6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

THE OTHER WORLD By Murray Leinster

DICK BLAIR dug up a Fifth Dynasty tomb in Lower Egypt and found that one object, and one only, had been spoiled by dampness in a climate which preserved all the other objects in the tomb to perfection. Almost simultaneously, in New York, a plumber carrying a kit of tools turned into a doorway on Eighth Avenue and was never seen again, living or dead. Shortly after, a half-ton of dried figs vanished inexplicably from a locked warehouse in Smyrna, and—in New York—a covered barge complete with a load of bricks and building materials evaporated into thin air while a night watchman gazed goggle-eyed. His account of the event was not believed.

There were other pertinent events even before these. One year in New York’s history of the number of missing persons who had no reason to vanish went up to four times normal. Most missing persons have their reasons for disappearing, but there are always a few who seem neither to have been murdered or to have absconded. This year the number of such cases was unprecedented, and there was no explanation for it at all.

There was the time seventy-five years before when the four prettiest members of a theatrical chorus went upstairs to doff their winter wraps in the home of a rich man who was giving a party, and never came down again. Then there was that indubitable were-wolf which was killed in Avino province in Italy, in the 1850’s. It was classed only tentatively as wolf because it had some oddities of conformation, but it had intelligence at least equal to that of the peasants on whom it had preyed for two weeks before its destruction. It had killed and partly or wholly devoured twenty-two human beings in two weeks. The scientists of the time were very much annoyed when enraged peasants stormed the place where it was held for examination and burned the carcass to ashes.

Before that, there was the well-attested disappearance of the carriage of a semi-royal princeling in the Tyrol. It went around a curve in the carriage-road, and riding-footmen a hundred yards behind found it utterly gone when they rounded the curve in their turn. Six horses, a coachman and footman, and two of the princeling’s mistresses —one of whom was said to be the most beautiful woman in Europe at the time—vanished in the twinkling of an eye and no trace was ever found of any of them. And still earlier there was that shipload of immigrants to the United States which was sighted only forty miles off Sandy Hook, pressing forward with all sail set on a perfectly fair day, which never reached harbor and from which not one particle of wreckage was ever found.

When these items are put together, they add up convincingly to mere nonsense. The farther back into history one delves, the less credible the affairs become.

[What follows has been cast in the form of fiction for obvious reasons. For one thing, it is extremely unlikely to be quoted in any newspaper. For another, it is extremely undesirable that any considerable group of people should take it for fact while any sizable residue of unexplained disappearances occur.—Murray Leinster]

But Dick Blair dug up a Fifth Dynasty tomb in Egypt and found that exactly one object had been ruined by dampness in a rock-hewn vault in which every other object had remained absolutely dry from the time of its entombment. That object meant the second discovery of the Other World and an explanation—an explanation— for very many mysteries which date back to the time of the Fifth Dynasty, five thousand years ago.

When he got back to New York, Dick Blair was very busy for a while, but at last, one night, he took a mass of greenish clay to his friend Tom Maltby. Dick was then only partly bleached out from the Egyptian sun, where he had dug out a previously untouched Fifth Dynasty tomb. But civilization already bored him. He was inclined to mourn the humdrumness of life in New York.

“This,” he told Maltby, “is a hunk of dirt. It’s colored with oxides, and once upon a time it contained something made by a worthy Egyptian at least five thousand years ago. At the Museum we’re pretty good at re-forming objects that have been corroded past recognition, but we have to have at least a sliver of metal to work on. The X-rays say this is absolutely gone.”

He handed over the X-ray negatives. They showed the distribution of the denser metallic oxides in the lump of clay. Maltby looked at them interestedly.

With a sliver of the original metal left,” Dick observed, “we run a contact down to it, use it as a cathode, run about a quarter-ampere to it for six months or so, and the oxides break down and the metal goes back to the shape it was originally in. It’s amazing how detailed the things get sometimes. We even find the original decorations. But this one beats us.” [This is literally true, and standard museum practice. Provided that the corroded metal in the clay has not been disturbed, excellent reversals of rusting processes are obtained and artifacts which would have been unrecognizable are regularly restored to a condition suitable for exhibition and study.—Murray Leinster.]

Maltby nodded.

“That’s what I want. I said I’d try to work out an improvement on your system. It’s in my line.”

Maltby was a consulting engineer specializing in the prevention of electrolytic damage by earth-currents. Every public utility has at least one engineer whose specialty is the prevention of damage of this type. Maltby was tops in the field. He’d checked the destruction of a very famous bridge, he had doctored a very modern skyscraper whose foundation-piles were being corroded even in their concrete sheaths, and his process for restoring rusted objects underground was not unlike museum methods for rebuilding prehistoric relics.

He put down the dried clay and mixed two drinks. Dick Blair settled down comfortably.

“That hunk of dirt is now officially your property,” he observed, “which is my doing. It may be a copper pot or pan or anything at all. I can’t figure out how it rusted. The place was absolute, stony, dessicated desert without a drop of water for miles. The tomb was bone-dry and nothing else showed any trace of damage by moisture. Where’d the moisture come from?”

Maltby sipped at his drink. Dick went on:

“More oddities about that tomb— Its occupant wasn’t a king, but he was fitted out for the afterlife in royal style! There were more imported objects in that tomb than you could shake a stick at. There was stuff from Cyprus, from Phoenicia, from Ethiopia, from Mycenae, and slathers of regular Egyptian stuff. The writings in the tomb are weird. He was a sort of royal physician and miracle-worker, who happened to be cousin to the Pharoah. There was a papyrus on medicine which is going to raise the devil! You simply can’t translate it except as a description of the circulation of the blood— forty-seven hundred years before modern men knew of it. Another scroll is crazier. It describes animals which simply don’t exist. The prize is a description of a small horse with three toes. I may add that the eohippus did not survive until his time. How’d he get such an idea?”

Maltby shrugged.

“Fairy tales can’t always be wrong,” he said. “Make enough fantastic statements, and some are bound to be right. You’d have trouble showing me there was modern knowledge fifty centuries ago, papyri or no papyri.”

Dick Blair grinned. “The old chap in the tomb had modern ideas. I don’t know whether you know it, but there were Pharoahs who never had even civil wars, much less foreign ones. He claimed , he handled that for his cousin. Anybody who even thought evil of the king died mysteriously. And he boasted of the dirt he did to the King of Cyprus of his time. Magic, but modern.”

Maltby raised his eyebrows. Dick went on zestfully:

“His funeral boasts say that a King of Cyprus had a pretty daughter and the then Pharoah sent a message demanding her for his harem. The King of Cyprus refused. So before his whole court he vanished in a pool of quicksilver. My old gent declares he worked that. The King of Cyprus’ son got ready to fight, but instead he and all his family—including the princess—died in a palace which poured out flames at every window. The next ruler was suitably abject and sent tribute. Nearly the same process happened in Phoenicia, Ethiopia and Mycenae.”

Maltby looked at the lump of clay. He said mildly, “Such a potent magician must have put a curse on his tomb in case anybody should rob it. Don’t tell me he omitted that!”

Dick grinned again, and then said in sudden half-seriousness: “Speaking of curses, an odd thing happened in Alexandria while I was there. The very pretty daughter of one of the richest men in town vanished from her bed, with two maid-servants watching her. She vanished in a pool of quicksilver. They screamed like all hell, and all her father did was throw dust on his head and die of a broken heart. That one made the newspapers, but the old sheykhs of Alexandria weren’t surprised. They said it happens occasionally and has since time began. The funny thing is that the quicksilver business—”

He stopped and looked startled. Maltby said: “That King of Cyprus you mentioned?”

“Y-Yes,” said Dick blankly. “I never thought of the connection before. Odd, isn’t it?”

Maltby said deliberately, “I know a chap who is digging into criminology. He’s a queer duck. He has all the money in the world, but he’s working like a beaver to set himself up as a consulting criminologist. And he says that he can’t understand some records he’s found. It seems there are several records of things disappearing in pools of quicksilver right here in New York. It doesn’t make sense, and nobody’s ever believed it. I must tell him about the King of Cyprus.”

Dick blinked.

“That’s crazy! In the Middle East quicksilver is considered more or less magical—”

“Mirages on a motor-road look like quicksilver,” observed Maltby. “I’ve seen a film of gas, formed in an electrolyte, look like it too... Now I’m going to set up my apparatus for your hunk of clay.”

He got out his gadgets. He had devised this particular set-up to work out his corrosion-reversal process for buildings. It was laboratory-size only, but it would serve for the clay. There was a plastic box with electrodes at its sides. He packed the relic into the box, filling the unoccupied space with more clay. A high-frequency oscillator came into play.

“There’s no metal in this stuff to serve as a cathode,” he observed, “and it’s just as well. I’m setting up a standing wave in the middle of this clay mass. There’ll be a constant potential difference between the middle and the outer surface. When the clay’s moistened there’ll be a steady flow of plating-out current from every direction toward the center. Presently some particle of metal will establish itself. Maybe several. I may have a dozen centers of potential—they’ll establish themselves wherever the oxide is densest. Then we’ll see what happens. I think the result should be pretty good, but it’ll take time.”

“At the museum,” said Dick, “we figure on six months.”

“I estimate two weeks,” said Maltby, drily. “My current-flow depends on the ions present, not on power fed to it. I’m not feeding current in at all. It makes its own.”

He arranged a moistening solution so that the clay would gradually acquire an even moisture-content. He turned on the oscillator and brushed off his hands.

“Now we wait. Have another drink?”

“No-o,” said Dick. “Just what did you mean by that quicksilver business? It’s odd to hear a story like that in New York. I didn’t believe the one in Alexandria, though the local inhabitants did. And it’s absurd to link them with an ancient papyrus with the same yarn in it!”

“I didn’t mean a thing,” admitted Maltby. “You spoke of a girl vanishing, and quicksilver, and of a forgotten king vanishing, and quicksilver. So I remembered Sam Todd telling me about a safe that was opened only a month ago in a perfume factory, and the flasks of essential oils worth up to hundreds of dollars an ounce vanishing in as many tiny pools of quicksilver. It seemed odd, so I mentioned it. That’s all.”

“I’d like to talk to this Sam Todd,” said Dick. “I hate to be silly, but that’s too damned queer—”

Dick Blair went about his business, which was partly that of relaxation just now. He’d been through a grueling grind in Egypt, and probably had a few tropical germs in his system which it would be a good idea to get out. He gave a lecture or two, wrote a magazine article, and kept himself available for consultation if needed by the Museum staff. But mostly he rested.

He met Sam Todd and found him a kindred soul who was, at the moment, almost ready to achieve his great ambition—to become a consulting criminologist with something to offer his clients. His material on quicksilver-pool disappearances and thefts was fascinating. The list went back for over seventy-five years. The tales were so impossible that it was only rarely that they had ever reached print, and that made it the more remarkable that on at least a dozen occasions the same story was told by persons who could not have heard of the others. A famous stallion vanished and when a groom looked in his stall there were four little pools of quicksilver descending to the floor. The horse was gone. There were other quicksilver droplets scattered here and there about the straw bedding on the floor, but they vanished too. No quicksilver was found when the stall was searched afterward. The old Delmonico’s was robbed of priceless wines. The wine bottles disappeared in round and oblong pools of quicksilver, which afterwards vanished too. Only one person saw them. There was the disappearance of an obscure dancer—by no means talented—who had been said to be the prettiest girl on the New York stage that season. Her dresser, and a stage-hand called by the dresser’s shrieks, claimed that they saw quicksilver as the girl vanished. That quicksilver could not be found, either.

The only common factor in all the tales was the absence of a sequel. Not one of the vanished things, whether persons or goods, had ever been found again. No corpus delicti. No underworld boastings. Nothing.

All of this brought Dick’s curiosity to the point where it became almost an obsession. Then he met Nancy Holt. Sam Todd had employed her to do research for him; she would be part of his staff when he opened his office. He thought a great deal of her brains, but the only personal fact he had noted about her was that she used a strictly personal perfume, which she said was made from a recipe of her grandmother’s.

But Dick Blair saw her as the one girl on earth whom he could not possibly let anybody else marry. He fell hard the first time he saw her. By the third time he was sunk so completely that she knew it too. And then he had an occupation which was at once relaxing and absorbing. He got busy trying to make her fall in love with him.

Meanwhile, the electrolytic reconstruction of the object in the plastic box went on. After four days, X-rays showed half a dozen small bits of solid metal in the clay. In six they had joined, three of them to form the beginning of a round flat disk, and the others still separated at odd angles to it. In eight days they were all joined. There was an irregular disk some four inches in diameter. It had a rod projecting from one side, and there were two branches from the rod. In ten days the object was recognizable. It was a ceremonial mirror with a cruciform handle, a crux ansata, part of an Egyptian Pharoah’s royal regalia through all the years down to Alexander the Great. Its significance was that the Pharoah was monarch not only of this world, but of the Other World beyond.

The outlines of the one in the clay were still rough. It was still being re-formed by the current the standing-waves induced. Two days later the X-rays showed an odd, disk-shaped shadow that Maltby could not understand. On the fourteenth day he had still made no sense of it at all, but the X-rays indicated that all metal in the clay had been returned to its original shape. The object was as completely restored as Maltby’s apparatus could make it. He called Dick on the phone to come and uncover it, with the precautions an archaeologist would take.

Dick arrived at Maltby’s flat, “Dammit, I tried to get Nancy to come along, but Sam had some photographs he wants made in the Police Museum. She’s busy listing the subjects for the photographer. Bludgeons and sashweights and ice-picks and other objects used by various murderers to express their lethal impulses. Damn!”

“That clay mess,” said Maltby mildly, “seems to have yielded a crux ansata. Interesting?”

“Rather early for such things,” said Dick restlessly. “And that mummy shouldn’t have had one in his tomb. He wasn’t a king.”

“I can’t make out,” said Maltby, “a disk that the X-rays show in the clay. It appeared quite suddenly at the very end of the process, and it’s quite opaque to X-rays. Even copper lets a little hard radiation go through. Any ideas?”

Dick shook his head, still thinking of Nancy. When Maltby dumped the clay out of the plastic box, though, his interest rose. He spurned a proffered knife and briskly cut a wooden spatula to carve the clay with. He looked at the X-ray negatives and placed the clay block just so. Then he made curiously surgeon-like incisions and laid the clay back cleanly. In only seconds he lifted out the golden-copper crux exactly as shown by the X-rays, and regarded it with astonishment.

“It’s perfect,” he said blankly, “—and there’s glass!”

The four-inch disk had seemed a solid mass of metal. Now the center was plainly transparent. They could see through it. Dick put it to one side and probed for the other disk, supposedly six inches from it, which should still be buried in the clay.

It wasn’t there.

He searched for minutes, until the clay lump was dissected into portions in which the imaged second disk could not be hidden.

“Queer,” said Dick. “We’ll use the X-ray again later. I want to look over this thing. Extraordinarily early for good glass! Really clear glass didn’t turn up until late in Roman times. Maybe it’s crystal.”

He picked it up impatiently. He cleaned the transparent surface from the front. He reached behind to clean the back, and his face went bewildered. He could feel the back of the mirror. It was metal. But he couldn’t see his fingers. He saw through them. Beyond them.

“Now, what the devil—”

He held up the thing and looked through it. He could see Maltby and the other side of the room. He took a book and slid it past the back of the supposed glass. It did not impede the view at all. He still saw Maltby and the other side of the room. The book seemed to be perfectly transparent as it passed before the window-like center of the disk. Then Maltby made an astounded exclamation.

“Here! Look at this!” he said sharply.

He took the crux ansata from Dick. He turned it over. He laid it on his desk glass side down. There was an extraordinary optical phenomenom. An infinitely thin layer of the desk’s surface seemed to be lifted up six inches above the desk. Beneath it could be seen the copper back of the disk. There was empty space above it, and then a film of desk-top. Which, of course, simply could not be.

“You see through it,” said Maltby, rather pale, “but there’s a space that the light seems to dodge around. It skips from the front side of the disk to a spot six inches this side of it. There’s that much distance that the light doesn’t have to pass through. Things look six inches nearer. See?”

He held the right side up and held it over the desk-top. The desk-top did look nearer. He pressed down—and gasped. He was looking at wood-fibres inside the substance of the wood. Then his hand dropped, and he was looking inside the desk, through the top. He was examining the contents of the top desk drawer from a point above the desk’s writing-surface.

The two of them babbled at each other. For twenty minutes or more they made absurd experiments. The fact remained. You looked into the transparent surface of the disk, and your sight skipped the opaque metal of the other surface and started on from six inches out in mid-air. Nothing in that six-inch space was an impediment to vision. The mirror could be held against a six-inch wall and anything beyond the wall would be visible. It was as if the light received on a small, circular area in mid-air curved through some unknown dimensions and returned to its proper line at the surface of the disk.

They had agreed on so much when Dick Blair said:

“What happens if you push something through?”

He thrust his finger toward himself, staring at its end through the unbelievably ancient instrument. His finger seemed to approach to the observed six inches. Then the impossible happened. He had no sensation, but he saw inside his finger. He saw inside the flesh. He saw the bone. He saw nerve-ends and capillaries—

He jerked his hand away and stared at Maltby. But Maltby was paler than Dick himself.

“I was—looking at your finger from the side,” said Maltby with difficulty. “The end of it vanished. And where it vanished, the end of it—looked like quicksilver.”

They doubted their own sanity, but there could be no doubt of the fact. They pushed a pencil into the impalpable place in-mid-air. The pencil disappeared. Looked at from the side, the spot where it vanished seemed a blob of quicksilver, which moved when the pencil was moved. From the proper side of the device, they saw into the inside of the pencil.

They pushed a watch, running, into that space. Dick saw its machinery in busy movement—or half its machinery. When it was withdrawn it was unharmed.

It was Dick who without warning suddenly thrust his whole hand up to the wrist into the enigmatic space. He looked at the bones and cross-section of the muscles and tendons of his wrist, while Maltby at one side saw a changing blob of quicksilver-like reflection the shape of the seemingly cut-off flesh. And then Dick said in a queer voice: “I feel something.”

He stood rigid for an instant. Then he jerked his hand out. He had something in his fingers.

It was a living green leaf, freshly plucked from what must have been a tree. It was a perfectly plausible leaf. There were only two things in the least odd about it. One was that it had been plucked from nothingness in an apartment three floors above the street and remote from any vegetation at all. The other was that it wasn’t the leaf of any species of plant known on earth.

It was Dick Blair who pointed out jerkily that the thing which looked into desks and through desk-tops and into flesh and bone had been used by its long-dead owner to study anatomy and accounted for the five-thousand-year-old description of the circulation of the blood. He could look directly into the inside of a living body. Then Maltby made incoherent noises about dimensions being at right angles to other dimensions and a field of force which made them interchangeable.

Then Dick said, stridently, that the significance of the crux ansata as a symbol of power over the other world had plainly once possessed a literal sense. There was another world somehow continuous to this one. It had been speculated upon since Plato was in diapers. This leaf had come from it. Which, he continued, might be an unjustified inference from inadequate data, but he was damned if he didn’t believe it, and anyhow he was going to put his hand in that round space again and see what turned up—

He did. He sweated as he fumbled. He broke off a spray of leaves from an unseen source, and dragged them back. It was the eeriest of sensations to stand in a lighted, well-furnished room with all one’s surroundings completely artificial, and to reach into vacancy in that well lighted room and produce from nothingness a batch of fresh foliage completely unlike any earthly leaves.

This grab into the unseen brought back something else, too. Coiled about the branch as if feeding on a leaf, there was a tiny living thing. It was perhaps six inches long. It had enormous, inquisitive eyes, and filmy wings. At the impact of the bright lights it blinked wisely and uncoiled itself and launched itself into the air. They both saw it clearly. It hovered delicately, like a hummingbird, and then darted to the window and out.

It was very small and quite harmless, but it was a serpent, a snake. It had wings. It flew. And winged serpents are not native to Earth.

The two men were quite literally babbling to each other when the bell rang and Sam Todd stumbled into the room. His face was ashen-white. He looked as if he had been drinking for weeks and had the horrors.

“Dick,” he said thickly. “I—was looking for you. I had Nancy at the Police Museum. We snatched a bite to eat and I—called a cab for her. Just as it was pulling up I— smelled something queer. Not that—special perfume she used, but—something else. I looked around and—Nancy was vanishing. The top half of her was gone into thin air and there—was a big blob of—quicksilver where her waist was, and it dropped to the ground and—she was gone! Maybe I’m crazy but that’s what happened...”

Dick Blair cried out furiously, because he knew as well as Sam that no thing and no person which had vanished in a pool of quicksilver had ever been seen again.

Then Sam lifted his head, twitching.

“Queer smell,” he said thickly. “Like—lush green stuff. I smell it now! My God, I smell it now! This is what I smelled when Nancy vanished...”

And then Dick and Maltby realized that their nostrils, too, were filled with an odor they had been too excited to notice before. Its origin was obvious enough. It came from crux ansata. And it was the smell of a jungle at night—in the heart of New York City.

For three days Maltby worked like a madman, while Dick Blair went practically insane. The worst of it was, of course, that Maltby could promise nothing. He did not dare to chip away any part of what might be called the transparent surface of the instrument from the past. He had to analyze without injuring the object he analyzed, for fear of destroying it altogether. He checked the light it transmitted, and found it circularly polarized. He checked the specific gravity of the entire object to six decimal places, and checked that against the density of a morsel scraped from the end of the handle. The whole instrument was made of bismuth bronze—copper and bismuth together. Normal bronze contains zinc or tin. It became certain that only one substance was involved, and that it was the bismuth-copper alloy. There was no insert of other substance to give the instrument its properties.

In the end, microscopic examination showed that, on the fine line of division where the transparent and opaque parts ran together, there was one irregularity. There was a place where for half a thousandth of an inch the metal was in an inbetween state—not quite the material of the handle, and not quite the enigmatic surface through which one looked around normal space.

That was the clue. Maltby worked on it for twenty-four hours straight, and had a one-inch ring of transparency in a flat slab of quarter-inch copper-bismuth alloy. It was not a duplicate of the entire crux ansata effect, but only of a part. The crux ansata seemed to look into another world and then back again to Earth at a remove of six inches in space. The peephole Maltby made looked only into another world. But that was a lot.

Looking through it, Maltby saw at first only spreading tree branches and thick foliage, speckled with sunshine from an unseen source. He touched a pencil experimentally to the transparent surface and nothing happened. The transparency was not penetrable.

He called Sam Todd on the phone and commanded him to get hold of Dick and bring him there. He worked on

When they burst, into his apartment he wavered on his feet from pure weariness. But he had a second bit of copper-bismuth alloy. This one was quite opaque. But there was a spot where you could push a lead pencil into it, and it vanished and you could pull it out again if it were not allowed to go in all the way. Moreover, if you looked through the peephole into the other world, in the direction of this second opaque spot, in between the illogical foliage you could see the part of the pencil which disappeared from Earth. It enlarged and grew smaller as it was pushed or pulled from Earth, and if it were pushed all the way through it could be seen to go tumbling through the tree branches toward the ground below this jungle.

“I’ve got a beginning,” said Maltby drearily. “I’ve gotten what is probably a sort of cockeyed alignment of cop per crystals with’ bismuth, in a crazy allotropic state. Normally, light-bending seems to call for one arrangement and matter-bending calls for another. Just for simplicity I’m assuming that this—this Other World is occupying the same space as Earth, and that it’s a matter of bending light to get it into that world, and to get it to come out again. It has to bend through an angle we normally can’t conceive of. And I’m guessing that matter more or less bends in the same fashion. That’s not clear, but I’m so tired I don’t think very straight.”

Dick said tensely, “What have you got ready for us?”

“I’ve got a one-inch peephole you can look into the other world with, and a space an inch across that you can push things through into the other world. I know how to make them, now. If I can stay awake, I can make a doorway somebody can go through.”

“Get to work!” commanded Dick. “Nancy’s there! You’ve got to get to work!”

“Agreed,” grunted Maltby, “but I haven’t slept for so long I can’t remember it. You take this peephole and go somewhere high and look around. While I make a door way for you, you’d better be stocking up on information.”

Sam Todd said, “And guns. But I’ll attend to that!”

“Since you may use a taxi,” added Maltby, “you’d better carry only the peephole. If you took the thing that matter can go through, you might be driving down Fifth Avenue in our world and drive through the space a tree occupies in the other. And the tree trunk might try to come through into the cab.”

“How long will it take to make the doorway?” demanded Dick.

“Maybe three hours, maybe four.”

The three of them separated instantly. Dick went raging to The Empire State Building and rode to its top; where he quite insanely held a small slab of copper alloy to his eye, and looked into the Other World.

Below him there was terrain identical with Manhattan Island in form and size and shape. But it was covered with foliage of which not one leaf was recognizable. To the south there were marshes where on Earth he saw tall buildings; and flowing streams, in the Other World, coursed merrily across the paths of streets in this.

At first he saw but one sign of humanity. That was a great villa, apparently of brick, with wide and spacious lawns. But he saw no human figures about it. It was too far away, on the Brooklyn shore. Then, here and there on the twin of Manhattan Island, he saw trails winding apparently at random through the heavy woods. It was a sunny day in the Other World. Everything seemed utterly tranquil and utterly at peace. And Dick, staring with desperate intentness, made notes which identified this trail—meandering from side to side—roughly with Fifth Avenue almost beneath him, and that trail with Twenty-Ninth Street. By sighting with both eyes open, one looking at Earth and the other into the Other World, he identified the position of the one vast villa as roughly south of the Navy Yard.

Then he saw movement on the trail a thousand feet below his eyrie. In the Other World a horse-drawn vehicle plodded slowly between giant tree trunks in the space otherwise occupied by Altman’s. There were two human figures in the vehicle, and at first he thought them naked, before he saw loincloths about their middles. Behind the vehicle trotted a four-legged creature far too large to be a dog. But the equipage turned beneath over hanging branches and he lost sight of it.

He went uptown to Radio City. Again from a vast height he surveyed endless forests. From here, though, he saw plowed fields which before had been invisible. More, in the middle of a virgin wilderness, he saw the sunlight glinting on acres upon acres of glass. It looked extraordinarily as if hothouses sufficient to supply a small town with foodstuffs were in existence. And he thought, but he was not sure, that he saw horses pulling plows. There were two of them. If men guided them, they were too far away to be seen with the naked eye.

It seemed all peace and serenity there. But Dick, staring from a great height, knew such hatred and horror as made him tremble. This Other World lay beside the earth that men knew, in that greater cosmos men have not yet begun to visualize. And Dick had an idea of the perverted significance that had been given it. Eons since, other men had found a way to pass between the worlds. Men had moved to the Other World, with the power to return to Earth where and when they wished. And man is the most predatory of animals; his favorite prey is other men.

That first discovery had unquestionably taken place far back in the dim dawn of history, when all of civilization lay in Egypt. A scientist or a magician of that time had doubtless made the first crossing between the worlds. Perhaps he told his king and was duly slaughtered for reward, after the king had made the discovery his own. At first, perhaps, the Other World had seemed to the king merely a possible refuge from rebellious nobles or an unruly people. A fugitive king, driven from his throne by his own tyranny, could retire to the Other World and be in safety from all his enemies. He could take his women and his slaves and build a palace in which to live in perfect security. Perhaps some king did do this, fleeing from successful civil war. But in exile he would crave revenge. And what could be more obvious than to make a doorway back to Earth which would open into the bedroom of his former palace, where his successor on the throne lay asleep behind guarded doors?

Then Dick remembered a scrap of history almost lost in the mists of time. He himself had first translated an ancient papyrus which told of such a thing. There had been such a king who had gone into the after world and bided his time, and had come again to rule Egypt in terror and blood when all his enemies died in a single night.

That was unquestionably it. The later kings of the Fifth Dynasty had ruled more ruthlessly than any other kings of Egypt. Magic slew their enemies. Disasters overwhelmed their foes. There was no treasure they could not lay hands upon, nor any human being they could not seize or slaughter. All Earth was at their mercy, when they could walk at will into the most secret, most guarded, most hidden retreat of the normal Earth.

They would be the masters, then, those men of the Other World. They would not need to fight battle for loot, when loot could be taken without hindrance. They need not capture cities for slaves, when slaves could be stolen in absolute safety from any place where men lived.

Dick could only guess at the development of so purely parasitic a society. The robbery of gold would soon cease to have meaning. Gold would have no more value than a clod of earth, when it could be taken as easily. Jewels would have no more value than so much glass. But fine fabrics and soft carpets, and luxuries of food and drink, and horses and strong men for slaves and pretty girls for playthings—those things would have value. And there would be no great nation of the parasitic Other World. It would be absurd for them to rob each other with the Earth to loot, so they would not need to combine in defense against each other. Their society would be anarchic. They would set up villas, as time went on, wherever Earth cities promised easy supplies of luxuries and slaves. The master of one villa would owe no allegience to any other. Yet how would they keep the loyalty of their guards, because guards against the slaves they must have?

There Dick’s imagination failed him, but such faint imaginings as he could contrive were enough to make him half-mad when he got back to Maltby’s place.

Sam Todd came in. He had brought guns. He began to divide with Dick, but Dick said grimly:

“No division, Sam. I’m going through the doorway alone as soon as Maltby has it done. You’ve got to stay behind. I may need some help I can’t anticipate. I need somebody cruising about—watching through the peephole we already have—ready to give me help if it’s needed. And if both of us go through, who’s going to tell the authorities about this business and bring help along?”

Sam laughed without amusement.

“Tell the authorities?” he asked sardonically. “How long would they listen before they’d usher me into a padded cell? Oh, it could be done in time, but I’d need to spend weeks convincing them that I wasn’t crazy and the peephole wasn’t a trick, and then they’d refer to higher authority and they’d need to be convinced, and then they’d decide that the democratic procedure was to send an observer or an ambassador through— We’ll get Nancy back and then talk about such things!”

“But you’ll stay behind to help me when I need it!” snapped Dick. “You know damned well you can do that better than Maltby! And you’ve more reason to do it as well as more money to spend if it’s needed. You stay behind! Look here!”

He spread out his notes on the correspondence of locations. Plowed fields near Seventieth Street, Manhattan. The great villa south of the Navy Yard on the Brooklyn shore. What looked like an enormous stretch of hothouses in the Sixties on the East Side. A road leading past the Empire State Building, curving through Altman’s.

Sam accepted the memorandum. What Dick had said was true enough, but so was what he’d said himself. To wait for action by authority would be sheerest folly. There couldn’t be any more delay. The two of them had to work as private adventurers to try to go to her help. There were plenty of others who needed help too, no doubt. But for speed there would have to be action without hindrance.

Presently Maltby brought in a sheet of copper foil, neatly rolled. He said wearily:

“Here it is. It’s just a doorway. You can’t look through it, but somebody can go through.”

“I’ll go through where Nancy did,” said Dick grimly. “We’ll get a cab and you show me the exact spot, Sam.”

“All right, but we’ve got to arrange a way to communicate-”

“In the taxi,” snapped Dick. “Come on!”

Maltby spoke like a sleepwalker, tonelessly, “We’ll have to hold this thing sideways to the way we’re going.”

“Right! I’ll carry it. Coming?”

Sam Todd picked up his burden of weapons in a bag and gun-case. They went downstairs. The street seemed incredibly normal. Dick carried the rolled-up foil. They got into the cab, and it started downtown.

This was three days after the disappearance of Nancy Holt in the seeming of a pool of quicksilver. Dick Blair knew that if his guesses were right, the disappearances of humans were for their enslavement. Nancy had been a slave for three days. Sam spoke to him, and he nodded, but he hardly heard what Sam was saying.

At Thirtieth Street, Sam opened his bag and began to pass its contents to Dick. Two automatics, with ammunition. A riot-gun—a sawed-off shotgun with shells loaded with buckshot. Two small objects which were tear-gas bombs. Bars of chocolate. A canteen.

“There,” said Sam to the taxi driver. “Draw up to the curb, right there.”

It was a perfectly normal street in downtown New York. There was asphalt pavement, a concrete curb and sidewalk, and a street-light. There was a hydrant. A barbershop and a small stationery store occupied the street-level shops in a building which rose skyward.

The taxi stopped. The driver turned.

“We’re not getting out,” said Sam smoothly. He pointed ahead. “Hasn’t that car ahead got a flat?”

The taxi driver looked front. Sam unrolled the copper foil.

“Remember how to leave messages for me,” he said crisply.

Dick Blair touched his pockets, where his weapons and ammunition were. He picked up the sawed-off shotgun. Without a word, he stepped into the two-foot by three-foot sheet of copper-bismuth foil. He stepped down.

Maltby was asleep, his face lined with exhaustion. He did not see what was happening.

Dick Blair vanished in a pool of quicksilver.

There was bright sunshine where he found himself. There were gigantic trees, rising apparently to the height of the buildings which had surrounded the taxicab only seconds before. He tumbled down three or four feet and fell on his hands and knees on the ground. There was sparse brushwood here, and when he straightened up he saw a crude wooden platform, built of hewn planks. It had a cage-like structure of beams upon it, with a door now open. The door had a clumsy but effective latch so that it could not possibly be opened from the inside, but could be opened from without by a mere tug on a leather thong. In any case the cage was empty and deserted, but it had been made by men.

There was music that seemed like bird-song everywhere. The brushwood was green. The particular bush on which he first cast his eyes was not only green, but leafless. It was a mass of slender, branching boughs, each one green as a grass-blade as if its stems had adapted their bark to perform the function of leaves. There was a small, strange flower only inches tall which waved long cilae with remarkable energy, like those marine creatures which fumble endlessly for plankton. But this waved slime-coated threads to catch dust-motes which actually had wings and were insects smaller than gnats.

Overhead, the sky was blue. Something flew, and it was small and nearby, but its outlines were not those of a bird. Something howled suddenly, making an enormous din, and a feathered creature scuttled into view with a duck-like gait, stopped, made that monstrous tumult fitted to a being many times its size, and waddled on again upon some unguessable errand.

It went across a wagon-trail that meandered through this forest, curving erratically, avoiding the larger trees. He moved to it, grimly intent, and examined the wheel tracks. They were wide, as of wooden wheels without metal tires. The horse-tracks were of unshod hoofs. And where whitish dust lay in the road, he saw other tracks. They looked like the tracks of dogs, except that no dog was ever so huge. Great Danes might have such monstrous pads, but surely no lesser breed.

Then a rhythmic squeaking sound came through the music of tiny vocalists. Dick whirled. It sounded like the noise of a squeaky wheel upon a wooden axle. There were thudding hoof-beats, and then a cart came along the trail. It was a wholly ordinary cart, with a wholly ordinary horse in frayed but ordinary harness. A half-naked man, in a loincloth only, with hair to his shoulders and an unkempt beard, drove the horse. Behind him a beast like a wolf—only bigger—paced leisurely.

Dick stepped out into the road with automatic leveled.

“Hold up, there!” he said coldly. “I want some information!”

The bearded man gasped.

“My Gawd! Where’d you come from?”

He wasn’t afraid. He was amazed. His mouth dropped open and he stared blankly. The horse stopped.

The beast trotted around the cart and looked at Dick. It was very much like a wolf. It was hairy and sharp-nosed, with pricked-up ears. But no wolf ever had such eyes of such keen intelligence. It looked at Dick estimatingly. It was thinking, in the way in which a man thinks when he comes upon a strange thing.

The man in the cart said quickly:

“The critter has savvy like us. Get me?”

The beast turned its head and looked at the man in the cart. It snarled a little. The sound was bloodcurdling. The man in the cart paled. He seemed to go all to pieces.

The beast trotted toward Dick without haste and without fear. Its eyes were intent. He swung the pistol upon it. It stopped dead, regarding him. No, not him, the pistol. It was looking at the pistol. It made noises which were partly growlings and partly whines. They sounded oddly like speech. The man in the cart said, shaking, “It—wants to know where you come from.”

“Never mind,” said Dick harshly. “I want to know where new-caught prisoners are taken! Where?”

The beast understood. Plainly, impossibly, it understood. It made more noises. The man said, in panic: “No! Please! Y’don’t understand—” He was talking to the beast. The beast turned its head and looked at him. That was all. The man sobbed. He caught the reins around the corner of the cart. He prepared to descend.

“The devil!” snapped Dick. “I want an answer to my question! Where are new-caught prisoners taken?”

The man, shaking in every limb, crawled down to the ground. He moved slowly, abjectly, toward Dick.

“It—it ain’t any use to kill me,” he panted. “I—ain’t done you any harm—”

Out of the corner of his eye as he watched the man, Dick saw a flashing movement. He whirled and the automatic went off. The beast was in mid-leap and the heavy bullet tore into its chest, checking it in mid-air. It fell, inches short of Dick. It struggled convulsively. “Kill it!” panted the man shrilly. “Before it howls—” The beast essayed to scream, dying as it was. Dick shot again. It stiffened and was still. The man from the cart wrung his hands. He seemed stunned by catastrophe.

“Migawd!” he said in a thin voice. “Oh, Migawd! That finishes me! Killin’ it didn’t do no good—”

“Hold on!” raged Dick. “I tell you I want to know where new-caught prisoners are taken! Answer me!”

The gun-muzzle bore savagely on the other man. Five minutes ago Dick had been in a taxicab on a street of the most civilized city in the world. But he was not in that city now, nor bound to its code of conduct or its laws.

“I came here from New York. A girl was brought here three days ago. Where is she?”

The other man turned to him in incredulous hope.

“You come from N’York? You weren’t brought? Can you get back? Gawd! Can you get back?”

“Yes, when I take that girl with me,” rasped Dick. “Where is she?”

The other man fawned upon him. He scrambled up into the cart. He drove it invitingly close to Dick. His eyes were pleading and hopeful and terrified by turns.

“Which way, fella? Which way to get back? W-We got to move fast before somebody comes!”

There was a movement. A second beast came loping around the nearest bend in the trail. Its legs and chest were wet. The man squealed and lashed the horse crazily. It bolted ahead. The beast stopped and regarded Dick with the same intent air of estimation without terror that the other beast had shown. The horse and cart jolted and bounced out of sight down the trail. The beast looked at its dead fellow, and suddenly darted for the underbrush beside the trail. Dick’s pistol crashed. The thing made gurgling noises. It toppled to the ground, kicking in utter silence, then lay still.

These dead beasts made Dick’s flesh crawl. They had looked at him as men would look. The first beast had given commands to the bearded man—who spoke of his own kind as slaves. The man was subject to the beast. It had commanded him to get out of the wagon and keep Dick’s attention on him, and while Dick looked at the man the beast had sprung. The second beast had deduced from the body of the first that Dick had killed it, and was darting to cover when a bullet stopped it. It had acted exactly as a man would have acted if he heard a shot and raced to see what had caused it, and then found himself facing an armed and unexpected enemy.

Dick had thought earlier of making a prisoner of some inhabitant of this Other World, and of forcing him to lead the way to where Nancy might be held captive. But if men were subject to beasts, and accompanied everywhere by the beasts their masters...

Then his mind clicked on the few things it had to work on. He’d seen a man and cart and beast from the top of the Empire State Building. He’d seen a man and cart and beast here. He’d killed the beast and another had come shortly after. That was now dead too. So there might be another man and cart—

He marched savagely along the trail in the direction from which the second beast had come. Cart-tracks showed that it was a frequented highway. Beast-tracks in occasional patches of dust showed plainly, as well as the hoof-prints of horses. He saw tiny pellets of wetness. They would be drops from the wetted pelt of the second dead beast. Dick found himself hurrying a little.

Half a mile, between leaves of unknown species and genera, brushwood which had leaves and no leaves, and berries of very improbable color. Something with a preposterous number of legs slithered across the highway. It saw him and squeaked and insanely whirled and went back across the highway and vanished, having exposed itself twice to danger. A furry biped eight inches tall ran behind a tree trunk and peered at him through large blue eyes which were not in the least human. The bird-notes which filled the air kept on in a constant tide of sound.

Then a stream. It was possibly twenty feet wide and swift-running. The trail led into it and out on the other side. Some thirty feet beyond the water there was a second horse and cart, and a second more than half-naked man. This man sat apathetically in stillness. The horse was still. The man, red-haired and with a monstrous red beard which was utterly untended, waited dully as if in numbed obedience to orders. There was no beast in sight. Dick had killed the beast which should have been here.

He halted on the near side of the stream and lifted an automatic suggestively.

“You!” he said coldly. “I’m going to ask some questions! You’ll answer them! Understand?”

The man raised his eyes. They fixed themselves dully upon Dick. It was seconds before surprise dawned in them. For a time, then, there was merely blank amazement. Then other emotions passed over his features in succession. Hope, and sudden recollected despair, and then a burning fury.

“Where’d you come from?” demanded the red-beard in a croaking voice. “The ruhks ain’t stripped you. Did you—did you come from some’rs by yourself, or—” Then his voice dulled again. “No ... You just busted outa a cage-trap ...”

The fury died in him. He drooped.

“Go on some’rs else,’ he said dully. “I ain’t seen you. The ruhks’ll track you down by smell, an’ they’ll kill you. That’s best anyways. Go on!”

Dick said evenly:

“I’ve just killed two beasts that look like wolves. One was wet, as if he’d forded this stream. Are those beasts ruhks?”

The red-beard’s eyes lighted again, this time in delight.

“Killed two of ‘em? Good! Swell!” He suddenly cursed in a terrible, gleeful passion. “If only every one was dead there’d be some killin’ around here! Fella! You got guns? I hope you kill plenty of ‘em before they get you! I hope you kill thousan’s of ‘em—” Then he said eagerly, “Did y’break outa a trap-cage, or—”

He trembled, unable to express a hope so remote that it could not be imagined.

“I came through a thing one of my friends made,” said Dick. “I was in New York half an hour ago. My friends can get through to here whenever they wish.”

The red-beard blasphemed in fierce joy.

“How about other carts and ruhks coming along?” snapped Dick. “Is it safe to stand and talk?”

The red-beard suddenly grinned. He clucked to his horse. The horse moved forward and went into the stream. It halted in the middle.

“Wade out an’ climb in,” panted the red-headed man. “They’ll track you by smell to this here stream. Then they’ll hunt for where you come out. You ride with me an’ I’ll put you down miles away, ah’ you can get back to your friends. Tell ‘em to fire the palace with gasoline an’ kill them ruhks. We’ll tend to the rest!”

When Dick waded out into the stream and then swung into the vehicle, he saw that the red-beard’s back above his filthy breechclout was scarred in an intricate, crisscross pattern as if by long-healed sores which could only have been made by a lash. And there were other scars, which had been made by the teeth of beasts.

He clucked to the horse again. The animal pulled ahead to shore. Presently they were proceeding at a slow walk along the trail. And the red-headed man, in a hoarse and confidential whisper, spoke of destruction to be wrought upon a palace—which must be the villa on the Brooklyn shore—and then of tortures unspeakable to be inflicted upon overseers.

It was quite impossible, for the moment, to get from him anything but expressions of his hate.

After a time, the red-bearded man grew coherent. He was not actually mad. In the seven-mile ride between monster tree trunks, Dick came to understand that there are experiences one can have, after which self-control and a normal manner would be impossible. Yet too great a change from sane behavior would have a penalty on this Other World, where there were penalties for madness as for illness or crippling injuries or a rebellious spirit or anything which made a slave less than wholly useful.

The picture the red-beard painted was only partly like the pattern Dick had imagined. There were human masters, to be sure. They lived in the palace on the other side of the river. The red-bearded man had been a slave for years, but had never seen a member of the race or family he had been enslaved to serve. He had only rarely seen more than one overseer. Years ago he’d been an electrician in New York, and on his way home one night along Fourth Avenue, he suddenly felt himself falling, and all the world swirled about him and he was in a cage of wooden bars, in a forest like this of monster trees and unfamiliar vegetation. Over his head an object rose, and drew back, and minutes later another man fell into the cage with him. The other man freakishly broke his arm in falling. They did not know where they were, and they did not know what had happened to them. They shouted for help, and some beast snarled horribly, nearby. Then they were silent in terror. And all that night they thought themselves insane, and all night long the beast prowled about outside the cage.

When dawn came, they saw it. It was one of the wolf-like creatures called ruhks. It regarded them with businesslike, icy, intelligent eyes. Presently, in the dawn light, there came others of the animals—a dozen or more. In their midst marched a man with a spear, and with a pistol in a holster about his waist. He wore a long, knee-length robe rather than garments they would recognize. He looked at the two caged men without interest or mercy. The ruhks made whining, barking noises to each other. Their tone was unmistakably conversational. The robed man stood back, and one of the creatures pulled on a leather thong and the cage-door opened. The two captives shivered in horror. They pleaded with the man among the beasts, but he ignored them. Now they shrank back in the cage and he gestured to them to come out. When they did not, he prodded them out with his spear.

Outside, the beasts pushed between them, separated them, and then roughly flung them to the ground. Then, deliberately—and apparently under the orders of one of their own number, who stood back and made noises at the rest—the animals ripped off every article of their clothing. The red-bearded man was numb with horror, but the other man screamed.

The thing that dazed the red-bearded man, then, was the manner of the beasts. They showed no ferocity, though they looked ferocious enough. They were businesslike and matter-of-fact, like animals going through a well-rehearsed trick. They released the stripped men.

Their leader looked at the other captive’s broken arm and turned its head to the man with the spear. The beast made more specific sounds. The man with the broken arm was—somehow it was clear—the subject of a comment or a question. The man with the spear shrugged.

The beasts—the ruhks—tore the man with the broken arm to bits. It was hard for the red-bearded man, telling this to Dick, to convey the horror of their matter-of-factness. The beasts killed his fellow-prisoner and devoured him without snarlings, without competition, as men would have divided a new-killed steer. Then, still matter-of-factly, they closed around the red-bearded man and herded him before them.

The red-bearded man had been marched for miles, with the beasts around him and the man with the spear ignoring him. Once the read-beard was sick, from sheer horror and fear. The beasts drove him on with bared fangs.

In the end he arrived at a slave pen, the crudest possible shed of logs within a palisade. He was turned into it. There were other humans there, men and women denned together on straw in a structure in all essentials a stable for domestic animals. They were themselves domestic animals, they told him. They had been of all possible walks of life originally. Each had been through the same experience—of falling into a cage-trap, of being stripped by the ruhks who came to herd them to the slave-pen, of being driven like captured wild animals, and of being treated thereafter as beasts of burden.

Dick interrupted, here, to demand if Nancy had been brought to that slave-pen. The red-beard swore that she had not. No new prisoner had been brought to the slave-pen for much longer than three days.

Because they had hands, the red-beard went on, they were driven by the ruhks’ to harness horses, to plow-fields, to perform all the necessary tasks of the production of food and the gathering of fuel. The spear-armed man gave orders. The ruhks saw to it that the slaves carried them out. Some of the food and a little of the fuel they were allowed to keep and use. Most went to the river-shore, to boats rowed by men in chains, which took them elsewhere. They were guarded in the slave-pen by ruhks. When sent on errands, like the red-beard and the other man Dick had seen, a ruhk accompanied them. At such times they were subject to their four-footed guards. But the man with the spear was not their master. He was their overseer. Their master—or masters, they did not know which—lived in a palace on the other side of the river. What they knew of the palace they had learned from a slave sent to labor with them, brought to their pen across the river in one of the boats rowed by men in chains. What he told them, shivering, was not pleasant. And in a matter of days he was given to the ruhks.

The sun sank down among the giant trees on Manhattan Island as this tale unfolded. Sundown drew near. Then the red-beard drew rein.

“Here,” he said bitterly, “You get out here. I’m a slave. I couldn’t go back to livin’ like a human again. I’ll go on an’ tell my story. I’ll say my ruhk told me to wait an’ went off, an’ I waited till I got scared I’d be hunted as a runaway, so I started on an’ I seen him an’ another ruhk layin’ in the road dead. That’s all I’ll tell ‘em.”

“That’s right,” said Dick grimly.

The red-bearded man drove on, chuckling to himself.

Dick ground his teeth as the horse and cart went out of sight in the gathering darkness. He had started wrong. It had seemed quite logical to plunge into the Other World after Nancy, and to force some inhabitant to lead him to her. The primitiveness of what he’d seen from the top of the Empire State Building had made him feel that the Other World would be all savagery. It was savagery, to be sure! But was not a kind he prepared for.

The ruhks, alone, made his original plan sheer suicide. They had obviously been the dominant species on this planet when some ancient Egyptian magician first stepped through a doorway of his own making to this world. Intelligence alone would have ensured their dominance, but they could not use tools to rise above the cultural grade of pure savagery. When the first Egyptians appeared, undoubtedly they strove to prey upon them. Undoubtedly they failed. And somehow—Dick could not imagine a process offhand—somehow an unholy compact had been arrived at. It continued until this day. With the master race to provide shelter and security and luxuries they could not contrive for themselves, it would be a mutually admirable compact which made them loyal slave-guards. That such a compact would be kept was not wholly reasonable, but Dick had to accept the apparent fact. They would not be domesticated, like dogs. They would feel no reverence for humanity as such. But as slave-guards they would have reasonable outlet for beastly instincts of cruelty. And the masters of this world would value them highly. While they were loyal, no slave revolt could possibly succeed nor any slave hope to run away.

They and their masters would surely apply every trick five thousand years had developed, to track down and destroy the one man who had entered their world without being enslaved. As for Nancy—It was still true that no person or object which had disappeared with an accompanying tale of quicksilver had ever been seen again.

Dick tried not to think of what was Nancy’s most probable fate. He fanned the sick hatred that had been growing all during the red-beard’s tale. Among the things Sam Todd had provided him with was a compass with luminous dial. Dick set out doggedly to find his way through the night by its means.

A girl vanished in Paris. A prominent commissar disappeared in Prague. Two workmen, weaving their way home tipsily from a wineshop in Madrid, dropped utterly out of sight. There was a disappearance of cheeses in Belgium, of wine in Bordeaux and Athens and Malaga. A dahabeah lost half its cargo of dates in mid-Nile, and its crew saw quicksilver in the hold and dived howling overboard. In Damascus a shop in the Street of the Goldsmiths missed a bit of tapestry thickly interspersed with gold thread. In Baghdad a flask of attar of roses vanished into thin air. A sweetshop in London was robbed of its most expensive confections. A farmer lost two mules in Maryland. In Philadelphia a trusted employee seemed to evaporate under the most suspicious of circumstances; his accounts were correct to the last penny. In Denver a schoolboy did not come home from high school, in New Orleans the father of eight children disappeared, in Antofagasta a beautiful young girl vanished. ^

Over a very large part of the Earth, things which men had made and treasured, people whom others cared for and depended on, ceased to exist as far as the normal world was concerned. But nobody considered that anything requiring a new explanation had occurred; such things had been happening for five thousand years. Nobody thought to look for any common factor linking them. Nobody at all thought of the possibility of another world, beside this one in hyperspace and identical with it save in flora and fauna and population. Among all the two and a quarter billion humans on Earth, only Sam Todd and Maltby even guessed at such a thing.

Instantly after Dick Blair vanished in a pool of quicksilver, the taxi driver turned back his head and blinked. Three men had been in the cab. Now there were two.

“Hey!” said the taxi driver. “What happened to the other guy?”

“He got out,” said Sam briefly. He rolled up the sheet of metal foil and looked at Maltby, sunk in sleep. “Now go back to where we came from.”

The driver looked at him dubiously, and turned back to the wheel.

Sam reflected unhappily as the cab went uptown again. He re-examined the preparations that had been made for Dick’s adventure. He was dissatisfied. The need for speed was great, of course, and of course since Nancy had gone into the Other World somebody had to go after her as quickly as possible. But still things were wrong.

He piled Maltby out of the cab at his house. He dragged him to his apartment and dumped him on his bed. Then he picked up the little copper-alloy window that Dick had used for his preliminary survey of the Other World. He remembered the location Dick had assigned to the villa, which must be in some sense the headquarters of the local interdimensional thieves. He went downstairs and got a taxicab and started for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Huddled back in the cab, he glued his eye to the little peephole. As an experience, that ride was unique. The cab followed straight streets and traffic lanes in normal New York. But Sam Todd’s eyesight traveled in a straight line through jungle, a jungle of giant trees through which his vision seemed to float eerily. He saw brushwood of unknown varieties, and deep, shadowed glades where there was no undergrowth but only a carpet of rotted leaves. Once he came out into a tiny natural clearing and saw a relatively small tree, barely forty feet high, with foliage which was not green at all, but heliotrope; the other trees seemed to shrink from it as if its vicinity were poisonous. There were occasional glimpses of trails cut through the forest, but they were rare, and once Sam saw a wooden cage, rotting away, which had no meaning to him.

But then the taxicab seemed to leave the earth and soar upward, and he jerked his eye away from the metal window and saw that it was actually sweeping up the ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the Other World there was, of course, no bridge at all, so that Sam looked down from the viewpoint of a bird in flight. He saw the river which was the counterpart of the East River flowing beneath him. He saw the great brick villa on the gently sloping farther shore. He saw a galley—propelled by many oars—pulling away from a small dock, and he saw a luxurious, old-fashioned carriage with four horses moving back toward the villa with trotting four footed forms running beside it.

Then the taxi soared down from the crest of the bridge, and trees rose to engulf it, and Sam winced as his eye at the peephole told him he was about to crash into great masses of foliage.

Presently the taxicab stopped by the Navy Yard. He paid the driver and got out. He was excited, now, because he’d seen signs of more than untouched wilderness. He stuffed the window in his pocket and walked a block. Then he put the peephole to his eye again. He saw a garden, plainly artificial and plainly watered and tended with the prodigal use of labor. He stood still, gazing. When he lowered the peephole, he saw three children and a fat woman staring at him suspiciously. He hastily put away the bit of metal and walked on.

He went into a tiny confectionery store and into the phone booth. He dropped in a coin and dialed at random. In the privacy of the booth he looked into the Other World while the voice of a telephone operator exasperatedly told him over and over that there was no such exchange and would he please hang up the receiver. But he was seeing walkways of smooth marble leading through fancifully trained foliage, and fountains, and statuary, and—

He saw a slave. The slave was utterly unkempt, with uncombed beard and hair, with no garment save a loincloth. But he wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He worked busily at the fertilization of a vine of climbing roses which was a veritable blanket of blooms. He finished that task and walked seemingly within a yard of Sam Todd in a telephone booth in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn. As he passed, Sam saw ghastly scars upon his body. Some were the marks of lashes, and some were the marks of teeth.

There was somebody tapping on the glass of the phone booth door with a coin. Sam confusedly put the peephole in his pocket and went out. The woman who had tapped said acidly:

“When a person can’t get their number, it’s a pity they won’t let somebody else use the phone!”

The street outside was incredible. Sam had just seen enough of the Other World to make his own seem unreal. As he looked at dingy store-fronts, he seemed to see the wraiths of flowers and fountains and intricately trimmed shrubbery in the midst of shops and delicatessens. He had an idea of the location of the villa now, though. He oriented himself carefully and walked toward the place where the villa should be in the other cosmos.

A great, warehouse-like building blocked his way. But there was an office-building of sorts nearby. There was a phone booth in its untidy lobby. He took refuge in the booth and again surveyed the Other World.

He was within yards of the villa—which was gigantic— and within feet of a terrace where a little girl played with a kitten. She was a rather thin little girl, with delicate features, dressed in a healthily brief garment Sam could not identify. She treated the kitten with the extravagant affection normal in six-year-olds. But within two yards of her stood two giant, wolf-like creatures, watching her. A little distance back stood six men in knee-length robes, with swords and shields in an antique style, and highly incongruous automatic pistols in holsters at their waists. Behind them again there was an elderly woman with a worried air, and behind her a row of young girls with bare feet and arms, each of them carrying a toy.

The six-year-old played absorbedly, but presently dropped the kitten with a sigh of quaintly adult weariness and then clapped her hands. The kitten darted away. Instantly there was movement all about. The two wolf-like creatures moved nearer to the child. The worried-looking woman gave agitated, inaudible commands. The line of young girl slaves moved forward. As each drew near to the child, the wolf-like creatures regarded her coldly. Each slave, in turn, knelt and offered the toy she carried. The six-year-old contemplated them solemnly and waved them aside one by one. There was a girl with a swollen face, as if she had been struck a violent blow. She offered a squirming puppy. It was waved away. Extraordinarily elaborate dolls were offered. Every conceivable device for the amusement of a six-year-old girl was offered for approval by the row of slave girls who knelt abjectly, trembling, in their turns.

The child graciously accepted a mechanical toy of sheet-tin, brightly-colored. It was of the sort which is sold in five-and-tencent stores. The slave wound it and put it before the child. She backed away. The wolf-creatures moved back to their former positions. The child solemnly watched the toy perform its jerky, mechanical antics.

Then one of the wolf-creatures snarled suddenly. Its eyes were fixed upon Sam Todd’s tiny copper-and-bismuth window. The beast flung itself before the child. There was swirling, rushing movement, and the child had been caught up swiftly and was being raced away.

Sam blinked and drew back. He assured himself of his safety and turned to stare in all directions through the peephole.

In the Other World more beasts were racing into view. There must have been fifty of them who came boiling up from somewhere, fangs bared and snarling. Men appeared, racing, buckling on pistol-belts over their robes.

Then there was stillness. Sam was bewildered. He turned the peephole in every direction. In the Other World, the spot from which he looked out was the exact center of a circle of snarling beasts and cold-eyed men, who held weapons ready.

Then he swallowed. The peephole was evidently visible in that other world. They didn’t know that nothing could be shoved through it. They were prepared to fight—but he could not guess what they expected to happen next.

Then an extraordinary device came into view. It was thin and spidery and skeleton-like. It moved upon eight slender, shining wheels. A man in a robe ran panting beside it. He wore extraordinary goggles which should have blinded him. There was a curious, light, jointed girder at the forefront of the spidery device, and a large disk at its end. That disk could be set at any angle and moved in any direction by the girder. The man in the goggles shouted, but Sam could not hear him. The armed men, though, pointed. The spidery vehicle swerved straight at him.

For a moment he looked out of his phone booth. Everything about him seemed normal and commonplace and slightly dingy. But he felt hunted. Then he saw a tiny, a trivial oddity. The open door of the office building showed bright against the daylit street. Against that lighted background Sam Todd saw two small opaque specks in midair. They moved toward him, undulating up and down like the eyes or the goggles of a man running. In a flash of cold horror he understood everything.

The spidery vehicle carried a disk which was a portable doorway between worlds. The rest of the device was simply a carrier for that doorway, so that it could be pushed or pulled. The man in the goggles could see in both worlds as Sam could. And with the swinging, movable disk he could seize anything on Earth as a man may net a goldfish in a globe from which it cannot escape. He could take anything or anyone away from Earth into the Other World forever. And against this, Sam had no defense.

He flung open the phone booth and bolted. There was but one way to flee—to the open, blessed, asphalted street of Brooklyn, with its trucks and cars and hydrants and dusty shop windows. He had to plunge straight toward the space the goggled man occupied in the Other World. He probably had to run through the very substance of that man and his device. But, gasping, he rushed.

He reached the doorway. He thought he saw a momentary glow of light behind him as if the disk in the Other World had become a doorway, and light from the Other World sky shone for an instant into the lobby. But then he was outside.

At first he ran. But people stared, and he knew that if he ran on he would be stopped forcibly and questioned, and that while he panted out his utterly impossible story he would vanish before his captors’ eyes in a pool of quicksilver, as Nancy had vanished.

He slowed to a fast walk. Sweat poured out on his skin. Once he turned and put the peephole to his eye and saw the spidery thing turning swiftly to pursue him over the clear lawn of the villa of the Other World.

It was nightmarish. It was worse. He felt stark panic. But there was a sure refuge if he could find it—

Twenty yards, and he dared to turn again. His actions were peculiar, and a demand for an explanation of his actions would be utterly fatal. But the device had to go around a massive plantation of shrubs on the villa lawn. He hurried, in an agony of haste, yet not daring to hasten too much.

Then he reached the subway entrance. As he swung to descend, someone coming up the stairs bumped into him. His hat fell off. He did not try to retrieve it. He plunged downward, but in spite of himself his head jerked around.

He saw his hat disappear in a curious coruscation, as of a pool of quicksilver.

As Sam rode back to New York underground, he felt cold all over and shivered violently, even while he sweated profusely. He sweated so much, indeed, that other passengers on the subway train looked at him oddly because he wiped his face so often.

In the Other World there was moonlight. It came down through the trees with a harsh bright radiance such as it seemed no mere moonlight could possess. But when Dick found an open space through which he could see the sky, the moon appeared wholly like the orb which circles Earth. The stars seemed the same, too. There was a Milky Way, and there were large bright heavenly objects which had the appearance of planets. It seemed unbelievable that the Other World could so completely resemble Earth in all its conformation and still not be the same.

The night noises were wholly unlike those of the world of men. The cries in this jungle darkness sounded strangely like bells, from tiny shrill nearby tinklings to single, deep-toned, far-away tollings as of illimitable grief.

But Dick had not gone far before he heard noises with which he felt almost familiar. They were beast-cries. But they were not the meaningless howlings of mere brutishness. Somehow he knew that they were the cries of ruhks. He had enough knowledge of this Other World, now, to guess at what would happen.

When the red-beard told his story—if the first man Dick had met hadn’t babbled out his tale first—a coldly merciless hunt would begin for Dick. Ruhks would logically be entrusted with the night-search. They would find his trail entering the stream. And when no trail appeared on the farther side, the ruhks would divide. They would hunt through the jungle on either bank of the stream, both upstream and down, for the spot where he had come out.

The one thing that could go wrong, of course, was that his scent might be detected in red-beard’s cart. If that happened, red-beard would die, and Dick soon after.

But he heard the ruhk cries in the night. The compass direction was wrong for beasts actually on his trail. They had, then, gone on to the spot where Nancy had come into this cosmos. Dick heard them calling to one another from separated places. He’d guessed their tactics, and what he heard confirmed his guess. He headed for a point between the separating parties of those who sought his trail. This was a world of slaves and masters and there would be no system of swift communications. A man does not do skilled work under the lash. A slave telegrapher is unthinkable, and slave telephone maintenance crews are unimaginable. When human beings are classed as animals, only the labor of animals can be had from them.

So Dick went on through the darkness. The noises all about him compounded themselves into a sort of muted bedlam. There were the sounds as of bells, and at startling intervals something made a noise as of drums, and now and again the hunting ruhks howled their reports of futility. Dick reached the stream and waded it. A little beyond, he blundered into thick, squashy vegetation with a scent like that of garlic, only more pungent, and his feet crushed the pulpy leaves and he reeked of the smell as he went on. He was offensive to his own nostrils. But even so he smelled the reek of a slave-pen a good half-mile downwind from it. He veered aside.

Presently he heard the lapping of waves through the darkness. He pressed forward cautiously. The glitter of moonlight on water warned him, and he went very tentatively down the last steep slope to the East River. The shore was wilderness. The water was completely tranquil. He waded into it and began a cautious march along the shoreline. Here there was little or no breeze. His scent would not be carried far, and that out over the river. He waded for a very long time, keeping from ten to thirty feet from the water’s edge. Twice he disturbed private affairs of the inhabitants of the jungle. Once there was an ecstatic splashing in the water before him, and he advanced with care, and something sputtered alarmedly and flashed up the beach—he did not see it clearly, but it was very long and furry—and went crashing to safety among the trees. The other time was when he came on an animal fishing. It prowled upon the beach, staring absorbedly into the river, and as Dick came near it plunged from the beach and with a sweeping motion of an extraordinarily long paw sent a two-foot fish writhing through the air toward the land, with an accompanying shower of moonlit drops of spray. Then Dick loomed up and it fled. He heard the beached fish flapping convulsively as he went by.

Then, less than a quarter-mile farther on, the moonlight showed him a small wharf going out into the water. His eyes were well-used to the moonlight now. He saw a boat tethered to the wharf. Its thwarts were occupied by drooping, naked rowers. There were two ruhks on the wharf, squatted on their haunches like wolves or dogs.

Dick went quietly ashore. He made certain of his two tear-gas bombs and swung the sawed-off shotgun around and threw off the safety-catch. He had fired three shots from an automatic pistol and had been lucky. But one does not want to depend on luck when it is dark and animals may be charging. A sawed-off shotgun is better.

He went as silently as possible along the beach. But he touched a brushwood branch, and one of the ruhks turned its head. Dick was still. Presently the ruhk yawned and looked away. Dick went on. He did not really hope to reach the wharf undiscovered, of course—

He did not. A ruhk stared in his direction and stood up quickly while he was better than two hundred yards away. Dick broke into a run toward the wharf. Fortunately, the beach here was all of ten feet wide.

He was in full stride when both ruhks were up and staring keenly at him from their positions on the stem of the wharf. They could not see him quite clearly because of the background of brush behind him. One of them yelped questioningly. Since he was not another ruhk he should have been—to the creatures of this world—a fugitive. That he ran toward them instead of away was unsettling. He covered nearly fifty yards before the ruhk yelped again. Seventy-five before it snarled. A hundred before both animals trotted ashore to intercept him. And the ruhks were slave guards. They felt contempt for men. They stood poised and waiting while he plunged on still nearer. It was not possible for them to be afraid of him. It was unlikely that they would even feel the need for caution.

They stood on the wharf-stem, snarling in indecision. Dick was actually within seventy yards before the first of them emitted a high howl and plunged at Dick.

He pulled the trigger of the sawed-off shotgun when it was twenty yards away, and practically tore it apart. The other leaped crazily aside into the brush. Dick ran on, leaping over the dying creature, and whirled as the second ruhk leaped from behind. The riot-gun crashed again. At such short range, the heavy pellets hit in a compact mass of destruction and then caromed outward from each other with all the effect of an explosion.

Dick reached the planks of the wharf as a beastly howl came from the trail which led to this landing-place. He saw four-footed figures rushing toward him, and tossed a tear-gas bomb, and ran out to the end of the wharf as the bomb created a cloud of mist around the shore end.

Human figures cringed, below him in the boat. He saw dull, animal eyes and matted shocks of hair and naked bodies on which the moonlight shone. This was a galley. At one time it had been an oared cutter of a United States warship, and doubtless its disappearance from its proper place on Earth had caused some concern. Now a dozen chained men slumped over their oars upon its thwarts. They looked up at Dick, and cringed. He heard scrabblings on the wharf-planking, and fired furiously. A beast screamed. There were splashes. Dick fired again. Ruhks, plunging toward him, had run into the nearly stationary wall of tear-gas, and were blinded. Some went overboard. A man in a white, knee-length robe came stumbling out of the tear-gas cloud. He carried a spear and there was a pistol slung about his waist, but he wiped streaming eyes and tried to see—if only so he could run away.

Dick moved savagely toward the tear-gas and shot the gun’s magazine empty. He came back carrying the spear and the overseer’s pistol. With the sharp blade of the spear he sawed at the ropes which held the boat to the wharf. It floated free and he jumped down into its stern. None of the dozen chained men stirred. They simply looked at him in numb terror.

“Row, damn you!” raged Dick. “Get away from here!”

There was a splashing nearby. A blindly swimming ruhk snarled in the water. Dick killed it in cold ferocity. He turned back to the rowers. He opened his mouth to threaten them again. But suddenly the oars were beginning to dip, and suddenly they fell into cadence, and suddenly the boat swept away from the wharf and began to move out into the river. And Dick felt a dozen pairs of eyes staring at him incredulously.

“Look!” he snapped. “Somebody back on the real Earth has found a way to come through to this world, and how to get back. I came through to find a girl who’s been kidnapped as I suppose you were! Play along with me and you’ll get back too!”

There was silence. The rowers pulled automatically. They were living automatons. On the shore near the wharf there was a snarling, yelping tumult. Ruhks created a monstrous din. Then one of them seemed to silence the others and emitted high, keening cries which would carry a vast distance over the water on a night as still as this.

Then one of the rowers said dully:

“Telling ‘em. They’ll give us to the ruhks, now!”

A man near the bow cursed. The rowing kept on. Then another man said, marveling:

“He killed a ruhk!”

Dick said sharply:

“I’ll kill some more!” He held up the overseer’s pistol. “I’ve got an extra pistol. Who wants it?”

More silence. Then a voice said in a whisper:

“Could kill ruhks with that.”

“Or overseers,” said another in a hushed tone.

“Could kill anybody,” said yet another, as if dazed. “With a pistol, a fella could kill ‘em ...”

Babbling. Sudden, lustful babblings. The oars stroked irregularly, Dick barked at them as the babblings rose to uproar.

“Silence there!” Instant stillness. These men were cowed to where they were hardly men. The rowing took up its regular cadence once more. “There was a girl vanished from New York three days ago,” said Dick harshly. “She wasn’t taken to the slave pen back yonder. Where was she taken?”

A long pause, and then a voice said fumblingly:

“We didn’t take her across the river. We ain’t taken nobody across but ruhks an’ overseers.”

“Then she’s still on Manhattan Island,” rasped Dick. “How many other slave pens there?”

Another voice, heavily:

“One up by the hothouses. That’s upriver. Across from Blackwell’s Island—or what looks like Blackwell’s.”

The use of the name, alone, was an indication of the length of time the man who used it had been a slave here on the twin of Earth. Blackwell’s became Welfare Island many years ago.

“We’ll head for there, then,” said Dick grimly.

The rowing went on. It was spiritless and dazed. Dick found a tiller and swung the boat about. A man said humbly:

“Give me that extra pistol, fella? There’s a overseer I got to kill. He gave my girl to the ruhks. Lend it to me?”

“I’m getting some more,” said Dick. “First—”

A man near the bow whimpered.

“ ‘Nother boat ... It’s got ruhks in it ...”

Dick strained his eyes. He saw the boat, upstream, coming down, heading out on the wide, moonlit river. It came as if headed for the villa on the other shore, down where the Navy Yard should have been. It was impossible to see the size of the boat, but it could only have come from somewhere on Manhattan Island opposite Welfare. It could have come from that other slave pen. It could be carrying Nancy to the villa now. At least, its crew might know what had happened to her.

He swung the tiller over.

“Pull hard,” he directed.

The two boats neared each other steadily. The other did not change its course. Its rowers—doubtless chained like these—rowed in the steady apathy Dick’s own crew had shown. But now, slowly, a trace of spirit was coming to his crew. Presently a voice whispered:

“We goin’ to take that boat?”

“Yes,” said Dick. “I want to find out about that girl.”

The voice said hungrily:

“Fella—let me have anyway that spear! I’m dead anyways, now, but maybe—”

Dick silently passed it to him, and he seized the haft of it without slackening his stroke on the oar.

The other boat was a hundred yards away. A voice called from it in a language Dick did not know. He did not answer. It was fifty yards away. Twenty-five. Its helmsman called again, this time obsequiously, as if the arrogance of a boat holding to a collision course implied that some mighty personage must be in it. Dick grimly shifted his own tiller as the other boat gave way, to keep collision inevitable. Under his breath he said:

“Pull hard!”

The helmsman of the other boat snapped agitated orders. There came animal noises from it. Sounds which were neither yelps nor snarlings, but something in between and somehow conversational. The ruhks in the other boat were calling to supposed fellow beasts in this.

Then, in panic, the other helmsman swung his boat clean around to avoid a head-on collision, and Dick swerved and crashed along the other craft’s stern. So near, he could see a robed figure at the tiller and two uneasy ruhks balancing themselves as if to spring and regarding him and his craft with anxiety.

As the stern of his own boat scraped the other, Dick fired twice, point-blank. Then there was screaming, snarling uproar, and a man rose, grabbing at his pistol-holster, and there was deadly battle in the waist of Dick’s boat where a wounded ruhk had sprung on board. Dick fired again, and the thing was ended.

He called sharply to the other crew: “Hold up, there! Back water! Try to get away and we’ll sink you!”

The captured craft lay still, its chained rowers shivering and in dread.

Of course, Nancy wasn’t in it. They’d never heard of her.

Dick had tried not to think of this possibility, but he could not help it. There were two slave pens on Manhattan Island, but Nancy had not been taken to either of them. She had not been carried to the palace of the masters on the Brooklyn shore in either of the now-captured cutters. Of the remaining possibilities, for her to have been devoured by ruhks because of an injury was most likely, and the bare suspicion drove all thoughts of humanity out of Dick’s mind.

Certainly the slaves of this Other World knew nothing of her. There was but one way to learn definitely—no, two. If Dick could capture an overseer alive, he might force the man to tell him Nancy’s fate if he knew it. And if that failed, then the palace itself—

Now, though, he had two dozen men to command. They were doomed, of course. No slave who had witnessed the killing of an overseer or a ruhk could be allowed to live, because his tale would inspire the others to wishful thinking. More, no slave who had seen an armed free man could be allowed to spread such tidings of hope.

So Dick acted with the ruthlessness that knowledge justified. He now had twenty-four followers, chained to their seats in the two cutters. He did not free them from their shackles. Instead, with the second boat following docilely because its crew could do nothing else, he made for a point on the Manhattan shore close to that small splinter of rock which lies southward of Welfare Island. As the boats headed for that spot, he took a notebook from his pocket and wrote grimly in its pages. It was a report to Sam Todd. It was a demand for arms. It told very curtly what had happened, but essentially, primarily, emphatically, it was a demand for arms to make a slave-revolt not only possible but successful. Arms with which, by massacre, to make this Other World no longer a place from which thieves and slavers preyed on the world of men. Now that five thousand years of mysteries and crimes were solved, those mysteries and crimes must end. They must!

He landed on Manhattan opposite the little splinter-islet. He tore out the pages on which he’d written his account and pinned them to the bark of the largest nearby tree with a thorn longer than his hand from a nearby bush. Sam would hunt the tree-trunks hereabouts from Earth, looking through his peephole from the equivalent space—it was a park in New York—as early as tomorrow morning. He might even hunt them up tonight. When he saw a message at the arranged place, he would use the doorway Maltby had contrived, and retrieve it. He would obey it as nearly as he could.

Then Dick took his two boats up the river past all observation. He found a secure hiding-place for both boats on a shore which should have been the Bronx. Then, and only then, he began to free his followers from their shackles. He had delayed that until he could tell them confidently that the means of fighting would soon be on the way.

It was late, by the time they were well hidden and free. The slaves had among them now two spears and two automatic pistols, besides Dick’s own. These were not arms enough. So Dick commanded them to cut saplings and make substitute spears, sharpening the points with the steel blades of the spears. And if any could make bows or arrows—but that would take time.

Time was of the essence, of course. And arms were essential. At the moment they were probably safe. There would be no regular patrol of men or ruhks on the mainland, where no slave pen lay. But they could be found, and ultimately would be. If the freed slaves tried flight inland, of course they would be tracked down. That was a function of the ruhks.

So he asked grim questions of his followers. He began to outline the beginnings of his plans. The men were cowed, and they had been almost spiritless. But they were desperate beyond the desperation of mankind. Their hate was a burning flame. So Dick made plans to utilize their desperation and hate as substitutes for the spirit that had been driven out.

Back on Earth there was the barest beginning of a possibility of change. Sam Todd—still sweating when he thought of his experience in Brooklyn—went to the park which was the Manhattan shore opposite the splinter-island south of Welfare. It was dark when he arrived, but he sat on a bench and put a copper alloy peephole inconspicuously to his eye. He did not at first see the sheets of paper that Dick had pinned to the trunk of a tree for him to find. There was no light but moonlight in the forest where the big tree stood. But even so, Sam made a discovery which was disheartening. In the world of men there had been a fill-in at that spot. The park area had been raised in level by earth piled high, with grass and concrete walkways laid on top. Fifteen feet back from the shoreline of the Other World, the ground-levels in the other world were completely different. Sam discovered, even before he saw the impaled sheets of paper, that any message Dick had left for him would be buried deep beneath publicly maintained park lawn. Actually, the scribbled sheets were stuck to a tree trunk under a drinking fountain on Earth. To get at them would have required an excavation besides an interdimensional door, and it could not be accomplished without either permission or discovery. In short, Sam simply could not pick up Dick’s message at all.

But he had the twin to the metal peephole. It was a miniature interdimensional door. Maltby had made it to be sure he could. And sitting on the park bench Sam wrote painfully in his turn:

“There’s an earth-fill covering up your papers. I can’t get to them. But I have been looking around Maltby’s place. Two miles northeast of here there is a pond in the world, you’re in. There is a cart-trail past it. Just beyond the first bend in that trail to northward of the pond, there is an unusually large tree with mottled bark. That tree grows through the space Maltby’s apartment occupies on Earth. Come there. I’ll have something fixed up so you can come back—with Nancy, I hope.—Sam.”

He fumbled in his pocket. The only suitable container was his wallet. He emptied that and put his message inside it. He put the end of his handkerchief between the zipper teeth and caught the cloth firmly. He rolled up the wallet into a cylinder and managed to squeeze it through the tiny round alloy doorway which corresponded to the alloy eye. Feigning to drink at the drinking fountain, he released the handkerchief by which the wallet dangled in the Other World. Then, through the peephole, he watched. The wallet fell at the foot of the very tree in the Other World to which Dick’s report and demand for arms was fastened. Dick could not fail to find it when he came to make sure his message had been retrieved by Sam. The handkerchief showed up plainly.

As an emergency way to explain to Dick why his message hadn’t been removed, and to arrange a better means of communication, it was an excellent idea. But it did not take into account certain facts.

The ruhks were slave guards. The slaves were cowed. But sometimes pure horror made them cunning. So the shoreline of Manhattan Island was trotted over, at least once in twenty-four hours, by a keen-nosed ruhk with the intelligence of a man. Being beasts with undiminished feral instincts, they made those rounds with all the satisfaction of hunting animals. They savored the smells of the jungle. Sometimes they snapped up an unwary wild thing and devoured it. But discovery of the scent of man on the shoreline was the purpose of the patrol.

Two hours after Sam dropped his message for Dick to find, a ruhk came padding through the darkness on that particular errand. He picked up instantly the scent of Dick’s footprints where he had landed and selected a tree to hold his message. Slavering a little—because unaccompanied humans on unlawful errands were the lawful prey of ruhks—the beast followed the human trail. He did not find Dick. He did find two messages. One was impaled on a thorn on a tree-trunk. One was the wallet on the ground.

The ruhk made sure that Dick had returned to the water. Then he picked up the wallet and set off at full speed to find the nearest overseer. The conversational noises of the ruhk were quite equal to an exact account of what he had found, so that an overseer and ruhks soon retrieved the other message. Both were sent across the river in a double-banked galley, specially summoned by light-signals from the shore.

The master of all the slaves and ruhks of these parts, and the lord of all local overseers, had already had two frights that day. One was the unprecedented appearance of an armed free man in the Other World, a matter of great gravity. The other alarming event had been the appearance of a between-worlds peephole in his very palace, as if enemies capable of interdimensional travel spied upon him for purposes of their own.

He had the notes translated, because he had never bothered to learn any language but the language of his ancestors. He puzzled over the interpretation of the two. He was annoyed, and he was frightened. He gave orders for the finding of the place where—according to Sam Todd—a doorway for passage between worlds was to be opened by those who were not of his race and hence were enemies to him and all his kind. He gave explicit commands about that. Then he ordered an adequate ambush prepared about the place where the messages had been left.

Then the master of the villa relaxed again, as bustling preparations began for the execution of his commands. But he could not relax completely. He wondered if the disappearance of six ruhks with no explanation whatever —some three days before this most upsetting day—had any connection with today’s events.

He was not aware that just before the six ruhks disappeared, Nancy Holt had vanished from the sidewalk where she waited for a taxicab. Nor was he aware that as she vanished Sam Todd had stared helplessly at a dwindling pool of quicksilver. But the master, in his palace on the Brooklyn shore, wouldn’t have thought that matter significant even if he’d known about it.

Sam Todd was in the parkway beside the East River Drive at sunrise. He was unreasonably uneasy. He had been unable to sleep. He sat on a dew-wet park bench shivering a little with the morning chill. As the dawnlight strengthened, he put the peephole to his eye.

The sun came slowly up over the eastern edge of the Other World. Splendid sunrise colorings silhouetted the green forests of the Brooklyn hills, almost solid at the upper surface save where giant trees of a species unknown on earth threw up lacy fountains of foliage like spray. The surface of the East River was oily smooth, and reflected the reds and golds and violets of the fading night sky so that it looked like rainbows going into solution. Mists hung here and there over the treetops, and seeped out from the jungle’s edge to make the shoreline mysterious.

Dick Blair’s small squadron crept along the shore, barely out from the beaches. The rowers strove to be silent. Often they were hidden in the mists, and sometimes they were only vaguely visible, like ghosts. But now and again the sun’s red rays smote fully on them. Then the crimson light made their bodies the color of blood.

Presently, the two oared boats checked their motion. One turned in toward the land. Its bow touched, and Dick Blair stepped ashore. All was stillness and silence. Somewhere a fish leaped, and the “plop” of its splash was somehow shocking. The rowers seemed not to breathe. Dick looked, and listened, and then in the fathomless hush of morning his nostrils wrinkled suddenly. He smelled something. The hair rose by instinct at the back of his neck. He smelled beasts.

He stood still on the beach. He spoke in a low tone to the men behind him. They had been tense. Their bodies grew tenser still.

He stepped into the underbrush.

The silence held, save that somewhere in the forest far away a staccato bellowing noise set up and almost instantly thereafter ceased. Something stepped delicately into view on the shore of the island out in the river, spread long, angular wings, and suddenly soared out over the water barely two yards above it. A tiny twittering noise came from a treetop. One of the men in the boats shifted his position suddenly, and his oar splashed.

As if that small sound had been a signal, all hell broke loose where Dick had disappeared. There was the startling, thunderous crash of an explosion, which echoed and reechoed among the trees. A beast screamed. A second shot and a third, and then an automatic pistol roared itself empty and another took up the unholy task—and then there was a ghastly uproar of snarlings and screams and men shouting and more shots. Then the deeper bellowing of a sawed-off shotgun.

Dick came plunging from the brushwood, grinning savagely. Leaping forms came after him. He halted to fire twice, plunged on again, and splashed into the water and the bow of the beached boat.

The naked men shoved off in panic. He stepped along to the stern and sat down, saying composedly, “Don’t get too far away! We’ve got a chance to kill some ruhks, now.”

He began to reload his weapons. The brush erupted snarling forms. They howled their fury. Dick said: “Act confused and scared. Make it convincing!” The rowers of his own boat splashed and fumbled. Some of their awkwardness was confusion in reality, but not all. Neither cutter was more than ten yards from the shore, and both looked as if their crews were helpless from pure terror. Men bellowed from the brush, and the ruhks plunged into the water. Dick said hungrily:

“Out a little farther! Lure ‘em! We’ll kill ‘em if we can get ‘em swimming!”

The two cutters, splashing and clumsy and in seeming hysteria, went erratically out from the shore into the brightening dawn. Snarling beasts, intelligence forgotten in the instinct to kill, swam after them.

“Now!” roared Dick.

There were only two spears and two pistols besides his own weapons in the boats. But the men suddenly turned upon their pursuers. The ruhks could not yet believe that slaves would defy them. The slaves themselves almost failed of belief. One man in Dick’s own boat screamed and fled blindly from the bow, trampling on his fellows, and in glassy-eyed fear went on over the stern. But there was an aching blood-lust in the others. As the beasts swam snarling closer, they yelled in triumph when they found their oar-blades and sharpened saplings would reach. A man shrieked with joy when a sharp-pointed pole sank in a ruhk’s furry body and the beast uttered raging cries and snapped at the thing which impaled it. Another man howled with glee as his flailing oar broke a ruhk’s back and the thing screamed.

There were almost no shots. Dick held his own weapons in reserve. Once a ruhk got its paws over a gunwale and he raised a pistol, but a clubbed oar literally cracked its skull open. He almost relaxed, then. The other boat was close, and one ruhk did get on board it before three sharpened stakes impaled it simultaneously. No other came so near to close combat.

But the ruhks were intelligent. Devilishly, viciously intelligent. They had attacked in over confidence, urged on by blood-lust and the shouts of men on shore. Overseers, those men would be. But Dick’s own boat had killed six ruhks in a bare two minutes of tumultuous slaughter. A seventh paddled weakly toward shore. The other boat had done almost as well. The remaining beasts snarled horribly, but one among them yelped and growled meaningfully, and the rest obeyed. They did not retreat, but they did draw off, just beyond the reach of spears or oar-blades. There they swam, raging.

The light grew momently stronger. The men in the boats now snarled and jeered in their turn at the animals they had feared so terribly. The ruhks made bloodcurdling sounds, their eyes blazing, just out of reach. One of them snapped at an oar-blade. The men shouted and paddled fiercely to come to grips again. It was full dawn, now, and though the sunshine was yet a deep orange there was brightness everywhere. The dew-wet trees looked golden-green and stark, sharp shadows played as the naked men derided the ruhks and strove with burning eyes to lure them within spear-stroke or to overtake them.

But it was not right. The ruhks were brainy and they knew what they did. Dick realized it with a start. The overseers were not even shooting from the shore, and they had pistols and the range would not be much over fifty yards. There must be something else—

Dick jerked his head about and saw the answer. Around the southern tip of Welfare Island a large boat sped. It was a galley of two banks of oars, converted from a coasting-schooner with clean, sharp lines. Its masts had been cut away, its deck removed and its bulwarks cut down. It floated lightly on the water. It was open to the sun save for decking at its bow and stern and a railed walkway in between, over the heads of the slaves at the oars. Overseers ran up and down that walkway, now, their whips cracking mercilessly, and the long and clumsy oars bent as the slaves pulled the galley on. Sixty men pulled the oars— lash-scarred, chained, maniacs in despair. There were half a dozen robed men at the stern, besides one who handled a wholly modern small ship’s wheel. There were others, with ruhks, at the galley’s bow. A dozen men with firearms to four pistols and a shotgun—and one of the pistols was empty and another had only three bullets left. But the larger galley had no need to fight. It could merely ride down the smaller craft and spill their crews.

That was evidently its intention. When Dick shouted his discovery, tumult broke out, alike on the shore and from the swimming beasts. The ruhks on the larger galley howled an answer. Dick leaped to his feet and shouted, and the two cutters struck out in flight.

But there was no escape. They might beach, to be sure. But on the Manhattan shore there were ruhks and overseers. In jungle-fighting, the beasts would have it all their own way. If the boats beached on the long narrow East River island, the ruhks would even more surely have them in the end. They would be ferried there in monstrous numbers, and they had the grisly cunning of werewolves.

The sun shone brightly, now. It was day, and the two small fleeing craft and the larger, vengeful one in pursuit made a strange picture against the shores which showed only jungle. And of all insane preoccupations, Dick Blair at this moment tore leaves out of his notebook and shredded them to confetti, and tossed them in the air.

Then Dick gave orders to his own crew. The other cutter drew nearer at his hail. Without slacking their straining effort to keep ahead, the cutters raced along with their oar-tips almost touching, as if for mutual comfort. Then, when the bigger craft was barely fifty yards behind, they turned together for the farther Manhattan shore. The galley swung triumphantly. Closer. Forty yards. Thirty. Twenty. Ten. It would ride them down—

Dick flung the second of his tear-gas bombs. It was a perfect target and a perfect throw. The bomb landed on the bow-deck of the galley, in the very thick of the men who waited so zestfully to do murder. It exploded with a totally inadequate “plop!” and dense white vapor spouted out. And Dick’s tossing of paper fragments bore its fruit: for by it he had gauged the faint breeze exactly. The tear-gas cloud hung almost stationary. The galley rode through it. The mist rolled all along the length of the bigger boat, blinding overseer and slave and ruhk. When the galley came out of the quite inconsiderable cloud, its oars beat erratically and out of rhythm, its overseers’ whips no longer flailed, it lost way and veered crazily. And then the two cutters plunged to its sides and the slaves swarmed over the low gunwale.

What followed was not pretty. The former slaves, armed with sharpened poles and two spears and clubbed oars, raged the length of the galley, killing. Ruhks, unable to see, died fighting blindly. Overseers fought hopelessly with no eyesight. The men with whips, who from the walk over the rowers’ benches had lashed on the slaves to work, were so helpless in their blindness that the men of the cutters laughed at them, stripped their whips and weapons from them, and flung them down to their still-chained fellows. The eyes of the rowers streamed copiously, but with howls of joy they tore their tyrants to pieces.

It seemed a matter of no more than seconds. Certainly not more than two minutes elapsed between the time when the cutters were in full flight and the time when the revolted slaves had grown from two dozen men in small boats, freed by Dick, to more than eighty with the oared galley of the master of the villa in their possession. Sixty of them still wept uncontrollably from the tear-gas they’d taken with their masters. But they grinned and howled and clanked their chains in glee, careless of possible retribution.

The men from the cutter were not blinded. The gas mist was gone before they boarded. But the eyes of some began to smart from traces of the stuff drifting up from the rowers’ space. So Dick got the galley under way again to make a breeze to clear the last of it.

Sam Todd, white-faced, sitting on a bench in East Side Park in the New York City of Earth, put down the little metal peephole through which he had watched the battle in the dawnlight. Behind him, early morning cars whirled past on the double highway. Around him innumerable buildings poured plumes of steam and sooty smoke toward the sky. A puffing tug towed coal barges over the very spot where, in the Other World, Dick Blair and a crew of freed slaves took account of their victory.

Sam Todd dazedly got up from the park bench. He knew that his message to Dick had not been picked up by Dick. The ready ambuscade told that somebody else had intercepted it, and made a trap for Dick and the naked scoundrels now obeying his orders.

Then cold chills went up and down Sam Todd’s spine. Not one message, but both must have been intercepted. And his had told Dick how to find the tree which, in the Other World, grew through the space Maltby’s flat occupied on Earth. And the folk who kidnapped slaves would have found it necessary to learn English.

Sam himself had risen before dawn to see if Dick received his note. Now he knew somebody else had received it. He went white and sick, and suddenly he plunged blindly across the East River Drive without regard to the traffic. Brakes squealed about him but he did not hear them. A car’s bumper nudged his calf, but he did not feel it. Trembling and panting he found a phone booth at the nearest corner, darted inside, and dialed Maltby’s number with fingers that shook uncontrollably. He sweated as the phone buzzed, stopped, buzzed and stopped, in monotonous assurance that it was ringing. Presently Sam hung up and dialed the same number again.

There was no answer.

In a taxi on the way to Maltby’s place, his teeth chattered. But he couldn’t bring himself to use the peephole to look into the Other World. Only at the very last instant, when the cab turned into the last block, could he nerve himself to look. Then he had the cab stop short. He got out and put the peephole to his eye.

He saw the virgin jungle of the Other World. Nothing else. He moved slowly and timorously along the street, the early morning sounds of New York seeming very loud indeed. He looked into the Other World, and then examined his surroundings in this so that he would not run into a blank wall.

Before the building in which Maltby lived, he stopped again. Shivering, he regarded the corresponding space in the Other World. He saw jungle, which here had little undergrowth and was merely a carpet of rotted leaves. He saw the mottled bole of the great tree he had described to Dick. Then he saw tracks in the dead leaves and wood mold on the ground. Something had come here on narrow, tired wheels like bicycle-wheels. It was gone. It had accomplished what it came for.

Sam Todd went heavily into the apartment building and into Maltby’s flat. It was quite empty. Maltby was gone. More, all of his experimental apparatus was gone, too. Everything that had been used to make the doorway between worlds was missing.

Sam knew that there had been many small pools of quicksilver glistening in this place recently. Maltby was now a slave in the Other World. The doorway he’d made for Dick to go through was taken. No more doorways could be made, because Maltby had been the only man who knew how to make them. Dick Blair was beyond help, Nancy—if she still lived—was beyond hoping for, Maltby would shortly be tortured to make him tell everything he knew, and Sam Todd was helpless.

The telephone rang in Maltby’s apartment. It rang again. Sam swallowed, looking at it.

Then he turned and went tip-toeing out of the flat. He was now the only man on Earth who knew that the Other World existed. He dared not talk about it, but he had to do something about it. His first impulse was to run away. He’d slept here last night. When Maltby was missed, he’d be asked about it. Naturally. As a man of ample means and a known student of criminology, the questioning would be very polite, of course. But he’d slept here. He’d gone out before dawn. He’d returned—and Maltby was missing. More: when Dick Blair was reported missing, Sam and Maltby had been the last two persons to see him. And Nancy Holt—

It would strike the police as a series of remarkable coincidences. They would expect him to explain them reasonably. When he couldn’t, they would begin to get suspicious. And if he told the truth— There was nothing that could be more damning, in the eyes of the cops, than for Sam to tell the exact and literal truth. It would look like a very clumsy attempt to feign insanity.

His metal peephole would be considered a clever fake. It would be cut into to solve the mystery of its construction, and thereby be destroyed. The little door through which pencils and wallets could be thrust into the Other World would be considered also a device of modern prestidigitation. Sam Todd would be jailed until he explained the vanishing of his friends. In the Other World Maltby would be subject to fiendish tortures, and Sam Todd’s name would come out of his babblings. When newspapers were snatched into the Other World, they would presently reveal Sam Todd’s exact whereabouts and that the police accused him of faking insanity. Shortly the newspapers would print the news of his inexplicable escape from a locked cell. Then there would be nobody at all on Earth who knew anything about the Other World, and things would go on as before—theft and blood and agony and murder for thousands of years to come.

Sam went to his hotel and up to his suite. He began to pack for hiding, and for combat. He had been studying weapons as a part of his work. He took what weapons he had ammunition for, and all their ammunition. And he took what money he could find. There wasn’t enough. He was in the act of debating whether or not to cash a check at the hotel desk when his telephone rang.

He jumped. It rang again.

He swallowed, with some difficulty. His mind was in the Other World. He felt hunted. He tried not to think of Maltby, but Maltby would have to scream out every secret thought he knew when the Other Worldlings began to work on him. He knew Sam’s address and how to call him by phone.

The phone rang a third time.

Sam went quickly out of the door, sweating. He carried two bags. He left the telephone ringing.

Minutes later, he was at his bank. He cashed a large check. He cursed himself for knowing that he looked very pale. He cursed himself still more for being unable to devise a plan to save Maltby or even Dick.

He tried to close his mind and not think of such things. He went to Penn Station and paid off his taxi, then went by subway to Grand Central and left that with the passengers of an incoming train, apparently one of them. He took another taxi to a medium-priced hotel and registered as from out of town, asking for a room as high from the street as possible. Doggedly and bitterly, he meant to do what he could to fight the Other World. Within hours—days at most—the police would be hunting him. From the Other World he would be hunted, too. He had just two weapons—a one-inch peephole through which he could look into the Other World, and a one-inch space on a copper plate through which he could thrust things into the other cosmos. He had nothing else.

With the peephole he would learn the ways of the Other World. Slowly, carefully, he could find where doorways were placed and how they were made sometimes to be open and sometimes shut. In time he would be able to drop written word to some slave, guiding him to such a doorway and instructing him in its use. He might be able to drop small sharpened steel rods to serve as daggers. He should be able to pour down inflammable stuff and start incendiary fires to cover a break by such a slave. If once an interworld doorway fell into his hands, he would manage to get it underground where in the Other World it could not be found, or else to some upper floor of a skyscraper. And then he would act as the situation required. With one full-sized doorway opening into the other cosmos and freed slaves to tell what went on there, he could not fail to cause conviction and armed exploration.

From his eighth-floor room in the hotel he looked exhaustively out over jungle and placid waters. He saw only those, and once the reflection of sunlight from the villa’s roof. There was nothing to be learned from aloft. So Sam took a deep breath and equipped himself with arms so that he would be inconspicuously a walking arsenal. It was wryly humorous to think that if the police found him his weapons would be proof of criminality, and if a between-worlds door closed on him the weapons would be useless. But he carried them just the same. He went down to the street to begin his search.

Then an idea struck him. He could give himself more time before the police hunted actively for him. He stepped into a phone booth and dialed his original hotel.

“Desk?” he said briskly. “Todd speaking. I have suite 406, you know. I’ve been suddenly called out of town. Cleveland and possibly Chicago afterward. Hold my mail for a forwarding address, won’t you? I’ll wire it.”

The desk-clerk said hurriedly: “Yes, sir. But Mr. Todd! Your secretary has called three times in the past hour. She says it is desperately important for you to call her at once, sir. Extremely urgent.”

Sam’s hair stood upon his head. Nancy Holt was his secretary. Four days ago she’d vanished in a pool of quicksilver. And nobody who vanished like that ever came back. Nobody! It would be a trap—

“Very well,” said Sam Todd, his throat tightening. “I’ll call her. Did she leave a number?”

“No sir.”

“Thanks,” said Sam.

He hung up, his lips twisted. Then the oddity of it hit him. Nancy hadn’t left a phone number. She didn’t need to, of course. He knew the number of her phone. But anybody impersonating Nancy, or Nancy under duress, would have left a number. Anybody who forced Nancy to call would think it suspicious if she didn’t leave a number Sam could call. So—incredibly enough—it was possible that it was straight. Or it was possible that some compulsion more terrible than he could guess at would have enslaved Nancy’s mind as well as her body.

It was a decision of importance vastly greater than merely his own safety. Sam felt that the wrong decision might mean slavery and degradation and shame and horror for generations yet unborn. He had to play it out.

He called her number from the other side of town, with a taxi waiting to carry him away the instant he dashed out of the booth. He heard the crisp buzzings that meant her phone was ringing. Then her voice. It was unquestionably Nancy’s voice, strained and tense.

“Hello?”

“Nancy!” he said hoarsely. “This is Sam Todd.”

He heard her give a cry of pure relief.

“Sam! I’ve been going crazy, trying to reach Dick, and I couldn’t—the Museum doesn’t know where he is—and—”

“He went after you,” said Sam flatly.

She laughed without amusement, almost hysterically.

“He couldn’t. He couldn’t, Sam! He’s going to think I’m crazy—”

“Another world,” said Sam. “Manhattan Island with no buildings on it. Slaves. Animals like dogs or wolves that have as much sense as men. Jungle all around. Right?”

“Sam!” she gasped. “How did you know?”

“Dick’s gone there,” he repeated. “The people who live there just kidnapped Maltby. How’d you get back?”

He kept listening for a false note in her voice. There weren’t any false notes. Either this was the first escape in five thousand years, or it was Nancy made into a traitor to Earth and all her kind.

“Sam!” she panted. “They have ways like doors from that world to this. They set traps for people to drop into!. I—I got back through one of those traps. It was—like the one I fell into when I was on the street with you. If—you hurry we can get the trap and—”

Sam said flatly, “Where is the trap? In terms of this world, Nancy. Where were you when you got back?”

“A little alley between two old houses—” She told him, almost incoherently, the exact location. “Why?”

“I’ll be seeing you,” he said. “Right away. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Y-Yes. I brought back a slave with me. A man who was a slave there. Where are you, Sam?”

“I’m on the way,” said Sam grimly. “I’ll be right over,”

He hung up. He went out and got into the cab. He stopped it two blocks from where she said she’d come back to earth. There was again an office building handy. Sam bribed an elevator operator and was admitted to a men’s room normally accessible only to tenants of the building. In privacy, there, he peered through his peephole. He looked directly into the Other World from a height above the jungle trees. At first he saw nothing, but there was a small gap among the branches through which he glimpsed squared, fresh lumber. It was a crude and clumsy cage, of hand-hewn timbers mortised together so that anything inside could not possibly get out. He stared at it, and saw a movement nearby. There were beasts around it. The wolf-like beasts he’d seen at the villa and engaged in the galley fight of that morning. There were several beasts. At one time he saw three, one lying peacefully on the ground, and one sitting up thoughtfully licking at its paw, and another pacing restlessly up and down.

He went very pale indeed. He went down to the street again and rode the six blocks to Nancy’s home. He approached it cautiously, several times using the peephole in his handkerchief as if he had a speck of dust in his eye.

The part of the Other World corresponding to Nancy’s apartment-house was empty of beasts or cages or beings of the Other World. The space corresponding to her apartment itself was empty of anything but tree branches. But there were Other World beasts waiting where she said she’d returned to Earth. And she’d brought back a man.

It was Sam’s duty to be suspicious, but he felt rather sick. He liked Nancy. He’d been naive before, when he went to Brooklyn, and he’d almost been picked up. There were just two possibilities here. It might be quite straight, and a break of incredible importance, or—Nancy had been in the Other World for four days, and she might have been the victim of contrivances or concoctions developed during five thousand years of pure villainy, and she might have become enslaved in the most literal possible sense.

Sam took a deep breath. He hoped desperately that everything was all right. But he held his pistols fast as he went into the apartment-house. He was unhappily ready to kill Nancy as an act of kindness, if it should be necessary.

There was sunshine streaming in a window. There was dust on a polished table on which the sunbeams smote. There was a man with shaggy, uncombed hair and beard seated at the table, clad in a quilted dressing gown which obviously belonged to Nancy. He was eating ferociously with his fingers. Nancy was nowhere in sight. The man looked up. Sam backed against a wall and said: “Well?”

His fingers were very ready to pull the triggers. The man stared at Sam. He swallowed convulsively and spoke. “You Sam Todd?”

“Yes,” said Sam. “I am. Who’re you?”

“Name’s Kelly,” said the long-haired man huskily. “I been a slave—yonder. She got me back here. She’s—washin’, I guess. She said she felt filthy.”

Nancy’s voice called, “Sam?”

“Here!” said Sam. It didn’t seem like a trap.

“Just a minute!” she called. “Get Kelly to tell you!”

“Right. Go ahead,” said Sam to the man. But he kept his back against the wall.

“I was a slave,” said the man in the dressing, gown. “I— here!” He stood up and slipped off the garment. He wore a loincloth underneath, and nothing else. There were horrible, crisscross, purplish marks upon his back, laid over and over each other. “They’re floggin’s,” he said briefly. “The overseer said I was hard to break an’ the ruhks’d get me sure. But they didn’t. I was choppin’ wood when this ruhk come up an’ told my guard a master wanted me. So I went with the ruhk.”

“What’s a ruhk?” asked Sam warily. The man drew the dressing gown about his shoulders and sat down again.

“A creature of the devil!” said Kelly in a hard voice. “Critters that look like police dogs, only twice their size. They got sense like men. They can talk to each other an’ we slaves hadda learn to understan’ their orders.”

Sam waited. He felt very lonely. It had seemed to him that he was the only man left with the purpose of fighting the Other World. He wanted to believe this man, but he did not quite dare. Not yet.

“The ruhk took me to—her.” He nodded in the general direction from which Nancy’s voice had come. “There she was. White as a sheet but game, talkin’ to the ruhks who were lookin’ at her an’ waggin’ their tails an’ crawlin’ on the ground when she looked at them. I never seen a ruhk wag his tail before. An’ she was dressed.” He was eating again, but at Sam’s expression he explained: “Slaves get stripped soon as they’re caught. Men an’ women both. That’s a sign they’re slaves. Overseers wear things like shirts. Long ones. But she was dressed like N’York, so she wasn’t no slave, an’ she wasn’t no master, either.”

The word “master” evidently referred to males and females alike, of a class of humans concerning which Kelly had evidently only indefinite ideas.

“When I got there, she says to me, ‘I—I’m here and I don’t know where here is, and—I’m afraid I’ve gone insane. These—animals seem to understand when I talk. Can you—tell me what’s happened?’ “

That was convincing. It sounded like Nancy.

“What had happened?” asked Sam. His hands weren’t clenched so tightly on his pistol-butts, now.

“She’d found herself in a cage-trap,” said Kelly. “Same as me. When they want slaves they set a trap somewheres where only one fella at a time is likely to be. Or they fix it for times when there won’t be many folks around. You get in the trap-space an’ somethin’ drops over you, an’ you are—yonder.. There’s a ruhk watchin’ the trap. Always. He makes sure you don’t do nothin’ funny. Me—when I was caught the ruhk just snarled every time I moved, then some more ruhks come with a overseer. They turned me outa the trap an’ the ruhks threw me, neat, an’ tore my clothes off. I thought they was gonna kill me, but when I was stripped they marched me to the slave pen. A man that’s been stripped an’ herded by ruhks has all the starch took out of him somehow. For a woman it’s worse. It took a long time to figger out why when she—” again the nod toward the other room “—found herself in a cage-trap the ruhk on watch pulled the latch an’ let her out right away an’ whined anxious tryin’ to say he was sorry. Acted like a puppy, she said. There was moonlight enough for her to see his tail waggin’ like crazy. Come mornin’, she started to walk away, scared, an’ he follered her, an’ presently a couple more ruhks come up, trailin’ by scent, an’ they acted like bashful puppies, too.”

Kelly took a mouthful of food. What he said was not reasonable, but Sam found that he believed it. He tried to guess at an explanation.

“It was the next day before she asked ‘em pretty if they would bring her somebody human to talk to. She’d found out they could understand better’n dogs. As good as men. They just can’t say words, not havin’ the throat for it. Anyhow, one of ‘em run off an’ brought her me. An’ I told her where she was an’ what’d happened as best I knew, but it took two days to figure out what made them ruhks act like they did. They caught some animals an’ brought ‘em when she said she was hungry. I managed to make a fire an’ cook. The ruhks hung around like they were crazy about her. When we got things figured out, we made ‘em crazy about me!”

He laughed suddenly.

“What was it?” asked Sam.

“Her grandma’s perfume,” said Kelly sardonically. “The perfume she used that she had made up after her grandma’s recipe. They’re crazy about it. When I’d told her everything I knew, she said she must smell like the masters they had—the masters that boss ruhks an’ overseers together. I never seen a master, but she said the ruhks acted like cats with the smell of catnip, or dogs with the smell of—what is it? Anise? Maybe ruhks are bred to be crazy about that scent, like dogs are bred to be crazy about the scent of different animals they’re s’pposed to hunt. She said if that kinda breedin’ was kept up long enough—”

“Five thousand years, more or less,” said Sam quietly. “That’s long enough to breed in a special instinct, all right! And it’s clever. Damnably clever! That’s why they can trust the beasts. That’s why there can’t even be a revolt of overseers; much less slaves! Go on!”

“That’s all,” said Kelly. “When she had it all figured out—she had a little perfume thing in her purse. She sprayed some smell-stuff on me. Her kind. Them rukhs got bewildered, then. I’d been a slave, an’ all of a sudden I was a master. All of a sudden they loved me. They hadda do like I said. It was bred in ‘em. An’ still underneath the master-smell I stunk like a slave! Funny, huh? So that part was okay an’ we told ‘em to take us to a cage-trap that was set, an’ we went in, an’ they let down the thing on us, an’ we were back in New York. We stepped off an’ I was in a fix without enough clo’es on to walk a block. She grabbed a taxi an’ we come here.”

He poured a huge glass of milk—it was strange to see this brawny, hairy man drinking milk—and turned from the table.

“I’m goin’ back,” he added coldly. “We kinda agreed on that. She’s goin’ to get some more of that perfume—gallons an’ gallons of it—an’ I got use for it! We got those particular ruhks waitin’ by that trap for us. I don’t know how long they will. We got to hurry. We need guns ...”

Sam felt sick again, but now it was relief. This narrative had just that quality of convincing unreason that nobody in the world would devise to deceive him. So much more plausible stories could have been contrived! And he had been so horribly afraid that Nancy would have been enslaved in a fashion akin to drug-addiction!

She came in the room, smiling.

She had been his secretary for almost a year, and he had admired her efficiency and respected her intelligence, but he hadn’t thought about her as a girl. She was helping him get set to be a consulting criminologist. But for four days he’d felt horrible self-reproach because she’d been the victim of a crime literally within arms’ reach of him, and he’d been unable to help her. Now—she was beautiful.

She was freshly bathed and brushed. She was dressed in a sort of whipcord costume. She looked tense, but without fear. She looked at him, smiled, and then said urgently:

“Sam! You said Dick’s in the Other World after me! Where and how, Sam? We’ve got to catch up with him and give him some of that master-scent so he’ll be safe from the ruhks! And we’ve simply got to do something about the slaves, Sam! People from right here are made into work-animals and—and worse, Sam! Kelly told me!”

Sam Todd released his two pistols. He took a deep breath.

“List what you need, Nancy,” he said grimly. “I’ll get a suit for Kelly first. I’ve got plenty of money for that and anything else we need. Then—Kelly, can we move that doorway if we’ve both got the master-smell on us?”

“If you mean the thing we come through, sure!” said Kelly. “There’s always a ruhk on guard over them things in case somebody managed to get outa a cage after bein’ caught. An’ in case a slave got loose an’ found one. No slave is ever loose outside a slave pen without a ruhk guardin’ him. But ruhks won’t bother us, now!”

“I’ve already ordered the perfume made up,” said Nancy crisply. “I phoned a drugstore that makes it up for me. This time I ordered all they could make. It should be ready any minute.”

“Then—clothes for Kelly,” snapped Sam, “so we can get to the trap and into it, and we’ll go. Call and nag them about the scent while I see what I can do.”

He went downstairs and found the superintendent of Nancy’s apartment house. He bargained with him extravagantly. He came back with a coat and sweater and trousers—none of them clean.

“No shoes,” he reported. “You’re a nature-boy, Kelly, but in this part of town it’s allowable to be a little crazy. The scent?”

“It’s ready,” said Nancy.

They went out together, Kelly wriggling a little from the unaccustomed feel of clothing on his legs and body.

They got the scent-stuff from the drugstore, where it had been compounded, and a number of smaller empty bottles to transfer it to for dispensing.

“Now,” said Sam, as the cab started off again, “Here’s some money. It’s advance salary. Nancy, I want you to go to some small town and stay there until Dick and I get back. New York City isn’t safe for you. But it’s not likely that there’ll be ruhk-Egyptian set-ups anywhere but near big towns. You’ll be safest in a small one.”

Nancy said firmly, “I’m safe in the Other World, Sam. Ruhks would fight for me. And Dick’s there!”

“I could give you the peephole so you could watch out,” said Sam miserably, “but I can’t hope to get what we’ll need without it. If from this world I can look into the Other World with it, from the Other World I should be able to look back into this. And I’m going to need to do just that!”

“Of course you will!” agreed Nancy comfortably. “But since Dick went after me, not even knowing what he’d find, it’s only fair for me to go after him, since I do know! I’m going!”

Kelly said woodenly:

“Even with the stuff on me, fella, they minded her better than me. She’s right that they’ll fight for her. If you got a gun for her—we need her. And fella—for what I’m goin’ back there for, I’ll take anybody along that’ll help!”

Sam fumbled out pistols and shells for Kelly. He’d made himself into a walking arsenal, and he proved it. The cab swerved suddenly and stopped. The driver looked around. He saw the weapons being passed over. Sam’s eyes fell upon him and he swallowed and said:

“I—didn’t see nothin’. I didn’t see a thing!”

But Sam knew that he had seen. And the passing-out of pistols in a taxicab in New York has only one meaning. People who are not planning hold-ups do not exchange or examine pistols in taxicabs. But Sam could do nothing. He shrugged his shoulders and passed over a twenty-dollar bill. No matter what the driver did or did not do, if the cage-trap doorway was where it had been, and if the beasts were subject to Kelly and himself, it wouldn’t matter about the police. It wouldn’t matter anyhow, after he’d vanished in a pool of quicksilver.

They got out of the cab, and it jerked away with the flag still down. The brakes squealed at the corner, where a traffic cop was on duty. Sam saw the cab stop within inches of the cop, and saw the chauffeur jabber excitedly. The cop jerked his head around. He fumbled at his hip and started toward them.

Sam put the peephole to his eye. Yes. The cage-trap, with its doorway open. Six beasts—ruhks—waited on the ground about it. Sam saw exactly where the doorway was, and how it was contrived to work.

The cop blew his whistle shrilly. A radio-car, going crosstown, swerved sharply. It turned against all traffic rules and darted toward Sam. The taxi stayed in the middle of the intersection, the driver staring avidly back.

“Okay, Kelly,” said Sam wearily. “We go through the door, and fast. Nancy, you haven’t a gun and they can’t do a thing. Just act dumb. Come on, Kelly! Here goes!”

He stepped into place, Kelly beside him. Something seemed to flash into being over their heads and to drop soundlessly upon them. As the other cosmos came swiftly into view—actually, it seemed to be unveiled about them —Sam knew that to Nancy they had seemed to vanish in a double pool of quicksilver.

Bloodcurdling snarls filled the air. Six ruhks gazed at him with feral, deadly eyes. They were monstrous creatures, far larger than any wolves could be. Sam felt an angry horror of them. Then Kelly said harshly:

“I washed! Damn! Where’s that smell-stuff?”

Sam fumbled, and went cold. He’d been watching the driver. Then he’d been watching the traffic cop. He’d been scared for Nancy. His blood felt icy in his veins as he realized that he hadn’t even brought the scent-stuff out of the cab. He said bitterly:

“We muffed it! But they’ve got to come in the door, these beasts. Maybe we can kill them all before they call somebody—”

But he didn’t even hope it. And then something fell against him, hard, and Nancy was with them in the cage, and the snarling of the ruhks did not change at all but rather grew louder. Because she didn’t have the master-scent on her, either. She too had bathed and changed.

The galley lay at anchor in the Hudson, having stroked its way past the top of Manhattan Island. The two cutters trailed astern. Men fished, moved restlessly about, and uneasily scanned the river and the shores for signs of pursuit. But most of them talked. They babbled. They shouted, perhaps because as slaves they had been forbidden to speak.

Some had been so long enslaved and so broken in spirit that they babbled hysterically and then were struck dumb and cringed and looked fearfully over their shoulders. But there was one group in earnest, low-voiced discussion, and there were a few in grim consultation with Dick.

There had been only the three boats in all the harbor which should have been New York. The cutters had been used as ferries from Manhattan to the villa on the Brooklyn shore. The larger galley carried heavy stores, and on rare occasions one of that family of aloof and remote persons who were the masters of the palace and the overseers and the slaves and ruhks. But there were no motor-boats. There were no airplanes. There were no cars or other means of fast transportation—or pursuit.

“Ruhks, prob’ly, can keep pace with us on shore,” said a man with a crooked nose, “but there’s nothin’ else that can. We can go any place we want an’ they can’t stop us.”

Another man said sourly:

“Go what place? An’ do what when we get there?”

There was silence. A shout astern, A fisherman hauled to the deck a fishlike creature almost his own length. It writhed and snapped on the planking.

“The masters can get all the boats they want,” pointed out Dick. “They can drag PT boats into this world if they feel like it.”

“Who’ll run ‘em?” demanded a man with a scarred face. “Not slaves! They don’t even know which of us knows how to do what, and they can’t run machinery! It didn’t matter when all they wanted was slaves to row and dig and cut wood. They didn’t use PT boats then, and they can’t use ‘em now. They can’t even use galleys until they train new crews—if they know how to do that!”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Dick. “It makes sense, though. But we can count on their having plenty of guns. Maybe grenades. Certainly machine-guns.”

“Yes?” demanded the man with the scarred face. “They’d have to get slaves to teach ‘em how to use grenades. They’d have to find slaves who knew how. And then —would they trust grenades in slaves’ hands, or use them themselves on slaves’ instructions? And how about machine-guns? They can’t use them and don’t dare trust slaves to teach them. They’ll stick to regular guns. What we can’t lick are the ruhks.”

Dick said shortly, “We did today.”

“Sure! Twice. But once we had ‘em swimmin’,” said another man gloomily. “The other time you had tear-gas. Got any more tear-gas?”

“N-No,” admitted Dick. “But if I could get in touch with my friends—”

There was sardonic, mirthless laughter. If any man in the Other World had been able to get in touch with his friends on Earth, the fact of the Other World’s existence wouldn’t have remained a secret, and it would have been the object of the research of all the scientists on Earth for centuries or millenia. All Earthly science would have been focussed upon it, and it would have been reached and conquered long ago.

“What keeps the ruhks loyal?” demanded Dick. “Why do they work for the masters? If they’re so intelligent, why don’t they go off and be happy savage beasts?” Nobody knew the secret.

“I never saw a master,” growled a short, brawny man, “but the ruhks do. Every ruhk gets to stay at the palace a while every so often. The overseers see to that! And let me tell you, the overseers are scared of the ruhks, too! Plenty scared! It ain’t but three or four years ago that a overseer was given to the ruhks to play with. They had a swell game with him. I watched. First time I ever enjoyed watchin’ a ruhk game! There’s some trick the masters got to keep the ruhks crazy about ‘em—”

“Wait a minute!” said Dick sharply. “Overseers are scared of them? And still give them orders? Why do ruhks take orders from them and not from slaves?”

A tall man said with precise, academic detachment:

“It’s the robes. Police dogs learn to obey any man in uniform. Only overseers wear robes. That’s a uniform. Maybe the cloth has a special smell the ruhks recognize, but a robe would be enough. Slaves are nearly naked. A new-caught slave is stripped at once. That’s what makes him a slave in the ruhks’ minds.”

“But they’re supposed to be intelligent,” objected Dick. “Would that be enough—”

“Why not?” asked the tall man. “They’re intelligent, but they’re not educated. Illiterate peasants would accept a badge like that. In fact, they do. They obey any man in a policeman’s uniform. It doesn’t mean lack of brains. It just means lack of information. There are no schools for ruhks. They’re intelligent like men with limited educations.” Then he said deliberately: “Yes. I think that any of us with an overseer’s robe—we might need a bath, too— would be obeyed within limits by the ruhks. I would be quite willing to try to deceive them. I think it could be done at least for a time.”

“Good!” said Dick. “We’ll pick a few among ourselves to impersonate overseers, then. Right?”

The tall man said, “Overseers shave. That’s another badge. No slave ever has a blade he could use to shave— or cut his throat with.”

Dick fumbled mentally. He had an idea. It might or might not work. He put it forward diffidently. But to his surprise, there was no enthusiasm.

“That’s not what we want,” growled the man with the broken nose. “Get back to Earth? Sure! But only after we wipe out this gang! If I was by myself, I’d jump at the chance to escape. But there’s a lot of us here, and I aim to see some ruhks an’ overseers get theirs before I duck!”

Growled agreement echoed his words. A man who has been enslaved and degraded wants two things above all others. One is freedom, to be sure, but the other is to get back his self-respect, which means the destruction of the cause of his degradation.

“We’ll try the trick I mentioned,” said Dick, grimly. “I’ve got a pocket-knife of sorts. We’ll hone it up for shaving and use the robes of the overseers we’ve killed, and make more if we find suitable stuff on board, here. Let’s get to work.”

His counsellors rose. But the tall man lingered. He touched Dick on the shoulder.

“Just a moment. I used to be professor of physics. If you can tell me how your friend set about making that doorway between worlds... It can’t call for elaborate apparatus if it could be worked out five thousand years ago, as you explained.”

Dick began helplessly to tell him what he knew. It was not much. Maltby had explained that the trick was a freak orientation of the molecules of an alloy. The tall man listened. Dick added that Maltby, working drearily and close to exhaustion, had said that what we call dimensions happen actually to be merely a set of directions in which the forces we know of work. Forms of energy interchange at right angles to each other. Electricity and magnetism, for example. One wraps wire around an iron core, so that a current in the wire will always be at right angles to the length of the core. The magnetic field which results is parallel to the core and at right angles to the current-flow.

The tall man said, “Of course. It goes farther than that. There’s what they call the three-finger rule in elementary physics. Go on! What’s next?” [This of course, is the well-known principle by which dynamos; motors, ammeters, etc., work. The three-finger rule will be found in some form in any physics textbook which treats of electricity and magnetism.—Murray Leinster.]

Dick frowned, trying to recall what Maltby had said. When Maltby had made his explanation, however, he had been already tired and Dick had been close to madness because of Nancy’s disappearance. He hadn’t really tried to understand the abstract principles Maltby was wearily putting into words.

“All I can remember,” said Dick, “is that he said that the three forms of energy you mentioned as following the three-finger rule—electricity, magnetism, and kinetic energy—simply have to operate at right angles to each other. And he said that if two of them or all three were interdependent and yet somehow the apparatus was contrived so that they were not at right angles in our cosmos, then the whole system would tend to rotate into a cosmos in which they could be at right angles. And that such a system could be made to bend anything introduced into it into other cosmos. Does that make sense to you?”

The tall man clasped his hands feverishly.

“Of course! Of course! Go on!” Then as Dick looked at him in doubt, he said irritably. “The most obvious thing in the world!”

“I—suppose so,” said Dick doubtfully. “Anyhow, Maltby said he thought he could produce the set-up he wanted with electricity and magnetism and so on because there wasn’t any—” He paused and said uncertainly, “Hall effect? Because there’s no Hall effect in liquids?”

The tall man tensed.

“There isn’t! Go on!”

“I don’t remember anything else,” admitted Dick ruefully. “The only thing that had seemed strange to him was that the crux ansata we started with had bismuth in it. Actually, it was a freak bronze. Very early, perhaps earlier than the Fifth Dynasty. The Egyptians didn’t have tin at the beginning, you know. Egyptology is my specialty, though, and I could tell him that they had bismuth and antimony almost as early as they had copper. They used antimony for kohl—for eye-shadow, for the women to make their eyes look larger,” he finished unnecessarily.

The tall man stared at him, his eyes intent. He reached up and thoughtfully tugged at one ear.

“I shall have to think,” he said slowly. “I think I see the principle. Copper is just a trifle diamagnetic, and bismuth is much more so. Yes ... But—”

“Maltby,” added Dick, “was pretty much astonished to know that the ancients knew one metal would displace another from solution. They actually electroplated gold and silver—using meteoric iron to displace the noble metals because it was considered magic.” [This is fact. Electroplated objects have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs—Murray Leinster.]

The tall man’s eyes were still intent.

“That would be it,” he said slowly. “Yes. No Hall effect in liquids. Displacement-deposition from liquids. The same as electroplating of a mixed metal. Absolutely. Given copper and bismuth, I think I could do it myself.” Then his features turned wry. “Where’ll I find some bismuth? The masters won’t let it loose, one may be sure! I’ve no idea even where its ore is found or what it looks like I But any drugstore on Earth could supply me with at least some bismuth compounds!” He asked hopelessly. “Would you know bismuth ore?”

Dick shook his head.

“Given time, we might find a slave who could. Probably not here, though. In some other slave pen of some other villa. Which gives an aspect of reason to my acquired instinct to kill overseers and ruhks. I shall concentrate on that. We will try to destroy our master here, and then wage a holy war on others—for bismuth!”

“We’re going to try to capture a doorway back to Earth from a cage-trap,” protested Dick.

The tall man shook his head, in turn.

“Our masters are fools—our master and all the others,” he observed dispassionately. “They waste all the intelligence of their slaves by brutality which has no purpose but the protection of their stupidity. But they are not such fools as to keep any slave-traps out, with doorways to Earth in them, while there’s a galley full of slaves at large and in revolt! They’ll have called in all slave-traps and the doorways in them. Every one will be at the villa. And they’ll destroy every one of them if they have to run away from us to get help to destroy us. In absolute emergency they might even retreat to Earth. But I don’t think they’d like Earth!”

He grinned at that idea and went to the others. Dick turned his attention to the immediate problem of preparing to shave and otherwise disguise as many slaves as they had costumes for, to play the part of overseers.

Men continued to fish and to babble at the top of their voices. The galley was perhaps two hundred yards from shore, but this was the shore that was the Bronx on Earth. It was separate alike from Manhattan Island and from the Long Island equivalent where Queens should have existed, and on which the villa of the master stood. With all the known boats of the villa in their hands, Dick’s followers had no reason to fear bullets from the shore.

But now, suddenly, a naked figure appeared on a bluff where deep water apparently came close to the land. The figure was bent low and running. Behind it, gaining at every bound, there was the snarling shape of a ruhk. The naked man ran like a deer, reached the edge of the bluff no more than three yards ahead of the beast, and leaped magnificently. The ruhk seemed to falter in its stride, and then plunged savagely after the man. Its faltering had come with a glimpse of the galley at anchor offshore. But it plunged. Man and beast were in the air at the same time, though the man splashed and went deep before the ruhk touched water. The beast had estimated with cold ferocity that he should be able to overtake and kill the man before help could come from the galley.

The man stayed under for seconds. The ruhk rose almost instantly and paddled dog-fashion, snarling as it looked about for the man to reappear. On the galley and in the cutters howlings arose. Dick’s voice straightened out the confusion. Men piled into a single cutter and hastily shipped oars, while one with a spear crouched at the bow, grinning savagely. The cutter got under way.

The fugitive broke water, flinging back his head. The ruhk started for him, bloodcurdling sounds coming from its throat. The man in the water faced it. He dived, suddenly. The men in the cutter strained at their oars as they had never strained even under their overseer’s lashes. The ruhk growled and made for where the man had been. It swam, of course, but diving was not a part of its instinct or of its intelligence.

It screamed suddenly, and thrashed violently in the water. The man’s head momentarily appeared, five feet away. He gasped for breath and dived again. The ruhk suddenly swam powerfully for the shore. But the man rose behind it. He grabbed fiercely at its tail. His other arm rose and fell, and rose and fell, and the ruhk whirled, snarling, and a confusion of spray and foam erupted.

From the galley, Dick could see nothing but spray and battling portions of man and beast. The cutter sped for the spot, its crew straining every nerve. Then, abruptly, a sobbing cry sounded, and there was only stillness with ripples around something quite unrecognizable.

Then the man’s head popped up. The men in the cutter extended hands to him as the boat’s bow reached the floating thing. The spearman in the bow stabbed it and stabbed it and stabbed it. It did not stir.

Minutes later the cutter came back with the man who had been swimming. He was pale, but grinning. He held fast to one arm with the hand of the other, to stop the blood that came welling out from a deep bite in the flesh. A galley slave shouted, “Bring him here! I’m a doctor!”

They handed him up. Cloth that would have made part of an overseer’s robe went to make a bandage—a tight compress dipped in the salt tidal water overside for lack of a better antiseptic. Dick went to the improvised surgery and asked questions.

The newly-escaped slave, still grinning, told his tale. He had been sent—with a ruhk as guard—to carry a message to the nearest other villa up the Hudson. It should have been a two days’ journey. There was a small, one man boat still at the villa, and it had put him and his guard ashore. He’d started upriver. He’d made the journey before. As the trail ran close by the water, over a rise in the ground he caught a glimpse of the galley and the cutters at anchor. He knew of the bluff beyond him and the deep water below it. The ruhk, its eye-level lower than his, had not seen the galley. When it heard the chattering, babbling noise the exuberant slaves were making, it stopped short to listen. The slave had gone on. When it growled to him to stop, he’d started to run. It had been close, but he’d made it to the water.

“And I was in the Pacific, once,” he said, grinning more widely still. “Stationed on an atoll with a lotta natives that could swim from ‘way back. I learned some tricks from them. I’d been figurin’ on tryin’ a getaway anyhow. I hadda dagger-thorn hid in my hair. I figured if I could kill a shark, I oughta handle a ruhk. An’ I did ...”

The dagger-thorn was a monstrosity, all of ten inches long with a point like a needle. Since slaves were never barbered, he had been able to conceal it in his long hair. No tree of Earth ever bore such thorns, but here—

“What was the message you carried?” asked Dick. His face was tense. Their situation was bad enough without help coming to this villa from others.

The messenger brought out a packet neatly wrapped in modern oiled silk. Inside was a brightly-polished section of chromium-plated brass tubing, with a cork in each end. The corks yielded readily. A rolled-up sheet tumbled into Dick’s hand.

“It’s no good,” said the messenger. “It’s crazy picture-writing. I know that much!”

But Dick regarded it professionally. It was a parchment-like paper, the most beautiful and thick and glossy of hand-made writing material. It was written on in colored inks, very beautifully, and the beginning and end glittered with gold-dust or gold-filings dropped upon adhesive ink while it was still wet. It was written in hieroglyphic Egyptian characters.

They were not all familiar to Dick, to be sure. There were forms which doubtless dated back to the Fifth Dynasty, but the pictographs had been debased, and the language had undoubtedly changed, and there were probably abbreviations and quite certainly some entirely new words. But it was definitely derived from ancient Egyptian —and Dick was one of no more than a hundred men on all of Earth who would be able to puzzle out its meaning.

“I think,” said Dick, “that I’ll be able to decipher this. It’s possibly a break. It’s especially a break because they’d never dream either that it wouldn’t be delivered, or that anybody but one of themselves would be able to read it. I only hope it’s explicit about their plans!”

It was explicit, but it took him two hours to work out the meaning. He had to guess at words that had no parallel in ancient times from the stylized ideographic elements of the writing. But he read it.

He was pale when he had finished. It was not a message to encourage him. It called for action in a hurry. And it meant that no help could possibly be had from Earth, unless he was prepared to call down on the civilized planet such turmoil and devastation as would make even the lootings and enslavings of the past five thousand years seem trivial.

The ruhks which snarled at Sam Todd and Nancy and Kelly were intelligent animals, whose minds worked exactly in the pattern of illiterate intelligent peasants. When the three humans appeared in the cage-trap, they did not recognize Nancy as a member of the master-race because she no longer had the master-race scent upon her. Common-sense logic, that.

Sam snapped to Kelly:

“Look! I’ll hold the doorway if they try to get in. You heave Nancy up back through the doorway! The cops’ll grab her and take her somewhere else—”

Then he heard a very tiny hissing sound. It was the sound of a woman’s purse perfume dispenser. A curiously clean, pungently pleasant smell smote his nostrils.

And the snarlings died. Snuffings took their place. The ruhks were puzzled. Then they were abashed. And Nancy said to them severely:

“You should be ashamed! You know better than to snarl at anyone with this scent on them!”

And the ruhks, their ears flattened abjectly, groveled and whimpered before her. They made whining conversational noises. Kelly said curtly:

“They say they’re sorry. Spray some of that stuff on me.”

Sam Todd gasped a little. Then he turned to Nancy. She was very pale, but she smiled with a tiny silver object in her hand.

“You forgot, Sam. But I wanted to come here particularly to give the master-scent to Dick. So I brought it!”

And she showed him the jug in which all of one drug store’s supply of the needed odorous substances had been combined to make a gallon of master-scent solution.

Their actions, now, were based upon a complete change in the situation. Kelly stepped out of the cage-trap. He was clad in garments which to the ruhks meant that he should be flung to the ground and stripped, but he smelled of godhead. They fawned upon him. Sam Todd stepped out next, his hands gripping pistols. But though his suspicions did not lessen, his apprehension inevitably died away as the beasts groveled at his feet.

But as a matter of sheer common sense he refused to take any further action at all—even the dismantling of the doorway-between worlds which had dropped them into the cage—until he had filled all the empty small bottles in his pocket from the larger container. He had Nancy slip off her jacket, too, and hold it underneath as he poured, so that if any stray drops should spill, they would add to her divinity in the opinion of the ruhks. And his hands trembled a little, and drops did spill, so that when he had finished pouring all the air around Nancy was redolent of the fragrance that five thousand years of breeding had turned into a talisman of godhead that no ruhk could possibly deny. She was in no danger from anything or anybody as long as a ruhk was near her.

“See if these beasts know anything about the galley,” Sam told Kelly. He couldn’t speak to them directly because he wouldn’t understand their yelping.

While Kelly spoke authoritatively to the fawning beasts, Sam went to the cage-trap. There was a round disk which was the doorway, at the roof of the cage. There was a pole by which it could be lifted out of reach from below. His hands in his pockets still holding his pistols, Sam inspected it. If it wasn’t lifted in time, an agile man might climb back out. But most men would be far too terrified to think of such a thing immediately.

Kelly came over.

“The galley’s somewhere in the Hudson,” he reported. “They heard howlings that carried the news. That’s all they knew.”

There, again, would be an oddity. Wolf-howlings would carry news even faster than messengers, if ruhks were searching for a thing over a large area.

“That’s good enough,” said Sam morosely, “but we’ve got a job ahead of us. We’ve got to get this damned doorway off the end of this pole and find out how to carry it through what’ll be the streets of New York without bringing fat women and stray cats and odd brickwork through it. Then we’ll go to the nearest precinct police-station— I’ll find it with the peephole—and rob it of tear-gas bombs and maybe some riot-guns. We’ll use this same doorway for that. And then—”

He fumbled in his pocket. He put the peephole to his eye. He saw out into the street in New York from which the three of them had come. There were many police around, now. It seemed that he could reach out and touch any one. He flinched involuntarily. But they did not see him, of course. They were hunting feverishly for the three people who had disappeared so mysteriously.

Sam regarded them wryly. Then he shrugged and put away the peephole. With Kelly, he experimented cautiously. It was simple enough, however. The disk was a doorway on one face only. Objects could enter it only from one side, on Earth, and that side was unsubstantial—like, when he thought of it, the phantom disk six inches from the disk of the crux ansata. With the other side forward they could walk through the jungle unconcernedly, even though they marched through the space occupied on Earth by solid buildings. Of course anything that ran into the reverse face of the disk, in the Other World, would emerge on Earth ...

As a matter of fact, it is rather likely that some small fauna such as flying midges and the like did suddenly find themselves in a totally strange world of streets and stone buildings. And they would never be able to adjust themselves to it at all.

The three humans headed roughly west, and presently there were some little, glittering pools of quicksilver in a precinct police station, and some tear-gas bombs were missing on Earth. Then some other glitterings, and Sam and Kelly had two riot-guns apiece, and ammunition for them. The men off duty in the squad-room would later catch the devil for letting such things be stolen under their very noses, but Sam and the other two went on. Six great, deadly beasts trotted all about them, sometimes breasting the brushwood ahead and sometimes trailing a little behind, but always coming back to sniff at the master-scent it was bred into them to adore, and to wag their huge, shaggy tails worshipfully.

Presently even Sam almost took them for granted. He began to worry. He was going to need a boat. He could steal anything he needed from Earth. In the present emergency he had no qualms. But how could he get a boat big enough for his purposes through an interdimensional doorway designed to be a trap only for men?

From time to time he looked through the peephole for guidance through the other-dimensional New York. And then, on the bank of the Hudson as it existed on Earth, he found the answer. There was a small boathouse in a most unlikely place, storing canoes for apartment-house dwellers nearby. The boathouse was locked.

It was two hours after their arrival through the doorway before they reached the Hudson, and it took an hour and a half to make a platform and fix the outboard motor to it and lash it across the two canoes. But then they pushed off. They had a catamaran with a motor driving it from between the two canoes. It was moderately seaworthy, and not even very slow. When it moved out from the shore the ruhks howled at being left behind.

Sam pulled on the cranking-cord of the motor. Rather surprisingly, it caught instantly and ran smoothly. The improvised craft swung out into the river and headed upstream. The ruhks, howling their desolation, crashed through the brushwood, following. But presently they were lost to sight.

The motor made a steady roar. Sam headed out for a longer look up and down the river, and they had not gone far when they saw the galley. It was at anchor off Manhattan Island somewhere near what would be Seventieth Street on Earth. There was no movement visible. The two cutters were tethered to its stern.

The double canoe headed on a straight course for it. The tide was at full flood and the motor roared valiantly. It made excellent speed, but as they drew near men howled defiance at them. Oar-blades waved menacingly.

“Dick ought to recognize me, anyhow,” said Nancy uneasily. “What do you suppose—”

Then Kelly stood up in the bow of the right-hand canoe. He bellowed. His voice rose above the din of shouting and the motor together. The shouting died. There were not too many men on the galley—not many more than a dozen. They stared blankly as the motor cut off and the double canoe floated up to the galley under its own momentum. Kelly matter-of-factly climbed over the side. The other two heard his voice, harsh and argumentative. They saw him strip off his coat and sweater, showing the lash-marks on his skin. But his most convincing argument was the riot-guns he handed over in the most casual way in the world.

He came back to the rail.

“The gang’s gone ashore. Some are dressed up like overseers. They took all the guns an’ spears they had. They’re hopin’ to rush the slave pen and then fight off the ruhks until they find out where a cage-trap is, an’ then they’ll try to get hold of the doorway an’ get guns through that.”

“We’ve got to go after them!” cried Nancy. “With the scent—”

“All right,” snapped Sam. “Come along if you’re coming! Any of you other men who want to come along too, do so. Make it quick!”

Kelly spoke ungently, and climbed down. Half the men on the galley followed. He snapped again, and the rest followed sheepishly.

“They got nothin’ to fight with,” he said tonelessly. “All that have are plenty anxious to come.”

The catamaran’s motor sputtered. It headed for the beach. It touched, and men splashed to the shore. Nancy looked at them and shivered a little. She had seen Kelly naked save for a loincloth and with stripes on his flesh, but he had come as a human being when she was in terror of the ruhks—even though they fawned on her. These men, scarred and gaunt and terrible, were another matter. Kelly said briefly. “Put some scent on ‘em. Better pass out a bottle or two. When they see how it works—”

It was late afternoon, near to sunset. The extraordinarily assorted group started on through the jungle. Kelly and Sam had riot-guns and pistols. Two others had riot-guns. Then Sam brought out the rest of the arsenal he had been carrying. He saw one man caress a stubby pistol as if it were an infinitely precious thing.

They went on. Giant trees. Strange, improbable underbrush. Unfamiliar cries in the treetops. Discordant bellow-ings at unpredictable intervals in the distance.

They had gone perhaps half a mile when they heard shots ahead. Many shots. Then they began to run. The shooting rose in volume. Sam panted to a galley slave:

“How many guns did our gang have?”

“F-Fourteen,” gasped the slave. “The rest were spears.”

“Plenty more’n that up there!” said Sam. “Faster!”

They pelted toward the tumult. The sounds grew louder. They heard shrieks. There must have been fifty weapons in action up ahead.

There were. It was only logical that there should be. Because an expedition specially ordered by the master of the villa had been brought to Manhattan Island early that morning to kidnap Maltby. It had been composed exclusively of overseers and ruhks. It had captured Malt-by, but it couldn’t get back to the villa because the big galley was in revolt. So the party, in very bad temper, had taken refuge in the slave compound ahead.

Dick Blair and his party of pseudo-overseers and the slaves they would pretend they had recaptured—all of them together ran into forty armed men in the slave camp, every man armed with spear and pistol against the fourteen firearms of the attackers. And there were the ruhks.

It was sheer slaughter. It was a retreat from the beginning. It would have been a rout save that no man would turn his back while there remained a chance to kill a ruhk or an overseer with a bullet. So no armed man would run away. And no unarmed slave would actually flee while he hoped for one of the armed men to be killed so that he would have a firearm to use.

Leaping forms in the brush alongside the trail. Snarls and rushings. Then the ruhks stopped short. They tried to fawn on Sam Todd and Nancy and on Kelly. They whimpered and groveled before the slaves who had come from the galley with these three of Earth. The slaves fired vengefully. Ruhks whimpered, and were killed. Some ran away, howling. Five milleniums of breeding to be worshippers of creatures bearing that particular scent made too strong a compulsion. They could not attack or resist a creature that more than two thousand of their generations had learned must be obeyed. Frenzied panic seized the beasts—because godlings slew them.

The tumult came nearer as the smaller party ran. A slave, staggering with two ruhks at his flanks, fell as they came upon him. Sawed-off shotguns freed him. Nancy flicked droplets of the magic odorous stuff upon him. Then he was safe. They ran on. And they came upon pandemonium.

There was shooting ahead where the pitifully few men with firearms fought in the jungle to make a retreat possible. But jungle fighting was the ruhks specialty. The spear-armed slaves had had to close up together, back to back, making a hedge of spear-points against the ruhks, who could creep close and spring almost unseen in the shadowy undergrowth. Ruhks died, to be sure, but men died too. Yet there were many more men than weapons, and no weapon went unused because its owner fell.

It was all stark confusion and lunatic noise. When the newcomers plunged toward the embattled, despairing slaves, ruhks leaped—and then groveled before them. They made yelping sounds which warned off other ruhks.

They plunged into the mass of fighting men. And those who had just come from the galley had come to believe in their immunity from the ruhks. Roaring laughter, they plunged among the animals, killing zestfully. Sam and Nancy forced their way through the close-packed crowd of slaves who waited for spears that they might fight with them. Nancy battled through them to Dick, and drenched him with the master-scent. She panted in his ear. Sam thrust ahead of him and his riot-gun crashed.

“Sprinkle that damned stuff!” he roared over his shoulder at Nancy. “Get busy!”

Kelly was already at it. Sam brought down a robed overseer, and a slave darted forward to get his weapons. A ruhk pounced from behind a tree-trunk—and then could not attack as the odor reached its nostrils. The slave squirmed over and fired upward. The beast screamed.

And then, strangely, even the slaves not yet redolent of divinity ceased to be attacked. There was the master-scent about this spot. The ruhks drew off, whimpering, and the overseers commanded them to attack, and they yelped and whined. Then Kelly ran out from the knot of slaves. Godhead was upon him. He reeked of deity to the beasts. He commanded attack upon the overseers, waving on the animals with gestures.

That did it. Where a knot of naked slaves had fought despairingly, resolved only to fight until they were killed, and where robed men had angrily but still cautiously pressed upon the rebels, now the tide turned abruptly. Nancy ran about among the slaves, incongruously slapping at them with a scent-drenched lacy handkerchief. Dick groped to understand her panted, inadequate explanation, and suddenly caught her meaning. He bellowed to his followers and led a furious charge.

The retreat that had been almost a rout became an attack again. This time the ruhks were with the slaves. They flung themselves upon the robed men—all the robed men not infallibly declared by ruhk nostrils to be divine. The overseers knew terror and horror akin to madness. They broke and ran, and those whom the slaves did not overtake the ruhks did. With each dead overseer there was another slave armed with spear or pistol or both, and the flight of the overseers ended before the swiftest of them could reach the slave pen again.

There were more overseers there, but not many, and there were robed men among those who approached. The disguise of the slaves had seemed vain, before, but it was not vain now. Approaching, with ruhks fawning upon them, they entered the barred gate. They left the ruhks outside. They killed the overseers who had remained at the slave camp. The ruhk guards inside the pen groveled before them. They killed those, too. And they let in other humans who went about among the stupefied slaves, sprinkling them with sweet-smelling stuff until every slave reeked of the odor which to ruhks was sanctity.

Then they let in the ruhks—and killed them. For five thousand years the ruhks had been the victims of a discovery made when magicians first moved between worlds. The scent had ensured their absolute loyalty to a race which ruled over ruhks and overseers and human slaves alike. And now they could not believe that men with the smell of the gods upon them could destroy them. Some whimpered as the slaves stabbed and shot. A few fought half-heartedly, almost paralyzed by the instinct five thousand years had made immutable. Some seemed to go insane at the impossibility they saw and smelled, their own massacre by men who smelled like those they must worship. But they died. All of them.

Night had fallen, now, and great fires blazed in the slave pen. In their crimson light, hordes of more than half-naked men and women howled and leaped and gloried in the havoc that had been wrought. Some of them prowled among the dead bodies of the ruhks, clubbing and stabbing the dead things when they could persuade themselves that a spark of life remained in a furry carcass.

But Dick rounded up the men who on the galley had seemed instinctively leaders. There was a man with a scarred face, and a short and brawny man, and one who had been a professor of physics.

Dick found Maltby and freed him and Nancy doused him with scent. They found the spidery device that no slave should ever see—and Sam knew something of it. So Dick told his followers what he wanted to do next, and they scattered and rounded up suitable men from the rejoicing mob. It was a still-shouting gang which went back through the jungle toward their ship. They carried torches, and they pushed and pulled and wrestled through the jungle the device by which anything at all that was desired by the masters of this world could be brought here from Earth. Sam Todd had even found on a dead overseer a curious pair of goggles which he recognized.

He marched through the jungle with those goggles in place over his eyes, and he was able to see at the same time the flame-lit trunks of mighty trees as bare-bodied men swaggered through the jungle, and the electric-lit streets and motor traffic of crosstown streets in that Manhattan Island which was on Earth.

The triumphant men reached the river, and torches flared upon its flood. They got the cutters ashore, made a platform of oars between them, wrestled the spidery device upon it, and the double canoe towed it out to the galley. By main strength they loaded it on the galley, and then it was up anchor and down the long, moonlit jungle shore of Manhattan Island. Sam Todd returned the alloy peephole to Dick. With the goggles from a dead overseer which looked more efficiently between two worlds, he conned the galley through the night, guided by the lights on Earth.

The galley beached alongside a barren rock at midnight, and men sweated and strained to get the spidery thing ashore on what should have been Governor’s Island. Sam led men off into the darkness, again guided by lights on another planet which happened to be the twin of this. Because, of course, Governor’s Island on Earth is an army post and an air field, and in these days it is kept equipped for any emergency. There would be guns and ammunition and hand grenades and other things more precious than fine gold to the men of the galley and cutters. The Army lost valuable equipment that night, before Sam Todd came back and gleeful men made trip after trip to load their booty on the galley and in the smaller craft.

Dick did not share in that. He had to talk to Nancy, to suggest anxiously that, as soon as the loading of the galley was finished, she let him put her back on Earth down by the Battery, which was just across the stream from here. Of course the place that should have been the Battery on the Other World was dark forest from which eerie cries and a curious semblance of the sound of bells came faintly. But she resolutely refused to go back to Earth. When he told her why neither he nor any other man from the galley would go back to Earth to stay, just yet, she shuddered and seized upon the explanation as an additional reason why she should remain.

They were a little awkward with each other because Dick had merely resolved that nobody else could possibly be allowed to marry Nancy, and had not explained the matter to her. But suddenly he said anxiously, “Of course we’ll have to slip back long enough to get married—”

And then that was all right too.

When the galley’s oars spread out and she and the cutters went on through the dark once more, Dick had things to do. He called each cutter’s crew alongside and gave specific instructions. Then the expedition really began.

The moon sank low, though the waters were still streaked with flashes of its light. All three craft hugged the Manhattan shore, at first. When the dim lights of the villa first became visible, though, one of the cutters turned and streaked straight across to the Brooklyn shore. Lest any ruhks sight them and give the alarm, men landed and marched along the shore so that ruhks would sight them and creep up to spring—and remain to grovel and to die.

The galley made fast at the wharf on the Manhattan shore where Dick had killed his first overseer and taken the first cutter. A scented, murderous band of armed men marched along the trail to the slave pen inland from it. Nancy, for once, willingly stayed behind. She talked to Maltby, bringing him up to date on her adventures.

A wounded ruhk came staggering down the trail and out upon the wharf. A member of the galley-guard walked casually toward it. It smelled divinity. It staggered feebly toward him, making noises which told of disaster at the slave pen.

The sentry killed it.

Meanwhile the second cutter went on upriver well past the villa, and cut straight across like the first, and landed most of its crew. And Dick’s plan went forward.

It was simple. Men moved through the jungle to make a great half-circle behind the villa, far past the range of human guards. There would be ruhk patrols there. The ruhks would detect the men and instantly become subject to them. In ones or twos, they would be killed as they groveled. In greater numbers, they might be led back to the cutters and their boat-guards on the shore. Or they could simply be commanded to go to the boat guards and obey them. They would do so.

As the night wore on, there were no more ruhks patrolling the forest behind the villa, and it did not matter if there were. There was a single shot from a slave pen where gardener-slaves were imprisoned. And after that a line of freed slaves with a strange smell on them went through the jungle to where a cutter waited with firearms for every man who wanted them. Every man did, and many women, too. But the villa did not take alarm.

In the villa, the master was not disturbed. He was, at worst, annoyed. A man had been found spying upon the villa through an interdimensional window. Later he was found free on Manhattan Island, with arms in his hands. He had escaped capture. He had left a note for someone, pinned to a tree trunk with a dagger-thorn. Apparently some independent experimenter had discovered that there was an Other World and had managed to reach it and arranged to communicate with fellows still on Earth. When this fact was discovered, a note from an Earthling companion could not reach the thorn-pinned message without attracting attention—hence the discovery must still be a secret on Earth. The master of the villa had astutely commanded that this companion be seized. The number of persons in the secret would be learned from him, and where they were to be found. If practicable, they would be brought to this Other World and given to the ruhks as a suitable reward for their meddling. If there were many, the measures long ago decided upon for use in case of a discovery by Earthlings would be used.

No word had reached the villa of the capture of either cutter or even of the capture of the galley—which had taken place with Welfare Island screening the battle from the villa. The master of the villa was merely annoyed. He had not been kept informed by the regular procedure of events as they happened. Some overseers would be given to the ruhks for this inefficiency!

When the galley crossed the river during the last hours of darkness, it was loaded to the limit with beings who had been civilized men one, two, five or seven years before. Now they were half-naked, hairy, murderous incarnations of vengeance. And every man had a modern repeating rifle with ammunition for it, and those with experience in such matters had hand grenades besides.

Runners to the two cutters learned of the number of men they had freed and armed. Strong parties went inland just in case anybody tried to leave the villa on the land side.

Then the sun rose. It lighted a world of green forest and blue waters and seeming infinite peace.

There was the tiny, popping sound of a single shot. Then the army of former slaves moved on the villa.

From nearby, the villa was very splendid and very spacious. It was built of brick in the style of gimcrack magnificence most approved of some sixty or seventy-five years ago in these same United States of America. In a parasitic race such as the slavers from antiquity there would be no racial culture nor racial art in any form. The gardens were vast, intricately laid out and tended with infinite expenditure of labor. There were trees bent and trained into preposterous resemblances to animals and to men. There was statuary looted from Earth, and there were sunken gardens, and reflection pools which reflected nothing in particular.

Over this lawn and into these gardens the freed slaves surged. There were shoutings here and there where a man with past experience in combat led some others toward the villa and guided them so they were not exposed to fire from the windows.

A sudden crackling of rifle fire from the huge mansion. No parley, of course. The slaves could not be treated with. There could be no terms of surrender. In all probability the master of the villa did not even think of it. After all, in five thousand years some slave revolts must have been attempted and one or two may have attained to some success. Certainly overseers knew there could be no surrender for them. They were frightened, to be sure, and they were doomed and knew it. But they made no vain attempts to delay the attack which nothing could delay.

They shot from the upper windows. Slaves fell. But there was instinctive discipline among the attackers. Not everywhere, but in spots. Groups of men flung themselves down behind flower beds and hedges, and a single flash of a gun from a window brought storms of lead. Those volleys smashed the glass and the sash and filled the opening with death. This was a tactic the defenders, who did not know combat but only murder, could not cope with. Many robed men died from these volleys fired by the quite impromptu combat units of the attackers.

The horde of hairy avengers infiltrated the gardens. There was an elaborate maze of clipped hedge in which fifty men crawled to within a hundred yards of the house. There were tall beds of ornamental plants which sheltered dozens more. There were screens of shrubs. There were fountains whose stone basins were bulletproof breastworks. There were graceful terraces which were cover.

The sound of shooting became a steady, popping noise. There was little other sound. The slaves filtered forward here, and trickled closer there, and when a shot came from the house there was a hail of lead in reply.

Presently the forward movement ceased. Every bit of cover near the house was filled with men all ready for the kill. Then, suddenly, it seemed that the ground erupted ruhks— the palace beasts. The animals brought to the villa to see their master and smell the scent of godhead had been filled with ecstasy at his sight and smell. Now he sent them out to disperse the rebel slaves.

They ran into a withering fire. A dozen went down or rolled over, snapping at their wounds. The balance reached the attackers. And then they cowered and quivered in bewilderment, because they could not attack these men ...

A desperate rush of robed men on their heels. If they could cut through the ring of slaves, presumably thrown into confusion by the charge of ruhks, they could swing sidewise about the mansion, taking the attackers in flank and rolling them up before them, while fire from the windows could begin again.

Perhaps against some antagonists it would have served well enough. But there was a leavening of former professional fighting men among the slaves. The charge of the ruhks had been a fiasco. The survivors quivered with uneasiness but made no attack whatever once they were among the slaves. Those hard-bitten men ignored them unless to kill them with scornful satisfaction. So the charge of the overseers was no better. Indeed, it was worse, because as the last of them raced out into the open a lobbed grenade fell among them.

A man with matted red hair stood up, yelling defiantly. He heaved another grenade. It went in a window and exploded inside. Howls of joy arose. Another grenade in another window. A third and fourth—

And then there was one tremendous roar of fury, and the slaves swarmed into the building from every side and through every opening, grenades blasting a way for them.

There were noises inside, for a while, but not for very long. In one place there was a nursery suite, and shivering young slave-girls shrilly told the invaders that they were slaves, too, and they were unharmed. Another place a giant overseer stood at bay with a spear, his pistol empty, and a grinning young man with icy gray eyes snapped for others to stand back and fought it out, using bayonet tactics with a rifle that had no bayonet on it against an eight-foot spear. The rifleman won, after fighting his way inside the spear’s length. He killed his antagonist with a gun butt. Some overseers hid, and were dragged out and killed, and others barricaded themselves in a cellar, not realizing what would happen when grenades with pulled-out pins were dropped down among them.

There was one room where women of the master race were found, very frail and delicate to look at, splendidly dressed in soft stuffs. They were dead, preferring that to the fate their servants had administered to so many slaves, and which they feared for themselves.

The last of the fighting took place in what must have been the armory of the villa. The last surviving overseers fought desperately, here. When at last a surging tide of ex-slaves poured in upon them, the reason was clear. Here were the doorways between worlds. Here were the passageways to Earth. And while the slaves battered their way in, the master of the villa had been destroying them. Seared by a flame, apparently the freakish molecular orientation ceased to be. A great bonfire of garments and furniture burned in the middle of the stone floor. And there was a child here, an imperious, wide-eyed six-year-old girl, clinging to a man with the delicate features of that inbred race of masters. There was already but one of the doorways to Earth remaining. But the child’s father, while his servants fought until they were killed, emptied some small bag of treasure. He strung glittering necklaces about the child’s neck. He filled the small pockets of her healthily brief jumper full of gems, and then he thrust her forcibly through a great disk of copper alloy some three feet in diameter. She vanished. And then he heaved the disk into the mounting flames, seized a weapon from the floor, and plunged into the fighting. He, with the others, was dead within minutes.

What followed freedom was inevitably an anticlimax. There were some of the freedmen who—their vengeance sated—demanded immediate return to Earth. There were others—especially women—who bitterly protested against return. Many men, also, were ashamed. And the number who felt that their vengeance was complete grew smaller as hours passed. Most found themselves still lusting to kill more ruhks and overseers, and there were not a few who hungrily discussed the fact that there were other villas in the Other World. There was one up the Hudson near Albany. There was one near Philadelphia, and one near Boston. There were other men in slave pens—

Then Dick Blair showed the translation of the message in hieroglyphic script he had gotten from a messenger sent to take it upriver. The translation was explicit.

From Zozer, son of Haton, of the race of lords of men and ruhks, to Khafre, son of Siut, the son of Zozer’s uncle, greeting:

There is a slave from the land of slaves (Earth, or New York) at large in my land. He came from the land of the slaves by his own contrivance, not by being enslaved. There is one other who remains in the land of the slaves who knows of his coming.

I have sent ruhks and servants to seize him and to bring his companion from the land of the slaves for questioning. Do you have the news writings of the slave-people near you brought to your interpreters each day to be searched for word of this event or of the discovery by the slave-people of our world.

If such news should appear, tell all of our race, that they may spread fire and death and pestilence in the land of the slaves, in every house and every city, so that they will forget to think of our land in their study of their own griefs. Do this in the manner arranged in the time of our fathers.

Do not do this unless the news writings speak of our world.

Farewell.

Zozer, the son of Haton, of the race of lords of ruhks and men, to Khafre, son of Siut the son of Zozer’s uncle.

Dick said bluntly:

“There are other villas and certainly other slaves. This business started in Egypt, and it spread. And the one thing these masters are afraid of is that on our Earth the people will find out about them and come and wipe them out. So if they’re spoken of on Earth, they’ll start to work to destroy it. They won’t wipe out humanity, of course. But they can put a fire in every cellar of every house, in every warehouse, every building, every fuel store, every petroleum tank. They can put germs into all drinking water, foul all food, and spread disease beyond any possibility of our stopping them. They could steal bombs from any store of bombs on earth, and introduce and explode them anywhere they pleased.

“Nobody could stop them. The price of our going back to Earth is just that sort of catastrophe everywhere there are villas on this world. They wouldn’t destroy humanity, but they’d come damn near destroying civilization before they were through. So—let’s start smashing them up from here. We’ll go upriver and smash the villa up there. We’ll have more men, then. We’ll smash the villas at Boston and Philadelphia. We’ll spread out, smashing the slave pens and killing the ruhks until at least our own country’s safe from their revenge! And maybe we’ll carry on past that. If we destroy every slave pen and free every slave on this world, we can go back to Earth as conquerors instead of victims—”

He glared about him. The argument was hot. But before sunset of the day of victory, he saw men carrying bodies out of the villa and arranging to bury them, as if there were no question but that life was to go on here. He became busy planning the expedition upriver. It would be a good deal simpler than the affair here had been. For one thing, it would be an absolute surprise. A hundred armed men with the master-scent upon them would be ample. No ruhk would give warning of their coming. No force of overseers would be gathered to oppose them ...

The tall man who had been a professor of physics stopped him as he left a conference where Sam had made it clear that he was going to be in the expedition upriver.

“Nobody really plans to go back to Earth,” he told Dick dryly. “I don’t. No man or woman who’s ever been a slave will want to go back. They’d be ashamed. The thing to do is to arrange, very discreetly, for someone to buy bulldozers and tractors and clothes and books and safety razors and canned goods and get them through some doorway to here. There’s gold and jewelry enough in the palace yonder to pay for everything we need. And send us some bismuth. I’ve been talking to your friend Maltby. We can make doorways we can even get small ocean-going craft through. We’ve a job here that’s worth doing. In five thousand years those devils have set up villas in maybe hundreds and possibly thousands of places. They’ve got to be cleared out!”

Dick said, “Still, if people want to go back ...”

“They can’t go back right away!” said the tall man. “We put it to a vote. No question. Everybody stays, at least for a while. Actually, I doubt that any of us will ever go. We’ll get to realizing what will happen if Earth ever learns about this planet. Can you picture the stampede of the nations for pieces of this world? Can you picture them dumping bombs through doorways on us, or piling into this world to go dump bombs back on Earth?”

Dick winced. Then the tall man said:

“We can stop any war on Earth. I think we will. We’ve had enough of killing and cruelty. I think—”

“I’ve been talking to several people,” admitted Dick. “They are inclined to think as you do.”

“Surely,” said the tall man. “But for the time-being we’ll just tell ourselves we’re staying here until we free all the other slaves, and make sure there’s no interdimensional attack on Earth in case we want to go back. We’ll need somebody to buy things for us, and maybe to advise us from time to time. We’ll need somebody around who never was a slave. We’re apt to be pretty extreme.”

“To tell the truth,” said Dick, “I thought I’d go back with Maltby and arrange for buying the sort of stuff we need here, and—well—get married, and come back ...”

The tall man nodded.

That was the way it was. They returned the spidery device to its former storage-place in the villa. It would never again be used to rob Earth. They began to clean up the bloodstains. There were hundreds of things to be done. Dick, himself, had a list of literally thousands of items that would somehow, without creating curiosity, have to be bought for this Other World.

A cutter rowed them across to the Manhattan shore just at sundown. There was a doorway there which they would ultimately set up in a closet in the house Dick and Nancy would presently acquire for the benefit of the people in the Other World.

None of the brawny figures with them showed any sign of wanting to go back to New York with them. They were going upriver in the morning, to attack another villa. They grinned when Maltby went back to Earth. He had borrowed Sam Todd’s clothes; Sam was wearing a loincloth and a riot gun and enjoying it. Nancy went through. Kelly went through, with a parcel. Dick went through and they were in New York, in a narrow, smelly small alley only feet from a well-frequented street.

“Wedding present,” said Kelly. “I picked it up at the first slave pen we took. Thought you might like it.”

“What is it?” asked Nancy.

“A crux ansata,” said Dick. “On Earth it belongs to Maltby, but Kelly rates it as spoils of war. He’s right. It is. Maltby shan’t have it. I’ll turn it into a hand-mirror for you to look at yourself in.”

“Kelly,” said Nancy. “Don’t you want to stay for the wedding?”

“No,” said Kelly laconically. “I got a date upriver.”

Maltby went out of the alley into the street.

“See you next week,” said Dick.

“Okay,” said Kelly. “Good luck.”

He vanished in a pool of quicksilver. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Dick took Nancy’s hand and went out of the alley. He held up three fingers and whistled at a passing vehicle.

“Taxi!” said Dick.