Then, with the door beginning to open, we failed. All of us together. And there was no door. There was nothing but the dune climbing up the sky.
Something crunched behind us and I jumped up and swung around. The wheel loomed tall above us, crunching to a halt, and swarming down from the green mass in the center, swinging down the silvery spider web between the rim and hub was a blob that dripped. It was not a spider, although the basic shape of it and the way it came scrambling down the web brought a spider to one’s mind. A spider would have been friendly and cozy alongside this monstrosity that came crawling down the web. It was a quivering obscenity, dripping with some sort of filthy slime, and it had a dozen legs or arms, and at one end of the dripping blob was what might have been a face-and there is no way to put into words the kind of horror that it carried with it, the loathsome feeling of uncleanliness just from seeing it, as if the very sight of it were enough to contaminate one’s flesh and mind, the screaming need to keep one’s distance from it, the fear that it might come close enough to touch one.
As it came down the web it was making a noise and steadily, it seemed, the noise became louder. Although it had what one could imagine was its face, it had no mouth with which to make the noise, but even with no mouth, the noise came out of it and washed over us. In the noise was the crunch of great teeth splintering bones, mixed with the slobbering of scavenger gulping at a hasty, putrid feast, and an angry chittering that had unreason in it. It wasn’t any of these things alone; it was all of them together, or the sense of all of them together, and perhaps if a man had been forced to go on listening to it for long enough he might have detected in it other sounds as well.
It reached the rim of the wheel and leaped off the web to land upon the dune-spraddled there, looming over us, with the filthiness of it dripping off its body and splashing on the sand. I could see the tiny balls of wet sand where the nastiness had dropped.
It stood there, raging at us, the noise of it filling all that world of sand and bouncing off the sky.
And in the noise there seemed to be a word, as if the word were hidden and embedded in the strata of the sound. Bowed down beneath that barrage of sound, it seemed that finally I could feel-not hear, but feel-the word.
“Begone!” it seemed to shout at us. “Begone! Begone! Begone!”
From somewhere out of that moonlit-starlit night, from that land of heaving dunes, came a wind, or some force like a wind, that hammered at us and drove us back-although, come to think of it, it could not have been a wind, for no cloud of sand came with it and there was no roaring such as a wind would make. But it hit us like a fist and staggered us and sent us reeling back.
As I staggered back with the loathesome creature still spraddled on the dune and still raging at us, I realized that there was no longer sand underneath my feet, but some sort of paving.
Then, quite suddenly, the dune was no longer there, but a wall, as if a door we could not see had been slammed before our faces, and when this happened the creature’s storm of rage came to an end and in its stead was silence.
But not for long, that silence, for Smith began an insane crying. “He is back again! My friend is back again! He’s is in my mind again! He has come back to me.”
“Shut up!” I yelled at him. “Shut up that yammering!”
He quieted down a bit, but he went on muttering, flat upon his bottom, with his legs stuck out in front of him and that silly, sickening look of ecstasy painted on his face.
I took a quick look around and saw that we were back where we had come from, in that room with all the panels and behind each panel the shimmering features of another world.
Safely back, I thought with some thankfulness, but through no effort of our own. Finally, given time enough, we might have hauled that door wide enough for us to have gotten through. But we hadn’t had to do it; it had been done for us. A creature from that desert world had come along and thrown us out.
The night that had lain over the white world when we had been brought there had given way to day. Through the massive doorway, I could see the faint yellow light of the sun blocked out by the towering structures of the city.
There was no sign of the hobbies or the gnomelike humanoid who had picked the world into which the hobbies threw us.
I shucked up my britches and took the gun off my shoulder. I had some scores to settle.
FOUR
We found them in a large room, which appeared to be a storeroom, one flight down from the lobby that had the doors to all those other worlds.
The little gnomelike creature had our luggage spread out on the floor and was going through it. Several bundles of stuff had been sorted out and he was going through another bag, with the rest of it all stacked neatly to one side, waiting his attention.
The hobbies stood in a semicircle about him, looking on and rocking most sedately and while they had no expression on their carven faces, I thought that I detected in them a sense of satisfaction at having made so good a haul.
They were so engrossed in what was going on that none of them noticed us until we were through the door and had advanced several paces into the room. Then the hobbies, seeing us, reared back upon their rockers and the gnome began to straighten slowly, as if his back might have grown stiff from standing all bent over to go through our things. Still half bent over, he stared up at us through a tangle of unruly hair that hung down across his eyes. He looked like an English sheepdog looking up at us.
All of us stopped and stood together. We didn’t speak, but waited.
The gnome finally, straightened up by degrees, very cautiously and slowly. The hobbies stayed motionless, reared back on their rockers.
The gnome rubbed his gnarled hands together. “We were about, my lord,” he said, “to come after you.”
I motioned with my gun toward the luggage on the floor. He looked at it and shook his head.
“A mere formality,” he said. “An inspection for the customs.”
“With a view to a heavy tax?” I asked. “A very heavy tax.”
“Oh, not at all,” he said. “It is merely that there are certain things which must not be allowed upon the planet. Although, if you should be willing, a small gratuity, perhaps. We have so little opportunity to collect anything of value. And we do render services of which you are much in need. The shelter against the danger and the…”
I looked around the storeroom. It was piled with crates and baskets and other kinds of less conventionalized containers and there were articles of all sorts all heaped and piled together.
“It seems to me,” I said, “that you’ve been doing not too badly. If you ask me, I think you had no thought to get us. We could have stayed in that desert world forever if it had been up to you.”
“I swear,” he said. “We were about to open up the door. But we became so interested in the wonderful items that you carried with you that we quite lost track of time.”
“Why did you put us there to start with?” Sara asked. “In the desert world?” “Why, to protect you from the deadly vibrations,” be explained. “We, ourselves, took cover. Each time a ship lands there are these vibrations. They always come at night, before the dawning of the day that follows the landing of the ship.” “An earthquake?” I asked. “A shaking of the planet.” “Not of the planet,” said the gnome. “A shaking of the senses. It congeals the brain, it bursts the flesh. There can nothing live. That is why we put you in that other world-to save your very lives.”
He was lying to us. He simply had to be. Or at least he was lying about his intention to bring us back from the desert world. The kind of rat he was, there was no reason that he should. He had everything we had; there would have been nothing for him to gain by getting us out of the world he’d thrown us into.