But Dick regarded it professionally. It was a parchment-like paper, the most beautiful and thick and glossy of hand-made writing material. It was written on in colored inks, very beautifully, and the beginning and end glittered with gold-dust or gold-filings dropped upon adhesive ink while it was still wet. It was written in hieroglyphic Egyptian characters.
They were not all familiar to Dick, to be sure. There were forms which doubtless dated back to the Fifth Dynasty, but the pictographs had been debased, and the language had undoubtedly changed, and there were probably abbreviations and quite certainly some entirely new words. But it was definitely derived from ancient Egyptian —and Dick was one of no more than a hundred men on all of Earth who would be able to puzzle out its meaning.
“I think,” said Dick, “that I’ll be able to decipher this. It’s possibly a break. It’s especially a break because they’d never dream either that it wouldn’t be delivered, or that anybody but one of themselves would be able to read it. I only hope it’s explicit about their plans!”
It was explicit, but it took him two hours to work out the meaning. He had to guess at words that had no parallel in ancient times from the stylized ideographic elements of the writing. But he read it.
He was pale when he had finished. It was not a message to encourage him. It called for action in a hurry. And it meant that no help could possibly be had from Earth, unless he was prepared to call down on the civilized planet such turmoil and devastation as would make even the lootings and enslavings of the past five thousand years seem trivial.
The ruhks which snarled at Sam Todd and Nancy and Kelly were intelligent animals, whose minds worked exactly in the pattern of illiterate intelligent peasants. When the three humans appeared in the cage-trap, they did not recognize Nancy as a member of the master-race because she no longer had the master-race scent upon her. Common-sense logic, that.
Sam snapped to Kelly:
“Look! I’ll hold the doorway if they try to get in. You heave Nancy up back through the doorway! The cops’ll grab her and take her somewhere else—”
Then he heard a very tiny hissing sound. It was the sound of a woman’s purse perfume dispenser. A curiously clean, pungently pleasant smell smote his nostrils.
And the snarlings died. Snuffings took their place. The ruhks were puzzled. Then they were abashed. And Nancy said to them severely:
“You should be ashamed! You know better than to snarl at anyone with this scent on them!”
And the ruhks, their ears flattened abjectly, groveled and whimpered before her. They made whining conversational noises. Kelly said curtly:
“They say they’re sorry. Spray some of that stuff on me.”
Sam Todd gasped a little. Then he turned to Nancy. She was very pale, but she smiled with a tiny silver object in her hand.
“You forgot, Sam. But I wanted to come here particularly to give the master-scent to Dick. So I brought it!”
And she showed him the jug in which all of one drug store’s supply of the needed odorous substances had been combined to make a gallon of master-scent solution.
Their actions, now, were based upon a complete change in the situation. Kelly stepped out of the cage-trap. He was clad in garments which to the ruhks meant that he should be flung to the ground and stripped, but he smelled of godhead. They fawned upon him. Sam Todd stepped out next, his hands gripping pistols. But though his suspicions did not lessen, his apprehension inevitably died away as the beasts groveled at his feet.
But as a matter of sheer common sense he refused to take any further action at all—even the dismantling of the doorway-between worlds which had dropped them into the cage—until he had filled all the empty small bottles in his pocket from the larger container. He had Nancy slip off her jacket, too, and hold it underneath as he poured, so that if any stray drops should spill, they would add to her divinity in the opinion of the ruhks. And his hands trembled a little, and drops did spill, so that when he had finished pouring all the air around Nancy was redolent of the fragrance that five thousand years of breeding had turned into a talisman of godhead that no ruhk could possibly deny. She was in no danger from anything or anybody as long as a ruhk was near her.
“See if these beasts know anything about the galley,” Sam told Kelly. He couldn’t speak to them directly because he wouldn’t understand their yelping.
While Kelly spoke authoritatively to the fawning beasts, Sam went to the cage-trap. There was a round disk which was the doorway, at the roof of the cage. There was a pole by which it could be lifted out of reach from below. His hands in his pockets still holding his pistols, Sam inspected it. If it wasn’t lifted in time, an agile man might climb back out. But most men would be far too terrified to think of such a thing immediately.
Kelly came over.
“The galley’s somewhere in the Hudson,” he reported. “They heard howlings that carried the news. That’s all they knew.”
There, again, would be an oddity. Wolf-howlings would carry news even faster than messengers, if ruhks were searching for a thing over a large area.
“That’s good enough,” said Sam morosely, “but we’ve got a job ahead of us. We’ve got to get this damned doorway off the end of this pole and find out how to carry it through what’ll be the streets of New York without bringing fat women and stray cats and odd brickwork through it. Then we’ll go to the nearest precinct police-station— I’ll find it with the peephole—and rob it of tear-gas bombs and maybe some riot-guns. We’ll use this same doorway for that. And then—”
He fumbled in his pocket. He put the peephole to his eye. He saw out into the street in New York from which the three of them had come. There were many police around, now. It seemed that he could reach out and touch any one. He flinched involuntarily. But they did not see him, of course. They were hunting feverishly for the three people who had disappeared so mysteriously.
Sam regarded them wryly. Then he shrugged and put away the peephole. With Kelly, he experimented cautiously. It was simple enough, however. The disk was a doorway on one face only. Objects could enter it only from one side, on Earth, and that side was unsubstantial—like, when he thought of it, the phantom disk six inches from the disk of the crux ansata. With the other side forward they could walk through the jungle unconcernedly, even though they marched through the space occupied on Earth by solid buildings. Of course anything that ran into the reverse face of the disk, in the Other World, would emerge on Earth ...
As a matter of fact, it is rather likely that some small fauna such as flying midges and the like did suddenly find themselves in a totally strange world of streets and stone buildings. And they would never be able to adjust themselves to it at all.
The three humans headed roughly west, and presently there were some little, glittering pools of quicksilver in a precinct police station, and some tear-gas bombs were missing on Earth. Then some other glitterings, and Sam and Kelly had two riot-guns apiece, and ammunition for them. The men off duty in the squad-room would later catch the devil for letting such things be stolen under their very noses, but Sam and the other two went on. Six great, deadly beasts trotted all about them, sometimes breasting the brushwood ahead and sometimes trailing a little behind, but always coming back to sniff at the master-scent it was bred into them to adore, and to wag their huge, shaggy tails worshipfully.
Presently even Sam almost took them for granted. He began to worry. He was going to need a boat. He could steal anything he needed from Earth. In the present emergency he had no qualms. But how could he get a boat big enough for his purposes through an interdimensional doorway designed to be a trap only for men?