us, after all; and of course this air is their natural element. But now that we’re up here,
we’ll just have to fight them off; back to back, until we land.”
“But how can we stay back to back?” asked Margaret sharply. “We’ll drift apart at our
first effort. Then they’ll be able to get behind us and they’ll have us again!”
“That’s so, too-never thought of that angle, Peg. You’ve got a belt on, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Fine! Loosen it up and I’ll run mine through it. The belts and an ankle-and-knee lock’ll
hold us together and in position to play tunes on those sea-horses’ ribs. Keep your shield
up and keep that grating swinging and we’ll lay them like a carpet.”
Seaton had not been idle while he was talking, and when the attackers drew near,
vicious tridents out thrust, they encountered an irresistibly driven wall of crushing, tearing,
dismembering, and all-destroying metal. Back to back the two unknown monstrosities
floated through the air; interlaced belts holding their vulnerable backs together, gripped
legs holding their indestructibly dense and hard bodies in alignment.
For a time the four-dimensional creatures threw themselves upon the Terrestrials, only to
be hurled away upon all sides, chopped literally to bits. For Margaret protected Seaton’s
back, and he himself took care of the space in front of him, to right and to left of them,
above and below them; driving the closely spaced latticework of his metal grating
throughout all that space so viciously and so furiously that it seemed to be omnipresent
as well as omnipotent. For a time the hyper-men tried, as has been said; only to be
sliced by that fearsomely irresistible weapon into such grisly fragments that the appalled
survivors of the hyperhorde soon abandoned the futile and suicidal attack.
Then, giving up hope of recapturing the specimens alive, the hyperbeings turned upon
them their lethal beams. Soft, pinkly glowing beams which turned to a deep red and then
flamed through the spectrum and into the violet as they were found to have no effect
upon the human bodies. But the death rays of the hypermen, whatever the frequency,
were futile-the massed battalions at the pit’s mouth were as impotent as bad been the
armed forces of the great hypercity, whose denizens had also failed either to hold or to
kill the supernatural Terrestrials.
During the hand-to-hand encounter the two had passed the apex of their flight; and now,
bathed in the varicolored beams, they floated gently downward, directly toward the great
derrick which Seaton had pointed out as marking their probable landing place. In fact,
they grazed one of the massive corner members of the structure; but Seaton interposed
his four-dimensional shield and, although the derrick trembled noticeably under the
impact, neither he nor Margaret was hurt as they drifted lightly to the ground.
“Just like jumping off of and back into a feather bed!” Seaton exulted, as he straightened
up, disconnected the hampering belts, and guided Margaret toward the vast hole in the
ground, unopposed now save for the still-flaring beams. “Wonder if any more of them
want to argue the right of way with us? Guess not.”
“But how are we going to get down there?” asked Margaret.
“Fall down-or, better yet, we’ll slide down those chains they’ve already got installed.
You’d better carry all this junk, and I’ll kind of carry you. That way you won’t have to do
anything-just take a ride.”
Scarcely encumbered by the girl’s weight, Seaton stepped outward to the great chain
cables, and hand under hand he went down, down past the huge lifting cradles which had
been placed around the massive globe of arenak.
“But we’ll go right through it-there’s nothing to stop us in this dimension!” protested
Margaret.
“No, we won’t; and yes, there is,” Seaton replied. “We swing past it and down, around
onto level footing, on this loose end of chain-like this, see?” and they were once more in
the control room of Skylark Two.
There stood Dorothy, Crane, and Shiro, exactly as they had left them so long before. Still
held in the grip of the tridents, they were silent, immobile; their eyes were vacant and
expressionless. Neither Dorothy nor Crane gave any sign of recognition, neither seemed
even to realize that their loved ones, gone so long, had at last returned.
13 THE RETURN TO SPACE
Seaton’s glance leaped to his beloved Dorothy. Drooping yet rigid she stood there,
unmoving, corpse-like. Accustomed now to seeing four-dimensional things by consciously
examining only their three-dimensional surfaces, he perceived instantly the waxen, utterly
inhuman vacuity of her normally piquant and vivacious face-perceived it, and at that
perception went mad.
Clutching convulsively the length of hyperchain by which he had swung into the control
room he leaped, furious and elementally savage; forgetting weapons and armor,
heedless of risk and of odds, mastered completely by a seething, searing urge to wreak
vengeance upon the creature who had so terribly outraged his Dorothy, the woman in
whom centered his Universe.
So furious was his action that the chain snapped apart at the wall of the control room; so
rapid was it that the hyper guard had no time to move, nor even to think.
That guard had been peacefully controlling with his trident the paralyzed prisoner. All had
been quiet and calm. Suddenly-in an instant-had appeared the two monstrosities who
had been taken to the capital. And in that same fleeting instant one of the monsters was
leaping at him. And ahead of that monster there came lashing out an enormous anchor
chain, one of whose links of solid steel no ordinary mortal could lift; an anchor chain
hurtling toward him with a velocity and a momentum upon that tenuous hyperworld
unthinkable.
The almost-immaterial flesh of the hyperman could no more withstand that fiercely driven
mass of metal than can a human body ward off an armor-piercing projectile in full flight.
Through his body the great chain tore; cutting, battering, rending it into ghastly, pulpily
indescribable fragments unrecognizable as ever having been anything animate. Indeed,
so fiercely had the chain been urged that the metal itself could not stand the strain. Five
links broke off at the climax of the chain’s blacksnake-like stroke, and, accompanying the
bleeding scraps of flesh that had been the guard, tore on past the walls of the space ship
and out into the hypervoid.
The guard holding his tridents in Crane and Shiro had not much more warning. He saw
his fellow obliterated, true; but that was all he lived to see, and he had time to do exactly
nothing. One more quick flip of Seaton’s singularly efficient weapon and the remains of
that officer also disappeared into hyperspace. More of the chain went along, this time,
but that did not matter. Dropping to the floor the remaining links of his hyperflail, Seaton
sprang to Dorothy, reaching her side just as the punishing trident, released by the slain
guard, fell away from her.
She recovered her senses instantly and turned a surprised face to the man, who,
incoherent in his relief that she was alive and apparently unharmed, was taking her into
his arms.
“Why, surely, Dick, I’m all right-how could I be any other way?” she answered his first
agonized question in amazement. She studied his worn face in puzzled wonder and went
on: “But you certainly are not. What has happened, dear, anyway; and how could it have,
possibly?”
“I hated like sin to be gone so long, Dimples, but it couldn’t be helped.” Seaton, in his
eagerness to explain his long absence, did not even notice the peculiar implications in his
wife’s speech and manner. “You see, it was a long trip, and we didn’t get a chance to
break away from those meat hooks of theirs until after they got us into their city and
examined us. Then, when we finally did break away, we found that we couldn’t travel at
night. Their days are bad enough, with this thick blue light, but during the nights there’s
absolutely no light at all, of any kind. No moon, no stars, no nothing . . .”
“Nights! What are you talking, about, Dick, anyway?” Dorothy had been trying to interrupt
since his first question and had managed at last to break in. “Why, you haven’t been
gone at all, not even a second. We’ve all been right here, all the time!”
“Huh?” ejaculated Seaton. “Are you completely nuts, RedTop, or what . . . ?”
“Dick and I were gone at least a week, Dottie,” Margaret, who had been embracing
Crane, interrupted in turn, “and it was awful!”
“Just a minute, folks!” Seaton listened intently and stared upward. “We’ll have to let the
explanations ride a while longer. I thought they wouldn’t give up that easy-here they
come! I don’t know how long we were gone-it seemed like a darn long time-but it was
long enough so that I learned how to mop up on these folks, believe me! You take that