their feet and they fell, or rather, floated, easily and slowly downward. Margaret shrieked
in alarm, but the man remained unmoved and calm.
“‘Sail right, Peg,” he assured her. “We want to go clear down to the bottom of this dump,
anyway, and this’ll save us the time and trouble of walking down. All right; that is, if we
don’t sink into the floor so deep when we hit that we won’t be able to get ourselves out of
it. Better spread out that shield so you’ll fall on it-it won’t hurt you, and it may help a lot.”
So slowly were they falling that they had ample time in which to prepare for the landing;
and, since both Seaton and Margaret were thoroughly accustomed to weightless
maneuvering in free space, their metal shields were flat beneath them when they struck
the lowermost floor of the citadel. Those shields were crushed, broken, warped and
twisted as they were forced into the pavement by the force of the falling bodies-as would
be the steel doors of a bank vault upon being driven broadside on, deep into a floor of
solid concrete.
But they served their purpose; they kept the bodies of the Terrestrials from sinking
beyond their depth into the floor of the hyperdungeon. As they struggled to their feet,
unhurt, and saw that they were in a large, cavernous room, six searchlight-like projectors
came into play, enveloping them in a flood of soft, pinkish-white light.
Seaton stared about him, uncomprehending, until he saw that one of the hypermen,
caught accidentally in the beam, shriveled horribly and instantly into a few floating wisps
of luminous substance which in a few seconds disappeared entirely.
“Huh! Death rays!” he exclaimed then. “‘Sa good thing for us we’re essentially three-
dimensional yet, or we’d probably never have known what struck us. Now let’s see
where’s our river? Oh, yes; over this way. Wonder if we’d better take these shields
along? Guess not, they’re pretty well shot-we’ll pick us up a couple of good ones on the
way, and I’ll get you a grill like this one to use as a flail.”
“But there’s no door on that side!” Margaret protested.
“So what? We’ll roll our own as we go along.”
His heavy boot crashed against the wall before them, and a section of it fell outward.
Two more kicks and they were through, hurrying along passages which Seaton knew led
toward the buried river, breaking irresistibly through solid walls whenever the corridor
along which they were moving angled away from his chosen direction.
Their progress was not impeded. The hyperbeings were willing-yes, anxious-for their
unmanageable prisoners to depart and made no further attempts to bar their path. Thus
the river was soon reached.
The airship in which they had been brought to the hypercity was nowhere to be seen, and
Seaton did not waste time looking for it. He had been unable to understand the four
dimensional controls even while watching them in operation, and he realized that even if
he could find the vessel the chance of capturing it and of escaping in it was slight indeed.
Therefore, throwing an arm around his companion, he leaped without ado into the
speeding current.
“But, Dick, we’ll drown!” Margaret protested. “This stuff is altogether too thin for us to
swim in-we’ll sink like rocks!”
“Sure we will, but what of it?” he returned. “How many times have you actually breathed
since we left three-dimensional space?”
“Why, thousands of times, I suppose-or, now that you mention it, I don’t really know
whether I’m breathing at all or not-but we’ve been gone so long . . . Oh, I don’t believe
that I really know anything!”
“You aren’t breathing at all,” he informed her then. “We have been expending energy,
though, in spite of that fact, and the only way I can explain it is that there must be fourth-
dimensional oxygen or we would have suffocated long ago. Being three-dimensional, of
course we wouldn’t have to breathe it in for the cells to get the benefit of it-they grab it
direct. Incidentally, that probably accounts for the fact that I’m hungry as a wolf, but
that’ll have to wait until we get back into our own space again.”
True to Seaton’s prediction, they suffered no inconvenience as they strode along upon
the metaled pavement of the river’s bottom, Seaton still carrying the bent and battered
grating with which he had wrought such havoc in the corridor so far above.
Almost at the end of the tunnel, a sharklike creature darted upon them, dreadful jaws
agape. With his left arm Seaton threw Margaret behind him, while with his right he swung
the four-dimensional grating upon the monster of the deeps. Under the fierce power of
the blow the creature became a pulpy mass, drifting inertly away upon the current, and
Seaton stared after it ruefully.
“That particular killing was entirely unnecessary, and I’m sorry I did it,” he remarked.
“Unnecessary? Why, it was going to bite me!” she cried.
“Yeah, it thought it was, but it would have been just like one of our own real sharks trying
to bite the chilled steel prow off a battleship,” be replied. “Here comes another one. I’m
going to let him gnaw on my arm, and see how he likes it.”
On the monster came with a savage rush, until the dreadful, out thrust snout almost
touched the man’s bare, extended arm. Then the creature stopped, dead still in midrush,
touched the arm tentatively, and darted away with a quick flirt of its powerful tail.
“See, Peg, he knows we ain’t good to eat. None of these hyperanimals will bother us-it’s
only these men with their meat hooks that we have to fight shy of. Here’s the jump-off.
Better we hit it I wouldn’t wonder if that sandy bottom would be pretty tough going. I
think maybe we’d better take to the beach as soon as we can.”
From the metaled pavement of the brilliantly lighted aqueduct they stepped out upon the
natural sand bottom of the open river. Above them was only the somberly sullen intensity
of velvety darkness; a darkness only slightly relieved by the bluely luminous vegetation
upon the river’s either bank. In spite of their care they sank waist-deep into that sand,
and it was only with great difficulty that they fought their way up to the much firmer
footing of the nearer shore.
Out upon the margin at last, they found that they could make good time, and they set out
downstream at a fast but effortless pace. Mile after mile they traveled, until, suddenly, as
though some universal switch had been opened, the ghostly radiance of all the vegetation
of the countryside disappeared in an instant, and utter and unimaginable darkness
descended as a pall. It was not the ordinary darkness of an Earthly night, nor yet the
darkness of even an Earthly dark room; it was indescribable, completely perfect
darkness of the total absence of every ray of light.
“Dick!” shrieked Margaret. “Where are you?”
“Right here, Peg-take it easy,” he advised, and groping fingers touched and clung.
“They’ll probably light up again. Maybe this is their way of having night. We can’t do
much, anyway, until it gets light again. We couldn’t possibly find the Skylark in this
darkness; and even if we could feel our way down river we’d miss the island that marks
our turning-off point. Here, I feel a nice soft rock. I’ll sit down with my back against it and
you can lie down, with my lap for a pillow, and we’ll take us a nap. Wasn’t it Porthos, or
some other one of Dumas’ characters that said, ‘He who sleeps, eats’?”
“Dick, you’re a perfect peach to take things the way you do.” Margaret’s voice was
broken. “I know what you’re thinking of, too. Oh, I do hope that nothing has become of
them!” For she well knew that, true and loyal friend though Seaton was, yet his every
thought was for beloved Dorothy, presumably still in Skylark Two—just as Martin Crane
came first with her in everything.
“Sure they’re all right, Peg.” An instantly suppressed tremor shook his giant frame.
“They’re figuring on keeping them in the Lark until they raise her, I imagine. If I had
known as much then as I know now they’d never have got away with any of this stuff-but
it can’t be helped now. I wish I could do something, because if we don’t get back to Two
pretty quick it seems as though we may snap back into our own three dimensions and
land in empty space. Or would we, necessarily? The time coordinates would change,
too, of course, and that change might very well make it obligatory for us to be back in
our exact original locations in the Lark at the instant of transfer, no matter where we
happen to be in this hyperspace-hypertime continuum. Too deep for me-I can’t figure it.