Part 3

Newlin waited for a close shot. How vulnerable was such a soul-less, mechanical monster to even the shattering-heat-forces of a blaster gun?

Songeen lay quietly beside him, her body quivering as much from strained muscles as from fear. Behind the face-mask, her thin features were pale, ghostlike.

With elaborate caution, the tracker circled their hiding place. Its froglike head, with a ruff of exposed filaments lifted, like an animal scenting blood. It edged slowly closer, its movement a glide, sinuous, crafty, with no suggestion of mechanical action.

Newlin pushed the girl's form roughly away, lest her trembling foul his aim. Sighting, he pressed trigger. Bright flame leaped from the weapon, crackling.

The beam lashed at the tracker, which stopped suddenly, threw back its monstrous head, and burst into hideous uproar of sparking, electrical discharge. Like a live thing, it twitched, jerked, and flung itself in mad spasms. Convulsions stopped as short-circuits flared in both head and body. Molten, flowing, its metallic carcass glowed eerily in the dimness. Dying, it blazed up in a fireworks display spectacular enough to attract half of Venus to the terrified fugitives.

But the drone continued.

From behind the same corner came a duplicate of the first metal monster. Another tracker.

Its drone rose into shrill crescendo. Like a dog, it approached the wreckage of its fellow. And like a dog, it summoned help. Then, without pausing to examine the mechanical casualty, it turned its electronic attentions back to the hunted.

Hopelessly, Newlin urged Songeen to her feet. They fled, and the game began all over again.

* * * * *

It was a madman's dream. Desperate flight, the haunted ruins of an unknown city, deadly pursuit closing in, slowly, patiently inevitably. The familiar hare and hounds pattern of nightmare.

They fled through vague, littered streets, treacherous with the rubble of lost centuries. Buildings were lighter patterns upon the gathering darkness. Stone flagging underfoot was rough, eroded, rotten.

A pinnacled precipice rose suddenly to bar their way. Immense, sheer, buttressed by spills of loose rock, it towered above them and lost its heights in gloom.

Within a massive, deep-carved archway of stone, set an oval of polished red granite. A doorway, barren of carving save for one, scrawled and monstrous hieroglyph. Uneasiness stirred in Newlin, for something in his buried race-memories recalled that symbol with supernal dread. Ice formed about his spine and melted in trickling terror-drops. Instinct cringed, but his conscious mind rebelled at even the effort of memory.

Songeen stopped and stared at the hideously marked doorway, as if tranced.

"I _remember_ this place," she said in swift excitement. "But I had thought it vanished--eons ago."

Newlin swerved on her angrily. "This is no time for experiments with your subconscious," he growled, savage with strain.

"It is--sanctuary," she replied softly. "Come!"

Boldly she stood before the oval door. Her finger traced its complex symbol, and the symbol responded with a glow like moonfire.

Again, as it had been with that oval door in Monta Park, there was baffling suggestion of unmechanical movement.

The stone block did not slide, roll, or swing open. It gave a slight quiver and dissolved.

Songeen stepped through its aperture and the inner darkness of the building claimed her. Reluctantly, Newlin followed--caught as much by curiosity as driven by the yelping spectres of pursuit.

No light entered the building from any source. It was dark as the pits of Ganymede or the under-surface laboratories of Pluto. It was dense and tangible as a block of black crystal. Newlin could see nothing, not even Songeen. And there was an alien _feel_ to the interior.

He was aware that Songeen operated some hidden mechanism, and that the door, though he could not see it, was replaced.

"Now, for the moment, we are safe," she said slowly. "They cannot enter here."

Newlin shrugged bitterly. "It's all one. They can't enter and we don't dare go out. So we stay here and die of thirst. If you were really a top-rung witch, you'd think of details like air, food and water."

Songeen's laugh was a ripple of eery crystal in the darkness.

"How did you guess I was a witch?" she asked whimsically. "But we need not die here. Not unless you prefer to die among surroundings familiar to you. There is another way out. If we dare take it. For me, it will be simple. For you--"

"Not so simple, eh? You paint an interesting picture. Like one I once saw on Mars, in the Gneiss Gallery. 'Nocturne--Venusport,' it was titled. Beautiful. Dark purple background, the city seemed like fountains of flowering stars. It's not like that, not from the places I've seen it. Filth and dirt, people dying from poverty, disease or violence. Just a comparison. How close does your picture match the reality?"

"Close enough. You're a strange man, full of contradictions. I think you're only slightly mad. But for anyone, the way I could take you would be difficult. The pathway leads to my own world. To you--or anyone, not native--it will seem madness. Something of it you saw in the tower."

Around him in the darkness, he was conscious of her swift movements. She seemed untroubled by the lack of light. Neither by vision or hearing could he distinguish anything, but he sensed activity.

Then, suddenly, as if she had uncovered a cache of implements and struck a fire, radiance spread around her. Its source was not definite, and it spread slowly, like a stain through water. But something illuminated a vast, vaulted interior, Gothic in a sense, with a church-like air of gloom and mystery. It was Gothic, but of spiderweb delicacy, soaring arches, vague fretted ceilings, walls intricately carved into lacework of stone. Everywhere were echoes of that same eery symbolism in the door hieroglyph, and Newlin's folk-memories were oddly disturbed.

* * * * *

He could not place the feeling. Certainly none of the symbols bore even slight resemblance to any written language known to him.

Something about their intricacy clouded even clear perception, and the emotional effect was not religious in any sense--it was stark, abysmal fear, as if the mysteries behind such symbols were too great for humanity to bear.

Ignoring him, Songeen persisted at her curious tasks. Newlin went and stood beside her, watching.

With gloved hand, she appeared to be tracing out some maze of deep cut markings that figured what must have been an altar-fane.

"Do you expect any results from this ritual mumbo-jumbo?" he questioned irritably.

Songeen looked up, startled. "Not more ritual than any other mathematics," she chided. "This is no temple, as you seem to imagine. It is the old quarantine station. I seek a doorway, but not into a hidden passage. There are other doorways. This one leads between dimensions. My world exists in a different plane. At least, our pathway to it follows strange ways, that you could never understand. You are no scientist or scholar. How could you grasp such unknown and forgotten matters? How could anyone in your world?"

Newlin stared at her, seeing things he had only guessed before.

"You are--_alien_," he said.

"You can't guess how alien," she answered. "I said I was not of Venusian stock. My people came from outside. Our world exists in the same plane as yours, a planet circling one of the nearer stars. This place was never our home, but we had colonies on Venus, Earth, Mars and one of Jupiter's moons. Other colonies--like this one--and observatories and quarantine stations. Our scientific observers and the medical staff stayed here. They studied and recorded and treated.

"We were not gods nor demons nor anything else supernatural. Just a people not human, but not too remote from humanity. Just emissaries and workers, students and doctors. You might call us elder brothers to the human race. We came not to conquer, enslave and exploit, but to help. Sometimes the Masters came with us, since they were interested in our work.

"Many times, by our guidance, human beings reached high levels of development in the arts and sciences. We taught them and guided their stumbling steps, and released to them such knowledge as we dared trust to them. Time and again, we raised them from the slime, only to have them fall back. There is fatal disease in the race, a disease of instability and cruelty and violence. Call it madness--insanity--in the technical sense. It is pathological, and the disease is common to the human race, in all its ramifications. The Solar System is mad, and all who dwell in it are lunatics. Dangerous and homicidal lunatics. Sol's system is the asylum and pesthouse of our galaxy. We--my people--are its keepers and doctors.

"We are charged with the care and treatment of an ailing form of life. Because of our near likeness, in form and thought, it was hoped that we could understand and help them; in time, perhaps, find a cure. There are other races inhabiting the galaxy--many of them, civilized, intelligent, living, and sometimes even of matter similar to ours. Their minds and bodies are too different. We are nearest, both in form and feeling.

"We have tried, patiently and hopefully. For the most part, it is a long history of frustration and failure. The corruption is too deep, too basic. It is part of the life-pattern of the race. Some individuals may rise above it, but its taint lies dormant even in them. At best, they are carriers. And there seems little future for such a race.

"Your galactic neighbors have been patient. But now a time of decision is near. Your ships explore, exploit at will within your system. You have pushed your limits to the furthest expansion of that system. Colonized and despoiled. Now, you stand at the expanding horizon of stellar flight. Other star-systems tempt your imaginations, and technology batters at the problems involved.

"Your neighbors are watching, and afraid. If your people burst outside the limits of Sol's system, the contagion of your madness will spread and engulf the galaxy. At our request, they have given time, granting extensions freely. For countless centuries we have tried, and our effort, all our work and thought, has led only to failure. Now, the others have set a time limit, and the deadline is very close. Very close. You are all living on borrowed time; and but for our pleadings, it would be still less.

"The masters often send emissaries to us, as we send ours to the planets of Sol. They help and advise us--not as superior beings or as gods, commanding--but as elder brothers, trying to share their wisdom, trying to help and guide us. They only help and advise, never intervene unless asked. Their advice is wisdom--sometimes terrible, difficult to understand, painful to accept. Recently, they brought a message from the other peoples--a message and ultimatum. And the Masters advised us to accept failure, to let them destroy humanity as a blot on the galaxy. We begged one more chance, a last, desperate gamble, probably foredoomed to failure. But they granted us the painful right of the doctor. We can operate, but if the patient dies, so do we. That was our choice."

* * * * *

As she talked, Songeen had engaged herself busily with the queerly formal operations of tracing the intricate diagrams.

"Do you believe me?" she asked, looking up.

"I'm not sure," Newlin replied frankly. "Are these Masters your gods?"

"Not gods. Living, intelligent beings, civilized, but not like us. Not material. I cannot explain. Even they are but advisers and messengers. Not all-wise, nor all-powerful. I wish they were; for they are kind."

"You sound like nice people," Newlin admitted. "I wish I could believe you. Off-hand, I think you're crazy. You say we're all off the beam. Then you talk like delusions of grandeur, and I have reason to know you can be homicidal. One of us is nuts. It's a toss-up."

Songeen smiled wearily. "It is possible that I am infected. I am inoculated against it, but so was Genarion. Will you believe that I loved him? He was my husband. We were children together, like brother and sister. Later, we were schooled together, were married, and asked to be assigned our task together. I did not sentence him, and I would have died myself first. But he had been here too long. If he had gone back, the contagion would have gone with him. It was fated. You and I were mere tools. Weapons."

"I'm sorry, Songeen. I do believe you loved him."

She shook her head in curious ruffle of emotion. "He was not the first. Many of our kind have renounced their birthright to go among your people, become like you and share your hideous lives. They are part of your great religions, part of the legendary history of your races."

Silence fell between them. Newlin thought of dying Mars, the burnt-out husk of Venus, the political and economic pesthole of Earth--even the grim, gray, terrible frontiers on the further planets and moons. His recollections were a dreadful pageant of spectres, of an ugly, terror-haunted childhood, of the bleak years of his barren, lonely wanderings--the memory kitbag of a homeless, and often hunted, spacebum.

"I can believe you," Newlin admitted slowly. "Most of the truly worthwhile leaders of mankind stand so far above the mob that they seem cast in a different mold. The real leaders--not politicians, nor military brass. The thinkers and scientists, even the prophets. Every great religion sprang from the vision or inspiration of a single leader. Beyond the chaff, the fragments of his actual thoughts and words--always sound good. But their followers don't follow them."

Songeen's face twisted in bitter wrath. "How terribly true! Can blind men follow the sun? They feel its warmth and reach out to it, but they stumble and fall on their own clay feet. Blind eyes and hands can never reach the light. Most of our emissaries, of that kind, die horribly, and their message is distorted to serve the ends of madness and corruption."

"Is there no hope for us?"

She stared at him. The pale glow of her moonbright eyes softened and intensified.

"One hope, and only in yourselves. We have tried and failed. If you feel so strongly, why have you done nothing?"

Bitter hatred snagged in Newlin's throat, making his laugh a sound of horror. "Not me. I can pity the masses of poor and down-trodden, but only as masses. As abstractions. Individually, I loathe them. Cornered rats will fight back--but men lick the boots of their tormentors. I learned only hate and defiance. I'm a cornered rat, not a man."

There was sound now, outside the door they had entered. Low at first, a mere scrabbling, as if the trackers had located their refuge. In moments only, there came a heavy pounding, followed by the skirl of atomic drills. Newlin tensed, his hand itching at the butt of his blaster.

"I'm a rat," he went on. "Cornered, like any other rat. And the terriers are out there scratching at my hole. If you'll open that non-squeak door, I'll talk to them. Maybe even kill a few."

"No," said Songeen positively. "No killing."

"But I'm a killer," Newlin insisted. "I've killed men before for a lot less reason. They're mining the door. How long do you think that will last against explosives?"

"Not long," the girl admitted. "But long enough. I have the key at last. Stand back."

* * * * *

Something formless and faintly radiant hovered indescribably in space. Suspended above the worn flooring, without visible support or tangible outline--it existed. Something like weird emptiness, a void appearing in the air itself.

"This is the portal," Songeen told him calmly. "Choose now. I will take you with me if I can without permission. But do not come with me, unwarned. There is grave peril, beyond anything I can describe to you. Beyond your experience or imagination. I will try to get you safely back, somehow. But I can promise nothing. And if you stay too long, there is no coming back. You must remain there; even if the terror of your surroundings kills you."

She stood beside the mysterious doorway, waiting. Newlin made a start to follow her, then balked.

"Wait!" he ordered roughly, as she was about to lead the way. "I can't go with you--not like this."

"Afraid?"

"Yes, but not of you or your world. I trust you. But you say everyone here is crazy. That it's infectious. Won't I carry the contagion into your world?"

Songeen hesitated. Shadows deepened inside her eyes. "You would, yes. But you will have contact with no one but me. Perhaps with the Masters--if I can take you to them. They may help us, but they are strange, unpredictable. Remember, I promise nothing and you come at your own risk. But your disease will harm no one--I'm inoculated, and the Masters are immune. If you overstay the limit and cannot return, you will be decontaminated just as we must be when we return to our own people.

"Here, in this room, is the place where the people of our colony on Venus were decontaminated before they could be allowed to enter the place of refuge the Masters had prepared for them. It is a cruel and harrowing experience. I know. There may be a way to get you safely back, without that. But your mind could never stand the shock. Understand that, before you choose."

"If it won't harm you, I'll go along," Newlin decided. "Almost any world would be an improvement on this."

"Don't be too sure," she warned. "At worst, the terror here is familiar. Come, then. Hold my hand, stay close, and try not to be frightened. It will be bad enough. And try not to change too much, or I will have difficulty returning you alive."

The portal swallowed her, and Newlin felt himself drawn into the force-vortex, still clinging to her hand.

* * * * *

Transition was mild enough, less shock than he had expected.

A moment of chill detachment, as if something indescribably cold shattered his body into component atoms and readjusted them to new patterns. He gasped, his body making the same thermal changes as if he stood under a cold shower. He shivered.

Then it was like coming out of the blanketing fog of horror into the sunlight of sanity; like rebirth, painlessly, into an eery other-dimension.

There was light and sound about him, a stir of cool air. Songeen had become separated from him in that moment of strange passage. She stood apart, watching him with laughter in her eyes. Laughter as cool and calm and soothing as the soft wind that riffled her hair. She had stripped off the bulky armor, shed her plastic helmet. Now she was all woman again, and somehow, oddly, a symbol of all women.

Other senses than his five sprang into life within him. Weird _awareness_ through new perceptions which were nameless to his mind or to his memory.

At first there was no terror, no surprise. Merely an overwhelming _difference_.

Overhead was starless night, but not darkness. It was a vaulted, infinite sky, like an inverted ocean of tinted crystal, transparent, but softly colored, deepening imperceptibly to a heart of emerald, a-glow with faintest witchlights. All around him was a maze of shimmering crystal in odd forms, grotesque, clear but echoing the witchlights of that haunted sky.

Wind-borne, came the faint, sweet chiming of distinct porcelain bells. The place was alive with movement, sensed but incompletely seen. Even the wind flowed in almost visible currents, thickened as if the air had become dense, molten glass. All forms in the maze of crystal varied constantly. Light flared and died in odd rhythms, and the almost visible winds played icy arpeggios upon strings of spun glass, like Aeolian harps. Showering notes like those of Chinese windbells hung in clusters in the eddies of great wind rivers, and both sound and light flowed together and wove strange patterns and infinite variations.

It was not quite pleasant, vaguely nerve-tightening, but highly stimulating. Sound was muted at first, as was the light. Images blurred and outlines were unsteady, baffling. Everything fused and flowed together like half molten shards of broken glass. Wavelengths of troubled sound formed trembling notes that hung in the air, almost visible, crystalline and somehow painfully dissonant.

Like Songeen, her world or the pathway to it was strange, alien, but poignantly beautiful.

It was stranger than he thought.

He realized almost at once that his mind was making adjustments. It was lying to him, translating unfamiliar concepts into terms known to memory. It was diluting and enfeebling his sensations. But dread grew in him.

When his mind tired, stopped lying to him, what would it really be like? Could he stand the factual perception?

They trod the forest aisles of crystalline forms. There was light, of odd, gray, glary kind. A twilight, silvery, unreal as the trans-Lunar dreams of drugged poets. Songeen moved ahead slowly, making no effort to regain her clasp of his hand. Almost she seemed to avoid him, waiting until he almost overtook her, then skimming lightly away from him. Her slim, pale witchery was both taunt and challenge. She appeared to float rather than walk.

One by one she dropped her clinging robes. She became part of the mad forest, part of its dreamy gray enchantments.

Light grew steadily, and with it came more color, more magic, and more confusion of senses. The forest-forms assumed strange geometries. They stretched about him in endless vistas, blurring and transmuting as he watched. The dream-like cloudiness was fading from his perceptions. He caught dreadful hints now and then of new, unheard-of forms and colors, of unstable geometries as far beyond Einstein's as his were beyond Euclid's. Nothing was tangible or definite, and perhaps that was the secret. Nothing ever is. Fear wove a crystalline web about Newlin's throat, strangling.

He halted and took stock. Ahead, Songeen waited, watching him, her figure a pale, elfin flame form against the shadowy mass of colored crystals. It was a forest of gemfires, and she was the purest jewel of the forest. Naked, alien, but--

* * * * *

Why had he come here? His mind balked at backtracking. There was no going back. Perhaps he had already come too far. Was Songeen a vampire luring him into the hideous depths of this unknown place? He had been here before. It was like that awful illusion in the tower, but muted. How much did he perceive? How much was sheerest self-deception? Was he mad in the midst of awful sanity, or sane in the ultimate horror of lunacy?

Her voice floated back to him, its sound the chiming crash of splintering glass.

"Try not to change too much," she warned.

"Change?" Even the word sounded strange to him, as she said it. He felt a swift surge of anger. There was no change in him--_none_!

The tinkling bell-tones matched the swirl of his emotion and rose to jangling, tormented heights. It was shrill, maniacal tumult, that ranged upward and upward into octaves beyond sound. It was a rollicking, tortured insanity. Windbells chiming, jangled; tinkling, shimmering, exploding inside his brain. Windbells shattering in a hurricane of sound and ecstasy.

With his fists, Newlin pounded at his bursting skull. Pain deadened perception, gave him a moment's relief.

He was not changing, he shouted in loud defense. He was not!

Songeen poised, watching. Her body-outlines swirled and altered in swift mutations before his eyes. She was not woman now. Not even human. She danced and flickered and gibbered at him. She was jeweled movement. Change. She was as crystalline as the forest, as molten emerald as the sky. Points of fire inside her caught and flared and burned inside his eyes. She was not Songeen!

Newlin screamed. He looked down at his hands. He screamed again, louder. His hands were transparent as glass, and as fluid as water. Outlines wavered, changed.