Land Beyond the Map

X

Crane climbed the last flight of green and gold-veined marble steps and stood looking up, one hand resting on the alabaster urn with its draggle of scarlet poppies crowning the handrail. Behind and below him the hundred-yard wide staircase dropped away to the point where the road ended. Only when he’d stepped off the road, onto the first marble step, had the importance of that road in the scheme of things struck him. It had been like a first solo.

His eyes squinted a little as sunlight bounced back from the tower before him. Glistening white was that tower; tall and wide and round, a drum tower, crenellated, loop-holed, flanked by curtain walls almost as tall as itself. In the center of the tower, directly facing him, the door seemed odd, out of place, small, black, mean — and shut.

He stared at that wall and that tower and that door and the thick heady scent of the poppies hung in his nostrils like a warning. The feel of the rifle in his hand could give him only passing, illusory comfort; for here he envisaged joining battle with beings that were not of the Earth that had borne him.

“Well,” he thought, for his own comfort, “better get on with it.”

He lifted the rifle. From what McArdle had said the problem of ammunition supply would not arise; the arm was charged and would last what, oh — five thousand rounds? Something that would normally burn out the lands into inaccuracy in mundane weapons. He body-aimed, ignoring the sights, and touched the trigger feather-light — but three distinct crumps of light splashed over the door and battered it into shredded rags hanging from warped hinges.

He smiled. “This is a real jim-dandy piece of ordnance,” he said, admiringly, and began to tramp the remaining distance to the tower and the shattered opening.

Under the arch he paused. Murdering holes leered down on him; but nothing spurted from them and he had long since formed the hard opinion that nothing lived in these ramparts girdling the city. His goal lay over there, in the city proper — if city it be. Glistening with pimpled light like a Christmas tree a missile gantry lifted — high, higher than any he had seen before on any film. This was real. This towered. It was the tree he had seen as a child and from which he had lately fled. Multiplicity of lattice-work and elevators, of pump lines and conveyers concealed the ship within — she was a ship. Crane knew that simply enough. A missile that size could blow half the Earth into mushrooms.

Beside the gantry, workshops and hangars crouched low, busy with fire and thunder. Vast areas of roof covered industries stretching for acres. Streets bisected in neat patterns. The towers and turrets of his childhood vision resolved now into a complex of engineering workshops and refineries from which the glow and flood of color illuminated everything about.

In dominant tandem with the ship gantry lifted the bowl — the fiery bowl like an Olympic flame magnified ten times the size of Wren’s dome over Saint Paul’s. That, still, he could not neatly docket into a file of understanding.

He began to walk down the metal slatted road into the city. He walked on an escalator, a moving road; but the treads had long since ceased to move and weeds and daisies grew from the dirt trapped between them.

The first scuttler poked a stalked eye from the crumbled ruins flanking the stalled escalator. Its body followed: bucket-sized, scuttling on six jointed metal legs, gnashing metal mandibles before it, scrabbling out with hostile intent. This time Crane’s trigger pressure accurately released one shell. The scuttler vanished in a blooming detonation that rolled around the ruins in powdery echoes. Crane smiled.

“So the Wardens have baby brothers,” he said cheerfully. The first evidence of tangible opposition cheered him; he lost the sensation of boxing shadows.

He knocked off three or four more scuttlers as he pressed on determinedly for the squat blue-columned, ocher-walled building supporting that enormous bowl. They skittered out at him from the ruins and then, as he pressed on, from between rows of factory workshops from which sounded the heavy beat of machines in full production. And he remembered that all the time he’d been with McArdle not one single Warden had attacked. Odd, that.

The Loti posed a different problem. He halted, rifle raised warily, at the corner of a power house with massive aerials rising from the roof giving clear indication that beamed broadcast power was a reality here, confirmed by the general absence of pylons and cables. The Loti hung about twenty feet off, glowing, vibrating, a luminescent oval in which the great sad eye flowed, appearing and disappearing disconcertingly.

Crane began to resent what he felt about that luminous mournful eye. The thing looked at him so reproachfully. But it would be no good loosing off a round; the lozenge of living light would merely expand, rippling color, and contain the explosion. The converse also held true. The Loti wouldn’t grab him because they’d tried and he’d had the Amullieh. True, he now had only a broken link; but they weren’t to know that. Unless they tried to snatch McArdle and discovered he had the Amullieh — then they might turn nasty. He slogged on towards the building of the bowl, keeping the Loti in the corner of his eye.

Two or three others joined the first, and in between blasting a couple more scuttlers and nearly reaching the last expanse of wire-mesh landing area before the building, he’d built up quite a procession of them. They tailed along behind him like the caudal appendage to a comet. They didn’t want him to go into that building. The clattery scratchy sound of scuttlers’ feet on the wire-mesh sounded from all directions. Crane pushed his back up against a masonry tower supporting what at first glance looked like a statue of a wheelchair and began loosing off snap shots all around. Smashed and degutted scuttlers began to litter the ground. A nasty smile passed across his face as the shells crashed home. He crouched, and his reactions came lightning swift after the sluggish torpor of the preceding days. The opposition he understood — it presented targets as though in a shooting gallery. He was enjoying himself.

From the moment he had first clearly seen the enormous fiery bowl mounted atop its hulking blue and ocher building it had seemed obvious it was the place to make for. The focal point of the city, more dominating even than the giant missile gantry, it had drawn him. And now he was here.

The rifle hiccoughed deafeningly six times. Crouched over automatically as though subject to snipers’ bullets, Crane belted it out for the base of the building. His feet rang against the wire-mesh. His path carried him close by a Loti — and he could have sworn the lozenge of light swayed quickly away from him as he barreled past.

Then the floor came up in a leering hole and only some fast and fancy back-pedaling saved him from pitching into a square opening in the ground. He circled it, picking off two more scuttlers, and headed on for the building.

The door stood open — and that seemed wrong.

The Loti had been trying to prevent him from entering this building, hadn’t they? Then why leave the front door open? Answer — trap.

He looked for another way in. Between the blue columns, the ocher walls contained tall, narrowly conceived lancet windows, the lowest too high for him to jump. He had to snap his attention back to the wire-mesh as a fresh gaggle of scuttlers charged. This time they each had different appendages: one a broom, another a shovel, a couple with drilling implements. He smiled again as he blasted them competently. So the Loti were bringing out the wash-and-brush-up brigade to deal with him. That was only fair, anyhow; to them he was vermin.

If he was going into that building after Polly then he was going to have to enter that door. There was no other way he could see. Testing every step before putting his weight on it, he edged towards the door, rifle ready to blast the first scuttling heap of machinery to show itself. He felt cool blue shadow drop across his shoulders as the masonry cut off the sun. Beyond the door lay a smooth marble floor and multicolored walls. He couldn’t smell a trap anymore — the obvious hadn’t panned out this time.

The whole sequence of events since he had entered the environs of the city struck him as out of focus. If the Loti really wanted to stop him, then, with all their super-science so lavishly displayed around him, they should have found that no problem, no problem at all. He pushed on, puzzled and wondering.

Behind him the door shut with a click.

He whirled, rifle up, before he realized that it didn’t matter.

He wasn’t going out that door without Polly; and when he returned to it he’d blast it as he’d blasted the door in the tower. If he returned.

Padding up the corridor he saw the light subtly changing, running through the spectrum so that he had constantly to adjust to it, ready for what might spring out on him. But nothing did.

When he reached the huge and impressive antechamber to hell he stepped inside, an ant in a cathedral. The roof soared into corbelling high above; groined columns fluted into distance; under his feet the marble extended, vast and shining; and clustered thickly before him, waiting, hung a group of Loti, the living lozenges of light.

He looked about, faintly puzzled, not expecting this, ready to walk steadily on, into and through their lambent barrier. From, a hidden source a bright actinic light stabbed out, lanced into his eyes. Blinking, eyes watering, he flung up a hand, shading, trying to see into multicolored whorls of color and shadow beyond the light.

A voice cracked suddenly and shockingly from the great chamber, a woman’s voice, Polly’s voice.

“It’s Rolley! It’s Crane! It’s all right!”

The light went out. When he could see again Polly was walking across the marble floor towards him. Her feet went tac-tac-tac across the floor. Then they speeded up and she flung herself into his arms, grasping him, clasping him, laughing and crying.

“Hold up, Polly,” Crane said. “What’s this all about?”

“Oh, Rolley! I never expected to see you again alive! We all thought it was Trangor.”

“Trangor? You mean McArdle?”

“That’s right. One and the same. The Loti said he was in the Map Country, with an accomplice, and we’ve been waiting — it hasn’t been nice, Rolley…”

“We’ve been waiting, Polly? Who’s we?”

“Why, who do you think? Allan and Sharon, Colla, poor Barney — all the others who’ve been waiting here—”

“You’ve found Allan?”

“Of course! Do be sensible, Rolley. The Loti have been very patient with us, and they’re sweet — but I don’t want to have to ask them to spell it all out again.”

“The Loti — sweet!”

She pushed back from him and brushed a hand over her hair. She still wore her leather coat; but underneath she’d put on a white clinging dress, ending just above the knee, so that she looked like a Nymph from a Greek play. It was very becoming. Crane became bemusedly aware of other people moving up — and recognized Allan Gould. The girl with a dress like Polly’s and a calm, serene face that contained no hint of her quirks of personal taste must be Sharon. Barney, too, he recognized; but the parking lot attendant, like Colla, tough and wiry and darkly Irish, and like Allan Gould, wore a short white tunic and sandals.

Crane put the rifle butt on the floor and leaned on the muzzle. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, and said: “Tell me, Polly. Tell me what it’s all about.”

Off to the side the clustered Loti swayed and nodded and the weird notion hit Crane that they looked like a congregation of old men, bearded and near senile, nodding in muted approval. Allan Gould thrust up to Crane, smiling, holding out his hand.

“Polly told me you were with her, skipper, but we never expected to see you! You’re looking fit…. It’s been a long time….”

“Check, Allan. And now that the pleasantries are out of the way, let’s get down to cases. I want to know!”

“The first mistake we made,” Polly said, still holding on to Crane’s arm, “was to imagine the Loti were evil. They’re not. McArdle was — is! — but he’s a Loti, a renegade Loti, and the others here have outlawed him and feel sorry for him — but they’re scared to death of him…”

“So that’s why he wanted to get into the Map Country — to return to his kinfolk.”

“Yes and no. The story goes something like this — We’ve found out that there are other worlds in parallel with the Earth we know, other dimensions, by proving it coming through into the Map Country. The old idea was to liken the dimensions to a book, each leaf being a world — but the fact is many worlds impinge on each other, so that the last pages and the middle pages of the book really lie next to one another. It takes mathematics of an order I don’t have to work it out fully; but formulas exist to explain it, and also to act as portals through the dimensions, just as the map McArdle made was just such a portal diagram—”

“Diagram?”

“There was no magic inherent in the map, Rolley. When McArdle left he wanted to get back again, and so he took the key…”

“The key! Of course… But he lost it—”

“True. He had a double chance but he lost both sections of the map. The Loti don’t know how and I’m only repeating what they told me.”

Colla motioned to them and they all walked slowly through the vast hall, eagerly talking, until they reached the wall and a small door that led into a comfortable lounge furnished in tasteful Terran fashion. As they sat down, Polly said: “The other dimensions are universes like ours; that part of it all is easily understood. But what took me longer to grasp was that, if that was so, then space travel, too, must exist in other dimensions. The Loti are not native to the Earth — this other Earth — they traveled here from their own planet in a solar system light years away, seeking new worlds to colonize. Oh, Rolley, they are a good people, kind and thoughtful. When they landed on Earth they found it in the most frightful condition of primeval chaos—”

“The Map Country?”

“They’ve tamed it considerably. What we saw was only a flea-bite to what they had to contend with. They built this huge city and these machines to subdue the convulsions of the planet. It was a hard furrow they had to hoe. But they were winning, creating a new world for their children—”

“Children!” Crane stared at the clustered Loti, swaying and shining at the door, those great mournful eyes staring unwinkingly in. “Lozenges of light—?”

“Oh, Rolley; I thought you were with it! The Loti are people, not dissimilar to us, I’m told. But they’re resting far below in their vaults. The living lights are only their means of looking and traveling in the outer world. Like perambulating television cameras, if you like. They’re physically exhausted with the toil of subduing this world; and they’re failing. Really, they’re beaten. The ship is ready to take them back across the empty reaches of space to their own world.”

“So the Loti did a spot of space travel in their own universe, came to the Earth’s twin and found it to be a pretty dud place for colonization.” Crane could understand that well enough, and sympathized with the defeat the Loti had suffered, their sadness and depression. Those mournful eyes were enough to give anyone the willies. “But what about McArdle, or Trangor?”

Allan Gould said: “He’s a nasty piece of work, skipper. Apparently the Loti accidentally stumbled across the method of crossing the dimensions; something to do with immense strains imposed on the fabric of the universes by the nature of chaos in this place — Polly calls it the Map Country. The Loti prefer to call it the Unmapped Country.”

“Figures. So?”

“McArdle was their chief manipulator. That means he was a sort of electrical and mechanical engineer, responsible for designing the Wardens and the others to frighten off everything from the road. The road, is the first thing the Loti built. From it they tamed the rest of the country. Well, McArdle spotted our Earth and something happened to him.”

“There’s a black sheep in every race,” Polly said, thoughtfully. “McArdle was weak from the Loti point of view. He saw our wonderful Earth, and this horrible place here—”

“And he jumped to the logical conclusion.” Crane stirred restlessly on the seat. “But if the Loti are packing up shop and letting everything run down, why haven’t they gone home already?

Why stay on?”

“That proves you don’t know the Loti!” Sharon spoke with eager intentness. “They’re wonderful! While McArdle was still at large in our Earth and the map was not accounted for, the Loti refused to cut for it and run home. They knew the damage McArdle could do — and they stayed on trying to get the map themselves. For if McArdle regained his map, and put his plans into high gear—”

“Yeah,” Crane said, standing up. “I see that all right. You’d have an invasion. He intends to take it all over—”

“And the Loti cannot allow that. They colonize only worlds where the intelligence level of the inhabitants has not risen above a quite low level. War and invasions are taboo to them.”

Crane began to pace up and down, thinking. “Why haven’t the Loti spilled over into another one of the worlds in a different dimension?”

“Good question,” said Polly. “But it seems Earth is at a nexus of highly developed dimensions. The Loti have discovered many worlds; but each is occupied. And some queer setups they’ve run across, too. Races where people are used as computers; worlds where people struggle to lose every bit of wealth they’re born with; there is one particularly nasty lot called the Porvone, who are just golden caps, who squat on people’s heads and control them. The Loti debated a long while whether or not to take over there; but their laws are stringent. Just because an intelligent society is evil in their eyes does not stop it from being an intelligent society and taboo to takeover.”

Crane began to warm to the Loti. And he thought of McArdle out there in the Unmapped Country. No wonder the Tanks hadn’t attacked — they’d been told by McArdle not to attack the man who’d made them. Simple.

“McArdle’s up to something,” he said, worried. “He’s out there now — he seems to have the Loti frightened to death. Anyway — how come he looks like a human being?”

Polly answered that one. “He used his knowledge of scientific surgery to take over the body of a man — the real McArdle. That was some time ago. The Loti have been here a long time. They discovered the map was adrift and they set — well, call them enticements, to bring people in. Like old Liam and his diamonds. Specially made and cut to act as bait to bring him — and the map — back again.”

“Y’know,” Crane said reflectively. “Much as we know McArdle is a villain, you’ve got to feel sorry for the old devil. There he was, cut off from his buddies, desperately seeking his map and knowing if he didn’t lay hands on it, his friends would leave and he’d be marooned on Earth. Hmm. Makes you think, does that.”

“The Loti don’t want anything more to do with him. And for a good reason.” Polly’s voice sounded somber. “He doesn’t know — but he can never change back from the earthly body of McArdle to his Loti body of Trangor. They wanted to spare him that. If he tries — no one seems quite to know what will happen. But it’ll be nasty.”

“You give me the impression that Trangor was a sort of chief technician, not one of the big brains, a get-rich-quick social climber—”

“Maybe he is;, but you do the Loti an injustice if you imagine their social class system to be anything as antiquated as ours.”

“Well, whatever or whoever he is, he’s out there now with an extremely powerful weapon, gathering his clanking monster pals. What’s he going to do?”

Allan Gould, Crane noticed, had kept a careful distance from Polly. The atmosphere between them was tangible to him, and he suspected Sharon, too, to sense it clearly. But they did not act like long-parted lovers; and this gave a ray of hope to Crane, a ray like the infra-red against sunshine. Now Gould began to speak and it was like being back on patrol against the terrorists, not knowing behind what bush your very messy death lurked. “The Loti have kept the very minimum of equipment in operation to stabilize this little section of land where the city is built. As soon as the ship blasts off and the machines run down, primeval chaos will sweep back and obliterate everything. To keep the chaos outside they’ve arranged those encircling walls and if McArdle wants his own body back he’s got to break in.”

“He sent me up against the Loti first. Said something about me softening them up for him.”

“Good tactics. What he doesn’t know is the Loti are just about done for. They didn’t stop you when they thought you were Trangor’s sidekick—”

“The scuttlers were pretty ineffective—”

“ — and they won’t stop Trangor. But in breaking in he may well disrupt the field holding the guard walls together. He wants this place, skipper; he wants it bad. With it he can control two worlds. Without it — he’s just a footloose bum.”

Crane tapped the rifle that Gould had examined with deep professional interest and in a voice grimmer than he intended or liked, said: “McArdle made this in our own world using our techniques boosted by those of the Loti. It’s some weapon. If he can do that, I scarcely rate him in the footloose bum category.”

Gould shook his head. “I don’t mean that, skipper. Oh, sure, the rifle’s brilliant, especially after you showed what could be done with it. But it’s small-time stuff to a man craving for the dominance of two worlds. Look at the Wardens — the Loti knocked those together as soon as the road had been built — all flash and fire, shoddy but working — to make a big noise and scare off the wild animals. They work, you saw that. But you should see some of the machinery the Loti have below stairs — man, it’s fabulous!”

“And it’s all running down,” put in Polly. “Rolley, we must help the Loti! We’ve got to stop McArdle somehow…”

A long shuddering rumble rolled through the floor. A glass fell from a table, to bounce and roll under Gould’s chair. He bent and picked it up as the tremors came again, held on an excruciating moment that set everyone’s teeth on edge, then died to expectant silence.

“What was that?”

“That was McArdle starting his little campaign.” Crane tucked the rifle under his arm. “Is there a vantage point we can look out over the walls? The bowl?”

“Come on.” Gould rose and led them from the lounge.

By elevator and escalator and moving ramp the little party climbed inside the monstrous blue and ocher structure and all the time they climbed the living lights of the Loti followed, bobbing and weaving and in seeming anxious haste, illuminating their way. Crane caught Polly’s eye and drew her back out of earshot of the others.

“You’re all right, Polly?”

“Of course. If it wasn’t for the deadly serious threat against our own old Earth I’d be enjoying it all.”

“I was when I came back — but now… I don’t know. It’s too big. I felt, well, cheated when I got in here without a proper fight. But if McArdle wins it’ll mean the end of the world as we know it.”

“Some of our politicians have been working for that for some time. Bomb happy—”

“But this is different. And another thing. Colla looks remarkably cool for a man who’s been here all those years—”

“Allan warned me about that. To each of them here it seems they’ve stayed, oh, a week or a fortnight or so. Time has no meaning here as we found out.”

“But Colla’s kid—”

“He’ll be delighted with what’s waiting for him when we get home.”

Crane glanced at her, at her tough, beautiful face, her white dress and leather jacket, and looked away. He said: “We’ll get back home, Polly. We’ll get home.”

They followed the others out into a high glass-walled gallery atop the blue and ocher structure. The sun cast down a vast semi-circular shadow of the bowl above them. Crane could look out over the sagging roofs of the city, past the chimneys, most cold now, over the checkered rows of workshops and foundries, out across the girdling white walls and into the Map Country — no — the Unmapped Country.

A glint of vermilion caught his eye among a fold of green and as he watched a Warden rolled out from the shadow of trees and started directly for the walls. Other specks of vermilion broke into view, a cordon, enveloping the city, all headed in like ladybirds crawling up the spokes of a wheel.

A foot behind his right ear a soft, patient, infinitely tired voice said: “So Trangor begins his last move. And it is a winning move for we cannot stop him. Alas, that our high* dreams should end thus.”

Slowly, stiffly, his whole body rigid, Crane pivoted. He looked back and he saw his first Loti.

Polly had been right. They were people — oh, not quite like human beings from the Earth that had born Crane; but any sentient being with two eyes and a nose and mouth in a face lined with the years, calm and serene and yet shadowed with sorrow, a face that could belong to the wise grandfather of a centenarian monk from forbidden Tibet, was people.

It was as if he were sitting enthroned in a wonderful chair. The back arched up and over his head to form the support for a flexible mask that Crane guessed could be pulled down to cover his face. The arms were wide and broad, studded with a multiplicity of controls. The lower front curved up and concealed his legs. The whole chair rose from and was formed from a shell, its convex side a subtle curve, doming down against the floor. The smooth metal shone. The Loti sat in his great chair and the chair rested in its saucer of gleaming metal. The whole construction hovered three feet above the floor, silent and unmoving.

Polly said: “Hullo, Varnat. Don’t give up hope yet. Mister Crane has joined us — and he has a rifle—”

“Thank you, my child, for your wise attempt to comfort us. But what do the Loti know of rifles, or weapons of murder and maiming? If we were given to remorse we would rue the day Trangor set foot aboard our ship for our high venture among the stars. But it is too late for that now.”

“What bothers me,” Gould put in, “is McArdle’s strong-arm stuff. He doesn’t know how weak the Loti are now; he’ll come busting in here with his tanks and rupture the wall’s defenses. He sent you in first to draw their fire, skipper. He anticipated you’d be taken up by the Loti almost as soon as you’d set foot inside — why weren’t you, anyway?”

Varnat answered, his purple-lidded eyes heavy with weariness. “Crane possesses the Amullieh — or enough of it to prevent our transporting him. Trangor for all his wickedness was a master craftsman.”

“I have abhorred violence,” Crane said softly. “But it has been forced upon me again. If McArdle comes into my sights I shall shoot—”

“Trangor no longer understands.” Varnat waved a pencil thin hand towards the horizon.

“When he left us all that land was calm, cultivated, ready to accept the gracious villas we would build for our children and give to them the new life and new world we had planned. Now, look!”

Crane took his eyes away quickly. The ground beyond the immediate circle around the city heaved like a stew, gouting and roiling, hideous.

He looked again at the Loti. Withered and old Varnat appeared; but he recalled old Liam and guessed that disappointment and the burning out of a dream had ravaged the Loti past endurance.

Sorrow for him welled up — and then the building shuddered again.

“He is burrowing in,” Varnat said calmly. But his hands played across those confusing controls with nervous vagueness.

“From the face screen above Varnat’s face a golden light issued. Like a genie from a bottle it grew, wavering upright and growing until it parted from its source. Crane stared fascinated as a lozenge of living light soared out and over the wall, swooped away towards the distant trees. Varnat pulled the face mask down over his eyes and sat, entranced.

“So that’s how they do it,” Crane whispered.

“McArdle knows the Loti won’t fight.” Gould shaded his eyes and peered over the golden, writhing landscape. “But he also knows the strength of the defenses against chaos. He thought you’d help to smash them for him. And he’s hurling the Wardens in attack and burrowing in below. He’s really hurling in a terrible force, although to ordinary eyes it is not impressive. But — what he doesn’t know is the true weakness of the Loti. He’s using a bulldozer to shift an anthill.”

“It can only be a matter of an hour or two.” Polly turned bright eyes on Crane. “And, my dear, I think your rifle will prove of no avail.”

“Faith, if we’re to die,” Colla said with true Irish pugnacity, “I’ll take a few o’ the spalpeens with me, surely I will!”

“There is only one,” Polly reminded him gently.

And Crane thought of her saying “my dear” and in that moment of bitter acceptance of defeat her words were of far more importance.

And then, shockingly, a bestial wave of violence surged through Crane’s mind. His fingers gripped on the rifle savagely. “He’s only one! And he can be killed in a human body! By God! I’ll blow him to hell and gone!”

Turning and beginning to run so abruptly he collided with Colla and sent the Irishman staggering, Crane ran clattering down the stairs and escalators, leaping four treads at a time. He’d ask Polly why the Loti needed stairs some other time. Probably for their kids before they grew old enough to graduate to one of those marvellous chairs. His feet slammed the marble paving. Behind him he heard the rest of the Earth-people in full cry after him. The time for questions and answers was over. Ahead lay only the promise of action that would end, it seemed, in the inevitable death of them all.

And the destruction of the Earth he called home; that, too, would follow as Trangor’s evil plans succeeded.

Crane shouted back over his shoulder, harshly, and the light glanced from the planes of his face, gave him a wolfishly devil’s look of evil intent. “Keep back! If McArdle fires that damn great cannon of his he’ll blow you all up! I’ll tackle him by myself!”

Varnat’s chair atop its shining bowl skimmed lightly down. “If many explosions tear at the foundations of this place, weakened as it is by the slackening grip of the forces holding chaos at bay, the whole will crumble and fall.”

Before the Loti had finished the walls and floor shook to a subterranean rumble; pieces of marble facing fell and splintered in icy shards.

“Sounds as though he’s doing all right already.” Crane motioned to Varnat. “You know the way down to the vaults. Take me there. Pronto.” And Crane flung himself up onto the rear of Varnat’s bowl, grasped the seat in his left hand, pressed himself to the chair back. “Get moving!”

Down through the giddy perspectives of giant halls and the cyclopean architecture of a race of master builders, Varnat’s chair flitted, leaving Allan Gould’s cry dissipating on the air: “Hey! Skipper! Wait for me!”

Past marvel after marvel Varnat took Crane, skimming through a wonderland of scientific equipment so that Crane’s mind reeled, stunned. He was roused as the Loti’s quiet controlled voice spoke to him: “As death for us all is so close I am doing as you wish. For there seems nothing else to do… I am old and weary… I shall not be sorry to leave this sphere and—”

“Forget that sort of talk, Varnat. We’re not licked yet. Okay, so we’re going to die; but I’m an Earthman and until I’m good and dead I won’t believe it! You know where McArdle — that is, Trangor — is heading for down here. Whistle us to it, fast. He took a shot at me when I couldn’t do anything about it. But” — Crane hefted the rifle — “this time I can!”

And so, like a phantom rider in an hallucinatory dream, Crane rode the back of an alien other-dimensional chair skimming ever deeper into the depths of another earth.

McArdle had planned his campaign well — against a foe who had mighty defenses to resist him. Against the pitiful cobwebs remaining to the Loti, McArdle had knifed through like a scalpel opening a boil. Long before Crane reached the lowest level of the vaults the sound and fury of McArdle’s breaching machines reached up, and smoke and fumes roiled up the descending spirals. He slipped off Varnat’s chair as the Loti coughed and slammed down his face mask. The oldster couldn’t take the fumes.

“Thanks, Varnat. You go back. I’ll tackle McArdle from here.”

“Wait, Crane—” The voice whispered from the mask, “Look — beyond the crystal screen…”

Crane looked.

Set in a twenty-foot high alcove in the wall, ringed in purple shadow and yet haloed in silver light, like an alien and evil eye, a Loti sat slumped in his bowl-chair. Light splintered from an impermeable barrier before him. Away beyond the alcove the passageway wandered off into the bowels of the earth, lights dimming fainter and fainter with distance. In the air ozone stung the unexpecting nostril, and rivulets of black earth ran from cracks slowly widening in the ceiling.

But Crane, backed off against the far wall, riveted his eyes on the lone Loti, sitting his chair, immobile and silent in his tomb of crystal.

“Look closely, Crane. For you gaze upon the arch-traitor in person — that is Trangor!”

Without thought the rifle jerked in Crane’s hands. How many rounds he fired with that feather-touch trigger jammed solidly back he didn’t know. But light and smoke and the fury of ripping explosions thundered over the crystal screen. When at last he let his finger slacken, and let his breath out in a great sigh of defeat, the crystal wall stood firm and unmarked and flinging back its shards of reflected light.

“Mere force of that nature will never break down the shield Trangor left around his body.”

Varnat moved his chair and skimmed away. The last Crane heard of him, he was whispering: “Trangor must return here for his body, Crane. That is why I brought you here. Now… everything rests on your shoulders….”

The thought of putting a shell into McArdle’s hide sustained Crane in that eerie pit in the other earth beneath a tottering pile of masonry threatened by a man driven mad with dreams of avarice and power beyond the wildest schemes of all the dictators of earth rolled into one. The earth shook and more black earth sifted from widening cracks. Crane pushed back against the wall and leveled the rifle. When McArdle and his tanks and digging machines broke through he’d be met by a blast of his own death — destruction spitting from a weapon he’d fashioned himself. Crane liked the thought of that.

A hundred feet away the wall bulged outwards. It looked exactly like a house of cards toppling to destruction. With a roar that echoed in ear-punishing clangor up the corridor the wall splashed across the floor — and a vermilion body rolled through.

The tank had been fitted with a bulldozer shovel and immediately it began clearing a way through the piled wall debris. Crane blasted it into a heap of mangled wreckage.

The junk began to move, to jerk forward, slewing as a ruptured jag of hull caught against debris. A glimpse of vermilion metal showed behind as the second tank pushed its shattered brother out of the way. Crane blasted that one, too.

More sections of wall fell. More Wardens, hastily fitted for underground boring, waddled through. Crane fired with snap precision. He tried to clobber the tanks in the openings so they would hinder those behind. Smoke roiled in the close confines of the corridor. Heat built up so that he sweated, his face a shining mask, his chest beneath the shredded shirt shining slickly.

The noise and confusion of the battle dinned confusingly in the corridor. A sense of occasion swept over him, a realization that he fought what might be the great and decisive battle for two worlds, and had his temperament been different he might have sung an exultant battle song, there in the smoke and fire of conflict. There was no doubt he took glee in the fight. His regret lay in the unpalatable fact that McArdle was sending his tanks to fight for him and there seemed no chance of centering that dark sardonic face in the telescopic sights and blasting it to shredded destruction as he had promised.

Tanks broke through from the tunnel’s opposite end, behind him, and he had to whirl and fire two ways, taking it in turns, clearing his ground as tanks broke and buckled beneath the fearful ferocity of the rifle’s blast. Slowly, working to a pattern, the breakthroughs closed in on him. He was pressed back until he found a niche, little more than an eroded slit beneath the far wall, directly opposite the crystal-walled tomb of the empty husk that was Trangor’s body.

A flailing-armed clanking monster bore down on the piles of wreckage, flinging smashed tanks left and right. Crane sighted briefly and expertly on the tank’s vermilion hide and pressed the trigger.

The rifle did not fire.

He pressed again, harder, fiercely, willing the rifle to spit its orange tongue of death. Nothing happened.

He could never have fired through five thousand rounds.

But then, he had only McArdle’s word as to that — and a voice boomed from the shadows beyond burning tanks, magnified, distorted: but recognizable. McArdle’s voice, gloating in the moment of victory.

“You fool, Crane! Did you think I would let you loose even when doomed to capture by the Loti with a fully charged weapon? Numbskull! Your time is come… Now you die!”

A clanking monster closed on him. He scrabbled up, the rifle held by the muzzle slashing out in a rending blow that caromed from the monster’s shielding arm. A grapnel-claw seized him, thrust him back and down. Writhing like an insect on a pin he fell below the tank, jammed between tracks and the wall.

Through bloated eyes he saw a chink of light under the tank’s tracks, saw McArdle’s feet and legs walking cockily down through the sprawled mass of wreckage. McArdle was anxious, eager. He ran straight towards that crystal wall.

His senses fast slipping away, staring, the blood hammering frenziedly in his skull, Crane saw McArdle halt before the crystal screen, saw him bend, do something by the wall — saw McArdle vault lithely within the tomb, climb up to the narrow shelf behind the body of Trangor on its chair atop its shining bowl.

He knew that this moment represented McArdle’s supreme triumph. With his Earthly knowledge and the skills of the Loti. he could not fail to win the dominion of two worlds. And Crane could do nothing, pinned to the wall by the grapnel claw and the tracks of a clanking monster that haunted the dreams of his childhood.

At any moment now, McArdle would shed his Earthly body, the body of the man whose name had been McArdle, and would reenter his own body, the husk of Trangor, waiting for him. In complete despair and exhaustion, Crane closed his eyes.

The flash seared through his closed eyelids. The noise buffeted him in waves of pain-filled sound. He felt blackness shot with the lurid scarlet of eternity smash all across him — and then there existed only the blackness.

Everything stopped for Roland Crane.