steps downward and the other also failed-would no longer even scratch the stubborn
stone. Already falling, Seaton gathered himself together, twisted bars held horizontally
beneath him, and floated gently downward. He came to the ground no harder than he
would have landed after jumping from a five-foot Earthly fence; but even his three-ply
bars of hypermetal did not keep him from plunging several feet into that strangely
unsubstantial hyperground.
Margaret was there, however, with her grating and her plate of armor. With her aid
Seaton struggled free, and together they waded through the river and hurried to the line
post which Margaret had set. Then, along the line established by the obelisk and the
post, the man crashed into the thick growth of the jungle, the woman at his heels.
Though the weirdly peculiar trees, creepers, and bamboo-like shoots comprising the
jungle’s vegetation were not strong enough to bar the progress of the dense, hard,
human bodies, yet they impeded that progress so terribly that the trail breaker soon
halted.
“Not so good this way, Peg,” he reflected. “These creepers will soon pull you down, I’m
afraid; and, besides, we’ll be losing our line pretty quickly. What to do? Better I knock
out a path with this magic wand of mine, I guess none of this stuff seems to be very
heavy.”
Again they set out; Seaton’s grating, so bent and battered now that it could not be
recognized as once having been the door of a prison cell, methodically sweeping from
side to side; a fiercely driven scythe against which no hyperthing could stand. Vines and
creepers still wrapped around and clung to the struggling pair; shattered masses drifted
down upon them from above, exuding in floods a viscous, gluey sap; and both masses of
broken vegetation and floods of adhesive juices reenforced and rendered even more
impassable the already high-piled wilderness of debris which had been accumulating
there during time unthinkable. All hypernature seemed to be in league against them;
feebly but clingingly attempting to hold them back and devour them.
Thus hampered, but driven to highest effort by the fear of imminent darkness and
consequent helplessness, they struggled indomitably on. On and on; while behind them
stretched an ever-lengthening, straight, sharply cut streak of blackness in the livid hyper
light of the jungle. On and on; Seaton flailing a path through the standing jungle, Margaret
plowing along in his wake, fighting, struggling through and over the matted tangle of
underbrush and the grasping, clinging tentacles of its parasitic inhabitants.
Seaton’s great mass and prodigious strength enabled him to force his way through that
fantastically inimical undergrowth, but the unremitting pull and drag of the attacking vines
wore down the woman’s slighter physique.
“Just a minute, Dick!” She stopped, strength almost spent. “I hate to admit that I can’t
stand the pace, especially since you are doing all the work, as well as wading through
the same mess that I am, but I don’t believe that I can go on much longer without a rest.”
“All right . . .” Seaton began, but broke off, staring ahead. “No; keep on coming one
minute more, Peg-three more jumps and we’re through.”
“I can go that much farther, of course. Lead on, MacDuff!” and they struggled on.
In a few more steps they broke out of the thick growth of the jungle and into the almost-
palpable darkness of a great, roughly circular area which had been cleared of the prolific
growth. In the center of this circle could be seen the bluely illuminated works of the
engineers who were raising Skylark Two. The edge of the great well was surrounded by
four dimensional machinery; and that well’s wide apron and its towering derricks were
swarming with hypermen.
“Stay behind me, Peg, but as close as you can without getting hit,” the man instructed his
companion after a hasty but comprehensive study of the scene. “Keep your shield up and
have your grating in good swinging order. I’ll be able to take care of most of them, I
think, but you want to be ready to squash any of them that may get around me or who
may rush us from behind. Those stickers of theirs are bad medicine, girl, and we don’t
want to take any chances at all of getting stuck again.”
“I’ll say we don’t!” she agreed feelingly, and Seaton started off over the now
unencumbered ground. “Wait a minute, Dick-where are you, anyway? I can’t see you at
all!”
“That’s right, too. Never thought of it, but there’s no light. The grimmer of those plants is
pretty faint at best, and doesn’t reach out here at all. We’d better hold hands, I guess,
until we get close enough to the works out there so that we can see what we’re doing
and what’s going on.”
“But I’ve got only two hands-I’m not a hippocampus and they’re both full of doors and
clubs and thins. But maybe I can carry this shield under my arm-it isn’t heavy there,
where are you, anyway?”
Seeking hands found each other, and, hand in hand, the two set out boldly toward the
scene of activity so starkly revealed in the center of that vast circle of darkness. So
appalling was the darkness that it was a thing tangible palpable. Seaton could not see his
companion, could not see the weapons and the shield he bore, could not even faintly
discern the very ground upon which he walked. Yet he plunged forward, almost dragging
the girl along bodily, eyes fixed upon the bluely gleaming circle of structures which was
his goal.
“But Dick!” Margaret panted. “Let’s not go so fast; I can’t see a thing-not even my hand
right in front of my eyes-and I’m afraid we’ll bump into something-anything!”
“We’ve got to snap it up, Peg,” the man replied, not slackening his pace in the slightest,
“and there’s nothing very big between us and the Skylark, or we could see it against
those lights. We may stumble over something, of course, but it’ll be soft enough so that it
won’t hurt us any. But suppose that another night clamps down on us before we get out
there?”
“Oh, that’s right; it did come awfully suddenly,” and Margaret leaped ahead; dread of the
abysmally horrible hypernight so far outweighing her natural fear of unseen obstacles in
her path that the man was hard put to it to keep up with her. “Suppose they’ll know we’re
coming?”
“Maybe-probably-I don’t know. I don’t imagine they can see us, but since we cannot
understand anything about them, it’s quite possible that they may have other senses that
we know nothing about. They’ll have to spot us mighty quick, though, if they expect to do
themselves any good.”
The hypermen could not see them, but it was soon made evident that the weird beings
had indeed, in some unknown fashion, been warned of their coming. Mighty searchlights
projected great beams of livid blue light, beams which sought eagerly the human beings-
probing, questing, searching.
As he perceived the beams Seaton knew that the hypermen could not see without lights
any better than he could; and knowing what to expect, he grinned savagely into the
darkness as he threw an arm around Margaret and spoke or thought–to her.
“One of those beams’ll find us pretty quick, and they may send something along it. If so,
and if I yell jump, do it quick. Straight up; high, wide, and handsome-jump!”
For even as be spoke, one of the stabbing beams of light found them and had stopped
full upon them. And almost instantly had come flashing along that beam a horde of
hypermen, armed with peculiar weapons at whose use the Terrestrials could not even
guess.
But also almost instantly bad Seaton and Margaret jumped -jumped with the full power of
Earthly muscles which, opposed by only the feeble gravity of hyperland, had given their
bodies such a velocity that to the eyes of the hypermen their intended captives had
simply and instantly disappeared.
“They knew we were there, all right, some way or other -maybe our mass jarred the
ground-but they apparently can’t see us without lights, and that gives us a break,”
Seaton’ remarked conversationally, as they soared interminably upward. “We ought to
come down just about where that tallest derrick is-right where we can go to work on
them.”
But the scientist was mistaken in thinking that the hypermen had discovered them through
tremors of the ground. For the searching cones of light were baffled only for seconds;
then, guided by some sense or by some mechanism unknown and unknowable to any
three-dimensional intelligence, they darted aloft and were once more outlining the fleeing
Terrestrials in the bluish glare of their livid radiance. And upward, along those illuminated
ways, darted those living airplanes, the hypermen; and this time the man and the woman,
with all their incredible physical strength, could not leap aside.
“Not so good,” said Seaton, “better we’d stayed on the ground, maybe. They could trace