York was suddenly struck by something vaguely familiar in the sight. He squinted his eyes so the wide sweep of the planet below and the sky above were narrowed.
“Vera!” he telepathed excitedly. “I think I know now, partially. This is like a vast laboratory. Those domes are bell jars, in some stupendous series of experiments. The dome builders are the scientists. The creatures within are guinea pigs of this macro-cosmic research!”
“That sounds logical, Tony,” Vera returned. “But for what purpose? And why should there be hypno-beasts in every dome?”
York pondered.
“The answer might be simpler than we suspect. The builders must be super-scientists, greater than any we’ve yet met. I am not excluding the Three Eternals and ourselves. They have roamed all through this universe, carrying back ‘samples’ of various worlds. Like biologists breeding cultures of mice or fruit-flies, they are carrying out a tremendous observation of hundreds of life forms. This must have taken centuries. The purpose behind it must be something vital to them. What can it be? Hundreds of life forms from all over their universe, pitted against the frightful hypno-beasts—”
“From our Universe, too!” interposed. Vera. “I remember that winter-world of sixty-one Cygni clearly. The one under the third dome you visited was from there. Tony, what does it all mean?”
York had now approached the next dome.
He glanced in Again he gazed upon an alien scene. Leafy green trees dotted a woodland sward of rich emerald grass. The air above was blue, Puffs of soft clouds drifted’ down from an apparatus at the dome’s peak.
Not far beyond, a field of golden grain rippled as a warm breeze rustled over it. Several four-legged, horned and hoofed bovine creatures grazed on the grasses beside a brook that wound through sylvan glades. Little bright-coloured birds piped from high branches, though York heard no sound through the transparent shell. A red-furred animal crept forward and suddenly leaped. A startled white-furred creature bounded away like a rabbit—
“Tony, don’t you recognize it?” Vera’s psychic voice was tense, as she read his transmitted description. “It’s our own Earth!”
4
YORK jerked violently. He had been staring impersonally, as he had at all the other alien environments, without realizing it was shockingly familiar. The blind spot in his brain had suddenly been dissolved.
“Vera, you’re right!” His telepathic voice was a whisper. “It’s a ten-mile section of our own native world, down to the last blade of grass. Good Lord, if there are Earth people here and hypno-beasts also—”
Abruptly York’s whole perspective changed. Before he had been scientifically fascinated, altruistically enraged at the dominance of the hypno-beast in each dome over races with which he felt no kinship. Now the hot blood pounded in his veins. In here must be his own people, his own kind. The race that had given him birth. The people with whom, though he was half a god above them, he felt the ties of blood brotherhood.
“The builders!” he shouted aloud in his suit, stunning his own ears. “Where are they? I must find them. They can’t do this—”
He broke off. Something within the dome had caught his eye.
A man and a girl emerged from the shadowy forest, scaring away what York now recognized as a fox and a rabbit. They peered carefully in all directions and then advanced into the field, toward the cows. The man carried two empty buckets. Over his shoulder was slung a rifle like weapon, and in his belt was an unsheathed knife. Both were dressed in hides and woollens. The setting was pastoral, very near to the ancient pioneering days of America in the remote nineteenth century.
York knew nothing of those days personally. Earth for two thousand years had advanced to a much more scientific civilization. But the scene struck chords of aching kinship. This was a part of Earth, no matter if from a far past, and those two were his own people. If he could talk with them, they might explain this incredible mystery.
He pounded on the glass of the dome with his gauntlets and shouted, hoping to attract their attention. They were within a few hundred feet, but they took no notice. York desisted. Perhaps the dome was so polarized that they could see nothing but a blank gray wall.
York watched.
The couple reached the cows. The girl began milking, while the young man stood on guard, peering about cautiously. But gradually he became lax. His eyes wandered toward the girl herself. He spoke to her, smiling, and she smiled back. At times they laughed and he bent over once to touch her hair.
The love of a man and a maid—It was here too, under this prisonlike dome, on an alien world, in an utterly strange universe.
—“Tony, it’s wonderful and it’s horrible,” Vera said.“Wonderful that love can survive any twist of space and time,_ but horrible that these two have been taken from their home world. Do ,you suppose the builders watch somewhere, through some instrument, as if at ants?”
“Hush!”
York spied a slinking form among a patch of trees at the edge of the pasture. It was another man. He had unslung his rifle. He was kneeling now, taking aim for the man beside the girl.
York pressed his face against the dome glass and searched back of the man. He saw it suddenly, the pink-skinned, oily bulk of a hypno-beast. The man kneeling and shooting was under the beast’s dominance, ready to kill at his bidding!
York screamed in warning. Then, realizing the uselessness of that, he concentrated on hurling a. powerful telepathic warning. In all his wanderings throughout the universe, he had never yet heard of a substance that could stop the super-penetrative radiations of thought. But the dome did. His psychic vibrations rebounded with such force that they stunned his mind like a sledge-blow.
Yet perhaps the tiniest of thought impulses wormed through. The young man beside the girl turned uneasily, gripping the stock of his rifle. That move saved him for the time being. The shot ripped through the air from the ambusher, grazed his shoulder. Instantly he ducked, shouting to the girl. She flung herself flat in the grass, overturning the milk. The two cows lumbered away, lowing in fright at the sharp report. York filled in the sound sequences in his own mind.
Flat on his stomach, the young man unlimbered his rifle and cautiously raised his head, searching for his enemy. A puff of smoke from behind a bush and a shot that grazed over him gave him the clue. He fired back. A dozen shots were exchanged. One or the other was marked for death.
York ground his teeth when a shot from the attacker struck. In agony the young man doubled up, forming a better target. A second shot mercilessly crashed through his head. He sprawled out in death. The girl leaped up and flung herself on the body, weeping. Then she sprang to her feet and ran, as the victor came racing up, evidently to capture her alive.
Blindly the girl ran toward the dome shell. The man had cut her off from the concealing forest. Back of them the hypno-beast, who had instigated the tragedy, waddled up to the corpse. It occupied itself with its vampirish meal, as its brothers had over and over again in the other domes.
The girl was trapped. She ran to the dome wall and beat against it with her tiny fists, screaming. York moved to the spot. He saw her clearly, but she obviously saw nothing beyond the wall. She did not see that York stood there nearly mad with helplessness and fury. He could not answer the girl’s pitiful cries for help.
She turned her back to the shell as the man came up. He was young, too, not vicious in appearance at all. But behind his youthful features was the mark of mental slavery. He was the living zombie of the hypno-beast He spoke to her, and his face was strangely gentle.
York, no more than ten feet away outside the wall, was able to read their lips.