Then an extraordinary device came into view. It was thin and spidery and skeleton-like. It moved upon eight slender, shining wheels. A man in a robe ran panting beside it. He wore extraordinary goggles which should have blinded him. There was a curious, light, jointed girder at the forefront of the spidery device, and a large disk at its end. That disk could be set at any angle and moved in any direction by the girder. The man in the goggles shouted, but Sam could not hear him. The armed men, though, pointed. The spidery vehicle swerved straight at him.
For a moment he looked out of his phone booth. Everything about him seemed normal and commonplace and slightly dingy. But he felt hunted. Then he saw a tiny, a trivial oddity. The open door of the office building showed bright against the daylit street. Against that lighted background Sam Todd saw two small opaque specks in midair. They moved toward him, undulating up and down like the eyes or the goggles of a man running. In a flash of cold horror he understood everything.
The spidery vehicle carried a disk which was a portable doorway between worlds. The rest of the device was simply a carrier for that doorway, so that it could be pushed or pulled. The man in the goggles could see in both worlds as Sam could. And with the swinging, movable disk he could seize anything on Earth as a man may net a goldfish in a globe from which it cannot escape. He could take anything or anyone away from Earth into the Other World forever. And against this, Sam had no defense.
He flung open the phone booth and bolted. There was but one way to flee—to the open, blessed, asphalted street of Brooklyn, with its trucks and cars and hydrants and dusty shop windows. He had to plunge straight toward the space the goggled man occupied in the Other World. He probably had to run through the very substance of that man and his device. But, gasping, he rushed.
He reached the doorway. He thought he saw a momentary glow of light behind him as if the disk in the Other World had become a doorway, and light from the Other World sky shone for an instant into the lobby. But then he was outside.
At first he ran. But people stared, and he knew that if he ran on he would be stopped forcibly and questioned, and that while he panted out his utterly impossible story he would vanish before his captors’ eyes in a pool of quicksilver, as Nancy had vanished.
He slowed to a fast walk. Sweat poured out on his skin. Once he turned and put the peephole to his eye and saw the spidery thing turning swiftly to pursue him over the clear lawn of the villa of the Other World.
It was nightmarish. It was worse. He felt stark panic. But there was a sure refuge if he could find it-
Twenty yards, and he dared to turn again. His actions were peculiar, and a demand for an explanation of his actions would be utterly fatal. But the device had to go around a massive plantation of shrubs on the villa lawn. He hurried, in an agony of haste, yet not daring to hasten too much.
Then he reached the subway entrance. As he swung to descend, someone coming up the stairs bumped into him. His hat fell off. He did not try to retrieve it. He plunged downward, but in spite of himself his head jerked around.
He saw his hat disappear in a curious coruscation, as of a pool of quicksilver.
As Sam rode back to New York underground, he felt cold all over and shivered violently, even while he sweated profusely. He sweated so much, indeed, that other passengers on the subway train looked at him oddly because he wiped his face so often.
In the Other World there was moonlight. It came down through the trees with a harsh bright radiance such as it seemed no mere moonlight could possess. But when Dick found an open space through which he could see the sky, the moon appeared wholly like the orb which circles Earth. The stars seemed the same, too. There was a Milky Way, and there were large bright heavenly objects which had the appearance of planets. It seemed unbelievable that the Other World could so completely resemble Earth in all its conformation and still not be the same.
The night noises were wholly unlike those of the world of men. The cries in this jungle darkness sounded strangely like bells, from tiny shrill nearby tinklings to single, deep-toned, far-away tollings as of illimitable grief.
But Dick had not gone far before he heard noises with which he felt almost familiar. They were beast-cries. But they were not the meaningless howlings of mere brutishness. Somehow he knew that they were the cries of ruhks. He had enough knowledge of this Other World, now, to guess at what would happen.
When the red-beard told his story—if the first man Dick had met hadn’t babbled out his tale first—a coldly merciless hunt would begin for Dick. Ruhks would logically be entrusted with the night-search. They would find his trail entering the stream. And when no trail appeared on the farther side, the ruhks would divide. They would hunt through the jungle on either bank of the stream, both upstream and down, for the spot where he had come out.
The one thing that could go wrong, of course, was that his scent might be detected in red-beard’s cart. If that happened, red-beard would die, and Dick soon after.
But he heard the ruhk cries in the night. The compass direction was wrong for beasts actually on his trail. They had, then, gone on to the spot where Nancy had come into this cosmos. Dick heard them calling to one another from separated places. He’d guessed their tactics, and what he heard confirmed his guess. He headed for a point between the separating parties of those who sought his trail. This was a world of slaves and masters and there would be no system of swift communications. A man does not do skilled work under the lash. A slave telegrapher is unthinkable, and slave telephone maintenance crews are unimaginable. When human beings are classed as animals, only the labor of animals can be had from them.
So Dick went on through the darkness. The noises all about him compounded themselves into a sort of muted bedlam. There were the sounds as of bells, and at startling intervals something made a noise as of drums, and now and again the hunting ruhks howled their reports of futility. Dick reached the stream and waded it. A little beyond, he blundered into thick, squashy vegetation with a scent like that of garlic, only more pungent, and his feet crushed the pulpy leaves and he reeked of the smell as he went on. He was offensive to his own nostrils. But even so he smelled the reek of a slave-pen a good half-mile downwind from it. He veered aside.
Presently he heard the lapping of waves through the darkness. He pressed forward cautiously. The glitter of moonlight on water warned him, and he went very tentatively down the last steep slope to the East River. The shore was wilderness. The water was completely tranquil. He waded into it and began a cautious march along the shoreline. Here there was little or no breeze. His scent would not be carried far, and that out over the river. He waded for a very long time, keeping from ten to thirty feet from the water’s edge. Twice he disturbed private affairs of the inhabitants of the jungle. Once there was an ecstatic splashing in the water before him, and he advanced with care, and something sputtered alarmedly and flashed up the beach—he did not see it clearly, but it was very long and furry—and went crashing to safety among the trees. The other time was when he came on an animal fishing. It prowled upon the beach, staring absorbedly into the river, and as Dick came near it plunged from the beach and with a sweeping motion of an extraordinarily long paw sent a two-foot fish writhing through the air toward the land, with an accompanying shower of moonlit drops of spray. Then Dick loomed up and it fled. He heard the beached fish flapping convulsively as he went by.