being there. Across the table so that all could hear, Dikar told him that he had sent them on a special job on the other side of the Mountain, a job that might take them three or four days, and that they would not come back till it was finished.

Before anyone could ask what the job was, Dikar started telling what everybody was to do that day, although he usually didn't do that till after breakfast.

There was a lot to do, because it was time to start getting ready for the winter.

Dikar sent some of the Bunch to hunt for deer whose meat would be dried over the fire, and whose skins the Girls would make into clothing against the cold days to come. He sent some to pick berries that would be cooked with the sugar that they'd gotten from the maple trees in the spring, and others to search for honey in hollow bee-trees, and he set some to stopping up cracks in the walls of the houses with mud.

He himself took four of the older Boys, Johnstone and Danhall and Henfield and Bengreen, up near the top of the Mountain, to where some big trees had been blown down by a storm last year, to cut them up into logs for the fire now that they were dried out and would burn well and without smoke.

When they went to the Boys' House to get their axes, Danhall said that it would be a good idea for them to take their bonarrers along too, in case they happened to see a deer or some squirrels, and Dikar agreed. They hung their quivers of arrows on low bushes, and rested their bows against the bushes, and set to work.

It was shady and cool where they worked, and the kerchunk-kerchunk of their axes was a pleasant sound. Soon Dikar had almost forgotten what had happened last night and this morning, and the day seemed no different from all the other days on the Mountain. He liked the way the flying chips shone bright yellow against the dark green of the moss and the almost black brown of the ground, and he liked the way little spots of sunlight filtered through the leaves high overhead and danced on the ground. He liked the smell of new-cut wood in his nostrils, and the smell of damp earth and of last year's leaves, and the sweet smell of the breeze that was like the scent of Marilee's breath.

It was grand to feel the swell of his muscles, their smooth swell in his arms and across his back, to feel the chunk of his axe into a great tree-trunk, to feel the wood break apart under his strength; grandest of all to feel the touch of the other sweaty shoulders against his own as together the five would yank and haul at a hewn log.

Marilee and Annjordan, Johnstone's mate, brought lunch up to the choppers--cooked rabbit meat and dandelion greens and blackberries big as the end of Dikar's thumb. Dikar and Marilee sat a little apart from the rest, eating their lunch, washing it down with icy water brought from a nearby stream in a cup of birch bark.

"Dikar," Marilee murmured. "I have often wondered about the Drop." Her finger touched a little blue flower that grew out of the moss by her knee, but she didn't quite seem to know she touched it. "It goes all around the Mountain, an' it's so high an' steep. We were very little, Dikar, when the Old Ones brought us here. How did they climb the Drop with us?"

"They didn't." Dikar recalled his dream, recalled the memory that gave form to his dream. "The Drop didn't go all around the Mountain then. A sort of narrow hill slanted up to the top of the Drop, left by men who had been cutting away rock from the Mountain, the same men who built the houses in the clearing an' left cots here, an' these axes an' all the other tools we use. A road ran on top of that narrow hill, an' the Old Ones brought us up that road."

"What became of the hill an' the road?"

"The Old Ones hid us on the Mountain from the terrible hordes who came out of the East an' across the continent from the West an' up from the South," (Dikar was repeating words a Voice had said in his dream). "But some of them came to the foot of the Mountain, so the Old Ones brought the narrow hill down, on them and on themselves," he told Marilee what his dream had helped him to remember. "That is why there is no road to the top of the Drop, an' why the Old Ones sleep under the rocks, down there below the Drop."

"I know you went down there once, Dikar, but you never told me how you got down there, nor how you got up again."

"I plaited a rope of vines, Marilee, as long as the Drop is high. One night I tied the rope's end to a tree an' let it down where a stream leaps out an' down, so that the rope hangs behind the white curtain of the stream an' cannot be seen from below. I climbed down the rope, an' by it I climbed up again the next night, havin' seen what they have made of the far land that looks so green an' pleasant from the top of our Mountain."

"You climbed down a rope of vines!" Marilee's hand went to the flowery circlet that covered her breast. "You might have been killed, Dikar!"

Dikar nodded. "Yes, I might have been killed, an' I didn't care much whether I was or not. I'd been stoned from the Bunch, remember, an' you had cried me no fair. Have some more of these berries, Marilee. They are swell."

"No. You have them." Marilee fed them to Dikar, placing them one by one between his lips. Then they were finished. Dikar lay back, and Marilee lay by his side, quiet and drowsy, and Dikar was dreamily content.

Marilee stirred. "Dikar. Does the rope still hang behind the stream where it leaps down?"

Dikar sat up, pounding his knee with his fist. "Jeeze! It does! I did not lift it when I came back to the Mountain, an' I've forgotten it since. I must do that. Tonight I must do it, as soon as it is dark enough that I cannot be seen from below when I go to the edge of the Drop. Do not let me forget."

"I sure will not," Marilee answered. And then, with that curiosity Dikar had noticed all the Girls had so much more than the Boys, she asked, "Just where is the rope?"

Dikar looked about him, thinking how he could tell her. He knew every inch of the Mountain as well as he knew the lines on his palm. "That's funny," he laughed suddenly. "That brook, there, is the very one at whose end the rope hangs. By following it down the Mountain you would get to it. But look," he went on, rising, "the sun no longer strikes straight down through the treetops, an' much as I hate to send you away, it is time for work again."

"Yes, Dikar," Marilee sighed, reaching a hand for him to take hold of and lift her by. "Time for work." As she came up she swung close to him, and her arms went around his neck and her lips pressed against his, and they were flame on Dikar's lips, burning flame in his veins. "Oh, Dikar," Marilee sobbed. "I hate not to be with you."

"It is only for a little while," Dikar murmured. "Only till night." He held her away from him, drinking her in with his eyes. "What are you goin' to do till night, Marilee?" he asked. "I like to know what you do, all the time, because that way I can think myself with you, an' am not so lonely for you when we are apart."

"That's sweet, Dikar," Marilee smiled, touching Dikar's cheek with her fingertips. "I shall be somewhere in the woods. Bessalton wants me to hunt for a certain kind of grass that is best for sewin' with. Think of me a lot, Dikar," she said, and Annjordan called her, and she was gone.

Dikar and the rest set to work again. Marilee's lips still burned on Dikar's, and the touch of Marilee's fingertips lingered on his cheek, and he would not wipe the sweat from his face lest he wipe that touch from it too.

The kerchunk-kerchunk of the axes ran loud and long through the woods, and the pile of cut logs grew slowly but steadily. The beams of sunlight striking down from the leafy roof of the forest slanted more and more, and the shadows lengthened. At last Dikar rested.

"Enough for today, fellows," he said. "Tomorrow we'll--" The words caught in his throat. He'd heard a sound from far down the Mountain, a sound that should not be in the woods.

The sound came again, very far off, but Dikar knew what it was. He'd heard it down in the far land, and once, only once, on the Mountain. That time he'd made the sound himself, shooting the little gun out of the great oak that canopied the Fire Stone.

Chapter V: OVER THE DROP

"Come, fellows," Dikar snapped, springing to the bush where hung his bow and arrows, snatching them up. "Quick." He was off through the woods, running down toward along the bank of the stream because there it was clearest of bushes and trees. The other four ran after him.

Long the time seemed, endless, that Dikar ran thus through familiar woods suddenly grown strange and fearful. Dreadful the thoughts that Dikar thought as he ran. Who had shot off a gun on the Mountain? Had that plane, last night, seen something to tell those who rode it that someone lived here? Had they climbed the Mountain, the men dressed in green that he'd seen in the far land, the men with yellow faces and black who were so brutishly cruel?

Never had Dikar run so fast. The others could not keep up with him, so fast he ran, but still he saw nothing but the flicking shadows of the woods and the glinting sun on the stream beside which he ran. The stream was rushing faster now, was hurrying to throw itself over the Drop, just ahead--

Dikar dug heels to stop himself. Something in the water--Jimlane! Jimlane lay face down in the water, very still, and the water that swirled away from the still, small body was pink and dreadful. Jimlane lay in the water, but on the bank of the stream lay Billthomas, limp as an arrowed deer, his side red and terrible with blood.

Dikar dropped to his knees beside Billthomas, and inside him Dikar was cold, cold as ice. "My fault," he heard himself groan. "I set you to watch Tomball, an' Tomball had the gun hid in the woods, an' he got it an' shot you. My fault, Billthomas."

Dikar touched Billthomas, and Billthomas moved under Dikar's hand, Billthomas' eyes opened and stared up into Dikar's face, unseeing. Then they smiled. A faint smile touched Billthomas' gray lips and they moved, but Dikar could not hear what they said.

"What?" Dikar's voice was hoarse, strange to him. "What, Billthomas?" He bent, got his ear near Billthomas' lips.

"What are you tryin' to tell me?"

"Tomball--" the faint whisper came. "Went--over Drop--Took--Marilee--with him..." The whisper faded, Billthomas' eyes closed.

"What?" Dikar yelled. "What was that about Marilee? Billthomas! Did you say Marilee-?" But he saw that Billthomas did not hear him.

Shouts, exclamations, above him told Dikar the Boys had meanwhile come up. "Jumped over the Drop!" someone exclaimed. "They must be smashed on the rocks--"

"No," something shrieked inside Dikar's head. "Not Marilee!" and he was on his feet, was twisting toward the edge of the Drop.

The stream rushed away from Jimlane's still body, rushed down to the end of the woods. Not five paces away it leaped out--up from where it leaped slanted a thick rope of plaited vines to the great trunk of the last tree of all and it was wound round and round that trunk, tight-fastened.

Tomball and Marilee had not jumped over the Drop-!

Somehow Dikar was at the edge of the Drop, careless whether from below they saw him or not. Dikar was looking down, his eyes burning.

Down and down fell the white spume of the stream, down and down fell the awful wall of the Drop, gray-shadowed. Far, far below, the stream smashed itself on a great, jagged rock and joined the waters that brawled white and angry among huge rocks that might have been tumbled there by some unimaginable giants at play.

For a wide space from the foot of the Drop the ground was covered by the great rocks, and that space was made somehow fearful by the shadow of the Mountain that lay on it, but beyond it the sun still lay on a green forest that stretched away to the far land.

Dikar's staring eyes found the edge of that forest, found two figures, small as the dolls the Girls used to make out of rags when first the Bunch came to the Mountain. Two figures clambered over the rocks, nearing the edge of the forest, and the one behind was chunky, black-haired, and the one ahead was brown with her mantle of brown hair!

Till now Dikar had clung to a hope that he had not understood Billthomas rightly, that Billthomas had been mistaken, but now that hope was ended. A terrible rage flared up in Dikar, a rage hotter than the heart of the fire on the Fire Stone. He snatched an arrow from the quiver hung on his shoulder, fitted it to his bow.

"This was why she asked me how I climbed down the Drop," ran searing through his mind. "She planned it this mornin' with Tomball. This mornin' she stole from our bed to seek Tomball an' warn him I'd set the kids to watch him, an' they planned then to kill the youngsters as soon as they'd found out how to flee from the Mountain, together."

He had Tomball on the angle of his arrowhead. The muscles in his arms swelled, the bow grew taut. Careful, now. Careful. The distance was great. He must not miss.

He might miss Tomball and hit Marilee.

What matter? She was as much to blame as he.

Dikar couldn't! His fingers wouldn't open on the bowstring, wouldn't loose the arrow that might bury itself in the flesh of Marilee.

But he must! Not because they fled him. Not even because they had killed Billthomas, and Jimlane. Because even if they didn't want to, the men in green would make them tell where they'd come from, make them tell about the Bunch. That thought opened Dikar's fingers.

Whang!

Dikar's arrow flew straight and fast and true--far out over the rocks it veered, was no longer a live and deadly dart, was a dead stick tumbling aimlessly down, a plaything of the wind.

Another arrow lay ready across Dikar's bow, but he did not loose it. No use. They were too far--Marilee reached the woods, and Tomball. The woods swallowed them. They were making their way through those woods to Them--

Dikar turned to voices behind him, saw Danhall and Henfield, Johnstone and Bengreen, huddled just within the edge of the woods, pale-faced, mouths agape, eyes wide and dark. "Johnstone," Dikar snapped, banging his bow over his shoulder. "Take over as Boss. Take care of Billthomas an' Jimlane. I'm goin' down."

"You dare not," Danhill gasped. "Dikar, you dare not. The Old Ones will strike you--"

"Damn the Old Ones," Dikar snarled and was in the stream, had hands on the rope. He was lowering himself over the edge of the Drop. His legs caught around the vine-rope.

The water battered Dikar. The water filled Dikar's mouth and his eyes and his nose, so that he could not see nor breathe nor hear anything but the roar of the waters. The water had a hundred clubs that pounded Dikar, bruised him. Suddenly the water was only a stinging cold spray on Dikar's naked skin, and he was swinging free between the wet-black face of the Drop and the roar of the stream as it fell, and he was climbing down the rope of plaited vines.

This was as it had been that other time Dikar had climbed down this rope of plaited vines, but that time it had been night and once he had gotten through that first rush of waters it had been black-dark. Bad enough it had been to climb down into dizzy dark, but now there was light, and Dikar could see how the Drop came down from nothingness above and went straight down to nothingness below.

He could look down, endlessly down the swinging frail thread of the rope, down to where the jagged points of rock waited for him if he fell, and the stream smashed itself on the rocks as Dikar would smash if he fell.

From the rocks, so far below, there reached up hands that Dikar could not see, and they pulled at him, pulled him down to the rocks, his climbing too slow for them. Dikar wanted to let go of the rope, wild the desire was in him to let go and fall, fast and faster, down to those gray painted rocks.

Dikar was sick, sick with the terror that he would let go and with the wanting to let go. Suddenly his arms and his legs were without strength to move. He clung to the rope, unmoving, knowing that in the next moment, the very next, he would no longer have even the strength to hang on. "Dikar!" His name came through the mists that swirled around him. "Go on, Dikar. Go on." Dikar looked up to the voice, and he saw that it came not from far above, as it ought, but from the rope itself, from Danhall, hanging on the rope not far above him.

Down through the seething waters at the top of the rope, Bengreen climbed, the water streaming from him! They were following Dikar down. Danhall and Bengreen were following him where he went, in spite of their fear of the Old Ones, in spite of their fear of what might await them down below the Mountain. He was their leader, and they followed him--

Strength was back in Dikar's legs and his arms and he was climbing down again, but he kept his eyes on the wall of the Drop and did not look down. And at last his feet found rock beneath him and Danhall was beside him, and Bengreen; and then Henfield dropped off the rope.

"We wouldn't let Johnstone come," Danhall said, squeezing water from his brown beard, "because you said he should be Boss. What do we do next, Dikar?"

Dikar looked across the waste of tumbled rock to where Tomball and Marilee had been swallowed by the woods. "We go after 'em an' bring 'em back," he said through tight lips, "or we don't go back ourselves. Come on."

They climbed across the stony space, slipping and falling. When they reached the woods, that seemed no different from their own woods, it was easy at first to follow the trail of those they followed, by the small growth they had trodden down, by twigs bent with their passage. Marilee and Tomball had gone carelessly, not knowing they would be followed.

The shadow of the Mountain lengthened with the fast-dropping sun, and it grew dim about the four who hunted a Boy and a Girl. The green faded out of the bushes about them, the brown out of the tree trunks. All color grayed in the dimness, and suddenly there were no marks by which the four could tell which ways Marilee and Tomball had passed.

They cast around, their keen eyes searching each depression in the mossy floor of the woods, the way each tiny leaf hung on the brush, but they could find no sign of where Tomball and Marilee had gone, no sign that they'd ever been farther than where a twig pressed into the last mark of Tomball's foot.

The four Boys from the Mountain came together again, and huddled close, and they became aware that the graying air was chill against their skin, and the forest seemed strangely hushed about them.

"I don't like it here," Henfield said, and it seemed right that he spoke low-toned, as though someone were near to overhear what he said, someone or some thing no one could see. "There's somethin' wrong about these woods. They're too--too quiet." He was yellow-haired as Dikar, his chin fuzzed with what would soon be a beard like Dikar's. "The birds are still, an' the insects, an' I've not seen or heard a rabbit or a squirrel, or anythin' livin'."

"I don't get it." Bengreen was the shortest of the four, his face sharp, his eyes black and deep as a forest pool at night. "I don't get it at all. It's like--like Tomball an' Marilee got this far an' then--an' then were not."

"The Old Ones!" Henfield's voice was thin and piercing, louder it would be a scream. "The Old Ones have taken 'em an' they'll take us. We're lost! Dikar, we're dead an' worse than dead!"

Chapter VI: DEATH IN THE WOODS

A chill struck deep into Dikar as he heard Henfield's cry. All his life, all his life that was real to him and not a dream of Long-Ago, Dikar had believed that anyone who broke a Must-Not of the Old Ones would meet with a punishment the more awful because none knew what it was. By climbing down the Drop Marilee and Tomball had broken the most fearful of those Must-Nots.

Dikar recalled that he was the first of the Bunch to have broken that Must-Not, and that he had not been punished. "The Old Ones sleep under the rocks," he snapped, angrily because of the tremble of fear that had not yet left him. "They're not in these woods an' there is nothin' else here that could have taken Tomball an' Marilee without leavin' a sign. Stop talkin' foolishness an' use your eyes, an' you will find some sign of what took 'em, or of which way they went."

"Maybe," Danhall grunted. "Maybe you can, Dikar, seein' you're so smart."

"Maybe I can," Dikar answered. "Wait here, an' I'll try." He turned from them, moved to a big tree near which they were standing, ran up into its top as swiftly and easily as any squirrel. Thick boughs made steps for Dikar's feet, leaves rustled against his face, stroked his body, and then his head came out through the roof of the tree into a sunlight strangely ruddy.

The top of the forest stretched away from Dikar, a strange, bright green in that light, and solid seeming. About as far from him as from the clearing to the edge of the Drop, the forest ended and past its end the ground rose in a hill that was neither green nor stone--gray like any other ground Dikar remembered ever seeing, but a pale yellow that seemed to be striped.

Up through this yellow ground a wide brown stripe curved to the top of the hill, where, sharp-lined against the darkening sky, was a house not as long as the Boys' House but higher, its roof curiously shaped. Midway up the front of the house another roof stuck out, and the outer edge of this was post-propped like the roof of the eating place.

Just above this smaller roof, a row of windows flashed red as though there was fire within, but no smoke rose from the house, so Dikar knew this could not be.

Dikar's eyes came back to the leafy canopy of the woods. A low exclamation guttered in his throat. All that green stretch swayed a little with the wind, but, quarter way between him and the edge of the forest a tree swayed against the wind, and then another, just beyond, did the same.

Dikar marked the direction in which the trees moved so strangely, and dropped down to the waiting Boys. "Found 'em!" he cried. "They've taken to the treetops. They're goin' that way." Dikar threw out his arm to show.

"Come on then," Bengreen cried.

"Not in such a hurry," Dikar checked him. "They don't know we follow 'em, an' they'll be goin' slow, not sure of what is ahead. We can take time to think, an' we must, for remember Tomball has the gun an' can kill us, one by one, before we get near enough to him to bring him down with our arrows."

"What then, Dikar?"

Dikar told them the plan that had come into his head, and, as he had ordered, they spread out wide either side of the path Tomball and Marilee traveled, wide of each other because that way there was less chance of making noise to warn Tomball. Then they moved in the direction those they hunted moved, swift and soundless as when they hunted a deer downwind.

Now that Dikar was alone he needed no longer to pretend to be unafraid. These woods were fear-filled, as Danhall had sensed, but not for the reason Danhall had named. The Old Ones did not prowl them, nor were there any other strange beings in them that could make a Boy vanish.

The dread that lay heavy here was the dread that lay over all this far land, of Them who were more cruel than any beast, of their fists and whips and guns and the fearful things they did to the people who once had lived peacefully in this land.

There was no longer an endless, rolling thunder in the sky, such as Dikar remembered from his dream of the Long-Ago, but in the sky was a dark, dark cloud, unseen but very real, that laid over all the land, over the forests and the fields and the cities, a night of the soul that had lasted long, too long.

Only on the Mountain had there been any light, this long time, any hope of a tomorrow. Dikar was thinking of his dream, as he ran naked and silent through the woods, was thinking of the Voice he had heard in his dream, the Voice that had spoken to the mothers who, with their very littlest children and the very oldest of the men, were the last ones left in the last city untaken by the hordes, the city there no longer had been any hope of saving from them.

"This is the dusk of our day," the Voice had said, "of the America we lived for, and die for. If there is to be any hope of a tomorrow, it must rest with these little children in an attempt to save whom you are about to sacrifice yourselves. If they perish, America shall have perished. If by some chance they survive, then, in some tomorrow we cannot foresee, America will live again and democracy, liberty, freedom, shall reconquer the green and pleasant fields that tonight lie devastated."

The little children of whom that Voice had spoken, all of them who survived the flight from the city, had grown now to be the Bunch on the Mountain. And now, when almost they were ready for their task of bringing that tomorrow to these once green and pleasant fields, two of them swung through the treetops to betray them to their enemies, and destroy them.

It was of this that Dikar thought as he ran through the woods. Had Tomball been only his own enemy, only one who had taken his mate from him, if Marilee had been only the mate who was false to him, Dikar would have sent Danhall and Henfield and Bengreen back to the Mountain and pursued them alone. But it was the enemies of the Bunch he hunted, the enemies of an America, love for which, though he had never known it, was part of Dikar's blood, part of his breath, part of his soul.

And so Dikar came to the edge of the forest and fell to his hands and knees and crawled a little way out into the high, yellow grasses that striped with yellow the hill beyond the forest, and lay there waiting.

Somewhere in these grasses, Dikar knew, along the front of the woods, lay the three others, their eyes on the tops of the trees, on the green brush that met the grasses, arrows fitted to their bows, as his was. For this was his plan.

When Tomball and Marilee came to the edge of the woods, and came out into the open, the nearest Boy would shoot them down at once, before they were seen, before Tomball had a chance to use his gun. That they would come into the open, Dikar did not question. Had not Tomball tried, last night, to show the flame of the fire stick to the plane? Tomball was not afraid of Them. Tomball had come down to the far land to look for Them.

If only it did not get too dark to see Tomball, and Marilee, before they came out of the woods. The sun no longer lay on the grasses here. It just touched the roof of the house, there on top of the hill, soon would leave that too.

The sun no longer lay on the grasses, here where Dikar hid, but the hot smell of the sun was in his nostrils, and the ground was still warm with it. The ground was warmer than the ground on the Mountain ever got, it was warm as the body of Marilee when Marilee lay against Dikar's body, and the scent of the grasses was like the scent of Marilee's breath.

A lump rose in Dikar's throat. He was waiting here for Marilee, waiting to send an arrow into her slim, brown body. As so many times he had waited hidden in the forest to kill a deer, he was waiting to kill Marilee.

In that very instant that her lips lay on his, burning, Marilee had been thinking how she would find Tomball, how she would tell him of the rope that hung over the edge of the Drop! With her arms about Dikar, she had planned how to help Tomball kill Jimlane and Billthomas!

If ever anyone deserved to be killed, it was Marilee!

The ache in Dikar's breast was not an ache but a terrible, tearing pain--his muscles tightened. His head lifted, his lips tight-pressed within his beard, his nostrils flaring, ears and eyes straining.

Dikar started to ease, tensed again. No, that rustle in the treetops was not made by the wind. It came nearer. Nearer. Something brown, moving, showed among the leaves. Vanished. An' arm it had been, of this Dikar was sure, though he could not be sure whether it was Marilee's or Tomball's. They had come straight to him. He it was who must kill Tomball. Who must kill Marilee.

The pain within Dikar was as if someone had plunged an arrow into his vitals, was twisting it--

Dikar saw a form, crawling out on a thick bough. It was screened by the leaves at first, then Dikar saw black hair, a thick-lipped face. Tomball! Peering out of the tree with narrowed eyes. Dikar leaped erect, his bow taut--

Whang!

A feather quivered where Tomball's eye had been. Tomball, sprawling, black-shaggy, tumbled out of the tree, thudded into the brush beneath. A scream, a Girl's scream, came out of the tree and Dikar had another arrow laid across his bow, was tautening his bowstring once more. Shadowy in the treetop he could see Marilee. Marilee's voice came out from among the leaves. "Dikar!"

Marilee was out now, where Dikar could see her plain. Erect on the bough where Tomball had been, she held to an upper bough with one hand, stretched the other out to Dikar.

She was crying his name again. Her long hair was caught back among the leaves out of which she'd come, and Dikar could see her satin body, her lovely body he had held in his arms. His eyes fastened on the flowery circlet over Marilee's left breast. He would shoot her there--

"Dikar! What are you doing, Dikar? You're not going to--" Marilee's cry was checked by the arrow that was in her side, caught by its head in her flesh. She swayed, started to fall. Dikar's shot had gone wrong!

Dikar hadn't shot at all. His arrow was still across his tautened bow! Marilee fell! She caught the tree's lowermost bough with blind hands, hung from them, red streaking her side from where the arrow was caught in it. Someone else had shot her with that arrow. One of the other Boys. Marilee's left hand dropped from the bough by which she hung. The right hand let go and she fell--

Into Dikar's arms, somehow he was under the tree in time to catch her. Her weight crashed him down into the brush, but he fell sitting, with Marilee in his arms.

"Dikar." Her lips were white, her nostrils flaring. "You killed Tomball." There was pain in her brown eyes, but they were shining. "I'm glad. He was awful. I saw him shoot Jimlane and Billthomas, an' then he turned the gun on me--said he'd shoot me if I didn't go with him. He had the gun an' Jimlane's bonarrer, an' he'd found the rope long ago. First I was going to let him--kill me--but then I went with him, hoping to get a chance to take the gun away from him an' shoot him before--before--he told Them--"

Marilee's voice, strong at first, faded away. Her head rolled sidewise to Dikar's shoulder, lay there. She lay limp in Dikar's arms, as so often she'd lain asleep. But she wasn't asleep now. She was--

"Dikar!" Danhall was standing above them. "I was too far away to hear what she was saying." Dikar hadn't heard anyone come up, but Danhall and the other two were there. "I shot her. I couldn't hear what she was sayin' to you, thought you were holdin' your arrow because you couldn't get a clear aim at her. I could, so I shot her. Can you forgive me, Dikar? Can you-?"

"Forgive you, Danhall?" The words fell like stones from Dikar's lips. "You didn't know--Sure, I forgive you for killin' Marilee."

"Killin' her!" Bengreen exclaimed. "Bunk! She's not killed. Look at the way she's bleedin'. I've killed too many deer not to know bleedin' stops when one's dead. She's alive, you nuts, but she won't be alive long if you keep on sittin' there, holdin' her like a ninny an' lettin' her bleed."

"Not dead," Dikar whispered, staring down at the redness that welled out of Marilee's side and ran down over his thighs. "She's not--"

He could think again, could move again. He lifted Marilee across his arms, laid her gently down on a bed of soft moss near the foot of the tree out of which Danhall had shot her, knelt again.

"Find me some of those leaves that stop bleedin'," he threw over his shoulder. "Quick." He saw now that the arrow had gone deep in Marilee's side, but its point had hit bone and so it had not gone in far enough to kill her, not even far enough for its barbs to be held except by a little skin. Dikar pulled the arrow out, flung it away. Blood spurted and he put his hands down on the wound, pressed.

"Lift han's up, you fella!" a new voice ordered, hoarse and terrible. "Hurry befoh you get one big lot lead in you."

Dikar's hands were red with Marilee's blood, but the bleeding had stopped and if he lifted them it would start again. He turned his head to say so, saw a great long gun pointing from out in the light, saw the black hands that held the gun, and the man against whose shoulder the hands held the gun.

The man stood straddle-legged out in the yellow field. He was dressed in dark green, and the little round things that held the green together were yellow bright in the fading light. His black face was flat-nosed and shiny, animal like. His thick, purplish lips snarled like those of a wildcat, just before it pounces on its prey.

Chapter VII: REFUGE

The brush rustled, a little way from Dikar, where Bengreen and Danhall and Henfield had been looking for the leaves Dikar needed. "Come out you fella," the black man ordered. His big eyes, that had too much white in them, moved back and forth a little and his long gun moved back and forth. "Come out fom dere."

Dikar's heart bumped his ribs. Neither eyes nor gun were moving quite to where he was. The black man hadn't seen him! The black man was out there in the light but Dikar, bent down behind the tall brush that marked off the field and the woods, was in the deep shadow of the woods and so the man with the gun hadn't seen Dikar at all.

Arms above his head, Bengreen came out in the field, and Henfield and Danhall came out beside him. "Stop dere," the man said, and the look on his black face, gaping at them, was funny. "Wat kind fella you are?" the black gasped. "W'ere your clo'es?"

"What clothes?" Bengreen asked, grinning. "This ain't winter, is it?" Dikar looked down at his hands. They were red with Marilee's blood but she wasn't bleeding any more. If he took his hands away she would start bleeding again, and she would die.

"You one fella tink you smart, huh?" Dikar heard the black man's hoarse voice, but Dikar was remembering what he had seen men like him do to white women, that dreadful day when he had been in this far land before. Better for Marilee to die than that. "But Jubal smarter," he heard. "Jubal know you 'scape from one fella jail camp an' take all clo'es off so if you get killed nobody know wat guards you pay to let you 'scape. See? No use try fool Jubal. You tell Jubal were you come from, so Jubal get rewahd, an' Jubal make fings easier foh you."

Dikar took his hands away from the wound in Marilee's side. "A good sleep to you, Marilee," he whispered. "A good night. I'll be with you soon."

"W'ere you come from?" Jubal asked again, slow and hoarse, and there was something in his voice that made Dikar shiver. A gust of wind brought the smell of Jubal to Dikar, and that was worse than his voice.

Dikar pulled an arrow from his quiver, looked around for his bow. "If we told you,"--the grin was still in Bengreen's voice--"you would know as much as we do." Dikar remembered that his bow was out there in the field, dropped there when he jumped to catch Marilee. The arrow was no good without the bow.

"W'at you gonna know after Jubal blow you to little pieces wit' dis gun? Don't fink Jubal, no do it. T'ree more dead 'Merican make no diff'rence, Jubal kill plenty already."

"Go ahead. Blow us to pieces an' see if we care. I dare you, an' double--" Dikar didn't hear the rest of what Bengreen was saying because Dikar had slithered silent as a snake, behind the great trunk of the tree. And now he was erect, was leaping high to the tree's lowermost bough, was lying motionless along that bough while all about him was the rustle of leaves, loud and terrifying.

"W'at dat," he heard Jubal's shout. "W'at dat in de tree?" All of Dikar, inside him, pulled together, waiting for the thunder of Jubal's gun, waiting for Jubal's lead to tear through him, but he managed to make a sound through his rounded mouth, the "koooo-hooo" of an owl.

"Nothin' but an owl, Jubal," Danball laughed. "Ain't you ashamed, bein' scared by an owl?"

Dikar slid along the bough, slowly, very slowly, very carefully, and now the tree's leaves made no more sound than as if the wind were blowing through them.

"Jubal no scared," the black's voice came up to him. "Jubal not scared of not'in', but you better be big fella scared of Jubal. You tell were you come from, befoh Jubal count five or Jubal shoot. One on end, with yella hair, first. All right. One--"

Dikar could see them now, through the leaves, the three Boys from the Mountain standing in a line, their arms over their beads, brown and naked except for their little aprons, Jubal, spraddle-legged, black and huge, his eyes small now, and red, his long gun butted against his green shoulder and pointing straight at Henfield.

"Two--"

The Boys were under the tip of the tree boughs, but Jubal was farther out in the field, seven paces at least. Dikar slid further out along the swaying bough.

"Three--"

Dikar was almost to the end of the bough, and it was bending with his weight. If Jubal looked up now, he would see Dikar, couldn't help but see him.

"Four--"

Dikar, gathering his legs under him, saw cords stand out on the back of the black hand whose finger was curled around the little thing on the gun that, pulled, would shoot it off. Jubal was going to say five now, and then--

"No," Henfield screamed. "Don't shoot. Don't shoot me. I'll tell. We're from--"

Dikar leaped, the whip of the bough added to the lash of his muscles sending him out, far out over the heads of the Boys. He hurtled down, straight down on top of Jubal, pounding the black down. Thunder deafened Dikar but his hand slashed down, the arrow clenched in it, lifted and slashed down again on the heaving, screaming thing beneath him, and warm wetness spurted over Dikar's hand and that which was beneath him heaved no longer.

Dikar was on his feet, and the Boys were around him, jabbering words he could not get. Dikar saw Henfield's face, eyes still wide, mouth still agape. Dikar's hand lashed out, slapped, open-palmed, across Henfield's cheek.

"You yellow-belly," Dikar heard himself say. "You lousy yellow-belly," and then he was striding, stiff-legged, back to Marilee, was once more kneeling beside her.

Marilee lay on the green moss, terribly still and terribly white except where the blood was scarlet on her side and browning at the edges. Browning! The blood flowed no more out of Marilee's wound. She'd stopped bleeding--

But Dikar saw the pale nostrils flutter, and he breathed again. Her wound, he saw, had closed of itself. That was why she'd stopped bleeding. The wound wasn't bad, Dikar saw now. Many of the Bunch had been hurt lots worse and none had died...

"Here's your bow, Dikar," Bengreen said, bending to him, "An' Jubal's gun." Dikar looked up.

"You keep the gun," he said, "an' take the Boys back to the Mountain. Go in the tops of the trees, that way you'll leave no trail. It will be night very soon now, an' you have a good chance to get back without their bein' able to follow you."

"To follow us!" Bengreen exclaimed. "What about you? What about Marilee?"

"Marilee can't be carried through the treetops," Dikar sat back on his haunches, "without openin' her wound, an' so she will surely bleed to death on the way. If we make somethin' on which to carry her along the ground, we will make so many signs that we would lead them straight to the Mountain. So Marilee must stay here. I will stay with her, but I promise you that if they come, they will not find either of us alive. Now go, Boys. The quicker you start, the better your chances. Go."

Bengreen shook his head. "No, Dikar. We do not go without you an' Marilee. But you are right about leavin' a trail to the Mountain if we carry her, so we must stay here with you. I must stay, I should say. I have no right to speak for the others."

"You speak also for me, Bengreen," Danhall said. "I do not go back to the Bunch without you an' Dikar and Marilee."

"I speak for myself." Henfield stood straight in the forest shadows that had grown so dark that he too, seemed a shadow. "Dikar! You slapped my face. You called me a yellow-belly. Did you have a gun pointin' at you? Did you bear a voice count, 'One, two, three, four,' very slow, an' know that when it counted 'five,' you would die?"

"No, Henfield."

"Then what right did you have to slap my face an' call me a yellow-belly?"

"I suppose I had no right, Henfield. I suppose I was no fair."

"You had no right, Dikar, but you were right to call me that. I was a yellow-belly, but I am not, an' never will be again. I looked death in the face, an' I did not die, an' I never again will be afraid to die. Dikar, will you let me stay with you an' Bengreen an' Danhall an' Marilee? Because I want to. I want to very much."

Dikar lifted to his feet, put his arm around Henfield's shoulder, and smiled. "You are no yellow-belly," he said, very quietly. "But I will not let you stay, an' I will not let Bengreen or Danhall stay. The Bunch needs you three, an' you can do nothin' by stayin' here. I am still your Boss, Boys, an' I order you to go, an' it is for the good of the Bunch that I order you--" Dikar whirled to a rustle in the brush, saw that a formless shape blotched the fading yellow of the field beyond, saw that Bengreen and Danhall had their bows lifted, arrows across them.

"Don't shoot them things off at me," the shape said, its voice thin as a Girl's but higher-pitched and very tired sounding. "Not that I got much to live for, but I'm a friend, and I came to help you."

"Don't shoot, Boys," Dikar said, and moved nearer, peering. He made out that it was a woman who stood waiting for him, her dress gray and shapeless about her thin, bent frame, the skin of her face stretched tight over the bones beneath, her hands like birds' claws, her hair brown as Marilee's, but drab and lifeless. "You are white," he said. "You are not one of them." In one of her hands was something Dikar could not make out.

"No," the woman laughed, and the sound of her laugh sent a chill through Dikar. "No. I'm not one of them. My name's Martha Dawson and I was born in that house on the hill, and my father was born there, and his father before him. But who and what I am doesn't matter, and it's better for me not to know who you are. I can see that you must have escaped from one of their concentration camps, and I came down to warn you to get away quick, before the patrol comes along to change the guard here, and finds you."

"I can't go away," Dikar said. "My Marilee is hurt too bad to be taken away."

"Your who?" Martha Dawson looked in the direction Dikar had motioned. "Oh. The Girl who fell out of the tree. I heard her scream and I looked out of the window and saw you catch her." She was bending over Marilee. "She is hurt bad, isn't she? She must have been cut by a stone when she fell. Oh, the poor thing."

The woman went down on her knees, putting what she carried down on the ground. "So pretty too, and her hair's long. I never seen--Why, she has no clothes on, only this queer grass skirt. You all must have been hiding in the woods a long time. Yes, I can see that you were. You look too well fed to have been living on the scraps they give us. Your wife has lost an awful lot of blood. She is your wife, isn't she?"

"My--" Dikar checked himself. He'd remembered what "wife" meant. It was the same as mate. "Yes. She is my wife."

"I thought so when you called her 'my Marilee.' Well, don't you worry about her. I saw the way you fought the soldier and I thought one of you might be hurt, so I brought some stuff along. I'll just put a plaster on this cut to hold it together, and then you can carry her up to the house and I'll fix her up right."

"Carry her-!" The way Martha Dawson's hands were working at Marilee's side, Dikar knew that she could heal her, but--"But won't They find her there? Won't that get you into trouble with Them?"

"I've had trouble enough. A little more won't hurt. Besides, I don't think They'll find her, or you neither, unless they search a lot harder than they have already--Oh!" She rocked back on her heels, her eyes widening. "But they will. They'll find that soldier dead in the field and they'll know I couldn't have killed him but they'll be sure I know who did it."

"We can hide Jubal in the woods."

She shook her head.

"No. That won't do. They'll see the blood all around here, and they'll find him, never fear, them blacks is like Indians. Oh goodness. I don't know what to do."

"I do," Dikar exclaimed. "Look, Martha Dawson. One of us wanted to give us away to them an' we had to kill him." By the calm way the woman had acted when she saw how bad hurt Marilee was he knew he could tell her that without her getting excited. "We'll fix things so it will look like he shot Jubal with an arrow, an' that Jubal killed him with his gun before he died."

"Good!" The woman nodded. "That will do it. But you better carry your wife up the hill while your friends are fixing things. We'll go up by the road, the way come down, so as not to leave more tracks than can be helped."

Dikar told the others what to do and then be picked Marilee up in his arms, and went to the road, Martha Dawson beside him, went up the road toward where the house was a pale glimmer in the deep dusk that now had come down over the hill and the fields. just as they reached the house, Dikar heard a shot, and he knew that Tomball had no face any longer, knew that Bengreen was laying the long gun back in Jubal's dead hands, and that Danhall and Henfield were wiping out as much as they could of the marks that would show there had been more there than just Jubal and Tomball.

Martha Dawson opened a door for Dikar, and he went into darkness that smelled a little like the eating place on the Mountain. The door closed behind him, and he felt a hand on his arm.

"Bring her upstairs," the woman said. "This way."

Dikar didn't know what she meant, but he went the way her hand guided him. His toes struck wood, and he half stumbled. "Come on," the woman said, tugging at his arm.

"But there's somethin' in the way here. I can't go any further."

"Something? Oh dear Lord! Don't you know what stairs are?"

"Stairs?"

"Wait. I'll strike a match." Dikar stood stock-still, listening to the sound of her going away from him. He didn't like this place. He was afraid of it. It was too closed in. He could hardly breathe. The woman was coming back, and there was a strange, scratching sound and then there was a little flame growing on the end of a tiny piece of wood in her hand, and her other hand was cupped over it, and she was looking at Dikar as if she'd never seen a Boy before.

"Don't know what stairs are," she said again. "Well, I never-! Look. There they are in front of you." Dikar looked and he saw a kind of hill built out of wood. "Hurry and take her up, before someone comes."

Dikar climbed up what Martha Dawson called stairs, and came to a level place, and they went along the level place, and came to more stairs that he climbed. At the top of these stairs they came into a big room whose roof was high in the middle but slanted down low towards the sides, so that there were hardly any walls at all except in one place where the wall was made higher to make space for a little window.

Dikar stood still, Marilee nestled in his arms, and looked around him. By the light of another match Martha Dawson held he saw that the room was full of tables and little benches, and boxes, and a lot of things Dikar had never seen before, all old-looking and dirty and piled every which way on top of one another, right up to the roof. So full was the room that Dikar couldn't see where he was to put Marilee.

"Wait," the woman said and went past Dikar to a box that stood on end in the middle of the pile's front, a black box almost as big as she was. She knocked on this in a funny way.

The box moved--not the box but the side that was all Dikar could see of it. The side swung out on one up-and-down edge, like a door, and inside the box was a tall man with a thin white face and gray hair. The man was stooped over, and his eyes, deep-sunk in his face, glittered in the matchlight like the eyes of animals glitter in the night-blackened woods.

The man saw Dikar. His lips pulled away from his teeth and his hand came up, and in his hand was a little gun that aimed right at Dikar.

Chapter VIII: SEARCH

"It's all right, John," Martha Dawson said. "They're all right. They escaped from a concentration camp, and this young man's wife is bad hurt and I've promised to hide her here with you."

The man John peered past Martha Dawson, looking more closely at Dikar. "From a camp?" His voice was deep, much deeper than Dikar thought could come from so thin a chest, and it was a very tired voice. The woman moved so that the match light from inside her cupped hand fell on Dikar. "Aye, I see now. I could only see a black shape in the dark, and I thought that I had been betrayed, and that they had forced you to show them where I was."

"Never!" Martha Dawson cried out, and then. "Who would betray you, John? Who would tell them you are here?"

John looked at her, and Dikar saw that there were deep lines in his face, lines of pain, and that his lips were gray. "I've just had bad news, Martha. They raided zee-seven this morning, so suddenly there was no chance to blow it up, and they took Ed Stone alive. But we're keeping our friends standing. Bring her in here, my friend," he said to Dikar, moving back into his box. "Bring her in."

John's voice came out of blackness inside the box, but something in that voice told Dikar he need not be afraid of him, nor of anything in the blackness, and he went into the box carrying Marilee. Martha Dawson's match went out, and Dikar stopped short, the blackness thumbing his eyes.

Martha Dawson pushed against Dikar's back, and he got moving again, and the other side of the box wasn't there, as he'd expected, but he went right on into a feel of bigger space. He heard sound of door-closing behind him, felt a hand on his arm stopping him, and then there was light.

The light came from a shining thing that hung by a wire over Dikar's head, and Dikar saw that he'd gone right through the box into a room hidden behind the pile.

"Lay her there," John said, pointing to a bed that stood against one side of the room. "It's clean and comfortable, I assure you."

Dikar put Marilee down on the bed, and Martha Dawson was beside the bed. Her hand took hold of Marilee's wrist and she seemed to be listening for something, and then she smiled and said, "Her pulse is strong." She put her hand on Marilee's forehead, and said, "She has no fever at all."

Dikar didn't know what the words meant, but he knew that Martha Dawson meant that Marilee would be all right, and breath hissed from between his teeth. "Martha," John said. "You'd better go down and make some hot water to wash her with, and bring it up with the iodine and bandages. You ought to have light on down there anyway, or our sweet guardian might start wondering what you're up to."

Martha (the man called her that, Dikar noticed, instead of the longer Martha Dawson) looked queerly at John. "Our guardian won't notice anything," she said. "He's dead. This young man killed him."

"Ah," John nodded. "That means trouble, of course. Well, we can only hope and pray as we've done all along. Go on, my dear."

He moved, and there was darkness again. Dikar heard the boxdoor open and shut. The light came back, and Dikar was peering around the room, so much in it strange to him.

There was the bed on which Marilee lay and a little table in the middle of the room, and a little bench with a back. The wall of the room in which was the door was covered with things Dikar vaguely recalled were named "books." The roof slanted down to the wall opposite this, and this was low except for a narrow space where it was built higher to make space for a window, but the window was covered over with a gay-colored, thick rug so that Dikar couldn't see them.

But it was at the fourth wall at which Dikar stared longest. A narrow table along the full width of this. Under the table were a lot of small black boxes, and on top of it was a jumble of wires and black boards standing up and lying down, and round things marked with little white lines, and a lot of shining things like what hung from the ceiling and made light in the room. In the middle of the wall above the table was something that Dikar recognized.

It was from a thing like it that the Voice in Dikar's dream had come, the Voice that had spoken about the dusk that had come to America, and the tomorrow that might never be. Dikar remembered the name of this thing, and said it aloud.

"A radio," he said.

"Yes," John said. "And now you know that you're in one of the stations of the Secret Net." His hands went wide. "The oldest of them, my friend. Five years I've operated it from here, five long years since I escaped from a concentration camp and in all the five years I have not seen the sun. In those five years I have had from that loud speaker"--he pointed to the thing on the wall that Dikar had recognized--"news of the unearthing of hundreds of our stations, news of the death of hundreds of our co-workers. Time and time again that speaker has brought me word that we were almost ready to rise against the invaders, and time and time again it has brought me word that they had found our leaders and hung them, and that all the work was to be done over again.

"Yes," John said. "This is the oldest of the stations, now that at last Ed Stone's gone, and I am the luckiest of the agents of the Secret Net, but tonight, my friend, I somehow have a feeling that my luck has run out. Perhaps that is only because I am tired and hungry, for Martha dares not bring me food until dark. They do not, I know, suspect that I am here, but they know I am alive, somewhere, and always they keep a sentry, out there in the woods, watching my wife and waiting for me to contact her." He smiled, and his smile was bitter. "That is why they have permitted her so long to live on here, unmolested. But I must hear your story. I thought that the prison camps were now too well guarded for anyone to escape from them. How did you and your wife manage it? What camp do you come from?"

Dikar shook his head. "We come from no camp. I don't even know what you mean by that word, camp."

"You--you don't-! You're American, aren't you?"

"Yes," Dikar said. "We are American." He knew, without just knowing how, that he could talk to this man freely and that it was important that he talk to him. "We come from the Mountain, off there beyond those woods."

And then Dikar went on to tell John about the Bunch, and about how they came to live on the Mountain, and about their life there.

John listened without interrupting, except to ask a low-toned question or two, when Dikar stopped, and soon after Dikar started talking, Martha came in and listened too, while she tended Marilee. Dikar told about his dream, and how he had come down into this far land and seen what went on here, and how he had gone back to the Mountain.

"I knew then that somehow, sometime, I must lead the Bunch down off the Mountain and try to take back this land for America," he came near the end of his story. "But I could not think how we few could do anything against the black and yellow men when you who are so many could do nothin' against them. Perhaps you can tell me, John?"

"Perhaps I can," John said, his eyes shining. "I must think. But you did come down again to us, Dikar." (Dikar had told them his name.) "And without any plans. Why did you do that?"

Dikar told him about Tomball, and what Tomball had done, and how Tomball died.

"There you are," John turned to Martha. "There's the innate depravity of human nature for you. Here are these youngsters who were isolated from the world when the oldest of them was only eight, who grew up together in such an ideal communion as man has not known since Eden, and yet a renegade turns up among them who would sacrifice them all because his personal ambitions were thwarted. Doesn't that make you despair, my dear?"

"No!" Martha answered, her hands still busy with Marilee. "No, John. Because if Dikar's story has in it one black-souled renegade, it also has in it forty who have worked for one another and lived for one another, sweetly and unselfishly, from childhood to young man--and womanhood. Because it has in it courage and loyalty and self-sacrifice and love that was not taught out of books. Despair, John? No. Dikar's story gives me new hope, new courage."

John moved to Martha, where she knelt by Marilee's bedside, and laid his hand on her head. "I'm wrong, Martha. You are wiser than I. Far wiser--" Just then Marilee stirred, and her eyes opened.

"Dikar," she whispered. Then, fright in her voice: "Dikar!"

Dikar leaped to her. "It's all right, Marilee. Everything is all right. We've found fr--"

"Hush," John broke in. "Quiet. Listen." At once the room was throbbing with silence.

Into that silence, well-muffled, came the sound of men's voices, shouts. "The patrol's here," John said low-voiced. "They're looking for the sentry you killed. You'd better get downstairs quick, Martha. They might come to ask you about him."

Martha was on her feet, her face set, her hands trembling. John's arm went around her, and he was holding her close to him. He was saying something Dikar could not quite make out, and then they were apart and Martha was going toward the door, straight, trembling no longer. The light went out, and the door opened and closed.

"Let's take a look outside," Dikar heard John say, and he heard him moving in the darkness. Then there was pale light in the darkness, starlight breaking the blackness of a wall, John's hand blotching it as it held aside that which hung over the window.

Dikar darted across the floor and was pressed against John, looking out.

Just below was the smaller roof Dikar had seen from the woods, and below that, yellow light lay on the ground. Down at the bottom of the hill, bright lights danced in the yellow grass and on the brush and trees at the edge of the woods. Black against these lights were the forms of men, and it was from these men that the shouting came.

"Look," John whispered, "there in the wheat." Dikar saw the black shape of his finder pointing, and looked in the direction the finger pointed.

Where the finger pointed, in the middle of the field, was one man who did not move. The arm held a light, and the light was on his face, and Dikar could see that the face was round and yellow. The mouth of that face was a straight, thin line and the eyes were slanted slits in the yellow skin, and there was a look on the face that made Dikar afraid.

"That's Captain Li Logo," John said. "He's provost for this district. He's shrewd as a fox and cruel as a tiger. It's hard luck that he had to come along with the patrol, on this night of all nights."

Dikar felt Marilee press against him from behind. "Go back to bed, sweet," he said. "You'll hurt yourself more."

"I'm all right, Dikar," Marilee whispered. "I feel fine. And I want to see too."

A louder shout came through the window. "They found the body," John said quietly but, pressed against him, Dikar could feel that now he was trembling.

The lights moved together, clustering at one place just at the edge of the woods. Captain Logo went down to where the lights clustered, and the babble of shouts from there stopped, and all Dikar could hear was a single high-pitched voice.

"I'll open the window," John said, "if you'll let me get at it." Dikar and Marilee moved back a little.

"Are you sure you're feelin' all right?" Dikar whispered under cover of a scraping noise in front of them.

"Sure. The woman gave me something to drink, before I quite woke up, and it's made me all warm inside, and strong again."

Cold wind came in on them, and the sounds from outside were louder, the sound of that single high-pitched voice, but Dikar could not understand what it said. Then there was another shout, hoarse like Jubal's, and a light showed within the edge of the woods, and Captain Logo went in there.

"They've found Tomball," Dikar said. "We'll soon know if we've fooled them."

Logo's high voice stopped the shouting again. The other shapes were separating. They were running back and forth in what John had called wheat, their lights shining on the yellow grass, and on their black faces. They were all dressed in green, like Jubal, and had queer round things on their heads, and they all had long guns like Jubal's.

"There are seven of them," Marilee said. "I counted."

One of the lights stopped, suddenly, and the one that carried it bent low, and straightened again, and as a shout came from him Dikar saw what the light shone on.

"Jeeze!" he grunted. "It's my bow. I forgot all about it. There was one by Tomball, so now they know there was at least one more of us."

Captain Logo came to the black who had found Dikar's bow, and he looked at it, and then he put his band to his mouth, and there was shrill sound from him. The blacks all came running to him, and clustered about him a minute, and then they were all running up the hill toward the house, their long guns in their hands, slanted across the front of them, their lights out.

"That's torn it," John said, low-toned. "They're coming to search the house, and they're certain to find this hideout. My premonition was right. My luck has run out. Well," he said, pushing back from the window. "There's only one thing left to do."

"What?" Dikar asked.

"To let them get inside," came the answer in John's tired voice, "and then push a button on this radio table, a button that will blow the house and everyone in it to pieces. If you kids are afraid to die, you can get out by this window and surrender, but I wouldn't advise it. No," he sighed. "I would not advise you to surrender to them."

"Wait," Dikar said. "Maybe--" He was still looking out and down. They had reached the house, and had stopped in front of it, and Li Logo was saying something to the black men he bossed, was waving his arms around. "Maybe something will happen to save us yet. Maybe they'll go away without searching the house."

"Not Logo," John answered. "Not when he's on the scent of something. But I'll wait as long as I dare."

Down below, the black men were separating. One moved a little away from the house and stood in the field, his gun in his two hands, looking watchfully around him. Two went one way, one another, and disappeared around the corners of the house.

"They're going to watch," Marilee whispered, "on all sides to see that nobody gets away."

An owl hooted, somewhere in the dark. The three blacks left went with Logo under the little roof that stuck out from the front of the house, and there was the sound of knocking from down there. The sound of knocking was in the room! Dikar whirled around.

"It's all right," John said. "I've just turned on the speaker system--something that lets me hear everything that happens downstairs--" He checked as another voice came into the room. It was Martha's voice.

"What shall I do, John?" she asked, very quietly.

"Let them in, dear, as we always planned," John answered her, just as quietly. "And--Martha. I'll meet you--on the Other Side."

"On the Other Side, John dear," Martha's voice came through the knocking.

There was the sound of footsteps going across the floor. There was a rattle, and the sound of knocking stopped, and Dikar heard a door open.

"Good evening, Missee Dawson," he heard Captain Logo's voice, very gentle, very smooth. "So sorry I must bother you, but I wish to come in with my men. You have no objections, of course."

"Of course I have objections, but they won't do me any good, will they?"

"Sorry, no. So very sorry." Feet trampled, many feet. Then, "Well, Missee Dawson. Where is he?"

"'He'? I don't understand."

"You understand quite well. One of my men was murdered, down there in your field, some time today. He got one of the assassins, but there was another. That other is your husband, come home at last. I want him."

"Go ahead and look for him, if you think he's here. Search the house."

"I do not wish to bother. You will call him to surrender."

"I will not."

"I think you will, Missee Dawson," and then there was a scream in Dikar's ears, a scream loud and shrill and very dreadful. "So sorry," Captain Logo hissed. "So very sorry."

Chapter IX: TOMORROW WILL COME

Dikar heard that from the sill of the window on which he was crouched Marilee's hand was pulling John's hand away from the button on the radio table. "Shut the talkin' thing off." Dikar heard her whisper, as he'd told her to, and while she was telling John the rest of what Dikar had told her to, Dikar dropped to the little roof below. He crouched out there, looking down to where, quite suddenly, quite silently, the black who watched the front of the house had crumpled into the wheat.

"Hooo-" the hoot of an owl came from his lips, and "Hoooo-" came an answer from near the still, black heap in the wheat. What little sound Dikar made jumping from the roof to the ground was covered by Martha's screams inside the house. The yellow light from the house's windows glimmered on the naked brown skin of Henfield, lifting up out of the wheat to meet Dikar.

"There were four outside," Dikar whispered.

"We got 'em all," the answer came. "I took two an' Bengreen an' Danhall each took one." Two other shadowy forms rose out of the wheat beside them. "What next, Dikar?"

Dikar hooted twice, then whispered his plan. "Give me your bonarrer, Danhall," he finished. "I'm a better shot than you." He took them, turned to the open door of the house, where Martha's screams had stopped.

The door was wide and Dikar could see everybody in the room inside. One of the blacks had hold of Martha. The top part of her clothes were torn and a knife in Li Logo's hand was red-tipped, and now Martha's flesh was bleeding, but Martha and Logo and the blacks were looking at the stairs that came down out of the roof of the room, at the gray-haired man who stood halfway down the stairs, hands behind his back, tall and straight and proud.

One of the blacks held Martha and the other two pointed their long guns at John, but it was Logo who spoke to John, what he said coming clear and distinct to Dikar. "Ah, John Dawson," Captain Logo said in that soft, thin voice of his. "I thought your wife's screams would bring you out of your hole."

Once more Dikar hooted, and in the same instant he loosed the arrow, and the twang of his bow was joined by the twang of two other bows in his ears. Inside the house the three blacks crumpled to the floor, an arrow in each of their backs, and John's hand came out from behind his back and the little gun in it flashed fire, and Captain Li Logo was down on top of one of his blacks, but his head was lifted, his eyes looking hate at John.

"So sorry," John Dawson said. "So very sorry, Captain Li Logo," and his little gun flashed fire again, and Li Logo's head fell down, and he was as dead as the men he had bossed for the last time.

The cool, green-smelling dark of the woods closed around the five from the Mountain, and around John Dawson and Martha. The Bunch would have wondered, could they have seen, what strange, heavy loads they were that the Boys and John carried, and they would have wondered at the light without fire that came to life in the hand of Marilee as she followed behind Martha and the men, smoothing out such signs of their passage through the woods as she could.

"Eight rifles, nine revolvers, and all the stuff necessary to rebuild my wireless," John chuckled. "Quite a beginning for what we'll need to bring tomorrow to America, as you put it. But you did a good job with your bows and arrows, you four."

The pallid, gaunt man seemed now to have found a new vitality; he walked with the step of a young man, and the memory of horror no longer lived in his eyes.

"We did only our best," Dikar muttered, looking back uneasily. "Martha said their blacks are good trackers. Is that right, John?"

Thunder blotted out the start of John Dawson's answer, a great clap of thunder from where they'd just come, and back there the sky was lit with red light. And then the sky was black again, and the thunder had ended, and John was chuckling.

"Yes. Dikar," he said. "Their blacks are good trackers, but I doubt very much that they will be tracking us. Now you know why I had you carry all the corpses into the house. It was already mined, as you know, and I set a time-fuse before we left, and all that anyone will ever find back there will be a big, charred hole in the ground and a mass of fragments too small to be identified. It isn't the first station of the Secret Net that has been blown up during a raid, and not the first in which everyone, prisoners and raiders, have perished. That is what they will think happened there, and they will not bother to look for Martha and me, nor will they ever know you and your friends were there."

"Ah," Dikar said, and felt eased. There was yet a long way to go to the Mountain, and there was still all these people and all these things to be gotten to the top of the Drop, and the load on his shoulders was heavy, but when he thought of what they would do with the load, of all the plans John and he would make, the load and his heart were light as the feathers of a bird.

The sun struck brightness through Dikar's eyelids and woke him, and though the night had held very little sleep, he was instantly awake. He flung out his arm to waken Marilee found nothingness--remembered that he had given his place in the bed in his little house to Martha Dawson, was back again, for this night, in the Boys' House.

Dikar leaped from his cot, and all around him the flashing brown bodies of the Boys of the Bunch leaped from theirs, and there were shouts of welcome to him, but Dikar ran out of the house and through the woods toward his little house, and Marilee. He went quietly when he neared the little house, and stood in the doorway peering in, and then his heart bumped his ribs as he saw that only Martha was inside on the bed.

"Where's Marilee?" Dikar demanded. "Where's my Marilee?"

Martha smiled at him. "Come in," she said. "Come in, son, I want to give you a little piece of advice."

Dikar went in, wondering, and squatted on the floor by the bed. Martha's fleshless hand reached out and took his, and she said, very softly, "Listen son. Don't bother your Marilee mornings. And be very gentle with her, very tender."

"I am," he said. "I try always to be."

"I know," Martha answered. "But try harder now. Don't mind it if she is irritable with you, and unreasonable, and angry over trifles."

"What do you mean?" Dikar cried. "What are you talkin' about?"

He had drawn taut now, staring at her and fear had come suddenly into his eyes.

"Go ask her," Martha said. "She is the one to tell you what I mean, though I had to tell her, myself, this morning. You children," she said, and there was a wetness in her eyes. "You precious infants. Go, Dikar, I hear her outside."

Dikar rose and he went out again, and Marilee was coming toward him out of the bushes, and her face was greenish as it had been the morning before, but her eyes were shining. "Dikar!" she cried, lifting her arms wide to him, and Dikar ran to her. "Oh, Dikar. I have something to tell you."

And then Dikar was holding Marilee close, close to him, and she was whispering something in his ears, and his heart leaped within him and in his veins his blood ran laughing and glad as the streams that laugh down the Mountain.

But after awhile Dikar sobered, and his face was grave, his voice solemn. "Now indeed, Marilee," Dikar said, "I must work hard for the day when I shall lead the Bunch down from the Mountain to an America retaken for freedom and liberty. For you an' I, Marilee, were the children of a dark yesterday, but ours must be the child of a bright an' shinin' tomorrow."

THE END

SEVEN OUT OF TIME

Chapter 1
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE

"You have not found Evelyn Rand."

"No sir," I agreed. "But I--"

"No excuses, Mr. March." The office was enormous, the desk massive, but sitting behind the latter Pierpont Alton Sturdevant dominated both. Not because of any physical quality. He was below average in stature nor did his graying hair have the patches of white at the temples that fiction writers and the illustrators of advertisements seem to think are the invariable mark of 'men of distinction.' It was rather his hawk's nose and the sexless austerity of his thin mouth that made me think of him as resembling some Roman Emperor, and myself, a very junior attorney on the staff of the august firm of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby and Garfield, as some young centurion returned from Ulterior Gaul. "You should know by this time," the dry voice rustled, "that I am not interested in excuses, but only in facts."

I had, in truth, just returned to the city, from the remote reaches of suburban Westchester, and what I had to report was failure. "The fact is, sir, that I have not found Evelyn Rand."

Sturdevant was very still, looking at me in the huge leather armchair to which he'd motioned me with a terse, 'Good morning.' He was expressionless and still for a long moment and then he asked, "If you continue searching for her, how soon do you think you will be able to locate her?"

I didn't like that if. I didn't like it at all but I contrived to keep my dismay out of my face and my voice. "I can't say, Mr. Sturdevant. I haven't been able to unearth a single clue as to what happened to her." The girl had walked out of her Park Avenue apartment house that Sunday morning, two weeks ago yesterday, and vanished. "The doorman seems to have been the last person ever to see her. He offered to call a taxi for her and she said that she would walk to church. He watched her go down the block and around the corner."

"I could not take my eyes off the lass," the grizzled attendant had told me, "though my 'phone was buzzing like mad. She swung along freelike an' springy like as if it was the ould sod was under her feet ate not this gray cancrete that chokes the good dirt. I was minded o' the way my own Kathleen used to come up Balmorey Lane to meet me after work was done, longer ago than I care to think."

By the way he spoke and the look in his faded eyes, I knew I needed only to tell him what it would mean to Evelyn Rand if the fact that she had never returned--never been seen again, got out, to keep him silent. And so it had been with the elevator boy who had brought her down from her penthouse home and with the servants she had there; the granite-faced butler, the buxom cook, Renee Bernos, the black-haired and vivacious maid. Each of them would go to prison for life sooner than say a single word that might harm her. Nor was this because she was generous with her wages and her tips. One cannot buy love.

"That is all you have been able to discover," Sturdevant pressed me.

"That is all."

"In other words you are precisely where you were two weeks ago," he murmured, "except for this." He turned a paper on his desk so that I could see it, then tapped it with a long, bony finger. "Except, Mr. March, for this."

It was a statement of account headed ESTATE OF DARIUS RAND, Dr., to STURDEVANT, HAMLIN, MOSBY & GARFIELD, Cr. Beneath this heading was a list of charges, thus:

1-27-47 1/2 hr. P. A. Sturdevant, Esq. @ $400                                  $ 200.00
1-27-47--2/10/47 88 1/4 hrs. to Mr. John March @ $25                           $2206.25
1-27-47 Disbursements and expenses to Mr. John March, (acct. 2-10-47 attached)   $64.37
Total                                                                          $2470.62

"Two thousand, four hundred and seventy dollars and sixty-two cents," Sturdevant's finger tapped the total, "up to last Saturday. To which must be added the charge for this quarter hour of my time and yours, plus whatever you have spent over the weekend. Two and a half thousand dollars, Mr. March, and no result."

He paused but I said nothing. I was waiting for what he would say next.

He said it. "As trustee of the Estate of Darius Rand I cannot approve any further expenditure. You will return to your regular duties, Mr. March, and I shall notify the police that Miss Rand has disappeared."

And that was when I lost my grip on myself--"No!" I fairly yelled as I came up to my feet. "You can't do that to her." He wasn't the Head of the Firm to me in that moment. He was a shrivelled old curmudgeon whose scrawny neck I lusted to wring. "You can't make her a pauper. You don't know what you're doing."

I stopped. Not by reason of anything Sturdevant said or did, for he said or did nothing. I don't know how he made me aware I was making a fool of myself, but he did.

And now he said, quietly, "I know exactly what I am doing. I know better than you do that because of the embarrassment his actress wife had caused him, before she died, by trailing her escapades through the newspapers, Darius Rand's will tied up his fortune in a trust fund the income of which goes to his daughter Evelyn only as long as her name never appears for any reason whatsoever in the news columns of the public press. When she vanished I determined as her legal guardian to conceal the situation for a reasonable length of time since a report to the police must inevitably bring her name into the newspapers. That reasonable time has in my opinion now expired without any hope of her return and I no longer can justify my silence. Therefore, as trustee of--"

"The Estate of Darius Rand," I broke in. "You're measuring the happiness of a girl against dollars and cents."

The faint shadow that clouded Sturdevant's ascetic countenance might mean I'd gotten under his skin but his answer did not admit it. "No, Mr. March. I am measuring a sentimental attachment to a young lady over whose welfare I have watched for more than six years against the dictates of duty and conscience."'

"Aren't there times, sir, when one may compromise a bit with duty and even conscience?" Not him, I thought. Not this dried mummy, but I had to try to persuade him. "Give me a week more. Just the week. I'll take a leave of absence without pay, I'll even resign, so you won't have to charge the Estate for my time. I'll pay the expenses out of my own pocket. If you'll only keep this thing away from the police and the papers for a week I'll find Evelyn. I'm sure I will."

Gray eyebrows arched minutely. "It seems to me that you are oddly concerned," Sturdevant mused, "with a young lady whom you have never seen, whom you never even heard of up to fourteen days ago. Or am I mistaken in that?"

"No," I admitted. "Fourteen days ago I was not aware that Evelyn Rand existed. But today," I leaned forward, palms pressing hard on the desktop, "today I think I know her better even than I know myself. I know her emotional makeup, how she would react in any conceivable situation. I have literally steeped myself in her personality. I have spent hours in her home, her library, her boudoir. I have talked on one pretext or another with everyone who was close to her; her servants, her dressmaker, her hairdresser. I know that her hair is the color of boney and exactly how she wears it. I know that she favors light blues in her dress and pastel tones of pink and green. I have even smelled the perfume she had especially compounded for her."

In his little shop on East Sixty-third Street, the walrus-mustached old German in the long chemist's smock had looked long and uncertainly at me. "Ich weiss nicht--" he muttered.

"You say a friend from Fraulein Rand you are und a bottle from her individual perfoom you want to buy her for a present. Aber I don't know. Ven I say so schoen ein maedchen many loffers must haff, she laughs und says she hass none. She says dot ven someone she finds who can say to her so true tings about her as dot I say in der perfoom I make for her, den she vill haff found her loffer but such a one she hass not yet met."

"Look," I argued. "Would I know the number of the formula if she had not told it to me?"

It was from Renee Bernos I had gotten it, but the German was convinced. When I opened the tiny bottle he'd sold me for enough to have fed a slum family a month, my dreary hotel room was filled with the fragrance of spring; of arbutus and crocuses and hyacinths and the evasive scent of leaf-buds; and with another fainter redolence I could not name but that was the very essence of dreams.

For a moment it had seemed almost is if Evelyn Rand herself was there in my room...

"Ah," Sturdevant murmured. "What did you hope to accomplish by so strange a procedure?"

"I figured that if I could understand her, if I could get inside her mind somehow, I should know exactly what was in it when she walked down Park Avenue to Seventy-third Street and turned the corner and never reached the church for which apparently she had set out."

"Is that all you've done in two weeks?"

"This weekend I went out to the house in which Evelyn's childhood was spent. It is closed, of course, but I got the keys from your secretary. I spent most of Saturday in that house and all of yesterday."

The other rooms had told me nothing about Evelyn Rand, and now I was in the last one, the nursery. It was dim and dusty and musty-smelling, for it had been closed and never again entered after a little girl of six had been sent to boarding school because her mother had no time to be bothered with her.

I pulled out a bureau drawer too far. It fell to the floor and split and that was how I found the thing that had slipped into the crack between the drawer's side and its warped bottom, at least fourteen years ago.

As my fingers closed on the bit of carved stone that lay in a clutter of doll's clothes, battered toys and mummified insects, something seemed to flow from it and into me; a vague excitement.

And a vaguer fear.

It was slightly smaller than a dime, approximately an eighth of an inch thick and roughly circular in outline and there was, strangely enough, no dust upon it. It was black, a peculiar, glowing black that though utterly unrelieved appeared to shimmer with a colorless iridescence so that almost it seemed I held in my palm a bit of black light strangely solid. Too, it was incongruously heavy for its size, and when on impulse I tested it, I found it hard enough to scratch glass.

The latter circumstance made more remarkable the accomplishment of the artist who had fashioned the gem. For it was not a solid mass with a design etched seal-like upon it, but a filigree of ebony coils that rose to its surface and descended within its small compass and writhed again into view 'til the eye grew weary of following the Findings.

Close-packed and intricate as were the thread-thin loops, they formed a single continuous line. True, two or three of the coils were interrupted at one point in the periphery by a wedge-shaped gap about an eighth of an inch deep, but the rough edges of the break made it obvious that this was the result of some later accident and not a Part of the original intent.

I could not bring myself to believe that any human could have had the skill and the infinite patience to have carved this out of a single piece of whatever the stone was. It must have been made in parts and cemented together. I bent closer to see if I could find some seam, some evidence of jointure.

I saw none. But I saw the snake's head.

Almost microscopically small yet exquisitely fashioned, it lay midway between the gem's slightly convex surfaces, at its very center. I made out the lidless eyes, the nostrils, the muscles at the corners of the distended mouth.

To avoid any interruption of the design, as I then thought, the reptile had been carved as swallowing its own tail.

A strange, weird toy for a little girl, I thought, and put it away in my vest pocket meaning to fathom out later what it could tell me about Evelyn Rand.

"You seem to have been making a good thing of your assignment," Pierpont Alton Sturdevant remarked, "wangling a week-end in the country out of it, at the Estate's expense."

I felt my face flush and anger pound my temples but if I said what I wanted to, what faint chance there was of persuading him to delay reporting Evelyn's disappearance would be lost. I swallowed, said, "I also talked to the woman who was Evelyn Rand's nurse and with whom she spent the summer before you sent her to college."

"And what did you learn from Faith Corbett?" For the first time a note of interest crept into his voice although his face still was an expressionless Roman mask. "What did you learn from Evelyn's old nurse?"

What I had learned he would not understand. "Nothing," I answered him. "Nothing that I can put into words."

Faith Corbett, so shrunken and fragile it seemed she was one with the shadows of her tiny cottage, had asked me in for a cup of tea. "Evelyn was a dear child," her tenuous voice mused as the scrubbed kitchen grew misty with winter's early dusk, "but sometimes I was frightened of her. I would hear her prattling in the nursery and when I opened the door she would be quite alone, but she would look up at me with those great, gray eyes of hers and gravely say that so-and-so had been there just now, and it would be a name I had never heard."

"Oh," I said. "She was just an imaginative child. And she was always alone except for you and so dreamed up playmates for herself."

"Perhaps so," the old woman agreed, "but she was no child that summer she stayed here with me, and what happened the day before she went away I did not understand and I will never forget."

She took a nibble of toast and a sip of tea and though I waited silently for her to go on, she did not. Her thoughts had wandered from what she'd been saying, as old people's thoughts have a way of doing. "What was it?" I called them back. "What happened the day before Evelyn went away to college?"

"I was packing her trunk," the old lady mused. "I could not find her tennis shoes so I went downstairs to ask her what she had done with them. Evelyn was not in the house, but when I went out to the porch I saw her on the garden path. She was going toward the gate through the twilight, and there was an eagerness in the way she moved that was new to her.

"I stood and watched, my heart fluttering in my breast, for I knew there was no youngster about that ever had had so much as a second glance from my sweet. She came to the gate and stopped there, taking hold of the pickets with her hands. Like a quiet white flame she was as she looked down the road.

"They had not put the macadam on it yet and the dust lay glimmering in the dimness. All of a sudden Evelyn got stiff-like and I looked to see who was coming.

"The road was as empty and still as it had been before, and there was no one upon it.

"The air was smoky, kind of, like it gets in the fall and there wasn't a leaf stirring, but there must have been a breath of wind on the road 'cause I saw a little whirl of dust come drifting along it. When it came to the gate where Evelyn was, it almost stopped. But it whispered away, and all at once it was gone.

"All the eagerness was out of Evelyn. I heard her sob and I ran down the path calling her name. She turned. There were tears on her cheeks. 'Not yet', she sobbed. 'Oh Faith! It isn't time yet.'"

"'It isn't time for what?' I asked her, but she would say nothing more and I knew it was no use to ask again. And the next day she went away..."

Faith Corbett's voice went on and on about how she rented this cottage with the pension the Estate granted her and how it was hard to live alone, but I heard her with only half an ear. I was thinking of how in that smoky fall twilight it had seemed to Faith Corbett as if Evelyn Rand were going down through the garden to meet her lover, and I was recalling how the grizzled old doorman had said, 'I was minded a' the way my Kathleen used to walk up Balmorey Lane to meet me.' And trailing across my brain had been the frightening thought that perhaps when Evelyn Rand had turned the corner into Seventy-third Street a whirl of dust might have come whispering across the asphalt...

"You learned nothing at all from Evelyn's old nurse?" Sturdevant insisted. "I cannot quite believe that."

"Well," I conceded, "she did make me certain the girl was unhappy and lonely in that motherless home of hers. But, as an imaginative child will, she found ways of consoling herself."

"Such as?"

"Such as writing verse." I indicated the yellowed papers I had laid on Sturdevant's desk when I came in.

The only light left in the cottage kitchen had been the wavering radiance of the coal fire in the range. So much talking had tired Faith Corbett and she nodded in her chair, all but asleep.

"Thank you for the tea," I said rising. "I'll be going along now."

The old woman came awake with a start. "Wait," she exclaimed. "Wait! I have something to show you. Something nobody but me has ever seen before." She rose too and went out of the room, the sound of her feet on the clean boards like the patter of a child's feet except that it was slower. 'I stood waiting and wondering, and in a little while she was back with a number of yellowed papers in her hand, pencilled writing pale and smudged upon them.

"Here," she said, giving them to me. "Maybe they will help you find her."

The papers rustled in my hand. I had been very careful to conceal from Faith Corbett the object of my visit and I was wondering how she could possibly know Evelyn Rand had vanished.

"Verse?" Sturdevant peered at the sheets as he might have looked at something slightly distasteful. "Poems?"

Eager as I was to pierce the dry husk of rectitude in which he was encased, I had sense enough to retreat from my intention of reading to him, in that great room with its drape-smothered windows and its walls lined by drab law books, the lines a child had penned in a sun-bright garden. He would hear the limping rhythm and the faulty rhymes; he never would understand the wistful imagery of the words, the nostalgia for some vaguely apprehended Otherland where all was different and being different must be happier.

"Poems," I assented. "They have told me more than anything else exactly what Evelyn Rand is like."

"And so it has cost the Estate almost two and a half thousand dollars to find out that Evelyn Rand once wrote poems. You haven't even located a photograph of her, so that I can give the authorities more to go by than a word of mouth description."

As far as anyone knew Evelyn never had been photographed. But, "I've done better than that," I said, triumphantly. "I've found out that a portrait of her is in existence, painted by--" I named a very famous artist but shall not, for reasons that shortly appear, repeat that name here.

"Indeed. Why did you not bring that portrait here instead of these?" He flicked a contemptuous finger at the sheaf of old papers. "Why did you not bring it here, Mr. March?"

"Because it is in a gallery on Madison Avenue. I intend to go there as soon as you finish with me and--"

Sturdevant's frosty look checked me. "You seem to forget, Mr. March, that I have cancelled your assignment to this matter."

There it was. I hadn't changed his decision in the least. My disappointment was too keen for speech for an instant, and in that instant the Call-O-Vox on his desk grated, with its metallic distortion of human tones: "Nine-thirty, Mr. Sturdevant. Mr. Holland of United States Steel is here for his appointment."

Sturdevant clicked the switch that permitted his secretary to hear him. "Send Mr. Holland in, Miss Carter. And please make a note. John March has been granted a leave of absence without pay for one week from date. This office will do nothing in the matter of Evelyn Rand until Monday the twenty-first."

He turned to me and I swear that there was a twinkle in his eyes. "Do not forget, Mr. March," he said, using a well-worn lawyer's phrase, "that time is of the essence of this contract."

I was to recall that warning, but in a sense far different from that which he intended.

Chapter 2
THE PORTRAIT OF EVELYN RAND

ART LOVERS ARE NOT as a rule early risers, and so after I had purchased a catalogue from the drowsy Cerberus in the foyer and passed through the red plush portieres before which he sat, I had the high-ceiled exhibition room to myself.

Shaded, tubular lights washing the surfaces of the paintings on the walls accentuated the dimness that filled the reaches of the gallery. A decorous hush brooded here; the thick, soft carpeting muffling the sound of my feet, close-drawn window drapes smothering traffic noise from without. I passed a circular seat in the center of the floor and saw Evelyn Rand looking at me from the further wall.

Although I had never seen her pictured anywhere, as sure was I that this was the portrait I had come to see that I did not took at the gray catalogue I'd picked up a the door but went right to it.

I was aware only of her face at first, ethereal and some how luminous against the dark amorphous background the artist had chosen to give her. It seemed to me that there was a message for me in the gray, frank eyes that met mine, message somewhere beneath their surface. It almost seemed to me that the satin-soft red lips were on the point of speaking.

Those lips were touched with a wistful smile, and there was something sad about them. Somehow the portraitist had contrived to make very real the glow of youth in the damask cheeks, the lustre of girlhood in the honeyed texture of the hair, but there was, too, something ageless about that face, and a yearning that woke a responsive ache within me.

Yes, this girl could have written the poems that were locked now in a drawer of my own desk. Yes, she would be loved by everyone who had the good fortune to know her.

She must have been about sixteen at the time of the portrait. The body one sensed within the gossamer frock, a misty blue such as tinctures the sky when it is lightly brushed with cloud, was just burgeoning into womanhood. The hollows at the base of the neck were not quite yet filled.

A fine gold chain circled that neck and pendant from it was a black gem, replica of the one I'd found in the nursery. There had, then, been two of them. Odd! I looked closer. I was not mistaken. The edge of the painted amulet was marred by a wedge-shaped break. But the same accident could not have marred two artifacts in precisely the same way. Nor could the one in the portrait be the same as that I had found in the nursery. The Evelyn Rand painted here was at least sixteen as I've said and when she'd sat for the portrait the black stone I'd found had been lost and locked behind a door that had not been opened for almost ten years.

I was wrong, of course, in thinking the breaks were exactly matched. I must be wrong, yet it was with curious reluctance that I fished the gem I'd found out of my vest pocket.

It was the same. It was precisely the same as the one in the portrait.

The stroke of a tower clock came dully into the dim gallery. Bonn-n-ng. As if to escape from the thoughts that probed at my mind I counted the strokes. Bonn-n-ng. Two. Bo-nn-n-ng. Three. Automatically I glanced at my wrist watch. Ten o'clock. Bonn-n-ng...

"An interesting bit," a low voice murmured. "Well worth the study you are giving it."

The little man had come up so quietly beside me that he seemed almost to have materialized out of the air of the empty gallery, yet somehow I was not startled. "Yes," I responded, slipping the stone back into my pocket. "Yes, it is quite interesting."

The fellow was short, so short that the top of his head, completely bald, barely came to my shoulder. That head seemed out of proportion, seemed almost grotesquely too large for his small figure and his round face seemed to float almost disembodied in the light from Evelyn Rand's portrait, the rest of him in shadow.

His skin was yellowish and of an odd lustreless texture I should have thought of as 'parchment-like' except that parchment is wrinkled and this skin was so smooth that I had a disquieting impression it might be artificial. There was nothing artificial about the tiny eyes that peered unblinkingly at the picture, black eyes keener and more piercing than any I'd 'til then seen.

"You have noticed," the little man was saying, "how painstakingly the artist has depicted every physical detail. You feel that merely by reaching out you can touch the warmth of the girl's flesh, or straighten that fold in her frock the wind has disarranged, or take that black pendant in your hand and examine it more closely."

Did his glance flash to my face at this mention of the gem, as if to trap any change in my expression before I could mask it? I could not be sure. He was looking at the portrait again and his low, clear voice flowed on.

"But I wonder if you appreciate how much of his subject's personality the artist has contrived to convey. She is not quite in tune with the world where she finds herself. All her life she has been lonely, because she does not quite belong. She has a sort of half-knowledge of matters hidden from others of her race and time, not altogether realized but sufficiently so that very dimly she is aware of the peril the full unveiling of that knowledge would bring upon her."

"What peril?" I demanded, twisting to him. "What do you know about her?"

He smiled blandly at me, answered, "I know what the artist put on that canvas for me to read. And for you. Look at it again."

I did. I saw the girl. I saw the dark, amorphous background and that was all.

"Look." I felt fingers brush lightly across my eyes but I did not resent the liberty, forgot it, forgot the little man who had taken it.

Behind the painted girl there was no longer formless shadow. There was, instead, a desolate landscape so informed with strangeness that I knew if it existed anywhere it was nowhere on Earth. And from that scene there reached out to me a sense of awe and a sense of overpowering dread.

No living thing was visible to explain that apprehension. It stemmed from the vista itself, from the grayish purple hue of its shadows, from the sky that was too low and of a color no sky should be. Most of all, however, it was aroused in me by the monstrous monument that loomed from the too-near horizon.

Black this tremendous shape was, the same strangely living black as the little stone in my vest pocket, and incredibly formed; and there spread from it an adumbration of menace of which Evelyn was as yet unaware.

"Where is it?" I squeezed through my locked larynx. "Tell me where that place is."

"Not yet." The little man peered at me with the detached interest of an entomologist observing an insect specimen. "Not yet," he repeated and it seemed to me that he was answering not my demand but the thought in my throbbing brain, the thought that Evelyn was in some nameless danger and I must go to her to save her from it. "When it is time you will come to me and learn what you want to know." He thrust a white oblong into my hand. Automatically, I glanced down at the card.

There was not enough light to read it. I lifted it to catch the reflection from the portrait--and realized that the man was no longer beside me.

He was nowhere in the room. He must have gone swiftly out, the carpeting making his footfalls soundless. Bon-n-ng. The tower clock was striking again. Muffled as it was, I was grateful for the familiar sound. Bon-n-ng ... Bon-n-ng. It was not the half-hour that was striking, but the hour! Bon-n-ng. We had not seemed to have been talking nearly that long. Bon-n-ng. The dull sound welled into the hush of that painting-walled room. Bon-n-ng ... The gong died to silence.

Six! There had been only six strokes of the clock! I had not heard the first five. That was only natural. My attention had been on the little man. The clock had struck five times before he was gone and I became aware of it.

It takes only a small distraction of one's attention to blot out awareness of a striking clock. I'd been counting those strokes an hour ago. I had counted four when the little man spoke to me, and yet I didn't recall hearing the rest of the ten at all.

Four and six are ten!

Nonsense! This I was thinking was arrant, impossible nonsense. Nevertheless my lifted hand trembled slightly as I turned it to look at the watch strapped to its wrist.

Its hands stood at ten. At ten o'clock precisely, just as they had when the little man first spoke to me.

For a long minute the shadows of that art gallery hid the Lord alone knows what shapes of dread. The painted faces leered at me from the walls--

All but one. The face of Evelyn Rand, its wistful smile unchanged, its gray eyes cool, and frank and friendly, brought me back to reason. Her face, and the fact that behind her I could see no strange, unearthly landscape but a formless swirl of dark pigment, warm in tone and texture and altogether without meaning except to set off her slim and graceful shape.

I was still uneasy, but not because of any supernatural occurrence. A fellow who's never known a sick day in his life can be forgiven for being upset when he finds out there are limits to his endurance.

For two weeks I had been plugging away at my hunt for Evelyn Rand, and I hadn't been getting much sleep, worrying about her. I hadn't had any at all last night, returning from Westchester in a smoke-filled day, coach on the nerve-racking Putnam Division. I was just plain fagged out, and I'd had a waking dream between two strokes of the tower clock.

Dreams I knew from the psychology course I once took to earn an easy three credits, can take virtually no time to go through one's mind. From what I'd learned in that same course, that I should have imagined Evelyn in some strange land, with some obscure menace overhanging her, was a symbolization of the mystery of her whereabouts and of my fears for her. The little man represented my own personality, voicing my inchoate dreads and tantalizing me wit I a promise of a solution to the riddle deferred to some indefinite future. 'Not yet', he had said...

It was all simple and explicable enough, but it was disturbing that I should have undergone the experience. Maybe I ought to see a doctor. I had a card somewhere--

A card in my hand was the one I dreamed the little man had given me. It was real! Objects in dreams do not remain real when one wakes...

Hold everything! There was a rational explanation for this too. The card hadn't come out of the dream. It had been in the dream because I already had it in my hand. It must have been in the catalogue. Leafing the pamphlet as I was absorbed in contemplation of Evelyn's portrait, I had abstractedly taken it out unaware that I was doing so.

I looked at it, expecting it to be the ad of some other gallery connected with this one, or of some art school or teacher. It might be the latter but it didn't say so.

All there was on the card was a name and address:

ACHRONOS ASTARIS
419 Furman Street, Brooklyn

There is something solid and utterly matter-of-fact about that Borough of Homes and Churches, something stodgy and unimaginative and comfortable about its very name. I stuffed the card among a number of others in my wallet (lawyers accumulate such things as a blue serge suit accumulates flecks of air-floated thread) and forgot it.

I took a last, long look at the portrait of Evelyn Rand. My reconstruction of her personality was complete. All that was left was to find her.

All that was left! I laughed shortly and a little bitterly as I turned to leave the exhibition room. I had hoped somehow, somewhere among the things she had touched, the people she had known, the scenes through which she had moved, to come upon a hint of where and how to look for her. I had found nothing. Worse, every new fact about her that had come to light denied any rational explanation of her disappearance.

There was no youth in whom she was enough interested to make the idea of an elopement even remotely possible. She had manifested every evidence of contentment with her way of life; quiet, luxurious, interfered with not at all by the trustees of the Estate. To conceive the sensitive, shy girl as stagestruck would be the height of absurdity.

No reason for voluntary disappearance that I had been able to think of would fit into Evelyn's makeup as I knew it now.

Foul play was as thoroughly eliminated. Kidnappers would have made their demand for ransom by this time. Seventy-third Street had been crowded with churchgoers that Sunday morning; no hit-and-run accident, with the driver carrying off his victim, could have occurred unobserved. The police and hospital records had offered no suggestion of any more ordinary casualty that might have involved her. The charitable organizations to whom the income of the Estate of Darius Rand would go were to be chosen by the trustees only after the event of a lapse of her right to it. Evelyn Rand was the last person on earth to have an enemy, secret or otherwise.

The more I had learned about her - the less explicable her absence had become. I was licked. I ought to go back to the office and tell old Sturdevant to call in the police--I stopped stockstill in the brittle winter sunshine of Madison Avenue. Tentatively, almost fearfully, I tested the air with flaring nostrils.

I had not been mistaken. Faint but unmistakable I smelled what I'd thought I had; the mingled scent of arbutus and crocuses and hyacinths and the nameless fragrance of dreams. The perfume that was used by Evelyn Rand, and Evelyn Rand alone.

She was near. She was very near. She had passed this way minutes before. Seconds, for the delicate aroma could not have lived longer in the gasoline fumes and the reek of this city street.

I looked for her. Eagerly I looked for the girl of the portrait, and saw a messenger boy slouching down the pavement, a rotund beldame swathed in mink entering her sleek limousine, business men bustling past, someone's chic secretary on her way to the bank on the corner with a deposit book held tightly in her gloved small hand. A shabbily dressed old man pored over a tome at the sidewalk stall of a used bookstore beside me. I was in the middle of the block and nowhere on it was anyone who possibly could be Evelyn Rand.

The scent was gone and I felt empty inside. Weak. People were turning to stare at me. A man in a gray Homburg hat and a double breasted dark overcoat started toward me; if he spoke to me I'd probably pop him on that clipped little triangle of beard that waggled from his chin. I wheeled to the bookstall, plucked a ragged volume out of it--anything to hide my face, to give me a chance to pull myself together.

If this sort of thing kept up I was destined for an asylum. First I'd seen, talked to, someone who didn't exist. Now I was taking to smelling things. I tried to recall if I'd ever heard of anyone having olfactory hallucinations...

The bookworm next to me was watching me curiously. That was because I hadn't opened the book I'd picked up, wasn't even looking at it. If I didn't do so right away he'd be sure something was wrong.

The cloth binding was blistered and water-soaked, but the lettering on it still was distinct. The title of the book was--THE VANISHED!

It was, of course, pure coincidence. Nevertheless the short hairs at the nape of my neck bristled. It was too damned pat a coincidence for comfort.

The cover almost came away from the rest of the volume as I opened it. The paper was mildewed, powdery. I found the title page. The words, 'The Vanished', were repeated. Beneath the Old English type was a short paragraph in italics:

"Here are tales of a scant few of those who from the earliest dawn of history have vanished quietly from among the living yet are not numbered among the dead. Like so many whispering whorls of dust they went out of space and out of time, to what Otherwhere no one still among us knows, and none will ever know."

'Like so many whispering whorls of dust.' Could it be pure coincidence that those words wavered on this stained page? My fingers were cold and numb as I turned it and stared at the headings; Elijah, Prophet in Israel. The Tsar Alexander the First. King Arthur of Camelot. John Orth, Archduke of Tuscany. Francois Villon, Thief, Lover and Poet. The Lost Dauphin. They Who Sailed on the Marie Celeste. Judge Crater of New York.

And, How Many Unrecorded Others?

Was Evelyn Rand one of the 'unrecorded others' who have vanished 'out of space and out of time?' Perhaps, the thought came to me, perhaps somewhere in this book I may find that hint, that suggestion of what has happened to her for which I've hunted so long in vain.

Not rational, of course. But remember I was not rational at that moment. Distinctly not rational, so far from it in fact that once the idea occurred to me it seemed to me that Evelyn approved, that she was urging me to act upon it.

I went into the store, shadowed, musty with the peculiar aroma of old paper and rotted leather and dried glue found only in such establishments. A gray man in a long gray smock shuffled out of the gray dusk between high shelfstacks.

"How much is this?" I inquired, holding the volume up.

"Hey?" He peered at me with bleared, half-blind eyes. "Hey?"

"I want to buy this book," I repeated. "How much do you ask for it?"

"This?" He took it in his clawlike hands, brought it so close to his face I thought he would bruise his nose. "The Vanished? Hm-m--" He pondered a matter of life and death. Finally he came out with the price. "Thirty-five cents."

"Little enough." I shoved my hand in my pocket, discovered I had no small change. "But you'll have to break a five for me," I said, taking my wallet from my breastpocket. "That's the smallest I have."

"You're a lucky man," the bookseller squeaked. "To have five dollars these days. Heh, heh, heh." I suppose the shrill twitter was meant for a laugh, but it irritated me. I jerked the bill from the fold so hard that it brought out with it a card that fluttered to the floor.

The gray man took the greenback and shuffled off into some misty recesses beyond the shelving. I bent to retrieve the white oblong.

I didn't pick it up. I remained stooped, my fingers just touching it, my nostrils flaring once more to the scent of spring, to the perfume of Evelyn Rand.

The sense of her presence was overpowering but now I knew it did not mean she was anywhere near. The perfume came from the card I was picking up and the printed name on that card was Achronos Astaris.

At last I knew where to look for her.

Chapter 3
SAFARI TO BROOKLYN

"HERE'S YOUR CHANGE, mister."

I thrust the card into my coat's side pocket as I straightened. "Keep it," I told the bookseller grinning.

"And keep the book too. I don't need it any more." The way he stared at me, pop-eyed, was excruciatingly funny. I laughed aloud as I strode out of that musty old store of his. I didn't know where Furman Street was--like most Manhattanites I thought of Brooklyn as some strange bourne the other side of the moon--but I'd soon find out. I looked around for a policeman, saw one standing on the corner observing a bevy of giggling young females board a bus. "Furman Street," he repeated, scratching his head. "Never heard of it."

"It's in Brooklyn," I suggested.

"Oh, Brooklyn." He looked disgusted. I felt that I ought to apologize for wanting to go there but decided not to, waited silently as he stripped off a white glove and from somewhere in the inner mysteries of his uniform dug out a dog-eared small book with a red paper cover. "How do you spell it?"

"B-R--"

"No! Fur--That street."

"F-U-R-M-A-N."

The cop wet a thumb and started turning frayed pages. "Fairfield," he muttered. "Flatlands. Freedom Square. Here it is, Furman Avenue."

"No," I said. "Furman Street."

"Oh! Yeah, there's a Furman Street too. What's the number?"

I glanced at the card. "Four hundred nineteen."

"Yeah. Yeah, I got it. You take the IRT subway. It says here IRT Sub Borough Hall four blocks west."

"I see." But I didn't, not quite. "Does that mean the Borough Hall station is four blocks west of Furman Street or that I walk four blocks west from the station?"

The policeman took off his cap and made a more thorough job of scratching his head. "Hanged if I know." Then he got a sudden inspiration. "I'll look in the front of the book."

"When I went to school," I said wearily, "the answers were in the back of the book. Thanks for your trouble but if it's as complicated as all that I'll take a taxi."

I hailed one, gave the driver the address and climbed in. For the first time that day I felt like smoking. I got my pipe out, tamped into its bowl the mixture that after much experimentation I've found suits me exactly, puffed flame into it.

The bit was comfortable between my teeth and the smoke soothing. I shoved over into a corner, leaned back, stretching out diagonally legs too long to be comfortable in any vehicle. The change of position brought my face into the rear view mirror and, not from any Narcissism but to relax my brain as my body was relaxed, I studied it critically.

There are two things that irk me about that phiz of mine. It is unconscionably young-looking in spite of my twenty-seven years and the staid and serious mien I assume when I can remember the appearance expected of an attorney, even a junior attorney, on the staff of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby and Garfield. Then too, my nose is slightly thickened midway of the bridge, and there is a semicircular scar on my left cheek, mementoes of a certain encounter with a son of Nippon who wielded his Samurai sword a bit too dexterously for my comfort.

Otherwise mine is not too unpleasant a countenance with which to live. I have a thick shock of ruddy brown hair, eyes that almost match it in hue and a squarish jaw I like to think appears strong and determined. I'll never take first prize in a beauty contest, but neither do babes scream at the sight of me. Not even grown-up ones.

Madison Avenue died and was buried in the Square of the same name. We were on Fourth Avenue for a while and then on Lafayette Street. The old Tombs Prison, abandoned now, lifted its formidable granite wall on the left, was succeeded by the white majesty of the government buildings that front Foley Square. The Municipal Building straddled Chambers Street like a modern Colossus of Rhodes and then the blare of City Hall Park was raucous in my ears.

An overalled truck driver disputed the right of way with my cabby. "Where the hell do you think you're goin'?" he wanted to know.

Where did I think I was going? Why did I think I was going towards Evelyn Rand when all the evidence I had of any connection between her and this Achronos Astaris was the faint hint of her perfume on his card?

Evidence? I was a hell of a lawyer! That card need never have been anywhere near Furman Street or Astaris.

Hundreds of them must have been inserted between the leaves of the art gallery's catalogues, and that had been done at the gallery. She'd never been on Furman Street. She had never heard of this Astaris nor he of her.

But the card carried her perfume. I fished it out, lifted it to my nostrils and sniffed. All I smelled was paper and ink.

The fragrance had not, then, come from this bit of pasteboard. But I'd smelled it, I was certain that I had smelled in the street outside that bookstore and again inside. I was a blithering ass. Evelyn had been in that store seconds before I'd entered it. I was running away from, not towards her. "Hey," I yelled to the driver. "Turn around. Turn around fast and go back to where we started from."

"Nix, fella," the cabby grunted. "It's ten days suspension of my license if I turn here on the bridge."

"What bridge?" But staring out of the window I saw that we were on the bridge to Brooklyn and I knew that the ordinance prohibiting a U-turn on it was rigidly enforced. "Okay," I grunted, resignedly. "Guess I've got to wait."

That was the longest, most chafing mile I've ever ridden. The noon rush was just beginning and the roadway was jammed, but at long last the taxi reached the trolley-cluttered plaza at the other end and slowed. "Well," my driver growled at his windshield. "Yuh change your mind again or is it go back?"

"Go on." That wasn't I who'd answered. It was a woman's voice; but so clear, so imperative that the cab's sudden burst of speed thrust me back into my corner and before I'd recovered myself it already was wheeling down a narrow street liberally supplied with one-way arrows.

And with signs that said, TO BOROUGH HALL. Some woman in a car alongside had said 'Go on' to her own driver and somehow her voice had carried to mine. Simple. So simple that in deciding it no longer mattered if I delayed an hour in returning to that bookstore, that I might as well go on and interview Achronos Astaris, I had no sense of yielding to any guidance outside my own will.

And then the driver veered the cab to the curb, braked hard.

"I got a flat, buddy," he turned to inform me, quite unnecessarily, as he heaved out of his seat. "Take me five, six minutes to fix. That's Borough Hall right ahead there. Mebbe if you'd ask a coupla guys where this here Furman Street is while I'm workin' it'll save us time."

"I've got a better idea," I grunted. "I'll pay you off now and walk the rest of the way. According to the cop's book it's only four blocks from here." I, paid him his fare and alighted. If travelling in Brooklyn was a matter of asking questions, I could do that with the best.

Asking questions was one thing, getting informative replies another. In turn a newsstand attendant, a brother attorney hurrying, briefcase in hand, toward the nearby Courthouse and a bearded derelict standing hopefully beside a little portable shine-box shrugged doubtful shoulders and looked blank. Finally, I approached a policeman with some trepidation. If he produced a little red booklet--

But he didn't. "Furman Street," he said. "That's over on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. Cross this here street and go past that there corner cigar store and keep going and you'll walk right into it."

I heaved a sigh of relief. It was exceedingly premature. My brisk pace slowed as I found myself in a maze of narrow, decorous streets labelled with such curious names as Orange, Cranberry, Pineapple. I entered a still narrower one designated College Place and brought up facing a blank wall that forbade further progress. I extricated myself from that Cul-de-sac, walked a little further and halted.

I had lost all sense of direction.

From not far off came the growl of city traffic, the honk of horns, the busy hum of urban life, but all this seemed oddly alien to this street where I was, this street of low, gray-facaded houses with high stone stoops and windows shuttered against prying eyes. Years and the weather had spread over them a dark patina of age yet there was about them a timeless quality, an air of aloofness from the flow of events, from the petty affairs of the very mankind for whose shelter they had been erected. The houses seemed to possess the street so utterly that no one moved along the narrow sidewalks or appeared at the blinded windows, or let his voice be heard.

I was strangely alone in the heart of the city, strangely cloistered in drowsy quiet.

Into that quiet there came a low sonorous hoot, swelling 'til the air was vibrant with it, fading away. The sound came again and I knew what it was. A steamboat whistle. I recalled that the taxi had not run far from the Bridge, that the East River must be very near. I recalled, too, what the policeman had just said about Furman Street's being on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. It would overlook the River, then, and the direction from which the whistle had come would be the direction in which lay the thoroughfare I sought.

I turned in that direction, saw a drugstore on the nearest corner, and started for it. I'd get straightened out there.

The shop was small, low-ceiled, the shelving and showcases white and very clean. There was no soda fountain. Glass vases filled with colored water, red and green, stood at either end of a high partition.

I heard the clink of a pestle on a wedgewood mortar behind that partition. It stopped when I cleared my throat loudly. A dark green portiere moved aside to open a doorway and the spectacled, white-coated pharmacist came out.

"How do you do?" he greeted me pleasantly, tugging at one drooping wing of a pair of walrus mustaches. "Warm for this time of the year, isn't it?" He came leisurely toward me, smiling.

"I wonder if you can direct me to Furman Street."

"Certainly." The druggist took me by the arm, impelled me gently to the door, opened it. "You haven't far to go, but it makes a difference which number you want. The two hundreds are that way," pointing, "but it's shorter to the four hundreds if you go up Plum Street." He indicated a thoroughfare at an acute angle to the one he'd first gestured to.

"I'd better go up Plum, then," I said. "The number I'm looking for is four-nineteen."

"You must be mistaken, sir. There is no such number on Furman."

I answered his smile with my own. "But there is. I'm positive that is the address." I brought the card out of my overcoat pocket and once more read it. The number was distinctly and indubitably 419. "Look here." I displayed the pasteboard to the pharmacist. "Isn't that 419 Furman Street?"

The druggist looked at the card. Then be looked up at me, and the smile was gone from his face. "Listen, old man." His hand was on my arm, solicitously. "Furman Street is very long and there might be an easier way for you to get to where you want to go than along Plum. Sit down here a minute," he led me to a bentwood chair in front of a showcase, "while I go in back and look up just where four-nineteen is."

I couldn't quite make him out, but he was being so decent to me that I couldn't argue with him. I sat down and watched him hurry back behind the partition to consult, as I supposed, another one of those little red guidebooks.

I was mistaken. I have exceptionally keen hearing and so I caught from behind that mirrored wall something I definitely wasn't supposed to hear. The pharmacist's whisper, suddenly excited: "Tom! Grab that 'phone and dial Dr. Pierce. I think that fellow out there is the patient that got away from his asylum last night."

Another whisper came back: "How do you figure that?"

"He just asked me for four-nineteen Furman. Four-nineteen, mind you. And he showed me what he said was a card with that number on it. But there wasn't any card in his hand. There was nothing in it at all."

"Certainly sounds like a nut," I heard the other whisper respond. "You go back out there and keep him talking and I'll get Pierce's keepers over here. Here, you better take this gun along in case he gets violent."

That got me out of the chair and out of that store in a rush. I was a block away before I slowed and stopped.

Chapter 4
FORMAN STREET

THERE WAS A CARD IN my hand. By the evidence of every possible sense I held the card of Achronos Astaris in my hand. A man who seemed sane insisted that hand was empty, but I could feel the card in it, see it, read the name and address printed on it. It was there. I'd found it in the catalogue of the exhibit where Evelyn Rand's portrait hung.

I did not know that. I'd decided the card had been between the pages of that pamphlet because it was madness to permit myself to believe that it had been handed to me during a space of time that occupied no time at all, by a man who did not exist.

But if the card itself did not exist!

Here it was between my thumb and fingers, white, crisp, unquestionable. Even if the pharmacist hadn't seen it, others had. The gray bookseller. The policeman on Madison Ave.

Had they? I had dropped it in the bookstore, had bent to pick it up, but the near-sighted dealer in second-hand tomes had said nothing, done nothing, to indicate that he was aware of why I stooped, of what I reached for. Nor, I now recalled, had I shown the card to either officer.

What if I had not? The card was real, couldn't be anything else but real. I had been meant to hear the druggist's whisper, saying that it was not. It was his perverted idea of a joke. The best thing to do about the incident was to forget it. The card had to be real. The alternative was--

I dared not put that alternative into words, even in thought. I could test it however, very simply.

I could go to Furman Street and look for number four-nineteen. If it was there, if a man named Achronos Astaris lived there, I was sane.

My skull felt drained, empty, when I reached that decision. I stared about me. I saw a lamppost and a street sign stiffly projecting from it. The sign said, Plum Street. By continuing on the way I was going I would come to Furman Street, in the four hundred block.

I got moving. This street was as deserted as those through which I had come. Yet I had a queer feeling that I was not alone in it, that someone was keeping ahead of me, just ahead, although I could see no one. The sidewalk curved, climbed quite steeply to brightness about a hundred yards before me. I thought I caught a flutter of misty blue up ahead, but when I looked more closely it was gone.

The houses beside me ended and I halted, staring out into the brightness of sky over water, gazing raptly at the mountainous mass that seemed suspended in that brightness.

Stone and steel and glass, across the bustling water each gargantuan tower was separate and distinct, but all were merged in a jagged pyramid that climbed, colossal in beauty, 'til its topmost pinnacle challenged the sun. Manhattan's skyscrapers.

After awhile my gaze drifted downward to the swirling, cloudlike haze that obscured the bases of the skyscrapers and made it seem as though they hung unsupported in midair.

Strange, I was thinking, that so late in the day the mists still should be heavy on the Bay, and then I realized that the obscurity was neither cloud nor mist and that it lay not on the water but on the nearer shore.

What my unfocussed eyes had diagnosed as vapor I saw now was a low building that faced the end of Plum Street, a low gable-roofed wooden house, white-painted, with a little green lawn before it. A narrow gravel path went up through the lawn to an oaken door that made a dark, semicircle-topped rectangle in the clapboard facade.

One comes upon such relics of a more gracious past in the most unlikely parts of New York. Mostly, though, they are dilapidated, ramshackle, mouldering to ruin. This one seemed perfectly preserved. The pickets of the wrought iron fence around its pocket handkerchief of a lawn were unscarred by rust, its windows obviously were washed and gleaming even if darkened by the blinds pulled down behind their panes.

From the center of the roof a small domed cupola rose and around it ran a narrow, railed balcony.

Recalling something of my school history, I wondered if George Washington had not perhaps stood on that balcony, spyglass to eye, watching General Gates' redcoats filling the barges that would bring them across the river to the Battle of Brooklyn Heights. Perhaps this house had been his headquarters during that momentous encounter. That would explain its preservation.

On either side of it was a four-storied structure of gray stone, each the beginning of a row running off to right and left paralleling the shore. In front of the building to the left--my left--of the gabled wooden house was a tall brown lamp post and the sign on the lamp post read Furman Street.

The number painted on the third step of the high stoop of the house behind the lamp post was 415. The number painted on the third stoop of the stone house to the right--my right--of the low white house was 423.

The house between them, the house with the little lawn and the balconied cupola must be, then, Number 419 Furman Street.

As I went across to it some errant breeze lifted a whirl of dust from the asphalt. It accompanied me across the opposite sidewalk and through the gate in the tall fence of wrought iron. It whispered about me as I went up the path and although I felt the gravel crunch under my feet there was no other sound in the hush than the whisper of that tiny whorl of dust.

The high portal, oak darkened by the years to the tone of old leather and to its secret glow, opened smoothly, silently before me. Without hesitation, almost as though I were no longer master of my own movement, I stepped through the aperture into cool dimness.

The door thudded dully behind me. It shut out the city's low murmur, so omnipresent that I had not been aware of it 'til now it was gone. It was as if a barrier had come between me and the world I knew.

Passing from the bright winter sunshine to this semidarkness, I was temporarily blinded. I halted, a bit bemused, waiting for sight to be restored.

I could make out no detail of the place where I was. I could see only a gray, featureless blur. But I had an impression of spaciousness--of space really. Of a vast, limitless space that by no imaginable means could be confined within the four walls of a house. Of a space that could not be confined within the four points of the compass!

Abruptly my thigh muscles were quivering and the nausea of vertigo was twisting within me! I seemed to be on the brink of a bottomless chasm. If I took another step I would hurtle down, forever down. The impulse seized me to take that step, to hurl myself, plummeting, into that illimitable abyss--

Hold it, Johnny March! I told myself, voicelessly. Hold everything! This is only the hall of an old house. In a moment your pupils will adjust themselves and you will see it--walls papered with the weeping-willow design you've always liked, hooked rugs on a floor of axe-hewn planks, perhaps a graceful balustraded staircase--

Subconsciously I must already have been aware of all this, for the very foyer I described took shape out of the formless blur. The design I remembered from the Early American Exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum patterned the faded walls. Wide planks made the floor, rutted with decades of treading feet and keyed together by tiny double wedges of wood, and their dull sheen was brightened by oval rugs whose colors were still glowing despite the years since patient hands had fashioned them. Directly ahead of me the wide staircase I had imaged rose, gently curving, to obscurity above, its dark rails tenuous and graceful.

"Well," I said, turning to the person who had admitted me. "This is--" I never finished the sentence.

No one was there. No one at all!

Someone had opened the door for me, and no one had passed me, going away from it. But of course whoever it was had slipped out the door, as I entered.

Was Brooklyn inhabited exclusively by practical jokers? This one wasn't going to get away with it. He couldn't have gotten far. I grabbed the doorknob, determined to go after him.

The door didn't open. It was locked! I was locked in!

That was going too far, much too far. I--

A silken rustle behind me twisted me around. I started to say just what I thought of the proceedings--My mouth remained open, the angry words dying unspoken.

Down the stairs from above were coming tiny feet, a froth of lace, a circular billow of foaming lace that could only be the hems of the multitudinous petticoats women wore in the days when this house was built. Then the filmy blue of a wide hoopskirt descended into view, a pointed bodice tight on a waist my hand could span.

I shook my head, trying to shake the cobwebs out of it. What the devil was this?

The crinolined maiden paused on the stairs, a slim white hand to her startled bosom. For a moment the shadow of the ceiling was across her face, and then I saw it, whitely luminous against the dark background of the stairs.

It was the face of Evelyn Rand! The soft red mouth was tight with pain, the gray eyes peering down at me were haunted with a strange dread; but this was the face that had looked out from the portrait on Madison Avenue...

"Evelyn!" I cried, leaping forward. My feet struck the bottom step, pounding upward--

And suddenly were motionless.

She wasn't there any longer. She wasn't above me on the stairs. She hadn't retreated, startled by my cry. She had blinked out, in the instant it had taken me to get across the floor and three steps up.

Something was left of her. A faint sweetness on the air. The scent of spring. The scent of dreams.

Of dreams. Was I at it again? Had I only dreamed that I saw her?

"Not quite," a low, toneless voice said behind me. "She was not there, but neither did you dream that she was."

I wheeled, my breath caught in my throat.

Just below me at the stairs' foot, vagrant light from somewhere gleaming on the polished scalp of his too-large head, his lashless and disquieting eyes pinpoints of flame in the gloom, was the little man of the art gallery!

Chapter 5
THE RIDDLES OF ACHRONOS ASTARIS

MY FINGERS DUG INTO the rail they had grasped to pull me up the stairs. That at least was firm and hard. That at least was real.

"Less real than I," said the little man who twice apparently had materialized out of nothingness. "The staircase exists only as you have conceived it. So do the walls about us and the floor on which you see me stand."

I'd not spoken aloud the thought to which he responded. Was he reading my mind?

"A crude way of phrasing it," he answered that unspoken thought, "but as near the truth as you can comprehend." Damn him! He was laughing at me. I knew he was laughing at me even though his round face with its artificial-seeming skin was as still as a modelled mask. He was--Hold on, John March. You're in that dream again, that confounded dream. What you think you hear him say is just the answer of one part of your mind to the thoughts of another. You no more see this odd human than just now you saw Evelyn Rand--

"Wrong," the little man said. "You saw her, or rather a projection of her that I presented to you in order to ascertain if what I already had observed is a constant of your psyche or an aberration."

I could not be dreaming that. I had no idea of what it meant. "The hell you say," I flung at him to conceal my growing apprehension. "What am I, some kind of guinea pig with which you're experimenting?"

A faint, mocking smile brushed his still lips. Or did it? "Exactly," he murmured.

That enraged me. "Experiment with this," I yelled and leaped down at him, my fist flailing straight for his round, inhuman face--

It whizzed through empty air! My feet pounded on the floor. The little man had vanished--

Sound behind me whirled me around. The fellow was on the staircase, three steps up. He was exactly where I had been, an instant before! But how in the name of reason had he gotten there? He couldn't have passed me, he couldn't possibly have passed me. To get to where he was he would have had to go up the steps at the same time, by the same path, I had plunged down them. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space--

"Matter can be in one place and then in another," he said in the slow, patient way one explains some complex idea to a child, choosing phrases suitable to its limited comprehension, "without ever having been anywhere between. Even you should know that. Or are you not acquainted with the observations on the behavior of electrons that already had been made in your time."

"In my time! What time?"

"The Twentieth Century, as you reckon it." I had the curious feeling that he was speaking of some period in the remote past. "I am certain our researches are correct on that point."

I shook my head. He couldn't be saying that, he just could not. It didn't make sense. With my confused sense of wrongness about all this was mingled a sort of baffled exasperation. Damn him! He was coldly amused by my bewilderment.

Queer! No flicker of the muscles in his face, no changing light in his black and piercing eyes, revealed that to me. But I was as aware of his amusement as though he had laughed aloud. Was I too, very dimly, beginning to learn to do without speech? Was I tapping some subtle current of communication that 'til now I had not even suspected to exist?

"Who are you?" I blurted. "Who the devil are you?"

He was growing tired of this colloquy between us. "If you must think of me by a name, Achronos Astaris will do." He had stopped playing, was coming to the nub of his purpose with me.

"What, John March, is it that has impelled you to forget everything else in your desire to find Evelyn Rand? What is it that makes her a necessity to you, so that without her you are not complete? What is it that has made ambition, the anxiety for preferment, pride in the occupation you chose for your lifework, insignificant compared with the need you feel for her? What force is it that draws you to her with a strength greater than the attraction of gravity, greater than the thirst of the sodium ion for the hydroxyl group it tears even from water? What chemistry of the emotions has governed your actions since she became real to you?"

His eyes, his dreadful, probing eyes, demanded an answer. "I love her," I flung at Astaris. "God help me, I have fallen in love with her."

I had not known it 'til that moment, had not realized it. But it was true. I was in love with the girl for whom I had been searching so long, the girl whom I'd never seen, with whom I had never spoken.

"Ahhh," Achronos Astaris breathed. "I know that the name of your reaction to her is love." For the first time I sensed a wavering in the clear, cold surety of him. "But what, precisely, does that mean?"

I glared at him, anger once more mounting within me. His eyes gripped mine with a hold almost palpable. He was invading the most secret recesses of my being, was stripping naked my very soul.

Melodramatic phrases, but no phrases less turgid would fit.

"It is most puzzling." Did I hear Astaris say that or was I reading his thoughts? "There is something more than physical chemistry, more than biological tropism, involved. It is plain that he has an urge to hold her naked against his nakedness, to merge--"

"Damn you!" I yelled, outraged. "Damn your rotten, prurient mind," and the wrath that exploded in my brain hurled me up the stairs to smash him--

I smashed instead against--nothingness! Against a wall invisible, immaterial, but as impenetrable as though a screen of armor plate had sprung up between me and the little man.

Still so possessed of wrath that I did not apprehend its full enormity, I clubbed at the unseen barrier with my fists. There was no sound of impact, none at all, but my knuckles were bruised and bleeding. I kicked at empty air and saw the toes of shoes buckle against nothing I could see. Exhausted, I put palms against it and felt perdurable nothingness warm as though it were animate flesh, vibrant with some ineluctable life, impenetrable as granite.

And all the time Achronos Astaris watched me with a cold, mildly interested detachment, as some scientist might watch a Siamese fighting fish batter its nose against glass inserted into its aquarium to bar it from the other Betta it has marked as its victim.

He sighed now as I hung, panting and weak against the invisible partition. "You learned quite quickly. There is a definite advance in five hundred years."

I stared at him too choked to speak by anger that had not subsided at all.

Oddly, while Astaris was still clear and distinct as he had been, the staircase, the ceiling and the walls were fading again into the gray, shapeless blur out of which they had formed. I glanced down, anger giving way to panic! There was only grayness beneath me, empty grayness! I looked behind. Nothing was behind me but a fearsome gray vacancy. I was enclosed by it, suspended in it. Once more the terror of height possessed me, the vertiginous, heart-stopping awareness of an unfathomable abyss into which I must plunge when Achronos Astaris released me.

For, wheeling again, I had found his eyes upon me, pulsating pinpoints of black flame, and it seemed to me that only those eyes held me where I was. Not the eyes but an impalpable something, a Force unknowable, that merely manifested itself in those eyes as it reached through the infrangible barrier that had frustrated my attack on Astaris, and embraced me.

And those eyes were not only holding me there, suspended. They were dissecting me, not my body but my ego? soul?--the me that is not physical yet lacking which I would not be. Keen, cutting lancets, they were peeling layer after layer from my psyche, searching, searching for something that was there but that they could not find.

Anger they found, and fear, and bewildered awe transcending fear, but that for which they probed they could not find. Gradually they faltered, at a loss. And then I was aware that Astaris had given up his search, that he was sending a message out into the boundless ether, that he was waiting for a reply.

I do not know, even yet, how I knew all this. I know only that for a little while I had the power, and that I was soon to lose it.

"No," the answer came. Not a voice. Not sound at all. Naked thought from an infinite distance. "Send him to us, but you must remain yet awhile."

Astaris did not like that. I was aware he did not, but I was aware also that he would submit. Abruptly fear flared into terror, into such paralyzing, agonized terror that it rocked the very foundations of my mind.

Now! NOW! Astaris' eyes released me! Astaris himself was obliterated by an inward swoop of the grayness. It swirled about me, and I was enveloped by a dizzy darkness.

Not darkness! An absence of form, of color, of reality itself. I was falling through nothingness. I was not falling. I was caught up in some vast maelstrom. I was whirling through some spaceless, timeless non-existence altogether beyond experience. I was rushing headlong through incalculable distances, distances beyond comprehension, yet I knew myself to be altogether motionless. The Universe had fallen away from me, was somewhere behind me, light centuries behind me. I was beyond life. I was beyond death. I was beyond being itself.

And all about me was the soft, voiceless whisper of swirling dust.

Chapter 6
A SKY TOO LOW, A FEAR TOO GREAT

IT ENDED.

The catapulting rush through infinite distances that were not distances at all, the headlong flight that was static as the stars, ended as it had begun; without jar and without transition.

There was solidity beneath my feet. There was vision once more in my eyes. I was John March again and I was back to reality.

Reality? I stood on a slight eminence in the center of a desolate plain across which a jumble of shattered, great boulders stretched to a horizon strangely too near. There was something--incoherent was the word that rose in my mind--in the shape of the rocks, in the dim hues of their fractured surfaces, and their shadows were not black as shadows ought to be, but a grayish purple. They lay in dark pools about the shattered rocks and the light that made them streamed sourceless out of a sky too low for any normal sky.

The sky weighed upon me as a storm sky would, heavy and ominous, but although no star hung in it, no moon nor star, it was lucidly transparent so that I knew no cloud mass made of it the lowering dome it was. And it was informed with a color such as no sky ever has had, an earthy and fathomless brown that seemed innate in the very air.

The brown lucence bathed the plain, wan and shimmering, and it dawned on me that the wrongly shaped rocks marched toward and past me across the plain as though once they had formed endless collonades and anciently had been smashed by some unimaginable cataclysm. And it seemed to me that in the gray-purple shadows of the rocks Things lurked so outrageous in shape that they had crawled into the deepest shadows to hide even from themselves.

Strangest of all, this landscape seemed vaguely familiar.

A sky too low? A sense of imminent threat? I felt, I swear that I felt fingers brush my eyes and in memory I saw a slim, graceful shape and behind it--

This was the vista that momentarily I had seen, or thought I had seen, form out of the dark, amorphous background of the portrait of Evelyn Rand.

My pulses hammered. Evelyn was somewhere in this gaunt and brooding land. As surely as I knew that I was here myself, I knew that somewhere here was the girl I had sought so long, the girl that in the last few terrible minutes--I'd learned I loved. Somewhere, there had been a landmark in the fleeting glimpse I'd had of this land in the art gallery on Madison Avenue. I turned slowly, searching for it.

And found it.

It loomed against the horizon of the strange low sky, an immensity hewn out of some starless night somehow solid. Black as night and as lustreless, it blotted out a full quadrant of the horizon to which I'd turned, a stygian escarpment deeply scarred and awesome in grandeur, and I now saw that the shattered pillars marched to it from every point of the compass and that their final coming together was buried beneath a black detritus of fragments riven from the monument by the same catastrophe that had destroyed them.

Fragments? They were masses huge as houses and myriads of them were piled in that wide, nocturnal tumulus, yet so tremendous was the shape from which they'd been torn that its configuration had been altered only as much as weathering may alter some heroic statue.

A statue it was, vast beyond any concept of vastness, but of what?

Its haunched body, on whose flanks the skin hung in pendulous folds that were mountainsides in themselves, was a beast's. Its legs--the hinder ones miles-long ridges folded under the colossal body, the fore-limbs soaring towers--were an animal's in contour and posture. But the tremendous head was not that of a beast.

Nor was it human.

It was sunk neckless between the figure's shoulders. It was wide-jawed, lean-jowled. The eyes were hooded with a black, scalp-tight hood, yet somehow I was aware of them, aware of the waiting that brooded in them as long as all the centuries that have been and will yet be, the patience endless as Time.

Impossible to describe that stupendous countenance whose very wrinkles were ravines, impossible not to read in its lineaments a knowledge that transcended the inner mysteries of the Universe and probed to where Space itself ceases to exist.

Limned in that face was all Good. And yet--

And yet stupendously below it, where the curve of one sculptured paw rose out of the jumbled shards, was the shattered outline of another figure modelled out of some pinkish and fleshlike stone. This was the representation of a man and he was contorted in unendurable agony, and into him were driven the monstrous claws to pin him down.

Good above, Evil below. Love above, Hate below and the esoteric knowledge in the vast countenance was that in the eternity-long progress of life from its inchoate beginnings to its ultimate goal, Good and Evil, Love and Hate, are one and the same.

How long I stood immobile, scarcely breathing, possessed wholly by that wonder, I shall never know. How long I might have remained in its spell I cannot tell, for abruptly I was torn from it by the rattle of small stones behind me and a deep-chested, ferocious bellow.

I snatched up a fist-size stone as I whirled, saw that the avid roar was not meant for me. Near the base of my mound a man rolled, scrabbling to regain his feet, and a gorilla leaped toward him, would reach him before he could possibly do so.

With some unformed idea of distracting the shaggy brute I let out an incoherent yell and started running across its line of sight. The beast twisted, saw me, bounded not towards me but angling to intercept me; and as I realized that the slope was steeper than I thought, that I could not change direction. I discerned also that he was no beast. A furry pelt was draped across the hairy torso and over its big-thewed shoulder, and his huge calloused hand clutched the wood handle of a flint-beaded axe.

A yard from me, that axe lifted--I flung my stone, and by sheer luck it struck the Stone Age weapon's head squarely, jolted it from the dawn man's grip. But I could not stop my impetuous rush, plunged headlong into him. I got in one blow that might have been the flick of a butterfly's wing for all the effect it had on him, and then his shaggy arms folded me to his barrel chest and constricted, drove the breath out of me, squeezed my ribs. Sight dimmed--

I was on my knees, hanging head down on arms that knuckled the stony ground, and the dark bulk shuddering to lifelessness on the ground here beside me incredibly was the Neanderthal man who'd almost taken my life. "Ve vous remercier," a light, almost musical voice said above me, "A fond de ma couar je vous remercier."

It was the man whom the brute had pursued who thanked me for saving his life. He wiped blood from a long and slender poniard with a lacy but tattered kerchief, and his spindly legs were sheathed in long hose of maroon silk laddered by runs. A sort of vest with sleeves wrapped mangy blue velvet about his meagre chest, and the ruffles at his neck and sleeves were ragged and dingy.

He scabbarded his poniard at his belt and bent to me, his sharp featured, predatory countenance anxious, and spoke again in his queer, archaic French which, oddly, I had no difficulty in comprehending. "You are much hurt, my old?"

"No." I let him help me up. "Not much." He seemed to understand my English as well as I did his French, for he looked relieved. "Seems to me it's I who ought to thank you, mister. I'd have been done for if you hadn't sunk that dagger into him."

"But no." Under a wide brimmed hat, its plumes fluttering, his hair was gray but the scar of an old slash gave a permanently raffish twist to his mouth, and his cheeks, blued by stubble, were sunken and emaciated. "It is my life that I owe to you, monsieur, and though it has many times been declared forfeit to the King's justice, I still set upon it a certain value." The sidewise cant of his eyes was slinking and furtive but in them was a certain dark sparkle of gaiety and about his lank, bony figure there was a swaggering devil-be-damnedness altogether intriguing. "If you had not come to my rescue you would not have been in danger so great."

He swept that wide hat from his head and brought it to his breast as he bowed. "I salute you, monsieur. Such clan, such courage I have not often seen in a life perhaps too much filled with episodes that have required them." He returned the hat to his jauntily cocked head. "If I may have the honor of being made acquainted with your name?"

"John March," I told him, somewhat dazed by this ebullience.

"John March. I shall not forget it when once again I set about my Grant Testamente. A vilanelle, perhaps, to express my gratitude. I shall--"

"Your Grant Testamente!" I blurted. "A vilanelle? Who are you? In the name of all that is holy, who are you!"

"There is very little holy about me." A bitter smile twisted the man's thin mouth. "Or so the abbot of Paris would hold. A jailbird, a liar, a thief. A consort of slitpurses and doxies. A picklock, a runagate o'nights and a lack-brained clerk by day. And-". He straightened, and drew pride around him like a cloak. "And a poet of sorts, I hope. My name--for what it is worth--Francois Villon."

"Villon!" I gasped. "You're kidding me. Francois Villon died four hundred years ago."

"No," the man in doublet and hose said. "Villon did not die. His sins overtaking him at last, he was banished from his beloved Paris. He trudged out through the Porte Sainte Jacques, all he possessed on his back and in a starveling packet under his arm. He plodded out on the Orleans road, weary of life, weary unto death. Though the day was breathless, a tiny swirl of dust whispered towards him, and," once more he bowed, "here you find Francis Villon. Not dead. Most assuredly not dead."

"But--" I still could not bring myself to believe him. "But four centuries. It is impossible!"

"Nothing, my friend," interrupted Francois Villon, "is impossible. Least of all in this land where Time--He paused.

"Yes."

"In this Land," he began again, "where Time is not."

"Where Time-! What do you mean?"

"That, my friend, you will learn--too soon." Villon was once more furtive, his eyes sliding away from mine as he said, "Suppose you satisfy the curiosity that is ever a flame burning within me, and burning me. You are from Britain?"

"No," I answered. "From America." I recalled that the Western Hemisphere had just been discovered in his day, that he might not know the name. "From the continent, Columbus discovered--"

"Yes," he cut in. "I know. She has told me of it. The maiden with the hair of honey and the gray eyes that hide laughter and dreams."

I grabbed his arm, my fingers bruising the thin flesh. "You've seen her, talked with her!" I could hardly get the words out. "She is here."

"She is here indeed. I--" He stopped abruptly. He was looking over my shoulder, and his face was suddenly pallid.

"Where is she?" I demanded. "Take me to her."

"No," Villon responded, and his voice was hollow with fear. "I cannot take you to the fair Evelyn. I cannot take you anywhere. For our hosts appear. I had thought to escape them, but they have found me and they have found you, and now there is no longer any hope for us, or for Evelyn Rand, or for that pleasant world into which we were born and which we shall never see again."

The air burst into an infinitude of darting sparks, green and blue and yellow and scarlet. My skin prickled sharply. Somewhere a white orb blazed. It was the hub of the sparks that immediately whirled about it in countless threadlike circles of luminance that merged into a solid shining disk. This drew in upon its dazzling center.

It was no longer light at all but a Shape, a Thing grotesque and weird and incredible, where nothing had been seconds before.

Chapter 7
THE EMPTY SHAPE OF A MAN

FRANCOIS VILLON WAS laughing. There was no amusement in his high, thin laugh, but a sort of wild despair and a sort of madness. Mad indeed was that which had materialized out of a whirl of coruscant light and poised now before us.

It was almost all head, three-quarters a huge ovoid head; yellow-gray skin naked of hair drawn tightly over a monstrous skull. Two enormous eyes, lidless and lashless, swam with an oily iridescence. The head's face had no nose, unless two black orifices just below its midpoint were nares. A round, tiny mouth beneath these putative nostrils was innocent of lips or teeth. Where ears should be, two circular areas of skin pulsed as though the brain within momentarily would burst through membranes too frail to restrain it.

The rest, invested by some dark hued, horny integument, was a bulbous torso out of which grew two boneless tentacles each terminated by splayed and writhing branches--caricatures of hands. Legs there must have been also, and feet of sorts, for the apparition stood upright as a man stands.

"Voila, John March," Villon chuckled, "he who calls himself Kass."

It was that chuckle, I think, the amazing effrontery of it, that set my thought processes going again. I did not really see this thing, I told myself. I was the victim of a hypnotic illusion induced by the whirling lights and the white blaze at its center. It was not, it could not be real.

I dragged the side of my hand across my eyes, and looked again, and the great head was still there, its bulging eyes fixed upon me. In their gaze was the same hard, impersonal speculation I had so resented in Achronos Astaris. Somehow more dreadful it was now, for Astaris at least had been human, while this...

"I am human," Kass broke in. "A million years more human than you." He did not say it. The words were within my own mind, a thought perceived, not heard, but it must have come from him. I could not have formulated it.

Moreover, Villon heard the soundless message too. "A million years more human than you or I," he drawled to prove it, his accents slurred. "Look well, my friend. See to what all mankind's aspirations, all mankind's strivings, shall bring us in the end." My gaze shifted to him. A sardonic grin twisted those thin, scarred lips of his. "In truth there must be a God, for only God could play so bitter a jest."

What they were saying seemed so much grim nonsense, but before I had time to react to it I became aware that Kass's attention had swung to Villon, and I sensed that Kass was puzzled. Once more I was reminded of Astaris, of how when the strange little man had demanded from me the meaning of love I had felt him to be troubled by some queer urgency, by some driving need for a knowledge that was denied him.

"Why do you not fear me?" Kass was inquiring of the Frenchman. "There is the consciousness of utter defeat in you, and despair, but you do not fear me. Why?"

"Fear you?" Villon murmured, insolence in the cant of his narrow head, divine contempt in the stance of the scrawny frame on whose bony angles hung his tattered finery. "I? Who have made a ballade of love's betrayal and a villanelle of torture's rack? Who have metered a rondeau by the clatter of my best friend's bones swung from a gibbet, and flung a roundelay to the rabble with the hangman's knot under my own left ear? Fear you? I who have listened to the music of the Universe and dreamed the dreams of the angels and the damned?

"There is that within me Lucifer cannot touch, nor the God your existence blasphemes destroy. I have gone up into a Heaven of my own devising and down into a Hell of my own imagining, and you can show me no terrors I have not known aforetime. Fear you? I am a poet."

He slapped the face of Kass with his mocking laugh, and there was a hush that was not of sound alone. Or there may have been some reply, but I did not know of it, for in that instant the corner of my eye caught furtive movement among the rocks and my look slid to it, my head not turning.

I glimpsed them only for an eye-blink before the shadows hid them, but in that split-second I saw them clearly and I knew I could not be mistaken, though reason insisted I must be. Reason, even with the animate, tangible presence of Francois Villon to confute it, insisted I could not have seen a knight in chain mail and a forester in the brilliant green of Sherwood Forest peering from behind a boulder's jagged edge, gesturing to me not to betray them.

I did something then that until that moment I should not have dreamed either possible or necessary. I deliberately blotted what I'd seen out of my consciousness, made myself think of something else at once; of the way the pallid and sourceless light glimmered on the round of Kass's skull, of how his monstrous shadow was a grayish-purple like no shadow I had elsewhere seen.

And I did this just in time, for once more he was reading me. "Matters stranger to you than the color of a shadow there will be to wonder at," he remarked, "before we are prepared to deal with you." It is difficult to convey the feeling of--nakedness--given one by the realization that one's thoughts are exposed to another. "Come. The Council awaits me."

"Lead on, fellow," I said, trying to get jauntiness into my tone. Villon had set me an example of courage I was ashamed not to emulate. "Whither thou goest I shall go." I rather suspected I wouldn't be very successful if I objected, and, too, I had a pretty good hunch that wherever he wanted to take me would bring me nearer Evelyn Rand.

No. All this weirdness into which I had been plunged had not driven the thought of her from my mind. Rather it had multiplied many times my anxiety for her. If she were here, and in the power of creatures like this...

A stinging prickle netted my body. Kass's fingers were touching my shoulder; his other hand gripped Villon. "Come!" It was as if abruptly I was at the heart of a maelstrom of some electric force. Panic struck at me. I had felt this same sensation at the moment the grotesque being appeared. Was I about to dissolve into a whirl of flashing, multi-colored sparks?

Nothing happened. Nothing except that the rocks about, the ground beneath, abruptly were flowing past us. We were motionless. It was the plain, the horizon, that moved. A sharp, twanging sound came from my left. Kass's touch was gone and the speeding earth pulled my feet from beneath me. I pitched forward headlong. Falling, I twisted, saw the writhing fingers that had released me pluck something from the air. A feathered arrow!

My shoulder hit the now motionless dirt. "Up, St. George!" a deep-chested voice bellowed, metal rattling through it. "Have at thee, hell spawn!" The burly, mailed figure I had glimpsed lunged out from behind a rock, his linked gauntlets sweeping a great two-handed sword down upon our captor's sickly-hued, immense skull. "Die, caitiff!" someone else cried, and a lithe green figure leaped past Villon, also fallen, and thrust a dagger at Kass's great eye.

The knight's broadsword shattered into a thousand clanging shards; the forester's knife, arrested in blank air, shivered as though it had jabbed into the trunk of an oak.

Neither blade had touched Kass, though the latter had not moved by the tenth of an inch. No one was moving now. All the fierce motion had stopped; the pounce of the ambushers from the covert which the flow of the landscape had brought to us, the skid of our momentum that had taken Villon and myself yards along the suddenly halted ground.

The scene held. Kass; one tentacle lifted to grasp the arrow, the membranes at either side of his gargantuan eves a trifle distended, no other sign of emotion about him. The knight; bladeless hilt clutched in chain-gloved fists, longskirted cloak of iron mesh enveloping columnar legs straddled to give foundation to his futile blow, all his head but his swarthy, hate-darkened face swathed in metal fabric, all his immense strength impotent. The other, the forester--

He was a lithe and slender arc, fluid movement abruptly rigid. His shoes, of some soft, chamois-like leather and pointed of toe, were green. His taut legs were tightly sheathed to the waist in the emerald of May leaves and his sleeveless leather jerkin repeated the hue as did the fabric that puffed about his shoulders and enveloped his extended arm, thrusting a dagger into the nothingness that held it. In spite of a flame-colored beard his countenance was youthful and debonair, though contorted now by a furious despair. The green, conical hat he wore sported a cocky, crimson feather.

Curious how one's mind works sometimes. There was in mine at that instant, not disappointment at the failure of the ambush I had anticipated and done my best not to betray, not consternation at the manner in which Kass had defeated it, but only a sort of dazed amazement at the anachronistic assembling of the figures in that strange tableau.

The cut of his coat of mail dated the sword-wielder as from the twelfth century. It was in the fourteenth that the Lincolnshire lads prowled Sherwood Forest attired in the green the forester wore. Francois Villon's Paris was that of the fifteen hundreds, and I--my birth date was the year nineteen hundred and twenty. Kass aside, we represented eight centuries of history. Eight hundred years! Absurd! They were masqueraders--

What of the Dawn Man I had fought and Villon had slain? That slavering brute had been no actor. Abruptly I was cold with recollection of the Frenchman's words: "Nothing, my friend, is impossible in this Land Where Time is Not," and then I was cold with something more imminent; a sound, a toneless squeal so shrill that it was at the upper threshold of hearing, a high, thin whine that pierced my ears and set my teeth on edge. It came from the tiny, puckered mouth that seemed so ludicrously inept in the vast yeasty expanse of Kass's visage and it was the first actual sound I had heard him utter.

It went on and on like a wire pulling through my brain, a blue fine wire that was all edge, all wounding edge. It flickered out into the dull, desolate glow brooding over that plain of tumbled rock and ominous shadows, and somewhere out there it found a response. Somewhere from among the malformed boulders, from among the gray-purple shadows that lurked at their bases and filled the mouths of their caves with mystery, something was answering Kass.

I rolled, tried to find the source of that second thin whine. My straining eyes could discover nothing alive in all that dreary tumulus. I saw only vacant chaos, only the gaping empty maws of caverns filled by impenetrable shadows.

The shadows were lengthening. That was queer, here where there was no sun to lower; then I realized that only one of the shadows was lengthening. It was flowing like a dark cloud, out of the mouth of a nearby cave. Like a gray-purple fog that somehow had more substance than a fog, it still was formless as drifting mist.

"Pater Noster in excelsis ... " I heard Villon mumble a Latin prayer. And then I heard him gasp, "A drina. God preserve us! I thought they were chained to their lairs by the light."

The cloud parted from the shadow and was a shapeless blob about the size of a small auto, moving more and more swiftly toward us. The tenuous whine that answered Kass's call came from it. It was animate with a blind and groping sort of life, yet it had no shape. Or rather its shape was constantly changing as it billowed toward us, as once in a microscope I had seen the outlines of an amoeba change. Because of this it had no identity, but individuality it had in full measure, and a terrible malevolence.

Kass's call rose shriller. The approach of that purple-gray mass grew swifter, and something in the sightless way it moved made me more certain that were it not for the strange sound Kass made it would not have appeared, and having appeared would not know which way to move. I could see it more clearly, could see now that near its center there was a throbbing spot of deeper purple that did not change in shape, and I was afraid.

I was deathly afraid of the thing Villon had called a drina. I was afraid of it because, for all its formlessness, for all its blindness, I sensed intelligence within it, and I knew that intelligence was different in some terrible way from the intelligence of any creature I'd ever known.

Its shrill whine had an eager sound now. It rushed past me and two heart-stopping screams twisted me about!

Knight and forester hung high above the ground, each wrapped around the waist by one of Kass's pipestem tentacles. They were puppets with jerking, boneless limbs, with white masks on which the features had been ineptly splotched, so little of human had terror left in them. The drina boiled toward them.

Kass flung them down and the gray-purple mass rolled over them. Rolled over them and--rolled past where they'd fallen, and they were no longer there.

I saw them! I saw them sprawled within that monstrous purple bulk, forms blurred and indistinct like shapes seen in a pea-soup fog--and still alive! Still moving. And then, as the pitch of Kass's squeal changed, I saw them melt.

The drina was scudding away towards the nearest shadow-pool, reached it, merged with it. It was gone, and mailed knight and green-clad forester were gone, and there was only Kass, poised here, motionless and silent now, to all appearances already oblivious to what had occurred.

On the ground between him and the cave into which the drina had vanished lay the bladeless hilt of a two-handed sword, a dagger, and a heap of iron links that still retained the empty shape of a man. That was all...

Not quite. A little farther away, caught on jagged stone, a conical green hood flaunted a cocky, crimson feather.

Chapter 8
ADALON, CITY OF DREAD

"THEY WERE FOOLS," I heard Villon murmur. "But they were brave fools. May God rest their troubled souls."

"Amen!" I managed to say.

Kass was gesturing for us to rise. I shoved shaking hands against the ground to obey, but I was sick, mentally and physically sick. I must have looked it, for the Frenchman, misunderstanding, said as he rose lithely. "There is nothing for you to fear, my friend. Not, at least, 'til you have served the purpose for which they have brought you here, or until, like those whose passing we have just looked upon, they have found you useless for that purpose."

"They!" I snapped. "Who are they? And what do they want from me?"

"He is one of them," Villon answered, nodding at the approaching Kass, "and the others are as like him as I am like you. They say they are men, as you have heard, and they say that between them and us stretches a million years and more of time. How that can be I do not know, yet neither do I know how it can be that we two are met, living, and nearly of an age though four centuries divide our natal days. If this smaller miracle can come to pass, why not the greater?"

Before I could answer that Kass reached us and laid his splayed hands on our shoulders. At once my body was again stung with countless prickles, and the landscape was once more moving past us.

It accelerated rapidly 'til the plain and the rocks and the sky itself became nothing but a streaked, brownish blur whizzing past us. We were not moving at all, it was everything outside of us that moved. I felt not the slightest intimation of that inner awareness of motion that the psychologists call the kinesthetic sense. There was nothing around me, nothing to protect me, yet there was no wind on my face ... Wind! At this unguessable speed the air should have been a solid thing, driving the breath from my lungs, tearing the clothes from my back.

It was, I thought, as if somehow we were detached from the Earth and it were spinning beneath us.

"You are not upon Earth at all," Kass's soundless voice told me. "You are no longer in its space nor of its time."

"What do you mean?" I yelled. "What in hell do you mean?" I shouted because I was frightened, because I was desperately afraid--and hated myself for it.

"It shall be explained to you, if the Council so decides." Kass seemed to be coldly interested in my agitation, in the way I might have been interested, watching a puppy growl at its image in a mirror. "You have, in what you already know, a foundation for comprehension of the matter such as is possessed by none of the others Astaris has sent us, except one. The female from your own generation."

The female! Did he mean Evelyn? The landscape about us was slowing! I made out that we were in a narrow, rugged ravine whose rocky walls were speeding past us.

Then these were gone, and there was no longer any motion.

Some five hundred yards behind us was the towering tumulus that had sped past us. Between it and us stretched a plain level and uncluttered as a concrete highway at dawn.

Ahead, and too close for comfort, the ground dropped sharply down as at the edge of a precipice and I was staring across miles of sheer vacancy to another plateau. There was a shimmering, dreamlike quality about this, an appearance, I discerned, due to my seeing it through a peculiar quiver of the air that rose from the curving edge of the chasm to the low, brooding sky. Like a vast, transparent curtain this was, intangible yet very real.

"Down, my friend," the Frenchman said softly. "Look down."

I stepped a little nearer the verge of the cliff. I looked down--a thousand feet, two thousand! I saw nothing but rock, gently curving inward, glass-smooth rock glimmering with high polish. My sight slid down another thousand feet and another, to where that astounding wall curved inward and levelled out to become the bottom of a vast bowl, a mile deep and five miles, I was to learn, across the diameter of its circling rim.

I have mentioned once, I think, the effect of height upon me. Now the illness seized me; my stomach went plummeting down into that yawning gulf. My muscles lost all strength. I toppled forward over the brink of that awful precipice ... I did not fall. I hung, arms sprawled out, a scream choked in my throat, my skin clammy with the sweat of terror. I hung above that sheer and terrible drop, and I was sustained by nothing I could feel or see.

Kass did not seem to notice but Villon pulled me back and stood me erect on legs gone rubbery, and he smiled at me and said, "You could not fall, my friend."

Our captor's bulging eyes were unfocussed, he was motionless as if absorbed in some weird voiceless communication with someone I could not see. I pulled in breath. "What do you mean, I could not fall?"

"The Veil of Ishlak," Villon gestured to the shimmering curtain that was no more substantial than the quiver of heated air above a railroad track in midsummer, "will not permit you to. So look down without fear, my friend, upon the city of Adalon while yet there is time for you to see what manner of place it is to which your fate has brought you."

I gritted my teeth and peered over that brink once more. Nausea still made me most unhappy, but because I knew now that I could not fall, the vertigo did not blind me. I took it by easy stages, let my eyes drift slowly down along that infernal wall.

My first impression of its smoothness was confirmed. The contour of the precipice was utterly regular, too regular to be natural. This abysmal pit had been quarried out of the solid rock--not quarried. There were no marks of tools or blasting. It seemed, rather, that the huge depression had been hollowed out by a heat so great that the unwanted stone had boiled into vapor and steamed away.

That was, of course, manifestly impossible, but how otherwise the formation could be explained I did not know. My gaze reached the level floor of the bowl. I saw the city of Adalon, dwarfed by height and laid out for me like a map.

Its structures were of the same color and texture as the rock, as though they had not been built but had grown or been moulded out of it. They were square and squat and ugly and no attempt at beautification, no thought of anything but utility, was evident in their design.

One, at the very center of the circular area, dominated all the rest by reason of its vastly greater size, and differed from them also in having a domed roof instead of a flat one. There were eleven other buildings. They were of varying sizes and they were scattered about the bowl's floor at varying distance from the hub, yet I had a curious sense that they were located according to some definite plan, and that the plan had some meaning for me.

"Like a sow and its rooting piglets," Villon murmured, "are they not? And see, some of the piglets themselves have their own offspring clinging close."

"Yes." Except for the central building and the two nearest it, each of the structures of Adalon had other smaller ones very near to it. The third had only one, the fourth two, but there were nine about the fifth.

The sixth also had nine--but these were connected by a wide-topped circular wall in which they were embedded like scattered stones in a ring. "Saturn," I exclaimed. "The ringed planet. The planet with nine satellites and a ring." Now I knew what Adalon's design represented. "The biggest building at the center is the Sun. Mercury, nearest it, and Venus, have no satellites. The Earth, third away, has one moon, Mars has two, and Jupiter nine. It works out, by George, it works out. The three the other side of Saturn would be Uranus and Neptune and Pluto. Don't you see it, Villon? They've built their city in the pattern of the Solar System, of the Sun and its planets."

He looked at me rather queerly. "The Sun and its planets," he whispered. "Aye, it seems to me that once I heard the rector of the university prate of this Mercury and Venus and Mars whereof you speak, and Jupiter too, as stars in the sky of nights, though those other names are strange to me. The Sun and its planets," he repeated. "Now is there some meaning here? I have wondered why they builded thus, higgledy-piggledy, when all else they do has a straight design serving its purpose and no more."

There were little flecks of light between his drooping lids. "Can it be," he whispered. "Can it be that these men a million years older than us, to whom love and beauty and even awe of their Creator are things forgotten and unknown, have yet some sentiment left? A nostalgia, perchance, for the skies they have forsaken, for the orbs that gave them birth?"

He had some other thought, some thought he was as carefully blotting out of his consciousness as I had blotted from mine the thought of the ambush that had failed so disastrously, and for the same reason. But what he had said was enough to make me grab his arm, my fingers digging in.

"Look here," I demanded. "Don't tell me you've swallowed all that stuff Kass has been spilling. That this isn't the Earth, and they're men of the future, and the rest of it."

Villon shrugged, expression draining from his narrow countenance. "It is what they say and they do not lie. There is much about them I do not know, but of one thing I am certain. To the Ishlak in nothing is sacred save the Truth, and the Truth to them is Divine."

I almost believed it all, in that moment I almost believed that Kass and the others who had built Adalon were men of a million years from my own time, that this strange place was not on Earth, that it was beyond the Solar System, perhaps beyond even our Galaxy. But not quite. It was too much to ask a man to believe, too much to ask him to conceive. All that one has been taught cannot be discarded in a single hour no matter how crowded that hour has been with happenings that seem to controvert the very essentials of one's philosophy.

Or was it an hour? Was it not years, a timeless time, since I'd walked along a Brooklyn street--"Listen, Villon," I exclaimed, recalling why I'd walked along that street. "Twice you've mentioned Evelyn Rand. Was it down there that you met her?"

"Aye," he replied and the sparkle was back in those black eyes of his. "She brightened that city of dread so that one did not quite so much miss the sun."

"Okay," I growled, my pulses pounding. "If she's in it, city of dread or no I'm going down there."

"Yes" Villon sighed. "I think you are." He pointed a long finger down to the dome of the central structure, and in that great hemispherical roof a hole was opening, irislike. "I doubt me that you will like much what you find there, yet I would give my hopes of salvation, such as they are, if I were awaited as you are in Adalon."

Chapter 9
'MORE MERCIFUL IS THE GALLOWS' DROP'

A SILVERY SOMETHING leaped out of the aperture of the roof of the structure I'd likened to the Sun. It shot, on a long, steep slant, straight for us, and so fast was its flight I could see nothing of it but blurred light streaking the air.

In the next instant it was hanging before me, absolutely motionless, in midair. Long axis horizontal, it was cylindrical, one end blunt-tapered like the nose of a bullet, the other square-cut. It was nine or ten feet long, about five in diameter. It seemed to be made of some metal that was a little grayer than silver, and it hovered there without visible support of any kind.

The only man-made things I know of that might approximate this feat are the balloon and the helicopter. No balloon could have moved with anything like the speed this had, nor could one have been brought to a standstill with such abruptness. It was no helicopter either. It had no whirling windmill vanes. In fact, I could make out no protruding part of any kind. The thing simply and unequivocally defied gravity.

I had just about time to note this and to become aware of a curious whirr that seemed to come from the object, when at its nose there was a quick succession of crimson sparks. At once I heard a long, ripping sound, like silk tearing.

"The Veil has parted," Villon answered my startled look, gesturing to a still place in the curtain of shimmer, like an oil slick on water. The projectile leaped inward, hissed along the ground, was static again beside Kass, who seemed to be rousing from his absorption. The whirr cut off.

"They call it a stratcar," the Frenchman told me. "I went to my knees in prayer when first one sprang upon me." Impish amusement danced in his eyes, and he chuckled. "I was persuaded that Lucifer in very person had arrived in it to claim my soul, so many times over forfeit to him."

A pale inner glow wavered over the surface of that about which he spoke, like waves of luminosity fluctuating over the surface of superheated steel, yet within a long stride of it I felt no heat. A white line was stripping along its side, from truncated rear to where the taper of its prow began.

"The magic art," Villon's chatter continued, "by which they cause the ground itself to flow past them, miles in a twinkling, appears to fail them at the brink of this chasm. To reach their Adalon from here they fly down to it in this iron contrivance. They fly, mark you. Now this indeed fills me with doubt of my senses, for while magic is a proper matter recognized by all theologians and metaphysicians, for a man to build an engine that flies, goes against Nature. Yet I swear to you, my John, that this stratcar is no uncouth bird but a thing wrought out of metal."

The line that slashed the side of it was widening. The upper half of the stratcar's curved skin was sliding up and around. From within it, toward the front, projected the big head and bulbous upper body of a goggle-eyed individual who might be Kass's twin except that the hard-looking stuff covering his torso was a brilliant orange instead of the dark brown that clothed the other.

Kass's tentacles lifted in what was evidently a salute. The newcomer imitated him, perfunctorily. Then I realized that they were conversing, though I heard nothing, aurally or within my skull.

"Kass seems pretty damned respectful to this new goon," I remarked. "Who is he? Mayor of Adalon?"

"He calls himself Daster," Villon replied. I thought I detected a puzzled note in his voice, and his eyes were narrowed. "The hue of his singlet marks him as a Doctil, as that of Kass tells that he is a Plebo. Daster is one of the Kintat, the Council of Five who rule this land, and that he should come to meet us is passing strange. Does it mean that something has occurred to change the even tenor of their ways during my witless attempt at escape from them?"

I had already begun to suspect that the membranes at the sides of the heads of the Adalonians were their sole features that might be said to have expression. Those of both were vibrating rapidly, seeming to confirm the poet's idea that they were disturbed.

Their colloquy ended, Kass swung to us. "Go," he commanded. "Into the stratcar."

Villon shrugged. "It appears that you are to have your wish, John." He started for the strange vehicle and I followed him. I can't say that I was very comfortable at that particular moment. I didn't like being ordered around, for one thing. And for another, Villon's warnings had convinced me that some very unpleasant experiences were waiting for me in the place to which I was about to be taken.

But Evelyn Rand was down there. There were two seats inside the stratcar, very much like those of an auto. Daster occupied the front one. I got into that in the rear, alongside Villon. I was surprised that the conveyance did not roll as I pressed down on its side, climbing in. It should have, balanced as it was on its rounded bottom. It certainly should have. But it was rigid as though that bottom lay flat against the ground.

I turned to see what would hold it steady when Kass got in, but he did not. His tentacles lifted in repetition of the salute with which he'd greeted Daster. The latter answered him, and then the Plebo was moving away. We were moving away from him, rather, though in relation to the ground we were not moving at all. The mouth of the ravine across the plain swallowed him.

"Didn't he say that the Council was waiting for him?" I exclaimed.

"Yes," Villon breathed. "And that too is strange, for they do not easily chanore their plans. Something indeed is not as it should be in Adalon. Has it any meaning for us? Dare we hope-?" he cut off, and I knew that once more he was veiling his thoughts.

Ignoring us, Daster reached forward to a bank of buttons on the back of the stratcar's nose, that was a circle-edged wall before him. The vehicle's side-wall slid tip from beyond Villon, slid over and came down on my side. We were at once in absolute darkness, a blackness that seemed to thumb my eyes with palpable weight.

The lightlessness lasted only a second. Daster's grotesque head was silhouetted against a greenish, spectral glow. The wall in front of him had become a luminous screen on which, about the level of my chest, rows of buttons were spots of scarlet. Above these, vague blurs took form, became a picture in grays and blacks of the plain outside, the high, rocky cliff that edged it.

They have radar, I thought. But this is more highly developed than any I know.

The Doctil touched another button. The stratcar filled with the whirr I had heard as it hung in midair. Villon gasped and caught at my arm, his fingers digging in.

The whole structure within which we were enclosed was vibrating in correspondence with that whirr. I was thrown to the right, hard against the carside, and Villon against my own left side. The photo-like scene on the screen was whisking to the right and I realized that the stratcar was spinning around to point at the Veil through which it had come.

The pressure against my sides eased. The screened image was steady again. Past Daster's head it photoed space and beyond it the distant rim of the bowl within which Adalon lay. My ears seemed stuffed with that infernal whirring. It rose in pitch and I was forced against the back of the seat. Blankness flashed over the screen ... was replaced at once by a picture of a vast, glass-smooth, curved precipice leaning precariously toward us ... shifting into a view of the bowl bottom lifted in a disturbing slant so that the buildings seemed about to slide off it.

Those buildings ballooned in size with breathtaking swiftness. It was we who were catapulting down to them, of course, with heart-stopping speed. The acceleration was a weight crushing me against the seat-back, crushing in my chest. Pluto flicked off the screen-edge. Uranus. Saturn. The screen showed only the immense rounded dome of the House of the Sun, a lustrous convexity against which we were going to smash!

A black splotch spotted the exact center of that roof-image, widened to swallow it. I could breathe again. I was no longer crushed in my seat. The whirr had ended. Light was coming into the stratcar, a bar of daylight cutting horizontally across the right hand wall, and widening rapidly. A bar of white sunlight, not the drab, oppressive glow out of which we had just come.

The stratcar's upper half slid over and down beyond my seatmate. The poet's eyes were closed. He had slumped, motionless and limp.

I grabbed for his shoulder. "Villon," I exclaimed. If something had happened to him ... "Francois!" I realized how much his indomitable cheerfulness, his insouciance, had endeared him to me in the short time I'd known him. If I was still sane it was because of his jauntiness, his gay fatalism.

His eyelids fluttered open and a rueful grimace twisted his mockina lips. "Thus one must fall," he murmured, "when the gibbet trap is sprung from beneath one's feet. But at the end of that drop is at least oblivion, provided the executioner has rightly knotted his noose. Aye, more merciful is the gallows' drop than that which awaits us."

"You've got hanging on your mind a devil of a lot," I snapped.

"And so would you, my John," he grinned wanly, "if you had been condemned to hang as often as I have been."

I twisted to a touch on my shoulder. It was Daster's splayed hand. He had climbed out of the stratcar and he wanted me to do the same. We were in a barn-like room, its floor apparently of the same fused and congealed rock that formed the sides of the bowl. The illumination was not sunlight but came from a wide, shining band circling the walls just where the domed ceiling rested on them, walls that lacked any sign of door or window.

Our stratcar was one of many that stood in a straight row across the chamber. Three Adalonians were clustered about a machine whose nose had been stripped of its metal covering to reveal an intricate mass of gears that they seemed to be repairing. They were, judging by the brown of their torso covering, Plebos, but an orange-clad Doctil was coming toward us.

He reached us as I dismounted from the stratcar. "Gohret," Daster greeted him, lifting his tentacles in salute. "This is John March, whom Astaris' last message concerned."

Gohret's great eyes rested on me very briefly, shifted to Villon who by now stood beside me. "And the other, of course, is the one who was lately found missing," he remarked. "I understand that the scanners located him near the entrance whorl."

"Exactly," Daster agreed. "And so Kass was able to pick up both at once and bring them to the brink together."

"Have you determined how this Villon succeeded in penetrating the Veil of Ishlak?"

"No. Kass reported that he evidently has learned how to conceal his thoughts from us. We shall have to probe his mind in the observation cell."

"Which must be done at once. We must find and punish the Plebo who assisted him. If it was a Plebo." Seeing the two together in that bright light I realized that there was a definite variance in their appearance, difficult to describe but differentiating them sufficiently for recognition. "I shall take charge of him and have the matter attended to immediately."

It seemed to me that Daster resented Gohret's dictatorial tone, but he said nothing to confirm this impression. "Come along," Gohret commanded Villon. "Unless you wish to tell us now that which we want to know."

Francois' lip curled scornfully. "I am too experienced a jailbird to be frightened into blabbing by hints of torture."

"We are not compelled to resort to torture," Gohret responded, "to obtain information we desire. Our methods are more--efficient."

Villon winced. In spite of your pretty speech about a poet and fear, I thought, you're scared, my friend. Hellish scared. That's because you don't know what they're going to do to you and that excellent imagination of yours is working overtime.

"Come along," Gohret commanded again, reaching a long tentacle for Francois. The latter shrank back against the stratcar and the Doctil's writhing limb wrapped around him. Villon's mouth gaped in a soundless scream as agony grayed his face. I swung a fist at the Adalonian. Its knuckles sank into squashy, rot-soft flesh under Gohret's tiny mouth and my other fist, driving in, was caught in midair as Daster's arms roped me, lifted me from the floor. I kicked back at him, furiously. My heels crunched. Pain rayed through me, traced every nerve in my body.

I hung from those terrible tentacles, paralyzed, halfblinded and, inconsequently, resenting it that the Plebos had not even turned from their work to watch me fight.

"Thank you, my friend," Villon called, his voice thin with his own agony. "You meant well but you could have done me no good, no good at all." Gohret's tentacle grooved the poet's scrawny chest and on the back of Villon's dangling hand blood trickled from the crushed flesh of his arm. "You cannot help me." They were sinking, visibly they were sinking into the floor and unless I was mistaken--I must be mistaken--the floor rose along their bodies undisturbed.

"Farewell, John March." He was smiling. He actually was smiling up at me, the indomitable fellow, only his shoulders and his head and his plumed hat still visible. "Tell the fair Evelyn that though I go now into eternal darkness I take with me the recollection of the gray-eyed Angel I met in Hell."

Chapter 10
SOME INCREDIBLE OTHERWHERE

THE FLOOR WAS solid over where Francois Villon had vanished. Daster set me down and the power of my muscles returned and the agony of my nerves faded.

I was alone in that stratcar hangar now with those strange beings that were so unhuman in appearance and yet so oddly human. I was alone and, I admit it without shame, I was afraid.

It was my turn, now, to be punished. For striking Gohret. For kicking at Daster. I faced around to the remaining Doctil, doing my best to stand straight, forcing myself to look into his mucid eyes. They were coldly impersonal. They lay upon me for what seemed a long time, altogether without emotion. Astaris had looked at me like that, and Kass, and slow resentment welled up in me again at the sense of inferiority that steady, speculative gaze inflicted upon me.

Daster's arm lifted in a gesture, and I knew I was to go with him--somewhere.

We started moving across the hangar floor, myself a little ahead. The Plebos to one side busied themselves with their task, not for one instant interrupted.

Where was I being taken? We were walking directly towards the opposite wall of that vaulted chamber, and there was nothing there but the blind face of the stone. It was so highly polished that it reflected us, vaguely. There was no seam where it rounded into the floor. Floor and wall and dome were of one piece, like concrete that had been formed in a mould. But they were not concrete. They were rock. How could rock have been poured that way?

"All things are plastic," Daster answered me, "at some degree of heat."

"True enough." Aeons ago, I recalled from my geology, the Earth itself was molten, shaped into an orb by the very speed of its spinning, bulging at the equator because there the centrifugal force was the greatest. "But the heat that melts rock is so great that it would be impossible for men to shape it, in such large masses at any rate."

"Nothing," the Doctil answered, "is impossible to man."

"You-!" I stopped short. I was face to face with my reflection in the wall, another half-step would bring me against it.

"Go on, John March." His hand on my back shoved me forward, gently. I went into that rock ... Not against it, into it! It impeded me no more than so much air, but for a moment I was blinded by intangible grayness. Then there was light again and I was in a narrow corridor that spiralled downward, the pitch so steep that I had to lean back and dig heels to keep myself from going too fast.

"What--what the devil!" I couldn't help the exclamation. "How did that happen?"

"Matter is not really solid," Daster answered, "as you should know, but is composed of vibrating electrons separated by spaces compared to which their own sizes are minute. The rate of vibration of the wall rock has been adjusted so that the electrons of which we are composed may flow through, between its particles."

"It's as simple as all that, is it?" I tried to be sarcastic. "Good thing the boys in Sing Sing don't know about it or they'd walk out some fine morning."

"Precisely. Except that the technique of changing the vibration rate of the prison walls would have been beyond the ability of even the most profound scientists of your time. That was not developed until some five hundred years after your period."

"Oh yeah?" I wasn't going to let myself be worked up again by the way these people kept tossing the centuries about, regardless. "Just a little matter of five hundred years." If I let myself believe that time had folded into itself, Daster and his friends might really be a million years beyond me in evolution. The inevitable implication of that would be that I was up against people I could have no hope of fighting. And I wasn't ready to admit that, not quite yet. "Just the day after tomorrow to you."

"No," Daster dissented, dryly. "The day before yesterday."

Now what could I do about that except shut up? We kept on going down and around, and though my own footfalls echoed within the confines of that interminable spiral, the Adalonian's movements were soundless. A Latin tag came out of my high school days--facile descensus Averni, greasy is the descent to Hades--and the speculation trailed across my mind that perhaps I had died in that old house on Brooklyn Heights; that, a disembodied soul, I wandered through some Afterland beyond death.

Abruptly the passage leveled out under my feet, straightened out. Far ahead there was a tiny oblong of the same curiously brownish light that had pervaded the plain above. It grew larger swiftly, although I was walking at an ordinary pace. I realized that all this time my footing had been moving, without vibration, an endless belt spiralling down from that lofty stratcar hangar.

The rectangle of light ahead became a squared opening at which the tunnel ended. I was through it, Daster's touch on my elbow keeping me from falling as I left the conveyor. I half-spun, saw that I'd emerged from an aperture in a blue-gray wall, lifted my look and saw that wall towering, windowless, tremendously above me.

So great was its height that it appeared to lean appallingly forward, to be about to hurtle down upon me. I whirled away from it, faced the wide expanse of the bowl floor down on which I had looked from the brink of the sheer, mile-high cliff that closed it in. Directly ahead, across a perfectly level stretch of fused rock, was a low building, blue-gray and windowless like the one out of which I had just come, but tiny in comparison to it. To my right and quite a distance farther off, there was another, somewhat larger, and to one side of it one about a quarter its size.

If I recalled correctly the layout of Adalon seen from above, the nearer structure was...

"Mercury," Daster supplied. "Correct. And the farther one is Earth, with its Moon. Mars is hidden behind Sun. You are the first of our--guests--to perceive that Adalon is planned to portray the Solar System." He seemed approving, and I could not help being a little pleased with myself.

"You call the buildings after the planets they represent?" I noted.

"Yes," the Doctil agreed.

There were a few Plebos about, grotesque caricatures of humanity with their tremendous heads, their bulbous bodies, their writhing, tentacular arms. They were moving briskly across the terrain in various directions, but they weren't walking. They stood on little wheeled platforms of the same odd metal of which the stratcars were built, and these were rolling swiftly along the trackless pavement. I could see no steering wheels or other means of control; the peculiar vehicles stopped and started and changed direction almost as if they were endowed with some queer life of their own.

One, somewhat larger than the others, and unoccupied, came toward us. It was like a child's playcart, except that it had no sides, but at the front end there was a boxlike protuberance from which rods ran to either end of the forward axle. As it neared I heard a low burr of machinery. It came up to us, wheeled around and stopped.

"They're worked by remote radio control," I decided, remembering a demonstration I had seen in New York's Museum of Science and Industry. "But I can't see the advantage. It must require an operator for each one and..."

"The rider of each rado is its operator," Daster interrupted, motioning for me to get on to the thing and doing so himself. We faced forward on it and it started rolling smoothly towards Earth. "I summoned this one, for instance, and am directing it now." It deftly avoided collision with another, whose Plebo rider lifted his tentacles in salute to Daster.

"Where's your sending set?" I challenged skeptically. I was getting more used to the Doctil's weird appearance, more aware of him as an individual with whom I could talk naturally, whom I could question. "You haven't anything in your hands and certainly you can't be hiding it anywhere about you."

"My brain is the only sending set I need for the rado."

"Oh now, listen! You don't expect me to believe that, do you?"

"I do. You have information and intelligence enough to understand it. Even in your time it was already becoming known that the processes of the brain and nervous system are essentially electrical in character. My control of the rado through what you would call will alone is merely a projection of the same manifestation of energy by which you wiggle your great toe."

"I get it," I exclaimed. "Just as radio is a development of telegraphing over wires. Then ... then your means of communication, my hearing you without your speaking aloud, must be something similar."

"Precisely. Except that in that case your brain is acting as a receiving unit. It has not yet evolved sufficiently for it to be used efficiently as a transmitter, although our researches seem to indicate that some among those of your time did have that power in a rudimentary manner."

"There have been some experiments with it," I recalled. "At Duke University, for instance. They call it telepathy, extra-sensory perception, and--" I broke off. We were being carried past the House of Mercury. Coming around from behind it and turning towards us was another rado like the one we rode. On this, beside a Plebo, was a man like myself.

Not quite like myself. He was much taller, built in a heavier mould. His colossal frame was clothed in a flowing dark robe down whose front flowed a luxuriant, silver-white beard. His massive features were swarthy, broadly sculptured, his nose wide-winged and bent-ridged, his brooding eyes sunken beneath shaggy white brows. I thought of Rodin's statue of Jehovah in the Metropolitan. There was about this man the same Semitic cast of countenance, the same consciousness of majesty, the same quiet strength.

His rado, shot by us and ran swiftly toward the great building we'd just quitted, too swiftly for me, startled as I was, to call to him. "Who is that?" I demanded, twisting to Daster. "Who is that man?"

"His name is Elijah," was what the Doctil responded. "He was known as a Prophet of Israel in the age to which he belongs."

"But..." I gasped. "But Elijah was taken up to Heaven in a chariot of fire."

"So it was reported by Elisha, his disciple, who saw him go. The sun struck through the whirlwind of desert dust that parted them and gave it the appearance of flame, and when it was gone, Elisha too was gone." And then, quite simply, quite convincingly, Daster the Doctil said, "I saw it. I was there."

Francois Villon! Elijah! A pattern, a faint and appalling pattern, was forming at the back of my brain. Elijah:

Prophet in Israel. Francois Villon: Thief, Lover and Poet. I had read those names not very long before. On a yellowed, crumbling page they had been, part of a list headed, The Vanished. And on the page before that one, in rubbed italics, had been words that now took on a heart-squeezing significance:

Like so many whispering whorls of dust they went out of space and out of time, to what Otherwhere no one still among us knows, and none will ever know.

"None will ever know." But I knew. Very terribly I knew where Elijah and Villon and I had come. And Evelyn Rand.

This, this Adalon, was that incredible Otherwhere out of space and out of time!

Chapter 11
THE SCENT OF DREAMS

THE RADO ROLLED up to the grayblue wall of the building called Earth, stopped. Daster dismounted and I followed, my mind occupied with trying really to comprehend the conclusion to which it had come.

There was an opening here like the exit from the gigantic central structure. The Doctil waited for me to enter this before him. Inside there was a tunneled passage similar to the one in the House of the Sun, lit similarly with a twilight glow. But the floor of this did not move. The corridor went in about five feet, turned sharply right. It did not rise as that other had but went straight on. I walked along it too shaken to be fully aware of what I was doing, too shaken to be curious about my surroundings or my destination.

Up to the moment when Daster had told me the long-bearded man in the dark mantle was Elijah, and I had believed him, I had neither accepted nor rejected the actuality of any of my strange experiences. Perhaps I can best explain what I mean by an analogy. Once, on Okinawa, a shell fragment slashed my leg. I sat on the ground staring at the inch-deep gash in my flesh, at the blood welling out of it and for minutes had absolutely no emotion about it at all. I knew it was my leg that was sliced to the bone. I knew it was my blood pouring out. I knew that it was beginning to hurt damnably but all of that seemed to concern me not at all. Then someone had yelled, "Hell. They got the lieutenant," and visions had smashed into my brain of that leg having been chewed up so badly that it would have to come off, of my going around on crutches all the rest of my life.

A medic had put a tourniquet on me in a hurry, that time, and penicillin and plasma and the miracle men they call Army surgeons had made my leg good as new more quickly than I'd had any right to expect. But this thing I was up against now was different. Nobody was going to get me out of this mess. Nobody could. It was strictly and entirely up to me, myself.

That was a laugh! These people in whose power I was, these Adalonians, had demonstrated themselves to be masters of forces I could not even begin to conceive. The Adalonians could read my thoughts at will, could sense them almost before I was aware of them myself. Against them I was far more at a disadvantage than the most benighted Australian aborigine had been against the invading white man equipped with all the knowledge and the tools of civilization. I was finished. Kaput. Done for. It was fantastic to imagine that I could do anything against them. Anything at all.

If I behaved myself, did exactly as they told me, maybe they'd let me live for a while. That was the best I could hope for.

"You have come to a wise decision," I heard behind me. "You are quite helpless, and your realization of that will save you a great deal of difficulty." I actually heard someone say that. It was no echo inside my brain, it was sound, a voice, in my ears! I twisted around.

It wasn't the Doctil I stared at, my jaw dropping. It was a man properly proportioned, properly clothed in a brown suit very much like my own. He was about my height too, but he was older than I. Gray-haired, high-foreheaded, blinkingly near-sighted, he had a distinctly professional air. He might just have stepped out of some university lecture hall.

"Who-?" I spluttered. "Who are you? Where did you come from?"

He smiled rather vaguely. "I am still Daster," he said in that thin, old man's voice. "I have merely assumed this appearance because I have found that my real form disturbs the natural reactions of the person we are about to join, and it is important that this should not happen. Now, if you'll step aside so that I can get to that door..."

There was a door, an honest-to-goodness wooden door with a knob of black glass, beside me where an instant before there had been only blank wall.

Daster stepped by me to the door. It is an index to my state of mind that I found more astonishing than his metamorphosis, more surprising than the sudden materilization of the door, the fact that he lifted his hand and knocked on it. The familiar, sharp rap of knuckles on wood was startling.

Someone inside said, "Come."

I knew that voice, though I'd never heard it before, and my breath caught in my throat. Daster's blue-veined hand was on the doorknob. He was turning it. It seemed to me I was watching a slow-motion film, of a knob turning, of a door swinging open. It swung outward toward me, so that it blocked my view of what was behind it. Daster went past its edge, was screened by it.

Very faint in my nostrils was the perfume of arbutus and crocuses and hyacinths, and the evasive scent of leafbuds, the fragrance of spring in a countryside I could never hope to see again. And underlying this was the redolence I could not name, the very breath of dreams.

"I have brought you someone," I heard Daster say, "whom I know you will be happy to see." I realized that I was going past the edge of that door, that I was going into the room on which it had opened.

She was standing with her white fingers to the soft round of her breast, her lips half-parted. There was an attitude of expectancy about the poise of her slim, young body, a look in her cool gray eyes that seemed to say she had been waiting for me all the time I had searched for her. She was not beautiful. Even in that moment I knew that in the ordinary sense of the word she was not beautiful, her features were too irregular for that, her mouth too generous. But her hair was a misty amber cloud, and the throbbing curve of her throat was a lilting line of melody. There was strength in her small blunt chin and in her face an aching sweetness.

"John March," Daster's voice said, somewhere to one side. "And--"

"Evelyn Rand," I put in, deep-throated.

A smile touched her lips, sunshine caressing rose petals. "You know me, Mr. March? I don't recall our having met."

"We haven't. I have never seen you. But I know you. I am one of your guardian's junior attorneys and I've been hunting for you for all of two weeks."

"Two weeks?" Her little frown of puzzlement was intriguing. "I don't understand. If Mr. Sturdevant wanted to get in touch with me why didn't he call me up? He knows my number and I was home 'til yesterday morning."

"You were..." I stopped myself. Something queer here. Something very queer. Daster was watching us. I didn't like the way he was watching us. His eyes were too glittering, too feverishly eager. "Of course you were," I said vaguely. "I ... I confused you with another client.

"I shall leave you," the Adalonian interrupted. "I have some matters to attend to." He was moving toward the door. "I shall return in a little while." Turning to him, I became aware of the room, a quietly furnished living room; rugs, furniture, very like those I was accustomed to all my life. Except for one thing. There were two other doors, but there was no window. No sign of one.

The door closed on Daster, and I was alone with Evelyn Rand.

She'd come close. Her fingers were on the back of my hand, cold. "Tell me," she breathed. "What did you mean when you said you have been hunting for me for two weeks?" Her pupils were widening and the color was draining from her lips.

"I said that I was mistaken, didn't I?" It was clear that she was bewildered, and afraid. "Another client..."

"You said that, but it isn't true. A veil dropped over your eyes when you said it." Her hand had closed on mine now, was clinging to it. I wanted to take her in my arms. I wanted to hold her tightly, to still the flutter of her pulse in her neck, like the hurried beat of a frightened bird's heart. "Tell me what kind of place this is. Tell me who they are, in there." Her free hand jerked to one of the closed doors. "Tell me what's happened to me."

All the strength was running out of her, all the courage. She was on the verge of breaking. The Lord alone knew how long she'd been holding herself together by sheer will, how long she'd been facing down her fears. She'd been surrounded by a strangeness she could not understand and she'd held her terror of it tight within her. Now I'd come, someone she recognized to be her own kind, and abruptly the burden had become too great for her.

"Easy," I told her. "Take it easy." The truth would be better for her, kinder, than any lie that probably would be disproven at once. But what was the truth? "I don't know very much about it myself but I know there's nothing to be scared of. We're both in something of a mess, and we've got to be brave and sensible and figure out together just what it is and just how to get out of it."

The idea was to let her know that she had help, but also to make her feel that she had to take hold of herself and cooperate. It was like rescuing a drowning person. If you let them go hysterical on you they'll go down and drag you with them, but if you get across to them that they've got to do something for themselves you can get somewhere. It worked. She let go of my hand, straightened and smiled wanly. "I ... I'm all right now." But there was still dread under the surface of her eyes. "You ... are you a doctor?"

"A doctor? What makes you--" And then I got it. The poor kid! "Look here." I took hold of her shoulders. "Look into my eyes, and listen to me. I'm not a doctor and this is not a sanitarium and you're not crazy." I said that slowly, with all the conviction I could put into it. "You're as sane as algebra. Not only you, but the man who told you he is Francois Villon is sane, and the man who calls himself Elijah is sane. That is who they really are, unbelievable as it may seem."

I knew she'd spoken with Villon, and I guessed that she must have spoken with others out of time. It was quite natural for her to think them suffering from delusions. From what he had said she must have seen Daster in his real shape, and been convinced that she too was the victim of hallucinations. The only reasonable conclusion would be that this was a madhouse and she an inmate.

"You believe me," I went on. "You must believe me. Whatever else is wrong, you are not mad. Do you believe me?"

She nodded.

"Say it. Say it aloud. 'I know that I am sane. Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen, I am sane.'"

"I know that I am sane." Her voice was just above a whisper, her lips tremulous. "Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen, I am sane." But her eyes were more natural now, the fear was gone from them. "Thank you, John March. Oh, thank you."

"Nothing to thank me for yet. Wait 'til I've gotten us out of this." I made myself sound brisk, confident. I was very far from either. About two minutes ago I'd decided that I hadn't the slightest chance of extricating myself from the predicament in which I'd found myself, had resigned myself to take whatever the Adalonians wanted to hand me. Nothing had changed since then. "That sofa looks comfortable." Nothing except that now I had Evelyn Rand to look out for. "Let's sit down and talk things over."

I put my hands in my trouser pockets and strolled over to the couch I'd indicated, giving a good imitation of nonchalance. Some coins jingled in the right-hand pocket, in the left I felt a wallet and a latch-key in its little leather case. Evelyn Rand was coming along beside me, her pale blue dress whispering against the thighs of those long, free-swinging legs of hers.

We might have been any boy and gal about to spend a pleasant evening in a New York living room. Except that there was no window in this living room, and that not far beyond its walls a man named Francois Villon was suffering some unimaginable fate.

No. The Twentieth Century couple we most resembled was a Jewish one in some Berlin parlor, pretending that all was right with the world while all the time they were aware of horror outside, and the inevitable closing in of doom upon them. I knew this was only a brief respite, a short moment of truce our captors were according us for some inscrutable reason of their own.

I kept my face averted from Evelyn 'til I was certain I had gained control of it, 'til I was certain she could not read from it the dread and the despair that were in my thoughts. If I had known then what there was to dread, what there was to despair of, I should not have been able to conceal those emotions from her.

Chapter 12
"WALK INTO MY PARLOR"

"SUPPOSE WE BEGIN," I said, when Evelyn Rand and I were seated, "with your story. You started out to go to church. You went around the corner--and then?"

"And then I had a curious feeling that I was about to meet someone who'd been waiting for me a long time." Just the tip of a tiny ear showed from beneath the honeycolored cap of her hair. "The street was full of people with Sunday shining in their eyes, but it wasn't any of them. It was someone else. I'd had that same feeling, dreamlike but altogether actual, once before."

"In Faith Corbett's garden in Westchester," I murmured, "the day before you went away to college."

"Yes." She didn't seem at all surprised that I knew. "That time I was sure Johnny, the boy I'd pretended to play with all the lonely years 'til he'd become very real and very dear, was about to meet me at the gate--Oh!" She broke off. "Your name is John, isn't it? And you've got reddish brown hair and eyes too, like my Johnny, and a cleft in your chin."

"Wait," I cut in, a cold breath blowing on the base of my skull. "Wait. Let's not talk about me. Let's go back to Sunday."

"I was excited, though I kept telling myself I was being very silly." Her gaze stayed on my face, and her eyes were luminous. "Halfway down the block I stopped, because there was a strange little man in front of me, bowing to me with old fashioned courtesy.

"'You are Evelyn Rand,' he said, in a whispery sort of far-away voice. He'd popped up so suddenly, right there. He was so queer-looking too, bald, with a round face and tight, yellowish skin and a head a little too large for him."

"Achronos Astaris!" I exclaimed, under my breath.

"What? What did you say?"

"I've met your little man." And how! "But go on."

"I admitted my name. I was a bit nervous, but I wasn't afraid. Not yet. There was something about him I didn't like, but nothing could happen to me there in the heart of New York, with crowds all around. 'And you are ...?' I asked.

"'A friend of Faith Corbett's,' he told me. 'Your old nurse--I've come from her for you.'

"'Faith's ill,' I cried. 'She's dying!'

"The little man shook his bead. 'No. Not dying. But if you'll be good enough to come with me. It will not take long.' He put his hand on my elbow, as if to urge me, and a strange thing happened. The buildings, the street, everything, melted into grayness, everything but the little man's eyes. Those eyes got larger and larger. I seemed to plunge into them. The grayness seemed to be rushing by me at a perfectly awful speed, and it was empty, most dreadfully empty. And then--and then--"

She stopped, her pupils widening again, the faint rose that had spread under her skin when she'd spoken of my resemblance to her imaginary Johnny fading to a transparent pallor.

"Steady, Evelyn," I said softly. "Steady." My hand slid along 'til it reached hers. "Look. You don't have to go on. I can guess the rest."

"But I want to, John. I want to tell you."

I'm no Galahad. I'd held hands with girls before, and done plenty more than hold hands. But there was something about the feel of hers, something about the way her icy fingers took hold of mine, quite simply, quite naturally. "Go ahead." I couldn't trust myself to say any more, just then.

"The grayness got solid. I was standing among a lot of queer rocks. Beside me there was something out of a nightmare, a Thing with a tremendous head, and awful eyes, and--

"Skip the rest. I've seen them."

"You have! Then it was real!"

"It's real enough," I answered dryly. "Too real to suit me. What happened next?"

"I don't know. I must have fainted. The next thing I knew I was in this room, lying on this sofa, and the gentleman who brought you here was telling me that I was all right, that I must not be frightened. But I was. I was terrified, though I couldn't seem to do anything but lie here and stare at him. Mr. Daster kept on talking, low-voiced and very soothingly. I ... it's funny, John ... but I can't remember what he said. I can remember only that little by little my heart stopped pounding, and the iron band that seemed to be squeezing my brain was gone and I--I think I fell asleep."

They had been kinder to her than to me, I thought. Thank God for that.

"I woke up," Evelyn went on, "with the feeling that someone was in the room. Someone was, a girlish looking little boy about nine or ten years old, with the saddest eyes I've ever seen. He smiled shyly at me and spoke in beautiful French, apologizing for his intrusion. I asked him who he was, and, John, he said he was Citizen Louis Charles, cidevant Louis Bourbon, heir to the throne of France."

"The Lost Dauphin," I exclaimed. "It checks. By all that's holy, it checks. He was on the list too."

"What checks?" she demanded. "What list are you talking about?"

"Never mind. I'll tell you about it later." I had a pretty clear idea of what happened next, from what I'd seen and what I'd gathered from her manner. "When the boy said that, you were sure he was mad. Then you met the others he spoke of and each one told you he was someone else who couldn't possibly be alive, and you were sure that you'd lost your mind and were in an asylum with a lot of other lunatics." I wanted to get her past that part. "Isn't that so?"

"Yes," she breathed. "What else could I think?"

"Certainly not the truth, the utterly incredible truth." The jittery look was in her eyes again. I'd learn the rest of what I needed to know later. "Look here, young lady, you've been talking long enough, it's about time you gave another fellow a chance. One thing though. You haven't been harmed, have you, or annoyed in any way?"

"No. But the time has been so long, so awfully long. I never knew a day and a night and half of another day could seem like eternity."

A day and a night. I checked myself. It was two weeks since she'd vanished. "Is that how long it is since you came here?" Did time run differently here? If it did that was proof, indubitable proof, that this was not some hidden-away place on Earth, as I still half-hoped. "Are you sure?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure of anything. But I've only slept once, in the bedroom in there," she nodded at the door opposite to that to which she had pointed before. "And I've only eaten four meals. Why do you ask?"

Here was something else that I'd have to break to her carefully. "Because that fits in, too, to my idea of what this is all about. Listen to me, Evelyn. We're involved in something very strange, something almost uncanny. It's quite unbelievable, but we've got to believe it, because it's true. And because the only way we can get out of the predicament we're in is to understand it thoroughly. What's more, we've got to keep remembering, always, that we can and will find a way out, no matter who or what opposes us, no matter how impossible it seems."

I was talking for my own benefit as well as hers. I needed the confidence I was preaching.

"I understand." Her grave, gray look was fixed on my face and I read utter trust there. "You'll find a way out, I know you will." I didn't deserve that. I was just a confused, bewildered guy up against something too big for him. And I was altogether a stranger to her.

Or was I? There was that imaginary playmate of hers, who had my name, my features. There was the way she had become a very real, very intimate person to me long before I'd seen her, a person so real that I loved her before I set eyes on her. "Now that we're together at last, Johnny," she said, "I'm not afraid any longer. I'm not afraid of anything at all."

I couldn't let her down after that. Now could I? "Thanks, Eve," was all that I said, but she got what I meant. "Now let me tell you my experience." I let her have it, lock, stock and barrel, the essentials of everything I'd been through from the time Astaris had shown up in the Art Gallery to when Daster had brought us together. Of almost everything. For no good reason I left out mention of the carved black stone I'd found in her nursery, the gem whose replica was so paradoxically painted into her portrait. Because it was so nerve-shaking I omitted the incident of the ambush on the entrance plain and the fate of the two who had attacked Kass. And I left out Villon's cryptic speculation about the implication of the arrangement of the buildings in Adalon for another very good reason, a reason that was sending ripples chasing up and down my spine at the same time as it tightened my throat with helpless anger.

We were being spied on

As we talked I had gradually become aware of this, I don't know how or why. We were alone in that room. The doors, keyholeless, were shut. There was no sign of a crack or peephole in the walls and nothing hung on them that might conceal one. I had heard nothing out of the way.

Perhaps I had become sensitized, vaguely, to the waves of nervous force of which Daster had spoken. Whatever it was, I was conscious, as distinctly as one is conscious of a stare on the back of one's neck, that our every word, our every thought, our every emotion, was being observed and noted.

Chapter 13
THE LOTTERY OF DOOM

THERE WAS NOTHING I could do about it. There was no point in alarming the girl by telling her about it, no point in undoing what I had accomplished in setting her at her ease. Moreover, there might be some advantage in concealing from the Adalonians my awareness of what they were up to. And so I went on as I had intended.

"It all adds up to something like this, Evelyn. In some quite incomprehensible way, we have been carried off to a region that isn't on Earth at all, that in all likelihood isn't anywhere in the Solar System. Tentatively, at least, we've got to assume that what's been hinted to me is true, that those who have done this, the people I've been calling the Adalonians for lack of a better name, come from Earth too, but from an Earth far, far older than that which we know. Whether this is so or not, they have a knowledge and powers far greater than we can conceive.

"One of these powers seems to be that of ranging backward and forward in time at will, for not only we, but other individuals from a number of far separated periods in Earth's history, have been gathered here by them. How they do this I can't even begin to think, but there is no question that they have done it, and done it with a definite purpose. That purpose seems to be the acquisition of some information from us, some knowledge that, omniscient as they seem, they lack."

"If you're right about them, what could we possibly know that they don't?"

I shook my head. "Don't ask me that. But you must remember that the knowledge of a race is not always cumulative. Mankind forgets, just as every man forgets. Haven't we often run across hints that the ancients had skills, arts, of which all trace has been lost? To take a simple thing, the secret of Michaelangelo's pigments has been lost."

"And no one knows how Stradivarius got that wonderful tone in his violins," Evelyn put in.

"Exactly. But I have a notion that what the Adalonians, want from us is something we don't know ourselves that we know." I was thinking of the questions that Astaris and Kass had put to me. "And even finding out what it is isn't quite as important as discovering why they need the information they're after, why they are so eager to get it. I don't think it's merely scientific curiosity, they're going to too much trouble for that."

The uneasy sense of being watched, listened to, persisted. It was a creepy feeling, that of an unseen Presence hovering over us, of privacy invaded and of being helpless to avoid it. A damned uncomfortable feeling.

"Why is it important, Johnny?" Evelyn asked. "How would it help us to know all this?"

Her inquiry seemed to crystallize something that all this time had been at the back of my mind. "Because, Eve, if we know what they want and why they want it, we may be able to trade it for our release. We can't fight them, but I have an idea that we can dicker with them."

I didn't say that for her. I said it for him, for whomever it was that was listening. And I waited for some indication that he had heard, for some sign that my offer was accepted. As if she sensed what I was about Evelyn waited too, her damask lips a little parted, her fingers tightening on my hand, tightening and trembling almost imperceptibly.

No hint came that I'd been heard, no slightest hint that what I'd said had made any impression on the eavesdropper. I was a fool to have hoped it. The Adalonians were too certain of their powers, too completely certain. They would squeeze us dry of what they wanted from us, and then toss us away like so much pulped orange. Toss us to the Drina.

"What is it, Johnny?" Evelyn exclaimed. "What's scared you?"

"Scared me?"

"Your face went white all of a sudden, your lips gray." Small wonder they had, with the vision flashing across my mind, of her graceful form swallowed within a gray-purple loathesome mass, of her lovely body blurring, melting away...

"White?" I laughed. "No wonder I'm white. I'm so hungry I'm carnivorous now, and in about a half an hour more I'll turn cannibalistic. If you don't look out I'm likely to be lunching on you."

Her laugh, responding to mine, was a silvery tinkle. "I'm afraid I wouldn't afford you much nourishment, I'm all skin and bones." She broke off. "Remember when I said that last, Johnny? We were playing we were shipwrecked and we were arguing which one of us should eat the other. Do you remember?"

The queer thing was that I seemed to. Very, very dimly, as if it were something I'd dreamed. But all kids play shipwreck sometime or other. "How did it come out?" I asked. "Who ate whom?"

"You ate me, of course. I meant you to, all the time."

"That must have been a pretty swell meal. But all kidding aside, is there any prospect of being fed around here?" Get a grip on yourself, chump, I was saying to myself. Keep your eye on the ball. "Or am I doomed to slow starvation?" Part of me was aching to take her in my arms, and never let her go. And another part of me was telling me that was just what I must not do. "A tenderloin about four inches thick, with the blood oozing out from under a blanket of mushrooms and onions, would just about put the roses you seem to miss so much back in my pallid cheeks." I sucked said cheeks in and pressed my hands to my middle, groaning.

This clowning brought that musical laugh from her again. Which was my intention. "It's quite likely your life may be saved," she said, "very shortly." She glanced at her wrist, at a tiny dial, no bigger than a fingernail, cased in crystal and clinging there by grace of a bracelet braided from platinum strands. "It's almost noon!" She rose from the couch, "Come on. We'll go see."

As I got to my feet, I was thinking: Almost noon! But it was almost noon when I started for Brooklyn, and that was hours ago. "Are you sure that's the right time, Eve?" I asked aloud. "Hasn't your watch stopped?"

"Of course not. I wound it this morning and it was going then." She was walking toward one of the doors and I was following her.

"How many times have you wound it since you left for church," I asked softly.

"Only that once, Johnny. Why?"

"Oh nothing. I thought anything as small as that would have to be wound every couple of hours or so." Nothing?

It was the indisputable proof that we were somewhere else than on Earth. Evelyn might have been deceived as to elapsed time, that faint of hers might have been a coma lasting for days, but the little mechanism on her wrist could not be deceived. Measured by Earth time she had started for church more than two weeks ago, but she'd only had to wind her watch once since then, and it had not stopped. Time ran differently here, there could be no question of that, and the rest followed inevitably.

Evelyn opened the door and a strange polyglot of voices came through to me. The room we entered was large, high-ceilinged. It was as windowless as the one from which we came. But that one had been empty save for the two of us. A dozen or so men were in here.

And such men! The one I first set my eyes on was olive-skinned, his face angular. He wore a short-skirted robe diagonally striped in vivid coloring, and leather sandals whose thongs were crisscrossed about his muscular legs. His mop of black, kinky hair came down on either side of his head almost to the jaws and it was square cut. He might have stepped down from a mural in the Egyptian Room of the Museum.

He was conversing, more by signs than words, with a blonde giant dressed in skins, his yellow shock bristling with strange ornaments of bone. A Briton barbarian from long before the invasion of the Picts or I missed my guess. Beyond them was a group whose members were a togaed Roman, an American Indian in full panoply of quill-embellished buckskin and a fierce eyed Mongolian jingling with hammered silver accoutrements who might well have been a lieutenant of Genghis Khan.

To describe all the occupants of that long chamber would be to make a catalogue of all the races of Man through five thousand years of history. It would require an etymologist to name all the languages they spoke. In speech, in customs, in origin, they were utterly different. But there was one thing they had in common, one thing I felt at once, in the moment I entered among them.

That thing was betrayed by a tautness of the cords in their necks, by a continual shifting of their eyes to the door that from its location I knew opened on the corridor that had brought me to Evelyn, by a jerkiness of movement that could come only from almost unendurable tension.

One of the grizzled elevator men in the building that houses the offices of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby and Garfield was a Russian aristocrat, an ex-Baron. He'd been captured by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, had been imprisoned for some years, had escaped by some fluke or other. We'd gotten friendly, and once he'd told me of the jails of the Cheka, of the rooms in which the prisoners were gathered, each one knowing that sooner or later he would be called out to be executed, none knowing when, or if he would be the next, or if he would be the last. All knowing that doom was certain, and waiting, waiting, waiting...

They were like that, exactly like that, the men assembled here, except that their case was worse because they did not know to what fate they were to be summoned. They knew only that it would be something less merciful than death.

"There's someone here I want you to meet, Johnny," Evelyn said. Her hand on my arm, she guided me to a corner where stood two men and a boy, a little withdrawn from the others, a little aloof.

The boy was the one she had already described to me; the Lost Dauphin, son of Marie Antoinette and the ill-fated Louis XVI of France. His clothing was almost in rags, his toes thrust through the broken uppers of his shoes and there was a bruise on the side of his face. The mark of some brutal jailer's blow, I thought, recalling that History's last certain glimpse of him was in a prison of the Terror.

One of the men with the Dauphin was a tall and stately Teuton, square-jawed, black polled. There was something of the military in his posture, but the long-fingered hand with which he seemed to be fumbling for a sword hilt was the sensitive hand of a musician, and his haggard countenance was too eloquent of thought to be a soldier's. I was afterward to learn that this was John Orth, Archduke of Tuscany, son of Princess Marguerite of the Two Sicilies and closest friend of that scion of the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria who died for love at Mayerling.

It was the last of that trio who interested me most.

He was shorter than his companion, broader of shoulder and chest. His powerful body was swathed in a cloak of dark purple, and if the little Dauphin's pose was kingly, this man's was imperial. His hair, his beard, were blonde and silken, the eyes that watched me as we approached were the deepest blue I'd ever seen and keen as the thrust of a rapier. At one instant there was a sad sweetness about his mouth, almost effeminate, at the next it firmed and I knew that here was a man to venerate, and to fear.

He spoke as we came up to the group. "Ali, Maid Evelyn. Thou hast deprived us of thy sweet company too long." His voice, though low, was sonorous and it was mellow, and something inside of me thrilled to it. "And who is this thou bringest with thee?"

"Someone from my own time and age. John March."

I'll be damned if I didn't have the impulse to go down on one knee when he turned to look at me. "Johnny," Evelyn said, "This is King Arthur of Britain."

"John March," he repeated, and lifted his hand. I didn't know whether to shake or kiss it, that's how bewildered I was. I did neither.

I did neither because in the next instant Arthur was no longer paying any attention to me, nor I to him. Because there was another voice in that room, a rasping, imperative voice. The voice that all its occupants were waiting for, saying a name. Saying two names.

"John March. Evelyn Rand. You are wanted."

The lottery of doom had been drawn again, and it was our names that had been drawn!

Chapter 14
A DEAL WITH DISASTER

EVELYN STIFFENED, BESIDE me, her winsome face drained of all color. "Us," she whispered. "Johnny. They have come for us."

Across the high-ceilinged chamber the strip of secret blackness between the portal's edge and its jamb widened with a fearful slowness...

"Chin up, Eve." My arm went around the girl's slender waist and I pulled her quivering body against my side. "Head up." My voice was steady, though how I contrived to keep it so I still do not comprehend. "There's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all." My forehead was wet with a chill sweat.

The togaed Roman backed away from the widening door, his haughty, patrician features gray with terror. A mustached Tartar lurched against a wing-helmeted Viking from the Fjords.

"Don't let them take me," Eve moaned. "Don't let them--"

"And that we shall not, Maid Evelyn," King Arthur's deep-chested tones cut across her plea. "As long as there remains breath in our body and strength in our arms." He shoved past me to interpose himself between us and the grotesque beings who now were entering the now open doorway.

"Nor so long as I have powder and ball with which to defend you," John Orth added and ranged himself beside Arthur, his hand fumbling out from within his oddly cut jacket a long-barreled pistol whose butt was of silver intricately engraved. "Never has it been said that an Archduke of Tuscany failed to champion the cause of a maid in distress."

"Nor a Bourbon." The little Dauphin joined the three, somehow no longer a child as he whisked a stiletto from somewhere among his rags.

And toward those three from the past there advanced across the wide space that had cleared between them and the entrance three men of the dim future, two Plebos and Daster in his true shape. Arthur's purple cloak fell back from his arm and a sword flashed out, a great gleaming sword full four feet in length, its blade a shaft of silver light, its hilt jewelled gold. "Excalibur has not forgot its skill," he boomed, "nor its master his chivalry."

Written down all this seems mere rhodomontade, then it was rather splendid. The bald and bulbous skulls of the trio they defied held all knowledge--unimaginably transcending the magic of Merlin, the esoteric powers to which Cagliostro laid claim. The ogling eyes could read our every thought, our every intention, almost before we were ourselves aware of them. The boneless, writhing tentacles could paralyze a man with agony, yet knowing all this Arthur, and Orth dared to challenge them with a sword, an ancient pistol and a stiletto.

A curious exaltation pounded in my veins as I stepped forward beside them, my empty fists clenched. And the Future Men advanced toward us, slowly, inexorably.

"Stop!" Orth cried. "Stop where you are or I fire." His pistol pointed at Daster. "Stop, I say."

The Adalonians kept advancing.

Orth's shot slapped my ears and orange-red flame lanced true to the Doctil's head. Utterly unperturbed, Daster came on, neither slackening nor hastening his relentless pace. "Missed," the Austrian groaned.

"The hell you did!" I jabbed a forefinger at a silvery splash on the wall directly behind the leader of the Future Men. "Your bullet went right through him." An eerie prickle scampered my spine. Though reason told me that this was only one more manifestation of that same mastery over the vibrations of matter that had enabled me to pass through a solid wall, no such scientific rationalization could make the occurrence less uncanny. "Bullets or steel are no good against them."

Now the Adalonians were within five feet of us and as though I'd not spoken Arthur's shaft rose, gleaming. "Halt," he roared, "an ye do not wish to feel the bite of a blade that hath never known defeat."

It was magnificent; and it was as pathetically ludicrous as Don Quixote's tilt with a windmill, as Canute bidding the tide retreat. It was worse than ridiculous, it was killing what faint hope I had of saving Evelyn from--"Daster!" Abruptly I was quite calm, my mind crystal clear. "Listen to me."

The Doctil's ear membranes pulsed and the three paused. I sensed Daster's question. "What is it, John March, that you wish to say?"

I pulled in a wheezing breath. Arthur and Orth were warriors and their weapons were futile against these strange beings who were our captors. I was a lawyer. My weapons were those of the weak against the strong; temporizing, compromise, stratagem.

"These men will fight you 'til you destroy them. You don't want to do that. You want them alive or you would not have brought them here in the first place."

"Exactly," the Doctil responded. "But they are of no use to us as they are. They must be taught to submit to our will."

"Taught? How? Read them, Daster, as I know you can. Read them and ask yourself if there is anything you can do, with all your powers, that will break their indomitable spirit."

His tremendous eyes moved to Arthur and Orth, and to the frail, boyish Dauphin. For what seemed an endless time the room was breathless.

Then: "No," the Adalonian sighed. "Even if we reduce them to their ultimate atoms they still will defy us." His thought flicked to the Plebos. He was giving them an order, "Feed them to the drina--"

"Wait!" I cut in. "Wait, Daster. I can tell you how you may bend them to your purpose. Will you listen to me?"

"Hold!" he told the Plebos. Then to me, "What do you propose?"

"What you cannot accomplish by force, you may by reason. Be frank with us. Tell us what you want of us and why, then offer us in exchange our release, our return to our own place and time, unharmed, and we will do our best to give you what you want. You have nothing to lose. You have to gain that for which you have gone to the trouble of gathering us here."

I sensed interest in the Doctil, then indecision. "If the rest of the Kintat agree--" He sank into the same sort of listening trance that had enveloped Kass on the brink of the plateau overhanging Adalon and I knew that he was in communication with his fellow Doctils, was transmitting my proposition to them.

"By the Holy Rood!" King Arthur growled, his countenance darkening. "We mislike this traffic with sorcerers. Merlin hath placed an enchantment upon Excalibur that rendereth it puissant against all evil witcheries, and we fainer would--"

"You damn fool," I blurted. "They could wipe you out in the twinkling of an eye, and you want to fight them. You're a blathering infant--"

"Silence, knave!" he thundered. "Thou art insolent." His eyes flashed blue lightnings and his sword rose in a swift, shining arc. "For less have we slain an hundred caitiffs." The blade swept down, straight for my skull swerved in the last instant to avoid Evelyn, who had leaped in front of me, her arms outspread.

"Arthur Pendragon!" she cried, stamping her foot. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Johnny's just saved your life and you try to kill him. You--you ungrateful--"

He glared at her, his great brows beetling. "This," he growled, "is not to be borne. We--" Abruptly his face was lit by a twinkling smile. "Nay. We cannot be wroth with thee, fair maid, who hath made endurable these dreary hours of our imprisonment. For thy sake we shall be merciful. Let this bold varlet crave our pardon on bended knee and it will be accorded."

"I'll be blasted if I will," I burst out, hotly. "I'm free, white and Amer--"

A soft palm across my lips cut me off. "Johnny," Eve whispered, her eyes pleading. "Do what he wants. Can't you see he's nothing but a big baby and has to be humored."

There was, indeed, something of the overgrown kid dressed up for 'let's pretend' about his purple trappings, something endearingly childish about the petulant scowl that had replaced his brief smile.

"Please," Eve begged. "Please, Johnny dear." Her hands tugged at my lapels and her mouth was moist and seductive. "For me."

"Oh well," I shrugged, and dropped to one knee. "I'm sorry I called you a fool, King Arthur," I muttered as graciously as I could manage.

"We grant thee our forgiveness." He held the back of his free hand to my lips. I might as well, I decided, make a complete ass of myself, so I kissed it and was rewarded by a grin from the hulking king and the tingling touch of Evelyn's fingertips on my cheek. "All the same," I grunted, scrambling to my feet, "you better cut out any idea of scrapping with these people if you ever want to see Camelot again."

"Camelot," Arthur sighed. "We misdoubt that we desire very greatly to return there. All our brave company that used aforetime to gather about the Table Round is scattered and the gray winds howl over our desolate land. The banners of our gentil and parfait knights are mired by fraternal strife, their shields besmirched with the breaking of their vows of fealty and fast friendship. All have abandoned us, all the noble chivalry who served God and us. Only Bedivere is left us, Sir Bedivere the Faithful."

That massively moulded countenance of his darkened and his lips twitched with pain. "But yestere'en, sore wounded in the Last Great Battle in the West, we gave Bedivere our blade Excalibur to cast back into the lake whence it came, and--" he broke off, staring at the storied sword he had named. "But we still have it! Now how-?"

"The legends say that a hand appeared out of the Lake and caught Excalibur from Bedivere, King Arthur." A thrill ran through me as I recalled the ancient tale. "And the legends say also that you did not die, which is the truth as we can see. But the story of your passing that has come down to us tells that three Queens bore you away from that misted battlefield on a black-swathed barge, and that I know to be false. Wasn't it in a whorl of dust that you vanished?"

"A whispering whorl of dust!" His deep blue eyes fastened on my face, and in them was a starry wonder, and a growing awe. "Aye. Out of the drab fog it came, out of the dun veil that shrouded the moans of the wounded, the throat-rattles of the dying. Out of the battle in which none were victorious it stole, and made us part of it. Now indeed this is such a matter of clairvoyance as is worthy of Merlin himself. How know you this, John March?"

"I know it, and I know many things that are beyond your understanding, Arthur Pendragon," I pressed my sudden advantage. "Which ought to convince you that you'd better take my advice, as you used to take Merlin's. You may be a grand fighter, but when it comes to using your brain--"

"Johnny!" Eve broke in. "Daster's coming out of his trance."

The Doctil's great orbs were focussed on me again. He was about to give me the Kintat's answer to my proposition and I seemed to empty out, inside; was a cold, shivering shell.

"You will come with me," I heard. "John March and Evelyn Rand." My heart sank. "And you also, Louis Capet, John Orth, and Arthur Pendragon."

I had won!

It was not to be long before I learned how hollow a triumph it was.

Chapter 15
THEY TOO CAN FEAR

EVELYN STAYED CLOSE to me as, led by Daster and shepherded by the two Plebos, we emerged from the strange, windowless House of Earth. A tightening of her fingers on my hand, a sharp inhalation, reminded me that this was her first sight of Adalon.

"The city's built on a rather interesting plan," I remarked, in an easy, conversational tone, "if you notice." I wanted to get her thoughts off what lay ahead of us. She was trying hard to be brave, but her face was dreadfully white and her little chin was quivering. "Look at that enormous building in the center, these eight others scattered around." For some reason Daster was not using rados for us. We were walking across the plaza towards the domed, enormous House of Sun.

"Scattered is right, Johnny." Eve smiled wanly. "I can't see what you mean by a plan."

"You can't? Look..." I pointed out how the pattern of the city was that of the Solar System. The others listened as attentively as Eve, though to Arthur what I was saying must have seemed the sheerest doubletalk. "I don't even think that it is by coincidence that our prison is the building corresponding to Earth. I think--"

"Pardonnez, Monsieur Marsh," the Dauphin interrupted. "Ditez moi, s'il vous plait, qu'est ce que c'est qui mont, la bas?" The thin-bodied lad's face was alive with a boyish, eager interest as he asked me what it was that lifted from the ground beyond the House of Mercury.

It was a lacy erection of crisscrossed, metallic beams, a spindling tower some five hundred feet high. "Jove!" I exclaimed. "They work fast, these Adalonians. There wasn't a sign of that when I passed here before, and that can't be more than an hour ago."

"It is not yet completed," Orth put in, in his too precisely enunciated English. "See there, Herr March, what goes on."

I discerned what he referred to. At the top of the tower, and at its base, what I had taken at first glance to be excrescences from its netted surface were machines, their gears turning, their piston arms shuttling frenetically.

I saw now that from the distant House of Pluto, clear across the plaza, a conveyor belt brought a stream of silvery girders to the machine on the ground. It seized them, swallowed them, disgorged them to another endless belt, changed in shape and studded with what from here looked very much like rivets.

Now the girders were carried almost vertically up to the machine at the tower's summit and the tower visibly grew upward as the machine moved upward with it, building it.

"Where are the workmen?" Eve demanded. "Those machines can't be simply working all by themselves."

"Oh," I replied airly. "An Adalonian somewhere out of sight is directing them by remote control."

"No," Daster corrected me. "They were set for their task by a stencilled pattern inserted into them. They will need no further supervision until the tower is finished."

"Of course," I made a quick recovery. "Just like our own jacquard looms for weaving intricately designed rugs and laces--"

That was lost on Louis. "How high will it be?" he asked the Doctil in that beautiful French of his. "When it is finished?"

"Its apex will be level with the lip of the encircling precipice."

"Whew!" I whistled. "That's a mile--five times the height of the Empire State--"

"What is its purpose," Orth inquired. "And why is it being built in such haste?"

Daster didn't answer him, not intelligibly, but the Austrian paled, his black eyes flashing, his hand straying to the sword-hilt that was not at his waist. "Easy, mister," I said softly, realizing that he had been rebuffed in no uncertain manner and in his resentment was on the point of an overt act that might undo all I had accomplished. "Easy. They've got a right to their secrets."

Nevertheless, the incident held a meaning I would have given a lot to fathom.

I glanced around the expanse we were crossing, wondering if there were any other significant changes I had failed to notice. It seemed to me that there were fewer Plebos than before. Those I did see, darting about on their rados, paid not the slightest attention to us but none failed to manifest a keen interest in the swiftly mounting tower. I had the impression that this interest was underlaid by some pressing anxiety.

Eve got it too. "There's worry in the air here," she whispered. "Fear almost. That thing's being built to protect them against something, and they won't feel safe until it's finished." As if to confirm her one of the Plebos accompanying us glanced upward. I caught the beginning of a quick thought-flash between him and Daster, curtained from me at once.

Up there at the brink of the cliff, a gray-purple shadow was flattened against the shimmering Veil of Ishlak. I saw it only momentarily, and then it had oozed away in a fashion that told me it was a drina.

Had it been spying on us? I wasn't sure whether that was my own speculation or whether I was intercepting some communication among the Future Men, but somehow I fancied a vast horde of the formless creatures bursting through the Veil, flowing down the immense, rocky ramparts, filling the bowl and swallowing every living being within it. So vivid was the illusion that my nerves drew taut.

"By our halidom!" King Arthur exclaimed. "So bright a bird we have never seen!"

It wasn't a bird that leaped from the Sun Dome. It was a stratcar that zoomed with blurring speed straight for the spot where the drina had peered down at us, hovered there for a split second and dived through the Veil. Once more, in that swift leap, I sensed alarm. The feeling of apprehension in the air of Adalon seemed to deepen.

Villon's voice came back to me, musing when Kass was ordered back to the wild and rocky tableland out of which he'd just conducted us, "Something is not as it should be among them. Dare we hope...?"

I must blot that line of thought before Daster tuned in on it. Poor Francois! He was himself undoubtedly beyond hope by this time. His audacity, that a dozen times had saved him from hanging, would be futile against the Future Men. His luck had run out. Decidedly it had run out when Gohret took him--

"Look out, Johnny!" Eve's tug pulled me to a stop. "You almost walked into the wall."

Daster and the Plebos shooed us now into the corridor in the House of Sun out of which I had emerged not so long ago. Or was it the same? The passage we entered went straight into the depths of the structure. Nowhere was there any sign of the spiral ramp by which I had descended from the stratcar hangar. The doorway through which we had entered was the same. It must be the same; there had been only that single opening on this side of the great building...

But here, within, was a hall different in direction, in contour. A little while ago, in the House of Earth, a door had appeared in a blank wall beside me where an instant before there had been no door. In that same instant the great-headed, tentacular Daster had become a near-sighted, professorial human...

This impermanency of things apparently substantial was the most disquieting of all the phenomena of Adalon. Villon first, then Arthur and Orth and the Dauphin, had proved so altogether human that I had grown to accept, not through logic alone but with an inner conviction, the fact that our company had been assembled out of fifteen disparate centuries. Once oriented to such a telescoping of Time, I could also comprehend that Daster and the other Adalonians were beings out of a remote Future.

But that flesh and bone, that solid stone, should be subject to unpredictable flux in shape and appearance still seemed incomprehensible.

It was, I had come to realize, this very flavor of unreality, menacing though it might be, that had enabled me to carry on. One may know utter, stifling terror in a nightmare, but in a nightmare one never quite despairs. One keeps on fleeing the inescapable succubus, one keeps on battling the unconquerable apparitions, because in the depths of one's being one somehow is still aware that awakening will come in the end.

I knew that this was no dream. I knew that the ghastly dilemma with which I was confronted would not be solved by a merciful awakening. And yet, because so much that had happened had the quality of a nightmare, I did not quite despair.

"Mordieu!" King Arthur exclaimed abruptly, halting. Eve's fingers dug painfully into my arm. I saw little Louis' narrow face go white. Orth's jaw ridged and my own throat was dry.

We were, with no gradation, with no warning of any kind, far within a chamber so vast that it dwarfed us to inconsiderable midges. Its walls were so immensely distant that they were misty limits to our sight, its ceiling so far above that it was a cloudy, indefinable dome. Only the floor beneath was definite, and this was a level expanse black as space itself. A gleaming, polished black it was, so that it seemed to have no substance and we appeared to be suspended in a featureless void, balanced sole to sole on our own inverted images.

In this gargantuan cavern there were only the five of us. Daster and the Plebos had vanished!

As a vaulted Gothic Cathedral is imbued with the very essence of the God to whose worship it has been erected, so was this unimaginable nave with some awesome Presence. It laid upon us, upon our hushed and crouching souls, a dark shadow of awed anticipation that had some fraternity with fear but transcended fear. It silenced us. It held us motionless. It held us peering wordlessly into the endless, empty reaches--

Far off there was movement. Something was coming toward us!

Chapter 16
"WHAT DO YOU WANT OF US?"

IT SEEMED AT FIRST a speck moving jerkily across that gleaming black expanse. There was no point of reference against which to measure the speed of its approach but it did approach, because very gradually it grew larger.

I heard King Arthur's sword slide from its scabbard. I heard the click of John Orth's pistol as he cocked it. I didn't bother to remind them how futile their weapons were. My own muscles were tautening across the back of my shoulders and in my thighs. For seconds I held my breath. Evelyn's hushed voice was in my ears. "They're men, Johnny. They're two men like us, not like the Adalonians."

Her eyesight must have been far keener than mine, because it wasn't 'til several heartbeats after that, that I made out the tiny forms. There was infinite weariness about the way they approached, a desperate fatigue that carried somehow across the distance between us. Once one of them fell, and it took a long time for the other to lift him to his feet.

And then, quite suddenly, they were near enough for us to see who they were.

"Villon!" the Dauphin exclaimed. "Et le Prophete Elijah!" He broke away from us, was scampering toward them, excited and eager as a ten-year-old boy might be expected to be and as reckless in his excitement of any precaution.

In the next instant the rest of us were streaming after him, our feet curiously making no sound on that marble-hard floor.

With a strange swiftness we had reached the two, were crowding around them. I had eyes for Villon alone. He held himself erect, but I could see that it was with tremendous effort that he did so. He was clothed as he had been when I had last seen him, and there was no wound visible about him, but all his jauntiness was gone and he was drained, somehow, of his infrangible spirit, emptied of all his indomitable courage.

"Francois!" I groaned. "What have they done to you? What have they done to you, man?"

He looked at me out of eyes that were like soot marks thumbed into hollow sockets. A shadow of his old mocking smile crossed his scarred lips.

"What have they done to me, my old?" A long shudder ran through him. "I know not. I know only that though they laid not a hand on me they have torn from my breast matters I kept secret from God Himself. I know only that I have babbled to them every thought I have had since I lay in the warm womb of my mother, though not a single word crossed my lips. I know only that they did not learn what they wished, and that I was about to be cast to the drina when some message came to them and I found myself here instead, this venerable Jew leading me across midnight's floor."

"But you must have seen something, heard something."

"Light only, John March. A blaze of white light about me and within me, and eyes in the light, the terrible eyes of our captors. Light that possessed me utterly. Eyes that read my very soul. And I read theirs too and--" He pulled the back of his hand across his seamed brow. In his eyes there was such horror as I hope never to see again in the eyes of any man.

"And what, Francois?" It was inflicting torture on him to ask, but I had to know.

He stared at me. "What?" His long-fingered hands went out from his sides, palms toward me, in a baffled gesture. "Why--I have forgotten, John." Dismay in his sultry look. "I remember that it was very terrible, but what it was, I have forgotten."

"Don't lie to me, Francois," I choked through the tightness in my throat. "The lives of all of us depend on what you've learned."

"More, far more than the lives of us seven is in balance," the poet answered, his countenance that of one who has died and been reborn with the memory of Hell searing him. "That much I know and the knowledge is a cloud of terror that invests me. But I swear to you, by the Crown of Thorns that was pressed on His brow, more I cannot remember and meseems that is because it is too terrible to recall."

"May Jehovah scourge them with the whips of His lightnings." The interruption was in sonorous Hebrew. "May He crush them with the bolts of His thunders." I understood it though I had not 'til that moment ever heard the ancient tongue spoken. "May He smite the sight from their eyes and the light of reason from their brains. May the plagues He sent upon the Egyptians rot them and their sons and their sons' sons unto the twentieth generation."

Intoning this curse, Elijah stood straight and tall and vibrant with an awful majesty. His gnarled hands were lifted high above the silver mane of his unkempt hair; his silver browed eyes were pits filled with a black and blazing fire and the nostrils of his craggy nose were pinched and quivering.

"May oblivion swallow them," he thundered, "and their names be a stink and an abomination even unto the end of Eternity. Hear me, Adonai, my God--"

"Your God," Francois broke in, "old man, your God, Who is ours also, has forsaken us. Here are only we seven and none else, and if we are to be saved it is we alone who can save ourselves."

Did I say that his courage had been drained out of him? I was mistaken.

"But how?" Evelyn's voice was thin with the new terror that their appearance had brought to her, to all of us. "How can we save ourselves, Francois?" Her hands were thrown out to him, appealingly, and they were trembling.

Villon turned lithely to her. He swept to his breast his wide-brimmed, cone-crowned hat, its bedraggled feather fluttering. "Nay, Evelyn of the honeyed hair, I must indeed be bemused that I have not yet observed your presence. I know now that we have naught to fear, for not even Lucifer could be so evil as to harm one so fair."

I didn't like that. I didn't like the bold admiration that had come into his look in spite of what he'd just passed through, in spite of the threat hovering over us. I didn't like, as far as that went, the way Eve had turned to him for help, nor the tender smile that brushed her white lips.

"Please," she murmured. "Please, Francois, answer me. How are we to save ourselves?"

He shrugged bony shoulders. "That, sweet maiden, is not for me. You have at your service a prophet of Israel, a king and a princeling, a duke and a barrister at the law. Apt these are in the art of arms and in the more subtle skills of tongue and brain, and surely so brave a company can devise ways to defeat our enemies. To myself, rhymster that I am, is left the more difficult task of essaying to enshrine your beauty and glamour in a ballade of gray eyes. Hmmmm." He laid a finger against the side of his rascally nose. "Let me see. Let me see..." He winked at me with the eye that was thus hidden from Evelyn!

That wink said, as clearly as though he had spoken, "Don't worry, my friend. I'm putting on this act just to calm her down. She's going to pieces and the only thing that will hold her together is a bit of skilled love-making."

"You might leave that to me," I thought, but I grinned at the Gallic effrontery, my heart warming again to the fellow. And then the grin was wiped from my face and my eyes were widening. The wall from whose direction Francois and I had come had swirled forward 'til it loomed starkly over us, black and shining as the floor, but, because it rose to unguessable heights, indescribably menacing. High up, a long, arc-roofed niche opened in it, a niche filled with a golden, luminous vapor.

For an instant of awestruck silence this aureate cloud billowed in upon itself, vibrant somehow and somehow alive. Somehow the very essence of life. Then, as we stared at it gaping-mouthed, it seemed to become more solid, to coalesce and divide and take on definition. Abruptly there was no longer a mist in that recess, but in a golden light that etched it sharply against its Styglan background, five figures gazed down at us.

Whether by some trick of perspective or in actuality, they seemed gigantic apparitions high in some ebony sky, godlike rather than mortal. But they had the bulbous bodies, the tentacles, the enormous heads, enormous-eyed, of the Future Men.

I recognized Daster at one end of their rank and Gohret at the other and so I knew the five to be the Kintat of Adalon. Some ineluctable, psychic effluvium emanated from them, invisible yet all but palpable, and there was nothing grotesque about those misshapen bodies, those tremendous occiputs.

It was we who were grotesque; we with our tiny brain pans, our clumsy hands, our groping, purblind eyes, dependent on inept physical senses for our small acquaintance with the world about us. We were only by courtesy human. They were truly human, and more than human. They had progressed immeasurably farther beyond us than we had beyond our furred and hand-footed simian ancestors who not so long ago roamed chattering in the jungle treetops. Our only right to existence was that we might be of service to them, and to be of service to them was high privilege.

I might actually have gone to my knees in genuflection had not Evelyn's cold fingers, just then, crept into the palm of my hand.

One does not easily strip oneself of pride in the presence of one's beloved. That silent appeal of Eve's restored my manhood. I straightened, the awed humility that had invested me sloughing off. Gohret's head-membranes pulsed once, at that, and I knew that by grace of that which lay between Evelyn Rand and myself I had won the first skirmish of a duel just beginning.

They were my opponents, that they were my masters was yet to be proved. As though we were about to appear against one another in the forum of some court, I weighed their qualities. Gohret was ruthless, coldly cruel, implacable. Daster, at the other extremity of the line, had a modicum of kindliness, a trace of benevolence that had impelled him to assume a shape that would not frighten Evelyn, and to answer my wanderings about the miracles of Adalon.

The Doctil next to Daster--Oddly, there was something familiar about him. Not in appearance, though there were the indefinable differences about him that made the Adalonians individuals. It was rather a matter of imponderables--I knew who he was. Astaris! The 'little man' who had appeared to me in the Madison Avenue Art Gallery that was worlds, and eons, distant from here. The emissary who had plucked me, and Evelyn, out of our own time and space.

He was the only one of the Five whose brooding gaze was other than general and unfocussed. He had singled out Eve for his attention, and there was a peculiar quiver about his tiny mouth--

"John March!"

The same demanding summons that had sounded in the House of Earth; it was the voice, not of any one of the Kintat, but of all five. It pulled me out in front of our little group. Eve clung to my hand and came with me, but I was scarcely aware of it.

"Yes?" My own voice was a hoarse croak.

"You have offered to yield to us that which we require of you, in return for your safe release. You have prevailed upon Arthur Pendragon, John Orth, Louis Capet and Evelyn Rand to accede to the treaty. We require that Elijah of Israel and Francois Villon signify their assent to it before we procede."

"Now indeed they are most gracious," I heard Villon mutter, behind me. "Can it be that they have found prophet and poet more obdurate than they deemed possible?"

I was reminded of the horror in his eyes, the horror of something he had learned but could not recall. Were the Adalonians tricking us into some promise we might have reason to regret?

"One moment, Doctils," I objected. "My words, as I remember, were 'Tell us what you want of us, and why. Offer us then our return to our own place and time, unharmed, and we will do our best to give you what you want.' That was my proposition, that was the proposition to which my friends agreed, and it is the one on which we stand."

"A Daniel," Elijah's murmur approved. "A very Daniel." But it was not so much this as another pulse at the sides of Gohret's head, a throb of his membrane that once more seemed to betray disappointment, that made me glad I'd said it. I was certain now that we had something with which to trade, something that they had gone to great lengths in their effort to obtain, and would go to greater. I would insist on knowing what it was before I would commit my clients to any irretrievable contract.

"We must know," I repeated, my tone firmer with the greater assurance this intuition gave me, "what you want of us, and why."

"What we want of you?" It was like a vast sigh filling all that enormous vault. Then there were no more words in my brain, but only an indescribable something beating upon it, swamping it--

Who was I to demand anything of those beings so superior to me? They were all wise, all-powerful. I was presumptions. I must withdraw--Fingers were tightening on my hand. Eve's fingers. Against my shoulder, on the other side, was the pressure of a comradely shoulder--Villon's. Behind me there was a rustle of moving feet, Arthur, Elijah, Orth and the Dauphin were crowding close.

"Precisely," a voice that was mine, yet somehow unwilled by me, sounded in my ears. It was not only my voice but the voice of us seven, of all of us. "Before we can proceed we must know what you want of us," I said firmly, abject no longer, nor fearful.

Silence received that demand, a throbbing silence behind whose veil I sensed that there was communication among the five who loomed high above us in that aureate niche. And then the voice of the Kintat was replying.

"Of you, Elijah," I sensed it to say, "we want the secret of Faith. We want to know what it was that sustained your kith through centuries of oppression, what it was that moved a certain Man of your people to pay with His agony for the sins of generations yet unborn."

"Of you, Francois Villon, we want the secret of Beauty. We want to know how, with words laid together in a certain order, with sound vibrations combined in certain simple relations, with color and with shape, some among our ancestors could recreate in men born long after they had died their own ecstasy, an ecstasy whose very nature we do not understand.

"Of you, Arthur Pendragon, we want the secret of Obligation. We want to know why you inspired a devotion in those you ruled that transcended all selfish motives. We want to know why, having the power over your people that this devotion gave you, you yet used that power for their welfare and their happiness rather than for your own ends.

"Of you, John Orth, we want the secret of Loyalty. We want to know why, when your prince and friend had slain himself at Mayerling and in no manner could reproach you, you yet gave up all the honors and the luxuries that were yours to carry to some undivulged destination a casket with which he entrusted you, for some purpose you never learned. Because of that something you called loyalty you became a wanderer on the face of the earth. What is there in you that made it impossible for you to do otherwise?"

As I have said, the voice we heard was the voice of all the Kintat, yet, in some way that I did not quite understand, each of the divisions of this long speech seemed to be the contribution of a different Doctil. It had been the one in the center, I later learned he was called Bolar, who had spoken of Faith, Daster of Beauty, Gohret of Obligation. Favril, between Gohret and Bolar, had been the one to question Orth concerning Loyalty. Now it was the turn of Astaris, and his demand was very simply put.

"Of you, John March and Evelyn Rand, we want the secret of Love."

I heard Eve gasp at that, and felt her press even closer to me than she had been. My arm already was about her, so that I did not know whether it was she or I who had brought that about, but beside us there was a soft chuckle that could come only from Villon.

It would amuse a Frenchman, that!

In the next instant my attention was back to the voice, and now it was once more that of the whole Kintat. "We have attained all knowledge. There is not one smallest Law of the Universe which we have not mastered. We know the rules that govern the interaction of Galaxy with Nebula, of proton with neutron and the interplay of all the vast range of entities between. We know the Laws that bind all into one organic whole. Nothing in Nature has any mystery for us, and we have learned that everything in Nature exists and is governed by rigid, immutable laws. We know all--"

"You know not the Eternal, O Benighted!" Elijah's resonant tones flung at them. "You know not God, and without you know Him, you know nothing."

"Precisely, prophet. The laws which govern these five things we do not yet know: Faith, Beauty, Obligation, Loyalty and Love. But their nature also we can learn, in the same manner that we have learned all else, by studying those entities which manifest them. We have found them neither in the stars nor in the ultimate atom, but in you we find them and you shall give us their key."

"When," I responded quietly, "and only when we know why you are so anxious to find out about them."

"But that speaks of itself, Monsieur Marsh," the Dauphin's boyish tones broke in. "Is it not that the more understanding a savant acquires, the greater is his thirst to learn more? These creatures here have of knowledge all but these small fragments and it is their nature to not rest 'til they have fitted the final bits into their picture. There," proudly, "I have solved for you the problem."

I groaned. With one impetuous splutter of his tongue the youngster had stultified everything I had been trying to accomplish. He had supplied the Kintat with a good, a sufficient reason for their demands--

"Remember, my old," Villon whispered. "Truth is their religion. They cannot lie."

"Bless you," I said huskily. And then, "Is that true, Doctils of the Kintat? Is it merely the desire to fill out the last gaps in your view of the Universe that inspires you?"

The response was long in coming. But it came at last, reluctant. "No, John March. We have a definite need for understanding of Faith, Beauty, Obligation, Loyalty and Love."

"What is it? What need have you of these secrets?"

Once more that sense of reluctance, of inaudible consultation among them. Once more the exultant awareness that I had won my point.

"We shall answer you. But it would take too long to set the answer forth in words. Therefore you shall learn it without words."

At that the golden light in the lofty niche above us faded and utter blackness possessed the wall. Possessed not only the wall but that whole vast space and us, a blackness that thumbed my eyes and lay thick against my skin and choked me, so absolute it was.

It was a blackness of non-being. And yet within it there was a stir as of infinitely vast masses moving, and the rush of great winds, and the rumbling thunders of many waters.

"I'm afraid," Eve quavered, close to my ear. "Oh, Johnny, I'm terribly afraid."

Chapter 17
DESTINY

A FLECK OF LIGHT FLOWERED IN THE heart of utter lightlessness. Then the light was the Sun, and about the shining orb danced midge-like the spheres of its planets, and the backdrop for them was the whole vast, gold-speckled panoply of the heavens.

Now you must remember that we had no scale of distance or direction by which to measure the tremendous drama now beginning. To say we viewed it is really incorrect. Experienced is more nearly the proper term, though this too does not quite convey the manner by which it became part of our consciousness.

Perhaps it progressed on a screen before us. Perhaps it moved wholly within our brains, as a dream does. Perhaps within the plasma of our component cells ancestral memories were awakened, and pre-memories (I know no better word) of events yet to be; events implicit in each cell of ours as they were implicit in the microscopic protoplasm that first blindly stirred with life within the primal deep. However it was, we seemed to be of that which passed in the same manner that humanity itself was of it, not as individuals but as the race itself.

This is as clear an explanation as I can make. It is as clear as it was to me and the others when the final terrible realization burst upon us, and once more we were ourselves. Only the dreadful thing we had learned was clear then, not how we had learned it.

At any rate, there was the Sun, and there its wheeling planets, and we looked upon them as a god might. The next instant a sea, warm and gray and limitless, heaved sluggishly on a green-scummed shore and out upon that shore we crawled, a fish that somehow had gained the ability to breathe.

Hot was the sun, and steamy the air with vapors, and the great, fronded ferns everlastingly dripped moisture on the oozy slime they feathered. So like our own native brine was that climate that we flourished and multiplied.

The land heaved as the sea had heaved. Red-glowing rock split its covering of lush black mud, here to be cooled by the hot air that was frigid to its own infernal temperature, there to flow, moving landscapes of molten fire, into the hissing waters. Many of us perished, but some survived when at last the land froze in the shape it was to hold for aeons.

Legless, scaled creatures we were then, but within us there were mute, inchoate strivings. These gave us blurred sight, and a sort of hearing, and the power to make small, peeping sounds. Some of us thrust out limbs, and some of us learned to carry our progeny within our bodies 'til they were miniature replicas of ourselves and more fitted to survive in the inimical world.

Now it was cold that threatened our existence, great moving mountains of solid cold that crept indomitably down upon us, pinching us between their groaning walls of death, so that only in a narrow zone was life possible, and there only in a sluggish and dormant way. The ice retreated, and those of us who were left reawakened and the changes to our forms resumed, adapting us to the changes in our habitat. We were furred now, and toothed. Some of us rose erect, and the shapes of our forelimbs changed so that we could swing chattering from limb to limb in the tops of the trees that now cloaked the earth.

We learned that with sticks we could lengthen our reach to secure things that otherwise we might not. We learned that when the over-arching foliage failed to shield us from the rains we could find shelter in the caves. We learned that we could soften the rocky floors of the caves and fashion many needed things out of the reeds and out of the mud of the swamps.

In the swamps were monstrous beasts that stalked us for food as we stalked other beasts smaller than ourselves. When we saw the fearful creatures looming upon us, terror wrenched sounds from us and these sounds were always the same. When we heard them we knew they meant danger, and we would flee. After a while we would make these sounds intentionally as warning to others of our kind, even when we who made them were safe.

This worked so well that we set other meanings to other sounds, and no longer had we to rely on gestures alone to convey our groping thoughts.

Because of our own hunting, and because of the hunting of the greater beasts, the small creatures upon which we lived grew sparse. It became a question of which would survive, the giant beasts or us; and since we were so puny we seemed to be doomed. But it dawned on us that though singly we were helpless against them, if we fought against them in hordes we were often triumphant.

To help us in our fight against the giant beasts we devised nets of the vines that everywhere grew luxuriant, and shaped stones and fastened them to the ends of sticks that they might the more dexterously be handled. Yet were we still inept and clumsy in our common endeavours, interfering with one another, 'til we ceded to one of us, the strongest first, afterwards the wisest, command over us in our raids.

Hunting together we came to dwell together, and it was natural to obey the chief huntsman in all things. Because he was the greatest among us, his was the right to first choice of meat, and the dryest cave, and the most desirable among our females.

Sometimes one among us disputed the right of another to be chief, and the horde would divide, some cleaving to the one, some to the other. Then would we tear and rend one another with fang and with claw, and with our axes and knives of sharpened flint, 'til only one of the parties remained, and the dispute was thus settled.

Sometimes there would be poor hunting in the land where we dwelt and it would be decided to find some other land. Sometimes that other land would be inhabited by some other clan who did not wish to give it up, and so it was necessary to fight with them 'til they were slain or enslaved. If our own land was most desirable it was natural that some other tribe should covet it and attempt to wrest it from us. Thus we learned that any men who were different in appearance from us, or whose speech-sounds were not the same as ours, were by these very signs our enemies, to be destroyed if we were in greater force than they, to be fled from if they were the more numerous or the more subtle.

There were these enemies to fear, and there were the beasts to fear, the sabre-toothed tiger, the great snakes of the jungle. But there were things in the world more greatly to be feared than these. There was the great maw that nightly swallowed the sun and that some morning might not disgorge it. There was the recurring winter-death of the world from which we were never sure it would awaken. There were invisible beings who rumbled monstrously in the skies and hurled jagged spears of blue fire down upon us. There were the unseen wraiths of the dark who made men's limbs like water, and heated their blood 'til it was liquid flame in their veins, and stole away their minds.

Luckily there were among us some who could hold converse with these dread beings, and who could placate them. More powerful than the chiefs became the medicine men, for they could call upon the unseen to destroy the chiefs, and the chiefs feared them.

We learned many things. We learned how to make fire, and how to use it to warm us, and to make more palatable our foods, and to melt certain stones so that they became at once malleable and harder so that from them we could fashion for ourselves better weapons and tools and vessels for cooking and storage. We learned how to go upon the waters, and to journey far from sight of the land, and we found other lands and other peoples to conquer. Our tribes became nations; our chiefly, kings; our medicine men, priests.

Our ways changed, but one way did not change. If men differed from us in language or appearance, they were our enemies and it was our right to take from them that which they possessed and we desired, though we had to destroy or enslave them.

Our knowledge and our skills grew. We changed the face of the earth to suit our desires. We harnessed the lightning to our purpose and laced the continents with roads of stone and of steel. We builded ourselves magnificent cities. We conquered the air and projected our sight and our thought into the farthermost reaches of the heavens. We shifted the atoms at will, making new and ever new compounds.

We bickered and fought among ourselves as we had when we wore skins for clothing and prowled the lush jungle. The wealth we had created we destroyed with a passion and a savagery transcending that of the jungle-men we once were, as the weapons we now used transcended our ancient flint-axes.

Where once a war might involve two tribes or two nations and few hundred square miles of territory, wars now raged over a continent, a hemisphere, over all the globe. Where once only the men of a nation battled in set lines behind which there were hunger and distress but at least no peril to limb and life, now crashing bombs and deadly gases rained out of the sky and our women and children, our aged and crippled were engulfed in the holocaust.

As war after war spawned new and more terrible instruments of mass murder, in the intervals between wars we would attempt the formation of some world organization that would put an end to war. Each such league would be born with the same high hopes, each would be born with the same cancer; the reluctance of every nation to yield what was called its 'sovereignty.' Sometimes indeed, so dreadful were the weapons that the last war had evolved, it appeared that rather than bring upon the world the universal destruction they promised, the nations would yield as much as was required of this 'sovereignty.' But always in the end the scientists of one nation or another would devise a defence, or what they thought was a defence, against the latest avatar of death or perhaps would secretly invent a new and more terrible one, and the latest League of Peace would die.

Triumph for one side or the other, or exhaustion of both sides, would end a war, and such was our indomitable spirit that we would turn back at once to the arts of peace. Science all but conquered disease and began even to find ways of combatting the slow deterioration of senility so that our life span grew always longer.

Through the ravages of war and our other careless dealing with natural resources, the area of tillable land kept lessening. But biologists discovered how to grow our vegetable foods with their roots in liquid plasma of inorganic salts that filled enormous trays, piled high in gigantic tiered structures.

Domestic animals, too, were bred in factories rather than on farms. Huge sheds of steel these were, miles long; their one end alive with the bawling of cattle, the cackling of hens, the baaing of sheep, the other shaking with the hammer and pound of the slaughtering and dressing machines; pouring forth the products of an agriculture that had become a mechanized industry.

These agricoles were built near the cities whose population they fed; and so, there being no longer need for any of us to live separated from our fellows, we gathered together in the cities. These grew infinitely vaster than we could have conceived in the Twentieth Century; but where there were no cities the wilderness reclaimed its own, cloaking with tangled greenery the unpeopled land.

Mile upon mile the cities stretched, great masses of concrete and steel. Many-levelled they were, covered over against the elements by monstrous shells, lighted no longer by the Sun, but by a cold and sourceless artificial light that never lessened and never brightened.

The cities breathed air held to an even temperature, moistened to the optimum degree, dustless and germless. Within them were the teeming warrens where we dwelt; the throbbing, thunderous factories where we labored; arenas for such sports as our thinning blood permitted us to partake in; theatres and music halls. Threading the cities in soaring arabesques were the street-ways, trafficless because their paving itself moved, slowly at the outer margins, swifter and more swiftly towards the center. Always the Ways were crowded, for there was no longer day or night for us but only the work and rest and sleep periods that the Aristos decreed.

The Aristos were the brain of our body politic, the Leaders and Masters of men. Obsolete as the chiefs of the ancient clans had become kings and presidents, outmoded as the fire-centered tribal Councils were parliaments and congresses. Forgotten except by some wild-eyed anachronisms was the quaint idea that the State exists to serve its people, a contention as fantastic as that a human body exists to serve the cells of which it is composed.

The State, we had learned, was the be-all and end-all of life, each citizen subordinate to its weal. Each contributed to the State the best that he was able, each received from the State a recompense measured by what he contributed.

Centuries of leadership, of training had endowed the Aristos with their innate genius for management, their congenital fitness to govern. They were the incarnation of the State, their decrees its laws, their will, its will. They regulated our every act, set our every task, dictated our every thought, ruled all the minutiae of our lives so that the State might best be served.

It was their due, was it not, that they should be rewarded with every luxury the civilization they created could produce? Was it not their right to have first choice of all the best of life, even though the Plebos were by millions the more numerous?

The Plebos carried out the behests of the Aristos, serving the State and grateful that by being of use to the State they earned the right to live at all. Cast by birth in a grosser mould, they were fit only to give to the State their labor in time of peace, their bodies when war flared between the cities.

Not that their labor was long or arduous. For this we had to thank the Doctors of Learning, the Doctils.

A caste apart were the Doctils. Like the Plebos they were amenable to the Aristos, but their rewards in luxury of living were but little, if at all, inferior to those which accrued to the Masters themselves.

Magnificent were the Doctils' contributions to the State; in machines that did all the world's work under the unremittent attendance of the Plebos; in knowledge that probed the Universe for new ways to exalt the State. They gave us stratcars that shuttled above earth's atmosphere and brought the farthest distant of our cities within an hour's journey. They gave us spaceships that visited Mars and Venus and fetched for us new and strange elements to make more godlike our life. They fashioned for us our brave, new world.

It was the Doctils who made the State the efficient mechanism it had become. Take, for instance, the matter of human procreation.

By the old, biological process, a full half of the Plebos, the females, were incapacitated for their usual employment during the recurring periods of gestation. This was, of course, a direct loss to the common weal, but the disturbance to the State's economy did not end with that. Since the only limits to life now were those set by war, and infrequent accident, there were times when no additions to our population were required, others when great numbers of Plebos were badly needed. But, utterly obedient to the decrees of the Aristos as they were in all else, the Plebos could not be regimented in their mating habits. This situation seriously threatened the meticulous balance of work and workers that had been set up, and posed economic problems not even the genius of the Aristos could solve.

The scientists changed all that in a single brilliant stroke. They devised a method by which ova were removed from the human body, artificially fertilized, and kept in a state of suspended animation until such time as additions to the population were required. When the need arose, by various ingenious processes the maturation of the stored eggs was brought about at twenty times the previous rate, so that within one year exactly the desired number of new Plebos at the efficient age were produced. Thus it became possible to sterilize all male Plebos, and all but the comparatively small number of females required to supply the basic ova. Thereafter, by certain treatment of the growing embryos; only neuter Plebos were matured, except for the few females, the Matras, required to replace those who for one reason or another ceased to function.

The Aristos directed that the Doctils apply the process to their own class as well as to the Plebos, but exempted themselves from it. Their superior self-discipline, they proclaimed, rendered it needless as far as they were concerned.

Oddly enough, the Doctils argued against this decree, maintaining that they did not fall behind the Aristos in self-discipline. But their appeal was denied, and there was nothing for them but to obey, since all the weapons they had invented--the disintegrating rays, the atom bombs, the sonic vibrators that changed the frequency of nervous impulses 'til those upon whom they were focused became insane--were entirely in the hands of the Aristos and none knew better than the scientists how futile opposition to them would be.

So dreadful, indeed, were these weapons, that no City any longer dared to make war upon another, and we knew peace at last had come to Earth.

For some centuries we occupied ourselves with the business of living. To the Plebos it was a dreary business, because they were cogs in machines that ran smoothly and without vibration and without purpose, unless that purpose were to provide luxury for the Aristos.

The Doctils occupied themselves with the pursuit of ultimate knowledge, and with many curious experiments, such as that of changing our shape and form in better adaptation to the tasks set for us. The Aristos were amused by the results of these trials, and mildly interested in the discoveries the Doctils made as they probed even farther into the infinite and infinitesimal, but mostly they were engrossed in their own sybaritic pleasures, pleasures neither Doctils nor Plebos any longer could comprehend.

How could the sexless understand dalliance between male and female? How could those whose very bodies had been changed so that they were fit only for their assigned function in the economy of the State understand beauty of sound or color or form? How could those whose every act was meshed into the acts of those about them in absolute and rigid cooperation understand the joy of competitive sport?

Somewhere in these centuries the Doctils learned how to transmute energy into matter, so that no longer was it needful for our ships to ply space, nor our stratcars to dart across the skies in trade between the Cities.

This was a consummation welcomed by us. The people of each city spoke different languages, differed from one another in color, in cephalic formation, in bony structure; hence they were natural enemies. As long as we had been mutually interdependent for the unique resources of our contiguous territories, we had been forced to maintain a certain basis for more or less peaceful intercourse. Now the need for this was done away with. It took only a brief conference of the Aristos of the world to decide upon a complete severance of relations. The City shells were ordered permanently sealed against entrance or exit and now each City was a world unto itself, completely self-sufficient.

Man himself at last was completely self-sufficient, wholly independent of Nature, wholly independent of all but his own powers. Two million years after the first lunged fish crawled out of a steamy sea, Mankind had reached its apogee.

"BUT THEY DENY JEHOVAH!" a sonorous voice thundered across the heavens. "THEY SPURN THE ETERNAL. BEHOLD! THEY HAVE TURNED THEIR FACES FROM GOD AND HE HAS TURNED HIS FACE FROM THEM AND LACKING HIS COUNTENANCE THEY MUST PERISH."

Chapter 18
THE CURTAIN FALLS

I was vaguely aware that it was Elijah who had thus broken into the tremendous drama of Man's Destiny. As vaguely I was aware of the others who shared with me this experience, but it seemed to me that someone was missing.

"There is neither nobility nor chivalry among them." Arthur's voice was something heard half dreaming, half waking. "Their rulers govern only for themselves without obligation to their subjects..." It was all dim and unreal but quite clearly there were six of us, not seven, as Orth's deep accents rumbled, "Nothing but machines they are and like machines they work only how and as long as they are ordered. There is not one who is loyal to his task or to another. Not one..."

Evelyn was phantasmal, but wraithlike as she was there still was a thrill for me in her bated whisper. "How terrible, Johnny. How very terrible. There is no love in that world, no one to love..."

They were shimmering back into the blackness; Elijah, Arthur, Louis, John Orth. Evelyn was fading as the blackness closed in; but where was Villon! He had not spoken of the absence of Beauty from the drear world of Man's future. He was gone from among us.

Was he only the first to go? Were we to vanish one by one while those who remained were engrossed in this pageant of Man's Destiny? The blackness became absolute again.

Once more we were part of the colossal drama, of the cosmic tragedy that moved swiftly--now and inevitably to its final curtain.

Man had attained the ultimate. Within the sealed shells of the Cities we had achieved perfection.

Between the Cities spread a dark and whispering wilderness. Through the gloomy forest aisles of the Wastelands prowled wild beasts that had changed but little from those that we had hunted--and feared--in the dim and shadowed past. Out there the winds still seethed through rustling leaves, streams still babbled down to an untracked sea, and the sun still shone, but none of this had any meaning for us.

'Til, in Moska, farthest north of the Cities, the Plebos in charge of the climate machines noted that these were speeding up beyond any rate known before in their effort to warm to the thermostatically predetermined degree the air drawn, through immense ducts, from outside the shell.

In accordance with regulations, this curious circumstance was reported to the Aristos of Moska. These ordered their Doctils to investigate.

The Doctils checked the climate machines and found nothing wrong with them. Their peculiar performance must be due to an unprecedented drop in the temperature of the Wasteland air. The scientists made some adjustments in the machines and requested permission of the Aristos to break the seals of the City shell, so that they might determine just what changes were occurring outside.

This permission the Aristos denied. The Doctils, they argued, were trying to cover up some mistake of their own, or perhaps were even involved in some conspiracy against the State. This accusation they held proven when the scientists took the unprecedented step of persisting in their plea and dared even to hint that the Aristos were something less than all-wise. The matter was settled out of hand by a mass execution of all the Doctils of Moska. They were, after all, no longer needed since Man had attained perfection.

The Aristos returned to their pleasures. The Plebos continued functioning in the rhythmic routine of their labors. Nothing had changed. Nothing except that the climate machines continued speeding up.

Then the enclosing shell of Moska commenced to groan under some inexplicable pressure from without.

For the first time in memory, the Plebos were aware of an emotion--that of apprehension. But habit confined them inexorably to their routine, and it was the Aristos, themselves breaking the seals, who discovered that Moska was doomed.

Mountains of ice, an endless continent of it, were moving down from the Pole to swamp the City! It was possible that Doctils might have devised some means of dissipating the ice or forcing it back, but there were no longer any Doctils in Moska. As matters stood, there was no recourse but to abandon the City before its human occupants were ground to pulp in the ruin of its soaring structures.

The advance of the glacier, inevitable though it was, was infinitely slow and the shell was very strong, so there was time to prepare an orderly evacuation while messengers were dispatched in hastily reconditioned stratcars to arrange for accommodation by the Cities of Berl, Par and Lond, Moska's nearest neighbors.

Meantime, the far southern City of Melbour was commencing to have difficulties with its own climate machines. These were as yet, however, not serious enough to be alarming.

There was a great deal of confusion in Moska. The Plebos, wrenched from their accustomed tasks, were bewildered. The Aristos, deprived of the guidance of the Doctils, were not at all certain as to just what should be done, or how. There was, however, nothing approaching panic until the stratcars returned with their reports.

These were all three alike. Each crew had had trouble in penetrating the shells of the Cities to which they had been sent. When they had succeeded in this and delivered their plea, the answer in each case had been an immediate and incontinent refusal.

"Moska's predicament is no concern of ours," the Aristos of Lond, for example, had replied. "We see no reason to upset the balanced economy of our State on behalf of strangers."

The consternation with which these reports were received was followed by boiling wrath, and then a grim determination. "What they will not give us," was the decision, "we shall take."

A rending crash, the first crack of the shell, emphasized the need for haste. Before the Great Glacier had advanced another meter, the sky was darkened with a vast cloud of stratcars and rocket-ships, crewed with Plebos, captained by Aristos.

The destruction of Moska was earth-shaking thunder in the north as its fleets swept toward Berl and Par and Lond.

But these were not taken by surprise. They had sent spies on the trail of the homing Moskvites to verify the truth of their tales, and these had sounded the warning. Up from the threatened Cities leaped their own myriad-numbered fleets and the enemies met fifty miles high over the Wastelands.

An Inferno took possession of the startled silences of the substratosphere; a hell of lancing, lethal beams, of crepitating ionic discharges; a cataclysmic Hades of sounds that invaded men's brains and set them mad.

Across the heavens that prodigious battle raged, and the heavens were a sheet of flame out of which rained soot that had been men, and white-glowing embers that moments before had been proud, space-eating ships and fleet stratcars. The forests received this dust-hail of destruction, and the heat of the disrupted atoms set fire to the forests, and the flame above was matched by the searing spread of flame below.

For a little space the remnants of those mighty fleets still fought, and that little while was sufficient to complete the contagion of disaster. While the darting ion-lances of the cosmic annihilators, the radioactive blasts of the atom bombs, and the beams of the disintegrators obeyed the laws of ethereal vibration and sped off into outer space in straightline tangents from Terra's globe, the maddening shrills of the sonic vibrators were conducted to Earth's surface by its atmosphere, were carried to the Cities not as yet involved in the explosion. High pitched and fiendish, they penetrated the shells of Madri and of Byzant, of Ning and Tok and Nyork, and curdled the brains of the Aristos and Doctils and Plebos that dwelt there.

The madness seized upon all of us who heard those sounds, and none of us escaped. We were stripped of all that the centuries had taught us, were left only with what we had learned in the steamy jungles in whose treetops we had swung chattering, in the caves where we had shivered with fear of the beasts and hate for alien men ingrained itself in the germinal genes of our race. The hordes were on the move! The enemy hordes were swooping down upon us! If we did not kill them they would kill us.

Kill! Kill! KILL! KILL!

From Losan and Washton, from Alexan and Buenos and Capetin, burst our fleets to hurricane across the world, seeking those of alien speech and alien countenance who because they were different from us needs must be our enemies.

We found one another in the screaming empyrean, we found those who sought us as we sought them, and we shattered together with the crash of our atom bombs and the lightnings of our disintegrators and the lunatic shriek of our sirens.

Now the skies were a fury of death, and the face of the Earth was a seething conflagration and the madness that wailed, "kill, kill, KILL," ringed the spinning sphere where Man had achieved the ultimate. The ultimate in self-destruction, for nowhere on that blazing orb, nowhere in the incandescent atmosphere enveloping it, could life longer exist.

There were no victors in that last war of all, and there were no vanquished; for when the fires had burned themselves out Earth was a dead planet, its flesh of soil blasted and torn and blackened, its bones of rock melted into the tortured, nightmare skeleton of that which had been the Sun's most favored child.

There could be no life left on such an Earth, but all Earth-life was not extinct.

Chapter 19
THE WILL TO LIVE AND KILL

IF, SOME CENTURIES BACK, THE Aristos had not included the Doctils in the Law of Controlled Procreation, the Story of Mankind would now be ended.

Although they had ventured some feeble protest, the Doctils of the world had accepted the edict--except for a certain one in Moska.

This one, Roya by name, had been perhaps the last human alive who did not altogether subscribe to the doctrine of the State Supreme and to the omniscience and omnipotence of the Masters.

Roya resented the Aristos' act, resented even more his fellow scientists acquiescence therewith. He became definitely non-social. Hereafter, he decided, he would share his accomplishments with no one. He would, moreover, direct his researches toward the discovery of hitherto unknown natural laws, and new applications of known laws, that would enable him eventually to gain control of Moska, and then of the world, for himself.

Benefitting by the pooling of the thought of all the other Doctils of the City while withholding the bulk of his own scientific achievements, Roya forged far ahead of the rest of the fellowship of the Doctils. He learned that beyond the identity of matter and energy was a more fundamental identity of pure thought with both, and that this was the true reality. He learned the nature of Time; that the Past and the Future coexist with the Present, and he learned how to move pastward along Time's flux, though he did not quite solve the problem of how to take himself futureward. He learned how to warp Space at will, so that at will he could place himself instantaneously at any point in its infinity.

So many avenues of speculation did his discoveries open up that even Roya's great brain faltered at the task of exploring them all. He required aid, but he dared not communicate his knowledge and his intentions to any man. They would without any measure of doubt be reported at once to the Aristos, and these would at once move to purge him. He was not yet quite ready for a test of his powers, not yet quite sure that single-handed he could defeat a world.

His dilemma he solved thus: He brought about an accident in which a score or so of Plebos were killed. When the maturation of a sufficient number of fertilized ova to replace them was commenced, Roya managed to be assigned to the task and contrived to abstract from the storage trays five additional eggs. The nutrient baths in which these were placed he secretly adjusted so that they would mature as Doctils possessed of all his own store of knowledge and with his own non-social psychology.

In a year Roya would have help in his great project, five Doctils who would not betray him. But Roya did not live quite to the end of that year. He was one of the scientists purged when the first premonition of the Glacier brought about the dispute between them and the Aristos.

The interval between that incident and the departure of the Moskvite fleets for their attack on their neighboring Cities was just about sufficient for the five to reach their full growth. Completely armed with their foster-father's omniscience, they were at once aware of the implications of what was occurring and knew instantly what they must do to escape the catastrophe. The general confusion made it easy for them to seize Moska's largest spaceship, kill its Aristo officers and get it safely away from Earth before the sonic vibrators commenced spreading their contagion of madness. Within our spaceship now were all that remained of Man: we five newfledged Doctils, our ship's crew of a hundred Plebos and a single Matra, an egg-bearing female that Daster had had the inspiration to include in our cargo.

Included in that freight was also a complete assortment of the various devices our civilization had produced, so that our vessel was a microcosmic City as self-contained and as self-sufficient as any of those that now had been blasted into nonexistence. In a manner that with his inability to travel into the Future Roya could not have foreseen we who owed our existence to him had absolute dominion over the destiny of our race.

"It is," Bolar thought to us, "as if this ship were the germinal cell from which a new and greater civilization will evolve."

"Aye," sighed Daster. "But where? See. Earth is now a whirling cinder, heated by the fires of its immolation."

"It will cool," Favril reminded him.

"It will cool," Astaris agreed. "And then the ice will form again at the Poles, and creep down once more over the blackened desolation 'til the grinding masses meet at the Equator. A thousand years, and more, it will be before they once more retreat. A thousand years--Do we wish to wait that long before we rebuild our home?"

Favril had a suggestion. "There are the other planets, brothers. Mars, Perhaps, or Venus--"

"Neither," Gohret interrupted, "will support life in the form we know it."

"Then we can change our form of life," Favril argued, "to meet the conditions on either." But he himself was halfhearted in advancing the idea, and none thought it necessary to voice the veto all agreed upon.

Our head-membranes throbbed with an adumbration of despair and in the brains of more than one of us there was a flicker of something not quite thought suggesting that it might be best to flash our ship and all it contained into oblivion. But there is a Natural Law that compels every entity to cling to the preservation of its kind.

"I have it!" Daster's thought-waves impacted on our receptors. "There is no place for us in the Solar System, nor in the Galaxy of which it is a part. But somewhere among the myriads upon myriads of planetary bodies with which Space is filled, somewhere between infinity and infinity, must be another orb upon which the conditions are enough like Terra's for it to afford us shelter. Let us find it, brothers!"

"Let us find it!" our minds took up the cry, and at once we were projecting ourselves through the endless reaches of the Universe in such a search as even Roya would have been hard put to it to conceive.

Beyond Pluto, beyond Andromeda, beyond Suns whose light would have taken a billion years to reach us, we probed the Universe. Not in actuality. That monumental exploration of ours carried not one proton of us beyond the walls of our rocketship. It was mathematical, our hunt for a home for the life that was in our charge. It was a matter of unreeling countless formulae, of tracing countless curves, of an infinity of calculations based upon the infinity of data we had been born possessed of through the genius of our fosterfather, Roya.

And when it was ended, the result was this: Nowhere in the Universe was there any orb duplicating exactly the conditions on Terra. Only one planet, a million galaxies away, would support life in anything like the form we wished to preserve it. Only one.

It was Bolar whose calculations lit upon this. We checked, rechecked, his figures and found them faultless.

"We know where we want to go," Gohret summed it up. "Let us go there." But we still hesitated, gazing upon devastated Earth, upon white blazing Sun and its attendant planets wheeling about it, upon the golden constellations that we were about to leave forever. Though in point of personal life we were but hours old, compact within us were the history and the memories of our race; and these whirling orbs, these spangled skies, were the very warp and woof of our being.

Something held us, some inchoate and wordless nostalgia unworthy of creatures of perfect science, of perfect mind, such as we were.

"Let us go." Gohret the implacable recalled us to our task.

None of us had actually warped space to translate himself across it, but we knew how it must be done and we knew that it must be done just so or irretrievable disaster would overtake us. The disaster of a timeless, spaceless state of being, of a non-existence that was yet existence; endless, hopeless, the incarnation of eternal despair.

Five of us there were, and a hundred Plebos and one Matra, and we were all that was left of Man. One minutest error in what we were about to do would end humankind forever.

We set the proper forces at work in the proper manner.

Then--

Grayness. Non-being absolute. Non-knowledge. Only a terrible fear, a terrible certainty, that the error had been made and we were doomed eternally to this cognizant oblivion.

Our spaceship, the hundred and six of us within it, hung motionless at the upper limit of a sunless, brown sky such as no Man had ever viewed. Below was a quarter sphere of the planet we had traversed the Galaxies to seek and we knew at once that life was possible upon it, because there was life upon it.

What we could see of the world to which we had come was a level plain from over whose horizon stalked colonnades of pastel-hued, immense pillars that converged at its center on a mountain black and lustreless as the starless wastes between the nebulae. The wide paths set off by these roofless palisades, close-packed with the planet's denizens, seemed straight-banked dark rivers flowing toward the stygian pile that focussed them, and from those marching myriads a tidal wave of cadenced sound welled up to us.

A chorus of countless voices, the paean was yet a single, harmonious whole. There was solemnity to it, and awe, yet there was to it also joy and an exceeding ecstasy.

We could not read the meaning of that hymn. The meaning was not thought but an emotion that held those thousands upon thousands in a single thrall, and Earthman had so long ago discarded emotion that its very nature was forgotten. But we knew that it was inspired by the monstrous black mountain--

It was no mountain, or rather it was a mountain carved into a stupendous image of a hooded Being neither man nor beast, but transcending both.

It was not the image itself to which the emotion vocalised by a world's song was directed, but that which it depicted; not in form, because the Being had no form, but in representation of Its attributes. This much, gazing upon it, we could understand, but what those attributes were we could not comprehend, nor how any living race could worship them as this one did.

Curiously enough, we were aware that if we held our attention upon that monument for more than a brief instant, or longer permitted ourselves to hear the organ tones welling about us, we should be unable to do that which we had come to do. So at once we ordered our Plebos to the armament of our ship and they loosed their bolts upon the singing masses below.

The plain heaved in a vast shattering. The splendid, tall pillars collapsed upon the worshippers who had marched between them singing and now screamed their terror at the sudden destruction that came upon them without warning. No hymn now, but shrieks, shrilled through the crashing chaos of a world disrupted, through the rending of rock whose very atoms were being smashed into their component atoms, through he pealing thunders of the doom we had hurled upon them.

A cloud of dust rose out of the slaughter, and enveloped the orb below us. The cloud was luminous with the greens and scarlets and blinding blues of our armament, and it was black with the agony it concealed...

"Cruel. Oh, cruel." Eve's horrified whisper lay somewhere within the heart of that terrible spectacle. "They are not men, they're glorified beasts, Johnny. It can't be that this is what the years will make of people like you and me!"

Enough of my own personality had shimmered back that I might have answered her, but I did not. I could only have reminded her of fiery destruction raining from Twentieth Century skies on screaming women, and little children, on humans guiltless and unwarned kneeling at prayer in the cathedrals of their faith...

It was not our intention to destroy that race entirely, not at least until we could determine whether they might in some manner be of use to us and so we ordered our weapons shut off while still there was some evidence of life below. One disintegrator, throttled to minimum power, we used to sweep the veiling vapors out of the atmosphere.

The plain was a vast tumulus of rocky shards piled helter-skelter. The singing thousands were dissipated into their primal atoms, so that it was as if they had never been, but here and there gray-purple masses heaved in shocked and aimless movement.

The monument rose from that desert of desolation, its configuration altered hardly at all. Its miles-long body was still haunched as it had been, its great head poised neckless on gargantuan shoulders as before the holocaust.

Not quite as before. It must be because some fragments had been riven from it, that it seemed to have moved slightly, so that the hooded eyes appeared now to be directed towards us, hanging high above.

There was a sudden coldness within us, a sudden incomprehensible something that might be fear. And yet we sensed no anger in that veiled, quiet glance, no menace. Only a waiting, endlessly patient.

Strange, then, that in our moment of triumph, in the moment that we had proved ourselves masters of the universe and of all Life, we should be afflicted by this curious Unease.

Chapter 20
CHOICE BETWEEN DEATH AND DEATH

OUR ATTENTION RETURNED TO THOSE that were left of the planet's animate inhabitants, was returned to them by a wave of cold hostility, of hate and malevolence, of determination to resist us until none of them were left. The wave was thought, the single thought of the masses below that were writhing back to awareness, and we could not tolerate it.

That hate would render them useless to us and we could make use of the drina--so we were aware now they called themselves--as slaves. The problem was easy to solve. We had not yet used our sonic vibrator. We reduced its power and stepped up its frequency 'til it emitted a whistle just within the threshold of audibility, and we unloosed that whistle on the remnants of the conquered race.

The masses shuddered momentarily, then were still. The drina were mindless now, whatever intelligence they'd possessed destroyed. They were ours to control as we controlled the Plebos we had brought with us, as we controlled the ship whose shell enclosed us.

We zoomed downward to take possession of our new home.

Our attack upon the planet had blasted its surface into a wilderness of tumbled rock and had destroyed all evidence of the drina's civilization, but these circumstances exactly suited our purpose. We could fashion a city here that would equal or surpass any that had existed on Earth, and from the ova with which our Matra would supply us we could people it with exactly the form of humanity we desired.

We decided to plan carefully and without haste. We would, for the present, merely construct a temporary abode. Having recuperated from the tremendous drain on our vitality that all we had accomplished had entailed, we would design a Super-State.

Pursuant to this decision, we hollowed out for ourselves a smooth pit as distant from the disturbing black image as we could. From the molten rock with which our disintegrators thus furnished us, we moulded a number of structures to temporarily house ourselves, the freight of our rocketship, the Plebos and the Matra. For some not very well apprehended reason, we designed Adalon on the plan of the Solar System we had abandoned forever.

As matters of reasonable precaution we surrounded the bowl with a Veil of Ishlak, a wall of force impenetrable unless it is opened by controls from within, and assigned certain of the Plebos to roam the lands beyond the Veil, keeping watch on the drina.

Having thus set matters in order, we rested and refreshed ourselves for a space, and then called the first council of our Kintat of Doctils.

"I am aware of a curious feeling of dissatisfaction," Favril opened the council. "Although when I proposed that We remain within the confines of our System, I was compelled to acknowledge that your arguments against it were very cogent, I still feel that I was not altogether wrong."

"In spite of the fact that Bolar's calculations have proved to be correct and we find here a temperature and humidity, a gravity, a range of elements, sufficiently like those of Terra to make it possible for our form of life to exist, I yet sense in the very environment some intangible hostility to Mankind that makes me doubt the success of our experiment."

"What would you have?" Gohret demanded. "A world ready made for us?"

"Precisely," Daster responded. "We abandoned Earth because it is a denuded sphere. Have we anything better here? Is not the same amount of labor required to make this planet tenable as would have been required had we returned to Terra? And there we would have been where we belong."

"That is it!" Favril exclaimed. "That is what troubles me. We do not belong here. We are resented by the very ground, by the very rocks. We have vanquished its inhabitants, but the planet itself rejects us. It is because of this, vaguely realized, that we built Adalon as we did, to comfort us."

Gohret's answer to that was a sneer. "Earth, too, rejected us. Mait's folly completed the catastrophe that ended Man's life on Earth, but a natural phenomenon, the advent of a new Glacial Age, was the spark that initiated the cataclysm. Had Lond and Par and Berl taken us in, still would the ice have advanced, pinching us between its walls, 'til we should have been obliterated."

"Not so," Daster objected. "Had we not shut ourselves away from Nature, had we kept in touch with it, we should have found a way to avoid disaster. The genius of Man was unconquerable, as long as Man cooperated with Nature and did not war against it."

"The mistake was made," Bolar offered, "when the City shells were sealed--"

"No," Favril cut in. "When the Law of Controlled Procreation was decreed and Man became a designed creation of Man himself."

"We started to go wrong long before that," Bolar ventured. "I think it was when the Agricoles were perfected and men abandoned the good ground for the cities. That was when we definitely turned our back upon natural evolution and--"

"You are all tight, and you are all wrong," Astaris said softly. "All you mention was done because Man had become wholly a thinking machine, had forgotten certain basic urges not susceptible to reason but very necessary to his happiness. Only their names are left to us, their meaningless names. Love. Loyalty. Obligation. Beauty. And Faith. Faith above all."

"All this is futile," Gohret drowned him out, harshly. "What is done, is done. Only what is still to be done concerns us. Our future lies on this planet. We cannot return to the Solar System, to Earth--"

"Ah, but we can," Astaris answered. "We can go back to Earth, and to an Earth renewed and vigorous, fully fitted for the Super-Civilization we intend to erect. We can correct all the errors our predecessors have made."

"How?"

"By returning not only in Space but in Time to our native sphere. Here is what I propose. Let us consolidate our position here, but only temporarily. Let us scout all history for those among our ancestors in whom the traits I have mentioned were best developed, bring them here, and probe them for the secrets of those emotions. Having found them, let us adjust the nurture of the new race we are founding to include those traits. This having been done, we can--"

"Select the period of Earth's geological evolution," Gohret snatched the thesis from him, "when natural conditions were most favorable--"

"I've calculated it," Bolar put in. "The Twentieth Century--"

"So long ago!" Favril exclaimed.

"So long ago. That was when the interrelation of Man and Nature was at its best and that was when Man began to gain that ascendancy over Nature that eventually led to his undoing. My figures are irrefutable."

"Very well," Gohret took back the current of thought. "We'll try Astaris' project. When it is successfully terminated, or we find it futile, as I think more probable, we shall return to Earth of the Twentieth Century. We shall take possession of it in the same manner that we have taken possession of this planet, destroy or enslave its denizens, repopulate it with the younglings; we shall create from the ova our Matra bears within her. With our limitless knowledge, our inheritance of two million years of evolution, what wonders shall we not bring to pass! Done, brothers?"

"Done!"

Chapter 21
EXPERIMENT IN LOVE

BLACKNESS BLOTTED OUT THAT moment conference of the Kintat, blackness absolute. Within that blackness I was rigid, all my bodily warmth gone, unable to think, aware only that I had heard pronounced the doom of my people, that I had heard sentence passed on it of destruction, immediate and terrible.

I no longer was Man in General, living the history of mankind through the ages. I was John March, lawyer, born June twelfth, nineteen hundred and twenty into a good, green world I loved. It was my New York, my America, that these soulless, ruthless beings intended to seize for their own. It was the boys and girls with whom I had grown up that they were going to destroy or enslave. It was the fellows who'd sweated over our studies with me, who'd chased a pigskin up and down the field beside me. It was the one-armed newsdealer on the corner, and the people who jostled me in the subway, it was Pierpont Alton Sturdevant, and Mary, the pert-nosed telephone girl in the reception room, and the cop who'd handed me a ticket for speeding, whom they would treat as they had treated the drina hymning their God!

Evelyn formed out of the blackness, straight and slender as a naiad, a horror akin to my own graven on her dear face. Arthur and Orth were real again, straddle-legged, their fists clenched on their useless weapons. Louis Capet was a shaking, terrified little boy--

Elijah's right hand was raised above the shaggy, silver crown of his great head. His face was upturned to the high, vaulted roof of the vast nave, and his lips were moving in prayer to the Jehovah who was not there above him, nor anywhere in this space or this time. I heard him. I heard the eternal plaint of his people from his lips, the plaint that was now for me the plaint of all the people of my world and my time. "My God," the sonorous Hebrew rolled from those lips. "My God, why hast thou forsaken me!"

But I could see Francois Villon nowhere.

"John March!" It was the inner voice of the Future Man that called my name. "John March!" The goldenlighted niche was visible again in the topless, ebony wall, and within it there was not the five Doctils of the Kintat, but only one! Achronos Astaris! "We have told you what we want of you, and we have shown you why. We have shown you that we had no need to make a bargain with you, and yet, having made it, we have kept it. Now we call upon you and your companions to yield to us that which we desire, promising in exchange to return you to the location in Time and Space from which we brought you here and now."

Somehow I found my voice. "So that we may be destroyed along with the rest?"

"Only you and Evelyn Rand are of the Twentieth Century. The others will live out their span, all memory of their adventure here blotted from their minds."

"And we two?"

"Will also remember nothing, but will die or be enslaved as chance may dictate, when we descend upon your world."

My neck corded, so that for a moment my defiant reply was choked within my throat. In that moment, Eve's hand was on my arm, her taut voice in my ear.

"Our choice is only between death and death, Johnny, and as long as we die together I don't care at all. The others have a real choice. Let them answer."

She was right! I turned to them, my loved one in the circle of one arm. "It's your chance, my friends," I said, smiling. We were set apart from them, Eve and I, but we were one, completely and wholly one, and for that moment nothing else really mattered to me. I had lost hope and life and a world, but I had gained her. Everything after that would be anticlimax. "Take it."

Elijah's dark and brooding eyes came down from communion with the Eternal to fasten on the bizarre creature in the recess. The Dauphin straightened and was no longer a frightened lad, but the scion of a king. Arthur was regal in every line of his great body, his purple robes imperial. Orth was granite-countenanced, expressionless.

Where was Villon?

"What is your answer?" the Doctil demanded, and there was a curious impatience in the way he did so. An odd exigency.

It was Louis' high pipe that sounded first, the thin voice of a little boy. "For myself the answer is--No!"

"And for me," Orth's deep tones echoed him. "No!"

"The devil and all his fiends take you," King Arthur boomed. "Rather than live as poltroons, we choose to die as men!"

The Hebrew prophet was the last, statuesque in his white robes, his hawkbeaked countenance dark as doom. His bearded lips moved. "Ye have abandoned God. Can I give God back to you?"

They had their faults each of these men, the faults of the times and the kinds of humans they represented. Elijah, was the prophet of a creed that could be cruel and relentless, a creed one of whose dogmas was, "An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth." Underlying the magnificent pageantry of King Arthur's Age of Chivalry had been thousands of the disinherited; rags for their clothing, straw for their beds, bones to gnaw for food and unremitting, hopeless toil for their way of life. The Dauphin was the last of a dynasty that had ground and oppressed a nation, without conscience and without mercy. John Orth had been bred in an Imperial Court whose intrigue and chicanery and diplomacy of exploitation was to bring about the first World War and its grim aftermaths.

But Astaris had offered them life, the living out of their lives as those lives were meant to be lived, instead of a grisly death. Neither their world nor their own consciences would know what they had done, nor reproach them for having done it, yet they had the courage and the integrity to refuse him.

When I turned back to Astaris I sensed that he shared my admiration for them. I sensed, too, a certain sadness, a certain disappointment.

"Consider again," he insisted. "Consider that whether or not you give us what we ask, we shall nevertheless possess ourselves of Earth of the Twentieth Century. With or without the knowledge we seek from you, we shall carry out our plan. You cannot stop us."

What I said in reply was inane and without meaning and vainglorious. But I am not sorry I said, "We can try, Astaris. We can try our damndest."

Our damndest would be little indeed against him and his mates, who were masters of a knowledge I could not even attempt to comprehend, but I had to fling that defiance at him and I felt more of a man for having done so.

"Give us strength, Oh Eternal," I heard Elijah behind me, "to endure what it is Thy will we shall endure." Then Arthur's voice was booming, "Have at him brothers. Take him for hostage!" and the huge, purple-robed form was surging past me, Excalibur flashing above its flowing blonde locks. Orth pounded beside Arthur, and beside Orth the boy ran, lithe and pantherlike.

And I had joined them. It might work! If we could make Astaris our prisoner--"Down, Orth," I cried, still scheming, lawyer-like. "Down on your hands and knees to make a spring-board for us." He went down as I said, at the base of the wall, and Arthur was leaping from his back for the niche, and had made it. Louis bounded high, reached the recess. My own feet felt John Orth's back. My knees bent, straightened, threw me in such a jump as I'd never yet made, to join the two others.

Arthur's sword-arm was caught helpless in the coils of Astaris' one tentacle. The other wrapped Louis' waist and held his kicking, flailing body too far from the Doctil to reach him with his dagger. Elijah, amazingly here, sprang with me in between the two, the prophet's gnarled hands clawed, my own fisted and flailing.

My fists never landed. Something caught my arms, pinned them. A dark tentacle squeezed my chest, numbing me. Had Astaris sprouted another? No. A Plebo held Elijah in a similar grip. I twisted my head and saw that it was a Plebo too who held me. Others came through the backwall of the niche, wrested away Arthur's sword, plucked the Dauphin's weapon from his fingers. Astaris released Arthur and the youngster to Plebos, who held them helpless.

A scream, shrill and terror-filled, cut through to me. Evelyn's scream! It gave me strength to drive legs into the floor, fighting madly to get loose. I staggered my captor, wrestled him around, but could not get free of him. The crowding, bulbous forms of the Doctil's bodyguard hid Eve from me. Her scream had choked off.

I tried to call to her, but a splayed hand was clamped over my mouth. I could see neither Astaris nor my companions in the attack on him. Around me were only the Plebos' great, goggling eyes, their tiny mouths, their pulsing head-membranes. The golden light was fading. The explosion of super-strength Evelyn's cry had aroused in me was gone. I slumped, nerveless with fear for her but emptied of strength and hope.

The crowd of Future Men seemed somehow thinner. I heard Arthur, below me. "Nay, there is no need to keep tight hold of me. I have yielded." I heard Evelyn. "Have they hurt you, Johnny?" All tenderness. "Johnny, have they hurt you?"

And I heard a reply. "No, dear. I'm all right." My voice. In timbre and accent, my voice. But I had not spoken!

I lifted my head, my brow wrinkling. The niche was black-dark now, but the blocking Plebos were gone and there was light enough out there in the vast vault that I could look out and down to its floor. The group down there was moving away. Guarded by three Plebos, I saw Elijah's majestic form, Arthur's. I saw Orth. The Dauphin. Evelyn.

Someone walked beside Evelyn, his arm thrown protectingly across her shoulders. Had Villon returned? No. The man was taller than the poet, more heavily built. He was dressed in a very modern brown suit. His hair was a reddish brown, and something about the poise of his head was familiar.

He turned as if to answer some remark of Evelyn's.

I made out very clearly, a semi-circular scar on his left cheek.

I made out his profile.

It was mine!

It was I who walked beside Evelyn, talked to her. It was I against whom she shrank, finding courage in the feet of my arm, strength in my nearness to meet whatever fate the Plebos marched her off to.

How could I be there, and here too?

"Evelyn!" I shouted. "That's not--" And checked, realizing that the Plebo's palm on my lips muffled my cry. I kicked backward, felt my heel crunch against the pipestem leg of my captor, lurched forward. Went over the niche edge, thudded on the floor below. A weight smothered me and something pounded the side of my head, pounded me down into a sick oblivion.

I lay on the bosom of a shoreless, turgid tide that heaved beneath me. My throat was parched. My head seemed to have ballooned to quadruple its normal size. This was the granddaddy of all hangovers, all right. I couldn't remember where I'd accumulated it, though I recalled very vividly the nightmare I'd just been riding, with its weird mess of Future Men and men out of the past; I recalled something about a terrible doom that overhung the world. Evelyn Rand had been in the dream, of course. I'd found her and had fallen in love with her and she with me, but the dream had wound up with me watching myself walk away from myself, having stolen my girl from me.

Well, I'd better get up and fix myself a Prairie Oyster and try to get into shape. Old Persimmon Puss Conklin will give me the fish eyes if I come strolling into the office late, and the Head will be sure to hear that I displayed every evidence of having had a hard night out.

Without trying to unglue my eyelids, I shoved myself up, groaning. Gingerly balancing on my aching shoulders that grossly enlarged head of mine, I wiggled a leg sidewise to get it down off the edge of the bed.

It wouldn't go down. The devil! Was I paralyzed? No liquor ever hit me this hard before. Wonder who brought me home. Or am I home? Bed feels awful damned hard. Better get eyes open and look around.

I went to work on the left one first. It slit, widened. And then the right flew open, and I was jumping to my feet.

I hadn't been able to get my leg down because it was already down. The bed was so hard because it was the stone floor of a small, cell-like chamber whose walls, polished, blue-gray rock, had neither window nor door, nor opening of any kind. I looked up. The blue-gray ceiling was solid as the walls.

It was no nightmare I'd been living. It was stark, incredible reality. I was a prisoner of the Doctils, in the Land where Time is Not, and Evelyn--

Was Evelyn already out on the plain, prey to the drina! Why she and not me? Why had she and the others been taken off, and I left behind? It was I who'd led the fight against the Doctils, I who had engaged in an unequal battle of wits with them. Why should I be spared-? Wait. Hadn't I seen myself being marched off with the others, brown suit, scarred cheek--

Hold everything! That had not been I out on the black floor. It couldn't have been. Even the Doctils, with all their million years advantage over the science I knew, couldn't make two of me, each complete.

I stood rigid in the center of that cell, trembling a little as I tried to recall every detail of what had occurred. There had been our attack on Astaris, the incursion of the Plebos to frustrate it. Fighting uselessly with the one who'd seized me, I'd lost sight of my companions, of Astaris. When that futile fight was over, I'd glimpsed the men of my own time again, and Evelyn. But--I was certain of it now--nowhere had I seen Astaris.

While that fight was going on, the girl had been hidden from me by the crowding Plebos. By the same token, I must have been hidden from her. I still had been hidden from her when it was over, but she spoke to me.

I could almost hear her now, "Johnny, are you hurt?"

It wasn't of me she had asked that, then, but of my double. And it was my double who had replied, in a perfect imitation of my voice. "No, dear. I'm all right." King Arthur had already been taken down out of the niche, and so probably had the others. I should have been taken down out of it too, unless there was a definite reason why I should not.

Was it by accident that the Plebos had crowded around me, hiding me from my friends? Hiding me from Evelyn? Very little the Future Men did was accidental.

I recalled how Astaris had projected Evelyn's presence, her personality, before me in that Brooklyn house. I recalled how, in a twinkling, Daster had taken on the exact appearance, the mannerisms, of a professor of my own time.

If I were building up a case in court, I could have established no better one to confirm the startling hypothesis I had not yet dared to put into words. Opportunity: A brawling fight in which I'd been concealed from view. Ability: Demonstrated.

My double was Astaris! Achronos Astaris had assumed my shape, my voice. He had become me!

Motive? The caress in his tones, his arm tender across Eve's shoulder, betrayed that. By spying, by threats, by persuasion, the Doctil had failed to wring from Evelyn and me the secret of the love that lay between us, but he had not given up. He was trying another method now. Somewhere, in his wandering through the ages, he had become aware of the fact that love often begets love. He knew that Evelyn loved me. By becoming me he would become the object of her love and perhaps it would arouse that emotion in him so that he could study it by introspection.

"Damn him!" I cursed aloud. "Oh damn him!" shaken by a white and blistering rage, a jealous fury that blazed through my veins. And then I realized that I should be grateful, instead, that the Doctil had evolved this scheme.

As long as he still thought that it might work, Evelyn was safe. It was a greater protection for her than any I could give her.

What protection could I give her, what help could I be to her, against the Future Men? Physically, I was no match for them. Mentally, they had outmaneuvered my every attempt to match wits with them. But there was no shame in that. Not Einstein, not Michelson or Compton, not all of the outstanding intellects of my world and my age would make a better showing, pitted against them.

That might happen too. That would happen. It was only a matter of time. When they were ready--

The full and terrible implication of their plans, its promise of disaster to the civilization out of which I'd been plucked, swept down on me like a tangible black pall. I had flung defiance at them, but that defiance had been meaningless as the snarl of a week-old kitten at a Great Dane.

I stared at the seamless stone wall of my prison, stared at visions of New York's sky-reaching towers shattering down on terror-ridden crowds that fled to safety where there was no safety, of humans shrivelling in the blast of rays seething out of a menacing sky, of a civilization gone mad with the mad sound that filled the air, of flame-eyed men killing, killing one another, their arms, their clawed hands, dripping with gore.

And when the cataclysm was ended, I imagined the pitiful, mindless remnants of my race enslaved to the creatures of the Future who claimed to be men--"John!" A voice penetrated these appalling mental pictures. "It is you, my old. It is verily you!"

His velvet doublet more ragged than ever, the lace at his wrists and his throat more dingy, but with the same jaunty swagger to his meagre form, the same mocking smile on his thin, scar-twisted lips, Francois Villon stood beside me!

"Francois!" I gasped. "Where--how did you get in here? Where have you been? How-?"

"Softly!" Villon had laid a long finger beside his hawklike nose. "Softly, my cabbage. If you will permit me to answer one query before you prod me with another--I entered this cell in the same manner you were brought here, through its wall."

"Through-! Then there's a secret door--"

"My liver, John, no! They are solid of stone, all four walls, floor and ceiling. It is through the solid stone I came, as they do, by help of this." There was, in the hand he held out to me, a tiny mechanism of what seemed like platinum wiring and glass or fused quartz. "The Doctils need little beside the power of their brains to perform their magic, but the Plebos are of lesser mould. They require this--key, shall we name it for want of a better term--to translate themselves through matter without door or aperture. It is of a Plebo I had it, the one I saw carrying you off, when I returned to join you in the Hall of Miracles. He did not hear me follow him, nor will he miss what I have taken from him." He touched, delicately, the hilt of his poniard, and I saw at the throat of its scabbard an edging of red, sticky wet that had wiped from the blade as it slid into its tight sheath.

"The poet," Villon smiled slyly, "is also a master thief."

And a Paris apache, I thought, recalling what I had read of this strangest character in all literature. "Where did they take Evelyn and the others?" I asked him, trying not to repress a shudder at the way he could blandly smile, after what he had done.

"Nay, that I do not know. They were out of sight. Perhaps, if I had returned a moment sooner--" he shrugged his bony shoulders.

"Returned from where? When I saw you were gone I thought they had taken you--"

"They did not take me. I went of my own accord, and they did not know it. I--"

"They did not know! But they can read our thoughts. How-?"

"Name of a dog, but you make one imbecile with your questions! They read our thoughts only when they bend their own upon ours. To show us the scenes they cast upon the screen of the wall, to bring us into them as part of them, demanded all of their minds, to watch them took all the minds of you others. But me, I shut out from mine that shadow-play and watched the Doctils themselves, hoping that in an unguarded moment I might see something that might be of aid to us."

"And you did?"

He shrugged again, and though he still smiled, I thought there was a shimmer of fear in his eyes. "I saw something, but whether it gives us hope or is the death of all hope for us, I do not yet know. A long space of time I saw only five shapes in a high niche from which the golden light had faded, five monstrous shapes wholly intent on seizing our senses to make them toys of their wills. Fighting that intent, I sweated like a whipped coach horse. Then there was a stir among them. The strain upon me loosened, and meseemed some distracting word had come to them. I recall that there was a stir among you others also, as though their grip upon you had grown less strong."

"We came to ourselves," I interrupted, "for a moment or so. I wonder if it was then."

"Aye," Villon nodded. "It may well have been, for methought I heard Elijah cry out something about denying God. But four of the five Doctils were hastening away, and I did not turn for I was skulking after them and feared to lose sight of the four in the dimness."

Four. One had remained behind. It had taken the whole Kintat to hypnotize us so that we seemed to relive the whole evolution of civilization and its destruction, but once we were under the influence, Astaris had been able to hold us alone.

"They went out of that Hall of Midnight," Villon continued, "and out of the House of Sun. Me, I dared not emerge to the open, for fear that I might be spied."

"You stopped!" I exclaimed. "You let them get away from you!"

"Name of the name of a dog, will you let me tell my tale? What I saw, I saw, and if you have no wish to learn what that was, I am content to make silent."

"I'm sorry, Villon," I apologized. "I'll keep still. What did you see?"

"Nothing, at first, for that a white glare filled the Bowl of Adalon, and it blinded my eyes that were used to the dimness. There was a vast hissing in the sky, like a thousand flying serpents giving vent to their hate of our captors. I peered on high, striving to make out whence came that monstrous reptilian sound.

"The white light streamed from the top of the tower we saw building, that top ablaze as though it had impaled the Sun. The glare roofed the pit, from rampart to rampart of the cliffs that form it. It was only stray beams from it that dazzled me below, up there it was a very white hell of light in which nothing could live.

"Adown the walls of the bowl dribbled streamlets, graypurple and slow, as though at the brink of the cliffs the light from the tower melted something like fire melts wax. And this indeed was the case, as I descried when my aching sight became more accustomed to the glare.

"Circling the verge of the Bowl a dark cloud lay against the Veil of Ishlak, a heaving cloud that was not a cloud at all but thousands upon thousands of the weird creatures that people the plains where we found each other, you and I. The drina. The Veil, or so it seemed to me, was a little rent here and there, and where it was rent the gray-purple flesh of the drina oozed through, striving to rend the Veil still further, and there that flesh was melting in the white blaze from the tower and running in slow streamlets down the cliffs."

"I thought the Veil was impenetrable," I could not keep from again breaking into Villon's narrative, "unless the Future Men opened it themselves from some control down here."

"So it is," Francois agreed. "The drina masses boiled, behind each opening in it, about a stratcar, its shining plates torn apart, its shining form crushed. The Veil had been opened in each of those places to let a stratcar through, and some of the drina had blocked its closing again, were writhing through while their fellows swamped the flying machines that had been sent to hold them off while the tower was being completed. The drina were writhing through, and the blaze from the tower, now completed, was melting them as fast as they oozed through, and still they came in an implacable dark tide of hate."

"God," I whispered, "they're brave. No human army--"

"Not brave," Villon denied, "but mad. The drina know no fear, my John, because they are without minds to know fear. They are animate only with hate and the lust to kill. Now indeed such an enemy is the worst of all, for only by destruction can they be defeated, only by complete and utter obliteration. Against thinking beings like us, against all the armies our world could muster against them, the Future Men would be invincible. Seeing that our weapons were powerless against them, seeing that our defences were powerless against theirs, panic would turn our blood to water, our strength to weakness, and we would be undone. But these imbecile monsters that attack them--"

"Haven't sense enough to know when they're licked. By all that's holy, Francois, the Doctils may have beaten themselves." I was recalling how they'd deliberately destroyed the minds of this planet's natives, had deliberately made them the idiot things they were. "But go on. Is that battle still on?"

"Yes--and no. The Veil is whole again, and no drina has achieved the Bowl. The Plebos, it seems, were able only to obey instructions. They had been directed to delay the gray-purple hosts with the stratcars 'til the tower was finished and then to destroy them with the white light from the tower. This they did, but when the combat raged too evenly for comfort, they summoned the Kintat. With the advent of the Doctils a new phase of the fight set in. I saw a great scurrying about. I saw Plebos swarm up the tower bearing new devices. And then the light that seethed from it was no longer white. Crackling streamers of blue and scarlet and eye-searing yellow flashed overhead, seeking the rents in the Veil. The flesh of the attackers no longer melted but whiffed into nothingness. The breaches in the shimmering barrier were repaired, and the blaze at the tower-top sputtered out."

The excitement that had made me forget my despair drained out of me, "Then the Doctils have won. Why did you let me think-?"

"They have not altogether conquered, my friend. The Veil of Ishlak is whole again, and in the Bowl they are safe, but against the Veil still billows the gray-purple mass of the drina, and beyond the Veil the Future Men dare not venture. They are prisoners in Adalon, our captors, 'til they devise some means to destroy their besiegers."

"We mustn't let them do that." My fingers dug into the poet's scrawny arm. "We've got to find a way to keep them from doing that, Villon. We've got to find a way to let the drina get through the Veil and come down into the Bowl--"

"John!" He pulled back from me, his widened eyes on mine. "Have you gone mad? Do you not realize that if the drina gain Adalon we too, all of us, will die with the Plebos and the Doctils? Those loathsome masses will roll over us, my friend, and we will be taken up within them, and their acids will rot us--"

"Let them. So long as the Future Men are wiped out, let the drina wipe us out too. All of us."

"All, John?" Francois' gaze probed my brain. "Even Evelyn, John?"

An icy shudder ran through me. "Even Evelyn, Francois, if I cannot kill her with my own hand before that happens. If she were here, she would tell you the same."

"No," the poet sighed. "There is no madness in your eves. But why, then-?"

I told him. I told him, briefly, what we had seen, and what we had learned the Kintat planned. "You agree with me, Francois?" I asked when I had finished. "You agree with me that they must be wiped out, even if we have to be wiped out with them?"

There was no smile on his lips, and his countenance was gray under its blue stubble. "Aye, John," he answered. "No matter how terrible a death it be, our death in the bowels of the drina would be a cheap price to pay for the destruction of these demons."

Chapter 22
THE DEATH CLOUD

"CHEAP ENOUGH," I LAUGHED CURTLY.

"I'd set the value of our lives right now, at two dozen for a nickle, and that's too high if we hang around in here much longer. You say that thing you've got there is a key to this cell. If it is, let's go. Let's get out of here ... What's the matter?"

Villon was looking at the involved device in his palm, and something like dismay was in his face.

"It is a key," he said slowly. "And yet it is no key. It passed me, singly, in through the stone but--will it take two of us out?"

"The only way to find out is to try. Look. When we left the stratcar hangar through its wall, Daster had his hand on my back. When the plain rushed past us as we came to Adalon, Kass had his hands on the two of us. Maybe I ought to be touching you while you try to use that."

"Of a surety you must touch me." Francois' smile was wan. "Thus, if the magic of this thing avails to carry us into the stone but not through it, we shall at least be immured with a comrade near to accompany us into oblivion."

That was what he was afraid of. That the power of the 'key' might be enough to get us into the rock, yet not sufficient to take both of us all the way through it. I admit the thought was not exactly pleasant.

"Well," I put my arm around his narrow shoulders, "It will be an interesting experiment." I could feet the shudder that was running through him. "Come on." I'd hate to be cursed with your imagination, I thought, aware that he was picturing himself caught within the rock, entombed there forever...

I have a pretty good imagination too.

"Come on, old man," I urged. "Let's get it over with," and pressed him toward the wall through which he'd come.

A muscle twitched in his sallow cheek. He lifted his hand, placed the 'key' against the bluish, perdurable rock. "It was done thus," he murmured, "as I watched. And then, the Plebo pressed--this." His thumb moved.

There was no change in the appearance of the wall. "Damn!" I muttered. "It doesn't work." I struck the stone with my free hand--and my fist went into it! I stepped forward, pressed Villon with me.

The world blanked out. I felt nothing, saw nothing but featureless grayness. I seemed to be still moving forward, but the grayness pressed in on me, held me. I gasped voicelessly. Then, after one fearful instant, the grayness was gone, and I was in a dim corridor and Francois was beside me. The floor of the hall pitched steeply down, curving to the left, ran steeply up, curving to the right, but just here it was level.

Neither of us said anything for a long minute. Neither of us could have said anything if our lives depended on it.

Then, "It's done," I heard Villon say, and he was jaunty again when I turned to him, his black eyes sparkling with triumph. "We are through."

"Yes," I agreed, "we're through." I wasn't as happy over that as I might have been. I had spied an unmoving form sprawled at our feet and the skin on my back was crawling. Alive, a Plebo is not a pretty sight. Dead--imagine a dead spider big as a man, all eyes, all glazed, fishy eyes...

Villon was looking at it too. "He died easily," he murmured, "for so ungainly a creature."

"I don't like leaving him here." I tried to imitate my companion's nonchalance. "Anyone coming along this passage will at once know something's gone wrong, and it may mean the loss of precious minutes for us. I wish there was somewhere we could hide him."

"There is," Francois responded. "Right at hand."

"Where?" I glanced around, puzzled, saw nothing but bare walls.

"In here." The poet laid his palm against the wall we'd just penetrated. "If they do not find him 'til they come for you, we shall have lost none of those jewelled minutes of which you speak."

There was no argument as to that, but could it be done? "I suppose one of us might carry the corpse in," I ventured. "But, I'd rather not take the chance of your 'key' failing to work."

"Nor I," Villon shrugged. "But perhaps our friend need not be carried in there. There is strength in those rounded muscles of yours, my old, and I suspect that whether he goes all the way through or not will not matter to him."

I got his idea. "All right. We'll try it." I bent and lifted the dead Plebo while Francois placed the 'key' against the wall. The cadaver was lighter than I'd expected. Dangling from my grasp, it seemed almost boneless. "Ready?"

Villon's thumb pressed, and I threw the corpse at the wall. Threw it through the wall. It went into the blue, solid-seeming stone as though that stone were merely an opaque fog.

There was no evidence left of the Plebo, out here in the corridor, except a small, dark stain on its floor.

"I should like to be there," Francois chuckled, "when they discover him in that cell, and you gone. Will they think, I wonder, that we are masters of a magic they do not know?"

"They'll know damned well what's happened, and they'll be after us like a shot. The only reason I can figure out for their not having missed you yet is that they're so busy with strengthening their defences against the drina. If we're to accomplish anything we've got to get going."

"You have right," he agreed. "Which way shall we be going, up or down?"

I wanted to say down. That way would lead out of the House of Sun, would lead to the House of Earth. They must have taken the others there, back to the room where humans from all the centuries awaited the dreaded summons. They must have taken Evelyn there, and Astaris, posing as me. My blood was hot again with anger and the thought of the Doctil receiving the tenderness intended for me hammered at my skull. I understood how a man could kill and have no compunction at killing.

"Which way, my old?" Villon asked again.

"Up!" I answered. "When the Veil opened to let through the stratcar which Kass summoned, I noticed a flash near the top of this building. The control for the Veil must be somewhere above, and if we can get to that--"

"We may be able to raise the Veil and let the drina down into the Bowl!" Villon finished for me. "You are right; up it is."

And so we climbed upward along the steep spiral of that passage, while with me went the thought of Evelyn and Astaris and what might be, what must be, passing between them. It doesn't matter, I tried to tell myself. It doesn't matter at all. Before she discovers that the man to whose caresses she gives herself is not the Johnny she has loved since childhood, he will be dead, and she will be dead, and the only living things left in the Bowl of Adalon will be the mindless creatures they call the drina.

We seemed to have been climbing eternally, the curving of the passage hiding what was behind us, and what was ahead. "Like the living of life this is," Villon murmured. "A blind and toilsome mounting whose aim we do not know. And when the end is attained, we find it to be--nothing."

"There's something at the top of this climb," I growled. "There's got to be."

The spiral levelled out for a distance of about ten feet. Ahead it started climbing again--Villon's clutch on my arm brought me to a halt. "Hearken," he whispered, his long, grimy forefinger stabbing toward the slope.

I heard what he meant. A faint whisper of movement, far ahead, far above. Vague sounds brought to us by the resonance of the tunnel.

"Some of them are up there," I murmured. "In the passage, and coming this way. We've got to go back before they spy us."

"We'll not go back," Francois murmured, low-toned. "Hearken once more, my poor friend."

There were faint sounds behind us now, behind and below. Our retreat was cut off.

The poet's laugh was soundless, but in his eyes there were the same bitterness and the same despair as had been in the laugh with which he'd greeted the appearance of Kass. "They play with us, my old," he whispered. "They play with us as a cat with a mouse, or as a certain jailer of Paris with his prisoners, permitting that they escape from their dungeon only to attain, after much travail, another more foul and noisome." His poniard slid from its sheath. "But they shall not take me, alive." The dagger, stained with the blood of the Plebo he'd killed, flashed to his breast--

I caught his wrist before the point had more than pricked the velvet. "No, you fool," I grunted. "We're not caught yet. The passage is level here, like it was outside my cell. That may mean we're at another story of the building and that behind one of these walls there's a chamber in which we can hide."

"It may. It well may." His eyes were sparkling again. "And those we hear coming may be proceeding on their own affairs, not hunting us. But behind which wall, my old, lies safety?"

"Nothing like finding out. This side's my guess. It's this side the cell was on. Where's that 'key'? Quick. They're a lot nearer."

I grabbed Villon's arm and his hand went up to the wall I'd indicated. I was going through the grayness again, but I was getting quite used to that. What bothered me was whether there was a room on the other side of the wall, or whether it had become the outside wall of the building so that, once through, we'd go hurtling down--

We didn't. We came out smoothly, safely, on the other side--I crouched, forcing Francois down with me, my pulses pounding.

The space into which we had come was low-ceiled but long and wide. It was bare as the cell from which Villon had rescued me, but it was occupied.

At one end King Arthur and Orth and Louis were seated on the floor, Elijah erect not far from them. Nearer us Evelyn Rand walked leisurely about.

And strolling beside her was--myself!

"Magic!" Villon gasped. "John is here and he is there, and--" My palm over his mouth muffled the rest. Too late. Astaris had turned, was looking straight at us with my eyes, out of my face. But he did not see us. He could not have seen us, for that turn of his had been slow and leisurely and Evelyn had turned with him. She had not seen us either for now they were walking slowly away, hand in hand as a couple of lovers might walk beneath a silver moon.

"Johnny," I heard Evelyn murmur. "Are you sure it wasn't all something we dreamed? What we've gone through can't be real, and this too. This garden, this quiet peace, and you here with me, it's all just as I pictured it, longingly, all those lonely years."

"Why worry," I heard my own low voice answer from the lips of that other who was so like me I might be looking in a mirror. "This is real for now, this loveliness. Don't think of anything else. Think of me. Think of how much you love me, and of how--" He hesitated.

"Yes, Johnny?"

"And of how I love you." He was looking down at her now, with a curious eagerness. "Tell me, my very dear, how I love you, and why."

They were only a pace from us now, and yet there was no hint that either was aware of our presence. I felt Villon quiver, under my restraining hand.

"Why don't you tell me, Johnny?" They angled, as though turning the corner of a path where I could see only naked floor. "A girl wants to hear things like that from her lover." They were walking parallel to the wall against which we crouched, about a yard from it.

"Does she? I wouldn't know, Eve. I don't know how a lover should speak and act. Will you teach me?"

"Doesn't your own heart teach you-? Oh look!" She stopped, half turning to the wall. "Isn't this forsythia lovely?" Her slim hand reached out to empty air, but her fingers seemed to be touching something that wasn't there. "It's just like the bush near the gate of our fence where I waited for you, years ago."

I got it! Jumping Jupiter, I got it! Eve saw a garden, shrubbery, where there was nothing at all but gray rock. The others--I threw a swift glance at them and saw Orth's fingers trail along the floor as one trails his fingers through sod, saw Louis gesture as though he picked up a twig and threw it from him--were victims of the same illusion. It was just one more instance of the mass hypnotism, the capture of our weaker minds by those infinitely more powerful, tremendously better trained, that I had already experienced more than once. Its purpose, this time, was clear.

Astaris had arranged a romantic setting for his laboratory experiment in romance.

Villon and I were not affected by the illusion because the Doctil did not know of our presence. And this implied that he also saw this bare space as, a lovely garden, that to him also there appeared to be shrubbery here where we crouched, forsythia bushes that concealed us.

Could this be because he was himself the real subject of the experiment and so deliberately was exposing himself to its conditions, or because, assuming my eyes, my brain, he had also assumed my susceptibility to the mass hypnosis? It didn't matter. What mattered was that we were hidden from him by those illusory bushes.

"Don't move," I muttered in Francois' ear. "Don't make a sound." And then I was stealing away from him, crouched low, was creeping stealthily toward Evelyn and her companion, their backs still toward me.

I had to guess how far the invisible shrubbery extended. I had to take the chance that my very real body would not rustle those unreal leaves. All I could do was to make no sound on the corporeal rock across which I stole.

I got within a yard of the two and sprang. My fist flailed, pounded the jointure of spine and brain-case where a blow is certain to stun a man. My victim thudded soggily to the floor.

Evelyn whirled, screaming. Her scream cut off, and only a gasp came from her throat. There was no color in her face, her lips. Her pupils were dilated.

A strangled shout came from behind me. "The garden--where?" There was the trample of feet running toward us. There was Arthur's bellow, "Ho, varlet--"

"Evelyn!" My arms went out to her, my hands found her shoulders. "Eve! Don't look at me like that. I'm real. I'm your Johnny. He wasn't--" Fingers bruised my own shoulder, twisted me around. I saw Orth's furious countenance, King Arthur's.

"John!" the latter exclaimed. "John March. Thou art he indeed. But then who-?"

"Astaris," I told him. "One of the Doctils. He took my shape. He made you think he was I."

The king pulled the edge of his hand across his eyes, his face ghastly. "Magicked again. A moment ago we were stretched on greensward, besides a purling stream. Now--these walls, this footing and ceil of bare stone--"

"Wait." It was Orth who had grabbed me, and he had not let me go. "How do we know this one is March and not--" He cut off. He was gaping down at the floor and a green pallor spread across his blunt jawed countenance. "Ach Gott!"

I twisted as far as his hold on me would permit, looked to see what had affected him so. It wasn't my double that lay unconscious at Evelyn's feet. It was Achronos Astaris in his proper shape; tentacular limbs, bulbous small body clothed in its orange integument, enormous head, all complete. The huge eyes were sightless, staring.

"Now you know which one of us is the real John March," I grated, jerking free from the Archduke's clutch. "Get him tied up, with your belts, with everything you've got that can be made into ropes, before he comes to."

"He must not be permitted to come to, John," Villon's quiet voice said. "Tie him as we may, we cannot prevent him from sending a mental message to his fellows." The poet dropped to his knees beside Astaris, and his poniard was in his fingers.

"No!" I cried. "No, Francois!" He looked up at me, his shaggy brows quizzical, his twisted smile mocking. "Oh, I haven't any feeling for him, but we thought Arthur's idea of holding him as a hostage was a good one, and it still may be. We'll tie him up, and we'll keep him stunned. We'll watch him every minute, and the instant he shows signs of regaining consciousness, we'll conk him again."

"He is right, Villon," Orth supported me. "It may do us some good or not, but to keep him alive yet awhile cannot do harm."

The Frenchman shrugged. "Perhaps. Yet I would fear him less if he were dead."

"We approve of our John's advice," Arthur put an end to the discussion. "The creature shall be bound, and we, in our own proper person, shall make it our charge that he remains asleep."

I left the others to tie up the Doctil, got to the girl's side. "Eve!" She was rigid, her tiny face still and pallid.

"What's wrong?" My arm was around her, I was drawing her close to me.

Her mouth twisted. "I--I kissed him, Johnny. I gave my kiss to that--Thing."

"It was I you gave that kiss to, darling," I murmured. "You thought it was I you were giving it to, and that makes it all right. Or it will, as soon as you correct the misdelivery."

"Will it, Johnny?" That tight mouth of hers broke into a tremulous smile. "Will it?"

It seemed to. At any rate the tenseness went out of her, and she was very sweet, very warm, in my arms.

We were reminded that we were not alone in some ecstatic solitude by Louis' boyishly plaintive voice. "I wish someone would tell me where the garden went to. I liked it. It was the first time I'd viewed grass and flowers since I was a very little boy."

"Oh, you poor kid," Evelyn exclaimed. Pulling free of me, she ran to him, put her arm around him. "You poor, poor child. They put you in prison when you were only nine years old, didn't they?"

"The garden wasn't real, Louis," I told him. "Astaris made you all 'see' it, and when I knocked him out he couldn't make you see it any longer."

"There will be no gardens anywhere, John," Villon drawled, "if we spend our time on kisses and prattle. Have you forgotten the mission on which we set out?"

"What mission?" Orth demanded. I told them about the drina's attack, about our plan to attempt to lift the Veil of Ishlak and let them into the Bowl. "There is no doubt in my mind that if the creatures are powerful enough to keep the Veil from closing, they will be able to tear down every building in Adalon," I ended. "And so there will be no safety from them for anyone in Adalon, for Plebos or Doctils--or us. Villon and I made the decision for you, my friends, when you were not there to ask, because we felt that is how you would want it. Were we right?"

Elijah was the first to answer me. "Gladly would I embrace the Angel of Death, knew I that in the same dark flight he would bear off those heathen who have denied their Creator and would destroy His work." Looking about at the faces of the others, I read confirmation in their grave lineaments, their level gaze. I sought Evelyn's.

"I could not love you," she said, simply, "if I thought you would consider saving my life at the cost of letting them carry out their dreadful plan. I am not afraid to die, Johnny, now that I have been in your arms."

"All right," I said, crisply to hide the emotion that was tearing at my throat. "We'll go ahead with it then, if we can. But I'd give a lot to know what's going on out there. If they've already driven the drina away, or destroyed them, there would be no use in our trying to find the place from which the Veil is controlled. But as it's impossible for us to find that out, I--"

"Monsieur Marsh!" Louis interrupted. "I think that perhaps you can do that. When first we were left alone in this garden I saw you--this Doctil who pretended to be you--gazing into something that appeared like a mirror, thinking himself unobserved. I wondered then what he saw in it that made him look afraid and angry, both at once. Maybe this thing he looked into was no mirror at all, but--"

"Some device similar to television," I finished for him. "In taking my form he seems to have lost a great many of his mental powers, and he'd want to keep in touch-. If we can find it--" I turned to Astaris' bound form, and saw that Villon was already kneeling to it, his long, deft fingers searching it.

"This that he wears is skin-tight as the costumes of the tumblers who amuse the rabble on Seine's bank of a feastday," the poet reported. "It gives no space for the concealment--Ah!" he broke off. His hand came out from under the body it was searching, and there was a gleaming plate in it, circular and about the size of a woman's hand glass. "It lay beneath him. Your clothing, on him, was an illusion, but this is real."

"I hope the fall hasn't put it out of commission." I reached for it. "Let me see." He gave it to me.

The thing looked very much like the toilet article to which I've compared it, except that it had no handle. It was somewhat thicker too, and the edge of the disk was serried with tiny protuberances. The mirror itself was oddly milky, so that in it the reflections, of my face and of Evelyn and the others crowding about me to peer into it, were vague and wraithlike.

"Post thou see aught?" King Arthur demanded, glanced at him. He was watching the recumbent Doctil, his scabbarded sword held clublike in his big hands. He wasn't allowing curiosity to distract him from his self-delegated task of keeping our hostage unconscious and innocuous. "What dost thou see?"

"Nothing," I answered, my voice flat with disappointment. "It's a washout."

"Johnny!" Eve exclaimed. "Those bumps on the edge look like push-buttons. Why don't you try pressing them?"

"Good girl!" The excrescences were indeed movable. I squeezed them.

The misty reflections vanished from the glass. It was clear, abruptly, and glowing. But it showed only a meaningless jumble; broken shapes of stone, corners, canted walls, a disjointed tentacle, a single great eye, the confused pieces of a jig-saw puzzle or a surrealist's nightmare. "Damn!" I grunted. "It's television all right. But I can't make head or tail--"

"He held it like this." The Dauphin grabbed the rim of the disk, tugged at it 'til I was holding it vertically. The chaos slid beneath its surface as it moved, and changed kaleidoscopically, but it was still a chaos.

"Oh," Eve stamped her foot. "It's exasperating."

"Wait!" I grunted. "I'm like a kid with a toy piano, banging all the keys at once." I let all save one of the buttons come up. "That does it!"

Etched crystal-clear in the mirror was the corridor where Villon and I almost had been caught. "The buttons control the distance the thing sees, and by pressing all of them I was superimposing layer after layer of this building upon one another, like a dozen transparent pictures." A Plebo went by in the glass descending, some peculiarly shaped instrument in his hand. Another followed him. "They're still looking for Francois and me."

"I doubt that," Orth disputed me. "These people better ways of finding you will have than running around like chickens with the heads chopped off. For example, they must have more than one of these glasses and with them in minutes they could scan the whole of Adalon."

"He has right, John," Francois agreed. "Me, I think they hasten to the defence of their city. Perchance the drina once more have pierced the Veil."

"We'll soon see. Which way was Astaris facing this when you saw him use it, Louis?"

The youngster showed me, and then, as I pressed buttons in rotation, room after room of the House of Sun appeared in the mirror and flicked off. I should have liked to examine each but it was more important to determine what the situation was outside.

The last button brought a vista of the Bowl of Adalon into the round glass.

The aspect of its level floor had not changed much from when we'd crossed it, shepherded by Daster, except that the girders no longer flowed across it to the tower, and that the tower was finished. A number of Plebos were clustered around its base and Favril and Bolar were among them, but it was up the lacy spire that my eyes lifted--to where its apex, level with the rim of the bowl, was surmounted by a wide platform that held a knot of Plebos and Daster and several machines whose nature I could not make out.

The occupants of the platform were looking outward and there was something in their posture that told me that they were afraid. I canted the small glass to bring what they gazed at into its circle, and I saw.

I saw the brink of the cliff and the grayish purple cloud that mounded monstrously there, more menacing than any thunderhead. It was not storm with which that cloud was pregnant but hate and the lust to kill and the vilest of deaths. It was not cloud. It was a massing of a myriad pulsing bodies merged by their own weight, their own avid pressure into one, and it was restrained only by the shimmer of force Villon had called the Veil of Ishlak from pouring down upon Adalon.

And in Adalon the men of the future watched the dark and mindless death brooding over their city and were afraid. If the veil should yield to its awful thrust they would perish horribly--and we with them.

But Earth, the Earth of the Twentieth Century, would be saved. Somehow I must find a way to make the Veil yield.

As these thoughts flashed through my mind, John Orth groaned. "Mother of all Living. This is horror--"

"That's it!" I exclaimed. "That may be the answer." An idea that may have lain beneath the surface of my mind all this time had broken through. "Maybe," I said trembling with sudden hope, "maybe we don't have to die after all, my friends. Maybe we can save Earth from the Doctils without that."

Chapter 23
THE MOTHER OF ALL LIVING

"WHAT?--How?--JOHNNY, WHAT DO you mean?..." A tumult of questions beat at me, but I paid them no attention as I feverishly thumbed the button of the television disk that I'd first pressed, at the same time moving the device to focus again the corridor just outside this chamber.

The plan that had sprung into my mind was breathtaking in its simplicity, but there were many things I had to know before I could even attempt carrying it out. The level part of the passage was now empty of life. I moved the disk so as to follow the descending spiral and catch up with the last of the hurrying Plebos I'd glimpsed. The thing he carried was, in the same manner that a revolver is a miniature cannon, a miniature of one of the machines on the towertop.

"Yes," I muttered, "that must be it. They've been called together to guard something or someone tremendously important. Pray, Elijah. If you have any influence with your God, pray that it's in this building."

"Look here, March," Orth insisted. "We've got a right to know what you're up to." The Plebo I watched reached another of the level places in the ramp, halted, and turned to the blank wall. "What are you looking for?"

"You named it yourself, Orth. You handed it to me on a silver platter."

"I named it!" The Plebo melted into the wall and I manipulated buttons to follow him. "What did I name, John Marsh?"

The room that came into the disk was walled with silver and it was as large as the one we were in. Ten Plebos, each armed with a weapon such as the newcomer carried, stood in a circle and at its center on a raised dais the Doctil Gohret stood above a case of some transparent substance within which, couched on billows of white, softly gleaming silk lay--"Marsh!" Orth was insisting. "What was it I named?"

"The Mother of All Living," I answered him softly. "Look at her. The mother-to-be of all the living whom the Doctils intend shall inherit our own good green Earth when they have conquered it."

Within that case she was larger by far than any woman any of us have ever known, but she was formed like the women we knew and not like the grotesque beings of the Future who guarded her. Her skin was as white as the cushioned silk on which she lay nude, her eyes closed, and more lustrous. She was great-bosomed, huge-limbed, immensely wide of hip. Her face was possessed of pale, almost unearthly beauty but it was a bovine beauty, a mindless calm that made of her something less than human.

"The Matra," I breathed. "The Queen Bee. The spawner of ova for the Doctils and the only one of her kind left alive. From her they must get the seed of the superhumans of whom they dream, and without her their dream cannot be fulfilled. Without her they will be five Doctils and a hundred Plebos, and never any more. Without her there would be no point in their depopulating Earth of our race and our generation, for without her they could never repeople it again with theirs.

"That is why they guard her, and Gohret. If only one Doctil is left alive with her, he can recreate his race. If all of them escape the drina, but she dies, they are beaten."

"And so," Villon was the first to comprehend, "we must slay her."

"No, Johnny!" There was horror in Eve's cry. "She is a woman, a mother. It would be an unspeakable crime."

I twisted to her. "A crime, Eve, and unspeakable--but not mine. They are guilty of it who degraded womanhood to the level of a breeding machine. You call that Matra a mother, but is she? It takes love to make a mother, and years of fostering care. That poor creature will never know her offspring, never even see them. She is no more a mother than a hen whose eggs are taken from her as soon as they are laid and placed in an incubator to batch. And, Eve, million's upon millions of real mothers on the Earth of our time will die, as horribly as you saw the mothers of this planet die--if the Matra lives. If she lives they will die, and the children whom they have borne in suffering, and fed at their breasts, and agonised over, will die. It is the Matra's life against the lives of those mothers, one against millions."

I was justifying my proposal not only to her but to myself. It ran counter to all the tradition bred into me, to all I had been taught. I recalled with what horror I'd watched, in the twentieth century I was fighting to protect, bombs rain from the sky upon women, mothers--

"The Matra is not even a woman, Fraulein Evelyn," Orth put in. "Look how in that so beautiful face there is no hint of a soul, no semblance of thought. Were she a woman, did she know what she is and what is done with her, she would embrace death as a mercy and a blessed release."

"She--she is asleep," Evelyn objected, weakly. "Maybe if she were awake--"

"That isn't sleep, darling," I interrupted. "Look. That case is hermetically sealed. There is no way for air to get into it, let alone food. She is in a state of suspended animation, a sort of living death. She is to all intents, already dead. It is only a very tiny spark of life that would be extinguished if she were killed."

The girl made a little, halting gesture with her hand. "You are right, Johnny, and I am wrong." And then she smiled tremulously and put her hand on my arm. "But look. If you can take her away from them and not kill her, they'd give anything to get her back. Promise me you won't kill her unless you have to. Please, Johnny, promise me that."

I would have promised her the world with a fence around it right then. "I promise, Eve."

The fluttering touch of her fingertips on my cheek was thanks enough.

"You promise much, John, and talk much about seizing the Matra or slaying her," Francois said softly. "But of how it is to be done you say nothing. Is it that you will enter that room, bow, and say prettily, 'Messieurs, I have come to slay her whom you guard, armed with weapons against which I have no means of attack. Pray stand while I slice her gullet."

He was right. I looked again into the disk, saw again the quiet, confident circle of Plebos around that gleaming casket, saw the orange-torsoed Gohret beside it, one splayed hand resting on its top. Of all the Kintat this one was the most implacable, the most nearly naked intelligence, the most formidable. What strength did we have, what strategy could we evolve, that could have any hope of success against him?

"Have faith in the Eternal, my son," Elijah intoned.

"The Most Holy arms the righteous with the lightnings of His wrath. Jehovah casts the cloak of His omnipotence about them who go forth to battle against His enemies."

"I fear me, sage," Villon's slurred accents took issue with him, "that your Jehovah has forsaken this land and all who people it. I seem to recall that its inhabitants were in the very act of worshipping Him, or Someone very like Him, when disaster fell upon them."

"Silence!" Arthur ordered. "We will not have this squabbling while our John March meditates upon the means to defeat the heathen."

And Louis was piping, "You'll win over them, Monsieur March. You will, I'm sure of it."

Whether I wished it or not, I had assumed the leadership of the little band. I had to justify their faith in me. I simply had to. "I'll work out some way of getting at the Matra," I told them, pretending a confidence I didn't feel. "But we ought to have two strings to our bow. Suppose we see what chance there is of our carrying out our original idea, to lift the Veil of Ishlak and let the drina down into the Bowl."

I moved the disk, pressed the proper button. The scene outside flashed into the glass once more--the strange structures that were arranged as the planets of the Solar System are arranged, the defending tower with its cluster of Future Men about its base and on the platform at its top. Their tenseness, the slow throb of their ear-membranes, filled with a brooding fear the Bowl of Adalon.

The gray-purple mass of the drina pressed against the Veil, waiting. They'd wait there 'til the end of time if need be. Hate would keep them there, the hate that was the last remnant of mentality the conquerors of their world had left them. The lust to kill would keep them there, the blind lust to destroy that the maddening vibrations of those conquerors' sonic vibrators had instilled in them, a grisly exchange for the souls of which they had been robbed.

There seemed in this latter circumstance a twisted justice, a grotesque sort of retribution.

My throat tightened. One of those who crowded around me to look into the disk may have jolted my arm, or perhaps some obscure impulse had made me tip it a little, so that I was looking over the cloud of the drina and beyond it.

At any rate, silhouetted against the low brown sky, I saw something that had not been there before, that could not, I swear, before this have been seen from within the Bowl. Black, and so vast as to blot out a full quadrant of the sky in which it hung, I saw the statue that was my first memory of the Land Where Time is Not. The haunched body, the soaring legs, the hooded, awful head of a Being that was neither man nor beast.

Or was it the statue? Immense as it was, it seemed to have a quality of life that the great monument had not possessed. Was this because it was a mirage? Or was it? Reason rejected the other hypothesis. And yet--and yet, the tremendous apparition was not quite the same as the monument that had so astounded me. Its hood seemed lifted a little. The eyes still hidden with that hood seemed to be gazing down on the hosts of the drina. And something in the poise of that vast head, in the very lines of that monstrous body, seemed to speak of pity, and sorrow, and also of a patience that was reaching its end.

The others saw it too, they must have seen it. For I heard Elijah's rolling, orotund tones, answering Villon. "Oh little man of little faith. The Eternal is infinite and all-present. Nor in the uttermost reaches of the Firmament, nor in the ultimate end of Time, is there limit to Him, nor let to His majesty. For His own inscrutable purpose He may permit His faithful to suffer, but never, in the end, does He forsake them."

And for once Francois Villon had no mocking reply at the tip of his tongue.

Chapter 24
THE MAGNIFICENT FOOLS

THE PRESENCE IN THE BROWN SKY faded and was gone. It must after all, I told myself, have been a mirage. But I was not quite able to rid myself of a certain awe. I had seen Something few men have been privileged to see through all the ages, and the despair, the empty feeling of helplessness that had weighed me down, curiously was lessened.

I returned to a scrutiny of the tower. I counted the Plebos under Daster's command on the high platform. Twenty-six. It was more difficult to count those below, but I saw there were certainly in the near neighborhood of fifty. Ten were with Gohret, guarding the Matra and one was dead. Originally, I recalled, there had been a hundred.

That left only a handful unaccounted for, not more than fifteen certainly. Where were these?

Blurred movement at the edge of the disk seemed to offer an answer. I shifted it to bring the movement near its center--

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed. "Look at that."

The movement I'd glimpsed was at the entrance aperture to the House of Earth. There were coming out of it no Plebos, but the giant Norseman, light glinting from his winged metal casque, and the blonde Briton. Streaming after them came the Roman in his toga, the vividly garmented Egyptian, the Mongol Lieutenant of Genghis Khan, all the humans who'd congregated in the room from which Daster had called me and my companions.

They started running, toward the Future Men at the base of the tower! Something flashed through the air ahead of them and a Plebo on the fringe of the cluster nearest them toppled, an arrow quivering in the back of his enormous head. The Redskin who'd dispatched that arrow fitted another to his bow. The bare, muscular arm of a patrician-featured Greek swept back to launch a javelin.

"They're attacking!" Evelyn cried. "They're charging the Future Men!"

"If they capture and destroy the tower..."

The Viking came on in great bounds, swinging a two-handed sword broader even than Excalibur. The Roman's, close beside him, was a short blade little longer than a knife. The Greek's javelin arced over their heads, found its mark in another Plebo's eye--

Passed right through and left the Plebo, standing, unaffected!

"Damn!" I grunted. "Now that the Future Men know they're coming those things can do no more harm to them than Orth's bullet to Daster."

The Indian's second arrow swept harmlessly through the defenders of the tower. A stone axe hurled by a pelt-clothed Pict might have been thrown at shadows, for all the effect it had. The Plebos were facing the charge, their weapons in their hands now, weapons like those with which the ones guarding the Matra were armed. The very calmness with which they awaited the attack gave proof of how little they feared it. But the Norseman came on, waving his sword, his walrus mustaches drooped on either side of a mouth wide open to vent a bellow of defiance I could not hear. The attacking column rushed toward the menace of the Plebos' mysterious weapons and not one of the motley assortment that composed it hestitated or turned to flee.

"They are fools," I heard Villon voice what was in my mind. "But what magnificent fools!"

Or were they? The Plebos held their fire and the Viking, still foremost, was within ten yards of them. Did the charging men have a chance? If they had, if they captured the tower--The wing-helmeted head vanished from the Norseman's shoulders! The Roman's sword arm was sheared off clean at the joint and his abruptly legless torso thudded down, quiveringly, horribly still alive. The Egyptian was sliced in half, a slashed fragment of the Indian skidded across the plaza...

It was over. There had been no flashes from the Plebos' weapons. There had been no evidence that they'd done any thing but stand there and wait for the charge to reach them, yet there no longer was any charge. Nothing was left of those who'd attacked with such magnificent courage save scarcely recognizable fragments of human bodies scattered over the rocky plain.

There was no blood. It seemed especially horrible that they did not bleed.

"Take them, Oh Eternal," Elijah droned. "Take their bright souls to Thy bosom and give them eternal rest."

"Amen," I whispered, and I heard a whispered amen from Orth and Louis, from Arthur and Evelyn. None of us could possibly have spoken above a whisper, for a long moment.

The throbbing silence was broken by Villon. "And that, my friend," he was not smiling, "is what awaits us in the chamber where the Matra lies."

"Nevertheless, poet," I growled, "I'm going to have a try at making our friends of the future pay for what they've just done out there."

"You were going to find the controls for the Veil," Evelyn's soft voice reminded me.

That brought me back a little to myself. I blotted out the scene outside the House of Sun, drew the probing rays of the television disk within it, started scanning its every nook and cranny.

It was a vast labyrinth of passages, a warren of rooms large and small. Some of the rooms were empty, some piled to the ceiling with all kinds of things that I should like to have examined more closely. I went on and on, grimly searching for the vulnerable heart of Adalon's defences.

I had begun at the lowermost level of the immense structure, and now my search had reached the base of the dome that surmounted it, and as yet I had not found that for which I hunted.

The great stratcar hangar came into the disk. Only one of the silvery fliers remained there; all the rest, I guessed, had gone out to fight the drina and had been wrecked. I tried to recall how many there had been. About a dozen. Each of the missing ones must have been ridden by at least one Plebo. There still were four or five to be located. They must be somewhere.

The disk moved slowly in my hand. It was grayed by the momentary blankness I had learned meant that the beam, or whatever it was that scanned the distant scenes, was passing through a wall. The grayness cleared and I was looking at a vaulted room fully as large as that where the stratcars had been.

This, however, was not like the hangar, hollow and empty. It was packed with a maze of gleaming metal, of glowing tubes and looped cables, the whole vibrating so that I could almost hear the hum of leashed energy.

"This is it," I said hoarsely. "This is their powerhouse."

Here, for the first time anywhere in the House of Sun except the room where the Matra slept, I found life. A single Plebo paced around the intricacy, his enormous eyes intent upon it.

"One," Villon murmured. "There is only one." From the corner of my eye I saw that he fingered the hilt of his poniard. "Wait," I said. "Wait, Villon."

At one end of the plexus of polished steel and copper the cables joined and formed a huge coil, something like the intricate induction coils of a radio except that this was perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. No conductor left it. All the energy that was being created here was being fed into this, and apparently remained there.

That was queer, I thought, then recalled what Daster had told me of the manner in which the Future Men used their own brains as electrical machines. It dawned on me that they mentally tapped this reservoir of power and directed it to where it was needed.

That was that. I could not get at the controls of the Veil of Ishlak because those controls were the minds of the Doctils themselves. Wait! I did not have to worry about the controls! The energy that formed the Veil originated in that room and if we could reach it, if we could destroy the prime power-source it housed, the Veil would collapse.

The Veil would collapse and the drina would pour down into Adalon. They would surge over the Doctils and over the Plebos.

And over us. Over Evelyn.

I recalled what I had seen on the entrance plain. I recalled the linked armor that still held the empty shape of a man. Not even that much would be left of the honey-haired girl, the gray-eyed girl whose lips I had tasted and found sweet.

There was that other room. The room where Gohret and his Plebos watched over the Matra.

I had just seen what folly the thought of a frontal attack on them was. To think of reaching the Matra by stealth was as futile. Her case was in the chamber's very center, the unbroken circle of Plebos around it and Gohret beside it. Only an Adalonian could even enter that room in safety. Now if only I could assume Astaris' shape as easily as he had mine--

Maybe that wasn't necessary. Maybe--"It's worth a try," I said aloud.

"What's worth a try, Johnny?" Evelyn inquired. "What are you thinking about?"

I turned to her, drinking in that slender body of hers, etching on my memory its delicate curves, the translucent oval of her face. I had come to a decision and I had only a few moments more to capture an image of her to take with me into oblivion.

"Johnny." Her hand was in mine. "Why don't you answer me? You've figured out something. Why don't you tell us what it is?"

"Yes, dear. I've figured out a way of getting at the Matra that has a one-in-a-million chance of coming off. But before I talk about that, I want to arrange for the second string to our bow, the lifting of the Veil. I'm sure that can be done."

The others were looking at me now, their eyes questioning.

"Francois," I said. "You were watching the disk as closely as I was. Do you think that you can find the room where the great machine is?"

"Of a surety, my cabbage. That is very simple for one who could travel the roofs of the Faubourg St. Germaine on nights when even the squawling cats were blind, and in all that myriad of windows find the one behind which slept the maiden to whom his current fancy drew him."

"Fine. Because I want you to lead them there, Elijah and Orth and Louis, and Evelyn. Arthur too, carrying Astaris with him. When you get near it, you will leave the others and sneak into that place and use your poniard on the Plebo in there."

A crooked grin crossed the Frenchman's face. "Understood, my carrot."

"When you've disposed of him, call in the others. And wait."

"Wait? For what?"

"You'll know. Because I'm going to give you this television disk to take along--here Louis, you'd better carry it--and in it you will watch the room of the Matra. What you see happen there will tell you, Arthur," I turned to him and Orth, "whether to smash the lights you will see glowing here and there about the machine in that room."

"To smash lights." Arthur's brows gathered in puzzlement. "And why should you set us to smashing lights, John March?"

"If you are discovered," I ignored his question for the moment, "don't stop to fight but smash those lights. Because," now I answered the king, "when they are smashed the power will be shut off from the Veil of Ishlak and there no longer will be a Veil to hold back the drina and so there will be no point in fighting.

"Orth," I continued, trying not to see the effect of that on them, "give me your gun. Francois, after we are out in the corridor I shall want the thing you took from the Plebo you killed, the 'key' as you call it."

"Why, Johnny?" Evelyn broke in, her eyes widening. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to try to get to the room of the Matra, darling, and I'm going to try to kill her. The chances are a million to one against my succeeding, but if I do succeed, in time, you will have a chance to live."

"And you?"

"Oh," I shrugged, "I'll make out all right." And quickly, so that she should not read in my eyes that I lied, that whether I killed the Matra or not I would surely die, I turned to the Dauphin. "Louis. It will be your job to act as lookout to warn the others of the approach of any Plebos or Doctils. And, my boy, if and when it becomes necessary for the lights to be smashed, to warn them of the approach of the drina."

Now I was almost finished. I had only one more instruction to give. "Francois. A word in private with you, if the others will not mind."

We stepped aside and I murmured what I had to say in his ear. He heard it, and blinked at me, and then I thought he stood a little more erect, a little more proudly than before. "John," he murmured. "John Marsh. I have received the accolades of counts and dukes, of a king and a Pope but never, in my misspent life have I been honored as thus at its end you honor me."

What I had told him was that if it came to it that Louis warned of the drina's approach, he was gently, very gently, to slip his poniard into Evelyn's heart.

Chapter 25
TO DIE ALONE

A SOFT THUD SWUNG ME TO KING Arthur. His sheathed sword was lifting from Astaris' enormous head.

"The varlet stirred," the king explained, "and we had to quiet him."

I stared down at the Doctil, grotesque, malignant even lying there bound and unconscious. If in that instant of dawning awareness, he'd sent out even one syllable of a cry for help, my million to one chance of getting to the Matra and gaining for Evelyn a slim hope of survival was gone.

There was no way of telling whether he had sent out that appeal.

Villon's arm was across my shoulder. "John," his low voice murmured. "Indeed there is peril for all of us, but for the task of greatest peril you have appointed yourself. You are young. You have the love of that sweet maiden to live for. For me, even were I to return to my land and my epoch, there is nothing left but a dreary exile, poverty, the haunted skulking of an outcast. Let me take your place, and you mine."

"Thank you, Francois," I answered. "But it isn't any melodramatic heroism that motivates me. If what I'm going to try to do can be done at all, only I can do it. I'm the only one who possibly can hope to get near the Matra. We're wasting time. Let's get started."

I was sure that the 'key' would take two at a time through the wall, and I didn't want to risk experimenting with more. Our exodus to the corridor, therefore, took longer than I liked, Villon ferrying us through one by one. I went first, to stand on guard with Orth's gun, and each time Francois vanished into the stone, I wondered whether before he returned I should see a squad of Plebos hurrying toward us, through simple bad luck or brought by some call from our prisoner. My palms were wet with cold sweat by the time Arthur appeared with the stunned Doctil across his shoulder so for the sake of doing something I took the 'key' from him myself and went back to bring Francois out.

I dropped it into my vest pocket when we were in the corridor again, and saluted the men. They moved away, rounded the curve of the corridor where it lifted upward to continue its long spiral, passed from sight. I was alone with Evelyn for the last time.

I dared take only a minute for our parting, dared not trust myself to speak. Nor was it with words that she told me that my love for her was no greater than hers for me.

Then Evelyn Rand was going away from me, to join the others who were waiting for her, and I was really alone. Forever. I turned, started down the long, winding incline towards where, as surely as though I myself had drawn the plans of the House of Sun, I knew I would find the cell of the Matra and those who waited with death in their hands for any enemy who might try to approach her.

I wasn't afraid of what lay ahead. One is no longer afraid when one knows that death is imminent and inevitable.

I went over what I contemplated. I would have to rehearse my every act, my every movement so that they would follow one another precisely, mechanically. If I had to think, even for an instant, I would fail. That was--

My hand flashed to Orth's gun in my pocket as I whirled to a footfall behind me--"Eve!" burst from my lips. "My God, Eve. What-?"

She slipped her fingers into the crook of my elbow. "You didn't think I would let you go alone, Johnny," she smiled. "You didn't really think I would let you die, without me at your side to die with you." There was a glint of mischief in her eyes, a mischievous twist at the corners of her mouth. "I waited 'til I was sure you had gone too far to send me back, and then I came after you."

"You little fool. You dear little fool. You'll ruin every--" I checked. Her being with me wouldn't ruin my plan. It might even help it.

"What are we going to do, Johnny?" she asked. "What's' your plan?"

I had to tell her. I had to be sure that she understood it in every detail. "It's very simple, my dear. I'm going to pretend to be Astaris."

"Astaris! But you can't make yourself look like him."

"I don't have to. He made himself look like me. Gohret knows that, doesn't know he's changed back. He doesn't know that I've got hold of one of the instruments that enable the Plebos to go through the walls. When I come through the wall into that room, he'll be almost certain, in the first instant, to think I'm Astaris."

"In the first instant. But he can read our thoughts, Johnny. He'll read yours, and since you know that you're really John March he'll know it too, at once."

"That's the weakest point of my scheme. But I think can get past it."

"How?"

"By being Astaris. By convincing myself that I am Astaris, as a great actor convinces himself that he is the character he portrays; so that every unconscious gesture of his is that character's and not his own. I'm no actor, the Lord knows, but now I have to be one and I will."

"I know you will, Johnny." Her quiet trust in me gave me renewed confidence. "I know you will. But, Astaris, why should you keep your disguise as March when you're going to Gohret?"

"Whoa up, Eve. You don't know that I'm Astaris. You still think I'm John March. You've asked a question that was bothering me 'til you showed up but now it's answered. Here's the story. I assumed John March's personality, his whole make-up, in the hope that your love would evoke a corresponding emotion in me. You see, I can't conceive that it is anything but a physical or chemical reaction, requiring only a duplication of conditions to come about. Well, I've succeeded. I've learned the nature of love. Under normal conditions I would bring you before the whole Kintat to confirm it, but because the others are occupied with the defense against the drina, I'm taking you to Gohret alone.

"If I changed back to my real form, you would be terrified, and the experiment ruined. I might even lose the effect it has had on me. That's why I'm still posing as John March. Do you understand?"

Her brow wrinkled, adorably. "It's a little complicated. You're Astaris, and you want Gohret to know that, but you want me to think that you're my Johnny."

"Exactly. I'm posing as Astaris posing as me. I am Astaris posing as John March. Your part is easy. You know I'm John March, and you're very much in love with me. You don't understand what I'm up to but you trust me implicitly."

"In other words I just have to be myself."

"Exactly. You can even be as scared as you please of Gohret and the Plebos. You only have to be careful to remember to forget what happened in that garden back there."

"You mean when you--"

"Hold it, darling. I kissed you in the garden, and we were very happy with our love, so that you almost forgot all the strange things that had been happening until then. I asked you to come somewhere with me, and you answered that you would go anywhere as long as it was with me, anywhere in the world or out of it. You're a little startled because you have suddenly found yourself in this corridor. You'll be somewhat more startled when I've taken you into the room of the Matra, and you'll be terrified of Gohret, but you will depend on me to take care of you. Come on, my very dear. We've got only a little farther to go. And trust me."

"Yes, Johnny, dear. I trust you always and forever."

She has no suspicion that I am Astaris, I thought. She trusts me, and she loves me. Queer. This feeling I have towards her, drawing me to her, thrilling me at the very touch of her, is baffling. Something electrical in its nature, something chemical. I can't quite analyze it, using March's brain. If I could use my own--I'd better not, just yet. I don't have to. Gohret will examine us, both of us, and he'll know exactly what change she has made in me. Ah. We're here, outside the Room of the Matra. I hope that her terror over what she'll see in it won't mask her love-reactions from Gohret. Well, that's a chance I have to take. But I'll try to prepare her for what awaits her.

"We're going through this door, dear," I said aloud. "There will be things inside you won't understand, but trust me, no harm is going to come to you."

"I'm not afraid, Johnny," she answered. "As long as I'm with you. But kiss me, before you open that door."

I took her in my arms, the way I'd seen it done so many times, in so many different centuries, and I pressed my lips against hers. Her slender body was trembling in the circle of my arms, and her lips were cold on mine. Mine were cold too, and there was a tightness around my brow. That was because this was the crucial moment of my experiment, and I was really quite worried lest it fail. Strange how this love business makes one susceptible to other emotions too, how it weakens one's philosophical attitude toward all the phenomena of nature.

I took her arms tenderly from about my neck. "We've got to go in, darling," I said. I took her hand in mine. My fingers slid into my vest pocket and, standing close to the wall, I pressed against it. We were going through the wall. We were in the Room of the Matra. The guards circled the crystal case, and Gohret stood above it, thinking how much depended on the white, sleeping form within it.

The Plebos were startled. Their weapons came up. "Gohret!" I sent the thought to my brother Doctil, proud a little of my triumph. "My experiment has succeeded. I want you to examine the change in me, but be careful not to disturb the female."

Aloud, I said, as Evelyn Rand might expect John March to say, "You sent for us, Mister. What do you want?" And I kept moving toward the center of the room.

We were moving straight on the lifted weapons of the Plebos. The fools. They look uncertain. They are about to loose their rays. Is my pose as John March too well done? Don't they, doesn't Gohret, believe that I am Astaris?

John March's hand closed on the butt of the gun in the pocket of his jacket, and his fingers curled over its trigger.

Chapter 26
VENGEANCE

EVELYN RAND'S FEET DRAGGED. There was no color in her face and her eyes were dark pits in its pallor. Gohret's thoughts were unformed, puzzled, as he stood motionless above the bed of the Matra and watched us come toward him.

They became clearer. "Something wrong, something blurred, in the way he communicates with me I do not recognize Astaris' mind." "That is because my mind uses the cells of March's brain," I answered him, silently. "I am surprised that you do not comprehend it." I was beginning to be a little angry at his stupidity, at the insolence of the Plebos who stood steadfast, blocking me. Me, a Doctil! They were blocking my way no longer. Two had moved aside to let us pass.

We were on the platform. We were within a long pace of the Matra's case. John March's gun moved a bit to aim at the form within it-

Gohret's right tentacle lashed forward! March's finger squeezed the trigger! The Doctil grabbed my arm in that exact moment. I saw the case smash into splinters, I saw a red splotch on the Matra's temple. "Goodbye, Eve!" I gasped, as the Plebos whirled to cut us down--Darkness smashed into the room, utter, impenetrable darkness!

Gohret's reaching arm found me, and I pounded it with the butt of the gun, out of my pocket now. "The power!" I sensed his startled thought. "All power's off!" All about me was a jumble of panic, the Plebos' dismay, their confusion. I knew they were trying to ray me down, but nothing was happening. Nothing was happening because their weapons no longer tapped the energy that would have sliced us to pieces as we'd seen the charging men sliced, out on the floor of the Bowl.

Keeping tight hold of Evelyn I lurched toward where I recalled the wall was, was using Orth's gun as a club to batter the unseen Plebos out of my way. Confused, panicky, they were blundering into one another, into us. Gohret's mind was searching for us, but we were screened from it by the terror of the Plebos, by their silent shouts, "The Veil. The Veil of Ishlak is gone. The drina are coming." Abruptly I was through their heaving mass, was staggering across a free space, Eve still in the circle of my arm.

"It wasn't any use," I gasped. "We've killed the Matra, but Arthur had smashed the machines." We thudded into something hard, vertical. "We've saved our world, but we're through. The drina will get us."

"We've saved our world, Johnny," I heard her answer. "And we can die happy. Like this." Her lips trailed across my cheek, found mine and clung to them.

"No." I pulled my head back from hers. "Maybe the books are closing on us, but we aren't dead yet." I was fishing in my vest-pocket. "We're not giving up. If we're going to die, we'll die trying." I didn't have any hope the 'key' would get us through the wall now, with no energy-flux for it to tap, but I was going to try it. "The drina haven't gotten us yet."

There were two small objects in my pocket. One of them was the key. The other--I brought them both out--the other, I recalled, was the black gem that I'd found in Evelyn Rand's room in Westchester and had carried ever since.

"Put your arm around my waist, Eve," I directed. I held the gem in my left hand while I put the key against the vertical rock and squeezed it.

Nothing happened. Well, I had expected that. We were done for. We'd stay here 'til the drina found us--

We wouldn't be alive when the drina found us. Gohret was coming toward us! In the same curious manner that I'd been able to hear their unspoken words, I knew that he'd succeeded in quieting the Plebos, had located us, and was coming to take revenge on us for the death of the Matra. He was no longer the cold, intellectual man of the future. He was white hot with rage, with fury, and he wasn't going to leave us for the drina. I turned to meet him--

Started to turn! The floor heaved--threw me against the wall. I shoved both hands against it, to save myself from falling. The black stone in my left hand clicked on the rock, and there was a sharp, tearing sound. Dim, brownish light jagged the blackness of the wall and there was dust in my nostrils. The break in the facade widened, and I half fell through it.

Evelyn fell with me into the spiral corridor. Its floor heaved as I spun to meet the menace of the Doctil--was just in time to see the cleft in the wall through which we'd come closed by rock fragments tumbling into it, to see them crush in Gohret's ungainly skull. Evelyn's little fists were pounding my back. "The drina, Johnny," she screamed above a shrill vibration of sound that 'til now I had been unaware of. "Look."

The brownish light came in through the aperture at the end of the long ramp out of which Daster, long ago, had led me from the House of Sun. That aperture was jagged-edged now, was growing wider as I glimpsed it. Was being made wider by amorphous, purple-gray tendrils tearing at its rocky frame, tearing the stone from it in great chunks. A purple-gray sea surged out there beyond it, and it was from this sea that the shrill, ear-piercing whistle rose.

"Good Lord!" I grunted. "The projectors on the tower were useless when the power was cut off, and there was nothing at all to hold back the drina. They've swallowed all the Future Men out there, and now they're tearing this building apart to get at the few left inside here--and us. That's why it's shaking so, as if it were in the grip of an earthquake. It's curtains for us--"

"Not yet, Johnny. Their tearing at the building was what broke the cleft in the wall, and saved us from Gohret. Don't you get some hope from that?"

"I don't see--"

"Johnny!" Evelyn shook me. "You said we'd die trying."

"Yeah," I grunted. "But what's there left to try? Look. They're coming" The aperture large enough, a purple-gray mass was oozing through it. "And they're tearing the whole building down over our heads. Wait! They can't tear the whole building down all at once, it's too huge. It will take them a long time. There's one thing we can still try. If we can get to the top ahead of them, if that stratcar can still fly--Come on!"

We were running up that steep, winding incline. We were running endlessly. Behind us, and below, was the shrill and terrible whistle of the drina, and the thud of falling stone, and abruptly there was a great scream in my mind, a soundless scream that I knew to be the death cry of the Plebos whom we'd left behind in the Room of the Matra.

And then the scream was ended, and there was only the shrill whistle of the drina, and that was fading, and the shuddering of the floor under our feet had diminished to an almost imperceptible vibration. We were running, endlessly running in the sightless dark, endlessly circling, endlessly climbing.

My legs ached, every muscle, every sinew a separate, tearing pain. An iron band about my chest constricted my lungs and each gasping breath sliced them. My temples pounded--

Evelyn wasn't beside me any longer.

I halted, turned back. "Eve!" I gasped. "Eve!"

No answer. No sight of her in that absolute darkness.

I started back, groping. "Eve!" I mustn't pass her in the dark. "Eve!" I staggered from side to side of the passage to make sure I would not pass her. "Eve, darling." My feet thudded against something soft, and I went to my knees.

"Johnny." It was barely audible. "I can't ... run any longer. Kiss me ... Johnny ... and go."

I bent forward and kissed her. And then I was working my arms under her, to lift her. I couldn't. I no longer had the strength. I couldn't lift Eve. I couldn't carry her to safety.

Well, this was as good a place as any to die. I settled down, like that, her warm body in my arms, the softness of her against my chest, my lips on hers in a long, long kiss.

Very faintly I began to hear the drina's shrill whistle. They were coming. They were coming up the black spiral. Very slowly they were coming, and they had a long way to come, but they'd get here.

I was tired. So tired...

Chapter 27
DUST UNTO DUST

SOMETHING SEIZED ME, TORE ME from Eve, lifted me. I cried out some unintelligible gibberish, batted feebly at that which had taken hold of me--

"'Tis he, by my halidom," a familiar voice boomed. "'Tis our John March." King Arthur's great voice. John Orth's guttural tones, answering him. "And the Fraulein Evelyn."

"Arthur," I managed to whisper. "What? How...?"

"We essay to sortie from this castle, the Archduke and I," he answered "The others preferred to await their fate above."

"You can't get out, Arthur. You'll have to go back. Listen. Do you hear that whistling sound?" It was only a little louder. "The drina are making that. They're coming up the passage. You can't get past them."

"Back it is, then." He started off, carrying me. "Follow, Duke Orth."

"Let me down," I said feebly. "I can walk."

"Nay. Layest thou quietly in our arms, John. Thou art but hardly able to make thyself heard. Thou hast not strength to make this exceeding great climb but we have the strength for both. Lie still, and let thy king carry thee."

There wasn't any use in arguing with him. "What happened, Arthur? Why did you smash the machinery? Didn't you see in the disk that we'd gotten into the room of the Matra? Why didn't you give us a few seconds more?"

"Nay an that we would have, had we been able. The Frenchman had slain the single guard, and we were gathered in the chamber where the magical contrivances buzzed like an hundred hives of bees, all but the lad Louis who guarded without as thou hadst commanded him. We watched thee in that Satan's circle, marvelling that the demons permitted thee to pass through their ranks, that the orange-clad ogre seemed to greet thee amicably but in that instant the lad cried out, 'Plebos! Ware Plebos!' and instanter I with Excalibur, the duke and the Jew and the Frenchman with their bare hands, shattered the witch lights that shone there.

"In the sudden night we leaped upon the demons already within the chamber. Then, indeed, Excalibur proved its worth. The unequal combat was over and done with in a trice. No quarter was asked in that fray, and none given."

"How about Astaris?"

"He remaineth our prisoner."

I would have asked more, but just then the passage curved and levelled out, and ahead a wavering yellow light silhouetted Elijah's tall, bearded form and cast a wavering glimmer on the faces of Villon and the Dauphin, who seemed absorbed in something the poet was telling him. The light came from a small, extremely smoky fire on the floor. "We each gave some article of our apparel," Arthur explained it. "And Duke Orth set flame to them with fire dust he beareth with him."

"Powder for that gun of mine," the Austrian made clear.

"Let me down," I told Arthur. "I'm all right now." This time he took my word for it and so I was on my own feet when Villon spied me.

"John!" He bounded toward me, and before I could prevent him, had kissed me on the cheeks. "John! Mourning you for dead, I was about to compose an elegy for you. And Evelyn," he turned to her. "The white flower of all man's dreams! Now indeed, Elijah my bearded rabbi, I begin to have some credence in the efficacy of your heathen prayers."

"We still need those prayers, Elijah. Listen." I lifted my hand. The whistle of the drina came clearly from the passage that had led us here. "We've got just about five minutes to find some way out of here, and I don't know what that could be, unless the stratcar's still working. Is there any way we can get into the hangar?"

"We've searched. Its walls are solid--But you have the 'key', John!"

"I have it." Somehow I'd held on to it all this time. "But it isn't any good." I held it out to him. "Want it for a souvenir--" It was my left hand I had held out. The black thing on its palm was not the 'key,' but the carved gem.

"How came you by this?" It was Elijah who demanded that, staring down at the thing. There was something of surprise, something almost of awe, in his face. "How came you by it?"

"Why?" I asked. "What is it?"

"The very basis of the Kabbala," the prophet answered me. "The very essence of all its philosophy. Look you." He pointed at it. "The Snake of Life, swallowing its own tail, and therefore without beginning and without end. His coils wind in and out in symbol that the spirit of the Godhead, no matter how twisted, no matter through how many planes of existence, how many layers of time and space it passes, returns always upon itself, and is always of one nature, one being. Israel possessed this before my time, and before my time it was lost! How come you by it, John March?"

"I found it in Eve's room."

Elijah turned to her, but it was to me she said, "You gave it to me, Johnny."

"What!"

She smiled wanly. "I mean the play-friend I called Johnny gave it to me. At least, I found it on my dresser one day, after he'd gone. I don't know where it could have come from."

"It was I who left it there." No voice this but a brain-echo I knew must come from a Doctil. From Astaris, the only Doctil still alive. "I found it on this planet, Evelyn Rand, and I left it with you when you were a child so that I should know you again when you had grown old enough to be brought here." He stood beside me, his broken bonds at his feet. "When I had brought you here I replaced it where I had first left it to mark for me the man you were destined to love."

The nape of my neck prickled. Astaris had brought the gem to Earth from this planet, yet Elijah had recognized it as a sacred symbol of the creed that was among the very first on Earth to proclaim the Oneness of God. It was made of the selfsame substance as the awesome monument of the Being the drina worshipped, yet a million years before there had been any contact between Earthman and drina, it, or something so like it that the Prophet in Israel had been able at once and fluently to interpret its intricate message, had existed on Earth. There was meaning beneath meaning in the carved gem. Was it, I asked myself, by accident that the wall of the Matra's room had split for Evelyn and me precisely where I had struck it with the gem-? "The drina!" The Dauphin's cry broke in upon these thoughts. "Messieurs, the drina are upon us," and the shrill whistle of the drina pierced my ears and their slither was very loud against the spiral tunnel's walls.

I twisted to where it debauched into the room, saw the first gray-purple psuedopod squirm in, saw Arthur leap to it, saw Excalibur flash above his blonde locks and slash down.

The jelled and terrible mass quivered in the doorway, hesitant. "Take the maid, my old," Villon whispered to me, his smile still holding the twisted and bitter mockery with which it greeted life and death alike. "Retreat with her behind the great engine and do there what you must. We will defend you as long as we may." Then he was beside the king, his poniard hacking at a renewed surge of the drina as Orth thrust a twist of powder, a bullet into my hand, whirled and with a bar snatched from somewhere had joined the others.

As I feverishly reloaded Orth's pistol, I saw Elijah flailing the dark protoplasmic surge with a black length of wrist-thick cable. The gun was ready and I looked for Evelyn, found her wrestling with the Dauphin who struggled to break her hold and join the hopeless battle against the drina. I saw her eyes widen with horror abruptly, saw the boy break loose and dive headlong to where a slow wave rolled over the Archduke and engulfed him.

Arthur already was gone, but the white-maned patriarch and the poet still fought, giving back step by reluctant step from the horror--it was utterly useless to fight but that somehow they slowed in its inexorable advance. "Evelyn," I called. "Eve," and as she came about to me strong in my nostrils was the perfume that had been all I'd known of her for so long, the fragrance of a terrestrial spring that neither of us would ever know again. "Eve, darling," I said. "There is only one more thing I can do for you." Raising the pistol, taking careful aim, I said. "You understand, I know."

I read comprehension in her gray eyes and thanks and love. I heard Elijah drone the prayer a devout Hebrew prays when he is about to die, and I heard the prayer silenced. I heard Villon cry, "Farewell, John and Evelyn. Fare you very--" and that cry was blotted out. I gritted my teeth for the pull on the trigger that would give Evelyn a clean death--

"No!" Astaris' voice in my brain forbade the shot. "No, John March. Wait!"

I'd forgotten him, but now in that blazing instant our minds were one and I knew that he had the power to save himself or us but not himself and us.

"I am sending you back, John Marsh. You--and Evelyn Rand."

His experiment had been successful. He had set out to learn love and he had. He'd learned love and in learning love he'd learned sacrifice.

A scream of ultimate anguish threaded blue-edged through my brain--but it was not from Evelyn it came, nor from me. We were wrapped in sudden darkness. Not darkness. An absence of color, of form, of reality itself. We were falling through nothingness. We were caught up in some unimaginable maelstrom, we were whirling down and down in a spaceless, timeless nonexistence.

All about us was the soft and voiceless whisper of whirling dust.

Chapter 28
THE FORK IN TIME'S RIVER

A WHORL OF DUST SWIRLED AWAY from us down the country road and faded into the gray and quiet light of dusk.

Cicadas began their shrill piping in the thickets. The evening star twinkled in the sky's darkening blue and I turned to Evelyn. "We're home, Eve," I murmured. "We're home again, dear heart. In our own time. In our own world."

"Home, Johnny." She opened the gate and a faded, tenuous voice came to us out of the dusk. "Come, Evelyn. Come in and bring your young man with you. Come in to Faith who's been waiting a long time for you."

The voice came from the porch of a great house that glimmered whitely in the dusk. Faith Corbett, so shrunken and fragile that it seemed a not too high wind must blow her away was calling from the open door that framed a rectangle of light, warm and welcoming. Hand in hand Evelyn and I went up the path to the house where a lonely child with curls the hue of honey used to play with the Johnny of her dreams.

It seemed natural that supper waited piping hot for us on the table in a high-ceiled dining room walled with dark and lustrous oak. It seemed so natural that it was not 'til we sat side by side on the cushioned sofa before the great fireplace in the parlor that Evelyn thought to ask Faith Corbett how she'd known to have the house ready for us, how she'd known we were coming home.

"I knew," she smiled faintly. "When John talked with me in my cottage I knew then that he would find you and that he would bring you home in two days."

"Two days, Faith!" I exclaimed. In that Otherwhere it had seemed but a few hours. "Are you sure it is two days since I talked with you?"

"Aye, I am sure," her thin voice answered. "That was Sunday afternoon and this is Tuesday night." And then she was rustling out of that drowsy room, so bent and shrunken and old that she seemed a wraith from some, Otherwhere herself, and left us to the red leap of the fire and to the peace of our being together with no fear brooding in our hearts and no doom overhanging us and our world.

Eve stirred in my arms, after a while. "Johnny," she murmured. "It--it was all a dream, wasn't it. I dreamed it."

"No, dear heart. You didn't dream it. It was very real. It--" my brow puckered. "I--I'm not so sure. It's getting so vague now. It does seem as though I dreamed it. But we couldn't both have had the same dream. That isn't possible."

"How do we know it was the same dream, Johnny?" Eve asked. The scent of her was in my nostrils, the redolence of spring and the evasive fragrance of dreams. "Suppose we tell each other what we remember, and then we'll know whether it was the same--the same nightmare we both had."

"No, darling. We won't talk about it any more. Not tonight. But I'll write it all out, and you'll read what I've written and tell me whether it checks with your memories."

And so, when at last we went up to the rooms Faith Corbett had prepared for us, airing them, warming the sheets, I did not go to sleep but sat down at an old desk to write what I could remember. This that you have read is what I wrote that night, and all the next day, and all the next night, and when I read it over after I'd finished, it was all quite as new to me as it was to you.

And Evelyn had no memory at all of any of her part in the narrative.

Now this might seem to prove that it was only a particularly vivid nightmare that I had had, except for this. Evelyn cannot tell me where she was between Sunday, January 26th and Tuesday, February 11th of this year nor has the most diligent search unearthed for us anyone who saw her between when the doorman of her apartment house watched her set out for church and when Faith called to us from the doorway of her old home in Westchester. And none of my friends, my acquaintances can be found who saw hide or hair of me on Monday the 10th or Tuesday, the 11th.

I have been able to locate the entrance guard of a certain art gallery on Madison Avenue, the owner of a second hand bookstore on the same thoroughfare, a policeman who was on post near that bookstore Monday before noon and a taxi driver. All four of these men recall me and the latter three recall exactly the details I have set down in this narrative.

Understandably, I think, I did not care to interview the owner of the drugstore on Plum Street.

In addition, I have looked up whatever is known about the other five of us who were taken out of time--if my story is true. There is no question as to the inexplicable disappearances of Francois Villon and John Orth. The incident of Elijah and the pillar of fire is in the Old Testament, of Arthur's passing in the Morte d'Arthur and in Tennyson's immortal poem. The evidence as to the Dauphin is confusing. He did vanish from the Paris prison where he had been jailed from the age of nine, but some legends still extant insist that he escaped and lived to a secluded old age on Long Island. But then it will be recalled that I did not actually see Louis die. It is possible that Astaris sent him back to his own time as he did Evelyn and me to ours.

All these circumstances seem to confirm what I have written. There is another concerning which I cannot make up my mind as to whether it verifies or casts doubt on my tale.

One day, not very long ago, Evelyn and I decided to make a pilgrimage to Furman Street, and examine the curious old house at four-nineteen. We took a taxi, and I dismissed it exactly where that other had had its flat.

Now that, to my certain knowledge, was the only previous time I'd ever been in this section of Brooklyn, yet I threaded the maze of those quiet streets with the curious Games of Orange, Pineapple, Cranberry, in absolute certitude, and found Plum without any trouble.

We walked past the drugstore where I seem to have had a weird experience with a card that no one could see but I and started climbing the slope at whose end was the brightness of a blue sky over the water of the bay.

The glorious massing of towers at the end of Manhattan Island rose slowly above the summit of that ascent. "The house is right at the end of this vista," I told Eve. "We'll see it in a moment."

We came to the end of the sidewalk, at Furman Street. Along that waterfront thoroughfare ran the rows of four-storied graystone houses I recalled, exactly as I recalled them. The one to our left had the number, 415, painted on the third step of its high stoop. The one to our right was number 423.

Between them was an iron fence edging a green lawn. The emerald velvet ran to the edge of the retaining wall that keeps Furman Street from tumbling into the East River, and there was no house upon it. None at all.

There was no Four Nineteen Furman Street. There never had been.

I hope this means that the adventure I have related was some strange illusion, that Eve's disappearance for two weeks, mine for two days, has some other explanation. For otherwise there is this disquieting thought to haunt me.

The Kintat of Doctils who will conquer the planet of the drina a million years from now, will believe themselves, their Plebos and their Matra, to be the sole remnant of Mankind. But suppose they are not. Suppose that from among the people of some other Earth City other Doctils, another Matra, will survive the catastrophe. Suppose that these will plan just such a return to the Earth of what to them is the dim past--as Astaris and his fellows will. Suppose that right now they are somewhere among us, spying on us.

Suppose that man in the subway this morning, that man with the strangely yellow skin and the weird, veiled eyes--

"But, Johnny," Evelyn interrupts. She has been reading over my shoulder, a cute trick now, but I'm afraid I shall have to ask her to stop that sort of thing when our honeymoon is over. "If it all really happened, we know the course of history for a million years and we know that no race of Future Men will come back to conquer us in this century or any other."

"We know nothing of the sort," I answer her. "We know nothing about the nature of Time as yet. It might well be that Time is like a great river with many forks down any or all of which the great tide of history may flow. Are we certain that Mankind has only one destiny, the one we saw in the Hall of Midnights Can we be wholly sure that the end of Man inevitably must be that which we saw?"

She has a way, I have learned, of withdrawing into herself when she is thinking, of seeming to be far and far away. She does that now, and now she is back to me, her gray eyes wide. "Johnny. If that's so, Johnny--"

She checks herself. "If it's so," I ask, "what then?"

With her whimsical irrelevance that is not irrelevance at all, she responds, "Remember, Johnny, why the Doctils picked our century for the return to earth? Remember that this was the critical time when what you just called the great tide of history was at a fork in the river of Man's destiny?"

"Yes," I say softly, suspecting what is in her mind but wanting her to put it into words. "Yes, I remember. Go on."

"I can't," Evelyn murmurs, her gray eyes deep and dark with her thoughts. "I can't go on by myself and you and I can't, Johnny, not just the two of us. But maybe all the people of all the world, together, can."

"Can what, Eve?"

"Direct our destiny down the other branch of the fork in Time's river, the branch that will bring our children's children to some brighter and happier future than the dreadful one we saw in that Hall of Midnight."

Her breath catches in her throat and her lip quivers, and she is a child again, a frightened child in the dark. "Can't we, Johnny? Please, Johnny, please say that we can. Please say that we will."

I want to. Very terribly I want to reassure her but I cannot. I alone, John March alone cannot tell her which way Man will direct his destiny. It does not rest with me alone to decide.

It is for all of us to make that decision, no matter in what part of the world we dwell, no matter with what tongue we speak, no matter in what manner we worship Him Who looks down upon Earth and upon some planet beyond the furthest galaxy. We still have, or still can recover, Obligation and Loyalty and Faith, and, yes, and Beauty and Love and with these still can direct our destiny to some better goal than the Doctils showed me and Evelyn in that Otherwhere. We still can decide.

But we must make the decision soon. As Pierpont Alton Sturdevant might say, in his lawyer's phrase, Time is of the essence.

THE END

THE GREAT DOME ON MERCURY

Trapped in the great dome, Darl valiantly defends Earth's outpost against the bird-man of Mars and his horde of pigmy henchmen.

Darl Thomas mopped the streams of perspiration from his bronzed face and lean-flanked, wiry body, nude save for clinging shorts and fiber sandals. "By the whirling rings of Saturn," he growled as he gazed disconsolately at his paper-strewn desk. "I'd like to have those directors of ITA here on Mercury for just one Earth-month. I'll bet they wouldn't be so particular about their quarterly reports after they'd sweated a half-ton or so of fat off their greasy bellies. 'Fuel consumption per man-hour.': Now what in blazes does that mean? Hey, Jim!" He swiveled his chair around to the serried bank of gauge-dials that was Jim Holcomb's especial charge, then sprang to his feet with a startled, "What's the matter?"

The chunky, red-haired control-man was tugging at a lever, his muscles bulging on arms and back, his face white-drawn and tense. "Look!" he grunted, and jerked a grim jaw at one of the dials. The long needle was moving rapidly to the right. "I can't hold the air pressure!"

"Wow, what a leak!" Darl started forward. "How's it below, in the mine?"

"Normal. It's the Dome air that's going!"

"Shoot on the smoke and I'll spot the hole. Quick, man!"

"Okay!"

Thomas' long legs shot him out of the headquarters tent. Just beyond the entrance flap was one of the two gyrocopters used for flying within the Dome. He leaped into the cockpit and drove home the starter-piston. The flier buzzed straight up, shooting for the misted roof.

The Earthman fought to steady his craft against the hurricane wind, while his gray eyes swept the three-mile circle of the vault's base. He paled as he noted the fierce speed with which the white smoke-jets were being torn from the pipe provided for just such emergencies. His glance followed the terrific rush of the vapor. Big as a man's head, a hole glared high up on the Dome's inner surface. Feathered wisps of tell-tale vapor whisked through it at blurring speed.

"God, but the air's going fast," Darl groaned. The accident he had feared through all the months he had captained Earth's outpost on Mercury had come at last. The Dome's shell was pierced! A half-mile high, a mile across its circling base, the great inverted bowl was all that made it possible for man to defy the white hell of Mercury's surface. Outside was an airless vacuum, a waste quivering under the heat of a sun thrice the size it appears from Earth. The silvered exterior of the hemisphere shot back the terrific blaze; its quartz-covered network of latticed steel inclosed the air that all beings need to sustain life.

Darl tugged desperately at the control-stick, thrust the throttle over full measure. A little more of this swift outrush and the precious air would be gone. He caught a glimpse of the Dome floor beneath him and the shaft-door that gave entrance to the mine below. Down there, in underground tunnels whose steel-armored end-walls continued the Dome's protection below the surface, a horde of friendly Venusians were laboring. If the leak were not stopped in a few minutes that shaft door would blow in, and the mine air would whisk through the hole in its turn. Only the Dome would remain, a vast, rounded sepulcher, hiding beneath its curve the dead bodies of three Earthmen and the silent forms of their Venusian charges.

Darl's great chest labored as he strove to reach the danger spot. Invisible fingers seemed to be clamped about his throat. His eyes blurred. The gyrocopter was sluggish, dipped alarmingly when it should have darted, arrow-like, to its mark. With clenched teeth, the Terrestrian forced the whirling lifting vanes to the limit of their power. They bit into the fast thinning air with a muffled whine, raised the ship by feet that should have been yards.

By sheer will he forced his oxygen-starved faculties to function, and realized that he had reached the wall. He was drifting downward, the hole draining the Dome's air was five feet above him, beyond his reach. The driven vanes were powerless to stem the craft's fall.

One wing-tip scraped interlaced steel, a horizontal girder, part of the vault's mighty skeleton. Darl crawled along the wing, dragging with him a sheet of flexible quartzite. The metal foil sagged under him and slanted downward, trying like some animate thing to rid itself of the unwonted burden. He clutched the beam, hung by one leg and one arm as his craft slid out from beneath him. The void below dragged at him. He put forth a last tremendous spurt of effort.

Two thousand feet below, Jim Holcomb, dizzy and gasping, manipulated the controls frenziedly, his eyes fastened on the dropping pressure-gauge. From somewhere outside the tent a dull thud sounded. "Crashed! Darl's crashed! It's all over!" Hope gone, only the instinct of duty held him to his post. But the gauge needle quivered, ceased its steady fall and began a slow rise. Jim stared uncomprehendingly at the dial, then, as the fact seeped in, staggered to the entrance. "That's better, a lot better," he exclaimed. "But, damn it, what was that crash?"

The headquarters tent was at one edge of the circular plain. Jim's bleary eyes followed the springing arch of a vertical girder, up and up, to where it curved inward to the space ship landing lock that hung suspended from the center of the vaulted roof. Within that bulge, at the very apex, was the little conning-tower, with its peri-telescope, its arsenal of ray-guns and its huge beam-thrower that was the Dome's only means of defense against an attack from space. Jim's gaze flickered down again, wandered across the brown plain, past the long rows of canvas barracks and the derrick-like shaft-head. Hard by the further wall a crumpled white heap lay huddled.

"My God! It was his plane!" The burly Earthman sobbed as his ten-foot leaps carried him toward the wreck.

Darl was his friend as well as Chief, and together they had served the Interplanetary Trading Association, ITA, for years, working and fighting together in the wilds of the outer worlds. A thought struck him, even as he ran. "What in th' name o' Jupiter's nine moons stopped th' leak?" He glanced up, halted, his mouth open in amazement. "Well, I'm a four-tailed, horn-headed Plutonian if there ain't th' boy himself!"

Far up in the interlaced steel of the framework, so high that to his staring comrade he seemed a naked doll, Darl stood outstretched on a level beam, his tiny arms holding a minute square against the wall. Lucky it was that he was so tall and his arms so long. For the saving plate just lapped the upper rim of the hole, and stemmed the fierce current by only a half-inch margin.

The throbbing atmosphere machine in the sub-surface engine-room was replacing the lost air rapidly, and now the increasing pressure was strong enough to hold the translucent sheet against the wall by its own force. Jim saw the extended arms drop away. The manikin waved down to him, then turned to the shell again, as if to examine the emergency repair. For a moment Darl stood thus, then he was running along the girder, was climbing, ape-like, along a latticed beam that curved up and in, to swing down and merge with the bulge of the air-lock's wall.

"Like a bloomin' monkey! Can't he wait till I get him down with th' spare plane?"

But Darl wasn't thinking of coming down. Something he had seen through the translucent repair sheet was sending him to the look-out tower within the air-lock. Hand over hand he swung, tiny above that vast immensity of space. In his forehead a pulse still jumped as his heart hurried new oxygen to thirsty cells. He held his gaze steadily to the roof. A moment's vertigo, a grip missed by the sixteenth of an inch, the slightest failure in the perfect team-play of eye and brain, and rippling muscle, and he would crash, a half mile beneath, against hard rock.

At last he reached the curving side of the landing lock. But the platform at the manhole entrance jutted diagonally below him, fifteen feet down and twelve along the bellying curve. Darl measured the angle with a glance as he hung outstretched, then his body became a human pendulum over the sheer void. Back and forth, back and forth he swung, then, suddenly, his grasp loosened and a white arc flashed through the air.

Breathless, Jim saw the far-off figure flick across the chasm toward the jutting platform. He saw Darl strike its edge, bit his lip as his friend teetered on the rim and swayed slowly outward. Then Darl found his balance. An imperative gesture sent the watcher back to his post, his sorrel-topped head shaking slowly in wonderment.

Darl Thomas ran headlong up the staircase that spiralled through the dim cavern. "No mistake about it," he muttered. "I saw something moving outside that hole. Two little leaks before, and now this big one. There's something a lot off-color going on around here."

Quickly he reached the little room at the summit. He flung the canvas cover from the peri-telescope screen. Tempered by filters as it was the blaze of light from outside hit him like a physical blow. He adjusted the aperture and beat eagerly over the view-table.

Vacation jaunts and travel view-casts have made the moon's landscape familiar to all. Very similar was the scene Darl scanned, save that the barren expanse, pitted and scarred like Luna's, glowed almost liquid under the beating flame of a giant sun that flared in a black sky. Soundless, airless, lifeless, the tumbled plain stretched to a jagged horizon.

The Earthman depressed the instrument's eye, and the silvered outside of the Dome, aflame with intolerable light, swept on to the screen disk. The great mirror seemed alive with radiant heat as it shot back the sun's withering darts. The torrid temperature of the oven within, unendurable save to such veterans of the far planets as Darl and Jim Holcomb, was conveyed to it through the ground itself. The direct rays of the sun, nearer by fifty million miles than it is to Earth, would have blasted them, unprotected, to flaked carbon in an eye-blink.

An exclamation burst from Darl. A half-inch from the Dome's blazing arc, a hundred yards in actuality, the screen showed a black fleck, moving across the waste! Darl quickly threw in the full-power lens, and the image leaped life-size across the table. The black fleck was the shadow of a space-suited figure that lumbered slowly through the viscous, clinging footing. How came this living form, clad in gleaming silver, out there in that blast-furnace heat? In one of the space suit's claw-like hands a tube flashed greenly.

Darl's hand shot out to the trigger of the beam-thrower. Aimed by the telescope's adjustment, the ray that could disintegrate a giant space flier utterly flared out at his finger's pressure. Against the lambent brown a spot glowed red where the beam struck. But, warned by some uncanny prescience, the trespasser leaped aside in the instant between Thomas' thought and act. Before Darl could aim and fire again the foe had dodged back and was protected by the curve of the Dome itself.

Two white spots showed on either side of Darl's nostrils. His mouth was a thin white slit, his eyes gray marbles. Standing against the wall beside him was a space suit, mirror-surfaced and double-walled against the planet's heat. In a few moments he was encased within it, had snatched a pocket ray-gun from the long rack, and was through the door to the auxiliary air-lock. The air soughed out in response to his swift thrust at a lever, a second door opened, and he was on the outside, reeling from the blast of that inferno of light and heat.

For a moment the Earthman was dazzled, despite the smoked quartz eye-pieces in his helmet. Then, as his eyes grew used to the glare, he saw, far below, the erect figure of the stranger. The man was standing still, waiting. His immobility, the calm confidence with which he stood there, was insolently challenging. Darl's rage flared higher at the sight.

Scorning the ladder that curved along the Dome to the ground, he threw himself at the polished round side of the great hemisphere. With increasing speed he slid downward, the gleaming surface breaking only slightly the velocity of his fall. On Earth this would have been suicidal. Even here, where the pull of gravity was so much less, the feat was insanely reckless. But the heat-softened ground, the strength of his metal suit, brought Darl safely through.

He whirled to meet the expected onslaught of the interloper. The green tube was aimed straight at him! The Earthman started to bring his own weapon up when something exploded in his brain. There was a moment of blackness; then he was again clear-minded. But he could not move—not so much as the tiny twist of his wrist that would have brought his own weapon into play.

Frozen by this strange paralysis, Darl Thomas saw the giant figure approach. The apparition bent and slung him to its shoulder. Glowing walls rose about him, dimmed. The Terrestrian knew that he was being carried down into one of the myriad openings that honeycombed the terrain. The luminescence died; there was no longer light enough to penetrate to his helmet's darkened goggles.

Frantic questions surged through the captured Earthman's mind. Who was his captor? From where, and how, had he come to Mercury? Jim, Angus McDermott, and himself were the only Terrestrians on the planet; of that he was certain. Only one or two of the reptile-skinned Venusian laborers had sufficient intelligence to manipulate a space suit, and they were unquestionably loyal.

This individual was a giant who towered far above Darl's own six feet. The Mercurian natives—he had seen them when ITA's expedition had cleaned out the burrows beneath the Dome and sealed them up—were midgets, the tallest not more than two feet in height. Whatever he was, why was the stranger trying to destroy the Dome? Apparently Thomas himself was not to be killed offhand: the jolting journey was continuing interminably. With enforced patience the Earthman resigned himself to wait for the next scene in this strange drama.

In the headquarters tent Jim's usual grin was absent as he moved restlessly among the switches and levers that concentrated control of all the Dome's complex machinery. "Darl's been gone a devilish long time," he muttered to himself. "Here it's almost time for shifts to change and he's not back yet."

A bell clanged, somewhere up in the mass of cables that rose from the control board. For the next ten minutes Holcomb had no time for worry as he rapidly manipulated the innumerable wheels and handles in accord with the vari-colored lights that flickered on a huge ground-glass map of the sub-Mercurian passages. On the plain outside there was a vast rustling, a many-voiced twittering and squeaking that was not quite bird-like in tone. Through the opened tent-flap one could see the stream of Venusian workers, their work-period ended, pouring out of the shaft-head and filing between the ordered ranks of others whose labors were about to begin.

They were queer-looking specimens, these gentle, willing allies of the Earthmen. Their home planet is a place of ever-clouded skies and constant torrential rains. And so the Venusians were amphibians, web-footed, fish-faced, their skin a green covering of horny scales that shed water and turned the sharp thorns of their native jungles. When intrepid explorers discovered in the mazes of Mercury's spongy interior the surta that was so badly needed as a base material for synthetic food to supply Earth's famine-threatened population, it was to these loyal and amiable beings that ITA's engineers turned for workers who could endure the stifling heat of the underground workings.

The tent-flap was thrust aside, and a hawk-nosed Scot came sleepily in, to be enthusiastically greeted by Jim.

"Hello, you old Caledonian. 'Bout time you showed up."

The newcomer fixed the speaker with a dour gaze. "An' why should I commence my tour o' dooty befair the time?"

"Because your chief, Mr. Darl Thomas, decided that he's a filliloo bird or somethin', flew to his little nest up top, an' forgot to come down again."

"Is this ain o' your jests, James Holcomb? I eenquire mairly that I may ken when to laugh."

"It's no joke, Mac. Last I see o' him he's skippin' around the roof like he has a buzzin' propeller stuck to his shoulder blades. He lights on th' air-lock platform, pops inside, an' goes dead for all I know."

From his bony legs to his scrawny neck the Scotchman's angular body, as nearly nude as that of the others, radiated the doubt that was expressed in every seam and wrinkle of his hatchet face.

"That's straight, Angus, may I kiss a pink-eared vanta if it ain't. Here's what happened." The bantering grin disappeared from Jim's countenance as he detailed the events that had preceded Darl's vanishing. "That was two hours ago," he concluded, "and I've been getting pretty uneasy about him."

"Why did na ye call me, so that ain o' us micht eenvestigate?"

"Hell. Darl wasn't born yesterday, he can take care of himself. Besides, your last shift was pretty strenuous, an' I thought I'd let you sleep. No tellin' what might happen next; this forsaken place has been givin' me the jim-jams lately."

"Your conseederation is touching, but—" A scratching at the door, accompanied by a high squeak, interrupted him.

To Jim's shouted "Come in," there entered a Venusian, whose red rosette fastened to the green scales of his skin marked him an overseer. In the thread-like fingers of his hand he held a time-sheet, but the nervous pulsing of his gill-membranes caused Holcomb to exclaim anxiously: "What's wrong, Ran-los? No accident, I hope?"

The shrill combination of squeaks and twitterings that came from the man-reptile's toothless mouth meant nothing to the Scot, but Jim's last service had been on Venus and he had gained a working knowledge of the language. Finally the interchange was ended, and Ran-los bowed himself out. Jim turned to his companion.

"There's some more queer stuff for you, Angie. Just before shift-change, Ran-los heard odd sounds from the other side of the barrier at the end of gallery M-39. Says they seemed like signals o' some kind. He's a wise old bird and if he's worried about something it's damn well worth lookin' into. I don't know whether to find out first what's happened to Darl, or—"

Again there was an interruption; this time from the usually silent radio-communication set in the far corner. Jim leaped to the instrument and snapped on the head-set. Angus leaned over him, watching his intent face.

Faintly, as from an immense distance, came the thin whistle of space-radio. "S-W-A ... S-W-A ... S-W-A...." The general attention signal for all Earth's far-flung outposts from Jupiter to Mercury! The signal was coming from "M-I-T-A," the Earth company's home station on the Moon, outside the Heaviside layer. "S-W-A ... S-W-A ... M-I-T-A ... M-I-T-A." Again the signal rose and fell.

Jim reached for the sending key and pounded out his acknowledgement: "K; M-E-R ... K; M-E-R ... K; M-E-R." He listened again, heard Venus answer, and Jupiter. Across five hundred million miles of space ITA men were responding to the roll-call of Earth. A reminiscent smile crossed Jim's face as he recognized the stuttering fist of Rade Perrin, on Eros. Rade always sent as if he were afraid the instrument would snap at his fingers.

M-I-T-A was signalling again, and now came the message: "S-W-A. All trading posts, mines and colonies are warned to prepare for possible attack. The Earth Government has just announced the receipt of an ultimatum from—" A raucous howl cut across the message and drowned it out. The siren blast howled on and on, mocking Jim's straining ears. "Well I'll be—Interference! Deliberate blanketing! The rats! The—" He blazed into a torrent of profanity whose imaginativeness was matched only by its virulence.

Mac was clutching his shoulder, stirred for once out of his vaunted "deegnity." "What is it, mon, what is it?"

"War, you bloody Scotchman, war! That's what it is!"

"War! Foosh, man, 'tis eempossible!"

"The hell it's impossible! Damn, and Darl not here! Take over, Mac; I've got to go up an' get him!"

In the meantime Thomas' helpless journey had come to an end. After an interminable descent in what to him had been pitch darkness, the giant who was carrying him halted. Darl had heard the whistling inrush of air into some lock, then the clanging of a door. He felt himself hurled to the ground. Fumbling hands tugged at him, drew off his space suit.

The dim light of the cavern, as the helmet was dragged from his head, hurt Darl's eyes. Salt sweat stung them. It was hot, hotter than the Dome, hot as it was in the surta mine, where only the nerveless Venusians could work for any length of time.

Darl struggled to focus his eyes on a blurred blue form that towered above him. He felt sharp claws scratch at him and realized that cords were being passed around his limp body. They cut tightly into his legs and his arms. Then he was staring at a tube in the hand of his captor. Its end glowed with a brilliant purple light, and he felt a flood of reawakened energy warm him. His head jerked up, he strained against the taut, strong fibers binding him. The paralysis was gone, but he was still helpless.

A husky, rumbling voice broke the silence. "I wouldn't struggle, Earthman, if I were you. Even should you get free I still have my ray-tube. And my little friends would ask nothing better than your body to play with."

Darl writhed to a sitting posture. Now he could see his mysterious abductor clearly. This eight-foot, blue-feathered individual, with curved beak and beady eyes glittering from his naked, repulsively wrinkled head, was a Martian! Despite the human shape of his body, despite his jointed limbs and thumbed hands, this denizen of the red planet resembled a vulture far more than he did any other Earth creature.

The Earthman's pride of race came to his rescue. "What's the game?" he growled. "Looking for trouble?" There was nothing in Darl's voice to show the fear that chilled him. Behind the Martian he could see vaguely a group of little yellow Mercurians.

"I'll ask all the questions here. And you'll answer them, too, if you're wise. Even your dull mind should comprehend that you are in my power."

Darl decided to proceed more cautiously. "What do you want from me?" he asked.

"I want," the Martian answered, "the recognition signal of Earth's space-ships."

"What!" The ejaculation burst from Darl's throat. This alien wanted the secret code, the watch-word that distinguished Earth's space ships, that gained for them free admittance to ITA's armed posts on the outer planets! This could mean only one thing, that the long rivalry, the ancient dispute between Earth and Mars was about to flare into open war. Any friendly visit from a foreign flier would be heralded by word from M-I-T-A. Thomas' face became a stony mask, covering the tumult of his mind.

"You understood. I want the Earth recognition signal at once—and after that, the surrender of the Dome." The very calmness of the husky tones was a threat.

"Never!"

"I warn you, Darl Thomas. It would be the better part of wisdom for you to yield willingly what I ask. You will give in eventually, and the means of persuasion I shall use will not be exactly—pleasant."

"You'll get nothing from me!"

The outlander's lidless eyes were filmed with a gray membrane. His head thrust forward, the feathered ruff beneath it bristled. Darl braced himself to withstand the swooping pounce that seemed imminent, the slash of the sharp beak. A burring rattle broke the momentary hush. The Martian relaxed, turned to the Mercurian from whom the sound had come and replied with staccato vibrance.

As the cave filled with a whirring tumult Darl had a chance to examine the Mercurian natives crowding around his prostrate body. They were little yellow midgets, ranging from eighteen inches to two feet in height. Half of their small stature was taken up by snouted heads, with saucer-like, crimson eyes, and long white tusks jutting from foam-flecked mouths. The trunks were globular. The spindling legs and thin arms ended in sharp claws. There was an impression of animal ferocity about these tiny beings that stamped them as utter savages.

His captor was speaking to the Earthman again, his horny beak parted in what might have been a grim smile. "My friends remind me that I promised you to them. They have not forgotten how you and your fellows drove them from their burrows."

Darl was suddenly cold, though the sweat still streamed from his bound body. An uncontrollable shudder took him as he saw what the diminutive claws of the midgets held. While the Dome was still an unfinished framework one of the Terrestrian artisans had somehow been isolated from his fellows. Thomas had been of the party that found what was left of him, and the memory was still a throbbing nightmare.

"Once more! Will you give me the recognition signal?"

Darl shook his head, and prayed for sudden death. The Martian spoke to the dwarfs. They started forward, saliva drooling from their tusks. Darl gritted his teeth. He would hold out as long as was humanly possible.

A shrill rhythmic whistle came from somewhere outside. The blue giant started and snapped something to the Mercurians. Then he turned to Darl. "I must leave you for a little while," he said. "You have till I return to change your mind." With a parting admonition to the savages he was gone through a side door that Thomas had not noticed before.

Grateful for the postponement, however short, of the inescapable ordeal, Darl took stock of his situation. He lay, firmly bound, on the gritty rock floor of a low-ceiled cave about twelve feet square. In one wall was a door of red metal. The portal through which the Martian had vanished was next to it. Darl repressed an exclamation when he saw the opposite wall. It was of solid metal, bluishly iridescent. That was beryllium steel, the alloy from which the barriers at the terminals of the surta mine were fashioned. He forced his head higher. There were the marks of the jointures, the weldings that he himself had made.

The discovery seemed only to emphasize the helplessness of his predicament. His faithful Venusians, Ran-los, Ta-ira, and the rest were just on the other side of the three-inch plate of toughened steel. Three inches—yet it might have been as many hundred miles for all the help they could give him.

The yellow pigmies were circling in a macabre dance, their crimson eyes turned always toward him, hate glowing from their crawling depths. The whistle beyond changed in character. Darl recognized it. It was a Martian space-radio, the code of which Earth scientists had never been able to decipher. The Mercurian circle tightened, the fetid smell of the dwarfs was overpowering. Low at first, then louder and louder came the rattling cacophony of their chant. It filled the confined space with an overpowering clamor.

Darl writhed again, rolling over and over till he had reached the barrier. The pigmies gave way before him; evidently they had been warned to keep their claws off. With his insteps Thomas could reach the helmet of his space suit, where it had been dropped against the wall. He drove it against the metal and the clangor of its striking reverberated through the chamber. Darl managed to regulate the sound. He was now hammering out double knocks, long and short, spaced in the dots and dashes of the Morse code. "H-E-L-P D-A-R-L H-E-L-P D-A-R-L H-E-L-P...."

It was like some scene out of a madman's dream, this dim-lit cavern with its circling, dancing pigmies, the human figure lying sidewise on the ground, the rattling, savage chant and the metallic tattoo of Darl's hopeless message. A diabolic orgy of weird sound and crisscrossing shadows.

It seemed hours that he pounded the helmet against the wall, hoping that the sound of it would be audible above the clamor of the midgets. His knees and hips were aching and numb, his leg ripped, almost to the bone by the sharp edges of the jagged floor. A sudden thought struck him. The fiber thongs that bound him were also rubbing against the rock. His flesh was terribly torn. Perhaps the thongs, too, had been frayed, weakened by the long continued friction.

He stopped the pounding signals and began to force his knees apart with all the power of his burly calves. The cords cut into his bulging muscles, cut into and through his skin. The veins stood out on his forehead, his neck was a corded pillar, his teeth bit through his lip as he stifled a scream of pain. Then, startlingly, the fibers snapped. His legs at least were free! He could fight, die fighting, and take these others with him into oblivion!

Darl leaped to his feet. Before the astounded natives realized what was up he was charging into their circle. A well aimed kick sent one crashing against the further wall. Another crunched against the rock. Then they were on him, a frothing wave of tiny furies. A score or more, they swarmed over him as a pack of African wild dogs swarms over a huge water-buffalo marked for the kill. Their claws scratched and tore, their sharp fangs stabbed into his flesh. His arms were still tightly bound to his sides, and he lashed out with his sandaled feet, swung his shoulders like battering rams, whirled in a dervish dance. Their brittle bones cracked under his hammer blows. They dropped from him like squashed flies. But, small as they were, he was terrifically outnumbered. By sheer weight of numbers they dragged him down, and piled on top of him as he lay, quivering and half-conscious, on the blood-soaked floor.

Through the blackness that welled and burst in his brain, one thought held. He had fooled the Martian, for in another instant the enraged savages, would kill him and the password to Earth's outposts would be safe. Already, he felt their fangs at his throat.

A whirring rattle cut through the turmoil like a whip-lash, and the heap of pigmies swiftly scattered. The man-bird from Mars was in the room. To Darl he was a blurred blueness from which glittered those two jet beads of eyes. As from a distance he heard a rumble, its meaning beating dully to him. "Not so easy, Thomas, not so easy. I want that signal, and by Tana, I'm going to have it."

The Earthman felt a current of cooler air. Instinctively he drew it into his lungs. It swept him up from the blackness that was closing in about him, brought him back to consciousness and despair. The chattering Mercurians crowded round to commence their interrupted orgy. "For the last time, Earthman, will you talk?"

Darl shook his head weakly and closed his eyes. In a moment—

Suddenly there was a crash of metal on metal. Another! The clangor of falling steel. Now someone was shouting, "Darl, Darl, are you alive?" All about him were shrill twitterings, squeaking calls, squeals and scutterings. Darl's nostrils stung with the odor of burned flesh. A door slammed....

He opened his eyes on a confused riot, saw Jim crouched, flashing ray-gun in hand. There was a hole in the barrier, and a mob of green-scaled Venusians were crowding through. Jim's ray caught the last Mercurian and the dwarf vanished in a cloud of acrid, greasy smoke.

"Thank God you've come!" Darl managed to gasp. Then cool blackness closed around him.

Darl Thomas lay on a cot in the headquarters tent, swathed from head to foot in an inch-thick wrapping of bandages. Jim's theory was that if one bandage was good, two were better, and he had cleaned out the post's slender stock. The red-haired Earthman was seated at the cot's side, watching the taciturn Scot operating the control board. He was telling Darl of the stirring message from M-I-T-A, and of the blanketing interference that marred the completion of the message.

"I didn't know what to do first," he continued, "whether to go down below and find out what Ran-los was battin' about, or shoot up to you in the connin' tower with the message. Like the thick-head I am, I picked the wrong thing. I sure got the gimmicks when I found the look-out empty, an' a space suit an' ray-gun gone." Jim grinned mirthlessly. "I was runnin' around in circles. You were outside, God alone knows how long. Believe me, I had you crossed off the list! That left two of us. With a war on, somebody had to stand guard in the look-out, the control board here had to be watched, an' somebody else had to get below.

"I was just tryin' to figure out a way o' cuttin' myself in half when I thought o' Ran-los. For a Weenie he's got a heck of a lot of sense. I zoomed down, hauled him out o' his bunk, scooted back up, showed him how to work the peri-telescope an' the big beam-thrower, an' left him there on guard."

"Best thing you could have done." Darl's voice was muffled by the bandages in which his head, as well as the rest of his body, was swathed. "He's got a head on his shoulders, that bird."

"Somethin' told me to take a ray-gun down in the mine with me. I was just steppin' out o' the elevator when I caught your last signal; -L-P D-A-R-L was all I got, but it was enough. How you ever got the other side of the barrier had me wingin', but you were there right enough, and yellin' for help. Ran-los had been doin' some repairs on a head support an' his weldin' machine was still there. Takin' an awful chance on there bein' air on the other side, I butted it up against the wall, shot the flame against the steel, and when she was soft enough had some of the Weenies smash her in with sledge-hammers. First thing I see is you, stretched out in a pool o' blood, with a couple of those yellow imps just gettin' to work on you. I clipped them first—that gave the Martian a chance to get away. An' then—well, you know the rest."

"I owe you one for that, Jim. Too bad, though, the big fellow escaped; we'll hear from him again, or I don't know the breed. Wonder how he got on the planet."

"The sucker must 'a' stowed away on the last recruit ship from Venus, slipped in a case o' tools or somethin'. Mars has labor agents there, too, you know, for their farms on Ganymede."

"Possibly. He knew my name, and that I was chief here. He's rigged up an air-lock out there, though I can't figure out how he gets the air."

"That's easy. While I was repairin' the barrier I found a pipe runnin' through. He's been stealin' ours. Which, by the same token, is why he was punchin' holes in the Dome rather than down below, where he would have been safer from discovery."

"So that's it. Get anything more on the space-radio?"

"Nope. Angus has kept the ear-flaps on, but the ether is still jammed. Hey, what're you up to?"

Darl was swinging his bandaged body up from the cot that had been set up in the headquarters tent at his insistence. "Can't lie on my back," he panted, "with that devil loose on the planet. Lord knows what he's up to now. We're short-handed enough as it is."

He rose to his feet, staggering with weakness and loss of blood. But his indomitable will drove him on. "I'll take over the control board. Send Angus up to relieve Ran-los, and you get below and speed up production. Earth will need double quantities of surta for food, now that there's a war on."

Jim turned to convey the order to the Scot, but he whirled to the tent-flap instead as a riot of sound exploded outside. He tore aside the canvas, and now there was a burst of shrill, frightened Venusian cries, and a deeper, rattling chorus. Out on the Dome floor, pouring from the shaft-head in a panic torrent, came the Venusians. And among them, leaping, slashing, dragging them down, were countless little yellow men, their fangs and tusks and curving claws crimson with the blood of their victims.

"Darl, Mac, they've broken through! The Mercs have broken through!" The brown plain was a blood-spattered battlefield. Here and there little groups of the green men, braver than the rest, fought with spanner and hammer and whatever improvised weapon they may have found. "Come on, give 'em hell!" The three Earthmen dashed out, weapons in hand. But friend and foe were so intermingled that they could not use the devastating ray of their hand-guns. The fighting Venusians were vanishing under a tossing sea of yellow imps. And still the dwarfs poured forth from the mine entrance.

A blue form towered, far back, where all green had vanished, and only Mercurians were left. The Martian's beak opened in a rattling call. A group of hundreds of pigmies suddenly left the main fight, and came forward with short, swift steps. They dashed straight for the Earth trio and cut them off from the Venusians they were running to aid.

Side by side the three fought. Their weapons grew hot in their hands as the beams cut great swaths in the seething ranks. The attackers halted, gave back, then surged forward again as the roar of their alien commander lashed them on.

The Earthmen faced the frenzied throng. A cleared circle was still around them. Beyond, the Venusians were all down. The Mercurian mob was closing in, the Terrestrians' rays had lost half their range. In moments now the ray-guns would be exhausted.

"The plane!" Darl shouted. "Back to the plane, it's our only chance."

The gyrocopter that could carry them aloft, out of the rout, was fifty feet away. They fought through to it and reached it just as the last faint charge flashed from Mac's tube. Jim was at the controls, Darl smashed his useless projector into the chattering face of a dwarf that had leaped on the Scot's shoulders and dragged Angus into the cockpit.

The overloaded flier zoomed to the landing at the lofty air-lock's manhole and hovered as Darl and Angus slipped home the hooks that held it to the platform. "The spy has the Dome," Jim grunted, "but by God, he hasn't got us. We'll be safe in the lock up here, till help comes. And then—"

"Safe is it?" Angus broke in. "Mon, luik ye what those bairns fra hell are up to the noo."

A yellow tide was rising about the base of each of the latticed steel arches that vaulted to the Earthmen's refuge. On every side the dwarfs were climbing, were swarming up the walls in numbers so great that they concealed the metal beneath. Up, up they came, slowly but surely. And right in the center of the plain, ankle-deep in the torn fragments of the murdered Venusians, was the Martian, directing the attack.

Jim groaned. "I might've known he'd never let us get away. It's slow bells for us, I guess. Hey, where's Darl?"

"Gone weethin. No, guid losh, he's here!"

Darl appeared, his features pale and drawn, carrying an armful of ray-guns. "Grab these," he snapped. "We're not licked yet."

"Licked, hell!" Jim's roar reverberated. "We've just begun to fight!" The Scot was silent, but the battle light shone in his eyes. In another moment the Terrestrians were kneeling, were raking the roof girders as the mounting Mercurians came within range. Each had two ray-guns in his hands, and a little pile of extra tubes beside him. They fought silently, wasting not a single blast.

Six white rays flamed through the misty, humid air, and striking the teeming girders, swept them clean. A greasy, horrible smoke cloud gathered along the shell and drifted slowly down, till the concrete blocks from which the steel framework sprang were hidden in a black pall. Fighters, these three, true ITA men who had left memories of their battle-prowess on more than one wild planet! Gaunt-bodied demi-gods of war, they hurled crackling bolts of destruction from their perch at the Dome top. By hundreds, by thousands, the Mercurian pigmies vanished in dark vapor, or plunged, blackened corpses, into the fog that billowed below.

One by one the tubes were discharged and tossed down at the seething mob. The heaped weapons dwindled, and still the climbing hordes renewed themselves, came on in endless mounting streams to sure destruction. The open tunnel vomited forth a torrent of gibbering dwarfs. From the uttermost burrows of the planet the pigmies were flooding in at the call of the Martian who stood scatheless beneath and lashed them on with the strange dominance he held over them. The Earthmen fought on, endlessly, till they were sick of killing, nauseated with slaughter. And still the snouted, red-eyed imps came on.

Jim snatched up his last two ray-guns. Out of the corner of his eye he noted that Darl was using but one, the other, his last, was thrust into the chief's belt. He wondered at this, but a new spurt of yellow above the oily fog wiped the question from his lips. "Swallow that, you filthy lice! Hope you like the way it tastes!" His guns spouted death.

"I'm through!" The call came at last from McDermott. "Me too!" Jim Holcomb hurled his final, futile tubes down at the blue figure of the Mars man. A moment's hush held the trio. Then Jim flexed his great hands. "Well, these'll take care of a couple more o' them before I check in."

"No you don't," Darl barked, his face a graven image. "Inside with you. The lock will hold 'em off."

"Yeah? Look."

Thomas swung in the direction Jim was pointing. Rising above the murk, something glinted in the pale light. On the furthest upright a clumped group of climbing savages were struggling to drag up one of the welding machines, a long black hose snaking from its cylindrical bulk.

"They'll cut through the steel in fifteen minutes with that. The bloody bugger ain't missin' a trick."

"Inside, I tell you." Darl's crisp tone of command brooked no denial. The three crowded into the cool recesses of the manmade aerie. Angus slammed the steel door shut. Even if by some miracle the Dome wall should be pierced and the air in the main vault dissipated into outer space, this air-tight compartment hung from the hemisphere's roof would remain, a last refuge, till the atmosphere within had become poisonous through the Earthmen's slow breathing. But the Martian had anticipated Darl's final move. The oxy-hydrogen jet of the welding machine the dwarfs were hoisting would make short work of their final defense.

From the conning-tower above Ran-los called excitedly. Through all the long battle the Venusian had remained steadfast at the peri-telescope, scanning the vacant terrain outside, and the heavens. As Darl and Jim dashed for the stairs Mac ran after them, crying out, "What did he say, mon?"

"Space ship in sight," Darl flung over his shoulder as he reached the upper landing.

"Praise be! Noo the haythan weel get his desairts!"

"Yeah, maybe—if it's an Earth ship. But we won't be here to see it."

Jim's red head was bending over the peri-telescope view-screen. "She's still thirty thousand miles away. Give her a speed of fifteen per second—she'll have to slow up to land, can't make it under forty-five minutes. By then we'll be in little pieces. It took me ten minutes to burn through the barrier when I rescued Darl, and it won't take the Mercs any longer to get at us."

Darl was very sober as he looked on with narrowed eyes. Against a background of velvet black, gold spangled, the slim space-traveler showed. The sun's rays caught her, and she was a tiny silver fish in the boundless void.

"Luik ye, mon, luik ye!" Angus, fairly dancing with excitement, elbowed Darl aside. "She's from Airth, richt enow!" At the nose of the oncoming flier a rapid succession of colored lights had flashed, the recognition signal that should give her safe access to the Dome. Again there was a coruscation of coded flashes. "She's a battle cruiser, what's mair!" the Scot exclaimed.

Darl sprang to the keyboard that manipulated the signal lights from the Dome's roof. "No use," he said, after a short while. "The Martian has cut off the current from the dynamos. I can't warn the ship." He made a hopeless gesture.

Jim looked at him wonderingly. "Warn 'em? What for? Even if we are all dead when she reaches here, at least she'll clean up the Mercs, and retake the Dome for Earth."

"Don't you see it? When the Mars man has once blasted his way in here and disposed of us, he'll be ready for the space ship. Her captain can't suspect anything wrong. He must have left Earth at the time of the ultimatum, and would easily get here before any ship could be sent out from Mars. He'll come on till he's within range of the beam-thrower, and the Martian will aim, press the trigger and the Earth ship and her crew of a half a thousand brave lads will be star-dust."

"Oh God!" Jim was white-faced. "Isn't there anything we can do? Maybe if he doesn't get our all-clear signal he'll sheer off." This was clutching at straws.

"Why should he? He must know how short-handed we are, and will simply think we're not on watch, or that our signal lights are out of order. Matter of fact, if he were at all suspicious he should be alternating his course right now—and he hasn't. Look."

Seemingly motionless, but really splitting the ether with terrific speed, the warship was coming straight on to garrison the beleaguered post. She had never wavered from her straight course for the Dome. The little group was silent, watching the help that was coming at last, coming too late.

From below there came a thunder of sound. Jim slid down the stairs. An irregular disk on the wall was glowing cherry-red from the heat of the blow-torch without, and the metal was quivering under the Mercurian's sledge-hammer blows. "Darl's right," he almost sobbed as he gazed helplessly. "They'll be through in no time. The Dome's gone, we're gone, the space ship's gone!"

"Let me pass, Jim." Thomas' quiet voice sounded behind him. Holcomb turned. His leader was in a space suit, the helmet still unfastened.

"Blazes! Where the devil are you going?"

"Here, cover me with this till I reach the gyrocopter, then get back quick, and seal the air-lock." Darl thrust into Jim's hand the ray-gun he had previously reserved. "There's only one way to kill off the Martian and his mob. I'm taking it."

Suddenly Jim Holcomb understood. "No, Darl, no—you can't do it! Not you! Let me go! I'm just a dumbhead. Let me go!"

"Thanks, Jimmy, but it's my place." Darl's voice was low, and very calm. "I was in charge, and I lost the Dome. If I can save the boys on the ship, and you two, it's the least I can do. Good-by, old man. Give my regards to Earth."

Thomas' face was gray-white. The thick bandages that still swathed him, Jim glimpsed them through the open neckpiece of the suit, gave him the semblance of a mummy. The helmet clicked shut. Swallowing a lump that rose in his throat, Jim pulled open the door. A wave of Mercurians surged in, to be seared into nothingness by his weapon. He was in the doorway, his ray sweeping the platform clear.

Darl was out now, stepping into the flier that still hung by its hooked moorings. Jim caught a flash of blue and looked up. The Martian was hanging to a girder just above, his green tube pointing straight at Darl. A white ray spurted from Jim's gun. The Martian's weapon and the hand that held it vanished in the sizzling blast. The plane was loose! Jim leaped inside the air-lock, slammed the steel door shut, clamped it, and sprang for the quartz peer-hole.

Darl's gyrocopter was diving on a long slant for the Dome wall. Faster and faster it went, till all Jim could see was a white streak in the smoky dimness. And now he could see the vast interior, the teeming plain, the dwarf-festooned girders and roof-beams. He stood rigid, waiting breathlessly. Then the plane struck—fair in the center of a great panel of quartz. The wall exploded in a burst of flying, shattered splinters. A deafening crash rocked the Dome.

Jim clung to his port-hole, tears rolling down his cheeks, unashamed. The plane, and Darl, vanished. Jim saw the black smoke masses whirl through the jagged hole in the Dome's wall as the air burst out in a cyclonic gust. He saw the vast space filled with falling Mercurians, saw a blue form plunge down and crash far below. He knew that in all that huge hemisphere, and in the burrows beneath it, there was no life save himself, and Angus, and the faithful Ran-los. For only in this compartment that clung to the roof of the Dome was there left air to breathe. And, from the void beyond, the silver space ship sped on toward Mercury, sped on to a safe landing that, but for Darl Thomas's sacrifice, would have been her doom....

Guided by Jim and Angus, a party of men from the battle-flier, equipped with oxygen respirators, went to the aid of Darl. They dug him out from under his crumpled plane and the piled splinters of quartz. His metal was dented and twisted, but unpierced. They carried him tenderly to the space ship, and carefully set him down. The ship's physician listened long with his stethoscope, then looked up and smiled.

"He's alive," the doctor said, "just barely alive. The thick padding of bandages must have saved him from the full shock of the crash. They're hard to kill, these ITA men. I'll be able to bring him around, God willing."

TOMORROW

Chapter I: THE LOST ONES

Dikar was on his knees, his head bowed against the side of his cot, his hands palm to palm. The fragrance of the dried grass with which his mattress was stuffed was in his nostrils, the rabbit fur of his blanket soft and warm against his forehead. Behind him there were two long rows of cots, eleven in each, separated by a wide space. At every cot knelt one of the Bunch, but the only sound was a low drone.

Dikar's own murmur was a part of that drone. "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And should I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." Dikar used, as all of them did, the prayer they had learned before the terror had come. They had never been taught another.

Dikar stayed on his knees as behind him there was a rustle of lifting bodies, a chatter of voices. One cried out, loud above the others, "Hey, fellers!" Jimlane it was. "Who took my bow and arrows an' didn't bring 'em back?" His changing voice, deep at first, broke into a high squeal. "If I ketch the guy--"

"They're out by the Fire Stone, foolish." That was Tomball. "I seen you leave 'em there yourself. You'll be leavin' your head somewhere one these days, an' forget where. You're sure the prize dumby of the Bunch."

The other Boys laughed, tauntingly. Dikar heard them, and he didn't quite hear them.

He was waiting for a soft hand to stroke his hair, for sweet, low tones to say, "The good Lord bless you, my son, and give you pleasant dreams." He knew they would not come. Hand and voice were vanished in the mists of Long-Ago, curtained from Dikar by the dark Time of Fear before which, as he very dimly recalled, everything had been different from what it was now. But always, when he had said his "now-I-lay-me," he waited for them...

"Quit callin' me a dumby," Jimlane squealed. "You gotta quit it."

"Who's gonna make me, dumby? You?"

Dikar rose to his feet, sighing, the burden of his leadership once more heavy upon him.

From the blaze on the Fire Stone, a wavering light came in through the unglazed, oblong openings in the wall of the long narrow Boys' House. It bathed with red the stalwart, naked bodies; nut-brown skin under which flat muscles moved smoothly.

Tomball was out in the space between the cots, his bulging arms hanging loose at his sides, his adolescent, chunky jaw black-stubbled, his eyes, too closely set, glittering between slitted lids.

Jimlane faced him and was little more than half his size. Puny, his hairless countenance rashed with small pimples, the kid's upper lip trembled but he stood his ground in mid-aisle as the other advanced, slow and threatening.

"Yes, me," Jimlane answered him bravely. "I ain't scared uh you, you big bully."

"You ain't, huh," Tomball grunted, closing the distance between them as Dikar got into motion. "Then I'll teach you to be."

Tomball had hold of Jimlane's wrist and was twisting it, his shadowed lip curling. The smaller lad's face went white with pain. His free hand twisted, batted at his tormentor's hairy belly. Tomball grinned and kept on twisting. His victim bent almost double, agonized, but still there was no whimper from the youngster...

Dikar's fingers closed on Tomball's arm and dug into the hard muscle. "No fair," Dikar said. "Break!"

Tomball loosed Jimlane, jerked free of Dikar's hold and swung around. "Says who?" he growled, a redness in his black, small eyes that was not put there by the light. He was a quarter-head taller than Dikar and broader across the shaggy chest, and his thighs were twice the span of Dikar's. "Oh, it's you!"

"It's me," Dikar said quietly. "And I'm orderin' you to quit pickin' on Jimlane an' on the other little fellows who don't take your guff." Dikar was lean-flanked and lithe-limbed, his hair and his silken beard yellow as the other's was black, his eyes a deep, shining blue.

"There will be no bullyin' here, so long as I'm Boss of the Bunch."

Their code, like their talk, had been preserved unchanged from their young childhood, back before the Days of Fear. Isolated, they had no adult models to copy as they grew to young manhood.

"Yeah?" Tomball said through lips thin and straight beneath their sparse covering of sprouting hairs, and somehow Dikar knew what he was going to say next. It had been coming for a long time and now it was here and Dikar was not altogether sorry.

Tomball said it: "As long as you're Boss." Two gray spots pitted the skin at the corners of his flat nose. "Maybe. But it's time you made room for someone else, Dikar. For me."

By Tomball's increasing unwillingness to obey orders, by his sulking and his endless whisperings with those of the Boys who had to be watched lest they shirk their share of work, Dikar had known the challenge was coming.

He had thought out his answer and was ready with it. "All right," he said, low voiced and very calm. "I'll call a Full Council tomorrow, of the Boys an' the Girls. I'll tell 'em why I think I should keep on being Boss an' you'll tell 'em why you think I should not, an' then the Bunch will decide."

A murmur ran around the ring of Boys that had close-packed about Dikar and Tomball.

"No!" Tomball refused. "It wasn't the Bunch decided you should be Boss in the first place. It was the Old Ones." He paused, and a meaningful grin widened his mouth. "Or so you say."

"Maybe," Dikar smiled, surprised he could smile. "Maybe, Tomball, you'd like to ask the Old Ones if they picked me to be Boss when they brought us here and left us. Maybe you'd like to climb down the Drop an' ask 'em whether you or I should be Boss from now on."

The Boys gasped in the ring around them, and Dikar's own skin crawled at the back of his neck.

Down, down as far as the Mountain upon which the Bunch lived was high, fell the great Drop that fully circled its base. Straight up and down was the Drop's riven rock, and so barren of foothold that no living thing could hope to scale it.

Below, for a space twice as wide across as the tallest of the trees in the forest that robed the Mountain, were tumbled stones as big as the Boy's House and bigger. White and angry waters fumed beneath the stones, and beneath stones and waters were the Old Ones.

Dikar himself had seen these things, from the topmost branch of a certain tree that gave a view of them, but not even Dikar had ever gone out from the concealing curtain of the forest to the brink of the Drop, for of all the Must-Nots the Old Ones had left behind, this was the most fearful; "You must not go out of the woods. You must not go near the edge of the Drop."

Thinking of all this as he stared into the red hate in Tomball's eyes, Dikar asked, "Do you dare, Tomball, climb down the Drop an' talk to the Old Ones?"

"Smart," Tomball sneered. "You think you're smart, don't you? You want me to go down there an' that way be rid of me. Well, it don't work, see? I'm just as smart as you are."

Dikar spread his hands. "You will not let the Bunch decide between us, an' you will not ask the Old Ones. How, then, do you want this thing settled?"

"How? How have you yourself ordered scraps between the Boys settled? Dikar! I dare you to fight out with me, fists, or sticks or knives even, who's gonna be Boss of the Bunch--you or me."

"No fair," Jimlane cried out at that. "I say it's no fair. Tomball's bigger than Dikar an' heavier."

"No fair," Steveland yelped. Billthomas yelled, "We cry the dare no fair." But others were shouting, "Fight!" Fredalton and Halross and rabbit-faced Carlberger. "They gotta fight it out. It's Dikar's own Rule an' he's gotta stick by it."

Most of the Boys shouted, "Fight!"

"Shut up!" Dikar bellowed. "Shut up, all of you," and at once the yelling stopped. But the ring had shrunk till he could feel their breaths on his back and heard little whimpers in the Boys' throats and read their eyes, shining in the changing light of the Fire. "You dare me fight to decide who'll be Boss," Dikar said to Tomball, taking up the ritual he himself had set. "Do you cry a fight between us two fair?"

A cord in Tomball's short neck twitched. "I cry us equal-matched." (By the Rule, Dikar had a right to appeal to the Bunch from Tomball's lying response.) "If you refuse my dare, Dikar, I will cry you yellow, an' claim the right about which we scrap." Reading the eyes in the ring, Dikar saw that if he appealed and the Bunch said he and Tomball were not equal matched, he might remain Boss in name, but Boss in truth he would be no longer. "That is the Rule you yourself have made." Tomball abandoned the ritual. "And you gotta stick by it."

Dikar's lips still smiled. "That is the Rule I have made, Tomball. But this over which we scrap is no bird brought down by an unmarked arrow nor question of whose turn it is to bring water from the spring. Who shall be Boss affects not only you an' me, but the whole Bunch. Is it right that it be decided in the way such small scraps are decided?" Dikar pretended to ask that of Tomball, but his eyes asked the question of all the eyes in the crowded circle, and the eyes had already answered him when Tomball spoke again.

"It is right," Tomball voiced the verdict of the eyes. "It is the only way that is right. You gotta fight me or crawl." There was triumph in his voice, and triumph in his swagger. Tomball had weight on his side, and reach and strength, and he knew he was already as good as Boss.

Dikar knew it too, and his heart was heavy, but he smiled still. "All right," he said. "We fight, Tomball. With bare fists."

The Boys hurrahed, the sound like the bay of the dogpack when they've brought down their prey under the trees. Even Steveland and Billthomas hurrahed, and though Jimlane was silent his pale eyes danced with the dancing red light of the Fire.

Dikar listened, thinking what Tomball would do as Boss of the Bunch; whether he would let his pals shirk work, whether he would see that the corn patches were weeded, and the water tank cleaned, and the roofs of the Boys' House and the Girls' House kept patched against the rains and the snows and the cold.

It was worry about these things and others like them that weighted Dikar's heart. He knew how painfully he had learned, in the long years since the Bunch had come to the Mountain, all the many little irksome tasks that must be done for the good of the Bunch; and he remembered that Tomball had always scoffed at them.

For himself Dikar would be happy to be no longer Boss. It meant being lonely--for the Boss must have no pal, lest he be accused of favoring his friend over any other. It meant carrying a heavy freight of care through the day, and lying sleepless through the night, and never knowing rest. It meant assigning the hunters to the chase, whose joys he never knew; to judging the games and never playing them; to punish when Rules were broken but never breaking Rules just for the fun of it and finding the punishment worth it.

"What are we waiting for?" Tomball's growl broke into Dikar's thoughts. "Come on outside an' let's go."

"No," Dikar said. "We fight tomorrow, before the whole Bunch. Tonight, now, we sleep. Already it is Bed-Time, an' long past."

"I want to fight now," Tomball insisted, standing his ground. "I don't want to wait till tomorrow."

The smile faded from Dikar's lips, and he felt tiny muscles knot along the ridge of his jaw, beneath his yellow beard. "Bed-Time is not my Rule, but a Rule of the Old Ones. Perhaps, when you are Boss, Tomball, you will let the Bunch break it, but I am still Boss, an' I do not. To bed, Tomball. To bed, all of you. Right away!"

Dikar's eyes locked with Tomball's, and blue eyes and black held for a long minute and there was no sound in the Boys' House, and no movement at all. Then the black eyes fell, and Tomball muttered, "It's the Old Ones I obey, Dikar, not you," and the ring broke up into Boys hurrying to their cots.

Dikar stood spread-legged, the firelight playing on his tall, well-knit form, his chest moving quietly with his slow breathing, the taut hollow of his belly heaving, his eyes somber as he watched the Boys obey him--perhaps for the last time.

He didn't feel Jimlane's fingers squeeze his. He didn't hear Jimlane's whisper, "I hope you win tomorrow, Dikar. Gee, how I hope you win."

Dikar stood there while the curtains woven from slender withes were dropped over the window-openings, shutting out the red light of the Fire that the Girls tended tonight.

He stood there, unmoving, till the excited whisperings along the walls of the Boys' House had faded, and the scrape of the fur blankets along skin had ended, and there were no more creakings. Then he turned and padded to his own cot, and knelt beside it.

Dikar's lips moved, but the words came. He was sending them out through the wall, past the leaping flames on the great, flat Fire Stone, past the Girls' House into the night-darkened woods.

He was speaking to a Presence there, a Someone he had never seen and never heard, but had always known to be there, because He showed His work in the carpet of the leaves underfoot, in the tall and stately trees, in the wind that rustled through the woods' green roof and the sunlight that shimmered through it.

"I don't care what happens to me tomorrow, Sir," Dikar told Him. "I don't care how much Tomball hurts me, or what he does to me if he wins. It's the Bunch I ask you to take care of. Please, Sir. If Tomball is too strong for me, tomorrow, an' he licks me, please make it all right for him to be Boss. Please make him smart enough to be a good Boss. Please make him be a better Boss for the Bunch than me. They're good kids, Sir, the Boys an' the Girls, an' mostly they obey the Rules the Old Ones left, an' You ought to take care of them. You will take care of them, Sir, won't you?"

Dikar's lips stopped moving, but he stayed on his knees a little while longer, his head bent as if he were listening.

He heard nothing but the soft breathing sounds, and the wind's treetop whisper, and the insect chorus of the night.

When at last he stirred and climbed into his cot and drew his fur blanket up over him, he was comforted.

Chapter II: THE NIGHTMARE THAT WAS TRUE

Sleep's deep emptiness claimed Dikar swiftly and wholly, as always it claims one whose weariness is clean and physical.

A voice came into the nothingness, the voice for which Dikar waited each Bed-Time after he'd said his Now-I-lay-me.

...Mom's voice it was that came through the open door of the dark room where Dick Carr had awakened. Something in Mom's voice made Dick afraid: tears, and a trying hard to hide the tears, and a smile that he somehow knew hurt Morn more than the tears.

"Take care of yourself," Mom was saying, "and come back soon."

Who was going away? There was only Mom and Dick in the flat, and Henry who was twelve, four years older than Dick, and who took up more than his half of their bed. Dick pushed out to wake Henry, and his hand found only bunched sheets.

Henry wasn't there!

The next minute Dick heard Henry out in the hall. "Sure, I'll come back soon. Don't you worry. This thing will be over in a jiffy, you'll see. We're just being called out because--because the last big drive is on, an' they need us in the rear lines so's all the real soldiers can be free to do the fightin'. There ain't nothin' to worry about, Mom. They can't lick us. Maybe they've licked the rest uh the world but they can't lick the good old U.S.A. We've won every war we were ever in an' we'll win this one--

"Look Mom, I got to run. The radio said for my unit to be at the Eighth Street Armory at eleven o'clock, an' it's four of, now. Goo'bye, Mom."

There was a kiss, and the flat-door slamming shut, and then there wasn't any sound coming in through the door at all and the flat seemed awful empty.

In through the window rang the clatter of feet running in the street. Dick heard it every night, listening to the big boys who didn't have to go to bed early and could play in the street after supper. But Dick knew they weren't playing now, because they all ran the one way and after a little while he didn't hear them any more.

Then Dick lay listening to the thunder that had been in the sky so long he usually didn't hear it. The thunder seemed a little louder tonight, and a little nearer, and more scary. The glass in the window kept rattling and that made Dick look at the window and at the square gold-starred flag that hung in the window.

The star was for Pop. It was to show everybody how proud we were that Pop was a hero. Only Dick didn't quite understand why we should be proud when every window in the block had a flag with a gold star, a lot of them even with two or three gold stars.

What was there to be proud about in your pop being a hero when all the other kids' fathers were heroes too, and their big brothers, and a lot of their sisters too, being Red Cross nurses and working in ammunishun plants that was blown up and all?

Dick wished Pop would stop being a hero and come home.

Mom and Henry said Pop wasn't ever going to come home, but Dick didn't believe that. Dick didn't believe Pop would go away from them forever and ever.

Now Henry was gone away too. But he was coming back soon. He had told Mom he was, hadn't he? He wouldn't lie to Mom, would he?

Dick heard the sound of feet again, coming down the street. The feet weren't running now. They were marching. Dick knew what feet sounded like when they were marching. He'd heard them before Pop went away, when you could hardly hear them for the crowds shouting and the bands braying soldier-music.

He'd heard the feet marching when Pop went away; there were no bands then, and no hurrahs, and there were hardly anybody in the street, only in the windows a lot of women, waving handkerchiefs, and then holding them up to their faces.

Yes, Dick had heard a lot of marching feet, but they had never sounded quite like these. The sound of them feet wasn't nearly as loud as the others.

Dick pushed back the covers and got to the window. The tops of the street lights were painted black, and the bottoms were blue; so that the gutter was like blue water, deep and awful, and across the street was only a black and dreadful wall.

Down the street came the marchers.

They were boys like Henry, some of them bigger and some smaller, but none of them very much bigger or very much smaller. Each had a gun slanted across his shoulder. Not one was in uniform. They were dressed in their everyday clothes, caps and jackets and pants. Some of the boys wore longies, most wore knickers or shorts, and a lot were barelegged down to the socks folded over the tops of their shoes. They were like a bunch of boys marching out of school on a fire-drill.

They were not playing soldiers. They were soldiers, real soldiers. The way they marched showed that, straight-backed, not talking or laughing. Their chins were lifted. Their eyes looked far ahead, to the end of the street and the end of the city and farther still, to the dark night out of which came the sound of thunder that never stopped.

Four abreast they marched, four and four and four, as far as Dick Carr could see. And alongside each tenth four marched a man in uniform; a man with one empty sleeve pinned to the breast of his coat: a man whose leg swung stiff so that Dick knew it was not a leg at all: a man whose face was broken so it was ugly and terrible as a Hallowe'en mask.

For a long time the boys and the broken men marched by, to where the thunder rolled and the black sky flickered with a lightning whose flashes Dick Carr could not see...

(And Dikar's dream faded into sleep's nothingness.)

...And into sleep's nothingness came a crash of thunder, shaking the ground. It shook Mom's arms that were tight around Dick Carr, and her body against which Dick's face was pressed. Out of the corner of his eye Dick could see the pin on Mom's black breast. The pin was oblong, and it had a blue border, and on the white inside the border there were two gold stars. There were two on the flag in the window now.

Dick was scared, but he wasn't bawling. He hadn't bawled when the siren waked him up, screaming in through the window, nor when Mom and he had jumped out of bed, all dressed like the radio said they should be. He hadn't bawled when, the siren screaming like a great devil in the black sky, they ran in the dark street, and then stopped running because all the women and kids were carrying them along in a rush faster than Dick could run.

No, Dick hadn't bawled even when he and Mom had fallen down the station steps and the old man had dragged them through the big, stiff curtains into the station.

The station was crowded with women and kids, and it was like an ogre's cave. A couple of electric lights made light enough to see them by, but not enough to keep back the shadows that reached out of the enormous black holes at each end of the station, like black arms pawing out to drag the women and the kids into a night that would never end.

The faces he saw were a queer white, and the eyes were too big; and they were sort of hunched, as if they were waiting for something terrible to pounce on them out of the dark.

It came!

Thunder! Thunder louder than before, thunder so loud that when it stopped Dick couldn't hear himself say, "Don't be scared, Mom. I'll take care of you." But Mom must have heard him, because she squeezed him tighter to her and kissed him on top of his head. Then Dick could hear again. He could hear a woman say, "That must have been one them half-ton bombs. They tell me they can go right down through a ten-story building, and they don't blow up till they hit the cellar, and after they blow up there ain't nothin' left of the building or anyone was in it. Nothin' at all."

The old man, who stood by the brown curtain that hung over where the station steps came in, laughed. His laugh was like the cackle of the hens Dick used to hear when pop used to drive him and Henry and Mom out into the country.

"Yeah," the old man cackled, his eyes kind of wild. "That's right. Ef'n one o' them things hits overhead here they won't even be little pieces of us left ter pick up."

He had on a uniform, but it wasn't like Pop's uniform. It was very faded but you could see it had once been blue. It was ragged and much too big.

There was thunder again, not so loud. "Well," said a woman sitting with a suckling baby in her heavy arms. "I wish one would hit right over us. That would be God's mercy."

"There ain't no God," someone said. "God is dead." Then whoever it was laughed, and Dick's insides cringed from the laughter. It was a woman in the middle of the platform, and she was standing as still as a rock--her mouth didn't move, and the eyes behind the hair that was down all over her face saw nothing at all. "The End of the World is come and it is too late to repent. We are doomed, doomed--"

Thunder again shattering the laughter, but far away now. The woman who sat next to Mom, with a little girl on her lap and another, brown-haired and brown-eyed and pretty, on the floor alongside of her whispered: "Poor thing, I hear tell she escaped from Philadelphia after it was surrendered. She got through the lines somehow. Did you hear how they went through all the houses that was left and dragged out-?"

"Hush," Mom begged. "Hush. The children--"

The little girl's mother laughed quietly. "The children will know all about it soon. Yours too, girls or boys, it don't make no difference to those fiends."

"Not mine," Mom said, very low, and she moved a little to show the other woman what was in her hand. It was a carving knife from their kitchen--

"Attention!" A loud voice shouted out of the place where you used to get your change before the subways stopped running. "Attention, all shelters!" Dick looked and he saw there was a radio behind the little hole where your money used to be pushed out. "The raid is over! The raid is over--"

"It's over," the old man cackled. "And I'm still alive. Eighty-three years old and not dead yet. I allus said I was born ter be hanged."

"--where you are. Remain where you are. Gas-tests are being made. Remain where you are until gas-tests determine that it is safe to leave. Stand by."

"The Government should of gave us all gas masks," grumbled a fat lady whom Dick knew. "Like they did in England." She was Tom Ball's mother and Tom was behind her, hiding his face in her skirts.

"Much good that did England," the woman with the baby said. "Much good anything did England--"

"Attention!" the radio shouted. "Attention all shelters. Important. An important announcement is about to be made. Stand by."

"Mom," Dick asked. "What is an important annou--what the radio said?"

"News, son. Big news."

"Good news, Mom?"

"Maybe. Maybe we've won the battle. Maybe we're driving Them--"

"Attention! Attention, all shelters. The next voice you hear will be that of General Edward Albright, provost-marshal-general for this area."

"That's Ed Albright," the old man cackled. "I remember when he was a buck private along o' me, the both of us down with dysentery at Key West. In the Spanish War that was, an--"

"Hush. Hush, you old fool."

The voice Dick heard now, coming into a quiet so deep he could hear Mom's heart beating in his ear, was thin and tired, awful tired. "Our lines are crumbling. Enemy infantry has already penetrated to the outskirts of the city, south and east. The boys, the young women, who have fought so heroically, are still fighting, but there is no longer any hope. Word has come that the columns that were marching to our aid have been completely wiped out by a phalanx of enemy planes."

Chapter III: AFTER ARMAGEDDON

The voice stopped, and there wasn't any sound at all. "We are beaten," the voice began again. "But we shall not surrender. We shall not give over the mothers and the children of this city to the horror that has overtaken the other municipalities that have surrendered.

"My people, when our lines finally break, when the enemy hordes swarm in, I shall press a button on the desk before me to set off mines that have been laid underneath the streets. Every soul in the city will perish in that cataclysm; I, and you, and with us some thousands of those who have made this world of ours a hell."

"Good!" yelled the woman with the babe at her breast. "Good!"

Mom's arms were tight around Dick, and she was crying, but her eyes were shining. "We're going to see Henry soon, son, and your father," she whispered. "Isn't that wonderful?"

And then everyone was quiet again, and the tired voice was still talking.

"To die like that will be, I know, no sacrifice to you who have laid fathers and husbands, sons and daughters, on the altar of your country. But there is one more sacrifice I must ask of you, for your country.

"Somehow, in the maneuvering of the past few hours, a gap has opened in the enemy lines, to the north. It is already being closed, but the terrain is such that a small and determined force may be able to keep it open long enough for a few to escape.

"No troops can be moved from their present positions. We have some arms, some ammunition, available, but no one to use them. No one--except you women who hear me. You mothers."

"That's funny," Mrs. Ball sniffed. "We can escape through a hole if we get ourselves killed keepin' the hole open. The man must be crazy."

"If you mothers can keep that gap open long enough, we may be able to take your children out through it, the tots who are all you have left.

"We may--the possibility is infinitesimal--be able to get them away to the hills north of the city. The chances are that they will die on the way. Even if they do not, it is possible that they will be hunted down and exterminated, that Nature, though less cruel than these hordes that have come out of the East and across the continent from the West and up from the South, will finish the work of our foes.

"But there is a million-to-one chance that the children will come through, and it rests with you to choose whether we shall give them that chance.

"I know that it is a bitter choice to make. I know, mothers, that you would rather that your little daughter, your little son, when I press this button on my desk, go with you into the Outer Darkness where there is peace at last.

"I know how dreadful it would be for you to die not knowing what fate awaits your children, and I should not ask you to make the choice save for this one thing.

"This is the dusk of our day, the dusk of democracy, of liberty, of all that has been the America we lived for, and die for. If there is to be any hope of a tomorrow, it must rest in them, in your sons and daughters.

"If they perish, America shall have perished. If through your sacrifice they survive, then, in some tomorrow we cannot foresee, America will live again and democracy, liberty, freedom shall reconquer the green and pleasant fields that tonight lie devastated.

"If you choose to give America this faint hope, if you decide to make this sacrifice, leave your children in charge of the warden of the shelter where you are, and come at once to headquarters to receive your weapons and your orders.

"We have no way of telling what your decision is until and unless enough of you come here to make the attempt we contemplate feasible. We wait for you. Will you come? Mothers, the choice is yours."

The voice stopped, and for a long time nobody moved, nobody said a thing. Then, all of a sudden, all the women were standing up. All the women were kissing their kids, and then they were going toward the curtain that hung over the bottom of the steps from the station.

They were pushing aside the brown curtain. They were going up the steps.

They were going fast, fast, and their faces were shining as Dick once had seen a bride's face shine as she walked, all in white, up the aisle.

They were all gone, and in the station there were only the kids, and the old, old man in the uniform of faded blue that was too big for him.

It seemed darker here in the ogre's cave. The dark reached out from the great black holes at the ends of the platform. A small, cold hand took hold of Dick's hand. "I'm frightened," the little brown-haired girl whimpered.

"Aw," Dick said, squeezing her hand. "There ain't nothin' to be frightened about. I'll take care of you."

"Will you," she asked in a very little voice. "Do you promise?"

"Cross my heart," Dick said, "I'll take care of you, always and always," and somehow he wasn't quite so frightened any more. "What's your name?"

"Mary Lee. What's yours?"

"Dick Carr."

"Dikar," she murmured, and moved close to Dick, and her head dropped sleepily on his shoulder.

He liked the way she said it: "Dikar," so he didn't bother to tell her it was two names. He said "Marilee" in his head, making one name out of her two, and he liked the sound of that...

And a shadow moved across Dick Carr ... A shadow moved across Dikar, and he stirred and came fully awake out of his dream, and it seemed to him that someone had passed him, moving silently in the night.

Chapter IV: WE MEET IN THE NIGHT

Dikar lay in his cot, alert. The soughing of the wind came to him, and the shrilling of the insects of the night and the breathing of the sleeping boys. There was no sound at all out of tune with the harmony of the dark forest.

Yet Dikar was troubled with an uneasy sense of something wrong.

He tried to quiet himself, tried to find sleep again, sleep and the dream out of which he had wakened. Dikar was desperate to find his dream again, for he knew it was one he had dreamed many times. But always before it had slipped from him in the instant of wakening and tonight it was still as vivid in his mind as yesterday.

The small boy of the dream, Dick Carr, was himself in the Long-Ago that had been only a mist of gray half-memories as shapeless as the dawn-haze that drifts in the waking forest. The dream had told Dikar something of himself and something of that Long-Ago, and if he could find it again it would tell him more.

But Dikar could not find sleep again, nor the dream, because his eagerness barred the way, and his sense of something wrong with the night. So he sighed and rose from his cot, making no sound.

He groped for his apron of woven leaves and tied it about his waist, and stole to the curtain of twined withes that closed the door, moving it a little to peer out.

The leafy boughs of a great oak made a roof that joined the roofs of the Boys' House and the Girls' House, at the end where they came nearest the woods. Beneath it the Fire was burning low on its Stone, and a little distance away from its heat Dikar saw the two Girls whose task it was tonight to tend the Fire.

The two Girls drowsed, arms about each other's waists. They had undone their braids, and the hair that cloaked one was black as the night, and the hair that cloaked the other was brown and shining. The black hair swallowed the light, but tiny red glints from the Fire danced merrily on the wavy fall of the brown.

The Girls wore short skirts of plaited grasses, and circlets of woven leaves covered their deepening breasts; but through their cloaks of long hair a shoulder peeped shyly, and a rounded knee, and curve of a thigh.

Now as long as he could recall Dikar had seen the brown bodies of the Girls as they busied themselves with their tasks or tried to outdo the Boys in the Games, and so it was strange that tonight these small glimpses should set a pulse throbbing in his temples, and stir his breast with a not unpleasant pain.

It was to the Girl whose hair was brown that his eyes clung, to her knee and the soft swell of her throat, and the pale oval of her face.

As he looked out at her, he seemed to feel a small hand in his, to hear a very little voice asking, "Will you take care of me? Promise?" For this was Marilee, the little Girl of his dream. Dikar had forgotten his promise, "I'll take care of you always and always," but now he remembered it.

Remembering, he wanted to hold out his arms to Marilee, wanted to call her to him. He almost did, and for fear that he might, looking at her, not longer be able to hold her name in his throat, he tore his eyes from her and turned them to the Fire. Little flames, blue and yellow and red, licked along the sides of a single log that lay across a great heap of orange glowing embers. That log will not last much longer, Dikar thought. I should wake the Girls and tell them to put more on.

Then he thought, no. Let them sleep. I'll do it myself, and with the thought his look went to the pile of logs at the base of the oak.

...To the place where the pile ought to be! There was only one split log there.

Queer, Dikar thought. I sent up enough for the night from where we were cutting them in the woods yesterday--A hand slid past the trunk of the oak, out of the blackness behind! The hand took hold of the one log that was left of the pile and drew it back into the blackness.

A muscle twitched in Dikar's cheek, under his beard.

"Oh," Bessalton exclaimed, the black-haired Girl. "Marilee! We've been sleepin' an' the Fire's almost out. Quick."

They were running to the Fire, and past it to the oak, and they were looking, dismayed at the base of the oak. "There isn't any," Marilee said, her small face puckered in puzzlement. "You must have put on the last."

"I did no such thing," Bessalton denied. "It was you. You were the last one to put wood on. Remember?"

"Yes," Marilee said slowly. "Yes, I was the last. But there was more here then. I'm sure there was."

"Looks like it," the black-haired Girl came back, "Don't it? If I did something like that--"

"Oh what's the use of scrapping about it? We've got to get more up from the place where the Boys were cutting, before the Fire burns out."

"We?"

"I'll do it, Bessalton. I know where they were," Marilee said, and before Dikar could move or cry out, she had gone past the oak and the night had swallowed her. The night out of which a hand had slid to draw away the logs from the base of the oak!

Dikar sprang to his cot, snatched up his bow and quiver of arrows, was back to the door and out through it. Bessalton stared at the Fire; she neither saw nor heard Dikar flitting by. Then the damp, fragrant dark of the woods was about him, and the cool softness of its carpet of leaves was under his noiseless feet, and he was a shadow slipping through the forest.

All the Bunch was taught to move in the woods with the silence of its creatures, but Dikar's ears, trained to keenness, caught the barely audible sound of Marilee's progress ahead of him, the flick of underbrush against her legs.

He did not call to warn her, because he needed to know who had lured her into the forest, and why. This was a thing that never before had been done by one of the Bunch and Dikar must find out why it was being done.

Moonlight filtered through the foliage overhead and flecked the night with silver. A small beast scuttered away from beneath Dikar's feet. Marilee was well away from the Houses now. She was almost to the place where the Boys had been cutting--

"Oh!" he heard her exclaim, and then there was another voice ahead there. "Hello, Marilee." Tomball's voice. "I've been waitin' for you."

Dikar froze, as motionless as the tree trunks about him.

"You've been waitin'--" Marilee was puzzled. "Why? Why should you be here, waitin' for me?"

"I wanted to see you alone."

"But--but why do you want to see me alone?"

"Marilee." Tomball's voice was curiously thick. "Do you like me?"

"Of course I like you. I like all the Boys."

"Not that way. Do you like me--like this?" Dikar heard the sound of flesh, and he sprang into the little clearing ahead, and Tomball's hands had hold of Marilee's arms, and he was pulling her to him.

"Stop!" Dikar said, low-voiced, and somehow there was an arrow hooked in the string of his bow, and the string was tight, and the arrow was pointed at Tomball's back. The bow was long almost as Dikar was tall, and the arrow sharp-pointed with stone. Loosed, it could go clear through a deer--or a Boy. "Let go of her."

Tomball turned on Dikar. Crouched knee-deep in fern there was something about him more animal than Boy. The curling thickness of his lips; the feral look of his black eyes, and the way his neck was tense and corded.

"You--" Tomball grunted. "You again!"

"Me," Dikar said, heavy-tongued with anger. "The Boss. Tomball, you have left your cot before day. You have laid hands on a Girl. For breakin' these Must-Nots you are subject to seven days in the punishment cave, with only water an' dried corn to eat. What's your excuse?"

Tomball licked his lips, and straightened. "Nothin'," he said. "Because you won't give me the punishment."

"Won't I? An' why not?"

"Because I'm not here, that's why. Because I'm in my cot, asleep. Halross will say so at the Council, an' Carlberger."

"They will lie?" Dikar's brow wrinkled. He could not understand. "They will lie, at a Council?"

"Sure, they will. What are you goin to do about it?"

"But Marilee here will say different, an' I."

"Course you will," Tomball grinned. "Why shouldn't you, the Boss of the Bunch an' the Boss of the Girls? Why shouldn't you say that I left my cot, an' that I laid hands on her, when seven days in the punishment cave on water an' dried corn will leave me so weak you'll be sure to lick me, an' stay Boss? Will the Bunch believe you, Dikar, when I remind 'em of that, or will they believe me an' Halross an' Carlberger?"

Dikar felt sick. That any should lie at a Council, that any should talk as he was hearing Tomball talk, was a new and dreadful thing. "Tomball," he cried. "You're foolin'. You wouldn't really say those things."

"Wouldn't I?" Tomball grinned, licking his lips. "Just try me. You're licked, Dikar, an' you know it."

Dikar knew it, and he knew that a terrible thing had come among them, and he could not think how to fight it. He was licked--

"Dikar!" Marilee's fingers touched his arm. "Dikar. Hold him here with your arrow while I run an' call the Bunch. When they see Tomball here in the woods, he an' his pals cannot say that he is in his cot, asleep." She started away.

"Wait!" Tomball's command halted Marilee. "You can call the Bunch, Marilee," he said. "But when they get here I'll tell 'em that Dikar drew his arrow on me an' forced me to come here. An' Halross will say that, wakin' from sleep in his cot next mine, he saw this, an' that Dikar said he would kill him if he did not keep quiet."

Marilee and Dikar stared at Tomball.

"You can't win," Tomball sneered. "I'm too smart for you, see. An' tomorrow you'll find out I'm too strong for you, Dikar. An' here's somethin' else for you to remember, Marilee. When I'm Boss, you better like me the way I want you to like me!"

He laughed, then, and turning his back on Dikar's arrow, and swaggered away; they heard his laugh coming out of the dark woods.

"What did he mean?" Marilee whispered, coming close to Dikar. "He said, 'When I'm Boss.' What did he mean, Dikar?"

Dikar wanted to put his arms around her.

"He meant that we're gunna fight who should be Boss, Marilee. In the mornin, right after Brekfes, you will call a Full Council of the Bunch, an' Tomball an' I will fight who shall be Boss."

Marilee's eyes were upturned to his eyes, her lips were moist and red. "You must win, Dikar," she whispered. "You heard what he said. You must win."

The wanting to take her in his arms, the wanting to hold her close to him, was a great ache in Dikar's arms and in his breast, and a weakness in his legs.

"I heard him, Marilee," he said, deep-throated. "I will win."

And then Dikar turned and ran off through the woods, but he looked back over his shoulder at Marilee once and saw the way she stood looking after him, mantled in her brown hair, and he saw the look in her face.

Chapter V: THE OLD ONES

When Dikar got back to the Boys' House and slipped inside, all was dark there, and quiet, and Tomball was in his cot. Dikar put down his bow and arrow, and took off his apron. He lay down again, and pulled up the blanket of rabbit's fur.

He lay staring up at the black roof of the house, trembling a little. It seemed to him that he saw Tomball's face there, black-stubbled and small-eyed and sneering. And then it was Marilee's face he saw, the red lips moist, the brown eyes holding his, telling something her lips could not. And looking into Marilee's eyes, Dikar's eyes closed and the nothingness of sleep received him ... And out of sleep's nothingness formed a sky that flared with blue light, and with red, and was streaked with bright yellow that shimmered and faded; and the sky was filled with rolling, endless thunder. Against that terrible sky loomed monstrous black bulks, huge and ominous, hills that overhung a road and a big truck in which Dick Carr was riding.

In the truck kids were jammed so tight they could not lie down, and just could move a very little. Dick was in a corner so that his back was jammed against the iron sides of the truck, and Marilee was jammed against his side, and her head was on Dick's shoulder, and she slept.

Most of the kids were asleep, in spite of the terrible lights in the sky and the awful thunder. But the old man who was driving the truck wasn't asleep, nor the old woman who sat next to him. Ahead of them on the road were a lot of trucks, and behind them were a lot more trucks, but Dick could tell this only by the noise they made, because none of the trucks had any lights.

Dick knew some of the trucks were loaded high with boxes and boxes of things, but most of them were jammed tight with kids like this one.

"Tom," Dick heard the old woman ask. "Do you think we'll get through?"

"I don't know, Helen," the old man answered. "Only God knows. So you had better pray to God to take us through."

"I can't, Tom. I can't pray any more. I'm all prayed out. God cannot hear our prayers. He has forgotten us, Tom. He has turned His face from us."

"Pray, Helen. Not for you or for me, but for the children in our charge. Pray to God's Son. It was God's Son who once said, 'Suffer ye the little children to come unto Me.'"

"All right, Tom. I'll try."

They didn't say anything more. The truck bounced along, and the red and blue lights flared in the sky, and yellow streaked it, and thunder rolled.

Once the road got steep, climbing up into the sky to what looked like the Jumping-Off Place, and up there against the sky Dick saw things that stuck up out of the top of the black hill. They were just a Bunch of broken poles, black against the blazing sky, but Dick knew that once they had been trees. And to one side there was a chimney sticking up, and Dick knew that was all that was left of a house that the trees used to shade.

Dick started to get sleepy. His eyes closed. The old woman woke him up, yelling something.

"Tom!" she yelled. "Tom! Turn into this side road. Quick!"

Dick's head banged against the truck side, and the kids fell against him, and Marilee woke up, screaming, "Dikar! Dikar!" Dick grabbed hold of her, telling her it was all right, and then the truck wasn't going any longer, and Dick could bear the other trucks going past, somewhere behind.

"You caught me off guard, Helen, and I did it," the old man said. "But why?"

"I don't know, Tom," she answered, talking slow. "I saw the side road ahead and something told me we must turn off into it. It was like a voice in my ear. No. It was more like a voice in my brain."

"You're all worked up, Helen. You're excited." Tom's back moved, and there was a noise of grinding metal. "Watch out behind. I'm backing up to the highway. As soon as you see a clear space you tell me, so that I can back out and get into line again. If we lose the others we won't know where to--" And then there was a white light in the sky a light bright as the sun floating down out of the sky.

And there was a new sound in the sky, like a bee, like a giant bee, and it became a roar. An enormous black shape came down under the light, and there was a rattling noise, like a lot of Boys were running sticks along a lot of picket fences, but louder, and there were screams and crashes and the rattling noise kept on.

The rattling noise cut off, and the roar faded and became a bee-buzz again and the bee-buzz died away in the sky. There were no more crashes, and no more screams. There was only the rolling thunder overhead, that never stopped.

Old Tom got down from his seat, and went away into the dark. The old woman sat very still, and all the kids sat very still, and nobody moved. After awhile the old man was back, and he was climbing up again to the truck driver's seat.

"Well?" Helen asked, so low Dick could hardly hear her.

"None," Tom said. "Not one of them all. We're the only ones left. If we hadn't turned in here--" He didn't finish.

"I guess," Helen said. "I guess God is still listening, up there above the sound of the guns." And then she said, "Where do we go from here?"

"There's a smashed signpost back there, where this road turns off. One of the boards on it reads, 'To Johnson's Quarry.' Do you remember, Helen, my heading a committee once that tried to stop the Johnson Granite Company from cutting down a Mountain? They were defacing the landscape, you recall, and we wanted to preserve the beauties of Nature for posterity."

He laughed. It wasn't pretty, that laugh. "We failed. Recently I heard that they had blasted away almost the entire base of the Mountain, leaving only a narrow ramp by which their trucks could reach their camp at the top. There are probably quarters for the laborers up there, perhaps some supplies. The Mountain, as I remember, is thickly wooded and there's a possibility we may be safely enough concealed there, at least for a time."

"If only we can get through to it."

"We can try. This is a State Park we are in. There are woods almost all the way, and nothing to attract enemy patrols." The truck started running again.

(Dikar's dream blurred.)

The thunder faded out of it, and the dark, and there was sunlight, with green trees, and a wide cleared space with two long houses each side of it, with cots and a warless house at one end in which there were big stoves, and a lot of tables. There were a Bunch of little kids and there were the two Old Ones.

The Old Ones made the kids work. Helen made the Girls make beds and cook and things like that. Tom made the Boys go down the road up which the truck came that first night and hammer deep holes into the hill of rock on top of which the road climbed up to where the trees were. When Tom thought the holes were deep enough he would put fat white sticks into them that he got out of a big red box they had found where the road started to climb up, and little, silvery things on top of the sticks.

When it would begin to get dark, they would all eat, and then the Old Ones would make the Bunch all sit around and they would tell them things.

They called this a Council. At the first Council the two Old Ones told the Bunch a lot of things they should do, and they should not do, and these were the Rules. The Old Ones said Marilee should be Boss of the Girls, and they said Dick should be Boss of the Boys, and of the whole Bunch.

Every morning one of the Boys would climb up high in a tree and watch all day if anybody would come out of the woods on the other side of the fields down there, where Tom and the Boys were working.

The Boys took turns doing this. One day (and this is where Dikar's dream got clear again) Dikar was sitting on top of the tree. The Boys had got through making the holes yesterday, and they weren't down there any more. They were in the front of the house where they slept, and Tom was teaching them how to make bows and arrows. The Girls were in front of their house and Helen was teaching them how to make baskets out of twigs from the bushes in the woods.

Dick was looking at the black smoke, way far off in the sky, that had been there all the time since they came here. He thought about a new Rule the Old Ones had made at Council last night, a Rule they said was most important of all. "You must not go out of the woods," the Rule said. "You must not go near the edge of the Drop."

Wondering why the Old Ones had made that rule, Dick looked down at the edge of the Drop, and at the place where the road climbed up and over it. His eyes went along the road, and across the fields, and he saw someone come out of the woods across there.

The someone looked very little, way down there, but Dick could see he had a kind of dark-green uniform on, and that his face was yellow. Then another one and another one came out of the woods. These were in green too, but their faces were black, and they had guns. All of a sudden there were a lot of them.

Dick yelled down, "Coo-eee! Coo-eee!" and when Tom looked up at him Dick pointed down at the men in the green uniforms and held up his spread fingers and wagged them to show Tom how many there were.

Tom started running into the woods, and then he came out on the other side of them, where the road came up over the edge of the Drop, and he was running down the road. And then Helen was running after him, and Tom saw her. Tom yelled something and she stopped, but she didn't go back.

Tom had a little hammer in his hand.

Dick heard a crack, like a twig breaking, and he looked down and down, and across the fields, and he saw that the men in green had their guns up to their shoulders, and he saw a little white puff of smoke floating away from one of them. Then he saw white puffs come out of all the guns.

Dick looked back at Tom, and just then Tom fell down, but he didn't stop. He was crawling down the road, and Helen was running down it now, running fast.

A lot of cracks came to Dick's ear, and across the fields the air was full of the little white puffs. On the road Helen caught up with Tom and was lifting him up, and then he was leaning on her and the two of them were running down again.

The men in green started running across the fields, stopping every couple of steps to shoot at Tom and Helen, but the Old Ones got down to the bottom of the road, and around inside of where the road started to climb up out of the fields, and the men in green stopped shooting because they couldn't see them any more, but they kept on running.

Dick could see the Old Ones. They were standing near the rocky wall of the hill the road climbed on, Helen's arm around Tom, and the first of the men in green came around to where he could see them.

Tom lifted his little hammer and hit the rock with it. A cloud of dust hid the Old Ones, and Dick heard a boom, and then there was another boom, and another, and one so loud it filled the whole world. The hill the road climbed on leaned away from the rest of the Mountain, and it started to fall.

It fell slowly at first, and then faster and faster, down on where the Old Ones were, and on the men in green, and the noise was so loud Dick couldn't hear any noise at all, and the air was so full of dust it was like night.

The whole Mountain shook, and the tree shook so hard Dick had to grab hold of it to keep from being shaken and his hands started to slip, and...

(Dikar woke.)

Chapter VI: SHADOWS AT SUNRISE

Dikar lay in his cot, his eyes still closed, remembering his dream, fitting the things it had shown him into the things he knew, seeing how it explained a lot that had always puzzled him.

It explained the Rule that no fire must ever be made except with wood so dry that it would burn without smoke, and the Rule that no fire must ever burn at night except the big Fire on the Fire Stone, and why the big Fire was set not in the center of the space between the Boys' House and the Girls' House but at one end, where it was hidden from the sky by the spreading leafy top of the giant oak. It explained the Rule that when there was a noise in the sky like a bee buzzing, everyone must run into the Houses or into the woods and stay very still until the sound was gone.

But most of all it explained the Must-Not about going out of the edge of the woods, about going to the edge of the Drop.

They were down there, in the woods across the space of tumbled stones at the bottom of the Drop, beneath which the Old Ones lay. Dressed in green, with black faces and yellow faces. They were in the woods, and in all the far country Dikar could see when he climbed the tall tree, if They saw any of the Bunch come to the top of the Drop and so found out that the Bunch lived on the Mountain, They would come and do to the Bunch what, in his dream, They did to all the kids on that terrible night in the Long-Ago.

Dikar knew now how the Bunch had come to the Mountain, and he knew now that the Bunch could not always stay here on the Mountain. Some day he must lead the Bunch down the Drop, down into the far, green country that stretched away, fold on fold, to meet the sky. And now Dikar was glad that he was Boss of the Bunch, so that he would lead them--

But after this morning he might be no longer Boss!

Dikar remembered that he must fight Tomball over who should be Boss, and he remembered what Tomball had done and what Tomball had said last night, between dream and dream. Dikar threw off his blanket and leaped from his cot, and all down the length of the Boys' House bronzed forms leaped from the cots, and curtains were raised, and the sun streamed in.

But the Boys did not laugh in the sun, and they did not laugh and play jokes on one another as they ran, behind Dikar, out through the door in the wall away from the Girls' House, and through the woods to where a stream leaped from a ledge overhead into a pool below, and ran brawling out of the pool as if eager to reach the edge of the Drop and leap again over it, and smash itself on the tumbled rocks below.

The Boys did not shout as they sprang after Dikar into the icy pool, and none swam near him, and none joined him when he climbed on the stone where the stream came down, and stood there, letting the stream batter him.

But when tingling with the cold of the waters, with the lash of the spray, Dikar ran back through the woods to the Boys' House, little Jimlane came up to run beside him.

"Dikar," Jimlane panted. "Oh, Dikar. They're sayin Tomball is sure to beat you. They're sayin he's too strong for you. An' a lot are sayin it's a good thing, that they're tired of you being Boss, and that when Tomball is Boss we won't have to work all the time, an' we'll have more time for Games, an' for--an' for playin' with the Girls."

Dikar ran along, and from his lithe limbs the drops spattered, shining in the sun, and under his yellow beard his jaw muscles hardened, but he did not speak.

"An' Tomball says he's goin' to fix me when he's Boss," Jimlane whimpered. "An' I'm afraid, Dikar. I'm awful afraid."

Dikar looked down at the little fellow, and he saw the frightened eyes in the pimply face, and the gray, quivering lips.

"Don't worry, kid," he grunted. "Tomball won't win." But Dikar wasn't sure.

Somehow Brekfes was over, and the Bunch was gathered in a circle in the space between the Houses, the Girls on one side and the Boys on the other, and Marilee sat in the Boss's Seat beneath the giant oak, her brown hair still unbraided, mantling her, her small face color-drained. Dikar stood before her, and Tomball stood by his side, and Marilee was speaking.

"You fight," Marilee's clear, sweet voice said, "over who shall be Boss of the Bunch, an' the Bunch will obey as Boss the one who wins. You fight with bare fists, an' you fight fair. You begin when I say the word, you end when one is beaten." Her brown eyes were on Dikar's, and her eyes told Dikar that he must not be beaten. "That is all."

Dikar turned away and walked toward one end of the cleared space about which the Bunch stood murmuring. The grass was cool under his bare feet, and springy.

Marilee had ordered it carefully raked, so that there would be no branches to trip the fighters, and no small stones to bruise them if they fell. Many twigs and leaves and small stones had been raked out of the grass, and so calm was Dikar that he even noted how the stones had been put in a great circle to mark the bounds of the space in which he must fight, and how just beyond the circle the Boys and Girls stood tight-packed.

Dikar came to the end of the space, and turned, and across the space he saw Tomball turning. Fredalton was whispering something in Tomball's ear, and Tomball nodded, grinning with his thick lips.

"Fight!" Marilee cried out.

Dikar started going back toward Tomball, and Tomball came to meet him, half-crouched, his black-stubbled countenance scowling fiercely, great pads of muscle across his shaggy chest, his hairy belly indrawn.

Dikar moved lithely across the raked grass, his beard shining yellow in the sunlight, his limbs dusted with yellow hair.

All at once Tomball was very close, and Tomball's fist struck Dikar's cheek, and Dikar's cheek knotted with the pain of the blow, and his head rocked.

But Dikar's arm jarred with the blow he had landed on Tomball's chest, and then Dikar no longer felt any pain. He stood breast to breast with his enemy, his fisted arms were clubs that pounded the dark face and the hairy body he hated. There was a salt taste in his mouth that was very pleasant, and there was joy in the blows he gave, and joy even in the blows he received.

He made no effort to guard himself from Tomball's blows, nor did Tomball try to guard himself from Dikar's. They fought like the beasts fight, eager only to hurt, eager only to pound the other to submission.

And over them washed the shouts and the screams of the Bunch.

Into a red haze that was all that was left of his vision, Dikar flung arms so heavy he barely could lift them. Somewhere in the haze was a darker bulk that moved about, and it was at this Dikar flung his arms. Sometimes Dikar found it, more often not, and when he missed the weight of his arms pulled him off balance, and he would start to fall, and somehow not fall.

Sometimes Dikar would be struck, out of the haze, and he would sway on his legs that had no strength in them, and almost go down; but he did not let himself because he must not, though he no longer knew why.

And out of the haze came an endless thunder of shouting.

Dikar pawed once again at the vague bulk that was his enemy, and missed, and swayed, and in that instant the bulk struck him, and Dikar's legs folded, and he sank. His sight cleared, and lurching at him came Tomball's red-bathed body, Tomball's distorted face. Somehow Dikar threw a heavy arm at Tomball and struck him, so that as Dikar settled to the ground Tomball staggered back.

Tomball did not fall, but was steadying. Dikar, sprawled on the grass, knew that when Tomball had steadied he would come in again to finish Dikar, and Dikar did not care--

"Dikar!" he heard a high, clear voice above the endless roar. "No!" Marilee! "No, Dikar. No!" And suddenly Dikar cared desperately that Tomball was beating him, and his fallen body trembled as he tried to get up, but he had no strength--

"Oh up, Dikar," a voice squeaked, and Jimlane's pimpled face swam over Dikar, close to Dikar's face, and Jimlane's hand was tugging at Dikar's hand to pull him up. "You can lick him now, Dikar." Dikar came up with the pull of Jimlane's hand, Jimlane's fingers closing Dikar's hand into a fist. And Tomball, grinning through the red that masked him, lurched in to beat Dikar down again.

Dikar lifted a heavy arm and flung it at Tomball, and Dikar's fist fell on Tomball's brow. Tomball crumpled and lay, a still heap on the grass, with Dikar swaying above him, arms hanging by his sides, in his ears a deafening roar.

And out of the roar came Marilee, her cheeks rosy, her eyes alight. "Oh, Dikar."

That was all she said, but Dikar straightened, feeling the strength flow back into him, hearing the hurrays of the Bunch clear in his ears, knowing the hurrays were for him.

Marilee took hold of Dikar's wrist to lift his arm and cry him the winner.

The color fled from her cheeks and from her lips, and the light went from her eyes as they fell to Dikar's still-fisted hand.

Dikar's eyes went down to where Marilee's eyes looked, and they saw what Marilee's eyes saw. In his fist that had pounded Tomball down was clenched a stone, and there was blood on the stone, Tomball's blood.

Dikar knew now why Jimlane had closed that hand into a fist, why Jimlane, tugging him up, had said, "You can lick him now." Jimlane had--

"Dikar," Marilee sobbed. "Oh, Dikar," and then Marilee was lifting Dikar's arm so that all might see what was in Dikar's fist, and the hurrays stopped, and there was a throbbing hush.

Marilee's voice was loud and clear in that terrible hush. "I cry Dikar no fair. I cry Tomball the winner of the fight. I cry Tomball Boss of the Bunch."

Marilee threw Dikar's arm from her, and it was as if she threw Dikar from her, and she turned away. Dikar thought he heard Marilee sob, but she walked away from him head high, back proud. Dikar's mouth moved but no words came out of it, and he knew there was no use of his saying that he had not known the stone was in his fist.

A strange, low sound came from the throats of the Bunch, and it grew louder. A stone struck Dikar on the shoulder, and another, and Dikar saw that all the Bunch was bending to pick up stones, lifting them to throw them at him.

"Run!" Jimlane screamed. "Run, Dikar," and Dikar turned and ran, the stones falling about him; ran, staggering, straight at the hating faces of the Bunch, and the Bunch opened a path for him, and Dikar ran into the woods, the stones spattering about him.

Dikar ran in the dim woods till he fell, and he crawled till he could crawl no longer, and he lay still in the woods, and a sick nothingness took him.

Chapter VII: THE FAR GREEN LAND

Dikar lived in the woods as the beasts live, and as the beasts' hurts heal so did his. He set snares for the rabbits and the birds that were so plentiful in the woods, and cooked them over his little fires. He found sharp-edged stones, and used them as knives to make a bow for himself, twisting and drying the gut of the rabbit for string, and he made arrows, feathering them, and a quiver out of the bark of a birch.

He hunted with his bow and arrows, and he lay long hours on the mossy floor of a clearing near the top of the Mountain, waiting the little creatures of the forest play, looking sometimes into the great, beautiful eyes of the deer peering out at him from the brush, watching the birds chirp on the tree boughs above him.

It was spring and always the small woods creatures played two by two, and the deer went two by two, and the birds; and seeing this, Dikar would think of Marilee.

Yes, Dikar's hurts healed but the ache within him did not heal.

Sometimes Dikar would climb to the topmost branch of a tall tree that stood on the very top of the Mountain. He would stay there till dark, gazing at the far green land that stretched, fold on fold, away to where the sky came down to meet it. He would think of what he had dreamed the last night he was Boss, and of his thought that some day he would lead the Bunch down into that pleasant land, and his heart would be heavy within him.

Spring warmed into summer, and summer deepened.

Every night Dikar would slip through the woods till he came to where the trees were black against the red glow of the Fire, and he could crouch behind the trunk of some tree and look out into the space between the Houses. He dared not do this till just before Bed-Time, when he knew most of the Bunch were in the Houses and there was little danger of one coming upon him.

Dikar would hear the drone of their Now-I-lay-mes, and he would kneel and say his own with them. With his palms together and his eyes closed, it was almost as if he knelt by his own cot in the Boys' House, almost as if he were still one of the Bunch.

After his Now-I-lay-me was said, Dikar would stay there, listening to the talk of the Boys or the Girls whose turn it was to tend the Fire.

What Dikar heard made his heart heavy. As he had feared, Tomball was letting the Bunch break Rule after Rule, was favoring his pals and laying double work on those he did not like, was shirking many of the little things that Dikar knew were needed if the Bunch was to be warm and comfortable and safe when the cold came, and the snow.

One of the Rules Tomball allowed to be broken was the Rule that none must leave his cot after Bed-Time. Dikar would see Girls come out of the Girls' House and slip off into the woods, and he would see Boys do the same. Often they had not yet come back when Dikar tired of watching had gone back to the shelter he had woven for himself out of twigs. One thing troubled Dikar above all others. He never saw Marilee tending the Fire. That she was never one of those who went into the woods after Bed-Time pleased him, but it was strange that her turn never came to tend the Fire.

One night Dikar heard the reason. He'd heard that, the day he was stoned, Marilee had said that she no longer would be Boss of the Girls, that she had made Bessalton Boss in her place on the promise that she would free Marilee of the duty of tending to the Fire, or of any other duty that would take her away from the other Girls. And that this was because Tomball wanted Marilee to go into the woods with him, and Marilee feared him.

Dikar's throat grew thick when he heard this. Growling, he rose from his haunches to stride out into the light of the Fire and call out Tomball to fight him, not with fists, but with bows and arrows, and knives, in a fight to the death. His rage blinding him, Dikar was caught in a bush he did not see, and before he could get free he heard something else from the tongue of Jimlane, who was tending the Fire with Billthomas and had spoken of Marilee and Tomball.

"If Dikar was Boss again, things would be different, but there's no chance of that, because the minute he shows up the Bunch will stone him again, the way Tomball was ordered, and he would not get away again."

Dikar went cold, remembering the way the stones had spattered about him, and was very still in the bush.

"The Bunch wouldn't stone Dikar," Billthomas said, very low and looking about with frightened eyes, "if you spoke out. Tomball's orders or no, they would not stone Dikar if they knew that it wasn't Dikar's fault he fought no fair."

"I dare not tell them." Jimlane's eyes went big in his white face. "You remember how I told you, an' how you said yourself the Bunch would stone me if I told."

"Yes, I remember."

"Well, I couldn't rest, an' I went to Tomball an' told him, an' Tomball beat me till I could hardly walk. That was the time I said I fell into a hole in the woods, you remember. An' after Tomball beat me, he told me that if I said a word to anyone else he would kill me, an' he would kill anyone I told."

"He did!" Now there was fear in Billthomas's eyes, too, and in his face. "You should not have told me, Jimlane--If Tomball finds out I know--" His voice was still low, but there was a scream in it.

"If only," Jimlane sobbed, "Dikar could some way come back and protect me while I told the Bunch--"

"What's the use of all the ifs?" Billthomas broke in. "Tomball's made sure Dikar would be killed before you had a chance to say anythin'. The best thing we can do is forget about Dikar, like everyone else has."

"Yes," Jimlane whispered. "I guess so. Dikar isn't one of the Bunch any more an' he will never be again."

"Never again," Billthomas agreed.

Now indeed Dikar, rigid in the dark, knew that he was disowned by his kind. He must live out his life alone, a wild beast in the woods--

And then, perhaps from Some unseen Presence in the close-crowding dark, perhaps from within Dikar, a thought came to him. He was no longer one of the Bunch, and so he was not bound by the Rules of the Bunch. He was not bound by the Must-Nots that the Bunch must obey. There was something for him to do, and no Rule to say that he must not.

He drifted off into the darkness, silent as a shadow. But there was no sleep for Dikar that night.

All that night, and all the next day, Dikar was busy, cutting down long vines from the trees, testing each one for strength. He plaited the vines, never stopping, never resting, till by nightfall he had made a rope long enough for his need.

When dark came Dikar hung his quiver of arrows over one shoulder, and he hung the great coil of green rope over the other shoulder, and he followed the sound of a stream through the black forest till he came to where the woods ended and there was a little space between the edge of the woods and the edge of the Drop, where the stream leaped out into the night.

Here Dikar paused, and laid the rope down, and passed its end around the great trunk of a tree that grew beside the stream, and fastened the rope with many knots, and pulled on it with all his strength to make certain that the knots would hold.

Dikar bent, then, and lifted the coil of rope that he had made from the vines, and carried it to the edge of the Drop, and let it fall into the dark.

At his feet the rope tautened, and quivered, and below him there was the sound of its unwinding coil thumping against the high, sheer rock of the Drop, and the sound of the stream's waters, falling down and down into sightless blackness. And then the rope at Dikar's feet was no longer quivering, so that he knew the coil was all unwound.

Dikar bent again, and lifted the rope, and moved it over so that it lay in the water where the stream leaped out over the Drop, so that when the sun rose again, all the length of the rope that hung down the Drop would be hidden behind the falling waters.

Then, without pause, Dikar had hold of the rope with his hands, and he was over the edge of the Drop, and the icy waters were rushing about him, were battering him, were fighting to break loose his hold and send him hurtling down into the dizzy dark to smash on the rocks below.

Dikar could not see and he could not breathe, and his hands were slipping on the wet rope. He caught a leg around the rope, and slid. He could breathe again because he hung between the rushing waters and the rocky face of the Drop.

Dikar went down and down, endlessly, down into the black and dizzy darkness, down to where the great stones lay tumbled, and the waters raged between them, and the Old Ones slept.

The sun was high in the sky, but Dikar was concealed in the leafy shadow of a treetop where he lay outstretched along a thick bough. He was peering at a sight that made of his skin an icy, prickling sheath for his body.

The tree was at the other end of the woods through which Dikar had loped after finally crossing the belt of immense stones that lay about the Mountain where the Bunch lived. Some time in the night, sounds ahead, and moving lights, had alarmed him, and he had climbed the tree to wait for what the day would show him.

Dikar, as comfortable there as on his mossy bed in the Mountain forest, had slept longer than he intended. Into his ears had come the sound of marching feet, and he had thought himself back in his dream of the night before his fight with Tomball. But his eyes had opened and the marching feet had still sounded in his ears, and then Dikar had seen those whose feet made the sound.

The tree in which Dikar wakened was at the edge of the woods and the edge of a great, flat field. Not far from the tree wires stretched, one above the other, twice Dikar's height. Fastened to thin poles, the wires ran away on either hand as far as Dikar could see, and the wires were thick with long, sharp thorns that would tear a Boy's flesh to bits.

Beyond this set of wires was another set just like them, as high and as wickedly barbed, and between the two sets of wires stood, far apart, figures out of Dikar's dream.

They were dressed in green like the men in the dream who had run across the fields that now were covered with great stones, shooting at the Old Ones. Like those, their faces and their hands were black, and like those they carried the shiny sticks that Dikar now remembered were called "guns."

But the sound of marching feet came from inside the second fence. A great crowd of people were marching out of some long, low houses that were very much like the Bunch's Houses. Just as Dikar spied them, they stopped marching and stood in a long, straight line in front of the houses.

They were pretty far away, but Dikar could see them, and he could see that they were very thin, and they were dressed in ragged clothes that hung loose on them. He could see that their faces were white, and that their eyes were sunk deep in their heads, and that they were all stooped over as if they were very tired, although it was only early morning.

A voice yelled something, and the white people turned, so that the lines faced Dikar. Dikar saw that the one who had yelled was different. His face was yellow, and he was dressed in green, but there was something different about his green clothes, and he had no gun.

There were other men in green standing around in there. Some of them were black-faced, and some yellow-faced, some had guns and others didn't. One very big one only had green on below his waist, above that he had nothing on. His body was as yellow as his face, and his muscles were bigger than Dikar's muscles, or even Tomball's. He was holding something in one hand. It was long and thin and black. His other hand was against a thick post beside which he stood.

The man in the different green clothes yelled something again, and then Dikar saw two black-faced ones come out of a smaller house to one side, and between them was a white one who was so weak they had to almost carry him. They came to the thick post, and they shoved the white man up against the post with his face to it, and they tied his arms and his legs around it, and then they tore off his clothes above the waist, and stepped away.

The yellow-faced man yelled a lot to the white people. Dikar could hear him, but he couldn't make out what he was saying. When he finished he made a sign with his hand to the big yellow man.

That one lifted the long, thin thing he held, and it looked like a snake. And he lifted it above his head and it straightened out, and then it came down across the back of the white man who was tied to the post. Dikar heard the crack it made, and he saw the red mark across the white man's back.

And the yellow man lifted the thin, snakelike thing again, and brought it down again, and there was another crack, and another red mark across the white man's back.

Dikar was sick, seeing that. And then he wasn't sick. He was mad. He wanted to yell out, "Stop!" but he remembered his dream now, remembered what the guns could do, and he knew that if he yelled the men between the wires would see him and shoot him down.

Crack, Dikar heard, and crack again, and now the back of the man tied to the post was all red, all shining red. But Dikar was on his feet, on the tree branch. He was pulling taut the string of his bow, and an arrow was laid across it.

The big yellow lifted his arm again, but when it fell there was no crack. The big yellow was falling, and the feathers of an arrow were sticking out of his back. Just the feathers.

Dikar didn't see any more, because he was swinging through the treetops, a brown and naked Boy flashing through the tops of the trees, fleeing the death from the guns that he recalled were swifter and farther reaching than any arrow.

Whether the men in green ever thought to look for him in the treetops Dikar never knew.

Far away from the place of the thorny wires, Dikar lay on his belly in the tall grass that covered a hill, and he looked down through the grass at a place where two roads crossed.

There stood a pole, high as a tall tree, but there was no bark on it, no branches nor leaves, and because at its top five or six cross-sticks were fastened, and a lot of wires ran from these cross-pieces to other cross-sticks at the top of another pole far away down one of the roads.

Dikar was looking at a rope that hung taut from one of the cross-sticks at the top of the pole. Dikar was looking at that which weighed down the rope and kept it taut.

The thing swung back and forth, back and forth, very slowly in the wind, and rags fluttered about it in the wind, and the rags were no grayer nor dirtier than the thing was. And Dikar saw that the thing once had been a man.

...Dikar came to a place where there was a House all of rock, and it was three or four times as high as the Boys' House, and ten times as long. The window openings in the wall of this House were very high and very wide.

Dikar saw a lot of people in there, and there were white men and women. These were thin and gray and sunken-eyed as those in the place with the wires, and they were pushing around things piled high with heavy loads, and they were so weak they could push the things only slowly. And there were men in green standing around, and these had little guns hanging at their waists, and they held black, snakelike things like the big yellow one held.

And Dikar saw a white woman stumble and fall, and he saw one of the men in green raise the thing he held and bring it down on her, again and again till, all bloody, she pulled herself up on the thing she had been pushing and started pushing it again.

And the other men in green laughed, but the white people just kept on pushing, all stooped over and weak, their eyes like the eyes of the woman in Dikar's dream who stood in the subway station and said that God was dead.

Dikar went far and wide that day, a brown shadow flitting through the fields and the woods, a silent shadow none saw. Dikar saw many things that day, and the more he saw the heavier his heart grew within him. For Dikar knew that the white-faced men and women were his people and that this green land belonged to them and to him, and that the black men and yellow men were They whom the voice in his dream had said, "have come out of the East to make this world a Hell."

Yes, Dikar saw the Hell they had made ... The sky darkened and the night crept out of the woods, and Dikar lay belly down in tall grass of a field near the woods, head buried in his curled arm, thinking. Last night he had known that he would never return to the Mountain where the Bunch lived, and now he knew that he could not stay in this land that had seemed so pleasant when he had gazed at it from his tall tree in the forest.

Neither there nor here was there place for Dikar. Nowhere was there place for him--

Fingers clutched Dikar's arm, bruising fingers. Dikar rolled over but the fingers held, and there was a growl of words Dikar could not understand, and in the sunless dusk Dikar saw green-clothed legs, and a green-clothed breast, and a black, fierce face goggling at him.

Chapter VIII: IN THE TOMORROW

Dikar kicked at the black man's legs, and he saw the black man's hand dart to the little gun at his waist. Dikar kicked again, wrenched loose, exploded from the ground.

Dikar's one hand caught the little gun, his other smashed into the black, goggling face. Somehow the black man was on the ground and Dikar was atop him, and Dikar was clutching the black throat with one hand while the other was smashing the little gun down on the black man's head, smashing and smashing and smashing.

When Dikar fled into the night-shrouded woods he left behind him something that had legs and a body and arms, but nothing that was anything like a head.

Deep in the woods, Dikar found a little cave. He crawled into this and lay there a long time, shuddering. But after awhile he stirred, and he became aware that he still held in his hands the little gun, and he sat up, his eyes widening with a sudden thought.

Dikar hid the little gun under a pile of rotting leaves, and he went out of the cave and prowled about till he was certain that no one was anywhere within sound of hearing. Then he went back into the cave with certain things he had picked up and he made a fire, and by the light of the fire Dikar studied the little gun until he had made out how it worked.

Satisfied at last, Dikar put out his fire and buried it with wet earth, and left the cave. That night Dikar traveled far and fast, but careful to leave no tracks by which he might be traced.

Dikar was going back to the Mountain, and he must not leave any trail the men in green might follow.

One more night Dikar stole down through the dark forest to the Houses of the Bunch, but this night it was long after Bed-Time that he did so. This night Dikar did not crouch behind a tree, looking out at the Fire, but crept, noiselessly, along the wall of the Boys' House that was away from the Fire till, under a certain window opening, he came to a stop.

Dikar listened, trembling a bit, and all he could hear was the whisper of wind in the trees, and the shrill of insects in the night, and the soft breathing of the sleeping Boys. Dikar lifted, slowly, slowly, till he stood upright. The ground here was banked against the wall so that, standing, Dikar's belly was level with the bottom of the window.

Slowly, he ran his hand over the sill, and touched the curtain of woven withes; and moved it aside. And then he was peering through, and a fleck of red light was dancing on a sleeping face, and the face was rashed with pimples.

Dikar breathed again. He had remembered right. This was Jimlane.

Dikar got his other hand through the window, and then it was tight over Jimlane's mouth, and Jimlane's scared eyes were staring up at Dikar.

"Listen," Dikar breathed. "Listen to me, Jimlane." Dikar spoke so low that barely he could hear himself, but by the look in Jimlane's eyes he knew that Jimlane heard him and understood.

After awhile Dikar stole away, and for the first time since Tomball had challenged him, Dikar was smiling.

There was green all about Dikar, the dancing, leafy green of the top of the giant oak in which he had spent the rest of that night. He was still smiling when he awoke, but peering through the leaves at the Bunch where they chattered, cleaning up after Brekfes, there was a flutter of some small muscle in the tautness of his belly.

Across the space between the House Dikar spied Marilee talking with Bessalton. Dikar saw how thin Marilee had grown, and how wan her little face, and how her fingers plucked endlessly at her short skirt of plaited grasses, and Dikar's smile faded.

Tomball strode up to the two Girls, black-stubbled as ever. His belly was overlaid with fat, but it was still shaggy with hair, and Tomball's grin was still leering.

Tomball put a hand on Marilee's arm, and Marilee shrank away from him. Under Dikar's yellow beard little muscles knotted to ridge his jaw, and there was a growl in his throat.

Tomball laughed, and then from behind the Boys' House came the loud words of a scrap. "He's mine!" Jimlane's voice piped, and "I say he's mine," squealed the thin voice of Billthomas, and around the corner of the Boys' House the two came, and between them was a half-grown fawn, with a vine wound around its brown neck and trailing, broken, from it.

Jimlane had hold of the fawn's head and Billthomas of its hind legs, and each tugged as if to take it from the other.

"It was caught in my snare," Billthomas piped.

"You lie," Jimlane squealed.

And then Billthomas straightened and cried out. "It's you who lie, Jimlane. I dare you to fight out with me, bare fists, whose snare he was caught in, and whose he shall be."

Tomball's deep-chested laugh came to Dikar's ears, but Jimlane's voice, breaking from squeal to bass and back again to squeal, was answering Billthomas. "You dare me fight whose the fawn shall be?" it said. "Do you cry a fight between us fair?"

And Billthomas: "I cry us equal-matched," and all about were cries of, "Fair. Fair. They're equal-matched!" and the Boys and Girls of the Bunch were running from all over, and crying, "Fight! Let them fight!"

And then the Bunch was crowded in a great circle, and the fawn was tied by the vine about its neck to the Boss's Seat, and Tomball, grinning, was seated in the Boss's Seat, just beneath the oak, and Bessalton was seated beside him, mantled in her black hair, and Jimlane and Billthomas stood before them while Tomball spoke to them.

But Dikar's look was on Marilee where she stood in the crowd, her two long brown braids coming down over her shoulders, her deepening breasts beneath leafy circlets.

Dikar's eyes drank thirstily of Marilee till Tomball was finished speaking and Jimlane and Billthomas were walking slowly, each to their end of the cleared space where they were to fight. Jimlane reached the end of the circle, turned--

The little gun jumped in Dikar's hand, and the fawn, just beneath him dropped, wet-redness streaking the brown neck.

A Girl screamed, high and shrill, and then Dikar was shouting: "Stay where you are or I'll kill each of you as I've killed the fawn. I'll kill the first one that moves."

"Dikar!" Marilee cried, and then she was silent, and all were silent and unmoving, the Boys and the Girls in their jammed circle, Tomball in the Boss's Seat.

"Jimlane," Dikar shouted down into that hush, "tell the Bunch how the stone came into my hand with which I struck Tomball when we fought who should be Boss."

Jimlane, white of face and big of eye, but standing straight, cried out. "I put the stone in Dikar's hand, when he fell at my feet."

"Did I know you put the stone in my hand?" Dikar shouted from the tree.

"You did not know, Dikar. You were blinded with your own blood, an' numbed with Tomball's blows, an' you did not know there was a stone in your hand."

A murmuring ran around the circle, and a growl, and Dikar saw that the Bunch did not quite believe that he had not known he was striking Tomball with a stone though they had agreed to fight bare fist.

"Jimlane," Dikar shouted. "Have you ever told this thing to anyone?"

"I told it to Tomball," Jimlane cried, "and Tomball beat me for saying that you did not know you fought no fair, an' Tomball said that if I spoke to anyone else he would kill me, an' kill the one to whom I spoke of it."

"You lie!" Tomball shouted, starting from seat. "You lie, dumby!" Jimlane screamed with terror of Tomball, but Dikar's shout beat down Jimlane's scream.

"Back!" Dikar shouted. "Back to your seat, Tomball, or you die." And Tomball went pasty white under his black stubble, and he slumped down in his seat.

And Dikar leaped out from the oak bough on which he stood, and came down, spring-legged, in the clear space around which the Bunch was jammed, and held aloft the little gun.

"This is the thing that kills," he shouted. "Without it I cannot kill," and then he flung the little gun from him, flung it hard so that it went up on the roof of the Boys' House and stayed there.

"Now I cannot kill," Dikar shouted. "No more than any of you."

"Stone him," Tomball yelled. "Stone him, Bunch. He is none of us and we will have none of him." And Dikar saw the Bunch stoop to pluck up stones. Spraddle-legged, bronze-skinned in the sun, he saw this, and his heart within him died, but he would not move.

"No!" It was a high, wild cry in his ear, and it came from Marilee, and Marilee's was beside Dikar. "I cry no fair. I cry the Bunch no fair, all of you against this one."

"He fought no fair," Tomball shouted, "and so has no right to call for fairness. Stand aside, Marilee, and let the Bunch stone him."

"I will not stand aside," Marilee answered. "Be you Boss or not, till you tell the Bunch why you said you would kill Jimlane if he told his tale to anyone, an' would kill anyone he told the tale to. If you still thought Dikar had fought no fair, why were you afraid to let the Bunch hear Jimlane's tale and judge for themselves?"

Now Tomball's little eyes seemed to have grown even smaller, and his mouth was drawn very tight.

"She's right," someone yelled. "Why, Tomball, did you not let us judge for ourselves?"

"Jimlane lies," Tomball answered. "He never told me this tale, and I never--"

"It is you who lie," Dikar cut in. "I say you lie, Tomball. I cry you a liar, Tomball, an' I dare you to fight me whether you lie or not. I cry that I fought fair, an' I dare you to fight me whether I fought fair or not. I dare you to fight me who shall be Boss of the Bunch. I cry us equal-matched, an' if you refuse to fight me I will cry you a liar and yellow an' not fit to be Boss of the Bunch an' not fit to be one of the Bunch. Will you fight, Tomball, bare fists?"

There was only one answer Tomball could make. "I fight you bare fists, Dikar. I fight you here an' now."

And then they were fighting, were clubbing at each other with fisted arms, lips drawn back from white teeth, eyes hating. But Dikar was gaunt and hard-bitten, and toughened by the life he had led since he'd been stoned from the Bunch, and Tomball was fat and slow, and short-winded, and so the fight did not last long. Dikar beat Tomball down, laid him rolling at his feet, and there was scarcely a mark on Dikar when he stood above his beaten enemy and heard the shouts of the Bunch.

"Hurray for Dikar. Hurray for the Boss. Hurray and hurray and hurray."

Dikar scarcely heard the hurrays. He was peering about for Marilee and he saw her, and he motioned commandingly for her to come to him. She came to him, her white and slender body shining in the sun, her eyes shining more brightly than the sun, and then she was beside Dikar, and Dikar's arm was around her, and he was holding her close to his side.

Under the thunder of the hurrays, Dikar spoke to Marilee. "Marilee," he said. "In the time I have been alone in the woods I have learned many things--an' one of the things I have learned is that each creature has his mate, the birds an' the small beasts of the woods, an' the deer. I learned that He who made all things meant this to be so, an' meant that we too, each of us, shall have his mate. Marilee, I want you for my mate." He was looking down into her face, and now he waited, with a tightness growing in him that was both keen happiness and fear.

Marilee's red lips spoke. "Oh, Dikar. This that you have learned only now, I have known always. Dikar, always I have wanted you for my mate."

A great joy leaped within Dikar, and he raised his hand and roared, "Shut up! Shut up, all of you." And the hurrays died away, and the Bunch was hushed, and Dikar was talking into that smiling hush.

"There are many things I have to say to you, an' many Rules I shall have to change. All this will come later. Just now I have something to say, but not to you, though I wish all the Bunch to hear it, all the Bunch, an' Another."

Then, in that hush, Dikar turned to the giant oak, and to the forest beyond the oak, and his voice was low, and slow, and awed.

"You Whose voice is the whisper of the wind in the trees, an' the ripple of the water in the streams an' the song of the insects in the night! You, Who watch over us by day, an' by night! You to Whom we say our Now-I-lay-mes at Bed Time! Sir! Look upon me and upon this Girl, an' hear me. In Your sight an' Your hearin' I take this Girl to be my mate, an' none other than this Girl, an' to You an' to her I promise that all my life I will take care of her an' let no harm come near her. I promise that all my life she shall be bone of my bone an' flesh of my flesh, all my life an' all her life, an' always an' always."

"Hear me, Sir!" Marilee's clear, young voice rang out. "I shall be this Boy's mate, an' none other's, an' he shall be bone of my bone, an' flesh of my flesh, always an' always."

And it seemed to Dikar that a soft hand stroked his hair, though it might have been the wind. How could it be the wind, though, that said in his ear, in sweet, low tones, "The Lord bless you, my son, an' the Lord bless my daughter."

Dikar had climbed to the topmost branch of the tallest tree in the forest, and Marilee had climbed there with him. For a long time, clasped in each other's arms, they had gazed out on the green land that stretched, fold on fold, to the sky, while Dikar told Marilee of his dream that was not a dream, and of the terrible things he had seen down there.

"Some day, Marilee," Dikar ended. "I shall lead the Bunch down there. I have to, because down there is the America of which the man spoke, an' this is the he talked about, an' we are the children of yesterday who will reconquer those green and pleasant fields for democracy, and liberty, and freedom."

And all at once there was a light shining on the land down there, a great and golden light that cast no shadows.

THE END

WHEN THE SLEEPERS WOKE

Only two small groups of people—enemies—survive the vast desolation of the Final War.

"Prepare for battle!" The command crackled in Allan Dane's helmet. "Enemy approaching from southeast! Squadron commanders execute plan two!" Allan settled back in the seat of his one-man helicopter, his broad frame rendered even bulkier by the leather suit that incased it. He was tensed, but quiescent. Action would be first joined sixty miles away, and his own squadron was in reserve.

Over New York and its bay the American air fleet was in motion. Suddenly movement ceased, and the formation froze. Ten flying forts were each the apex of a far-spread cone, axis horizontal, whose body was the fanned back-ranging of its squadron of a thousand helicopter planes. The cones bristled oceanward from the sea-margin of New York, their points a fifty-mile arc of defiance, their bases tangent to one another, almost touching the ground at their lower edges, then circling upward for ten thousand feet. From van to rear each formation was five miles in length.

Behind and above, the main body of the fleet sloped in echeloned ranks, hiding the threatened city with an impenetrable terraced wall of buzzing helios and massive forts. Up, back, up, back, the serried masses reached, till the rearmost were twenty-five thousand feet aloft. And farther behind, unmoving on their six-mile level, were the light 'copters of the reserve. Dane gazed down that tremendous vista to the far-off front line, and swore softly. Just his luck to be out of the scrap: the enemy would never penetrate to these northern out-skirts of New York.

"Men of the fleet!" General Huntington's voice sounded from his flagship, the Washington. Somehow its gruffness overrode the mechanical quality of the intra-fleet radio transmission. Almost it seemed he was there in the tiny cabin. "Reports have at this moment been received that our attack fleets have been everywhere successful. Our rocket ships have destroyed Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Odessa, Peiping and Cape Town, and are now ranging inland through enemy territory."

Even through the double leather of his helmet a roar came to Allan. He felt his craft vibrate to the exultant cheers of the fleet. His own mouth was open, and his throat rasping....

"But"—the single syllable choked the surge of sound—"London, Paris, and Berlin have fallen to the enemy." The words thudded in the pilot's ear-phones. "San Francisco is being attacked. Communication with New Orleans has failed. The enemy are in sight of Buenos Aires—" The general broke off, and Allan sensed dully that there was other news, news that he dared not give the fleet.

The gruff voice changed. "Men of the fleet, New York is in our charge. The enemy is upon us, the battle is commencing. The issue is in your hands."

Pat on his last word, a dark cloud spread along the south-eastern horizon. From the spear-heads of the cone formations great green beams shot out across the sea. Orange flame flared in answer, all along the black bank that was the enemy fleet. Where the green beams struck the orange blinked out, and the blue of sky showed through. And the American ships were as yet untouched. A great shout rose to Allan's lips—that they had the range on the enemy, and the attack defeated before it was well begun.

But was it? Swift as the American rays scythed destruction along the enemy line, the gaps filled and lethal orange leaped out again. Now the black cloud was piling up, was rising till it was a towering curtain against the sky. On it came, like some monstrous tidal wave. Great rents were torn through it by the stabbing beams of the flying forts, holes where ships and men had been whiffed into dust by the hundred. But the attack came on.

Now all the great defensive cones burst into an emerald blaze as the smaller ships loosed their bolts. And from the terraced slope of the supporting fleet a hundred steel ovoids lumbered forward to meet the threat. All the vast space between the hosts, mountain-high from the sea's surface, was filled with dazzling light, now green, now orange, as the conflicting beams crossed and mingled. There were gaps in the advancing curtain that did not fill, but the defending cones were melting away, were disappearing, were gone.

"Flight ZLX prepare for action!" Dane's eyes flicked over the gages, checking in routine precaution. He started when he saw the V of the chronometer's hands. Only six minutes had passed since the battle's start—it seemed hours. And already the reserve was being called on! He was suddenly cold. Out there, over the bay, the enemy forces had ceased their advance. The American first line cones were gone—true enough, but the support fleet was still intact. Some new element had entered the battle, visible as yet only in the Washington's powerful television view-screens. The flight adjutant's voice again snapped a command:

"Direction vertical. Thirty thousand feet. Full speed. Go!"

Dane jerked home his throttle. The battle shot down, and his seat thrust up against him. Something hurtled past, blurred by the speed of its descent. The plane rocked to a sudden detonation, and Allan fought to steady it. Then he had reached the commanded height. At sixty thousand feet the helio vanes were useless, only the power of the auxiliary rocket-tubes maintained his altitude.

"Formation B. Engage the enemy!" came the order.

They were just ahead, a dozen giant craft, torpedo-shaped and steel-incased, the scarlet fire of their gas blasts holding them poised steady in their fifty-mile-long line. From curious swellings that broke the clean lines of their under-bodies black spheres were dropping in steady streams. Allan knew then whence came the crash that had rocked his ship as she rose. These were bombs, huge bombs, charged with heaven alone knew what Earth-shaking explosive. They were catapulting down, an iron death hail, on the fleet and the city twelve miles below!

The enemy's strategy was clear. While his main fleet was engaging the American defense in a frontal attack, these huge rocket-bombers had looped unseen through the stratosphere to this point of vantage. The planes that had leaped to this new menace swept toward the bombers in three parallel lines, above, to right and left of them. Allan's plane leaping to position at the very end of one long line. The three leaders reached the first rocket-ship, and their green beams shot out. In that instant the enemy craft seemed to explode in intense blue light. Then the awful dazzle was gone. The rocket ship was there, just as before, but the American helio-planes were gone, were wiped out as though they had never been. The next trio, and the next, rushed up. Again and again came that flash of force, annihilating them. Superbly the tiny gnats that were the American planes plunged headlong at the hovering Leviathan of the air and were whiffed into nothingness. Sixty brave men were dancing motes of cosmic dust before the shocked commander could sound the recall.

The helicopter squadron curved away, still keeping its ordered lines, but orange flame leaped out from all twelve of the enemy vessels, orange flame that caught them, that ran along their ranks and sent them hurtling Earthward—blackened corpses in blazing coffins. "Abandon ships!" The adjutant's last order crisped, coldly metallic, soldierly as ever. In the next breath, as Allan reached for the lever that would open the trapdoor beneath him, he saw the command-ship plunge down, a flaring comet.

Above Allan Dane, the twenty-foot silk of his parachute bellied out in the denser air of the lower heights. His respirator tube was still in his mouth, and the double, vacuum-interlined leather of his safety suit had kept him from freezing in the spatial cold of the stratosphere. He looked south.

All the proud thousands of the defense fleet were gone, blown to fragments by the time bombs from above. The city was hidden in a thick, muddy-yellow fog. "Queer," the thought ran through his brain, "that there should be fog in mid-afternoon, under a blazing sun." Then he saw them, the circling black ships of the enemy, trailing behind them long wakes of the drab yellow vapor that drifted heavily down to shroud New York with—gas!

Allan felt nauseated as he imagined a fleeting picture of the many-leveled city, of its mist-darkened streets with swarming myriads of slumped bodies clogging the conveyor belts that still moved because no hand was left to shut them off; of women and children, and aged or crippled men strewn in tortured, horrible attitudes in all the roof-parks, in their homes, in every nook and cranny of the murdered city. He looked beneath his drifting descent and saw roads that were rivers, alive with every manner of fleeing conveyance, and he groaned, knowing that in moments the pursuing ships would send down their lethal mist to put an end to that futile flight.

Sugar Loaf Mountain rose toward him. At its very summit was a clearing among the trees, and, incongruously motionless in that world where every one was rushing from inescapable death, a man stood calmly there, gazing up at him. Allan screamed down to him! "Run! You fool. Run or the gas will get you!"

Of course the man could not hear that cry, but one tiny arm rose and pointed south. Allan followed the direction of the gesture and saw a black plane veering toward him. Then orange flared from it, though it was distant, and a wave of intolerable heat enveloped him. Something cried within him: "Too far—he's too far off to kill me with his beam!" Then he knew no more.

From New York, from devastated San Francisco, from Rio, from Buenos Aires, from fifty other desolated points along the seaboards of the Americas, the black fleets swept along the coasts and inland, vomiting their yellow death till all the continents were blanketed with life-destroying gas. And in Europe and Australasia the destroying hordes, having smashed the proud defenses of the coastlines, engaged in the same pursuit, till in one short week all the lands of the Western Allies were swept clear of life. Then the Eastern ships turned homeward, to wait until the vapor they had strewn had lost its virulence, and the teeming masses of the East might take possession of the half world the ebony-painted destroyers had conquered. The black fliers turned homeward, but there was no homeland left for them to seek!

For though the defense fleets of the Western Coalition had been everywhere beaten, their attack squadrons had been everywhere successful. All Asia and Africa lay under a pall of milky emerald gas as toxic, as blasting, as the Easterners' yellow.

And the Westerners were returning too!

In their teleview screens the commanders of the black swarms, and of the white thousands, sought their home ports, and saw the world to be a haze-covered sphere where not even a fly could live. Then, as if by common accord, the white ships and the black sped across lifeless hemispheres to meet in mid-air over the long green swells of the Pacific. They met, and on the instant they were at each others' throats like two packs of wild dogs, killing, killing, killing till they themselves were killed. No quarter was asked in that fight, and none given. No hope of victory was there, nor fear of defeat. Better swift death in the high passion of combat, than slow, hopeless drifting over a dead world.

But there was one black ship that slunk out of that mass suicide of man's last remnant. Within its long hulk three motionless forms lay in a welter of blood that smeared their officers' badges, and a dozen gibbering men labored at the controls of their craft. The long black shadows came at last to veil an empty sky, and a sea whereon there was drifting wreckage but not one sign of any life. And as far to the north a shadowed airship sped athwart the moon, searching for one spot, one tiny patch of solid ground, that was free from the dread gas.

Consciousness came slowly back to Allan Dane. At first he was aware, merely, that he was alive. That was astonishing enough. Even if the orange beam had not killed him with its heat, the gas should have struck his leather suit. The Easterners could not be behind his own forces in their development of that terrible weapon.

Allan felt a coolness on his face, his hands, that could mean only that his helmet and gloves had been removed. He heard movement, and opened his eyes.

At first he could see only blueness, pale and lambent. He gazed dully up at a lustrous, glasslike substance that arched above him. The sound of some one moving came again, and Allan turned his head to it. His neck muscles seemed stiff, that simple motion drew tremendously on his strength.

About fifteen yards away, a man bent over a transparent, boxlike contrivance in which something fluttered. From this device a metal tube angled away into the wall. There was other apparatus on the long table at which the man was—

"At last! Clear at last!" a mellow, rounded voice exclaimed jubilantly.

"Clear? Are you sure, Anthony, are you sure?" This other voice, throbbing with vibrant repression as if its owner feared to believe longed-for tidings come at last, was a woman's. As the man half turned, its owner came between him and Allan. All he could see of them was that the one called Anthony was very tall, and thin, and the woman almost as tall, and that both wore hooded white robes, the woman's falling to her heels, the man's to his knees, waist-girdled with black cords.

"Look for yourself, Helen."

She bent over the transparent cage. "Oh Anthony, how wonderful!"

Allan attempted to rise. He was unutterably weak; to move a finger was a gigantic task, to do more impossible. He tried to call out. No sound came from his straining throat.

The couple straightened. The man spoke, too low for Dane to hear. Each took something from the table, something that gleamed metallically. Then they turned—and Allan saw what the white robes clothed!

Skulls leered at him from beneath the hoods—fleshless skulls; tinted a pale green! Jutting jawbones, cavernous cheeks, lipless mouths that grinned mirthlessly—his eyes froze to them and a scream formed within him that he could not utter. Hands appeared from within the flowing sleeves, and they were skeleton hands, each phalanx clearly marked. They moved, that was the worst of it, the hands moved; and deep in the shadowed eye-pits of the skulls blue light glowed in living eyes that peered at something to Allan's right.

His eyes followed the direction of their gaze. Ranged along the wall, and jutting out, he saw four couches. On each was a figure, shrouded and hooded in white. Utterly still they were—and the cadaverous countenances exposed between robe and hood betrayed not the slightest twitch. The arms were crossed on each breast. Allan realized that his own arms were similarly crossed. He looked down at them, saw the white gleam of a robe that fell down his length in smooth, still folds, saw his hands—greenish skin stretched tight over fleshless bones. Suddenly it seemed to him that the air was musty and fetid.

Footsteps slithered across the floor. The woman-form bent over the farthest couch. With one skeleton hand she bared an arm of the corpselike figure; the other hand lifted—metal glinted in it and plunged into the unshrinking limb! A slow movement of the bony fingers and the threadlike, silvery thing was withdrawn. She stared ghoulishly—and the man, too, gazed tensely at her victim. A long quiver ran through the recumbent shape, another. The death's-head on the pallet moved slightly—and merciful blackness welled up in Allan's brain....

A cool liquid was in his mouth. He swallowed instinctively, and warmth ran through his veins. He felt strength flooding back into him—and he remembered horror.

"That's better," a mellow voice said, close above him. "Drink just a little more." The cool liquid came up against Allan's lips again, pungent, and he drank. Once more strength surged warmingly within him. "That's a good fellow. A little more now."

Fingers were on Allan's wrist, life-warm. There was friendliness in the voice that was speaking to him, and solicitude. He dared to look.

A skull-like head was right before him. But seen thus closely, the terror of it was lessened. Fleshless indeed it was. But a parchment skin was tightly drawn over the bones, and Allan could see that its true shade was a sere yellow. It was the bluish light that had given it the green of decay. The deep-sunk eyes were kindly; they gleamed with pleasure as Allan's opened; and the voice asked:

"How do you feel?"

Allan made shift to reply, though a strange lassitude still enervated him, and his mouth was full of tongue. "Much better, thank you. But who—who...?"

With a sudden access of energy Allan sat up on his couch. He looked about him, and his fears were back full flood.

He was in a chamber with neither door nor window—floor, walls, and arched ceiling entirely formed of the palely lustrous, glasslike substance. The room was perhaps twenty by forty feet, its ceiling curving to about five yards from the floor at its highest point, and the spectral blue glow that filled it was apparently sourceless. It lit three vacant couches to his left. To his right were the four he had already seen. The woman was ministering to the occupants of these—living skeletons that lay flaccid, but whose heads were moving, barely moving from side to side. Like nothing else but a sepulcher the place seemed, a tomb in which the dead had come to life!

Allan clutched at Anthony's arm, grasped textured fabric that was cold to his frantic touch, and thin bone beneath. "In Heaven's name," he mouthed, "tell me what sort of place this is before—" He stopped, appalled by a sudden thought. Perhaps he was insane, this seeming tomb really some hospital ward transformed by his crazed brain. A wave of weakness overcame him, and he fell back.

"Careful," the other spoke soothingly, "you must give the plasma time to act or you may harm yourself."

If Allan shut out sight with his eyelids, and listened only to the resonance of Anthony's voice, he could hold his slipping grip on reason. He felt that the cloth of his robe was metal, fine spun and woven. That was strangely reassuring.

"How long do you think you have slept?"

"How long?" Dane murmured. Something told him that he had been unconscious for a long time. "A week?"

Anthony sighed. "No. Longer than that, much longer." There was reluctance in his tone. "You have lain here for twenty years."

Allan's eyes flew open, and he stared up into the speaker's face. Twenty years! Somehow it did not occur to him to disbelieve this astounding statement. He struggled hard to realize its implication. Two decades had passed since last he remembered. He had been a youth then. Now he was forty-four.

Anthony continued. "That may be a shock to you, but this will be a greater. Unless I am greatly mistaken, we seven, we four men and three women, are the only living humans left on Earth."

The words dripped into Allan's consciousness. Beyond them, he could hear movements, exclamations. But they meant nothing to him. Only the one thought tolled, knell-like, within him. "We seven are the only living humans left on Earth."

Dimly he knew that Anthony was talking. "There is a possibility, a bare possibility, that somewhere near here there are two others. That chance is faint indeed. Otherwise humanity is dead, killed by its own hand."

Through a dizzy vertigo that blurred sight and sound Allan heard the rounded voice go on and on, telling the story of the doom that Man's own folly had brought. And intermingled with that tale of a world gone mad there came back to the listener the clear-cut vision of the day of horror that to him seemed but yesterday. He remembered the sudden ultimatum of the Easterner's, the Western Coalition's stanch defiance. Again he saw a supposedly invincible fleet utterly destroyed, saw comrades whiffed out of existence in infinitesimal seconds. Again he watched a city of twenty millions inundated by a muddy yellow gas in which no human being, no animal, might live. He waked once more to find himself helpless with weakness, among living corpses, in a place that seemed a tomb.

"All this we saw in our long-distance televisoscope." Anthony gestured to a blank screen above the apparatus ranged along the opposite wall. "Then, just as that last weird battle ended, something happened to the eye-mast outside, and we were isolated." He fell silent, in a brooding reverie, and Allan, recovered somewhat, saw that the other strange occupants of the place had risen and were clustered about that cage where something fluttered.

He turned to his mentor. "But I still don't understand. How is it that we escaped the holocaust?"

"Four of us, members of the scientific faculty of the National University, having foreseen the inevitable result of the course of world events, had joined forces and developed a substance—we called it nullite—so dense and so inert that no gas could penetrate it or chemical break it down. We offered it to the Western General Staff, and were laughed at for our pains. Then we decided to use it to preserve our families from the danger we foresaw.

"At first we sheathed one room in each of our own dwellings with the nullite. Later we decided that the deposited gas might last for many years, and blasted out this cave, a hundred feet below the summit of Sugar Loaf Mountain, for a common refuge.

"When the red word flared from the newscast machines, 'War!', we fled here with our wives, as we had planned. All, that is, save one couple, the youngest of us. They never arrived—I waited for them in the clearing at the entrance to the shaft. At the last moment I saw you dropping in your parachute, saw the death beam just miss you, saw you land at my feet, unconscious, but still breathing. I carried you in with me. There were two vacant spaces: you could occupy one of them. Then we sealed the last aperture with nullite, and settled to our vigil. We did not know how long the gas would last, but we had sufficient concentrated food, and enough air-making chemicals, to last two persons for a century."

"Two people," Allan interjected. "But there were seven here."

Anthony nodded. "We had worked out every detail of our plan. When release came we needs must be in the full vigor of our prime. From our loins must spring the new race that will repopulate the Earth; that will found a new civilization, better, we hope, and wiser than the one that had died. By injecting a certain compound we suspended animation in all but a single couple. Those so treated were to all intents dead, though their bodies did not decay. The two who remained awake kept watch, making daily tests of the outside atmosphere, drawn through tubes of nullite that pierced the seal. At the end of six months they revived another couple by the use of a second injection, and were themselves put to sleep. We exempted you from the watch, since you could have no companion, so that while we have lived about seven years in the twenty, you have not aged at all."

"Not aged at all!" Dane exclaimed. "Why, I have wasted away to a mere bagful of bones, and you others also."

The other smiled wistfully. "Even though life was the merest thread there was still an infinitely slow using of bodily tissue. But the drink we partook of as we awoke is a plasma that will very quickly restore the lost body elements. In an hour we shall all have been rejuvenated. You will be again the age you were on that fateful day in 2163, and the rest of us but seven years older. Look!" He moved aside, so that Allen could see the others, who had gathered around his couch. They were a curious semicircle of gaunt figures, but he could see that they had subtly changed. Still emaciated beyond description, they were no longer simulacra of death. The contours of their faces were rounding, were filling out, and the faintest tinge of pink was creeping into the yellow of their skins.

"Anthony, isn't it time that we opened the seals and went outside? Haven't we been long enough in this prison?" It was a short man who spoke, his voice impatient, and there was an eager murmur from the others.

"I am as anxious as you." Anthony's slow words were dubious. "But it may still be dangerous. The gas may have cleared away only from our immediate vicinity. In hollows, or places where the air is stagnant, it may still be toxic. It is my opinion that only one should go at first, to investigate."

A babble of volunteering cries burst out, but Dane's voice cut through the others. "Look here," the sentence tumbled from his lips. "I'm an extra here. It doesn't matter whether I live or die—I have no special knowledge. I cannot even father a family, since I have no wife. I am the only one to go out as long as there is danger."

"The young man is right," some one said. "He is the logical choice."

"Very well," agreed Anthony, who appeared the leader. "He shall be the first."

His instructions were few. One plane had been preserved, and was in the shaft. Allan was to make a circuit of the neighborhood. If he deemed it safe he was to visit the building, described to him, where the fourth couple had lived, and see if he could find trace of them. Then he was to return and report his findings.

All stuffed their ears with cotton wool, and crowded against one end of the chamber. Anthony had the end of a long double wire in his hand, and it curled across the floor to the farther wall. He pressed the button of a pear-switch—and there was a concussion that hurled the watchers against the wall behind them. A great gap appeared in the farther wall, beyond it a black chasm, and a helicopter that was dimly illumined by the light from within the room. A quick inspection of the flier revealed that its alumino-steeloid had been unaffected by the passage of time, and Allan climbed into it. A wave of his hand simulated an insouciance he did not feel. Then he was rising through darkness. The sun's light struck down and enveloped him, and he was in the open air. He rose above the trees.

Desolation spread out beneath him. In all the vastness that unfolded as the lone 'copter climbed into a clear sky, nothing moved. The air, that from babyhood Allan had seen crowded with bustling traffic, was a ghastly emptiness. Not even a tiny, wheeling speck betrayed the presence of a bird. And below—the gas that was fatal to animal life seemed to have stimulated vegetable growth—an illimitable sea of green rolled untenanted to where the first ramparts of New York rose against the sky. Roads, monorail lines, all the countless tracks of civilization had disappeared beneath the green tide. Nature had taken back its own.

Heartsick, he turned south, and followed the silver stream of the Hudson. The river, lonely as the sky, seemed to drift oily and sluggish down to plunge beneath the city at the lower end of the Tappan Zee. Allan Dane came over New York, gazed down at the ruin of its soaring towers, at the leaping arabesque of its street bridges. He peered into vast rifts of tumbled, chaotic concrete and steel. Nothing moved in all that spreading wonder that had housed twenty millions of people.

Allan drifted lower, and saw that from what had been gardened roof-parks, now a welter of strewn earth, the green things had spread till they covered the heaped jetsam with a healing blanket of foliage. Not all the city had been laid waste, however. Here and there, great expanses of the cliff-like structures still stood, undamaged, and in the midst of one of these areas he saw the high-piled edifice to which he had been directed. Its roof was lush with vegetation but by dextrous handling he set his helicopter down upon it.

The engine roar diminished and died. Silence folded around him, a black, thick blanket.

Dane got heavily from his seat, oppressed by the vast soundlessness, and pushed through curling plants that caught at his heels. The sound of his passage was like crackling thunder. A decaying door was marked, in faded, almost undecipherable letters, "Emergency Stairs." It was half open, and Allan squeezed around its edge. Spiral steps curved down into blackness. He hesitated a moment. He could feel the awful silence, the emptiness below was a pit of death. Anthony's words came back to him, echoed in his ears: "We seven are the only living humans left on Earth."

In that moment, out of the pitch-black well of soundlessness, a scream shrilled! No words, only a red, thin thread of sound, rising, and falling, and rising again out of depths where not even a living mouse should be! It came again, ripping the silence—a woman's scream, high-pitched, quivering with fear!

Allan plunged down into the darkness, caroming from wall to wall as he half ran, half fell, down the twisting stairs. Another sound reverberated from unseen walls, and Dane realized that it was his own voice, shouting.

His feet struck level floor. A pale rectangle of light showed before him, and he dived through it. He was in a corridor, dim-lit by phosphorescent fungi that cloaked the damp walls. He halted, at fault. The long hall stretched away to either side, cluttered with grimed bones, slimy with mold. By the age-blistered name cards on closed doors he knew himself to be on a residential level. But which way should he turn? Whence had come that scream? He crouched against the wall, his heartbeats thudding loud in his ears, and listened for a clue.

A muffled sound of scuffling came from his left. Allan whirled toward it and sped down the corridor. He was breathing in great gasps, and the air he breathed was thick and musty. Too late to stop, he saw a slick of green slime on the floor. His foot struck it, flew out from under him, he fell and slid headlong.

Something stopped him, something that crunched sickeningly as his sliding body crashed into it: two skeleton forms, clasped in each others' arms, moldering fabric hanging in rags from them. They lay across the threshold of a door, and just within Dane heard snarls, snufflings, bestial growls, the sounds of a struggle. Something thumped against the door and fell away. He heaved to his feet and his hand found the doorknob. But suddenly he was powerless to turn it. Panic tugged at him with almost palpable fingers, drove him to go back to his plane and safety. Almost he fled—but he remembered in time that it was a human scream he had heard.

The portal gave easily to his lunge. Bluish light flooded the chamber, dazzling after the fungous dimness. A bulking form, whether ape or man he could not make out, so brutish the face, so hairy the dark body revealed by its tattered rags bent over the sprawled shape of a girl. Dane saw her in a fleeting glimpse—the slim length of her, the tumbled, golden hair half hiding, half revealing white curves of beauty, a shoulder from which the tunic had been torn away. Then her attacker whirled toward the intruder. Allan leaped from the threshold, his fist arcing before him. The blow landed flush on the other's jaw.

Yellow, rotted fangs showed in a jet-black face, and the huge Negro lunged for Dane, roaring his rage. Before the American could dodge or strike again the other's long arms were around him. Allan was jerked against a barrel chest, felt his bones cracking in a terrific hug. Eyes, tiny and red, stared into his. Dane drove knees and fists into the Negro, but the awful pressure of those simian arms across his back increased till he could no longer breathe. The American was almost gone, the black face blurred, and the continuous snarling of the brute was dull in his ears.

Suddenly Dane went limp. Victory flashed into the red eyes. The squeezing arms relaxed, and in that moment Allan's legs curled around the black's, heels jerking into the hollows behind his captor's knees. At the same instant, levering from that heel hold, Dane butted sharply up against the rocky jaw. All the strength that was left in him went into that trick, and it worked! The Negro crashed backward to the floor. Allan twisted, and rolled free. He was up, looking desperately around for some weapon. But it was not needed; the hulk on the floor never moved. The back of the Negro's head had smashed against the floor, and he was out.

Dane turned and bent to the girl. She, too, was motionless, but to his relief her breast rose and fell steadily. He glanced about looking for water to revive her. Then he saw that this room was sheathed with nullite. Then this was one of the chambers prepared before the plans were changed. But the girl could not be of the fourth couple—the missing two that had never appeared. She was no more than eighteen. And whence had come the giant black who had attacked her?

"Stick up your hands. Quick!"

Allan whirled to the sudden challenge. The man in the doorway was pointing a ray-gun steadily at him! Dane's hands went up, and he gasped inanely: "Who are you?"

"What is going on here? Where did you come from?" The newcomer's English was precise, too precise. No hulking brute, this. A yellow man, slitted eyes slanted and malevolent; broad, flat nose above thin lips that were purple against the saffron skin. The uniform he wore showed signs of some attempt to keep it in repair, and to its threadbare collar still clung a tarnished insignia: the seven-pointed star, emblem of the enemy Allan had fought on a yesterday that was two decades gone.

"Well? Have you lost the power of speech?" The ray-gun jerked forward impatiently.

An obscure impulse prompted Allan's reply. "Almost. I've spoken to no one for twenty years."

"So-o,"—softly. The Oriental's eyes flicked past Dane, and a sudden light glowed in them. "You have been alone for twenty years in this city we thought was empty, but you were on hand to fight with Ra-Jamba for this delightful creature." Something leered from his face that sent the hot blood surging to Allan's temples. The Easterner stepped catlike into the room, shutting the door behind him with his free hand.

"That is true," the American said, with what calmness he could muster. Through the dizzy whirl of his mind he clung to one thought: he must conceal the existence of the little group on Sugar Loaf Mountain at all costs. "I had just discovered that it was safe to leave the room, similar to this, in which I had hidden from the gas, when I heard a scream. I reached here just in time to—"

"To interfere with Ra-Jamba's pleasure, and save the little white dove—for me. My thanks." The yellow man bowed mockingly. "Too bad," he purred, "that you should be robbed of the spoils of your fight." Then he asked irrelevantly. "So some of you Americans found a way to cheat our gas. How many?"

Allan temporized. There had been several similar refuges prepared, he said, but he did not know whether they had been used. This was the first he had visited beside his own. But how was it that the questioner knew so little about what had happened here? Had his people simply laid this country waste and never revisited it?

The Oriental shrugged. "My people are gone, wiped out by your gas as yours were wiped out by ours." He retold Anthony's story. "The crew of my own ship mutinied," he concluded. "We fled north, from that last terrible fight, north, ever north, till at the top of the world we found a little space that was not gas-covered. There was nothing there, just the ice, and the snow, and the cold. We lived there, twelve of us, all men. There were a few bears and seals. We slew them for food—and we grew a little mad. We were men—all men—do you understand?"

As he said this last, his thin voice rose to a shriek, and his eyes darted to the girl's recumbent form. At length, he went on, the gas began to retreat, and they followed it down. They had searched town after town, city after city, had found food in plenty, and all the trappings of civilization. But there was never a living being. And the fever in their blood drove them on.

That very morning the insane search had reached New York. They had landed on the roof of this very building. "We separated to hunt—and Ra-Jamba was the lucky one. But I—Jung Sin—am still luckier." He crept nearer to Allan, and tapped him on the chest with his weapon. "For look you—while those fools used all their ray-gun charges, even the charge of the big tube on our ship, to kill food, I husbanded mine." He laughed shrilly. "So you see, I have the only ray-gun in the world. It shall make me master of the Earth." Again he laughed wildly.

"Now I'm going to kill you." The black cylinder leveled, and Dane stared at death. Alone, he would almost have welcomed it, but the thought of the girl in the filthy power of this beast seared through him. Jung Sin, the little red worms of madness crawling in his brain, paused for a final taunt.

"Let the thought of the white dove in my arms cons—" Allan's sandaled foot shot out into the man's stomach. In the same movement his hands came down, one snatched at and caught the ray-gun, the other smashed into the yellow face. Jung Sin lifted to the drive of fist and foot, crashed into the wall, fell to its foot. From the crumpled heap rose a shriek, a long piercing wail that ended in a gurgle.

Dane froze, the captured cylinder in his hand, and listened. There were others of the unholy band about. Had they heard? Dim sounds came to him. He leaped to the door, flung it open. Faint footfalls, a distant shout, came from far down the corridor, away from the direction of the stairs. Allan glimpsed dark forms, rushing toward him. He darted back to the girl, swung her, still unconscious, to his shoulder, and was out. The floor was slippery beneath his feet. He reeled as he ran, and the sounds of pursuit gained on him. The heavy burden weighed him down, the dim hallway stretched endlessly before him. From close behind came hoarse, guttural shouts that chilled him.

The pack was not twenty feet away when Allan reached the stair door. He slammed it behind him, heard the latch click. He mounted the narrow, winding steps with the last dregs of energy draining from him, and heard a crash below that told of the collapse of the barrier. But he had reached his plane, had flung the girl into it, and was pulling himself in when the first of the pursuers burst out on the roof.

Allan thrust home the throttle, the helio-vanes whined, and his 'copter leaped skyward. He glimpsed men running across the roof; they vanished behind a leafy arbor. Dane turned the nose of his craft toward Sugar Loaf, amethyst in the haze of distance, but from that green arch a black aircraft zoomed up and shot after him. The American shook his head free of the cobwebs of fatigue, and veered westward. He must not lead the Easterners to Anthony's refuge.

Through the dead air, over a dead world they shot—Allan's white flier and the ebony plane with the bloody emblem of the seven-pointed star emblazoned on its nose. Allan wheeled again as the pursuers reached his level on a long, climbing slant.

But they continued rising! They, were five hundred, a thousand feet above him. Then they leveled out, and dived down. Their strategy flashed on him—they were planning to shepherd Dane down, to force him to land where they would have him at their mercy. And their craft was the faster!

The black ship was right on his tail; Allan flicked his controls and his 'copter slid sidewise on one wing. The other plane banked in a tight arc and sped for him; Dane countered with a lightning loop that brought him behind his enemy. His gray eyes were steel-hard, his lips were a straight, thin gash. The other ship was faster, but his, lighter and smaller, was more flexible. He could not get away, but—They flipped up and back in an inside loop; Allan's little craft barrel-rolled from under.

This sort of thing could not last forever. With each maneuver he was losing altitude. Serrated roof-tops were already a scant fifteen hundred feet beneath him, gaunt gray fingers that reached up to pluck him from the sky.

Only half Allan's mind was concentrated on the aerial acrobatics. The other half plodded a weary treadmill. In the nullite chamber beneath Sugar Loaf's summit, he thought, were three couples whose knowledge and wisdom had preserved them for the repeopling of the Earth. Their children, and their children's children—starting from such a source what heights might not the new race attain?

On the other hand, the ship that pursued him carried cowards who had failed in mankind's supreme test; men who had lost their manhood, ravening demi-beasts, half mad with loneliness and desire. As long as they remained alive they would be a menace to those others, an unclean band that would forever sully the new world with the old world's evils. Even should Allan himself escape them by some trick of fortune, they must inevitably find the little band of men—and women. A cold chill ran through Dane as he visioned the result.

He was not afraid to die. And the girl in the cabin behind him—better that she never awake than that she be the sport of Ra-Jamba's kind. A grim resolve formed itself, and he watched for a chance to put it into execution.

It came. At the end of a shifting maneuver the black 'copter was above and behind the white. Dane's fingers played swiftly over the control board. His ship flipped over backward, rolling on its long axis as it somersaulted. It was directly beneath the other. Then the helio-vanes screamed, and the American plane surged straight up!

A resounding crash split the air. Metal ripped, a fuel tank exploded. A black wing scaled earthward, zigzagging oddly. Dane's craft and the Eastern ship clung in an embrace of death. They started to drop. But, queerly, the black plane fell faster, left the white one behind as its descent gained speed till it splashed against concrete below. The American helicopter was dropping, too, but sluggishly. Something was buoying it up. Allan, momentarily struggling out of the welter of blackness and pain into which the concussion had thrown him, heard a familiar whine. His helio-vanes were still twirling, limply, stutteringly, bent and twisted, but gripping the air sufficiently to brake his crushed plane's fall.

Afterwards, Allan figured it out. The black pilot had slipped sidewise in that last frantic moment. His effort to escape had been futile, but instead of his ship's body, Dane's plane had struck the wing and torn it off. The impact had irreparably damaged the American craft, but the helicopter motor and vanes had somehow continued to function—just enough. The stanch alumino-steeloid fuselage, though bent and disfigured, had fended the full force of the crash from Allan and his passenger.

Just now, however, Allan Dane was doing no figuring. Pain welled behind his eyes, his left arm was limp, and a broken stanchion jammed his feet so they couldn't move. The vane motor stuttered and stopped, the plane floor dropped away from beneath him, then thudded against something. The jar jolted Allan into a gray land where there was nothing....

Someone was talking. He couldn't make out the words, but the sound was pleasant. It soothed the throb, throb in his head. Gosh, that had been some party last night, celebrating Flight ZLX's first prize in maneuvers! Great bunch, but would they be as good in real war—sure to come soon? Dane's stuff had too much kick; he must have passed out early.

Somebody shaking him.

"Lea' me 'lone; wanna sleep."

"Oh, wake up, please wake up."

Girl's voice. Nice voice. Voice like that should have pretty face. Better not look, though; too bad if she had buck teeth or squint eyes.

"Oh, what will I do? You're not dead? Please, you're not dead?"

"Don't think so. Head hurts too much." Allan opened his eyes. "Wrong again. Mus' be dead. Only angel could look like that. Not in right place, though. Mistake in shipping directions—tags switched or something."

A cold hand lay across his brow, and he felt it quiver. "Don't talk like that. Wake up." There was hysteria in the limpid tones.

Allan's brain mists cleared, and he grinned wryly. "I remember now. You all right?"

"Yes. But who are you? Are you Anthony Starr?"

"No. But Anthony sent me." Allan struggled to rise. He saw twisted wreckage beside him. He gasped. "I seem to be a bit conked. But what—what do you know about Anthony?"

The girl fumbled in her garments, brought out a paper. Allan found that he could move his right arm without much pain. He took the yellowed sheet, and read the faded writing.

DEAR NAOMI:

You are asleep, and we have been standing by your couch, drinking in the dear sight of you. You sleep soundly, tired as you are by the long-promised story we told you on this, your sixteenth birthday, the tale of how the world you know only from our teachings was destroyed, of how we planned with our friends to escape the general fate, of how an accident separated us from them and immured us here alone, of how you were born in this room and why you have lived here all your short life. We told you all that, but there is one thing we did not tell you.

Our food supply has run low, and the gas outside shows no signs of abatement. With careful husbanding we could all three live for another four months, but there is no prospect that we shall be released in so short a time. Alone, you will have sufficient for a year. If we had had some of Carl Thorman's life-suspension serum—but it was his perfection of that which caused the change of plan to a common refuge, and we never thought to stock with it the discarded rooms in our own apartments.

We have talked it over, and have decided that you must have that eight months' extra chance. And so, dear daughter, this must be farewell.

When the gas is gone Anthony will come to seek us, if he still lives. You will know him by the white robe of metal fabric he will wear, with its black girdle. Trust yourself to him; he was our friend. If all the food has been consumed, and he still has not come, open the door. But fate will not be so cruel to you.

We are weary of the long waiting, Naomi. Do not grieve for us. We shall go out into the gas hand in hand, and release will be welcome.

God guard you.

Allan was deeply moved by the love and sacrifice so simply worded. He looked at the girl, and had to blink away a mist that hazed his sight before he could see her. "I see," he said. "When the year ended and Anthony had not come, you opened the door—"

"And the gas was gone. Then I heard someone moving far down the corridor. I was so happy. Who could it be but Anthony? I called. A hairy, black giant came running, bellowing in some strange language. I was terribly frightened: I think I screamed, and tried to shut the door. But he was too quick for me: he was in the room, and his filthy paws reached out for me. I screamed again, dodged away from him. He pursued me. I threw myself backward, tripped, and fell. My head crashed against the floor.

"The next thing I knew I was here, and you were twisted and jammed there in front of me. At first I wanted to run, then I saw your robe. I dragged you out. Then I spied that other pile of wreckage, and I thought you too were dead...." She covered her face with her hands.

Allan turned his head, saw for the first time the crumpled debris of the black ship, a hundred feet away, saw stark forms. "There's nothing to be afraid of now," he said. "It's all over. We'll soon be with your father's friend, with Anthony."

A little smile of reassurance trembled on the girls lips. "Oh, do you think so?"

Allan nodded.

"Sure thing! Just trust to me, Miss ...?"

"Call me Naomi."

"I'm Allan." The pilot thrust out his big hand, full fleshed now, and a little white one fluttered into it. An electric thrill rippled at the contact, and the two hands clung. The girl gave a little gasp, and pink flushed her cheeks.

Naomi shivered a little, and Allan realized that a chill breeze was sweeping across the roof-tops and that daylight was almost gone. "Look here, partner, we'd better get started, somewhere." He pulled himself to his feet. Pain shot through him and his head still throbbed. "I'd better take a look at that." He gestured to the wreck of the Eastern ship. "You wait here."

When he returned his face was pallid, and there was a sick look in his eyes. The girl asked sharply: "What is it? What's wrong? Tell me, Allan!"

He looked at her grimly, started to say something, thought better of it. Then: "It wasn't a pleasant sight." He shrugged. "Come on, let's see what we can find. We'll have to spend the night here, and start for Sugar Loaf Mountain in the morning."

Once more Allan descended a narrow, spiral staircase into darkness and silence. But this time someone was at his side, and a warmness ran through him at the thought.

The topmost floor of this building was a residential level. Like the one where he had found Naomi, a green mold covered everything, and pallid fungi, emitting a pale-green phosphorescence, clung to the walls and ceiling of the long corridor. Apparently the dwellers here had rushed out at the first alarm, had died elsewhere. "This is luck," Allan said. "We shall have a comfortable place to sleep, and food is not far away."

"How is that?"

"Why, the stores level is not far below. Most of New York's structures have a number of residential levels at the top, then a floor of retail stores, and below that amusement places, offices, and factories."

"But whatever food there was must be decayed by this time."

"The fresh food, yes. But there was a lot of canned stuff, and that is probably all right." He pushed open a door. In the eery light a well-furnished living room was revealed. "You wait here, and I'll see what I can rustle up."

"But I want to go with you."

Allan was inflexible. "Please do as I say. I have my reasons."

The girl turned away. "Oh, very well," she said flatly, "if you don't want me with you."

"That's a good scout. I'll be back just as quickly as I can. And, by the way, lock the door from the inside, and don't open it till you hear my voice."

The girl looked at him wonderingly. "But—" she began.

"Don't ask me why. Do it." There was a curious note in Allan's voice, one that cut off Naomi's question. The door shut, and Dane heard the bolt shoot home.

He stood in the corridor, listening intently, his face strained. There was no sound save that of Naomi's movements behind the locked door. Allan turned to search for the auxiliary staircase that must be somewhere near the bank of ascendor doors.

Silence was again around him, almost tangible in its heaviness. His footsteps reverberated through dead halls, the echo curiously muffled by the coating of slime that spread dankly green. Allan found the staircase well, descended cautiously, pausing often to listen. Not even the faint scuttering of vermin rewarded him.

At last, three stories down, he reached the stores level. Here, in a great open hall, were the numerous alcoved recesses of the shops. Once thronged, and gaudy with the varicolored goods brought by plane and heavy-bellied rocket-freighter from both hemispheres, the vast space was a desert of moldering dust heaps, brooding. There was a faint odor in the stagnant air—of spices, and rustling silks, of rare perfumes, of all the luxury of the Golden Age that Man's folly had ended.

Allan searched the long shelves feverishly, a nervous urge to complete his task and get back to Naomi tingling in his veins. Once he stopped suddenly, his body twisting to the stair landing. He seemed to have heard something, an indefinable thudding, the shadow of a sound. But it did not come again, and he dismissed it as the thumping of his own blood in his ears, audible in that stillness.

At the end of a long aisle, neat rows of cans greeted him, the labels rotted off, the metal rust-streaked, but apparently tight and whole. He found a metal basket, a roll of wire, twisted a handle for the basket and filled it, choosing the cans by their shape. He should have liked to explore further, but the urge to return tugged at him. He went up the stairs three at a time.

There was a dark, oblong break in the long glowing wall of the upper corridor! The door—it was the door of the apartment where he had left Naomi! He leaped down the hall, shouting. The portal hung open, shattered: the rooms were stark, staring empty. Allan reeled out again. There were the marks of footprints, of many footprints, in the green scum of the hall floor, their own among them, that had led the marauders straight to the girl!

Fool that he had been! He had thought she would be safer behind a bolted door! Allan berated himself. He had thought not to worry her. There had been only four bodies in the wreckage of the black plane—but how had the rest gotten here so soon?

There was a humming whine from above. Dane hurtled toward the roof stairs. He burst from the upper landing, fists clenched, face a furious mask. A helicopter was just rising. Allan jumped for it, his fingers caught and clung to the undercarriage. But the down-swing of his body broke his hold, and Dane crashed to the roof.

He watched the plane, saw it zoom up, turn east, saw it sink and land a half mile away, atop the building where he had found her. In the moonlight he marked the direction of the place, its distance. Then he was descending stairs, innumerable stairs. He could not hope to reach it in time to save Naomi. But—his eyes grew stony—he could avenge her.

Afterwards that nightmare journey through the murdered city was a detailless blur to Allan. He clambered over heaped rubble, forced himself through windrows of piled bones that crumbled to dust at his touch. Vines, and whipping creepers of triumphant vegetation everywhere halted him; he tore them away with bleeding hands and stumbled on. He fell, and scrambled up again, and plodded on the interminable path till he had reached his goal.

Here, at last, some modicum of reason penetrated into the numbed blankness of his brain. The dark arch of the entrance-way was somehow familiar. Still legible under the verdigris of the bronze plate on the lintel he read, "Transportation Substation—District L2ZX." Now he understood why he had not seen the black flier till it had leaped in pursuit: how it was that Naomi's captors had so quickly found another 'copter. A broad well penetrated the center of this building—its opening must be covered by the luxuriant vines so that he had not noted it—and dropped down to the midsection that was a hangar for local and private planes. His own little Zenith had been stored here on occasion. There must be other helicopters there, and a stock of fuel. A dim plan began to form at the back of his head.

But first he must find where they were, and what had happened to Naomi.

Allan removed his sandals, and began the endless climb. He made no sound on the steps, cushioned as they were with mold, but at each landing he paused for a moment, listening. The cold fire that burned within him left no room for fatigue, for pain.

A murmuring, then a laugh, cut through the deathlike stillness. Allan was nearly to the top. Down the corridor into which he crept, snakelike on his belly, red light flickered from an open door.

Dane moved soundlessly to that door, and, lying flat, pushed his head slowly past the sash till he could see within. By the light of a fire that danced in the center of the unburnable mallite floor, its illumination half revealing their sodden, brutish faces, he saw an unspeakably strange group. A scene from out of the dawn of history it was, the haunch-squatted circle, their yellow skins and black glistening in the crimson, shifting glow. He recognized the giant Negro, Ra-Jamba, his head bound with a rag, and Jung Sin. There were five others clustered about those two, and a third, a skew-eyed Oriental, intent on some game they were playing with little sticks that passed from hand to hand.

Before each of the players there was a little pile of fish bones, black with much handling. The Negro's pile, and that of Jung Sin, were about equal, but there were only two or three in front of the third player. And just as Allan caught sight of them, the sticks clicked, and a shrill objurgation burst from that third as the last of his markers were raked in by Jung Sin's taloned hand. The circle hunched closer, there was a ribald, taunting laugh from Ra-Jamba and Jung Sin glanced over his shoulder into a shadowed corner.

"Have patience, my lotus flower," he purred. "Only one is left. Soon the goddess of fortune and love will clear him from my path. By the nine-headed Dragon, I have never seen a game of Li-Fan last so long. But it draws to an end. Then we shall have our joy together, you and I."

In that instant the fire flared. Allan saw an open window in the background, and beneath it a slim white form lying, bound and helpless. Fierce joy leaped in him, and fiercer hate, Naomi was as yet untouched, the game was being played for her as stake. He had come in time to save her!

But how? There were eight of the Easterners in the room. He had his ray-gun, and might cow them with it and free the girl. But as soon as he had gotten her out of the room, they would surge out after the whites. He could fight for a while, but the end was inevitable. And even if by some miracle he and Naomi escaped, they would be tracked to Sugar Loaf.

The sticks were clicking in a continuous rattle as the final bout of the game waxed fast and furious. And as fast and furious was the whirl of Allan's thoughts. He strove to remember the layout of this building. The helicopter hangar was next above this level. Outside the windows of this floor a narrow ledge ran. The nebulous scheme that had entered his dazed brain as he read the bronze plate below took clearer form, shaped itself to meet this new need.

Allan crept away to safe distance, leaped to his feet and flitted upward. He was in the empty, echoing space of the hangar level. The fuel tanks bulged huge in the dimness. Here were reels of the feed hose he needed—flexible metal that had withstood the years; here a faucet nozzle, and a long coil of fine wire. Haste driving him, he made the connections. Then he was descending again, dragging behind him a long black snake of hose whose other end was clamped to a vat of oxygen impregnated gasoline.

The rustle of the hose along the hall floor was muffled by the greasy slime. Dane got the nozzle to just outside the door of the room where Naomi lay captive. The rattle of the playing sticks still continued. Jung Sin's voice sounded, in a language that Allan did not understand. But there was no mistaking the triumphant note in the silky, jeering tones. The yellow man was winning, and winning fast.

Dane twisted one end of the wire around the faucet handle. Then he was unwinding the coil as he tried the door of the chamber next to the one where the fire burned, found it open, darted across the room and softly raised the sash. The sill here, like the one beneath which Naomi lay, was a bare two feet above the ground.

He was out on the ledge, sliding along it toward the fire-reddened oblong five feet away. He crammed his body close against the wall, kept his eyes away from the unfenced edge of that eighteen-inch shelf. Beyond, an abyss waited, twelve thousand feet of nothingness down which a single misstep, an instant's vertigo, would send him hurtling. Suddenly the rattle of sticks stopped, and he heard the black's long howl of disappointed rage. The game was over!

Allan reached the window, glimpsed a leering semicircle of animal faces, saw Jung Sin coming toward him. Then he had swung in.

"Back, Jung Sin! Back!" Allan was straddled over Naomi's form, the ray-gun thrust out before his tense threat, his face livid, his eyes blazing. "Get back, or I ray you!"

Consternation, awe, flashed into the brutal faces of the Easterners. Jung Sin reeled back, his saffron hands rising. Allan's weapon swept slowly along the line of staring men. "If one of you moves I flash."

He bent to the girl, keeping his eyes on the Easterners, and his weapon steady. He had hung the wire coil over his shoulder, leaving his left hand free to fumble for and untie the cords around Naomi's wrists. He got them loose.

"Can you get your feet free, Naomi?"

"Yes, I can manage it." Her voice was steady, but there was a great thankfulness vibrant in it.

"Then do it and get out on the ledge. Quick." He straightened, and the blaze of his eyes held the yellow men, and the black, motionless.

Naomi, at the window behind him, gasped. "I know it looks tough," he encouraged her, "but you can make it. Don't look down. Go to the left. And keep clear of that wire."

"I'm all right, Allan. But you—"

"Never mind about me. Go ahead."

Jung Sin jerked forward, driven by the madness that twisted his face into gargoyle hideousness. But Allan's ray-gun stabbed at him, and he halted.

"I'm out, Allan."

Dane's foot felt back of him for the sill, found it. He lifted, facing his enemies inexorably, caught the lintel with his left hand, and was crouching outside. A sidewise flick of his eyes showed Naomi just reaching the other window.

He pulled at the wire till it was gently taut. A moment's compunction rose in him at what he was about to do. Then the black roll of the Easterners' crimes rushed into his mind. Naomi's safety, his own, and that of the little colony that had endured so much to preserve humanity, cried out for their extinction. Allan jerked the metal thread, and the faucet nozzle in the corridor opened.

A black stream gushed forward, reached the fire, and the room was a roaring furnace. Allan saw the forms of his enemies silhouetted against the blaze for a fleeting instant, then they were flaming statues. One only, Jung Sin, nearer than the rest, leaped for the window and escaped the first gush of flame. Allan pressed the trigger of his ray-gun. But no blue flash answered that pressure. The weapon's charge had leaked out, was gone!

Allan tore himself loose from yellow hands that clutched at him, his fist crashed into Jung Sin's fear twisted visage, and the crazed Oriental fell back into the roaring blaze.

But Allan himself was thrust backward by that blow, was swaying on the very edge of the chasm. His hand went out for a saving hold on the window sash; flame licked at it. He was toppling, against the strain of his body muscles to resist the inevitable fall, and death reached up from depths for him. Then an arm was around him, was drawing him back to life. Naomi had darted back, defying the terror of that height, the surge of heat. She had reached him just in time—a split-second later and his weight would have been too much for her puny strength. But in this instant, the merest touch was enough to save him. They crept along the ledge and climbed wearily in.

There was another plane in the hangar, and presently Allan had it rising through the well into clean, free air. He turned to the girl in the seat beside him and pointed at the scene they were leaving.

"Look," he said.

The city was in darkness beneath them, save for the one staring rectangle that marked a pyre. But dawn shimmered opalescent in the east.

A soft white hand crept into Allan's. There was a long moment of silence. Then Allan said, softly: "A new day, and a new world for their children."

A sleepy, tired voice sighed: "For their children and ours, Allan."