Part 9

For the _Skylark_, which had been floating freely in space--a motion which the senses of the wanderers had long since ceased to interpret as a sensation of falling--had been given an acceleration. Only a slight acceleration, barely enough to make the floor of the control room seem "down," but any acceleration at all in such circumstances was to the scientists cause for grave concern.

"Nongravitational, of course, or we couldn't feel it--it'd affect everything about the ship alike. What's the answer, Mart, if any?" Seaton demanded. "Suppose that they've taken hold of us with a tractor ray and are taking us for a ride?"

"It would appear that way. I wonder if the visiplates are still practical?" Crane moved over to number one visiplate and turned it in every direction. Nothing was visible in the abysmal, all-engulfing, almost palpable darkness of the absolute black outside the hull of the vessel.

"It wouldn't work, hardly," Seaton commented. "Look at our time here--we must be 'way beyond light. I doubt if we could see anything, even if we had a sixth-order projector--which of course we haven't."

"But how about our light inside here, then?" asked Margaret. "The lamps are burning, and we can see things."

"I don't know, Peg," Seaton replied. "All this stuff is 'way past me. Maybe it's because the lights are traveling with us--no, that's out. Probably, as I intimated before, we aren't seeing things at all--just feeling them, some way or other. That must be it, I think--it's sure that the light-waves from those lamps are almost perfectly stationary, as far as we're concerned."

"Oh, there's something!" Dorothy called. She had remained at the visiplate, staring into the impenetrable darkness. "See, it just flashed on! We're falling toward ground of some kind. It doesn't look like any planet I ever saw before, either--it's perfectly endless and it's perfectly flat."

The others rushed to the plates and saw, instead of the utter blackness of a moment before, an infinite expanse of level, uncurving hyperland. Though so distant from it that any planetary curvature should have been evident, they could perceive no such curvature. Flat that land was, and sunless, but apparently self-luminous; glowing with a strong, somewhat hazy, violet light. And now they could also see the craft which had been towing them. It was a lozenge-shaped affair, glowing fiercely with the peculiarly livid "light" of the hyperplanet; and was now apparently exerting its maximum tractive effort in a vain attempt to hold the prodigious mass of _Skylark Two_ against the seemingly slight force of gravitation.

"Must be some kind of hyperlight that we're seeing by," Seaton cogitated. "Must be sixth or seventh-order velocity, at least, or we'd be--"

"Never mind the light or our seeing things!" Dorothy interrupted. "We are falling, and we shall probably hit hard. Can't you do something about it?"

"Afraid not, Kitten." He grinned at her. "But I'll try it--Nope, everything's dead. No power, no control, no nothing, and there won't be until we snap back where we belong. But don't worry about a crash. Even if that ground is solid enough to crash us, and I don't think it is, everything out here, including gravity, seems to be so feeble that it won't hurt us any."

Scarcely had he finished speaking when the _Skylark_ struck--or, rather, floated gently downward into the ground. For, slight as was the force of gravitation, and partially counteracted as well by the pull of the towing vessel, the arenak globe did not even pause as it encountered the apparently solid rock of the planet's surface. That rock billowed away upon all sides as the _Skylark_ sank into it and through it, to come to a halt only after her mass had driven a vertical, smooth-sided well some hundreds of feet in depth.

Even though the Osnomian metal had been rendered much less dense than normal by its extrusion and expansion into the fourth dimension, yet it was still so much denser than the unknown material of the hyperplanet that it sank into that planet's rocky soil as a bullet sinks into thick jelly.

"Well, that's that!" Seaton declared. "Thinness and tenuosity, as well as feebleness, seem to be characteristics of this hypermaterial. Now we'll camp here peacefully for a while. Before they succeed in digging us out--if they try it, which they probably will--we'll be gone."

* * * * *

Again, however, the venturesome and impetuous chemist was wrong. Feeble the hypermen were, and tenuous, but their curiosity was whetted even sharper than before. Derricks were rigged, and slings; but even before the task of hoisting the _Skylark_ to the surface of the planet was begun, two of the peculiar denizens of the hyperworld were swimming down through the atmosphere of the four-dimensional well at whose bottom the Earth vessel lay. Past the arenak wall of the cruiser they dropped, and into the control room they floated.

"But I do not understand it at all, Dick," Crane had been arguing. "Postulating the existence of a three-dimensional object in four-dimensional space, a four-dimensional being could of course enter it at will, as your fingers entered that tobacco can. But since all objects here are in fact and of necessity four-dimensional, that condition alone should bar any such proceeding. Therefore, since you actually _did_ take the contents out of that can without opening it, and since our recent visitors actually _did_ enter and leave our vessel at will, I can only conclude that we must still be essentially three-dimensional in nature, even though constrained temporarily to occupy four-dimensional space."

"Say, Mart, that's a thought! You're still the champion ground-and-lofty thinker of the universe, aren't you? That explains a lot of things I've been worrying myself black in the face about. I think I can explain it, too, by analogy. Imagine a two-dimensional man, one centimeter wide and ten or twelve centimeters long; the typical flatlander of the classical dimensional explanations. There he is, in a plane, happy as a clam and perfectly at home. Then some force takes him by one end and rolls him up into a spiral, or sort of semisolid cylinder, one centimeter long. He won't know what to make of it, but in reality he'll be a two-dimensional man occupying three-dimensional space.

"Now imagine further that we can see him, which of course is a pretty tall order, but necessary since this is a very rough analogy. We wouldn't know what to make of him, either, would we? Doesn't that square up with what we're going through now? We'd think that such a thing was quite a curiosity and want to find out about it, wouldn't we? That, I think, explains the whole thing, both our sensations and the actions of those sea horses--huh! Here they are again. Welcome to our city, strangers!"

But the intruders made no sign of understanding the message. They did not, could not, understand.

The human beings, now using Dorothy's happily discovered method of dimensional reduction, saw that the hypermen did indeed somewhat resemble overgrown sea horses--the hippocampus of Earthly zoölogy--but sea horses each equipped with a writhing, spinning, air-propeller tail and with four long and sinuous arms, terminating in many dexterous and prehensile fingers.

Each of those hands held a grappling trident; a peculiar, four-dimensional hyperforceps whose insulated, interlocking teeth were apparently electrodes--conductors of some hyperequivalent of our Earthly electricity. With unmoved, expressionless "faces" the two visitors floated about the control room, while Seaton and Crane sent out wave after wave of friendly thought and made signs of friendship in all the various pantomimic languages at their command.

"Look out, Mart, they're coming this way! I don't want to start anything hostile, but I don't particularly like the looks of those toad-stabbers of theirs, and if they start any funny business with them maybe we'd better wring their fishy little necks!"

But there was to be no neck-wringing--then. Slight of strength the hypermen were, and of but little greater density than the thin air through which they floated so easily; but they had no need of physical strength--then.

Four tridents shot out, and in a monstrously obscure fashion reached _past_ clothing, skin, and ribs; seizing upon and holding firmly, but painlessly and gently, the vital nervous centers of the human bodies. Seaton tried to leap to the attack, but even his quickness was of no avail--even before he moved, a wave of intolerable agony surged throughout his being, ceasing only and completely when he relaxed, relinquishing his pugnacious attempt. Shiro, leaping from the galley with cleaver upraised, was similarly impaled and similarly subdued.

Then a hoisting platform appeared, and Seaton and Margaret were forced to board it. They had no choice; the first tensing of the muscles to resist the will of the hyperman was quelled instantly by a blast of such intolerable torture that no human body could possibly defy it for even the slightest perceptible instant of time.

"Take it easy, Dot--Mart," Seaton spoke rapidly as the hoist started upward. "Do whatever they say--no use taking much of that stuff--until Peg and I get back. We'll get back, too, believe me! They'll _have_ to take these meat hooks out of us sometime, and when they do they'll think a cyclone has broken loose."

XI.

Raging but impotent, Seaton stood motionless beside his friend's wife upon the slowly rising lift; while Crane, Dorothy, and Shiro remained in the control room of the _Skylark_. All were helpless, incapable alike of making a single movement not authorized by their grotesque captors. Feeble the hypermen were, as has been said; but at the first tensing of a human muscle in revolt there shot from the insulated teeth of the grappling hypertrident such a terrific surge of unbearably poignant torture that any thought of resistance was out of the question.

Even Seaton--fighter by instinct though he was, and reckless as he was and desperate at the thought of being separated from his beloved Dorothy--had been able to endure only three such shocks. The unimaginable anguish of the third rebuke, a particularly vicious and long-continued wrenching and wringing of the most delicate nerve centers of his being, had left him limp and quivering. He was still furious, still bitterly humiliated. His spirit was willing, but he was physically unable to drive his fiendishly tortured body to further acts of rebellion.

Thus it was that the improvised elevator of the hypermen carried two docile captives as it went _past_--not _through_--the spherical arenak shell of _Skylark Two_ and up the mighty well which the vessel had driven in its downward plunge. The walls of that pit were glassily smooth; or, more accurately, were like slag: as though the peculiarly unsubstantial rock of the hyperplanet had been actually melted by the force of the cruiser's descent, easy and gradual as the fall had seemed to the senses of the Terrestrials.

It was apparent also that the hypermen were having difficulty in lifting the, to them, tremendous weight of the two human bodies. The platform would go up a few feet, then pause. Up and pause, up and pause; again and again. But at last they reached the top of the well, and, wretched as he was, Seaton had to grin when he perceived that they were being lifted by a derrick, whose overdriven engine, attended though it was by a veritable corps of mechanics, could lift them only a few feet at a time. Coughing and snorting, it ran slower and slower until, released from the load, it burst again into free motion to build up sufficient momentum to lift them another foot or so.

And all about the rim of that forty-foot well there were being erected other machines. Trusses were rising into the air, immense chains were being forged, and additional motors were being assembled. It was apparent that the _Skylark_ was to be raised; and it was equally evident that to the hypermen that raising presented an engineering problem of no small magnitude.

"She'll be right here when we get back, Peg, as far as those jaspers are concerned," Seaton informed his companion. "If they have to slip their clutches to lift the weight of just us two, they'll have one sweet job getting the old _Skylark_ back up here. They haven't got the slightest idea of what they're tackling--they can't begin to pile enough of that kind of machinery in this whole part of the country to budge her."

"You speak as though you were quite certain of our returning," Margaret spoke somberly. "I wish that I could feel that way."

"Sure I'm certain of it," Seaton assured her. "I've got it all figured out. Nobody can maintain one hundred per cent vigilance forever, and as soon as I get back into shape from that last twisting they gave me, I'll be fast enough to take advantage of the break when it comes."

"Yes; but suppose it doesn't come?"

"It's bound to come sometime. The only thing that bothers me is that I can't even guess at when we're due to snap back into our own three-dimensional space. Since we couldn't detect any motion in an ether wave, though, I imagine that we'll have lots of time, relatively speaking, to get back here before the _Skylark_ leaves. Ah! I wondered if they were going to make us walk to wherever it is they're taking us, but I see we ride--there comes something that must be an airship. Maybe we can make our break now instead of later."

But the hyperman did not relax his vigilance for an instant as the vast, vague bulk of the flier hovered in the air beside their elevator. A port opened, a short gangplank shot out, and under the urge of the punishing trident the two human beings stepped aboard. A silent flurry ensued among the weird crew of the vessel as its huge volume sank downward under the unheard-of mass of the two captives, but no opportunity was afforded for escape--the gripping trident did not relax, and at last the amazed officers succeeded in driving their motors sufficiently to lift the prodigious load into the air of the hyperplanet.

"Take a good, long look around, Peg, so that you can help find our way back," Seaton directed, and pointed out through the peculiarly transparent wall of their conveyance. "See those three peaks over there, the only hills in sight? Our course is about twelve or fifteen degrees off the line of the right-hand two--and there's something that looks like a river down below us. The bend there is just about on line--see anything to mark it by?"

"Well, there's a funny-looking island, kind of heart-shaped, with a reddish-colored spire of rock--see it?"

"Fine--we ought to be able to recognize that. Bend, heart-island, red obelisk on what we'll call the upstream end. Now from here, what? Oh, we're turning--going upstream. Fine business! Now we'll have to notice when and where we leave this river, lake, or whatever it is."

* * * * *

They did not, however, leave the course of the water. For hundreds of miles, apparently, it was almost perfectly straight, and for hours the airship of the hypermen bored through the air only a few hundred feet above its gleaming surface. Faster and faster the hypership flew onward, until it became a whistling, yelling projectile, tearing its way at a terrific but constant velocity through the complaining air.

But while that which was beneath them was apparently the fourth dimensional counterpart of an Earthly canal, neither water nor landscape was in any sense familiar. No sun was visible, nor moon, nor the tiniest twinkling star. Where should be the heavens there was merely a void of utter, absolute black, appalling in its uncompromising profundity. Indeed, the Terrestrials would have thought themselves blind were it not for the forbidding, Luciferean vegetation which, self-luminous with a ghastly bluish-violet pseudo-light, extended outward--flat--in every direction to infinity.

"What's the matter with it, Dick?" demanded Margaret, shivering. "It's horrible, awful, unsettling. Surely anything that is actually seen must be capable of description? But this--" Her voice died away.

"Ordinarily, three-dimensionally, yes; but this, no," Seaton assured her. "Remember that our brains and eyes, now really pseudo-fourth-dimensional, are capable of seeing those things as they actually are; but that our entities--intelligences--whatever you like--are still three-dimensional and can neither comprehend nor describe them. We can grasp them only very roughly by transposing them into our own three-dimensional concepts, and that is a poor subterfuge that fails entirely to convey even an approximate idea. As for that horizon--or lack of it--it simply means that this planet is so big that it looks flat. Maybe it _is_ flat in the fourth dimension--I don't know!"

Both fell silent, staring at the weird terrain over which they were being borne at such an insane pace. Along its right line above that straight watercourse sped the airship, a shrieking arrow; and to the right of the observers and to left of them spread, as far as the eye could reach, a flatly unbroken expanse of the ghostly, livid, weirdly self-luminous vegetation of the unknowable hyperworld. And, slinking, leaping, or perchance flying between and among the boles and stalks of the rank forest growth could be glimpsed fleeting monstrous forms of animal life.

Seaton strained his eyes, trying to see them more clearly; but owing to the speed of the ship, the rapidity of the animals' movements, the unsatisfactory illumination, and the extreme difficulty of translating at all rapidly the incomprehensible four-dimensional forms into their three-dimensional equivalents, he could not even approximate either the size or the appearance of the creatures with which he, unarmed and defenseless, might have to deal.

"Can you make any sense out of those animals down there, Peg?" Seaton demanded. "See, there's one just jumped out of the river and seemed to fly into that clump of bamboolike stuff there. Get any details?"

"No. What with the poor light and everything being so awful and so distorted, I can hardly see anything at all. Why--what of them?"

"This of 'em. We're coming back this way, and we may have to come on foot. I'll try to steal a ship, of course, but the chance that we'll be able to get one--or to run it after we do get it--is mighty slim. But assuming that we are afoot, the more we know about what we're apt to go up against the better we'll be able to meet it. Oh, we're slowing down--been wondering what that thing up ahead of us is. It looks like a cross between the Pyramid of Cheops and the old castle of Bingen on the Rhine, but I guess it's a city--it seems to be where we're headed for."

"Does this water actually flow out from the side of that wall, or am I seeing things?" the girl asked.

"It seems to--your eyes are all right, I guess. But why shouldn't it? There's a big archway, you notice--maybe they use it for power or something, and this is simply an outfall--"

"Oh, we're going in!" Margaret exclaimed, her hand flashing out to Seaton's arm.

"Looks like it, but they probably know their stuff." He pressed her hand reassuringly. "Now, Peg, no matter what happens, stick to me as long as you possibly can!"

As Seaton had noticed, the city toward which they were flying resembled somewhat an enormous pyramid, whose component units were themselves mighty buildings, towering one above and behind the other in crenelated majesty to an awe-inspiring height. In the wall of the foundation tier of buildings there yawned an enormous opening, spanned by a noble arch of metaled masonry, and out of this gloriously arched aqueduct there sprang the stream whose course the airship had been following so long. Toward that forbidding opening the hypership planed down, and into it she floated slowly and carefully.

* * * * *

Much to the surprise of the Terrestrials, however, the great tunnel of the aqueduct was not dark. Walls and arched ceiling alike glowed with the livid, bluish-violet ultra-light which they had come to regard as characteristic of all hyperthings, and through that uncanny glare the airship stole along. Once inside the tunnel its opening vanished--imperceptible, indistinguishable from its four-dimensional, black-and-livid-blue background.

Unending that tunnel stretched before and behind them. Walls and watery surface alike were smooth, featureless, and so uniformly and weirdly luminous that the eye could not fix upon any point firmly enough to determine the rate of motion of the vessel--or even to determine whether it was moving at all. No motion could be perceived or felt and the time-sense had long since failed. Seaton and Margaret may have traveled in that gigantic bore for inches or for miles of distance; for seconds or for weeks of hypertime; they did not then and never did know. But with a slight jar the hypership came to rest at last upon a metallic cradle which had in some fashion appeared beneath her keel. Doors opened and the being holding the tridents, who had not moved a muscle during the, to the Terrestrials, interminable journey, made it plain to them that they were to precede him out of the airship. They did so, quietly and without protest, utterly helpless to move save at the behest of their unhuman captor-guide.

Through a maze of corridors and passages the long way led. Each was featureless and blank, each was lighted by the same eerie, bluish light, each was paved with a material which, although stone-hard to the hypermen, yielded springily, as yields a soft peat bog, under the feet of the massive Terrestrials. Seaton, although now restored to full vigor, held himself rigorously in check. Far from resisting the controlling impulses of the trident he sought to anticipate those commands.

Indeed, recognizing the possibility that the captor might be aware, through those electrical connections, of his very ideas, he schooled his outward thoughts to complete and unquestioning submission. Yet never had his inner brain been more active, and now the immense mentality given him by the Norlaminians stood him in good stead. For every doorway, every turn, every angle and intersection of that maze of communicating passageways was being engraved indelibly upon his brain, he knew that no matter how long or how involved the way, he could retain his orientation with respect to the buried river up which they had sailed.

And, although quiescent enough and submissive enough to all outward seeming, his inner brain was keyed up to its highest pitch, eager to drive Seaton's gigantic and instantaneously reacting muscles into outbursts of berserk fury at the slightest lapse of the attention of the wielder of the mastering trident.

But there was no such lapse. The intelligence of the hyperman seemed to be concentrated in the glowing tips of the forceps and did not waver for an instant, even when an elevator into which he steered his charges refused to lift the immense weight put upon it.

A silent colloquy ensued, then Seaton and Margaret walked endlessly up a spiral ramp. Climbed, it seemed, for hours, their feet sinking to the ankles into the resilient material of the rock-and-metal floor, while their alert guardian floated effortlessly in the air behind them, propelled and guided by his swiftly revolving tail.