Sam Todd dazedly got up from the park bench. He knew that his message to Dick had not been picked up by Dick. The ready ambuscade told that somebody else had intercepted it, and made a trap for Dick and the naked scoundrels now obeying his orders.
Then cold chills went up and down Sam Todd’s spine. Not one message, but both must have been intercepted. And his had told Dick how to find the tree which, in the Other World, grew through the space Maltby’s flat occupied on Earth. And the folk who kidnapped slaves would have found it necessary to learn English.
Sam himself had risen before dawn to see if Dick received his note. Now he knew somebody else had received it. He went white and sick, and suddenly he plunged blindly across the East River Drive without regard to the traffic. Brakes squealed about him but he did not hear them. A car’s bumper nudged his calf, but he did not feel it. Trembling and panting he found a phone booth at the nearest corner, darted inside, and dialed Maltby’s number with fingers that shook uncontrollably. He sweated as the phone buzzed, stopped, buzzed and stopped, in monotonous assurance that it was ringing. Presently Sam hung up and dialed the same number again.
There was no answer.
In a taxi on the way to Maltby’s place, his teeth chattered. But he couldn’t bring himself to use the peephole to look into the Other World. Only at the very last instant, when the cab turned into the last block, could he nerve himself to look. Then he had the cab stop short. He got out and put the peephole to his eye.
He saw the virgin jungle of the Other World. Nothing else. He moved slowly and timorously along the street, the early morning sounds of New York seeming very loud indeed. He looked into the Other World, and then examined his surroundings in this so that he would not run into a blank wall.
Before the building in which Maltby lived, he stopped again. Shivering, he regarded the corresponding space in the Other World. He saw jungle, which here had little undergrowth and was merely a carpet of rotted leaves. He saw the mottled bole of the great tree he had described to Dick. Then he saw tracks in the dead leaves and wood mold on the ground. Something had come here on narrow, tired wheels like bicycle-wheels. It was gone. It had accomplished what it came for.
Sam Todd went heavily into the apartment building and into Maltby’s flat. It was quite empty. Maltby was gone. More, all of his experimental apparatus was gone, too. Everything that had been used to make the doorway between worlds was missing.
Sam knew that there had been many small pools of quicksilver glistening in this place recently. Maltby was now a slave in the Other World. The doorway he’d made for Dick to go through was taken. No more doorways could be made, because Maltby had been the only man who knew how to make them. Dick Blair was beyond help, Nancy—if she still lived—was beyond hoping for, Maltby would shortly be tortured to make him tell everything he knew, and Sam Todd was helpless.
The telephone rang in Maltby’s apartment. It rang again. Sam swallowed, looking at it.
Then he turned and went tip-toeing out of the flat. He was now the only man on Earth who knew that the Other World existed. He dared not talk about it, but he had to do something about it. His first impulse was to run away. He’d slept here last night. When Maltby was missed, he’d be asked about it. Naturally. As a man of ample means and a known student of criminology, the questioning would be very polite, of course. But he’d slept here. He’d gone out before dawn. He’d returned—and Maltby was missing. More: when Dick Blair was reported missing, Sam and Maltby had been the last two persons to see him. And Nancy Holt-
It would strike the police as a series of remarkable coincidences. They would expect him to explain them reasonably. When he couldn’t, they would begin to get suspicious. And if he told the truth— There was nothing that could be more damning, in the eyes of the cops, than for Sam to tell the exact and literal truth. It would look like a very clumsy attempt to feign insanity.
His metal peephole would be considered a clever fake. It would be cut into to solve the mystery of its construction, and thereby be destroyed. The little door through which pencils and wallets could be thrust into the Other World would be considered also a device of modern prestidigitation. Sam Todd would be jailed until he explained the vanishing of his friends. In the Other World Maltby would be subject to fiendish tortures, and Sam Todd’s name would come out of his babblings. When newspapers were snatched into the Other World, they would presently reveal Sam Todd’s exact whereabouts and that the police accused him of faking insanity. Shortly the newspapers would print the news of his inexplicable escape from a locked cell. Then there would be nobody at all on Earth who knew anything about the Other World, and things would go on as before—theft and blood and agony and murder for thousands of years to come.
Sam went to his hotel and up to his suite. He began to pack for hiding, and for combat. He had been studying weapons as a part of his work. He took what weapons he had ammunition for, and all their ammunition. And he took what money he could find. There wasn’t enough. He was in the act of debating whether or not to cash a check at the hotel desk when his telephone rang.
He jumped. It rang again.
He swallowed, with some difficulty. His mind was in the Other World. He felt hunted. He tried not to think of Maltby, but Maltby would have to scream out every secret thought he knew when the Other Worldlings began to work on him. He knew Sam’s address and how to call him by phone.
The phone rang a third time.
Sam went quickly out of the door, sweating. He carried two bags. He left the telephone ringing.
Minutes later, he was at his bank. He cashed a large check. He cursed himself for knowing that he looked very pale. He cursed himself still more for being unable to devise a plan to save Maltby or even Dick.
He tried to close his mind and not think of such things. He went to Penn Station and paid off his taxi, then went by subway to Grand Central and left that with the passengers of an incoming train, apparently one of them. He took another taxi to a medium-priced hotel and registered as from out of town, asking for a room as high from the street as possible. Doggedly and bitterly, he meant to do what he could to fight the Other World. Within hours—days at most—the police would be hunting him. From the Other World he would be hunted, too. He had just two weapons—a one-inch peephole through which he could look into the Other World, and a one-inch space on a copper plate through which he could thrust things into the other cosmos. He had nothing else.
With the peephole he would learn the ways of the Other World. Slowly, carefully, he could find where doorways were placed and how they were made sometimes to be open and sometimes shut. In time he would be able to drop written word to some slave, guiding him to such a doorway and instructing him in its use. He might be able to drop small sharpened steel rods to serve as daggers. He should be able to pour down inflammable stuff and start incendiary fires to cover a break by such a slave. If once an interworld doorway fell into his hands, he would manage to get it underground where in the Other World it could not be found, or else to some upper floor of a skyscraper. And then he would act as the situation required. With one full-sized doorway opening into the other cosmos and freed slaves to tell what went on there, he could not fail to cause conviction and armed exploration.