As the silicon-man began a second strip, there was an interruption. A large form ambled from behind the rocks. York had to look twice, for it was the same repulsive type of beast that had killed the two ape-creatures in the other dome!
It came forward confidently. The silicon-man heard its approach. He whirled about, drew his ray gun.
“Give it to him!” York found himself urging the silicon-man. “Shoot the beast down.”
The crystal-man seemed to make every effort. His gun pointed and his body trembled, but no shot was fired. Eyes fastened on the beast’s saucer orbs, he stood as rigidly as a statue. Hypnosis again! The beast seemed to give a silent signal. With what might have been a curse, the silicon-man picked up his knife, holstered his gun, and trotted away. He looked back once, shaking his fist in a manlike gesture, but with an air of helplessness.
The hypno-beast promptly inserted its sucking organ into the wolf creature’s corpse and drained it dry of blood. It could not use the silicon-men as food. But it still had the demoniacal power of chasing them away from prey they had killed.
What was the answer to this amazing riddle? The hypno-beast in two domes, in two different environments, lorded it over other life forms. Why had the builders-done this? They could be neither the ape-men, the silicon-men, nor the hypno-beast. For all had obvious shortcomings as beings of great intelligence.
Who were they? Where were they? Why had they built these domes? Were they the ones who also patrolled space?
Driven by the mystery, and suspecting a. third dome, York scanned the horizon and spied not one, but two more. He struck out for the nearest. So impatient that he sidestepped for nothing, he bowled over pulpy trees and fragile ferns with his swinging arms. He left behind him a trail of trampled vegetation that was already regrowing behind him.
The third dome was identical with the others. He would have been startled if it weren’t. And the scene within, as he expected, was totally different from the other two domes, and also from this planet’s indigenous environment.
It was a cold setting, in the third dome. White snow lay over all, sprayed down at times from an apparatus suspended under the dome’s peak. Hardy vegetation existed here that had the peculiar power of motivation, like animal life. Stubby rootlets slowly inched forward the low trees and bushes, seeking a nutritious spot in which to sink the feeding roots. Shaggy white forms, almost invisible against the white background, sneaked among the moving vegetation. It must be bitterly cold in there, far colder than any spot on Earth, perhaps duplicating the frozen wastes of Uranus’ moons.’
York stared, startled by something.
“Vera, listen as I describe—” When he had finished, he asked: “Does it remind you of anything?”
After a moment her psychic voice came back excitedly.
“Yes. It does sound exactly like the fifth planet of 61—Cygni, which we visited over a thousand years ago. But Tony, that was in our Universe! How could that exact setting be here?”
York made no answer. He was watching a scene within the dome. It had a larger scope than he had at first realized. A small city stood under one part of the shell overhang. Solid ice blocks and snow cement composed the square buildings, decorated artistically with shaped icicles and patterned snow crystals. York had seen the same structures on 61—Cygni, unless imagination had filled the gaps of memory after a thousand years. Water was the staple budding material, with temperatures ranging far below zero at all times.
Such was the city. The inhabitants were squat quadrupeds, their four, feet flattened smooth so they could glide over snow and ice on these natural skis. All other surfaces of their bodies were covered with fluffy, warm feathers. They were warm-blooded creatures. Their beaked heads held large, intelligent eyes.
At the moment, excitement reigned in the village of snowbird people. The males had collected on the flat roof tops, swinging around catapults of leather and wood. They knew nothing of smelting or metals in their low-temperature environment. The boiling point of water was to them the blast heat of a high temperature furnace.
The attack they prepared for came. York’s snow-blinded eyes hadn’t even noticed the body of white forms rushing across the open stretch before the village. They were of the same race. York cursed, as he had always cursed over the civil wars of the human race.
The catapults thumped, slinging blocks of hard ice upon the attackers. The latter stood their ground, setting up giant catapults of their own. Great bombs of hard, crushing ice arced into the village, cracking through walls and ceilings. The attackers were numerous, the besieged few. Perhaps this was the final assault of a long series of battles. The patched village crumbled, and the defenders were decimated under the bombardment.
York knew that hours had passed. He had watched with a fascinated wonder. In what way did this little battle, in a ten-mile patch of winter-world under a dome, fit in with the general mystery?
And then York saw the finale. From the distance, where they had been concealed by a mound of snow, came a group of naked hypno-beasts! No extreme of environment seemed to bother them. They passed among the victorious attackers, who advanced robotlike into the village. This was hypnosis control on a large scale. The hypno-beasts had directed an army of the bird people against the bird people’s own kind! The beast-masters browsed through the village, probing their tentacles into dead bird-men, feeding well of victims killed by their own brethren.
York ground his teeth in loathing and rage at the hypno-beasts. Surely in all the two universes, there could not be a more revolting, dangerous form of life. For a mad moment he beat with his gauntleted fists at the transparent wall that separated him from the monsters, as though to charge in and challenge them. The shell felt as solid and unshakable as foot-thick steel.
“Tony, control yourself!”
York relaxed. “Vera, there’s some answer to this. I won’t give up. I’m going to the next dome—and the next—”
Three days passed. York again went sleepless and without food, drawing on the super-vitality with which the elixir of immortality had endowed him. He visited a dozen more domes.
In those dozen domes were the environments of a dozen different worlds. The creatures who roamed within ranged from wormlike crustaceans to great, scaly dinosaurian forms. Intelligence reposed in anything, from a dog-sized spider to a ten-foot high mammoth.
In one dome, blobs of liquid life were held together by thin skins. Rolling through a noisome, swampy purgatory, they devoured everything after spraying out a vicious poison whose touch was fatal.
Most of the intelligence levels were low, held back by inhibiting environments. But in one dome, tailed and fine-fingered beings had mastered a great science. Here too was civil war, with most of—the beings dominated by the hypno-beasts, slowly conquering the rest.
The hypno-beast was in every dome! It was the sole common denominator of the baffling mystery. But what could be the purpose of the builders?
Trudging to the next dome, a queer phenomenon overtook York. With the suddenness of a dream ending, the flimsy life forms of the planet faded away. York watched the horizons melt down, as all the vegetation went to seed, dried to brittle dust. He looked up. The Cepheid sun had passed, its maximum. Temperature was declining rapidly, and the short “winter” was approaching.
In the space of a few hours, the planet’s surface was bare, wind-swept, as he had first seen it. He was on a high knoll, and when he looked around, he gasped. Within his range of vision now were dozens—no, hundreds—of the domes, in all directions. They marched down the horizons as—though beyond them were hundreds more.