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The Wizards of Senchuria

by Kenneth Bulmer

I

The vision of a thick and juicy steak on a well garnished blue-plate special and a cup of hot and steaming coffee brought Scobie Redfern hurriedly through the snow. Black snow razored down from a black sky between gaunt black buildings and Scobie Redfern, whose tastes ran to baking-hot beaches and palm trees and creaming surf, shivered and hunkered more deeply into his overcoat.

Traffic was light this time of a dark and dirty night in Lower Manhattan. He clasped his tennis racket and sneakers tightly under his arm and ran for the corner. He’d played a number of games and still felt flushed. Wind and snow blinded him.

The traffic light changed to red and the color glimmered across the snow like technicolor blood. A single cab hauled up for the light and Scobie Redfern sighted on it and pelted slushily, head-down.

He snapped the door open and felt the warmth inside and bundled in. As he did so the opposite door swung open and a bulky overcoated figure shouldered in.

They collided mid-seat.

Redfern was a husky, broad-shouldered young man with a mop of tow hair and usually a pleasant expression and an obliging manner. Now he said, “My cab, I think.”

The newcomer hadn’t budged from the shock of contact. Redfern had been the one to bounce. Big as Scobie was, this man was bigger, heavier. In the traffic light’s glow, changing back to green now, his profile showed craggy-jawed and tufty-eyebrowed. He somehow eased himself in the seat and looked back as he slammed his side door.

“We hit it at the same time,” he said pleasantly; but Redfern clearly heard the overtones in the voice and thought they indicated uncertainty. This big man was worried.

“I’ve been exercising and I’m hot and sticky.” Redfern was in no mood for argument. “I could catch double-pneumonia in that snow.”

The man didn’t answer. He was still looking out into the snow across the street. The tenseness in him was unmistakable now.

The cabby leaned back.

“If you guys want to slug it out, okay. Otherwise, share the cab and tell me where you wanta go.”

“It is a filthy night,” the man said, as though prodded. He moved his thick shoulders.

“Check,” said Redfern, a little less bellicose. “I’m heading for a restaurant that’s—”

“That’ll suit me,” the newcomer interrupted.

“Yeah,” said the cabby, shifting gear. “I’m not cut out for the refereeing bit.”

Redfern gave him the restaurant address and sat back. The warmth in the cab, the smell of snow melting from thick cloth, the quick reaction, made him shiver again. He’d had a few fights in his time and had not particularly enjoyed them. He looked out into the slanting snow. All his life he had been fighting authority, kicking against stupidities, and that took more out of a man than any physical brawl.

Something big and dark and somehow unholy moved out there. The snow impeded his vision. He leaned forward.

He heard the man draw in his breath sharply. Then he reached into the inside of his overcoat.

Something struck the side of the cab. Leaning forward, his mouth half open, Redfern saw a hand reach up to the window. Enough light broke through the falling snow to show him that hand in blasphemous detail.

He saw a hand glistening green and yellow with scales, a hand with two fingers and a stub thumb tipped with long, blood-red claws. The hand turned to clench into a fist and the scales caught the light; as though limned in radiation each scale burned with a violet edging. The fist drew back to strike. Then the cab lurched as the cabby let in the clutch, and the fist struck and vanished with a loud metallic gong note.

“What the jumping Jehoshaphat was that?” yelled the cabby, jerking his head around.

“Hail,” grunted the man.

He relaxed, sinking back into the seat.

“Hail!” The cabby eased up. “I’d better—”

“Keep going,” the man said in a voice that snapped like a chain-saw.

“Well, now…” But the cab still ran; it was warm inside and the snow outside was unpleasant, and, anyway, he didn’t own the cab, did he? The cabby kept on.

“What,” said Scobie Redfern in a voice like a rusty bucket coming up from the bottom of a well, “was that?”

“You saw?”

Redfern swallowed. “Yes. Some nut with a fancy-dress—”

“Sort of.”

Then Redfern saw the Colt forty-five the stranger was sliding back into the inside of his overcoat.

Redfern felt queasy.

“If you like,” the big man said slowly and with grave emphasis, “you can get off at the next corner.”

Scobie Redfern wasn’t fool enough to imagine all this was a trick to make him give up the cab. After all, cold and unpleasant as it was outside, there were other cabs on New York’s streets at night.

And that hand! It must have been a brightly colored papier-mache amusement arcade gimmick. Nothing human had a hand with claws like that.

“Well?”

Redfern looked back through the rear window. The falling snow absorbed light and warmth, in a diminishing perspective already coating tire marks and powdering a handful of snowmen-pedestrians, heads down, shuffling. There was no sign of that dark shadow Redfern thought he had glimpsed.

“It’s… cold out there.”

The man grunted and, although he didn’t relax, some of that tautness left him.

The cab slushed through snow and swirled around the next corner. Redfern knew he hadn’t dreamed that stupid monster hand. But why was this big tough character so het up about it? One thing, so Scobie Redfern told himself firmly, that hand wasn’t for real.

Scobie Redfern had had a wide variety of fobs in his short business career, most of them terminated by his habitual confrontation with established authority. The cab stopped outside the middle-priced restaurant he patronized after pay day, before the hamburger days immediately preceding pay day, and both men alighted.

From the yellow glowing windows a cheerful radiance fell across the snow-covered sidewalk. The rich aromas of cooking food brought saliva to the tongue. He hitched the racket and shoes under his arm and started for the glass door.

“I’ll join you, if I may,” said the stranger.

“Surely.”

An automobile came sliding through the falling snow along the street as the cab took off. Redfern heard it coming but did not look up, since his mind was tenaciously grappling with that envisioned steak.

A thrust like a butt from a maddened billy goat smacked into the small of his back—and the next moment he was sprawling into the snow with white soggy flakes packing into his nose and eyes and mouth. He spluttered and choked. A great roaring, ripping sound blasted the icy air. A showering crash of tinkling, shattering glass was followed at once by the vicious revving of a car engine and a bedlam of screams and shouts yammering insanely. Sluggishly, Redfern rolled over and sat up.

At his side the stranger was picking himself up. His face showed hard and bleak and yet a hint of a satisfied smile curved the corners of his wide mouth.

“You all right?”

“You just about pushed my backbone through my—”

“When the Contessa’s bully boys play rough you have to play it back to them, only rougher.”

“Yeah, sure.” Redfern spat snow and wiped his eyes and ears. He looked at the restaurant, where men and women showed scared faces.

The whole front had been ripped away as though peeled off by a can opener.

Before he had time to try to sort things out the stranger grabbed his arm—just above the elbow and most painfully —and dragged him across the sidewalk and into the alleyway at the side of the restaurant. Forced to run, Redfern stumbled over lumpy snow and nameless objects from tipped-over garbage pails. Packing cases and cardboard boxes, broken and soggy, littered the alley. They ran hard, the breath pumping in clouds of steam from their mouths and noses.

Halfway down the alley, Redfern pulled back.

“Hey!” he panted, gulping for breath. “What is this? What are you—some kind of nut?”

“No. Come on. They’ve seen your face. They’ll know you now.”

A sudden sick fear hit Redfern in the pit of the stomach.

The stranger dragged him on. “I feel responsible for you now. I should have pushed you out of the cab. You’ll be sorry I didn’t, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“Come on! Look, my name is Alec Macdonald. You’ve dropped right in the middle of a bit of a mess. As soon as I meet up with a buddy of mine—fellow called David Macklin—it’ll be all right. What do I call you?”

Shivering, Redfern told him.

“Right, then, Scobie. Until we can knock out the opposition, the Trugs and the others, we’re in the position of the fox, with the hounds nipping our rumps. Got it?”

Redfern didn’t want it. But he nodded, weakly, and ran on. He’d always fancied he’d be good if any adventures came his way; but he’d never envisioned them quite like this—in the snow, of all things.

This man, Alec, now: he didn’t have the cut of a gangster; more likely he was working for the forces of law and order.

Trying to cheer himself with the reflection, Redfern scampered after Alec. He remembered when he’d become briefly involved with criminals the time he’d worked for a few months in a Canadian logging camp. The experience had convinced him that law and order usually won out in the end, but it had also made it plain that the going in between could be awfully arduous. He’d been dragged in then without understanding. This time, he promised himself, he’d ask a lot more questions first.

The mouth of the alley showed ahead, a snow-filled rectangle of hazy light from the street beyond. A dark shadow fell across the close-packed snow from an automobile waiting. Alec skidded to a halt. His strong face showed stubbornness and anger.

“Is that them?” asked Redfern. He breathed normally now, getting his second wind, his athletic training adjusting to quick action.

Alec nodded. “Yes. They saw us duck into the alley.”

He pulled a small transistor radio from his pocket and hauled up the aerial. His powerful hands were gentle with the small controls.

“This thing is refusing to work. But it’s worth another try.”

Putting his mouth close to the tiny mouthpiece, he said crisply: “This is Roughneck. Come in, Knifestone.” He twiddled the controls. The radio sizzled like a hotdog. “Nothing,” Alec said disgustedly. He slapped the aerial down and shoved the useless transceiver back into his pocket. In its place he produced the Colt forty-five.

“Might be more useful,” he growled in his bearish voice.

The sense of disorientation that at first had alarmed Scobie Redfern had changed somewhere along this alley into a cocky consciousness that in the presence of this big bear of a man called Alec he had to make out like a man, too.

Redfern sniffed and said, “We’d better cut through a side door. We can get out into the next alley, perhaps.”

Alec switched him a quick glance. Then the tough, crusty face broke into a smile. “They won’t beat us, Scobie,” he said in a voice curiously gentle.

They found a door and scuttled through a smelly and greasy back kitchen and came out into another alley where the snow lay thick and unmarked. Light splotched randomly from small windows along the alley. At the end the rectangle of light from the street glowed a welcome.

They set off fast, heads down and coat collars up. Alec kept the gun gripped in his fist in his pocket. Their footfalls made only soft squeaking sounds in the snow.

Before they reached the street Alec tried his transceiver again. “This is Roughneck. Where the hell are you, Knifestone?” The only answer was the frying-pan hiss. Alec shook the little radio. He tried again. No good. Redfern became jittery.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, not too carefully.

They moved on. Through the falling snow a strange sibilant keening drifted down. Redfern looked up, blinking his eyes against feathery snowflakes. The sky showed a black contorted mass of flakes. Alec gripped his arm. “Hold still!”

Something blacker than the night swayed above their heads. Redfern made out a squat shape gyrating at the end of a ladder whipping in pendulum swings. He gasped. Alec’s gun snouted up.

A squeaky, rustly voice chirruped, “Hey! Alec!”

Before either man could say anything a bull bellow rolled down the alleyway toward them. Redfern snapped his gaze to the end of the alley.

A figure in a long raincoat charged toward them. It wore a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over its face; but in the alley lighting Redfern could clearly see twin pits of scarlet where a face should be. He saw two hands lifted, two hands with scarlet-tipped claws and scales shimmering in the erratic snow-laden light.

“A Trug!”

Alec hauled Redfern to one side. The Colt went off in a series of rippling smashes like a cabinet of crockery falling down.

The Trug jerked but came on. It screeched high and viciously, like a punctured steam-boiler.

The small bouncing shape at the end of the ladder chirruped again, frantically. It swung down.

“Alec! You know better’n to tickle a Trug!” The bottom rungs of the ladder whipped across the snow. “Broken branches, Alec! Grab the ladder!”

The ladder lashed around like a live thing. Alec got his left hand to it and fired his last round at the bellowing Trug. The automatic disappeared into his pocket with wizard-like speed. He hauled the ladder across and hoisted himself up.

“Quick, Scobie!” he shouted.

Redfern grabbed the bottom rung, the metal cold to his hand. He felt the ladder start to rise. He kicked frantically at the ground and his foot slipped; he got the other hand on the rung, then he was being hoisted up into the air, swinging like a puppet.

Above him Alec clung to the ladder. “Away then, Moke!” he called up.

The cold bit into Redfern’s fingers. His weight dragged down on his arms, his racket and sneakers vanishing below, his arms straightening and feeling as though they were being pulled from their sockets.

The Trug danced below vengefully. It tipped its head up and twin spots of feral fire burned up.

Redfern felt himself slipping.

Those long talons below, that massive beast with its claws and its savage fury, raked at him. The cloth of his trouser leg tore at a vicious swipe.

He slipped more.

He couldn’t hold on. With a despairing cry he felt his fingers slip from the cold rung.

Helplessly he started to plunge down to the maddened beast below.

II

His feet hit the Trug’s head.

For a ludicrous insane moment of time he half balanced there like a crazy acrobat in a lunatic circus.

Up the alleyway two more monstrous raincoated forms plunged toward him. He caught the baleful fire from the shadowed caverns where their faces should be.

In the instant before he toppled he heard two voices above him.

A man’s voice, incisive, controlled: “Put us through, Sarah!”

And a girl’s, breathless yet unflurried: “We’re right in the Gate—but the Trug!”

Then, as he fell toward the snow, he heard Alec’s grizzly growl: “Damn the Trug! There are more coming! Put us through, Sarah!”

He felt a lurch as his feet slid from the Trug’s powerfully sloped shoulders. He tried to get his hands up to break the fall as he hit the snow—and he felt them smash into a hard interlacing tracery of tree branches. Leaves whipped at his face. His foot slipped from a branch and he fetched up against a crotch of the tree with a jarring thump.

Below him the Trug bellowed madly and swung taloned claws at him and slipped away, spinning over backwards as the gross body battered down through branches and leaves. With a diminishing howl the Trug fell clear of the gigantic tree, turning head over heels, the floppy hat spinning free, and vanished into a mat of growing tendrils below.

Scobie Redfern, for an incredible instant of self-disappointment, thought he’d gone mad.

“You all right, Scobie?”

He looked up at the hail.

“What?” He swallowed and started again. “What happened? Where… ?”

“It’s all right, Scobie.” The ladder dropped down, sliding on the tree branch. “Grab that and climb up.” Alec swung the ladder towards him. “We’ll tell you all about it but first get up here. You look as though you might fall off any second.”

Shakily, not believing, Redfern climbed up. Alec was sitting on a neat little wooden platform built in the angle of two branches and the trunk. Slowly Redfern took in the scene. His head ached. He felt hot and flushed and his overcoat suffocated him. It was hot.

“It’s quite a jolt, Alec,” said the girl, smiling at Redfern. He hadn’t quite got the composure to smile back, not just yet. She was small and alive, with honey-colored hair smooth and well-cared for, and a soft innocent face. She wore an outrageous zigzag striped emerald and orange and red psychedelic dress.

“Just take your time, Scobie,” said the man. He looked even stranger, wearing a very tight pepper-and-salt suit and a big black floppy hat. His hair, when he pulled the hat off to fan himself, was a crisply shining white. His face, lined and careworn, showed clear indications of a life spent absorbing life’s lessons. “I’m David Macklin, and this is Sarah.”

Redfern swallowed again. “You seem to have saved our lives.”

Alec laughed.

“Damn right. I had an idea there was a Portal around there; but—”

“But why didn’t you—” interrupted Sarah.

“The flaming radio went on the blink!” Alec said indignantly.

Redfern sagged back. Alongside the wooden platform a small oval plate of some shining metal hung in midair. Set atop the central area were six seats with a glassed-in cover and a control podium at the front. From the miraculously supported plate hung the ladder. As he looked Redfern saw a small creature hop up into view and swing with incredible effortless overhand grips from hanging branches and vines to alight with a bent-knee crouch on the platform.

“The Trug went into a Snapper Orchid,” he said with evident satisfaction.

Redfern gaped at him. His body was barely four feet from head to toes; but each arm must have been all of the same length. As he crouched he wrapped his arms about him in a fantastic winding motion. He was dressed in a brown and green camouflage jacket, and a yellow breechclout. Gold studs glinted on a belt around his waist and from the belt hung a Colt forty-five in a holster, a machete in a wicker scabbard, and a high-quality Kodak thirty-five millimeter still camera. His face, like that of a debauched pug dog’s, all squashed nose and wrinkled lips and big shining eyes, twisted into a chuckle.

“You’re a blood-thirsty little devil, Moke,” said Macklin. But he looked relieved at the news.

“Is he… ?” Redfern said. “Is he real?”

Moke snorted a wheezing laugh of good-natured contempt. Sarah tittered. Alec, watching Redfern’s face, said, “Moke is as human as any human, only he’s a brachiating human—and highly intelligent and deadly in his own dimension. Don’t let him fool you—and don’t get into a game of craps with him.” He glared at Moke. “He cheats.”

“A fine friend you are, Alec. Now what chance do I have of making a quick buck?”

“And, as you’ll notice,” said Sarah, “he’s picked up a few snide Americanisms that he thinks make him a real—”

“Dimension,” said Redfern. “Dimension?”

“This world,” said Macklin, indicating the treetops and the forest and the intertwining branches, the blue sky and brilliant sunshine, “this dimension, parallel universe, other world, what someone used to call noncongruent reality until we pointed out that it—and all of the dimensions—are very congruent. Extremely so.”

“You’ll get used to it, Scobie,” said Sarah in her soft voice. “But you and Alec were lucky we managed to pick up enough of a fix on Alec’s radio to pinpoint you. We nipped through the Portal, picked you up and then nipped back—”

“Trug and all,” said Alec grimly.

“And,” offered Macklin as though commenting on the state of the weather, “the Contessa will rapidly discover that Gate and she’ll be through—or one of her alter egos will—muy pronto.”

“So?”

“So we have to move. I fancy none of us wishes another close introduction to her Trugs.”

Shivering in the hot sunshine, Redfern gave a vehement “No!”

Then, as though in some way breaking through an impalpable barrier of unbelief, he said, “But where is this?”

“There are many dimensions,” said David Macklin. He stepped onto the floating oval and settled in one of the seats. The others followed, Redfern with a little jolt of apprehension as he stepped from the platform onto the swaying oval plate, and Alec went automatically to the control console.

“This is a skimmer,” Alec said, glancing at Redfern. “Comes from a parallel world called Altinum. Nice place…”

“But here!”

Macklin chuckled as Alec sent the skimmer smoothly away from the giant trees and over the mat of branches and leaves intertwined below. Above them the blue sky shone with heat and Redfern loosened his collar, his overcoat already discarded in an untidy heap at his feet.

“This is Moke’s home world. His people live pretty comfortably among the trees. Place called Myrcinus, although we know only this island, which is about as large as Australia. There are Gateways—Portals—between the dimensions; and if you have the key”—he glanced fondly at Sarah —”why, then, you can travel between the worlds.”

“I’m a Porteur, Scobie,” said Sarah. “Sometimes it’s a curse; but mostly it’s a kind of extra privilege for being alive.”

Slowly, Redfern said, “It’s unbelievable; but I have to believe because a moment ago I was in New York in the snow and now I’m here, skimming over a forest, in the sunshine.” He squinted up his eyes. “That’s an improvement, anyway.”

“That’s more like it, Scobie,” growled Alec jovially.

“Unfortunately,” Macklin went on. “Our little scheme for discomfitting the Contessa misfired. Now we have to get back to Earth through another Portal, one of our regular ones, and think again. You were lucky, Alec.”

Alec snorted. “I left Tom nicely set up and he should be all right.”

“Oh, I hope so!” said Sarah, on a little gasp.

“Contessa,” said Redfern. “You mentioned the name before. Who—”

They all started to speak, then stopped to let David Macklin say with heavy emphasis: “The Contessa Perdita Francesca Cammachia di Montevarchi. It would be a solecism to call her a—”

“—a bitch!” flashed Sarah.

“—but she is a very dangerous woman. She runs most of a dimension called Irunium, and a lot else besides, and between us there is no love lost.” He paused as he said that and shook his head, then finished: “Be very careful if you have any dealings with her, Scobie, which I sincerely trust you never will.”

“She possesses unholy charm, and power, and a host of willing and unwilling tools and agents and slaves. The Trugs you have already met.” Alec shot the skimmer in a long, swerving curve to avoid a taller growth protruding from the forest. A few birds plummeted away to the side. “There are her Honshi guards, hissing devils, and her personal bargemen, and the poor creatures she keeps slaving for her in her jewel mines. You keep clear of the Montevarchi, Scobie.”

This packet of information might have bemused Redfern, but he clearly saw that everything he could learn would be vital to him if he was to stay not only alive but sane in these strange dimensions. He believed it all, now. He’d be a blind fool to do otherwise. Every name, every fact, must be carefully stored away in his mind.

Producing a map of New York city, Macklin studied it, concentrating. Redfern saw the familiar blocks and streets and avenues with a pang. Scattered across the map, small red crosses winked in the sunshine.

“Here, I think, Sarah,” Macklin said, shoving the map across to the girl, his manicured fingernail indicating a red cross in the West Seventies area.

She nodded. “And Moke can take the skimmer back home.”

Moke chirruped and went back to tossing a couple of dice in his incredibly muscled hands. His body was covered with a very fine fur of a reddish-brown tint, like a red squirrel’s. He seemed to be enjoying the ride.

“Yes.” Alec nodded. “Give my love to Miff.”

“She’ll be glad to see you home safe and sound,” Sarah said, a little wistfully.

Macklin looked up from the map and smiled. “Fezius will be all right, Sarah. Nothing can hurt that little bundle of energy.”

“I know. At least, I think I do. But he’s been gone a long time, and Offa said—”

“—Offa and Fezius couldn’t be beaten by a regiment, and well you know it. Now concentrate on smelling out that Portal. I need a drink.”

Redfern realized that these people had picked him up in the middle of some great scheme. He liked them. He liked the way they handled themselves. He led a lonely life marooned in New York, both his parents still insisting on staying in Cross Plains, and his own wandering succession of jobs had made him no permanent friends. He felt the stirrings of wonder that perhaps he had at last found people with whom he could feel friendly on a basis other than self-interest.

He had had one or two girls in his short lovelife, but he remained acutely aware that he wasn’t prepared for any girl to dictate to him. When he married—if he married—he would do so of his own volition. No girl could expose her charms and throw herself at him and expect a meal ticket for the rest of her life; not from Scobie Redfern.

Suddenly, breaking into his train of thought, Sarah sat up as though goosed.

“They’re near!” she exclaimed.

At once an air of taut expectancy engulfed them all. Redfern, not knowing what was going on or what to expect, felt exposed and alone. Alec kept his left hand on the controls and with his right took out his automatic. He had reloaded back on the platform. Moke, too, drew his gun. They looked about in the bright sunshine.

The skimmer swerved to avoid another upflung clump of trees. As they skidded around the waving greenery another skimmer leaped from the shadows. Larger than their own and with plating in place of a glass canopy, the floating oval looked somehow menacing to Redfern.

Alec shouted and sent the skimmer headlong for the shelter of the trees.

Moke began shooting back, holding the gun in both hands.

From orifices in the metal walling of the pursuing skimmer a bright pink light glowed in stuttering bursts. That pink radiance spiraled across the gap, passed just above them as Alec forced their skimmer down toward the trees below. Redfern smelled a skin-chilling aroma of burning wool. He gagged.

“It’s the Montevarchi’s hellions, all right,” growled Alec. He flung the skimmer about the sky. Between the bursts of spiraling pink destruction they plummeted for the trees.

“Thank your lucky stars they’re not Porvone!” Macklin yelled, holding onto his seat, the map tucked between his knees, his floppy hat jammed over his forehead. “At least the Contessa isn’t as bad as them!”

They were going to make shelter. The branches and leaves leaped up at them. Then a pink glow burst about the rear of the skimmer. It jolted as though struck by an antitank shell. It turned over.

Redfern glimpsed the thick tree branch smashing up at him. He put out both hands in panic reaction. The branch swept in like an ogre’s club. He hit—and blacked out.

III

A foot kicked him in the ribs and he knew the whole mad episode had not been a dream.

He groaned. His head hurt all down one side where he’d smashed into the branch and when he put his hand up it touched dried blood. The foot kicked again. He sat up and tried to unglue his eyes. He felt awful. Now his whole head ached, and his body, too, and his mouth tasted as though he’d just gone through a full extraction.

“Get up and get in line!”

The voice sounded sibilant, menacing, unpleasant.

This time Scobie Redfern got his eyes open and stared blearily at the legs and feet that had been kicking him. They were standing on a tiled floor and he caught the scrape and hum of other people all about; but his vision blurred at the edges. The right foot lifted again. The shoes were dark tan and particolored cream, vulgar and ugly.

Redfern grabbed the foot as it swept in and pulled.

He jerked a man’s body down on top of him. He reached around and sank his fist into something soft and heard a foul Neapolitan oath; then, for the second time, a hard and unyielding length of wood laid itself alongside his head and he blacked out.

When he came around again he lay in darkness on a foul-smelling bed of straw. As he groaned and tried to move a man’s hand steadied his shoulder and a voice, speaking English with an odd semi-Italian accent, said, “Hold steady. Take your time.”

A water pannikin touched his lips with a grateful chill and he drank deeply. The water tasted of iron. Then he fell back again, into the darkness, this time to sleep more naturally. He woke twice more after that and was vaguely aware of being sick. Then it was lighter, with a wan sunbeam falling through a high grated window onto a stone cell, straw beds, and four men, hard-faced, who stared down> at him with expressions he could not understand.

“You’ll be all right now. We washed your head.”

He groaned. “Water—” he managed to croak out.

He drank from the pannikin again. The iron taste was more pronounced. Then he realized he wore only a pair of gray shorts. He pushed the water away and drops fell over his bare chest.

“What… ?” he said. His tongue felt overlarge. “Where… ?”

“The Honshi threw you in here. We took your clothes off—they stank. Rest up. Breakfast will be here soon. Then you’ll work with us.”

The man who spoke, dark-faced, haggard, with a wild shock of black hair, seemed on edge. He kept looking at the barred and grilled door of stained wood set between crude stone architraves. Outside the door and muffled by its thickness, the sound of people moving, of horses, or machinery, brought a sense of the mysterious, the fearful, to Redfern.

Where the hell was he, anyway?

“Alec?” he asked. “Macklin?”

“The Valcini picked you up in some dimension or other and brought you here. You’re working for the Contessa now.”

He slumped back.

Working for the Contessa!

After all his newly found friends of the dimensions had told him! He knew with a deep and terrible fear that he was in deadly trouble—trouble he might never escape from for the rest of his life. For, of course, he guessed what had happened.

“Only me?” he croaked. “No one else?”

“No one.”

Breakfast was brought by a fearful half-naked girl with wicked eyes and matted hair and dirty feet. She spat as one of the men tried to grab her playfully, and kicked him in the stomach. He doubled up, laughing and gagging at the same time. Breakfast was porridge and bread. Surprising himself, Redfern ate hungrily. Someone had washed his wounded head carefully and after a time the ache muted to a bearable level. Soon after that the Honshi came for them.

Hustled out, Redfern cringed from the guards.

The Honshi shoving him forward was not human. Five feet six inches tall and standing on squat bent legs, the thing possessed a face like a frog’s, with widely spaced eyes and flat wedge-shaped cheeks, gray and yellow, with a lick of blue about the chops. He wore reddish armor and a tall conical helmet from the tip of which floated a string with three or four scraps of hair attached. They meant nothing to Redfern. He scrambled along, prodded by a sharp spear-point.

Other Honshi guards were shepherding other men and women along. Most of them wore gray tunics or gray shirts and trousers. Through stone corridors they went, gradually going deeper, until the air clung dankly about them.

When at last they reached a square chamber cut from the rock the men and women, quite naturally, began to strip off their clothes. At an ungentle prod from a Honshi, Redfern took off his shorts. No one took any notice of him. The Honshi loosened their armor, then went forward to stand carefully over the men and women as an old man with scant white hair handed out pickaxes and shovels. Redfern took a pickax and hefted it.

A girl—a slip of a thing with livid weals scoring her yellow flanks and a crop of black hair—saw him and shook her head.

A Honshi guard half-drew his leaf-shaped sword.

Redfern swallowed and lowered the pick.

That was the beginning of a term of hard labor during which he discovered muscles the Canadian mining camp had overlooked, and grew and regrew the skin on the palms of his hands. His back ached. He shone with sweat. His head buzzed. For what seemed a very long time he hacked at the walls and roof, bringing down showers of rock and glinting shards of crystal, which were immediately swept up by the shovelers into wicker baskets to be taken away on the backs of sweating girls. About every hour or so they halted for a ten minute breather and a waterskin was passed around, the thick iron-tasting water like nectar.

The first day passed. He slept like a drugged man in the cell. The second day passed. And the third. A week went by. Now he could swing the pick with more skill and less effort. But the never-ending labor went on and on and on. He saw at least six men and women fall and be dragged out by the ankles.

On shift no one had the breath or spirit to talk much. Mere grunts to exchange orders or information were all he came by. In the cell the men slept and then talked desultorily. They came from different dimensions and all spoke either Italian or English.

Once a nattily-dressed man in fawn slacks and shirt, with two-tone shoes, came down to see how they were getting on. His dark hair shone sleekly in the strung lights.

Obo, the man who had washed Redfern’s head and who seemed to have more spirit left than the others, grunted a hard, hating word: “Valcini!”

The labor went on. Now Redfern understood they were digging out gems. A fantastic pipe of diamonds lay in the rocky ground. They would spend years before they scratched the surface of it. And the labor continued.

Then, one incredible day, after shift, Obo said gruffly: “We are going to escape. A few of us. We need men who are strong and who have not lost their spirit. Will you join us?”

Redfern’s first reaction was one of absolute astonishment. Escape? The thought had hardly left his mind; but he had seen no way at all to implement it.

He nodded. “Of course. And I’ll kill a Honshi—or a Valcini—if I have to.”

Obo’s thick lips writhed in a rictus of a smile.

“Tomorrow, then. Tony has found his Porteur. There are others: Gait, Carlo, Nyllee. They have provisions and guns.”

“Guns! Well…” For all his boastful words, the impact of guns and what he had said unsettled Redfern. He’d never had much time for soldiers, and guns had always seemed offensive. Even Alec and his forty-five had somehow failed to change Redfern’s attitude. But he could target-shoot, liked firing off an air rifle, in fact…

The others in the cell scarcely bothered to look at Redfern and Obo. Their spirit had been crushed. Redfern thought of the punishments he had seen meted out, uncaring beating, kickings, men and women hounded to death. Yes, these people who were escaping would be very special people.

Next morning after breakfast when the Honshi guard came for them Obo gave the signal. Redfern leaped to the thing’s back and clamped his arms about its neck. He felt the thing’s harsh skin and repugnance welled in him. It stank. Then Obo had seized the Honshi’s spear and driven hard into its belly. The body slumped to the floor. The others in the cell began crying and waving their arms, panic-stricken.

Outside the door Obo led Redfern through the gathering slaves. They kept their clothes on and headed fast in the opposite direction, a way Redfern had never gone. At an arched doorway a Honshi barred their way.

Obo waved the spear at him and said swiftly, “Special orders.” Then, as the Honshi wavered, he pushed the spear in.

They rushed up the corridor.

The rock-cut walls gradually gave way to hard-packed earth. The corridors branched and rebranched. A smell of mustiness, of disuse, grew stronger. Four or five other people in gray tunics joined them. One gave Obo a pack, which he immediately slung on his back. Later a pack was handed to Redfern, and Obo said: “Gait says one of his men couldn’t make it. Killed yesterday. You’ll take his place.”

They entered a square room into which six tunnel mouths opened. Twenty or so people jammed in, carrying packs, with spears and swords and, so Redfern saw, some with rifles.

He didn’t know any of them, and felt himself very much of an intruder. But he wanted out of this ghastly hellhole of a mine in Irunium, and he’d take his chances along with these people. One or two looked at him with a sharp and quizzical glance, as though they thought he might be a Valcini spy.

A man said in a crackly voice, “Where’s Tony? The Honshi will be after us soon.”

“I’ll die before I go back!” shouted an old woman whose presence surprised Redfern until a man put an arm around her, hushing and comforting her. So that was one reason why they’d asked him: he was young and strong and unattached.

A commotion began at one of the tunnel mouths. Four people had run in, the leader a young man waving a pistol. His face, thin and with a sharply pointed nose and narrow mouth, showed his excitement. A haze of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and his light sandy coloring, gave him a fresh boyish look.

The girl with him had been tightened up into the same excited expectancy. Her brown hair shone under the lights and her pleasant, cheerful round face with its snub nose and saucy expression contained an inner radiance of absolute determination. She stared around eagerly. A bright scarlet flower nestled behind her ear.

“That’s Tony, and the Porteur, Val,” Obo said. He glared at the other two men. One was a fat Valcini. The other a man wearing a gray shirt and slacks. “But those two—”

Tony propelled the Valcini and the other man in with his pistol. “Val thinks it’s here, right enough!” he shouted. The crowding people fell silent. Here, they all knew, lay their fate. “These two Valcini must be dealt with—”

“Hold on!” interrupted the other man violently. “I’m not a Valcini! I’m just an engineer—”

Then the people, swaying and moving in the square room, blocked Redfern’s vision and the man suddenly stopped speaking. The girl, Val, the one they called a Porteur, suddenly shouted in triumph. She pointed down a narrow mine shaft that seemed abandoned and crumbling. A rope hung down into the darkness.

“Down there,” Obo said to Redfern. “Our way into another world! Our escape, away from all this!”

One after another, the men and women, shouldering their packs, slid down the rope. Some carried lights and these flashed and sparked, hurling scurrying shadows on the walls and ceiling. The girl sat at the lip of the shaft and stared down. Her face puckered as she concentrated. A gathering of power fused in her face and all the immaturity, all the round cheerfulness, all the saucy piquance had gone as though her face had never held any other expression than this taut hypnotic gaze.

The lights slithering down the shaft spurted and then, weirdly, one after the other, died. It was like throwing lighted matches into a pool.

“We’re getting away from this accursed place,” whispered Tony. “The Valcini, the Honshi, all the vermin! We’re getting away through a Gate into a new, fresh, clean world—a world where we can set up our own people, get back home, begin a new life!”

Obo pushed Redfern toward the shaft. Tony was speaking savagely to the two Valcini, waving his gun, exalted.

Redfern heard something about Gates through the dimensions, about finding a new world, a world better than this one. He grasped the rope, rough and prickly even to his callused hands. He was not one of these people, yet he was prepared to jump down an abandoned mineshaft and trust in them. The last thing he heard was Tony shouting, “We don’t want your scum defacing our new world!”

He fell down the shaft.

The lights above whirled away. His shoulder struck the wall painfully. The rope sizzled past. He struck bottom.

For a moment he couldn’t understand where he was. Then, immediately, he was falling again in a white smother. Cold struck through to him cruelly. He was tumbling head over heels, plunging down a snow slope with clouds and sheets of snow billowing all about his helpless body.

The cold shattered him.

Someone grabbed his arm, hauled him up. Men and women, shouting, screaming, surged about.

Overhead a leaden ominous sky hung lowering over them. Snow whirled down. The cold was so intense he felt his body curling and shriveling. Snow smothered everything.

“Where the hell are we?” a man shouted.

“This world—it’s not the world we expected!” Someone screamed in his ear. “We’ve got to stop them coming through. Tell Val!”

Upslope a body abruptly materialized from nothing.

Tony fell asprawl into this new world, colliding with those who were trying to climb up, bringing them all down in a white avalanche.

“We’ll freeze to death here! There’s no shelter!”

Frantically Redfern looked about. Surely, surely, for the love of God, he was back in New York! He must be. The cold struck him far more cruelly than he remembered from that last night in Manhattan; and yet he must be back home. He just had to be!

And yet all around him stretched bleak nothingness. No lights, no traffic, no buildings and skyscrapers, no New York. Instead a waste of white emptiness and a howling, searing wind and a billowing, never-ending blizzard howled down on him like flaying knives in the hands of demons from the frozen levels of hell.

Men tried to climb back up the slope, slipped and fell.

Val appeared, tumbled down, sat up with snow on her hair and her face. She stared about, appalled.

“What happened?”

Val’s face broke. “We can’t go back!” she screamed, looking back up the slope. “Hundreds of Honshi guards—Valcini—they burst in as I jumped! We’ve got to stay here!”

“But we can’t! We’ll freeze to death!”

“Freeze here—or go back to be shot or tortured to death! Which?”

IV

Scobie Redfern’s teeth chattered. His skin felt numbed and flayed off his bones, his breath steamed out like an ancient steam loco riding a savage grade. Men and women around him were breaking out their bundles and taking out coats, blankets, scarves, anything to wrap around themselves against the freezing air and swirling snow.

Something—everything—had gone disastrously wrong.

“We’ve got to get back!”

Tony stared back up the snow slope, his face a misery of despair. Val clung to him, panting, her face taut and white and panicky.

“We can’t! There were Honshi and Valcini—they’ll cut us down!”

A large-bodied man with a short but intensely black and thick beard shouldered across. He dragged a blanket around his shoulders, already white beneath a burden of snow. His eyes showed hatred and cunning and anger.

“Is there another Gate, Val? For Arlan’s sake! Be quick, girl!” He spoke English thickly, accented.

She shook her head sickly, shivering. She clasped her arms around herself, shuddering.

“There might be, Gait! They tend to cluster—but the cold! The cold! I can’t sense—can’t think…”

Tony gripped one arm, the strong bearded man the other. They shook her, pleading. And all the time the breath poured in white clouds from their mouths and noses and the cruel cold cut into them like flaying knives.

“I’ll try!” she screamed. “Let me sense!”

They stopped shaking her. Other people crowded around, shaking and shivering and frightened. The snow blew in sheets over them so that their eyebrows grew white and their eyelids kept blinking away the clinging crystals.

A woman upslope of the main mass screamed. She pointed. Peering through the thickly whirling flakes, Redfern saw Honshi appearing from nowhere. Their flat faces, crowned by the tall helmets with their enigmatic scraps of swinging hair, showed a frog-eyed fright at this unexpected whiteness.

Gait snarled deep in his throat and threw up his rifle. His blanket slipped off in a white smother. Savagely he fired. The Honshi scattered. A Valcini group came through, their fawn slacks and shirts as much protection against the cold as the gray tunics of the escapers. Gunfire broke out. Blood stained the snow.

Redfern felt a cringing nakedness. His fear took a fresh turn; a feeling of intense exaltation, as of a superior order of drunkenness, took possession of him. He saw the Honshi trying to encircle them through the snowflakes and the Valcini upslope firing down. He saw and heard a girl at his side suddenly collapse like a dropped sack, the gurgle in her throat chopped off. He heard the cracks of rifle bullets passing near him. He saw Tony shooting his little popgun up toward the Valcini. He saw men and women falling into the snow.

A man shouted and bent toward the fallen girl. As he bent he must have been hit, for he continued on down until he sprawled limply in the snow, half on the girl. His rifle slipped from a relaxing hand.

Without thinking, Redfern snatched up the rifle. It appeared to be a bolt-action breech-loader in the style of the U.S. Springfield of World War I vintage, a .30 caliber. He lifted it to his shoulder, holding the wooden stock gingerly, feeling the fiery cold bite of the metal. Obo swung up his spear to throw and then jerked up, back, and forward; he dropped the spear and fell headlong into the snow.

“Obo!” shouted Redfern violently. He pressed the trigger.

Clearly he saw a Honshi stumble as though kicked in the stomach and fall in a shower of snow.

He pressed the trigger again and the pin clicked.

Ripping open the bolt again he bent over the dead man. Obo didn’t move. He was dead, too. Cartridges lay in clips in a pouch strapped to a belt around the man’s waist. The speed with which Redfern tore out a reload and slammed the clip into the magazine astounded him. He snapped the bolt shut and started firing upslope. Through the snow he could make out the Valcini firing and he lined up for a quick shot. As he fired the Valcini at whom he aimed vanished.

“They’re going back through the Gate!” howled Gait. He waved his rifle triumphantly. “We’ve beaten them off!”

Surprising himself, Redfern growled: “They’re leaving us here to die!”

“They’ll be after us with full protection,” Gait said.

Val surged forward, her face alight. “There is a nodal point, Gait! I sense it—out there, across the ice!”

Tony clasped a hand to his left arm and blood seeped over his fingers. His thin face looked shrunken with shock.

“We can’t hold out much longer…” he mumbled.

“Lead on, Val! Quickly! Find that Portal before we all freeze to death!”

Val led them out onto the ice and they all began to slip and slither across the ice sheet, where the wind cut away the snow to reveal black ice, hard and treacherous. Only eleven of them made it. The others had been killed in that brief but murderous gun battle.

“I didn’t learn to be a Porteur and then escape from the Contessa to die like this,” Val said staunchly.

Without compunction Redfern took the blanket from the shoulders of the man who lay sprawled across the body of the girl. He unbuckled the ammunition belt and lashed it around his own waist, drawing it up tight. A bayonet swung from the left side, thwacking into his thigh.

He started after the others.

This wasn’t New York. In all the welter of action he knew now that he had to stick with these people.

Irunium was not for him.

The dimension of these people, now, Montrado: that sounded as though it might be, from the little he had heard, the place for him. At least until he could get back to Earth —the real Earth…

Breathing became an agony. His feet slipped on the ice. He caught up with the others and put his left arm around Tony, who sagged back with a surprised and grateful look. Together, they struggled on.

Wind whipped the snow in long jagged lines that scythed into the little party. Up ahead Val plunged on. More than once Redfern had to stop to help a staggering girl, an overloaded man. In a bunch, heads bowed against the bitterness that howled all about them, they trudged across the snow and ice.

He bumped into Gait. People’s faces showed scoured and white, their eyes feverish, their lips filmed with ice. They glared in desperate hope as Val turned slowly, sensing.

Her face showed that deep, fierce determination all mixed up with fear.

Now she stopped. Her body arched, rigidly. She crooned softly to herself. Then she spoke as though from a trance. “It is here! But small, small and difficult! And I am tired…”

“You’ve got to do it, Val!” Gait pleaded. “You’ve got to—” He pushed a woman forward. Her slight body trembled with fear and cold. “Where does it go?”

“I’m not sure—how can I tell?” Val’s eyes opened wider. Her lips parted. Snow drove mercilessly into her upturned face. “It could be—no! No, I do not know—”

“All right, then!” Gait held the woman, comforting her with one thick arm around her waist. “I’ll go first! Put me through and give me a few seconds, then pull me back. Quickly, now, or we are all lost.”

Like the quenching of a flame, Gait disappeared. Val panted, her body tense and vibrant—then Gait reappeared. He now held his rifle across his body, up and pointing.

“It seems all right!” He shuddered as the cold bit in anew. “Rocks and sun and sand. No snow—”

“Put us through!” yelled Tony from the crook of Redfern’s arm.

Gait vanished. Tony vanished. The thin woman vanished. One by one, the escapers were sent through the dimensions to another world. All Redfern felt as he transmitted was a sudden, quickly over, fragmentary twitch.

Then he was standing in a rocky bowl with the sunshine pouring down, the wonderful, warming, heartening, altogether gorgeous sunshine thawing out his frozen body.

Val came through last. The snow on their blankets and scarves and tunics began to melt, thawed, ran in rivulets of shining water to darken the rocks and dry into nothingness.

Redfern licked his lips. They hurt.

“Water,” he said. “Maybe…”

Gait nodded curtly. “Some of you stay here. You stay, Val. The rest of us will recce.” His English, accented and heavy, coped with the language problem. Some of the others spoke Italian, some French. They did not all, Redfern learned, come from Montrado. They shared the languages used by the Valcini. Getting them all home to their various worlds would pose a problem.

Maybe, Redfern thought with a sour jolt, maybe he never would get back to his own Earth.

He went with Gait and four others, two men and two girls. They climbed a narrow dusty track between the encircling rocks of the bowl until they came out onto the flat top of a boulder that must have been spewed up in a volcanic nightmare in dark primeval days.

“If this is all desert…” Then Gait chopped that off. Away on the horizon, clearly visible in the dry air, stretched a mountain range and, at its foot, green and bright, lay a vast wooded and grassland area, shining and welcoming.

A shout of triumph brought the others up. Val had bandaged Tony’s arm and he seemed in better shape; the bullet had exited from the wound and the bone had not been broken. He carried his arm in a sling with a slightly raffish air.

A girl with red hair and a heavy doughy face looked and started, then relaxed. “For a moment,” she said in a choked voice, “for a moment I thought this was .y own world, Narlingha. If only it had been!”

“We’ll all get back to our own dimensions, Nyllee,” said Gait sturdily, toughly.

“Yes! Oh, yes!” cried many voices.

Redfern caught Val’s eye. She smiled shakily; but a clear thought passed between them, an understanding that it wouldn’t be easy, and that many of these people would never see their own dimensions again.

The small party began the march toward the mountains and the trees.

Gait, strong, undaunted, his black beard thrust ahead, led the way.

The time appeared to be just after noon, for as they walked on Redfern checked the declination of the sun. He was not equipped to define what conditions he should expect in other dimensions; but it seemed logical that gravity and atmosphere and time should parallel. At least, he hoped so. They’d been thrust through into a bitterly cold dimension so, perhaps, they could stumble through into a world of no air, or of multiple suns, or any other catastrophic astronomical combination. After a time he found himself, still half-supporting Tony, marching beside Val.

She smiled at him.

Her round saucy face had regained its cheekiness; her hazel eyes lit on him with a warmth he found very comforting. Beneath the gray tunic her body showed contours that promised litheness and strength. She strode along with a fine free swing.

“You are from the Earth I have heard called Terra?”

He nodded. “And Montrado?”

She lit up as memory sparked her words. “It’s a wonderful world! Full of light and sunshine and clean air; where I live is a beach ten miles long of the most golden, clean, shining sand you can imagine. Oh, I miss Montrado!”

“How’d you get here, then? I mean, to Irunium,” he added.

She made a face.

“A holiday group on the sands… a little ship sailed in, so friendly, so calm. Men jumped out of the ship, came toward us. We struggled; but we were captured.” She drew a breath at this memory, her hazel eyes darkening. “We didn’t understand what was happening. Then, when we were out to sea, we, the ship, the sea—”

“They Porteured us through to another dimension,” interrupted Tony, the venom in his voice overriding his pain. “We saw another sea, another shore. We were frightened.”

“Then, after a long time, we were Porteured through another Gate, and taken to a strange city. We saw… things. After that they took us through to Irunium.”

Redfern at once saw problems. “So you didn’t come straight here from Montrado? I mean to Irunium, of course. There must have been a reason for that.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “And I know. I had been studying to be a language philosopher—what you’d call, I believe, a philologist.” She pronounced the words perfectly and yet, like a strange tang to an unknown fruit, the English words she used all held that indefinable alienness. “I was dismayed to be told that I, too, possessed this horrible power of sending people through the dimensions; it had lain dormant in me, as it does in many people, unknown to them all their lives. So I was trained by the Contessa and her scientists. I learned that all dimensions are not interconnected; you have to go through one or two, sometimes more, before you can reach the one for which you are aiming.”

“Like a maze.”

She nodded unhappily. A little wind scudded over the sere plains. The mountains did not appear appreciably nearer. The afternoon wore on. Redfern’s feet began to ache.

“I was studying the philosophy of Arlan,” said Tony dully. “Gait—he is a great man!—he was our professor. Through the disciplines of Arlan one can attain perfect contentment and orientation so that no mundane influences can ever distress the inner personality.” He laughed bitterly. “Arlan seems a long way away now.”

“And these others?” Redfern asked.

“Some are our fellow students. Others we made friends with in the mines, or the workshops, or the slave-centers run by the Contessa. There were men from your world, too, Scobie; but none have survived with us now.”

Redfern couldn’t reply to that.

Tony went on: “We planned to break through into another dimension, set up a sanctuary, bring through others, then set out to find our way back to Montrado. Val was learning more and more of being a Porteur—”

“I was learning, all right!”

“When she knew enough to sense for a Portal, we thought we could make a break. We gathered in the old disused mines and waited. When Val escaped the training college—”

“Training college!” Redfern exclaimed, startled.

Val shivered. “The Contessa runs things very well, very highly organized. She catches people from many dimensions and when she comes across a potential Porteur, like me, she. sends them to her college. They are trained to work for her.”

Another thought occurred to him—rather, it shocked through his brain like a laser beam: everyone wanted to return to his own dimension. Now they trudged toward the mountains and water and shelter following Gait, striding out ahead, tough and commanding. And yet—and yet it was Val who was the important person. She, and she alone, possessed the power to transfer them back home. She was their key to the dimensions. Val for him was the key to Earth, and to herself and Tony and Gait she was the key to Montrado.

The thought of those bullets cracking about her head, of the perils of the snow and ice, of the unknown dangers that lay ahead, made him sweat. If anything happened to her they were all marooned!

There and then Scobie Redfern made up his mind to keep a very careful, a very paternal, a very comradely eye on Val. But yes.

A bright glitter as of the sun reflecting from a crystal facet winked from the base of the trees, blinked and vanished.

They moved on, exclaiming about the flash of light, wondering, watching for a recurrence of the phenomenon. Twice more the light flashed, like the sun shining on a moving polished surface.

Two men and a girl stopped moving forward. They formed a lonely trio, off to one side, staring dubiously ahead. Smaller than the average and with thick bodies and short stumpy legs, they came from some dimension unknown to the others. Their hair, black and lank, hung down in plaits tied with straw. None of them carried a rifle, but the men held long barbed spears; a thin dagger glinted at the girl’s waist. They spoke together in a thick gobbling language, then their leader, a man called Thusro, called across to Gait, who was impatiently motioning them forward.

“There are inimical powers there,” Thusro said in a strongly accented English. “Bad forces. We do not wish to go that way.”

“We’ve got to keep together!” Gait said determinedly.

“Then come with us,” said the girl, her thick lips shining, her eyes fearful.

A sense of unease spread among the group.

Tony held his wounded arm in the sling, his body heavy against Redfern. He said, “I can’t walk much further. We’ve got to go straight ahead, the shortest way. There will be water, shelter, food in the woods.”

“No!” shouted Thusro. He shook his spear. “Ahead lies danger and death!”

A thin woman with white hair and a fragile face, her eyes large and gray and filled with pain, swayed. “I cannot walk for long,” she sighed. “I need rest…”

The remaining man, a strong red-haired youngster with a broad-bladed sword at his side and a Springfield over his back, looked with concern on the white-haired woman and back again to Gait.

“Maybe we ought to rest now and talk—”

“If we split up, Carlo, how are we to get through the dimensions? Val must come with us.” Gait made it strong and confident.

Thusro and his two thick-bodied companions looked sullen. “Val could come with us. She would be safe.”

Gait’s woman, the one with the slight body and the lined face and the trembles, cried, “Val must stay with us! She is of Montrado, like us.”

“Let me do the talking, Mina!” snapped Gait.

The group formed a circle, talking, arguing, trying to reason with one another. Redfern experienced his usual frustration at the inability of men and women to communicate. The lack of understanding was bad enough between people who spoke the same language and lived in the same town; with different languages and different dimensions in conflict, the result was Babel magnified.

“For the sake of Arlan!” shouted Gait over the hubbub. “Listen! Thusro, unless you and your people from Thothtoreth can give us explicit reasons for not taking the shortest way, then we must go straight ahead! Speak up!”

Thusro shook his heavy head.

“I cannot give good reasons. Just that danger is there. We can sense it. We understand these things. We are not bound by the blinkers of science.”

“Science isn’t blinkered!” Redfern had to protest.

The three from Thothtoreth consulted among themselves. Their faces showed clearly the fear they sensed. Then the girl, Pathtee, said, “We cannot go on. We would rather stay and make our home here if Val will not come with us, rather than be disembodied—”

The red-haired youngster, Carlo, lost his color.

“Disembodied?”

Pathtee nodded vigorously. “There is danger ahead. Strange forces that can tear the psyche from the body—”

Gait boomed his laughter.

“Nonsense! We stick together and we rest up and we find another Portal and Val will see us home!”

He waved the party on.

The three from Thothtoreth rebelliously stood their ground. The two men held their long barbed spears loosely swinging forward in their hands. Unobtrusively, Redfern let his rifle slip down into his own hand, and got ready to disengage his left arm from Tony in a hurry. He didn’t like what he saw shaping up.

Imperiously, Val said loudly, “I cannot leave my friends from Montrado. I must stay with them. We welcome all of you. But if anyone wishes to go on alone, then I cannot stop them.”

“I’m sticking with you, Val,” said Redfern levelly.

The red-haired youngster swallowed. He looked at the woman with the white-hair and thin body and tragic eyes. “I don’t know…” he whispered.

She put a hand on his arm. “Carlo. You must not mind me. I must go the shortest way. You owe me no debt.”

As though that was the signal, the three from Thothtoreth began to move away, angling toward the forest, marching off so that they would reach the mountains and sanctuary many miles further along.

Nyllee, the girl with red hair and a doughy face, who carried a Springfield over her shoulder as though it were a broomstick, shouted, “I go with Val! I’ll help you, Mother Haapan. Let Carlo go!”

With a loud inarticulate cry Carlo bounded after the departing three from Thothtoreth. His arms waved. The rifle bounced on his back. The woman, Mother Haapan, set her face into a hard resigned grimace. Nyllee put an arm around her waist.

Gait looked personally offended.

“All right,” he said sturdily. “It’s their funeral. We’ve got time to make up. Let’s go!”

Marching on with the others and with his rifle now slung back over his shoulder, Redfern wondered just whose funeral it was. That guy Thusro, and his two friends, they’d seemed absolutely convinced. Nothing would have taken them any further toward that enigmatic flicker of light among the trees.

Now, three men and four women, the reduced party trekked on toward the promised haven ahead.

The sun sank ever more swiftly toward the horizon as they walked on, tired now and footsore. But they were approaching the woods. Now treetops interposed between them and the mountains, and the foothills were lost in the darkling woodlands.

And then Redfern saw how right the people from Thothtoreth had been and how disastrously wrong were these tired travelers staring on their own destruction.

V

There were two sorts of people: those who drink gin and those who drink whiskey.

Those who drink neither or both didn’t, Scobie Redfern decided soberly, come into this equation.

Gin drinkers tended to be morose, unhappy, put-upon individuals, by and large—and they were seldom by and large as a tribe. Whiskey drinkers tended to be open-handed, free-and-easy and happy, by and large—and they were usually too by and large for this mundane world.

Which was why Scobie Redfern wished he had a nice long Scotch in his hand right now.

The faceted crystals caught the last of the dying light and glowed with a crimson that reminded him of blood. They swung through the trees like Christmas lanterns animated by poltergeists. Quite clearly he caught their aura of hatred.

There could be no doubt about it.

Gait stood with his beard hanging; Val had a hand clapped across her mouth, white-faced and silent; Tony groaned and tried to move, a weak movement that meant nothing; the others watched with horror and loathing.

There could be no doubt about it: from the weaving, dancing crystals there clearly flowed a harsh breath of animosity. Each crystal was about two feet broad on a faceted side. They pirouetted and swung and poured forth the tangible breath of evil.

“Run!” shouted Gait, at last coming to life.

They all knew that running would be useless.

With a coarse epithet about frog’s bowels, Nyllee unslung her rifle and hauled back the bolt. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder. Before she could press the trigger a bolt of flame zigzagged from the nearest crystal and knocked the rifle from her hands in a smothering burst of eye-watering emerald fire.

The pressure of hate mounted. Like a psychic hose it swamped them in sheer ferocity, echoing in their brains, puddling their minds, deafening them to their own thoughts. Mother Haapan and Mina fell to the ground, screaming, their hands uselessly over their ears.

Nyllee stared in sick horror at the rifle and at her arms, which hung limply at her sides, traces of the green radiance still clinging to them like a leprous shroud.

“Who are they?” whispered Val shakily.

Gait’s tongue oozed away from him. He prostrated himself on the ground, among the tiny flowers and the thin grasses and drifted leaves from the forest. He bowed his head.

“If it be the will of Arlan…” he mumbled, and could not go on.

“Arlan!” screamed Tony, shaking himself free from Redfern. “Arlan would never agree to hate like this!”

About then the affair grew hazy to Redfern. His mind refused to accept the diabolical images and suggestions bombarding his brain. He felt fouled and despoiled. Just before he blanked out he saw Val standing proudly, her breasts straining the gray cloth of her tunic, shouting something he could not understand as the great crystals, glowing with the color of blood, sank between the trees toward them.

He awoke to an easy sense of comfort and lightness. The dark flow of passionate hatred no longer engulfed him. He lay for a moment sprawled out, as though just awakened from a good night’s sleep with all a pleasant day’s holiday before him and this moment in which to savor the coming delights.

Then he opened his eyes. He lay on a pallet beneath a high ivory-white roof; tall windows striped two walls, revealing an expanse of trees and high blue cloudless sky. The other walls were painted a restful green, and pictures of landscapes and seascapes were hung on them. In the room stood seven pallets. On each pallet lay one member of that little group which had set out so bravely toward the forest. All were stark naked.

Warm air wafted into the chamber from vents high in the angle of the two green walls; the windows were closed. Tony sat up and yawned and stretched and then, surprised, said, “Hey! My arm! It’s healed!”

Nyllee laughed at him, swinging sturdy limbs over the side of her pallet. She may have had a heavy doughy face, but her body was Junoesque and firmly rounded. Tony looked at her and made a sound that Redfern took to be the Montradon equivalent of a whistle.

Nyllee pushed Tony in the chest and jumped on him as he tumbled over backward. Redfern chuckled as they wrestled like puppies.

Gait was holding Mina and talking to her quietly. The lines of strain had vanished from the faded woman’s face. Her body showed its scrawny thinness; yet once she had been a great beauty. Gait had his bouncy, confident toughness back. His beard jutted.

Mother Haapan still slept, a fragile wisp of skin and bone on the pallet, her white hair a puffball of silver threads.

Val swung up lithely toward Redfern. As he looked at her he felt the blood jolt in him, the quick rising of his interest, the sudden fierce desire to crush her to him. Her saucy round face laughed at him. Her hazel eyes, no longer shadowed, sparked with devil glints of mischief.

“Hey, stay-abed! You’d never do for Montrado!”

He nodded toward Tony and Nyllee, who were thrashing about in a tangle of naked limbs.

“Watch it, my girl! Or you’ll be next!”

She laughed. About to reply cheekily, she turned away, still laughing. Redfern had the idea she knew what he was thinking.

Mina was saying fretfully but without worry, “We ought to have some clothes!”

“Why?” asked Val. “I feel wonderful! Free and light as air! I could dance—”

“There is this feeling of lightness and goodness in the air,” confirmed Gait. “I have always been very concerned about the proprieties. And yet, if Mina will forgive me, I take great joy in seeing Val and Mina and Nyllee as they are.”

“I’ll second that!” yelped Tony, coming up for air. Nyllee’s strongly muscled arm reached up, snagged around his neck and with a yelp he was pulled down again. Val laughed. Gait frowned and then, consciously relaxing, chuckled. Even Mina ventured a smile and put her other arm around Gait.

“And yet,” said Gait, stroking Mina’s hair. “This is not natural for us. We experienced hate from those dreadful crystals; now we are experiencing…” He hesitated.

“Love?” suggested Val.

Redfern said, “We’re being manipulated. But as long as it’s this kind of brainwashing and not that terrible psychic fear, then I won’t complain.” He found it difficult to take his eyes off Val.

“We’ve regained some of the innocence of childhood,” declared Val.

Part of the green wall valved open; a door formed like the iris of a camera, dilating to allow a woman to push a cart through. Like them, the woman was naked; a pleasant buxom person of middle-age with short dark hair and curved red lips, smiling now at sight of the people in the room. The cart contained kinds of food unfamiliar to Redfern but of unmistakable taste and quality. Everyone ate with relish, fat fruits dripping juice, flat pancakes that melted in the mouth, various drinks in crystal goblets inviting with aroma and taste.

“Eat all you want,” the woman said in perfect English.

“There is ample for everyone.” She touched her hair and Redfern caught the glint of a jeweled band. “I am speaking the language common to you all through the translator.” She smiled warmly on them. “You will soon be well enough to visit.”

Before they could ask the meaning of the last cryptic remark she left the room and the iris closed up.

Redfern puzzled. “Why didn’t we ask her where we were, what had happened? All we did was start to eat!”

Gait smiled. “We are in the power of Arlan, I feel sure.”

A breath of unease wafted through Redfern, to be lost in dreamy contentment as the food was digested. He looked again with great pleasure on Val. If they were being manipulated, why, then—and then that thought, too, faded. He liked it here.

All Redfern knew of Arlan was that he was the progenitor of a philosophical school of thought. Gait was an adept, a professor who taught students, among whom were Tony and Val. But they came from Montrado. Now they were in another dimension. As to whether or not the Montradons considered Arlan some sort of god or other cosmic or metaphysical force, he didn’t know. So how could the cult of Arlan exist across the dimensions, if Gait was right, without these entities, wherever they were now having access to Portals and Gates of their own?

Of the seven people in this room four believed in the philosophy of Arlan. Nyllee, almost inevitably, would have her own gods and beliefs. Mother Haapan, who had now woken up and quietly began to eat, would no doubt possess hers. As for Redfern, he had never been sure just what beliefs of the multitude of Terrestrial religions he should embrace; each had a nugget of truth.

So the crystals, or the buxom woman who had brought the food, or the things they were going to visit when they were well, might easily consider that the cult of Arlan represented a majority view. Hmm. Redfern felt a pointer there. And then, with a fresh shock, he realized he had automatically bestowed intelligence upon the crystals. Maybe —there would have to be, wouldn’t there?—there had been people in those shining enormous gems.

Of the two ideas, that these people had their own Gates to the dimensions, or that they were working on a majority belief, Redfern wished he could opt for the former. It would be less complicated.

So that meant, inevitably, that it would be the latter.

He had only carried the Springfield for a short time; yet already he missed the hard bumping feel of the rifle on his back.

Toilet facilities were available in a small annex through an alcove behind a dilating irised door. Tony and Nyllee were gone a good long time; they came back laughing and happy and flushed. Redfern smiled in sympathy. But he took care not to go into the showers when Val was out there. Not yet, he had to tell himself against the pressures he now recognized as urging him on to a loving relationship. Val was nice, but…

Against force he had always felt resentment. He had had many jobs, as a symptom of that rebelliousness. Certainly in the importance of personal relationships he would not allow himself to be pushed.

Go on, man! A voice seemed to whisper in his brain. She’s warm and vibrant and desirable! What does it matter? She will love it. Go on—enjoy yourselves. …

He stayed under the shower for a good time. He didn’t know if he wanted to cool off or if he Hoped Val would come back.

When the buxom woman brought their second meal he was already feeling the strain intolerably. Whatever pressures were being screwed down on them, Gait and Mina had succumbed easily; but for them it was the renewal and fresh finding of an old magic. For Tony and Nyllee it was all new and wonderful.

Then Val smiled at him and touched his hand. She lifted an eyebrow. He stared at her, at her brown body and laughing face, her shining brown hair and the wonder of her hazel eyes. He wouldn’t last out much longer and he knew himself to be a fool for fighting what seemed absolutely natural. Yet a stubborn orneriness in him kept fighting back, telling him that this was not natural.

For some reason they were being manipulated. First hate, then love. What next? Death?

Along toward evening the feeling of imprisonment curdled his brain. He wanted to scream. They’d been shut in this room all day. The desire for a breath of fresh air choked in him.

The third meal was not brought by the buxom woman. For some reason that Redfern didn’t at first comprehend, Mother Haapan stood up, smiling, and went toward the strongly-built man who pushed the cart. He left the food in the center of the room and extended an arm to the frail, white-haired woman. She seemed less fragile now, Redfern noted, as though—impossibly—flesh had grown on her thin body during the day, had filled her out, firming her breasts, plumping her cheeks, giving her the semblance of middle-age again. The man took her hand and, all in silence, led her from the room.

“Well!” said Mina explosively.

She, too, Redfern saw, had grown more youthful, so that her lost beauty was once again blooming. The changes he saw in the women should have taken months of geriatric treatment, if they were at all possible. Yet they had been accomplished in a day. Even Nyllee was less doughy of face, and Val was more splendid than ever.

“They mean to make us make love!” Redfern said hoarsely. “And we mustn’t! I don’t know how I know—I just do!”

“It is right!” declared Gait. He, too, had become more youthful, less toughly bullying. “Look at my Mina! She is growing back into the incomparable beauty I married!”

Tony chuckled and grabbed Nyllee. Together with an increase in beauty had come also an increase in performance. Still Redfern refused. Val looked languorously on him, sighing, and he realized that whatever strange forces were at work had almost broken her down.

The food wagon stood in the center of the room. The door opened and the buxom woman beckoned to Gait and Mina, to Tony and Nyllee. She glanced at Redfern, shook her head and then beckoned to Val. Without a word, much as Mother Haapan had done, they went out silently.

Redfern and the food wagon were left for company together.

He sat down and tried to think what to do, and all he could think of was what a damn fool he was.

He didn’t hear the girl come in; but he looked up suddenly to see her standing by the door, which was just irising shut. He gaped.

She was everything beautiful he had ever imagined in a girl. Every young man carries an ideal girl in his mind, whom he will never meet in this sinful world, and now Scobie Redfern was face to face with his ideal, plucked whole from his mind and set down in the flesh before him.

Here she stood, half-smiling at him, her hair a glory, her body tall and slim and straight and curved in subtle pulse-hammering loveliness. He recognized an insubstantial dream incarnate. He took half a step forward, conscious of his own body, of the blood thudding in him, of the close-packed roaring in his ears. Everything outside his immediate circle of vision vanished so that he stared only at her, only her face visible to him, gorgeous, supplicating, appealing, demanding. A nimbus of roseate clouds isolated her. Her lips curved into a deeper, more welcoming smile.

He put his hands on her shoulders and the feel of the silkiness of her skin overwhelmed him. Any thoughts of being pressured, of forces working on him, vanished.

The jeweled band in her hair glinted. He pulled her closer, feeling the warmth pouring from her body.

He looked down on her, knowing himself lost and drowned in her.

He looked down into her eyes.

Her eyes…

He saw into those flat lenses. He saw their blankness, their uncaring objectivity, their unawareness of self.

Those eyes had never belonged to a human being and in their mechanical inhumanity he could see only horror.

As he looked he seemed to be sucked into those eyes. He saw bleak landscapes, burning cathedrals, floods and famine and pestilence. He saw a microcosmic representation of that infamous twentieth century Shield of Achilles.

Her hot breath fluttered against his face. Her hands touched his body, groping. He felt abruptly the bones of her shoulders as angular constructs through the soft flesh he so savagely gripped.

He staggered back, nauseated.

“Get away!” he yelled, gagging.

She followed him, crooning softly now, her red tongue darting out, her lips curved, her whole body a voluptuous and blasphemous invitation.

He fell back over a pallet, sprawled on the floor. On one elbow he inched back, his skin crawling, his hair alive with static. Beneath each pallet he could now see thick black and red coaxial cables running away under the pillow across the floor and through outlets in the wall.

He only had a flashing glimpse of them before the girl who was not a girl had flung her hot naked body on him, her furnace mouth seeking to devour him, her passion consuming him.

VI

Even in that shrieking moment of twisted passion with the warm soft naked body of the girl clawing all over him in lush abandon, Scobie Redfern could summon the meaning of what he had seen in this quasi-girl’s eyes to his assistance.

Those red and black coaxial cables fitted in. He remembered what the squat people from Thothtoreth had said. There was manipulation here, a stealing of the psyche, a single determination to bend the will. He could believe near enough anything now, after going through the Gates to the dimensions, after all he had seen.

He pushed his left forearm against the girl’s throat and levered back. Spittle spattered from her mouth. Her tongue darted. Her teeth shone too whitely, like crude TV advertisements. Her soft body pressed against him, yielding as it thrust, and he twisted aside and half rose. She followed him, clawing.

Her hair rippled and waved about him. Strands caught against his teeth like silicon ropes. He put up his right arm as he fell back again, and pulled her hair savagely.

Yet still she did not cry out. Only her deep hoarse gasping as she breathed in passionate determination gave any indication that he was communicating with her. He pulled again, frenziedly, desperate to get away.

The hair came off. A glorious wig, it hung from his hand to reveal a shining domed pate from which every hair had been shaved. The girl bent toward him again, her throat hard and ridged against his forearm.

The jeweled band from her hair fell, tinkling, onto Redfern’s sweaty chest.

He made a last convulsive effort and thrust her back.

She clutched his legs as he rose and he bent to drag her clinging fingers free. The jeweled band slipped down and he grasped it, used it like a knuckle-duster to hit her flush along the jaw.

The blow had no effect.

She rose with him, panting, her breasts tumultuous. He staggered back and then lunged forward, hitting her again, seeing a lick of blood from a split lip. Still she urged her body on toward him, gruesome with its shining bald pate. He turned and ran.

He knew enough now to be sure she was no mortal girl. She was no human being. What he had seen in her eyes belonged to nightmares, alien landscapes and schizophrenic horrors out of this or any world.

Redfern didn’t know what he would find if he stripped that warm and glowing flesh from her: sharp metal limbs, transistors and electronic circuits, power packs; he knew with a cold horror that he would never find a human beating heart.

The only door open was that to the showers. He went through at a dead run, still clasping the jeweled band. The naked, buxom woman who had brought the food had called her band a translator. It would be useful. Redfern skidded on the tiled floor and heard the naked pit-pat of feet following him.

He pressed against the wall by the door. The girl—the thing—ran straight on past. At once he darted back out of the door and pressed the stud that irised it shut. Then he raced like a maniac for the far door.

By the time he was halfway there, the far door had irised open. That, he guessed, was part of the pattern. He had refused stubbornly, idiotically, humanly, not to do what he had been pressured into and unlike the others had not made love on the pallets; so now he would face the third alternative.

The door irised shut after him.

So the girl—the thing—had been recognized as a failure. So be it. He had a clearer idea, now, of what was wanted from him.

He put the translator band on his own head. He wanted both hands free.

At once he heard a voice shouting in perfect English:

“As you will! No one is entitled to a single thing without payment! So you will pay in another way—you will pay!”

Before him stretched a continuation of the room, the same height, the same breadth, with the tall windows showing glimpses of the forest and the sky a long dwindling perspective along one side. The room was immense.

Late afternoon sunlight shone through the windows and flung bars of golden illumination across the floor, like a massive succession of stepping stones.

At the far end he saw a patch of color and, looking more closely as he ran, he made out a group of men and women clad in scarlet robes. One stepped out before the others and held up a hand. Redfern looked about for another way out.

“You will go into the forest, you who are called Scobie Redfern. The crystals will not harm you—not yet, not until you have paid!”

He saw a door, a large irised-open door leading out between two windows. A glass-walled anteroom lay at the side. He saw faces pressed to the glass—Gait, Mina, Tony, Val. They waved to him, at first delighted to see him and then frightened and horrified.

He raced toward them.

Not understanding their horror, he at first did not fully comprehend the pitter-pat noise from the side. It was not the naked girl-thing, for she—it was still securely locked behind the irised-shut door.

Then he saw the walking hospital cart, white and antiseptic and covered with chingling chromed instruments. It stalked up to him on eight jointed legs that jerked out awkwardly. It made a high buzzing all the time.

He swerved in his run, but the thing extended a long telescopic arm with a padded hoop at the end and scooped him up. He fought to break the thing’s grip but his constricting fingers could not dislodge the padded ring. A hooded silver cap swooped down on another telescopic arm and covered his eyes and his nose and his mouth so that his breathing boomed like the buried-alive bellowings of a maniac.

He blacked out.

The very matter-of-factness of the operation annoyed and chastened him after the passionate preliminaries.

He awoke as padded metal bands slackened around his wrists and, ankles and a padded grip withdrew from his head. At once he felt a soreness just above and behind his ears. He put up a hand to rub but another hand came in the way, preventing him.

“Not yet. Wake up first.”

He squinted up. A solemn-faced woman wearing a long scarlet robe stared down at him impassively. Her makeup, heavy and obscuring, defied any attempt to read her face. Scobie Redfern knew very well that this was a matter of life and death for him and that his own life meant little in the greater scheme. He had to concentrate and take all this very seriously indeed if he didn’t want to solve the problem conclusively by his own death.

“Now,” the woman said in her calm monotonous tone. “You may touch.”

Reaching up a tentative finger, he explored his own skull. Bulky cold objects had been attached to his head just behind the ears, and wires led aloft to the crown, where a mast rose to support small aerials. His mind cringed. He felt again that defiling sense of being used. He shut his eyes for a moment, holding himself down.

“What have you done?”

She moved away with a rustle of drapes. “You must pay for what you receive. It is the prime law. You refused to pay in the most simple and pleasant way; now you must pay in a less simple and less pleasant way.”

Redfern shook his head wearily, the appendages and aerials scarcely impeding his movement. Without touching them he wouldn’t have known they were there.

“Pay?” he said. “Pay what? Money? Blood?”

She allowed her caked facial skin to wrinkle in disgust.

“Nothing so primeval. You wear a translator band in your hair. You have been fed and given shelter and protection. You naturally wish to live with us. So you must pay. Pay for what you have had and in advance for what you will receive. We are very fair. We take only what we, in our turn, pay for. You see?”

“No.”

He reached up again and grasped the aerial rod, preparing to yank it free.

She shook her head swiftly. “No. If you try to pull it out you will think the top of your head is coming off. Similarly with anything else we have attached. They are there only temporarily, of course; but you cannot remove them without harming yourself.”

“What are they for?” he shouted angrily, scared.

“So that you pay.” She gestured and a young man wearing a blue robe began to help Redfern off the hospital cart. Redfern pettishly struck away the helping hand; but then he nearly collapsed as his knees jellied and he was glad to grip the strong supporting arm. He glared at them.

“Am I your slave now, then?”

They looked as though he had mentioned the contents of a sewer in a drawing room. “We are not like some others of the Dimensions,” the woman said tartly.

“Oh! So you do know about the Gates and—”

“We know; but we have as little to do with them as possible. We of Senchuria keep ourselves to ourselves.”

Swaying, Redfern stood on his own feet. He felt a little better. The sun had completely sunk now and long drapes filled the windows. Lights glowed in profusion from the roof panels. In the glass-walled annex there now stood only an abandoned table and chairs with a black-robed woman cleaning up with what looked remarkably like a standard U.S. household vacuum cleaner.

“A night’s sleep will set you up, Redfern,” said the woman in a confident, matronly tone. “Go to your quarters.”

“Is—” Redfern swallowed. “Have you got rid of that… thing?”

“The succubus has been returned to storage.”

“Oh.”

When he walked back into the room from which he had fled with such fear, he found only Val, fast asleep on a pallet. The others were—well, where were they? He didn’t know; but he felt so tired and woozy that he flopped down on his pallet at once. He thought about looking beneath for the red and black cables; but he decided to do that in the morning. He keeled over and was asleep almost at once.

As a youngster he had always awoken early, alert, fresh and anxious to get to grips with what the day might bring; the habit had persisted through college and had only recently begun to wane into a hoarded few moments more of pillow before rising. This morning he remembered everything as though a bowl of boiling water had been poured over him. He touched the boxes behind his ears and the aerial. He remembered, all right.

He looked under the pallet. The cables were there, sure enough, coupled up to a connection beneath the pallet head and running away to a hole in the wall. What could they be? He had vague and unscientific ideas. At the moment his greatest interest was centered on the apparatus he wore on his head.

Then Val said something, in a frightened voice, and, turning to her at once he saw that she, too, wore the boxes and aerial on her head.

“Are they going to hypnotize us into something… dreadful?”

He tried to smile at her. He couldn’t say what he was thinking: that they—the strange people of Senchuria—might have placed this weird equipment on his and Val’s head in order to make them obey their will. The force that had yesterday awoken them with love and had during the day rejuvenated them all—even Redfern felt a lot younger and physically more resilient—had today not been used, for he felt no especially intense interest in Val. She, too, regarded him with friendliness, her hazel eyes smiling; but she was not all over him. The door opened and the buxom woman pushed the food wagon in. This morning she wore a demure gown of dark brown. She did not wear a translator band, Redfern, checking, found he still wore his.

When they had eaten, the woman returned for the cart and left. The door irised shut after her and then, unusually, paused before fully closing the central circle.

At once, Redfern raced to the door, bent down, thrust the knife he had secreted from the food tray into the central opening.

“Can you open it?” breathed Val, her face by his shoulder, her hair brushing his back.

He grunted with the effort.

“It’s—tough—”

Then the irised circle snapped open and the knife tinkled out to drop onto the floor. He snatched it up at once and then glared into the long room. It was empty.

Morning sunlight falling acutely from the tall windows struck sparks from the glass of the annex. “Come on !” he snapped at Val and started across.

Their friends were not in the annex. The quick dismay he killed at source—hell! He didn’t expect miracles, did he?

Just let them get out of this madhouse.

Through the annex glass he could see the large door, still irised-open, between the two tall windows.

“There’s our exit,” he said, urging Val to run faster.

She halted, pointing.

“Look! In the annex—it’s Mother Haapan!”

At first Redfern didn’t believe. He changed his stride and headed for the annex. Through the glass walls he could see a girl combing long black hair. He burst inside and stared.

“You’re right, Val.” He still didn’t really believe. “It is Mother Haapan—but—!”

The girl turned. He could clearly make out the features of the old woman in this fresh young face. In place of the white frizz-bob this glorious hair shone ravens’ wing black in the morning sun.

“Hurry, Val,” Mother Haapan said. “You don’t have much time left before they shut the doors.”

Bewilderment struck viciously at Redfern. “You’d better come with us.”

She laughed tinkingly. “What! Look what they’ve done to me! I’m young and prettier than I ever was. And I’ve a lover! A wonderful man—no, thank you. I have no wish to leave here.”

“She was changing when I saw her last, after they took you away, Scobie,” whispered Val. “But this is incredible!”

“I can see why a person would want to stay here.” Redfern felt the sweat of indecision on him. He felt like a man teetering over an abyss, knowing that whichever foot he put down first would be the wrong one.

“Do you want to stay, Val?”

She touched the apparatus on her head.

“No! This isn’t here for fun.”

“It’s to make me—make us—pay! Come on, Val—”

He stopped speaking as he strode for the corner of the annex. Loosely flung down were the old clothes, the packs, the shoes, of the travelers—and the rifles!

He felt like uttering a sob of gratitude as he snatched up a Springfield. Rapidly he dressed in the gray shirt and trousers and the good U.S. shoes with their strong soles. Val hesitated. Then, defiantly, she kicked the gray slave tunic.

“I won’t wear slave gear again!”

Mother Haapan chuckled. She was wearing a shirt of some white nylon material that shone silkily; the tails of the. shirt came down midway between her waist and knees.

“Don’t be silly, Val,” snapped Redfern. “Time is running out. You’ll need clothes outside!”

She shook her head mutinously. Looking at her, Redfern realized just what a gorgeous creature she was. She was no figment of a dream-world made incarnate; she was all flesh and blood, with a turned-up nose and a round fresh face and long brown gleaming hair, a woman who was real.

Mother Haapan took her shirt off and handed it to Val. “I’ll go along to the market and get another,” she said, smiling. Redfern had to take his eyes off her—forcing himself to remember the white-haired fragility he had escaped with across the snow and the prairie.

“Grab a rifle,” he told Val.

He loaded himself with cartridges, made sure the bayonet was still in its sheath and the sheath frogged to the belt, checked Val’s.

Together they left the glass-walled annex and headed out the large open door between the windows. Beyond lay all the forest, beckoning with green and brown and silver welcoming arms. Redfern swallowed. Had he been a colossal fool?

VII

They were not running through a jungle.

Neither, decided Scobie Redfern with some abruptly realized regret, were they running through the forest of Myrcinus where he might expect to see Moke come brachiating along the aerial terraces of the trees, his pug face split in a devilish grin and the dice all set for a quick game of craps.

Around them stretched temperate forest with familiar trees: oaks, beeches and maples, deciduous trees that now showed in full greeneiy of leaf. They ran fleetingly between the trunks, leaping protruding roots, skirting brakes where thorns and ferns grew fiercely around the decomposing detritus of a fallen giant. And yet… and yet…

Scobie Redfern sensed the unease in the forest. The waiting suspense was heavy on his skin with the weight of pennies on his eyelids.

They ran swiftly along the aisles of the trees where the filtered sunlight was soft and green. So Val—he didn’t even know yet if she owned another name—had seen the others after he, Redfern, had been carted off. Redfern knew with frightening clarity that he had to think the problem through; he had the answers in his brain; the trick was digging them out.

“What happened to Tony and Gait and the others?”

She flashed him a cryptic look, hurdling a fallen trunk. The smell of violets suddenly floated all the glade about them. “They opted to stay. They’d been rejuvenated, they were in love, they each had a partner. Why shouldn’t they stay? They were shown the city—”

“The city?”

“Yes. It lies beyond the big room we were in. It spraddles the line between grassland and forest. It is a very wonderful place.”

“We’ll have to give it a wide berth, then—”

“A what?”

He explained. She laughed. “Your Earth must be a funny old place, Scobie.”

“You’ll see it one day, Val.” Abrupt strength and confidence filled him. “I’ll see Montrado, too. Life is going to be all right, Val, once we get away from here and find a Portal for you to—”

She interrupted sharply: “No!”

“What?”

“I can’t leave Tony and Gait and Mina! They belong to Montrado, too!”

“Well, of course,” he shouted, annoyed.

“You mean… you’d go back for them?”

“I’m going back, but in my own way. We’ve got to get these filthy things off our heads first, haven’t we?”

Her cry as she slipped and fell between two logs halted him and he turned back to help her. He pulled her up and for a moment she clung to him, her chest heaving, her breasts warm and fluttery on his cheek. He forced himself to remain indifferent to her, looking over her shoulder back the way they had run.

Looking like that, keeping his wits about him, paid dividends. He caught the furtive flash of movement just where the trunks blended into an apparently solid forest-horizon. He reacted at once.

“Quiet, Val! This way…”

She reacted too, instantly controlling herself.

Just what Redfern expected he could not have said. He had bumped into so many unexpectednesses that the next ones would be dealt with strictly on their merits as antagonistic or friendly agents. He would kiss or kill now, having been pushed as far as he would be pushed.

The Springfield thunked into his hand with a solid grip of comfort.

From the shelter of a treetrunk and a fallen log he stared narrowly down their backtrail. He had not expected pursuit quite so quickly. Movement flickered down there, low, furtive, feral movement. He sweated.

How many times had he had that old dream where he was being pursued by something, anything, a grizzly bear, a lion, a homicidal maniac, and he had aimed the gun in his hands with desperate care? How many times had he been unable to pull back the bolt? How many times had he pressed the trigger as though pressing an entire world-mass? How many times had he actually pulled the trigger all the way—and the rifle still had not fired? How many times? Probably the same number as anyone else…

He lifted the obsolete rifle now and saw without surprise that the foresight trembled in a tight little circle.

Movement scurried again in the lower rambling growths of the forest that choked up some of the aisles. Redfern caught a glimpse of hard-edged, black and yellow banded fur—or skin or clothing; he could not be sure. He brought the rifle quickly around. Movement broke and vanished again as he stared out onto an empty forest.

Val squirmed, lying on the rough ground.

“I’m scared!” she said.

As she spoke, the aerials sprouting from the rod attached to the crown of her head began to glow.

Blue flames nimbused the aerials, so that it seemed she wore a slanted blue halo. Her round brown face looked drawn and miserable. And the blue glow sparked from the aerials on her head.

The panic pressures of the moment bore down mercilessly on Redfern then and, for a lunatic moment, he let the fear in him bubble over. He felt the grip of obsessional horror engulf him.

Val screamed.

She writhed back, pointing at Redfern’s head.

He knew she was pointing at his own aerial, most likely at a blue glow issuing from it. The fear flowed in him, dark and black like a tide of night.

“Calm down, Val!” He tried to fight his way up through this miasma. “I think I understand. I’m not sure—”

Somewhere out in the forest a twig snapped. He swallowed and tried to keep the rifle still.

“The people of Senchuria overcame us with a radiation of pure hatred from those crystals. Then they pressured us into loving one another. Now you and I, Val, are frightened.”

“Yes…” She leaned across to touch his arm.

“So I think they deal in emotions! They manipulate people and their feelings. Those cables under the pallets, these aerials on our heads—they serve the same purpose: the inhabitants of Senchuria drain off emotions from other people! Maybe they can store them—I don’t know—but I’m convinced that they let us escape and fixed up that half-closed door, the clothes, the rifles—”

“They let us escape? But, Scobie, that means—!”

He nodded savagely. He still felt fear; but his anger bolstered a tiny returning core of courage.

“They said we had to pay—and we wouldn’t pay with love as an emotion, so they’re taking fear instead. They let us escape, and now they are hunting us. They’re hunting us to make us frightened and the more frightened we are the better for them; the more fear we feel the more fear they collect in their damned emotion accumulators!”

She surged up, angry now too.

“You must be right, Scobie. This is nothing to do with Arlan! Gait was wrong! These people are not good—they are fiends!”

Redfern got her meaning although her expression was old-fashioned. They were to be hunted: not for sport but to provide a supply of fear emotion!

“I’d like to smash the aerial off!” he said viciously.

She shook her head quickly. “No, Scobie! They said that could kill me!”

“All right. We’ll have to accept that, then. It’s not worth a try, just yet. But whatever they’ve let loose on us is closing in. Just how well do you shoot a rifle, Val?”

“I aim and pull the trigger. I haven’t had much practice. On Montrado we use crossbows.”

“Well, there’s no time to give you a lesson now. Just point the thing at—at whatever is out there—and press the trigger gently. You’ll make ‘em keep their heads down, if nothing else.”

“What about that zigzag burst of emerald fire that knocked the rifle from Nyllee’s hands?”

“That was fired by a crystal. If they do that to us, I’ll assume the hunt is over. Those aren’t crystals out there now.”

Whoever was regulating the supply of fear emotion taken from Scobie Redfern was working overtime right now. He must be getting in a full quota. Redfern had to force himself to steady the rifle and look for the black and yellow horrors that chased him. Movement stalked in the forest.

He caught a scathing glimpse of black and yellow fur and a lick of glistening fang; and then the creature had disappeared once more beyond a tree bole. Redfern paused. He reasoned that if his seemingly crazy guesses were true, as he very firmly believed them to be true, then the people of Senchuria wouldn’t be hunting in the usual way. They wouldn’t bother too much if their hunters were seen and they wouldn’t try to kill the quarry; they’d faze it, encircle it, worry it, do everything to make the quarry go through the whole gamut of fear emotions.

Then, if he was right, that fear, raw and smoking, would be channeled into accumulators and stored.

A fearsome thing bounded into the open about twenty yards off, clicked its jaws at him, and then scuttled into the underbrush. Redfern felt the sickening jolt of his heart. Val choked off a scream.

“What was it?”

“Dangerous.”

The thing had looked like nothing so much as a cockroach—but a cockroach banded in black and yellow fur and fully six feet long from tip of snouted jaw to tip of short spiked tail. Its enormous jaws and the serrated crunching power of its mandibles offended Redfern with his own puniness. Truly, the wizards of Senchuria were drawing their fullest supply of fear emotion from him!

The rustlings in the thickets between the trees crescendoed and grew nearer. Val twisted around.

“They’re all around us, Scobie!”

“If what I think is right they’re not out to kill us. They want to scare us! All right! We’ll bluff them, make their own weakness our strength.” He surged up, bitter, angry, hating, scared. “Come on!”

With his left hand he caught her wrist, pulled her up.

He blundered out past the tree trunk into the glade. A cockroach skittered toward him. Instead of running, Redfern charged at the thing, swinging the rifle in his right hand. He butt-thwacked alongside the thing’s snout and it toppled over sideways, its short legs kicking like broken pistons.

A release of tension broke through Redfern. He ran on. “If they want to scare us they’ve got to do better than this!” he exulted.

Another cockroach charged. This time it was a black and white banded horror, of the same species but with a different line to its back and with even larger and more powerful jaws, giving its head the look of a mechanical scoop.

Redfern let go of Val and gripped the rifle in both sweating fists. He swung with an access of rage and terror. The thing bounced back, its jaws clashing. Again Redfern flailed the rifle at it and heard a sharp cracking snap and saw the buttplate sink through white fur. The thing screeched. It darted past him and raced crookedly up the tree aisle. Val stared after it with sick horror in her eyes.

More cockroaches appeared ahead, their jaws clicking, their feet carrying them inexorably on toward the humans.

Redfern’s terror and exultation and horror, all jumbled up chaotically, burst in berserker anger. He lifted the rifle and charged.

“Scobie!” screamed Val behind him.

He swung the rifle in maniacal heaves, smashing the butt down left and right, hearing snappings and soggy thunkings, seeing a dark purple ichor flowing from gashes and split bruises. Black and white and black and yellow fur clotted with alien blood.

He broke through the ring.

“This way!” he panted. Val followed him, leaping the upturned wriggling body of a fallen cockroach. As he looked at her Redfern saw the aerials sprouting from the rod fixed to her skull. The blue glow had changed into a sullen amber color, the sparks iron-red and spitting.

“My aerials, Val—the thing on my head—what color?”

She gasped.

“It’s all red, Scobie! Red like blood!”

“Hah!” He felt the strength in him then. “They’re not drawing off fear from us now! That’s anger! That’s defiance and pride ousting the fear! We’ll turn their fear on them. I’m still scared; but I’m too angry and worked up to let that get in the way!”

They ran on through the forest.

“But how do you know, Scobie? How can you be sure?”

“I don’t know how I know. But I am sure!”

Around them the forest stretched its leafy greenery, reassuring, friendly, a normal forest. Redfern cleaned off the purple ichor from his rifle with broad-leaved foliage. The strength still boiled in him.

“I can imagine the wizards of Senchuria right now, fuming that they’re not getting the right reaction from us. We’ve not cooperated all the way along the line. When you wanted me to make love to you and I refused I wondered if I was being a fool. I wanted to—but—but not in so cold and programmed a way. Now I know I was right.”

“But I love you, Scobie!”

That checked him. He looked at her, seeing the white shirt as ripped and torn and ichor-splashed as his own gray shirt and trousers. She was very lovely. “Question is, Val, is that a genuine emotion or one implanted in you for the delight of others?”

“Oh, Scobie!”

He wanted to laugh, to roar at the enormous irony of it. “When the time is right—in a private place—that is normal on my world. Right now we’ve got to go on being unpredictable. If we let ourselves be dragooned by this remote authority, then we’re done for. They have riots and demonstrations in my world, Val, when they don’t like what’s happening. The streets have become public places of protest. You and I are protesting the wizards of Senchuria!”

He had the glimmerings of a plan now, a crazy, harebrained scheme; but he saw that it offered their only chance of remaining true to themselves. And however old-fashioned such a concept might be, Scobie Redfern prized it above, rubies. He wanted to remain true to himself. He’d always been that, so far. It had got him into trouble and out of jobs; but he wouldn’t renege on his own principles.

They ran between the trees. The sun, a golden, friendly sun, gleamed and glimmered down through gaps and aureoled leaves and cast a soft undersea warmth into the forest.

The colors changed.

Brightening up through the spectrum, the light altered. Greens gave place to yellower tints. Oranges and reds began to drip down. Trees shone with orange trunks and golden leaves. Fire dripped. Brilliant violets and mauves coruscated blindingly. Actinic light blinded them. Dark dyes stained their vision; scintillating patches of brilliance stabbed hard fingers of radiance at them.

“What is it?” screamed Val.

Redfern saw that the smoky orange glow from her aerials was flickering, was greening, was blueing as she gave way once more to fear.

He shook her roughly. “They’re trying a new trick! Polarized light, radiation on different wavelengths—don’t trust what you see, Val! It’s all a trick! We must break through to the city! Come on!” He dragged her on, the silky white shirt a ripped rag, her legs trembling, her face a mask of sweat and fear.

She stumbled after him.

“Don’t give in, Val! Fight them! We can win! Just remember: they’re trying to scare us as though we were stupid children. We’re not children! We’re adult—stop feeling frightened of remote authority and use your own eyes and judgment!” The feel of her arm beneath his fingers, warm and soft and firm, reassured him. “And—Val—run!”

Through the swirling maddening wrong colors of the alien forest a fresh light grew ahead, a pale yellow radiance that washed down like amber lights seen through fog. All around them the forest writhed in impossible colors—and now a sound rose about them. A keening, moaning, sighing that sought to draw them back into the deadly embraces of the trees.

His ears rang with that eerie sound. His blood thrashed and pounded around his body and he could feel the slogging pump of his heart as a tocsin within his chest. He panted for air. But he did not stop running and he did not stop dragging the fainting form of the girl after him. He was by now good and mad, was Scobie Redfern.

The yellow light ahead washed up over the trees. He could see crimson and orange trunks and violet and mauve branches stark against that wan radiance. He forced his way on.

They fairly fell out of the forest.

Directly to their front stretched the turrets and domes and walls of a city made, it seemed, from gems. It sparkled and crackled with light in that all-pervading yellow brilliance. Then Redfern realized he was standing in sunshine, ordinary, if alien, sunshine, rendered into that ghastly amber glow by contrast with the virulent riot of strong colors within the forest.

“They tried to herd us the other way with their revolting giant cockroaches,” he panted. “But that’s the way we’re going! Right ahead—right into their damned city!”

He started off, walking fast, dragging Val.

A few trees and clumps of bushes grew between them and the city. All beyond beneath the sky, a sky of yellow and blue and white cloud, stretched the grassland over which they had tramped, it seemed, so long ago.

A group of cockroaches appeared to their left and another to their right. The black and yellow and the black and white horrors began to pace them, shrilling at the hunt.

“Ignore them, Val.”

She started to answer, but saved her breath for walking and running.

A thing, reared itself ahead of them. Redfern stopped. A tree grew to his left and he made a half-step toward it, watching the thing ahead. It might once have been human.

It wore a travesty of armor, rusted steel breastplate and morion, greaves to cover the skeletal nakedness of its legs. It waited for them. Its face, like a mad jumble of a mantis’s head with some human features superimposed, glared at them with large faceted eyes.

Val screamed and blue sparks shot from her aerials.

Still the angry red glowed from Redfern’s. The thing lifted a crossbow and a bolt hissed into the ground at Redfern’s feet. He hesitated. The thing methodically rewound the bow, using a windlass clamped to the bow stock. Again the head lifted, the quarrel pointed at Redfern.

He lifted the rifle and charged.

His foot caught in an obstruction and he pitched over and down. The rifle spun from his fingers. He clawed up, still angry, still fuming.

The thing clicked its jaws and the bow moved to cover Redfern.

“They don’t want to kill us, Val, remember!” he shouted. He hadn’t fired the rifle because of that, but now he began to scrabble toward the Springfield with a grim determination to shoot his way through.

Val screamed again. Redfern jumped for the rifle.

The bow thunked solidly and the bolt swished through the space where he had been, smacked meatily into the tree. He checked, shocked. That shot had been aimed directly at him—aimed to hit.

“Scobie! They are trying to kill us now! They are!”

VIII

The crossbow looked like a solid hunting job. The windlass creaked. As Redfern pitched forward on hands and knees, stared up with the reality of the final act and his imminent death upon him, he saw three more of the graveyard ghouls march from a thicket, swing toward him, their bows leveled, the sunlight a tongue of flame on each bolt-head.

From the sides the furred roaches closed in.

Val’s sobbing nearly unnerved him. He spared her a quick glance.

“It’s going to be all right, Val! If they want to change the rules they made, then we’ll go along with that.” He started off for the rifle again. “I don’t know what graveyard they dug these things from; but a rifle bullet will send them back there again, damn quick!”

He understood now that the wizards of Senchuria had maintained a strict control on the happenings in the forest. He realized that he could only have comprehended what they intended through their own wavelengths impinging on his brain. He just knew, somehow, that they wanted to run and faze these humans, to bottle the extracted emotions of fear from them for subsequent use.

But now the humans had broken out of the ring. They had refused to run. They had not been herded in a wild chase through the weird forest but had broken back toward the city. The wizards of Senchuria must guess what Redfern intended.

So now the game was over. The play was done. The humans had consistently refused to pay, so now they would be killed.

Their deaths would not go uselessly abegging; Redfern knew without knowing how he knew that the collection of their emotions as they died represented a great and delectable tidbit for the wizards of Senchuria.

The rifle was in his hands now, slick and hard and reassuring. He had never been a man to go to war. He realized that he had been left the rifles as part of the ploy. Maybe the things wouldn’t shoot. Maybe the pins had been removed. Maybe all the cartridges had been emptied of powder. Maybe, even, the wizards of Senchuria wouldn’t mind if he shot a few of their pet hunting cockroaches. They would be expendable in the hunt.

And these graveyard ghouls? Were they expendable, too?

Redfern lifted the rifle and squinted down the sights. He’d find out right now.

He pressed the trigger and heard and felt the satisfying explosion and jolt. The bullet hit the thing high in the chest as it was about to loose the crossbow.

It went over sideways, skirling a weird call, the bow flinging high into the air and the bolt spinning crazily in the sunlight.

Without giving it a second look Redfern slammed the bolt out and in and lined up on the first of the advancing three things from the thicket.

He hit it first time off. As targets, they had the humanity of clay pipes at a fairground. That, in a tiny fraction of sanity amid the turmoil, comforted Redfern. Shooting a fellow human had always seemed to him an act beyond his capabilities.

He missed with his third shot and took three more to dispose of the remaining two ghouls.

He gave a shaky laugh and stood up.

“I wondered if they’d stay down when they were dead.”

As soon as he’d said it he wished the words unspoken. Val’s face crumpled.

“No, Scobie! That would be—”

“They’re dead, Val! It’s all right.”

But the furred hunting cockroaches closed in.

The sight of the girl’s haggard face, all that saucy brown aliveness sered and drawn, angered him. He began to feel the rage in him flower. If these wizards of Senchuria turned out to be fat happy little Father Christmas men he’d feel little compunction in dealing with them as he had with the graveyard ghouls. Men should not perform this kind of obscenity on other men and girls.

He started off for the city slamming a fresh clip into the magazine. The cockroaches paralleled their movement.

The next looming problem would be the crystals and their emerald beam of force.

The roaches kept herding in on the left, opening out on the right.

“They’re trying to run us again,” Redfern said grimly. “A rule-of-thumb procedure: do diametrically opposite what the big boys tell you. That way you get results, if your head isn’t chopped off first.”

Val gave him a scared half-smile.

“We’re still alive, Scobie.”

Almost, almost he said: “That’s my girl.” But the line appeared to him flat and unreal in this context. He thought of the ghoulish things falling away beneath his rifle bullets and wondered if he shouldn’t feel some remorse for killing them. Animals also deserved serious thought before destruction.

He kept stubbornly on directly toward the city. Now, over to his left where the roaches pressed ever closer, running with a flowing motion of black and yellow and white, he saw a tall building isolated from the main balanced mass of the city. Tall windows lanced the walls of the building.

“That’s where we came from,” he panted. “So they don’t want us to go back there. That’s fine! Neither do we!”

Between that tall building and the outskirts of the city grew an extended arm of the forest. Soon it interposed between them and the building. The roaches, scuttling, broke into disorder as they dived into the forest. Feeling savage amusement, Redfern angled off to his right and selected the nearest gate in the city wall. Between it and him lay only a road paralleling the wall, a graveled road lined with bushes loaded with small, starry yellow flowers. He ran straight ahead to cross the gravel road.

A yellow flower spun into the air from a bush and like a miniature buzz saw swished toward him. He caught a quick glimpse of it from the corner of his eye and ducked. The thing rasped like a giant bluebottle. It rotated so that the starred shape blurred into a disk. It sliced a long hank from his untidy mop of fair hair.

Another one twisted off its stem and flew toward him. He beat it away with the flat of his hand with a fine free-flowing tennis forehand drive and felt it slice into his palm like a razor blade.

Val yelped as another one scored a line of blood along her rounded naked shoulder.

Once a flower had sprung from a bush it carried on in a straight line and then, if it missed, fluttered to the ground. Those that did not miss drew little nicks of blood and gasps of pain from the two humans. Soon they were running through a cloud of lancing flowers as though running through a swarm of mindlessly-incensed butterflies.

“We’ve got to go back!” screamed Val.

“No! Keep on!”

Redfern felt his body being nicked and cut and scored. He flailed with his arms. Then he put the rifle down, ripped off the tattered remains of his shirt, slung his rifle back over his shoulder and used the shirt like a fly-whisk, swirling it about him. He swished it through the air about Val, giving her what protection he could. Already her brown skin shone with a myriad of tiny blood flecks. They were being bitten to pieces in tiny, unceasing pricks and jabs.

Like a dancing dervish he leaped and cavorted and swung his shirt, and like a seven-veils dancer Val swayed and swung and kicked with him. Surrounded by the whirling scraps of yellow, being nicked and pinched and slashed, they broke across the gravel road.

Whatever these things were, they were not soft-petaled flowers. Silicon had gone into their hard crystal edges. What motive power could thus lift, spin and hurl them, Redfern didn’t know. But the wizards of Senchuria would have the answer. Scobie Redfern more and more looked forward to the interview with them he had promised himself.

That the wizards possessed tremendous scientific powers was obvious: the crystals, the emerald ray, the psychic and psychological pressures, and now these lethal spinning razor-sharp yellow flowers.

Yellowness swam about them. As though trapped in a cupped flower amid blowing golden pollen they stumbled and staggered across the gravel path. Their bodies puckered with flecks of blood as though they had run naked through crimson raindrops.

Beating at the darting, spinning flowers with his shirt in one hand and dragging Val along with the other, Redfern somehow reached the grass on the opposite side. His skin felt as though he had been rubbed against a nutmeg grater of giant size and excruciating sharpness. His lungs pained him. Blood dropped from his forehead and turned his vision crimson. He forced himself to go on.

“Keep going, Val! Only a few paces more—keep on!”

The shirt was a red and yellow smear over its grayness. His head was pounding some offbeat refrain. He was aware of Val only as a weight pulling at his arm. A few more paces…

Stung as though by a myriad of maddened hornets, stung like truth, stung by flung contemptuous silver coins, they pitched down onto grass and watched with bloodied eyes as the last few flowers drifted to the ground two feet short.

Weakly, Redfern laughed.

Although he knew that these events were really happening about him he was powerfully aware of the attraction of believing himself within a hallucination. How simple the answers would be then! But the world in which he now existed, the world of the wizards of Senchuria, really and truly was—all this was real.

“We need medical attention.” He stood up, panting still, his skin like a coat of penitence, feeling light-headed.

“You look awful, Scobie.”

“You don’t look so great yourself. But I still love you—” He checked her immediate response. “We’ve got to get into the city and get cleaned up. I feel as though I’ve just dived into boiling water.”

She tried to be brave now, for his sake; and, seeing the success he had had, for the sake of her own pride and for womanish spite against the wizards of Senchuria.

“Like a lot of people before them,” Redfern said as they headed for the gate, “these wizards of Senchuria are going to find that violence is not the answer to everything. It has its place; make no mistake about that. But it is not the final arbiter.”

Val said, “Those… things… are still following.”

The roaches moved over the gravel road and past the yellow-flowered bushes. Not a star-shaped flower stirred.

“One evil knows another,” Redfern grunted. He moved on faster. It would have been a debatable point whether or not he was moving faster to get into the city quicker or to get away from the roaches.

Four graveyard ghouls marched out of the gateway.

They each lifted a crossbow and the first two loosed.

Redfern, his body pressed into the grass, lined up on each ghoul in turn. This time, even with bolts prying the ground near him, he took only five shots to dispose of the four cemetery strays.

He thought about that for a moment before he stood up and began to urge Val on. Dispose of. A neat, cataloguing, euphemistic way of saying he’d shot them in the guts and their backbones had been blown out in a shower of blood and intestines.

He looked down at the bodies as they passed.

The things were tall, gangling, sprawled laxly in death and, he had to admit, for all their look of insect-cum-human face, must be living beings. Their macabre resemblance to the walking dead from graveyards was a mere chance. The thought made Redfern no happier.

The gateway rose above him, a fantastic jumble of arabesques, curlicues, crenellations, all picked out with studded jewels and brightwork. The arch itself was of Moorish shape, well retracted, and with many pierced stellar openings to either side. The grass petered out about a dozen yards from the gate and packed dust took its place. The runnel beneath the gate would be a quagmire when it rained.

The loss of blood was now becoming serious. He felt detached from the earth, as though his lightened body were about to take off. A continuous shirring, as of waves on a pebbled beach, sounded metronomically in his ears.

Val hung on his arm, limp, her eyes closed, scarcely breathing.

A sound made him turn. He moved very slowly; even to his own slack senses he moved with a bloated weariness.

Three roaches, two white and black, and one, the center one, yellow and black, stood looking at him. Their cavernous jaws clicked open and shut. He backed up until he was within the gate. He tried to lift the rifle and, for some reason, the weight defeated him. Annoyance fought in his mind with an emotion he could not identify, an emotion he thought might be fear, but could not be sure of. He had decided, some time ago, hadn’t he, not to have any more truck with fear? Something to do with spiting the wizards of Senchuria. He didn’t like that little lot, that was for sure. Poor Val, she did look a mess, her body a mass of little flecks of blood. Like his own, really. Now the rifle had dropped into the dust. Bolt side down, too. Bad, that. It was dark. Cloudy. Fuzzy. Better sit down. Val’s asleep. Sleep. Good idea-very tired, very tired…

IX

Alone and lonely, aloof and final, the Wizards of Senchuria maintained their city on the edge of the forest at the intersection of the dimensions.

With roaming crystals of faceted power armed with emerald rays of destruction and flowing floods of hatred, they marshaled the sea of grass. With half-insect, half-human ghouls they policed their forests, and their hunting cockroaches slipped slinkingly to hound and pull down and devour. Their flowerbeds of yellow-starred bushes grew in ranked phalanxes to hurl blood-drinking darts of spinning stars.

Alone and lonely, aloof and final, the Wizards of Senchuria lived in their city of gems. Alone, lonely, and aloof— yes. And frightened. Terribly frightened. Isolated and terrified, the Wizards of Senchuria existed in their wonderful gemmed city at the edge of the forest protected by super-science and wizardry, and they trembled at each passing tremor of the fabric stretched between the dimensions.

“But they’d never admit to being frightened,” said Gait in his usual heavy authoritarian way. They were strolling between banks of flowers—ordinary flowers—in the garden of the Chrysoberyl Wing, and the perfume of strange forms of chrysanthemums wafted about them. The wizards of Senchuria liked order in their arrangements.

Still walking a little gingerly, Redfern nodded. Val held onto his arm. He had capitalized, in his own mind, the W of Wizards after he had learned more of their story.

“I’ve come to terms with their idealism,” Gait went on. “Arlan teaches a similarly abstract form of withdrawal…”

“But warmer, Gait! Much more human!” cried Val.

He nodded, smiling. “In these worlds nothing is free. Well, that’s a fair enough evaluation. You just made it hard on yourself, Scobie.”

Redfern hadn’t forgotten. His convalescence, after they had patched him up and poured new blood into him, was taking time. Val, too, still looked white around the lips. Neither of them would forget the experience through which they had gone with the emotion broadcasters affixed to their heads. That apparatus had been taken away; but Redfern still thought he could feel it adhering like a clammy limpet to his head.

“So I did. But I’m constitutionally incapable of respecting an authority that is manifestly incompetent, overly cruel, or just plain stupid.”

“In this case the authority—the Wizards—was none of these things. You now know why they must have their accumulators fully charged. They see this purely in the light of a fair bargain.”

“Fair!” snapped Val with some acerbity.

Gait smiled deprecatingly. In the sunshine at the far end of the garden Mina, Tony and Nyllee turned on the flagged walk to return, their white gowns, like the ones worn by Gait, Val and Redfern, shimmering with silky cleanliness.

“I think so, Val. The Wizards maintain their independence in a most precarious situation. They defend us all now.”

“Those damned ghouls of theirs tried to kill us, though,” rumbled Redfern mutinously.

Gait shook his heavy head. “Not so. They were anesthetic darts. A trifle overpowering for humans; but the Wizards habitually deal with life forms far more monstrous and menacing than humans.”

“And the roaches?”

“Purely hunting animals. We have life forms on Montrado for those purposes, as you have on your Earth. And, Scobie, the Wizards have forgiven you for killing their Suslincs, what you call roaches. As for the Gara’hec, well, they are in reality close to zombies and your description of them as graveyard ghouls was striking and apt. They—”

“You mean they really were…” Val didn’t continue.

“Yes, Val. The Wizards are isolated here on an interdimensional nodal point of immense size and potential. They must use every artifice to maintain their integrity and independence. The Gara’hec are really the dead, refurbished for some use through mental techniques, clever mechanistic and electronic wizardry, given exoskeletal support and isotope-battery power. They have a pseudo-life of their own. They are not nice to look at, I grant you; but they are excellent hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Redfern felt the defilement of that idea. He shivered. “But I shot them! If they were the undead they wouldn’t have died, for they were already dead.”

“You shot away their motor functions, their controls. You said yourself you had to shoot some twice.”

Val clung to his arm more tightly. Mina and Tony and Nyllee looked like white statues from a sunnier age strolling among the flower beds. Redfern thought of those ghastly insect-human faces lowering down on him.

“Poor devils!” he breathed. “Is that all the people here have to look forward to when they’re dead?”

“I find nothing strange,” Gait said solemnly, “in learning that the Wizards consider it an honor to continue to serve in that form after their death.”

“So all the time they wanted emotion from us, to charge their accumulators? Well,” Redfern finished, still not too sure, “they got it from us, all right. I was scared silly.”

“I find it very hard to like them,” said Val in her soft voice. “Very hard.”

“Think of the teachings of Arlan. He will help you.”

“You said the Wizards defended us,” Redfern said. He’d have to adjust his thinking on this; but that would take time. “And you said this was a big interdimensional nodal point. How can they be isolated, then?”

The two groups had joined now, to continue their stroll in the sunshine of Senchuria.

“I can tell you that, Scobie.” Tony spoke with a sureness that he had not possessed before, his thin freckled face eager and alive. “We have a transportation system in Montrado that is similar to the railway system on your Earth. Think of the Wizards as being on the central platform of a large junction. They can be visited by people from many dimensions, yet they themselves are cut off by the webs and warps of the barriers. It takes power to break through the dimensions unless you have a Gate and a Porteur.”

“They receive many visitations. They trade with some races of the dimensions. For others they have only contempt and hatred, and these they fight against. They speak of the Porvone with utter horror and loathing.”

“I’ve heard of them,” said Redfern, nodding.

“Only last month they had to resist the invasion of a vast army of half-men, pouring through a nodal point in the forest. The area all around here is studded with Gates and Portals. They threw all the power of their emotion weapons. Hatred poured out like black floods of passion; fear gibbered through the forest.” Gait spoke with enthusiasm. “They fought a fierce and awful fight through the emotions. Luckily for us, the Wizards won. Had they lost”—he shrugged meaningfully—”when we arrived we would have received a very different reception.”

They began to walk back to the Chrysoberyl Wing. Lunch was due. Gait went on speaking.

“I’ve studied the whole problem with Vivasjan. He is what I’d call their chief minister, a wonderful old man with whom I’ve discussed the philosophy of Arlan at length. Since their written records began they have histories of continual dimensional incursions. They were a proud race but they learned much from other dimensions. A great deal of their power and their science is borrowed; they can maintain a higher degree of technological achievement than any they would have attained on their own, living between the forest and the sea of grass. The rest of this world is relatively untamed, virgin. There is much exploration to be done.”

“That follows.” Redfern adjusted the translator band with its winking jewels in his hair. They all spoke easily now, their languages freely intermingled. “I suppose you can feel sorry for them. But they really play it rough. I can still feel those yellow flowers cutting into me.”

Gait sighed. “The philosophy of Arlan teaches acceptance of all things.” He smiled with his heavy solemnity. “Although we could no longer stomach the Contessa and her cohorts of evil. I think you will come to believe that the Wizards of Senchuria are strictly fair. They take and they give, living by trading; they have their own integrity.”

“I suppose so.”

They all went in to lunch, taken in a wide pleasant refectory. The food was delicious. They were joined by Vivasjan and some of his advisers. Vivasjan was a strong-faced, solemn man, clad in the long scarlet robe generally adopted by the Wizards when they wore clothes, and his features showed the strain of a long life spent in balancing force against force, of maintaining his city and people against interdimensional trickery and invasion. For a short time Redfern had had this man as an enemy, so he had thought, and he could see the wisdom of changing that situation. Vivasjan would be a good friend and a bad enemy.

The chief minister explained the position again, and added: “We can accept all kinds of emotion and adapt it to our purposes. We prefer to use love. It is easier and more pleasant to collect. The obverse of love is hate. We have electroencephalographs here and we have studied many dimensions’ work on psychology and the pathology of the mind. Kandinsky, from your Earth, Mr. Redfern, has done much pioneering. In fact we have some Terrestrial EEG’s in operation. The nervous energy of the brain cells, part electric and part chemical, can be isolated. We do isolate it and we use it.” He sighed. “But we would prefer to bask in the emotions of love rather than hatred. We have been born into a parlous position, here in Senchuria.”

Again Redfern felt a feeling of sympathy for these Wizards engulfing him, against what he considered his proper feelings of resentment.

“Earth?” he said, picking up the point. “Then you could show us the Portal to get back home?”

Gait interrupted. “I’ve covered that, Scobie. There are no direct links with either your Earth, Montrado or Irunium.”

Val put down her wineglass. “We can go back indirectly, though. As soon as we’re strong enough.”

“Yes,” said Vivasjan. “Yes, that would be best.”

Redfern could not remain unaware of the general air of unease among the Wizards, the sense of resignation verging on apathy. Only Vivasjan, of all the men and women wearing the long scarlet robes, appeared to possess a strength and a determination that would brook no obstacles to what he wanted to do. Redfern saw the tired faces and the nervous gestures that made a question mark of the future. Here in Senchuria there was never any purposeful and clearly-held vision of tomorrow.

“What are they all scared of?” Redfern whispered to Gait.

The heavy man moved his shoulders fretfully. “They have means of testing the various nodal points scattered about their land. They can sense movement, preparation, a deliberate building-up of forces that can rip the dimensional barriers to shreds.”

Val gasped. “You mean another invasion?”

Somberly, Gait nodded.

Feeling personally refreshed even if the Wizards acted with that restraint upon them, Redfern joined the others in a tour of the city. He marveled at the concentration of wealth and the lavish use of scientific methods in sanitation and lighting and the provision of bodily comforts; he smiled to see strange incongruities of cultures, where, for example, a sodium-arc lamp standard would be wreathed in curled gems. He saw silent electric cars running on fat pneumatic wheels, and each car was a mobile encrustation of gems.

“Much of our technical help comes from Slikitter,” Vivasjan said, leading them up a jewel-sparkling escalator to the battlements. “They are not a particularly pleasant people, un-human in form; but they recognize self-interest as a valid method of bargaining and they do respect a contract.” A sense of the weirdness in living in a culture that exchanged goods and treasures and ideas across the dimensions seized Redfern. Here he was, walking on the smooth red stone of the battlements of this city, relishing the sunlight, when all about him lay that hideous snow-filled ice-waste of the dimension through which they had come. Here, also, lay a part of the wide savanna of Irunium, and here, too, must be a part of Manhattan, all coexistent and yet invisible and separated from each other by intangible bonds stronger than the toughest of man-made materials.

A group of the Gara’hec patrolled the battlements. The living dead wore their sketchy armor and carried short, stabbing broad swords. In place of the crossbows with which they had hunted the humans in the forest they now bore more sophisticated weapons. Redfern saw automatic rifles of Earthly pattern, machine-cannon mounted on gimbals, and odd, cone-like weapons the functions of which he could not know. He made a mental note to find out just what the powers of these strange weapons were. Knowledge, especially knowledge of unknown armaments, was power. Across the sea of grass a patrol of crystals floated past like wind-blown bubbles, faceted and hard-edged, gleaming and twinkling, menacing and inhuman.

He had learned that no one in fact was ensconced in each crystal. They carried their own lowly form of pseudo-intelligence sparked by a receptor tuned to the wavelengths broadcast by the Wizards; this gave them a limited range of independent decision and operation but chained them permanently to the overriding control of the city’s masters.

They knew their job and they did it with a remorseless matter-of-factness well in keeping with their hard crystalline nature.

The sea of grass shimmered under the sun.

On either hand, stretching away like a greenish yellow wall, the forest edge quivered with unseen life.

Redfern was only too well aware that a large number of unresolved questions hung about him; he also realized he would have to await those answers in the greater working out of the problems confronting him and his comrades. Activity only too clearly indicating coming conflict broke about him. Many more of the gruesome Gara’hec marched onto the ramparts. A voracious pack of the Suslincs, those huge furry roaches, burst from a gate beneath him and roamed out across the sea of grass. Gleaming crystals scintillating and flashing in the sunlight wove a pattern around and above the Suslincs. A stronger, more brilliant and vibrating yellow light seemed to irradiate the massed banks of yellow-starred flowers in their marshaled ranks.

“Yes.” Vivasjan nodded affirmation. “The report has been received.” He hitched vaguely at the waist of his scarlet robe as though seeking something there that was unaccountably absent. “From a world we know as Infalgon a fresh incursion is breaking upon us.” He sighed. “There are war machines and many armored men. Again we of Senchuria must descend to the folly of fighting to protect those things in which we believe.”

“I’ll help!” Tony sounded fierce and proud.

“Yes.” Gait nodded, grim and somber. “You have the promise of our aid.”

“Now wait a minute…” protested Redfern.

Val rounded on him. “Oh, Scobie! Surely you cannot refuse!”

“Help the Wizards, after what they did to us? It goes against the grain, Val.”

Her brown flushed face looked up at him, troubled, mutinous, her eyes sparkling dangerously, the effect, Redfern could not help considering, of moisture and sunlight. “But Gait has explained all that! It’s their way, their integrity, their demand for absolute fairness and payment for value received—”

“Value received! I can still feel that damned contraption on my head! Those vile yellow flowers cutting me to ribbons! I’d say the value was a little one-sided, Val. Wouldn’t you?”

A swarm of black dots burst over the far horizon.

“If you understood the philosophy of Arlan you’d know! Acceptance and repayment. They are tenets in which one can believe. And the Wizards are our only hope now. Look!”

Everyone on the battlements was looking and pointing.

The black dots grew in size. While the nearer ones coming swiftly on took form, color and substance, still more surged up over the horizon to form an unending band of movement flying toward the city.

Redfern gasped.

Each one of those dots resolved into a gauzy-winged flying creature from whose rounded contours the sunshine splintered in shards of iridescence. The transparently fragile wings beat in whorls of color. Long tactile antennae reached out ahead of the creatures’ heads.

Seated astride each flying body a chunkily square being crouched forward, compact and very menacing. The light caught reflections from the goggled face and gleamed from helmeted leather. The light struck sparks from the tips of long lances swung low. A shower of projectiles sprouted in advance of the oncoming host. Gara’hec coughed and died, again. Suslincs squealed and collapsed.

“They’ll fly right over the yellow flowers!”

“Prepare yourselves!” called Vivasjan strongly. “Our enemies know who are the masters here! Stand fast, for they are upon us!”

The sunlight darkened under the wings of the enormous host.

X

“Hurry the women to shelter!” shouted Redfern. If the Wizards of Senchuria had their confounded emotion-milkers affixed to his head right now they’d be slopping over.

Crystals flashed in the sun. The flying host winged on.

“Why aren’t your hatred dispensers working?” screamed Val.

Vivasjan’s face showed his stricken disappointment, the answer to the Wizard’s despair. “These are creatures like the Gara’hec! They can feel no human emotions!”

Nearby two Gara’hec swung a twenty millimeter machine-cannon, began pumping graze-fused shells. Noise and smoke and fire lashed the brilliance of the day. Ever since Redfern had learned of the nature of the Wizards of Senchuria and the fact that their city lay at the intersections of many dimensions, this was the moment he had feared.

This particularly nasty type of position was one in which he had everything to lose. All he could do now, as Val had said, was try to help the Wizards overcome these flying hosts from Infalgon. Earth, in that moment of screaming horror, seemed very far away.

He rushed toward the twenty-millimeter machine-cannon and pushed aside the twice-dead bodies of the Gara’hec. Each half-insect half-human face glared like a corpse uncovered after a hundred years. Their armor clanked as they fell.

The projectiles fired by the flying men—Redfern had to call them that for lack of any better pejorative—curved down to splash in puddles of steaming acid. Where they struck they ate through leather and flesh and bone. The air seemed full of them.

Redfern ducked down and pulled the trigger. The cannon bucked beneath his hands and he squirted it about as a fireman might direct a hose, which probably saved his life. Clear sky showed for an instant.

Tony ran to drop at his side and fire a machine carbine. The thin freckled face showed an intense concentration and no sign of fear. Redfern wondered how his own face looked. Then the magazine ran empty and the machine-cannon clicked futilely.

“How the hell do you reload this thing?” panted Redfern.

“No idea.” Tony slapped a fresh clip into the carbine. “Get back to the inner wall. I’ll cover you.”

Redfern glared about. There had to be another weapon.

The Infalgon dropped down from their gauzy-winged flyers and leaped onto the battlements swinging their lances with precision. Gara’hec met them with stiff formal reactions. Redfern saw at a glance that the walking dead possessed not a tithe of the flexibility needed to fight these squat devils.

Goggled faces bore down. Harsh, scaled tunics covering gnarled limbs and bodies, heavily muscled, their foes jostled to get at the Gara’hec. Redfern fought the red panic that assailed him. He had no Springfield now.

Bare moments had elapsed since the beginning of the fight.

Gait was pushing Val and dragging Mina into a low doorway opening off a tower dominating this section of the battlements. Smoke hung in the air. Thick acid reeked where the Infalgon projectiles had struck. Gara’hec and a few Wizards fought the invaders, bodies black against the sunshine. Gait was cursing and Val was struggling.

“Get in, Val! Get under cover!”

“I’m not leaving! I can fight too!”

Gait stopped trying to push Val through the low opening. He pulled her out and pushed Mina through. Then he darted in himself and, with a little shock of disbelief, Redfern saw the heavy metal door, gem-encrusted, slam shut. For a space Val stood isolated, then she snatched up a fallen weapon, a strangely shaped construct with a flare-mouth and a reverse-curved stock. Dryness caught at Redfern’s throat. A pounding fear for the girl’s safety drove him forward.

“Val!”

She saw him.

Two enormously buzzing flyers swooped on her, their riders swinging their gnarled legs free and their lances swinging low, like long stingers. They had faces like cats, these creatures of Infalgon, feral-fierce and ferocious. Empty-handed, Redfern plunged on.

Val lifted the weapon. A paler beam of light than the strong emerald of the crystals flashed out. Where it touched the Infalgon it withered them. The flyers spun away, their gauzy wings beating a ragged buzz.

Then Redfern had scooped Val up and carried her forcibly backward hard up against the stones of the tower. Two balls of acid fell to smoke fumingly where they had been standing.

“Scobie! This is terrible!”

“Tony!” Redfern yelled. The youngster darted for them, leaping a fuming acid projectile. He loosed off a full clip from the carbine as he came. His face showed radiantly.

“Val! You’re all right—where’s Nyllee?”

“She went with Vivasjan. I refused to go—Gait—”

Tragedy crumbled her features.

“I know, Val. Don’t worry about Gait now. If we don’t find a safe hidey-hole ourselves, or fight back, we’re done for!”

A group of scarlet-clad Wizards with the pale-green beam weapons in their hands cleared a space along the battlements. More Gara’hec appeared. The noise continued to sound spectacularly. The Infalgon tumbled from their flyers as soon as they spanned the walls and charged into hand-to-hand combat. The whole city was ringed with fighting.

“What chance have we?” gasped Val.

Redfern could size the situation up better now. He still had no weapon; yet here in this momentarily isolated fragment of peace amid the larger battle, he could see the pattern.

“If we can stop them when they clear the walls, we can hold them.” Acid fumed closed by. “If they once occupy the walls, the whole city is lost.”

One thing Redfern established. The Infalgon fired their acid projectiles from stubby mortar-shaped weapons strapped to their mount’s harness. Redfern did not see one reload. Once they had fired, they relied on lance or sword. That, at the least, spelled a chance.

Staggering back from a merlon a Gara’hec stumbled toward them. A barbed lance protruded from his back; his body equally divided the shaft, yet he continued to fight, slashing his sword at the Infalgon who had speared him, cutting into leather and muscle. The Infalgon screamed. The muscular little creature swung his own sword in a clanging resonance.

Tony lifted his carbine and the bolt clicked empty.

Val palely beamed the Infalgon into withered death; but the Gara’hec, twisting as he fell, collapsed. The walking dead had at last been killed again.

Redfern leaped forward and scooped up the Infalgon’s sword. Longer and heavier than the short sword wielded by the Gara’hec, its straight blade balanced perfectly. All Redfern knew about swords was that they were no longer considered a part of a gentleman’s walking-out dress. He swished it through the air. He had felled trees before.

The plopping of acid projectiles had grown noticeably less now. The stream of gauzy-winged flyers had slackened. Now a whole series of vicious individual combats began around the walls of Senchuria.

At this point in the battle the borrowed weapons from other cultures gave the advantage to the Wizards. The Gara’hec were able to form little clumps and shoot down the Infalgon as they charged up to close quarters. Now Redfern spotted crystals lazily drifting over the walls and beaming down the cat-faced aliens.

He hefted the sword and jumped in. He felt the overpowering need to release the tensions in him, to prove in however a foolish and adolescent way that he was capable of standing by his friends.

The sword swung like a butcher’s cleaver. Taller than the Infalgon, he could lean in and cut them up, if he was careful not to let them slide in to close quarters. Tony, his carbine shot empty, fought alongside Redfern with a snatched up sword. They cleared a space and then, joined by Gara’hec and Wizards, they cleaned up their section of the battlements. Redfern could feel horror and shame at this wholesale destruction of another life form, however inimical; but right now, with that life form trying to degut him, he could not afford the luxury of abnegation.

Tony let rip a great shout.

Like Diana fresh from the hunt, Nyllee, a smoking Springfield in her left hand and a bloodied dagger in her right, her white gown ripped and splashed with red stains, ran fleetly toward them. Her face showed a strange exultation. Redfern wondered, in that moment of release, what sports they played on Nyllee’s world of Narlingha.

As Tony and Nyllee assured each other that neither was hurt, Redfern glanced at Val. Her chest heaved. She looked haggard. She tried to smile bravely for him and produced a lopsided grimace.

“We won, then, Scobie.”

“Seems like it.”

A Wizard who had been constantly at Vivasjan’s side until the joining of the battle and who now swung his green-beam weapon from a hand that shook, walked across; from his grave face Redfern guessed at once, with a jolt of dismay, that the news was not good.

“We have won the opening skirmish,” the Wizard said in a low voice. “But you forget the war machines. Soon they will crawl over the sea of grass. Then the battle will begin.”

“Oh, no!” said Scobie Redfern, shattered.

Val laughed hysterically.

Tony kissed Nyllee firmly and put her from him.

“But we can still beat them! Arlan himself would not allow us to perish after all this!”

“But the hatred projectors!” Redfern gripped Val’s shoulders hard, quietening her. “No one could get past them!”

The Wizard nodded; but there was no confidence in him now.

“The Infalgon are creatures of similar character to our own faithful Gara’hec. Yet you saw the difference.”

“Quicker,” nodded Redfern. “Tougher, smarter on the uptake. So?”

“So the beings who created them may also be immune to our emotion projectors. We will try all emotions on them: hatred, fear, remorse, even love. We shall try to beat them back. But this is the day we of Senchuria have long feared—the day of reckoning, when an army comes against us immune to our emotion defenses.”

Tony’s sword clanged on the stone. “We’ll fight!” he said, angrily and unhappily. He hadn’t liked what the Wizard said.

Nyllee didn’t cling to him now. She was carefully and curiously inspecting one of the Wizard’s green-beam projectors. She hadn’t any concern, any worries, it seemed, over the blood splashed over her body and arms.

“Sure, Ton’,” she said, flicking over an intensity control on the projector. “Sure, we’ll fight ‘em.”

Abruptly, treacherously, mockingly belying all the brave words and deeds, Scobie Redfern knew it had all gone wrong, gone sour, that they were flapping their lips, that the end was truly coming and nothing they could do would halt it or deflect it by a millimeter.

A gathering noise of many people jostled his mind away from decisions he could not make. He looked down into the city. A vast crowd of people slowly moved toward the walls. People began to climb up. They wore bits of armor, scarlet robes, brown and black and blue robes. Many carried beam projectors, others rifles and tommy guns, and others cone weapons and weapons of a nature unknown to Redfern. They moved with a steady and yet somehow reluctant gait, like newly lectured children on their way to a hated tea party.

“Everyone of Senchuria will fight.” The Wizard spoke his rote words as though aware of their futility.

“But there are old people there!” protested Val.

“Why don’t you rejuvenate them, as you did us?”

“The rejuvenation process has been used for many generations,” said the Wizard. “An individual may be restored to youth only a certain number of times; after that the baffled forces of nature will not be denied. Some of those people are thousands of years old.”

A whiff of that idea tendriled in Redfern’s mind.

“You have a strange and yet somehow chaste culture here,” breathed Val. She caught Redfern’s arm. “And it will all be destroyed! Oh, Scobie! Isn’t there anything we can do to help?”

Redfern still considered himself badly treated by the Wizards, although he had come to grasp their reasons. They were a gravely polite people, lying about Earthly science and geriatrics and EEG’s when their own rejuvenation process must be as far removed from any Earthly geriatric medicine as a heart-transplant from a tonsilectomy. He felt that even by their own strict, perhaps harsh, standards of business and barter, he would owe them nothing after the fight. They must feel forced to use life to the full, with rejuvenation and after that the Gara’hec to look forward to; they must have a respect for life to wish to prolong it so.

All this life, this desperate striving to maintain enough people to make life worth living, all their art and science and skills—all would be wiped out. Of that Redfern felt absolutely sure. He wondered why he felt as sorry as he did, considering his experience with that emotion-milker on his head. Now he knew where that changed emotion would be used: against the mechanical war machines of the Irifalgon. Would be used—unavailingly.

Redfern looked at Val. She stared back at him, swallowing, her eyelids blinking rapidly, her face held back and her neck compressed, waiting.

The feeling of being trapped snapped down on Scobie Redfern with steel-spring jaws.

Paradoxically, that sensation affected him more powerfully now—here on the sunshine-soaked battlements of the city of the Wizards of Senchuria with a beautiful girl pleading with him—than ever it had when he had lain, a slave prisoner, on the straw of the jewel mines in Irunium.

Pressures. Forces. Great powers working on him. These, always, had been the enemy for Scobie Redfern.

Vivasjan had climbed slowly up to the wall and Val and the other Wizard were talking eagerly to him. Tony and Nyllee joined in. They grew more and more excited.

Then Val pulled Redfern’s arm.

“You’ve sulked long enough, Scobie! Listen: there is a way to beat the Infalgon…”

“I know.” Redfern had made his decision. “We’ll stand and fight. All of us. If we lose, we lose. We—”

“No, Scobie!” shouted Val, her face alive with her news. “Vivasjan knows where there is a great weapon. Only, whoever fetches it is likely to get killed doing it!”

XI

Kiss or kill.

Redfern remembered that, the way he’d promised himself to handle any opposition according to the way it acted.

Well, what should he do now?

He knew damn well what he ought to have done long before he allowed himself to be cajoled into this eerie cavern with its stalactites and its breath of evil and its gloomy recesses. The darkness pressed in closely. The beam from their flashlights carved pencil-thin slivers of light in all that great bulk of dark. Oh, yes, Scobie Redfern told himself, sliding down shivering into an icy underground stream, he knew what he ought to have done.

He ought to have grabbed Val and told her to find a new nodal point to take them to another, kinder dimension. She could have brought along her friends, too. If he’d insisted, they could have been back in New York, right now, eating that juicy steak with all the trimmings and drinking a cup of steaming coffee— His mouth salivated and he spat and cursed.

“Quiet, Scobie!” Val nudged him in the ribs, ungently.

They’d been outfitted and had gone to the nodal point, the Gateway, within the city of the Wizards, and Val had put them all through: Tony, Nyllee, Val and Redfern. And now here they were in another world creeping through a terror-haunted series of caverns seeking another Portal to the next world.

“Is it much further?” Tony whispered sibilantly.

“I can sense it ahead. Keep quiet. Vivasjan said there were… things… in here.”

Nyllee said something coarse about frog’s bowels.

The Wizards had no Porteurs of their own, the mutant strain never having showed itself in their race, and they didn’t altogether approve of them. Val had quite shocked them. But Vivasjan had said: “In a world called Narangon, whose people are the inveterate and bitter foes of the Infalgon, there are weapons to destroy the war machines. We know of them; but no trader has ever offered them to us. Now we have need of them.”

“We’re close,” whispered Val.

They crept over a huge boulder that must have fallen from the roof long ago. At the far side, fitfully illuminated by their flashes and a straggly phosphorescent moss, they halted. They huddled close to the stone as Val again cast around, sensing. Her closed eyes and rapt face fascinated Redfern.

They had entered this cavern from the vaults of the Wizard’s castle and now they sought the next gateway on their macabre journey through the dimensions.

A sound slithered over the loose gravel to their rear.

Tony swung his flash. Nyllee mentioned frog’s eyeballs and yanked out her beam weapon. Redfern felt the gorge rise in him. He yanked out his own green-beam weapon. Val still stood, seeking through the insubstantial medium for the next nodal point.

Over them all reared the scaled trunk of a gigantic snake. The wedge-shaped head arched over them, the long tongue flickering, the black-rimmed mouth open and four curved fangs glittering chips of light back from the humans’ flashlights. The reptile’s eyes blazed yellow as that enormous head swayed back and forth. Its scaly coils writhed away as it looped forward. Their chill glitter hypnotized with sheer size, as the yellow eyes with fury.

“By sweet Arlan!” breathed Tony shakily.

The cruel wedge-shaped head darted forward. As large as a bubble-car, the head and mouth could engulf a human in a single bite. Redfern experienced a shocked vision of Val’s arms and legs protruding like sticks on each side of that flat mouth. Nyllee fired. The pale green beam sheared through the scale and skin. Bones suddenly thrust through ripped away flesh. Smoke coiled. The smell of charred meat hung in the cavern. Redfern fired.

The head of the snake slashed on past them. But now it sprang and bounded and leaped without a body. Like a football it bounced into the cavern darkness. The body went mad. Scaled coils writhed and looped, thrashed and smashed. Rock was pulverized. Dust flew. At last the sinuous length shivered and subsided. A tremor or two rolled along the flanks; then the snake was dead.

“What a monster!” said Nyllee with approval. “I’d like his head for a trophy.”

Val opened her eyes. “We go on,” she said. She did not look at the snake. Quietly, continually looking about them, they picked their way forward over boulders and shale and gravel until they reached a little stream bed.

“Here,” said Val, simply.

They stood together, arms about each other, weapons ready, as Val told them to prepare for the transit. With no fuss and only a miniscule shudder they were through.

The trickling stream bed of the cavern had changed instantaneously into a wide and rolling river of turbid brown water. Floating logs and debris twisted and tumbled down the river. The humans stood on a crumbling bank with trees and llianas drooping to collapse into the flood. Earth fell to trickle away, and then to subside in clumps. A tree toppled and fell with a showering crash as they watched.

“Flood,” said Nyllee as though imparting information. She looked around alertly.

“Where to now, Val?” asked Redfern.

“I’m a little confused,” she said. “It’s all… new…”

He had to remind himself that this Porteuring business was weird and strange to Val no less than—and probably more than—to him. She was a brave little kid, at that. She had a toughness of fiber closer-woven than Nyllee’s coarse courage.

“Vivasjan knew of the route, Val,” Redfern said with a breezy confidence he hoped she would not pierce for the sham it was. “What was the next Gate he told us?”

“One more dimension to Narangon, I think…”

The bank crumbled again with the sliding displacement of a scoop-shaped hunk of earth. The party of dimension-travelers moved back. Redfern checked that their heavy packs were still safely closed and their weapons handy—including the long Infalgon sword he had retained—and then he said grimly to Val: “Right, Val. Let’s hit that next Gate.”

A few yards upstream Val nodded. “Here.”

They went through in a compact bunch. Again, despite his previous experiences, Redfern could not fail to be aware of the strangeness of stepping from one world into another, of passing through walls and barriers invisible yet stronger than beryl-steel, of knowing that all around him lay the familiar streets of New York, the mines of Irunium, the city of the Wizards of Senchuria—and who knew how many more uncountable multi-dimensions?

They popped into this new world in a wilderness of clinging spider strands of silk. A breeze waved banners and rolls and undulating ribbons of silk and gauze about them, flinging into their faces and eyes, coiling about their legs, sucking into their mouths. They stumbled on a softly heaving ground. The smell of jasmine filled the air and languorous shifts of spidersilk spun about them. Redfern could swear he could hear Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto thundering and roaring in the background with the sweet piano notes rippling upward and outward in time with the rolling, swaying mass of spiderstrands and ribbons surrounding them.

He drew the Infalgon sword and slashed himself free of the strands. The others did the same with their knives. Fresh strands coiled about them at once, blowing on that scented breeze; they found they had continually to cut and strip the gossamer bindings from themselves.

“Which way, Val?”

Redfern found himself shouting and wondered why. The close-packed oppressiveness of the unceasing stream of blowing fibers, the shifting patterns of light and shade from the unseen sky, the sonorous beat of the music and the insidious lassitude of the perfumes must have combined to pressure him into a response pattern—and Scobie Redfern without thinking had reacted as he always did to persuasion.

“This way. Not far…”

They battled after Val, flinging coils and strands of multicolored ribbon aside, pulling the sticky strands from hair and faces, pushing on through what seemed an eternity. Then Val stopped, sensing. “Here… I think…”

Redfern could sympathize with her. He had no conception of that unworldly other sense by which Porteurs could track down and position the invisible coordinates of a gateway in the worlds on both sides of that nodal point; but he could see quite clearly the difficulty of knowing where the hell you were in a crazy world like this of blowing spidersilk and stranded ribbons. He touched her arm gently and she flashed him a quick smile of gratitude.

“Right, Val. Let’s get grouped up.” Nyllee slashed her knife around freely, parting the clinging fragments of silk with vicious slashing cuts. “This is a world like—” Apparently the world bore some resemblance to a frog’s intentines, according to Nyllee.

They did group up and, arms around each other, awaited this transit under the composed guidance of Val.

They had begun in the vaults of the Wizards of Senchuria’s castle and so they might, as Scobie Redfern had to rationalize out painfully for himself, enter this new world far underground and be suffocated and entombed forever before they could do anything at all. The sense of relief each time they made it safely hurt him. This time they dropped eighteen inches onto a cold tiled floor.

Redfern opened his eyes.

A crone gibbered at them in utter fright. Her shabby dress hung on her and her hair frizzed out like wire. She put tip skinny hands as though to ward off the devil.

Redfern supposed they must look odd, with their scraps of spidersilk blowing about them, their fresh white robes torn from the cavern of the serpent, dirtied from the mud of the riverbank, and their weapons held in readiness, their faces grim and merciless. All that—quite apart from the unnerving fact that to this woman they had materialized out of thin air.

They pacified her and, still believing they must be devils or messengers from Golden Ranghavitsah, she told them where the merchant-quarter of the city lay. Val smiled at her very sweetly. “Do not be afraid, for by Arlan we wish you no harm. When we return we will bring you a present, what would you most desire?”

The crone’s features, all lines and leather, sucked in and out with pleasure, and her eyes showed she had once been a little girl. She thumped her broom down in excitement.

“I’d like a new set of false teeth!” she declared roundly. “These danged uppers slip all over the shop, and I haven’t had a sweet nut in years!”

To Redfern the crone’s voice came in perfectly understandable language thanks to the translator band in his hair which, so he had been told by Vivasjan, was a late model and infinitely superior to the older manually-set models. Now he burst into delighted laughter.

They set off into the city of Narangon with a greater hope for the future than at any time since leaving Senchuria.

“Vivasjan said the way we came was a short-cut through the dimensions,” said Nyllee, striding out. She had cut her robe off well above the knees and her strong limbs flashed freely. “He said it was too dangerous…”

“But the long way around crossed many more dimensions.” said Val. “And there were long treks between Portals. We’d have come in a long way away from the city, from some dimension or other called Sharnavoy, I think he said.”

“You were the one to take most of the risks, Val,” said Tony. He had grown more and more silent of late, as Nyllee had blossomed. Redfern guessed the youngster was vicariously enjoying the thrill of experiencing the birth of a new personality.

They walked along avenues of low, wide houses with yellow roofs and white walls and red doorways, in which a few windows, all heavily barred, clearly indicated the patio-like, inward-looking culture of these people. The sun shone; but not as warmly here as in Senchuria. People passed them and gave them, for all their outre appearance, not a second glance. Plenty of transport filled the streets, horses and weird polka-dotted animals, electric cars on fat pneumatic wheels, skimmers, hovercraft. The jumble of cultures mingled differently here from the way in Senchuria. A sense of aliveness and vibrancy filled the wide streets and plazas with a thrill of purpose.

“At the sign of the crossbow in Cutler Street,” said Redfern, remembering the address Vivasjan had given them. Cutler Street was easy to find, two blocks along after they asked the way, and the house at the sign of the crossbow was halfway down the street, a large yellow-roofed white building of three stories, blank-walled, frowning, yet their goal.

The crossbow, heavily gilded, swung over the door.

Their ring produced a man conspicuous for a paunch and a beard, who let them into an anteroom. There they waited until sent for. Redfern, for one, felt like a bank clerk awaiting the president’s summons, and did not like the sensation.

When at last they were attended to, the men who spoke to them—led by a hard-faced individual in crimson velvet whose demeanor and gold chains left no doubt at all in anyone’s mind that he considered himself a cut above everyone else—explained the reasons for their treatment. They had not reached Narangon through an accredited Portal. They had scared an old woman by not coming the right way. There were dues to pay, customs, travel expenses…

Redfern thought they must be joking.

The Narangon mediator, a bureaucrat called Narumble the Fourth, pointed out acidly that joking and business did not mix. At once Redfern knew the bureaucrat could be beaten: no fool ever said a more foolish thing.

The Narangonese were accustomed to trading through the dimensions. Many dimensions were kept private from them—the property of other peoples, the trading areas staked out for other great races, like Slikitter, Porvone, Zamash—but the Narangonese were a great race, too.

“Like the Infalgon?” asked Redfern disarmingly.

He could have dropped a stink bomb in the room.

Val picked up the danger signals first and, hurriedly smoothing over the imminent explosion, explained their mission here. When Narumble the Fourth learned they wished to barter for weapons in order to fight the Infalgon his manner changed. At once he became the businessman with a sale on his hands that pleased him personally, like a Carthaginian selling an elephant to a mercenary with eyes on Rome.

“Those zlinka-offal attacked Senchuria, you say? They are the foulest form of life we know of, debased, uncouth, diseased, leprous—” Narumble the Fourth checked himself, his face patchy with color, his chins quivering, his body shaking with anger and loathing. “Only the Porvone are worse than the Infalgon!”

Redfern showed the fat man his sword. “We smacked down a horde of flying zombies. You give us the weapons and we’ll finish the job.” That had always been a good line.

“Give?” said Narumble the Fourth, taken aback. “We can only supply against payment.” He glanced at the trophied sword with a shudder.

Now, Redfern was uneasily aware, came the tricky bit.

“We need what is called a Paraquatic Negative Coherer—”

“A P.N.C.! Impossible! They are reserved for the forces of Narangon alone.”

“So we’ve heard. But we need a Paneco, and we need one bad. The Infalgon war machines are even now, at this minute, on the spot where we stand, advancing on Senchuria!”

The Narangonese glanced around them with stupid little smiles, for all their interdimensional sangfroid shaken to realize just what was going on—right here and now—beyond those invisible walls.

“We hear, too,” went on Redfern, letting a little of the old iron creep into his voice, “that you’ve always wanted something from Senchuria. Well, now…” He let it hang.

Narumble the Fourth began to tremble. His eagerness became an obscene thing. “You mean the… the rejuvenation process? You would exchange that for a Paneco?”

“Both you and Senchuria have been trading for years, both directly and through intermediaries. Now Senchuria needs your aid and what has hitherto been refused is now available. We need four Panecos. What do you say?”

“This is big—important—City council—consultations—I shall have to inform the all-highest—” Narumble bumbled on.

“Hurry it up. There isn’t much time. Oh, and while you’re at it you could suggest your government send in its own army to help fight the Infalgon.”

Narumble, hurrying out, threw him an indignant, an aloof, glance. “We provide the fighting necessaries,” he said, as though the matter were self-obvious. He went out.

“Strange, though,” said Redfern. “I mean, who lives in the other dimensions all around them is more important to these people than who lives a few hundred miles away on the same planet. Instead of geographical distribution and exploration, you have interdimensional contacts and trade… and war.”

“I wish they’d hurry,” said Tony. Nyllee shushed him.

When at last Narumble returned he brought others higher in the hierarchy than himself, stern official-faced men who wanted to be provided with full briefs before they would commit themselves to the all-highest. Redfern explained he had all the details necessary in the packs to begin construction of a hall of rejuvenation; but he added, warningly, “The packs are booby-trapped. Until we get the four Panecons, you don’t get the Senchurian process.”

Another wait, and this time the waiting began to get to Redfern. Already Tony was walking up and down, frazzled and distraught, and pettishly impatient with Nyllee’s stolid comfort.

“What are they playing at?” he exclaimed. “Gait—Gait’s back there in Senchuria. He could be dead now, done for. For the sweet sake of Arlan, hurry up!” he shouted viciously at the unresponsive walls.

“I’m surprised you still care about Gait—” Redfern began when Val hushed him. She leaned across.

“Tony doesn’t really understand about Gait. Let him keep his illusions, Scobie… please?”

Redfern thought of that door closing in the tower, with Val pushed out, and he nodded grimly. “Let Tony. But I’m going to have a word with Gait when we get back.”

At last Narumble and the higher executives were back, this time with even higher executives in the hierarchy who trembled beneath furred capes and golden chains. The all-highest had agreed. He was getting on: if he could be made young again, what might he achieve! All the old men in the room cackled in self-congratulatory sympathy. Narumble looked at Val’s lissome figure with a forgotten fire. Redfern laughed and plunged into details.

The Senchurian packs were passed over and the details revealed. Everything for construction was there, meticulous and comprehensive. The four Paraquatic Negative Coherers were handed across in exchange. Redfern picked one up.

“Is this it?” he asked dubiously.

The thing looked just like a child’s plastic water pistol, with a few authentic-looking gadgets on the side. He swung it about and the old men, no doubt thinking of the joys of rejuvenation ahead, skipped out of the way of the muzzle.

“Don’t touch the trigger!” yelped Narumble the Fourth. Redfern could have betted he was totting up what Narumble number he could reach.

“Naturally.”

The Paneco worked by turning the binding energy of the target in upon itself and de-cohering the molecules. No power levels were required in the projector itself since it used the very power in the target. So simple, so precise, so deadly—Redfern felt a dark subterranean thrill of the power he held in his hands worm its way through his mind.

“Well, that’s it, then,” he said, the relief sharp in him.

“Refreshments… you appear to need them…” Narumble the Fourth narumbled away. The dimension-travelers would accept only a few flat crunchy cakes and a goblet of dry wine apiece. They were anxious to return to Senchuria, desperate to return, conscious of their responsibility and the distance, not geographically but interdimensionally, separating them.

“Look,” Redfern said, and swallowed the last crumb, “can’t you lend us some sort of transport to get us across the space separating the Gates on the next dimension down? I’m not too sure…” He glanced at Val.

She shook her head. “There isn’t time to go the long way around. We’ll go back the way we came.”

One of Narumble’s colleagues said: “In Sharnavoy you’d have a very long Griff flight, then you’d go through into a dimension called Ohio, then there would be a long auto journey to another part of that dimension called Manhattan, then you could go on through three or four more to Senchuria.”

Redfern felt the walls spin around him. He felt a hot flush over his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. A roaring crashed in his ears.

Earth!

He could step straight from this place and all the horrors facing him into a place where they’d take him to Ohio.

He could take Val—she’d have to go to Porteur them—

Of course he couldn’t go, for she wouldn’t go. She would quote Arlan at him, and the Wizards, and he’d nod and agree, and they’d go back. But Earth—Earth…

Redfern decided not to say anything. He had made the decision, and he would lumber himself with regrets, not Val or Tony or Nyllee.

He thrust the super-scientific gadget into its holster and hung it on his belt.

The other three copied his actions. The cakes had filled a cranny and the wine, in astringently tautening his throat, had warmed him, braced him. He glanced fondly at’ Val. Nyllee was patting the Paneco in its holster with the loving attention a mother gives to a newborn babe. Tony was staring with a half smile at Nyllee.

Well, good companions, these. They’d get through. They’d have to, for the sake not only of Senchuria and Gait and the others; but for the sake of Val and Tony’s peace of mind.

They stepped out of the room into a commotion of people milling about. Noise came nearer, and a few people ran on, looking back over their shoulders at the source of the rumpus.

An inexplicable, almost fey tremor of alarm touched Redfern.

A crowd of officials and flunkies wheeled over the tiles toward them, avoiding fern-like plants in globular pots, scampering over the pavement, all heading toward the four dimension-travelers and the bureaucrats with them.

A voice lifted strongly, a crystalline chiming voice of absolute authority with an undercurrent of sweetness which added a shuddery thrill of menace.

“You surely don’t believe for one moment they’ve brought the Senchurian rejuvenation process, do you? You are a pack of dodderers! Anyway, there are many such processes; I will not have these weapons given to the Wizards!” Her voice sharpened arrogantly. “I can give you more than you ask for: a genuine elixir of life!”

A man’s voice whined and rumbled in protest.

The unseen woman beat down all opposition mercilessly.

“You value my trade! It is my wish that the Wizards of Senchuria be destroyed, them and their city! I care nothing for the Infalgon—but I want the Wizards destroyed!”

Her words struck Redfern like ice shards piercing his heart.

“You know me and you know my powers! Send these boobies packing—without the weapons. I wish to see the Wizards utterly destroyed, smashed, broken, and all their friends with them!”

XII

Val clutched Redfern’s arm as the scurrying crowd parted and the woman stepped out, proud and alone.

Tall and regal and icily domineering, she stood in a sheer white gown that fell from gathers at her throat over her pointed breasts to a froth of feathers around her feet. Dark hair had been coiffed high and interlaced with many gems so that it sparkled and coruscated with light. Her blue-tinted eyelids and long dark lashes, kohled and shining, revealed pitiless blue eyes. Her small rosebud mouth, over-small and over-sweet, a cupid’s bow of malice, puckered with distaste.

“Are these the creatures?”

“Yes, milady, these are the traders from Senchuria.”

Redfern could feel her glance lingering on him like the touch of a spider’s web. He drew himself up.

A jeweled bracelet encircled her left wrist and now the long glittering chain attached to it chingled with movement and a creature stepped from her side into full view. The chain was attached to a metal band encircling the thing’s neck and Redfern had to puzzle for a moment to understand what manner of creature this was. Then he saw and revulsion flooded him.

The thing at the end of the chain was a man; but a tiny manikin, with an immense knobbled head on which a blue velvet cap perched ridiculously. The cap’s feather was broken at the tip. The little manikin was clad in dark red velvet with a white raff against which the metal band stood out starkly.

The chain chingled as the dwarfed man moved.

“Quiet, Soloman!” She jerked the chain cruelly.

Val shuddered deeply. Her slight form, travel-stained and weary, trembled.

Tony shouted, “By Arlan!” He fumbled at his waist.

Nyllee—Nyllee screamed out an exact reference to a frog’s more unpleasant habits and snatched out her green-beam projector. The pale green fire washed over the white-gowned woman.

She stood, tall and commanding, indifferent to the ray. The green beam recoiled, washing like a splashing hosepipe, died baffled.

“Run!” choked Val, sobbing. She snatched at Redfern’s arm. “Run!”

Turmoil broke out in the hall. Men and creatures from other dimensions broke and fled. The rebounding green beam had sliced into a column and now a section of the flat roof caved in in a smother of dust and tiles.

The smashing noise of the fall deafened them. Redfern saw the woman jerk at the chain. From the shadows beneath the intact room to her rear he saw a movement; he saw a large floppy hat, a long stained raincoat. He saw a shape move purposefully forward and where the face should be he could see only twin pits of feral fire.

“A Trug!”

Now he knew.

People scattered in all directions. Narumble the Fourth staggered back, his hard face broken and working with fear. Nyllee fired again. Then Redfern saw she had angled the beam, was bringing down more of the roof. Val’s tuggings at last brought Redfern into action. He pushed Tony.

“Let’s get out of here, Tony! Bring Nyllee! Hurry!”

But Tony shouted in triumph. He swung up the Paneco, aimed the innocent-looking nozzle into the dust and turmoil.

“The Paneco will settle the Montevarchi! This is the moment we have waited for! All the dead slaves of the mines of Irunium join me now in this moment of revenge and triumph!”

“No! No!” screamed Narumble. “You will destroy everything! Don’t fire the Paneco, you fool!”

The bureaucrat, his crimson robes swirling, leaped for Tony. The gun muzzle jerked up. Momentarily, Redfern thought he glimpsed a slender line of vibration stemming from the muzzle, like air dancing above a hot plate; but whether the line of tremblation originated at the gun muzzle or collapsed back onto it from the side of the building, he could not be sure. What he did see was the sudden coalescing of that insubstantial line, a thickening and a solidifying into a solid ebony blackness. Where that black pencil touched, the building ceased to exist. Air crashed in to replace the sudden vacuity, dust puffed and dissipated. The molecules of the stone and brick and tile had been completely shattered.

Cursing, Tony flung Narumble off.

He aimed the Paneco deliberately for the woman in the sheer white gown and her dancing gibbering manikin. The black pencil of complete annihilation swept down the roof, a cornice, a column, disrupting them all, centered on the woman’s breast.

And then Redfern gasped anew.

That ravening force of utter destruction, which drew its power from the very objects it annihilated, blossomed and spread; like the head of a cobra it puffed out to form a globular shell about the woman and her dwarf.

Her shriek of maniacal laughter gushed out.

Then Nyllee had grabbed Tony’s arm. Mentioning a frog’s bowels, she shouted: “She’s got some sort of defense against it, Tony! Come on! Now’s our chance to get away!”.

Val began to run, dragging Redfern. “We won’t get another chance!” she screamed.

Cursing with all the bitter hatred of thwarted vengeance, Tony followed. Together the four dimensional-travelers scampered out of the building beneath the gilded crossbow and fled along the Street of Cutlers.

The last thing they heard as they sped from the confusion was Narumble the Fourth, as he heaved himself up, shaking, crying: “A Paneco has never failed before! I don’t believe it!”

“You can’t have everything, Tony,” Redfern snapped, leading on at a dead run. “That was the Contessa, wasn’t it? Well, from all I know of her, she’ll have an answer to everything!”

“The cat!” Val panted. “And we didn’t get the fake teeth!”

Redfern hurt himself laughing as he pounded for the house with the cellar that contained a gateway to another world.

Instead of the crone waiting in vain for her new choppers they confronted a couple of guards in the cellar, chunky men wearing goggles and leather-covered metal helmets. The four travelers cowed them with their new weapons, clustered, and, on the word of command from Val, jumped into the air. Eighteen inches from the floor Redfern felt that tiny jerk of disorientation and the next moment he was staggering on a soft undulating ground and choking in the billowing battering of ribbons and scarves of spidersilk.

“This way!” Val set off, pushing doggedly through the spiderstrands. Swinging his sword, Redfern helped clear the way. The opus number had changed. Instead of the Number Five in E flat major of Opus 73, he could have sworn as he struggled on that he could hear the Symphony Number Six in F major, Opus 68. The conceit amused him. Perhaps those two works were all this world boasted, the Emperor Concerto and the Pastoral Symphony. If so, they were good choices.

Val screamed suddenly and stopped and Tony bumped into her.

The scent of jasmine drenched them.

A shape moved. A vast whiteness, rounded and furred, pranced and danced and cavorted through the unending stream of blowing ribbons. At first, what with all these strands of spidersilk billowing about, Redfern thought it had to be a spider: an enormous spider with treetrunk legs and giant mandibles clicking and hungering for their juices.

Nyllee, with her habitual reference, did not hesitate. Her green-beam weapon gouted. The thing, whatever it was, gibbered and mewed and, half its body blown off, tumbled backward into the blizzard of shreds and ribbons. It wasn’t a spider; just what it really was Redfern never knew. He pushed Val on and shouted, hard and urgently.

“Good on you, Nyllee. Now let’s reach that other Gate—fast!”

They cut and hacked their way through, and Redfern’s back itched all the time in dire apprehension that another corpse-white vampiric monster would drop suction-cup-like upon him.

“We’re here,” Val gasped. Spidersilk clung about her and diademed her hair. They were all panting and fearful and anxious to get out of this maniacal dimension.

Through the swirling storm of blowing strands Redfern clearly saw above them another white vast softness squashing down. He yelled. His mouth was wide open as he plunged bodily into foaming water.

Thrashing and gasping they clawed their way to the surface. Brown gushing water, foaming over tangled half-submerged trees, broke over them. He caught Val in a grip he swore death would not break. A log rolled nearby and he flung his other arm over it. After a struggle that left him winded and limp, he got Val and himself half-astride, half-lying on the log as it surged in the current.

She screamed in his ear: “The river’s flooded more! Where we took off from the bank’s under water—that means the other Gate into the caverns is in the river now, too!”

He nodded savagely, flinging water from his hair and eyes.

“We’re being carried downstream. Toward the nodal point. When we hit it, if we hit it, transmit us then, Val!”

“I can sense it,” she gasped back. “Coming up!”

Tony and Nyllee, struggling together, swept past on a rolling log, farther out into midstream. Redfern caught a flashing glimpse of Nyllee’s superb figure with the white robe cut and plastered to it. Tony was gasping for air. They rushed helter-skelter on, caught firmly in the dashing current, being swept faster and faster downstream.

“They’re going too fast—they’re floating away!” Val shouted.

“Where’s the Gate, Val, the Gate!” shrieked Redfern.

Water foamed and broke over them. His ears rang. Water stung his eyes. He spat mouthfuls and more mouthfuls sloshed in as he gasped for air.

“It’s almost here, almost here! But Tony! And Nyllee!”

“They’re gone, Val! Think of Gait and the Wizards. We’ll try to get back for Tony and Nyllee—”

And then, with only the faintest of jolts to tell him he had transited, he swallowed more water and sat up in the middle of a plashing underground stream in total darkness.

The flashlights showed them the cavern of the serpents.

They moved on, not talking, shrunken by the experience. Without their two companions they seemed naked, defenseless.

Yet, what else had there been to do?

When the glow of phosphorescent moss ahead indicated they were nearing the spot where they had encountered the giant serpent, Redfern hesitated. He took Val’s arm again. She responded; but her smile was wan.

“We’ll get them back, Val,” he promised her.

Since becoming mixed up with these crazy dimensions his path had been pocked by losses. First he’d mislaid David Macklin and Alec and Sarah, not to mention the brachiating dice-fiend Moke. Then the shufflers from Thothtoreth had gone off—wait. In between that he’d seen poor old Obo shot down. He hadn’t liked that at all and didn’t like to recall it. Gait had gone missing in a different way, and Mother Haapan had rejuvenated herself into a pulse-pounding piece of pulchritude. And now Tony and Nyllee were gone. Well.

That left Val.

He refused to let the thought roll on.

About the only worthwhile object left him was to get Val safely back to Montrado. He’d have to do what he could to help the Wizards of Senchuria first; but he promised himself, not without a sense of the pitiful grotesqueness of the promise, that he’d cut everything if Val ran into more danger. She’d about had her fill of that. This time he’d make her think of her own skin first.

And to hell with Arlan.

Val was the key—the key to Montrado—and the key to Earth. The serpent’s mate slithered icily from the darkness.

Looking at that sinuous length, that colossal wedge-shaped head, those curved shining fangs as the head swayed above them, Redfern wondered if they’d have time for Val to be the first and most important key—the key to Senchuria.

He aimed the green-beam weapon in shaking fingers. He pressed the firing stud. Nothing happened. The two yellow eyes blazed down hypnotically on him.

“The river! It fouled up the gun!” he gasped.

Val cowered back, trembling. Resolutely, he pulled out the Paneco. For all he knew it might bring the whole roof of this world in on top of him. But there was nothing else he could do. The head swayed and looped and darted—

Redfern pulled the trigger.

That insubstantial line of gossamer tremblation lashed out, thickened, coalesced into midnight blackness. The head of the serpent puffed into dust and the dank air of the cavern rolled in to fill the sudden vacuum. Their ears rang with the concussion.

The thick trunk writhed and leaped. Its scales gleamed and scintillated, reminding Redfern of the scales of the Trugs he had seen. Then the body flopped over and lay still. He let out his breath in a gust of relief.

“I still didn’t like it.” He breathed unsteadily. “But…”

“I think even Arlan would condone the act,” Val said in a small voice.

The roof groaned and dust and chips of rock fell; but the vaulted groinings held, fast pinioned to the unknown world above.

They went on. At every noise they made, every stone clink, every foot-scrape, Redfern shuddered, frantically aware that there could easily be other great serpents. He sweated and turned every which way with his eyes striving to pierce the darkness. The journey seemed never-ending. Then, blessedly, Val was saying: “We’re here, Scobie. The Portal.”

He felt he had aged years as he put his arms around Val and waited for the transit.

For a man who didn’t like being pushed around, Scobie Redfern had recently been pushed further and harder than any man he could imagine had been pushed.

The next instant they stood on the cool stones of the vaults beneath the castle of the Wizards of Senchuria.

A weirdly incongruous feeling of coming home hit Redfern.

The feeling of the Narangonese Paneco strapped to his waist bolstered him and gave him a deceptive suggestion of strength and competence which the memory of that giant serpent’s gross death bolstered even as it shamed. He felt a lightening of spirit. The blood thrummed through his body and while not looking forward to the coming strife he could at least face it in the rationalizing out of the lack of alternatives that confronted him. If he had to fight then at least he fought with good weapons. He was dimly aware of dark depths he had never suspected within himself.

Val called. Together they ran for the gemmed escalator. He burst out onto the courtyard and started for the battlements, the Paneco was in his hand as he ran. This time he was the hunter. It made a pleasant change.

Just what he had expected he couldn’t have said: the city exactly as he had left it with the people clustering on the battlements; smoke and flame and destruction; a city of dead men; the Gara’hec resurrected into a second blasphemous life; deserted and abandoned walls and buildings.

Instead Vivasjan hurried forward, his face sagging with despair. No great sound came from the walls. The sun, declining now, shone burnished arms into crevices and alleys between the buildings and walls sparkling the jeweled surfaces into blinding splendor.

“You have returned—but too late, too late! We must hurry. All is lost—”

“Too late!” gasped Val. She looked outraged.

“Hurry, hurry!” moaned Vivasjan. He went to brush past them, scurrying for castle walls to their rear. Other people followed him, old men and women, youngsters, Gara’hec and Suslincs intermingled with them. It was a rout.

“Wait! Wait!” shouted Redfern. “We have the weapons!”

“Too late!” and Vivasjan, supported by his close bodyguard of Wizards, hurried away.

“Well…” began Val. Then she saw Gait.

His dark bearded face revealed all too clearly now the hollowness of the man. Mina at his side was more supporting him than being helped. Then Mother Haapan, radiant still in the beauty of her youth yet with a strained and frightened expression on her face, pushed past with the man who had come for her in the hall of rejuvenation.

Redfern grabbed Gait and swung him to a halt.

The philosopher stared at him in uncomprehending panic.

Redfern shook him. “What’s going on, Gait?”

He babbled. Mina whispered, frightened: “Val! You have come back—that is good. You can help the other Porteur. We are evacuating the city of Senchuria—”

“Evacuating? Another Porteur?”

“Yes, yes. Didn’t you hear me? Hurry with us, now. They came for us, they will help us, they are taking us through to another dimension. But we must hurry. The war machines of the Infalgon are almost at the walls!”

Val glared at Redfern. Mother Haapan, passing, called across. “Val! You’re just in time to be saved. Hurry!”

“This other Porteur,” Redfem said, harshly. “Where is she?”

“By the Ruby Gate, the other side of the Chrysoberyl Wing. They came through, and now they are taking us to safety.”

At a dead run Redfern headed for the Chrysoberyl Wing and the gardens of chrysanthemums and the Ruby Gate beyond. Val panted along beside him. They burst through the scurrying people, trampling over flowerbeds. As they reached the gate, an imposing structure faced with solid rows of rubies, he heard the first ominous cracks of sound from the walls. A quick glance showed him rivulets opening in the stones. The Infalgon war machines were breaking through. He hesitated; the Paneco could stop them; but he knew as well as he knew anything in this life he had to get to this other Porteur.

The Ruby Gate swayed. A whole rank of rubies chipped away and a fortune rolled in the dust.

People screamed and scattered. A short and wide man with enormous energy and vigor leaped toward Redfern. He swung a long sword and he wore a strange glinting armor. At his waist was belted a hand weapon of a pattern unfamiliar to Redfern. He looked the incarnation of the devil, a man who could cut an ox in two with one stroke of sword.

He yelled at Redfern through the dust and Redfern was conscious of the words through the translator band he still wore in his hair.

“Get back in line! Women and children first!”

Out of the dust a giant of a man lumbered up with an ax so big no mortal could lift it, let alone wield it. His seamed and gigantic face showed all the fierce savagery of the barbarian. A straggle of fugitives eddied out of his path and bolted frenziedly for the Ruby Gate.

“Hold them back, Fezius!” rumbled the giant. “Sarah is getting swamped!”

“You great buffoon, Offa, what in Amra’s name do you think I’m doing!”

“You don’t have to namby-pamby them! By Mac the Black I’ll lay a few low before—”

“Sarah!” yelled Redfern. “Do you mean… Sarah?”

The squat man looked at him as though he’d crawled out of some unnameable sink. “This oaf has ears he doesn’t know how to use.” Then, like quicksilver: “What do you know of my Sarah?”

“Is David Macklin here? And Alec—?”

“Hai! This one does know!”

“This girl—this is Val—she is a Porteur, too!” yelled Redfern through the din. “She can help Sarah—I’m going to deal with the Infalgon war machines…”

“Another girl with the power! By Amra, that is good!” Then Fezius absorbed what Redfern had said. He frowned and his face looked like a gargoyle over a water spout. “Fight them! They have weapons—fearful forces—”

“And I have this!” shouted Redfern, brandishing the Paneco. He remembered Macklin talking to Sarah, back on that tree platform on Myrcinus, about Fezius and Offa. So Macklin had sent his friends after him! He hadn’t forgotten! The realization warmed Redfern afresh. He turned and started back against the flow of fugitives.

Before he reached the walls Fezius and Offa rolled along at his sides. He felt vastly comforted.

Fezius grunted: “We came looking for you, Scobie Redfern. David kept blaming himself that you had fallen into the Montevarchi’s hands. They only just escaped with their lives; but you had vanished. They could guess where. We’ve been following your trail… and then this pleasant little dust-up with the Infalgon interrupted.”

They reached the walls. Here and there they had been broken down. Redfern looked across the sea of grass.

Massive machines on tracks lumbered toward the city. Many had nuzzled up to the walls and smashed them in. Others reared up over their companions and rolled on and over the rubble. Immensely larger than the largest Terrestrial tanks, the machines moved with a ponderous menacing slowness, chilling in the remorseless non-stop ability of the onward surge. A few isolated clumps of crystals swung above them and even at this range and backlash Redfern felt the wash of hatred; but the machines rolled on unaffected.

“Aye, they are Anna’s black spawn,” growled Fezius. “Even the emotion projectors of the Senchurians could not stop them.”

“No. But this will.”

Redfern aimed the Paneco and again that insubstantial flicker of force rebounded, thickened into blackness. War machines dissolved into collapsing dust and the air rushed in to fill the vacuums. He swung the weapon along the walls, clearing out swaths and lanes through the ranks of machines, picking them off carefully, wondering when they would react.

Flanked by the two from Venudine, Redfern began a circuit of the walls. He came upon Infalgon war machines in triumphant onslaught; he left no sign that they had ever existed.

The reaction, when it came, fell far short of dealing with the power of the Paneco. Now Redfern could feel at ease that the other weapon remained with Val. Quite deliberately he had left it with her, for he knew that with it her chances of survival were immeasurably greater.

Flickers of flame stabbed from the war machines. One projectile struck a merlon and burst in a gobbet of foam. The three jumped back. Redfern caught the whiff of acid, and he chuckled.

“They’ll have to do better than that!”

He negatively cohered the resisting war machine out of existence.

“The Wizards used their beams of green force on them,” said Fezius in high glee. “Useless. But this weapon you have, Scobie, this is indeed a king of weapons!”

“It cost some to come by,” said Redfern dryly.

When all the Infalgon war machines were gone and with tiredness pressuring him in a way he found strangely soothing, Redfern walked down from the walls. Fezius and Offa came with him. They found Sarah and Val still porteuring people through the Portal that existed beyond the Ruby Gate.

“Where does it go?” he thought to ask.

People milled about, not sure what was happening, a little resentful that they were no longer being put through the dimensions, when Redfern explained to the two girls.

“You are safe now!” Fezius shouted in his bull-whip voice that could carry clearly from the back of a Griff. “Go home. We will bring your friends back from—”

“Where?”

Val, laughed, wearily, and brushed a strand of brown hair away from her forehead. “Sarah’s very good,” she said gravely. “I’ve no idea where we’re sending these people.”

Sarah, her psychedelic dress immaculate, chuckled. She looked in a very special way at Fezius as that dynamic bundle of energy swaggered up.

“It’s not important where, for we got them to safety, and now they can come back here. But it’s a dimension called the Shosunate.” She looked at Redfern meaningfully. “And there is, I understand, a direct connection to Earth.”

Vivasjan, disheveled but his dignity regained, gasped.

Gait joined them, with Mina. After the first impulse to turn his back on the bearded philosopher of Arlan, Redfern decided to let bygones be bygones. He told them about Tony and Nyllee and for a moment a sober hush fell on them. Then Fezius, toughly resilient, said, “If they’ve a couple of those Panecos between them I wouldn’t worry. We can get them out.”

“Of course,” said Sarah. She smiled at Redfern. “David and Alec went back to New York, we’d had news, the Contessa—”

Redfern told her.

She made a face.

“The bitch is really becoming too tiresome. We’re going to have to deal with Perdita soon!”

“She struck me as a very nice sort of woman,” rumbled Offa.

Fezius, mentioning a buffoon and an oaf, remarked that any slip of a girl could twist Oag Offa around her little finger, and Offa, mentioning Mac the Black, replied that witch girls could toy with Fezius and that…

Vivasjan, with his people around him and in the name of the Wizards of Senchuria, thanked Redfern and Val and their friends.

Slyly, Redfern said, “It’s strictly a trade, Vivasjan. Integrity and business acumen. You quoted the rules. I’ll let you know what we want in exchange.”

“Might come out pretty expensive,” said Fezius, irrepressibly putting his oar in.

Redfern thought of Tony and Nyllee, of his journey through the painted forest and the Suslincs and the Gara’hec and the emotion-milker on his head, and he nodded. He had gained some small insight into the overriding reasons why pressures sometimes had to be applied; but that didn’t mean he liked them any better.

“I think I know what is uppermost in our minds now, though,” said Sarah. “I’m for going home.”

“Me, too,” said Offa. “You and Fezius can squabble over just where home is, as usual.”

“Home,” said Redfern. “Earth.”

“Home,” said Val. “Montrado.”

Well, they might squabble over that too; but he had no doubt in all the world—in all the dimensions—that they’d sort that problem out, too.