The thing that dazed the red-bearded man, then, was the manner of the beasts. They showed no ferocity, though they looked ferocious enough. They were businesslike and matter-of-fact, like animals going through a well-rehearsed trick. They released the stripped men.
Their leader looked at the other captive’s broken arm and turned its head to the man with the spear. The beast made more specific sounds. The man with the broken arm was—somehow it was clear—the subject of a comment or a question. The man with the spear shrugged.
The beasts—the ruhks—tore the man with the broken arm to bits. It was hard for the red-bearded man, telling this to Dick, to convey the horror of their matter-of-factness. The beasts killed his fellow-prisoner and devoured him without snarlings, without competition, as men would have divided a new-killed steer. Then, still matter-of-factly, they closed around the red-bearded man and herded him before them.
The red-bearded man had been marched for miles, with the beasts around him and the man with the spear ignoring him. Once the read-beard was sick, from sheer horror and fear. The beasts drove him on with bared fangs.
In the end he arrived at a slave pen, the crudest possible shed of logs within a palisade. He was turned into it. There were other humans there, men and women denned together on straw in a structure in all essentials a stable for domestic animals. They were themselves domestic animals, they told him. They had been of all possible walks of life originally. Each had been through the same experience—of falling into a cage-trap, of being stripped by the ruhks who came to herd them to the slave-pen, of being driven like captured wild animals, and of being treated thereafter as beasts of burden.
Dick interrupted, here, to demand if Nancy had been brought to that slave-pen. The red-beard swore that she had not. No new prisoner had been brought to the slave-pen for much longer than three days.
Because they had hands, the red-beard went on, they were driven by the ruhks’ to harness horses, to plow-fields, to perform all the necessary tasks of the production of food and the gathering of fuel. The spear-armed man gave orders. The ruhks saw to it that the slaves carried them out. Some of the food and a little of the fuel they were allowed to keep and use. Most went to the river-shore, to boats rowed by men in chains, which took them elsewhere. They were guarded in the slave-pen by ruhks. When sent on errands, like the red-beard and the other man Dick had seen, a ruhk accompanied them. At such times they were subject to their four-footed guards. But the man with the spear was not their master. He was their overseer. Their master—or masters, they did not know which—lived in a palace on the other side of the river. What they knew of the palace they had learned from a slave sent to labor with them, brought to their pen across the river in one of the boats rowed by men in chains. What he told them, shivering, was not pleasant. And in a matter of days he was given to the ruhks.
The sun sank down among the giant trees on Manhattan Island as this tale unfolded. Sundown drew near. Then the red-beard drew rein.
“Here,” he said bitterly, “You get out here. I’m a slave. I couldn’t go back to livin’ like a human again. I’ll go on an’ tell my story. I’ll say my ruhk told me to wait an’ went off, an’ I waited till I got scared I’d be hunted as a runaway, so I started on an’ I seen him an’ another ruhk layin’ in the road dead. That’s all I’ll tell ‘em.”
“That’s right,” said Dick grimly.
The red-bearded man drove on, chuckling to himself.
Dick ground his teeth as the horse and cart went out of sight in the gathering darkness. He had started wrong. It had seemed quite logical to plunge into the Other World after Nancy, and to force some inhabitant to lead him to her. The primitiveness of what he’d seen from the top of the Empire State Building had made him feel that the Other World would be all savagery. It was savagery, to be sure! But was not a kind he prepared for.
The ruhks, alone, made his original plan sheer suicide. They had obviously been the dominant species on this planet when some ancient Egyptian magician first stepped through a doorway of his own making to this world. Intelligence alone would have ensured their dominance, but they could not use tools to rise above the cultural grade of pure savagery. When the first Egyptians appeared, undoubtedly they strove to prey upon them. Undoubtedly they failed. And somehow—Dick could not imagine a process offhand—somehow an unholy compact had been arrived at. It continued until this day. With the master race to provide shelter and security and luxuries they could not contrive for themselves, it would be a mutually admirable compact which made them loyal slave-guards. That such a compact would be kept was not wholly reasonable, but Dick had to accept the apparent fact. They would not be domesticated, like dogs. They would feel no reverence for humanity as such. But as slave-guards they would have reasonable outlet for beastly instincts of cruelty. And the masters of this world would value them highly. While they were loyal, no slave revolt could possibly succeed nor any slave hope to run away.
They and their masters would surely apply every trick five thousand years had developed, to track down and destroy the one man who had entered their world without being enslaved. As for Nancy—It was still true that no person or object which had disappeared with an accompanying tale of quicksilver had ever been seen again.
Dick tried not to think of what was Nancy’s most probable fate. He fanned the sick hatred that had been growing all during the red-beard’s tale. Among the things Sam Todd had provided him with was a compass with luminous dial. Dick set out doggedly to find his way through the night by its means.
A girl vanished in Paris. A prominent commissar disappeared in Prague. Two workmen, weaving their way home tipsily from a wineshop in Madrid, dropped utterly out of sight. There was a disappearance of cheeses in Belgium, of wine in Bordeaux and Athens and Malaga. A dahabeah lost half its cargo of dates in mid-Nile, and its crew saw quicksilver in the hold and dived howling overboard. In Damascus a shop in the Street of the Goldsmiths missed a bit of tapestry thickly interspersed with gold thread. In Baghdad a flask of attar of roses vanished into thin air. A sweetshop in London was robbed of its most expensive confections. A farmer lost two mules in Maryland. In Philadelphia a trusted employee seemed to evaporate under the most suspicious of circumstances; his accounts were correct to the last penny. In Denver a schoolboy did not come home from high school, in New Orleans the father of eight children disappeared, in Antofagasta a beautiful young girl vanished. ^
Over a very large part of the Earth, things which men had made and treasured, people whom others cared for and depended on, ceased to exist as far as the normal world was concerned. But nobody considered that anything requiring a new explanation had occurred; such things had been happening for five thousand years. Nobody thought to look for any common factor linking them. Nobody at all thought of the possibility of another world, beside this one in hyperspace and identical with it save in flora and fauna and population. Among all the two and a quarter billion humans on Earth, only Sam Todd and Maltby even guessed at such a thing.
Instantly after Dick Blair vanished in a pool of quicksilver, the taxi driver turned back his head and blinked. Three men had been in the cab. Now there were two.