by Earl
“Tony, I’m worried. There is a terrible menace in all this. Please come back!”
But Vera knew that her husband wouldn’t. Quite aside from his own problems and danger, York’s scientific curiosity had been aroused. He had never, in all their travels among strange worlds, left a mystery unsolved.
The second dome, when York arrived, was exactly like the first in size and shape, enclosing a space about ten miles in diameter.
But the scene inside was vastly different. The ground was sandy and speckled with clumps of oddly shaped cacti life. The air seemed thin and clear, with heat ripples streaming down from the peak of the dome, where a huge gleaming apparatus hung suspended.
York quickly discovered mangy, lean creatures similar to Earthly wolves. They loped after and caught smaller animals, in this cross-section of an alien desert.
Suddenly, from behind a towering rock formation, stabbed a hissing ray. It struck a wolf creature, electrocuting it. York stared as the wielder of the electric gun ran from concealment.
At first glance, York understood why its movements were stiff and awkward, why its skin glinted metallically. York knew it to be a silicon being, one with silicon atoms replacing those of carbon. Intelligence reposed in the flint-scaled face, though it was dead of expression.
The silicon-man took out a sharp knife and began slicing the carcass. With a flint he struck fire, feeding it with twigs of dried cactus. He rolled a strip of flesh in the sand, then toasted it over the fire, finally gobbling it down with relish. Within his stomach, York surmised, some strange chemistry of digestion replaced the carbon atoms in the flesh-food with silicon atoms from the sand “salt.”
AS the silicon-man began a second strip, there was an interruption. A large form ambled from behind the rocks. York had to look twice, for it was the same repulsive type of beast that had killed the two ape-creatures in the other dome!
It came forward confidently. The silicon-man heard its approach. He whirled about, drew his ray gun.
“Give it to him!” York found himself urging the silicon-man. “Shoot the beast down.”
The crystal-man seemed to make every effort. His gun pointed and his body trembled, but no shot was fired. Eyes fastened on the beast’s saucer orbs, he stood as rigidly as a statue. Hypnosis again! The beast seemed to give a silent signal. With what might have been a curse, the silicon-man picked up his knife, bolstered his gun, and trotted away. He looked back once, shaking his fist in a manlike gesture, but with an air of helplessness.
The hypno-beast promptly inserted its sucking organ into the wolf creature’s corpse and drained it dry of blood. It could not use the silicon-men as food. But it still had the demoniacal power of chasing them away from prey they had killed.
What was the answer to this amazing riddle? The hypno-beast in two domes, in two different environments, lorded it over other life forms. Why had the builders done this? They could be neither the ape-men, the silicon-men, nor the hypno-beast. For all had obvious shortcomings as beings of great intelligence.
Who were they? Where were they? Why had they built these domes? Were they the ones who also patrolled space?
Driven by the mystery, and suspecting a third dome, York scanned the horizon and spied not one, but two more. He struck out for the nearest. So impatient that he sidestepped for nothing, he bowled over pulpy trees and fragile ferns with his swinging arms. He left behind him a trail of trampled vegetation that was already re-growing behind him.
The third dome was identical with the others. He would have been startled if it weren’t. And the scene within, as he expected, was totally different from the other two domes, and also from this planet’s indigenous environment.
IT was a cold setting, in the third dome.
White snow lay over all, sprayed down at times from an apparatus suspended under the dome’s peak. Hardy vegetation existed here that had the peculiar power of motivation, like animal life. Stubby rootlets slowly inched forward the low trees and bushes, seeking a nutritious spot in which to sink the feeding roots. Shaggy white forms, almost invisible against the white background, sneaked among the moving vegetation. It must be bitterly cold in there, far colder than any spot on Earth, perhaps duplicating the frozen wastes of Uranus’ moons.
York stared, startled by something. “Vera, listen as I describe—” When he had finished, he asked: “Does it remind you of anything?”
After a moment her psychic voice came back excitedly.
“Yes. It sounds exactly like the fifth planet of sixty-one Cygni, which we visited over a thousand years ago. But Tony, that was in our Universe! How could that exact setting be here?”
York made no answer. He was watching a scene within the dome. It had a larger scope than he had at first realized. A small city stood under one part of the shell overhang. Solid ice blocks and snow cement composed the square buildings, decorated artistically with shaped icicles and patterned snow crystals. York had seen the same structures on 61-Cygni, unless imagination had filled the gaps of memory after a thousand years. Water was the staple building material, with temperatures ranging far below zero at all times.
Such was the city. The inhabitants were squat quadrupeds, their four feet flat and smooth so they could glide over snow and ice on these natural skis. All other surfaces of their bodies were covered with fluffy, warm feathers. They were warm-blooded creatures. Their beaked heads held large, intelligent eyes.
At the moment, excitement reigned in the village of snowbird people. The males had collected on the flat roof tops, swinging around catapults of leather and wood. They knew nothing of smelting or metals in their low-temperature environment. The boiling point of water was to them the blast heat of a high temperature furnace.
The attack they prepared for came. York’s snow-blinded eyes hadn’t even noticed the body of white forms rushing across the open stretch before the village. They were of the same race. York cursed, as he had always cursed over the civil wars of the human race.
The catapults thumped, slinging blocks of hard ice upon the attackers. The latter stood their ground, setting up giant catapults of their own. Great bombs of hard, crushing ice arced into the village, cracking through walls and ceilings.
THE attackers were numerous, the besieged few. Perhaps this was the final assault of a long series of battles. The patched village crumbled, and the defenders were decimated under the bombardment.
York knew that hours had passed. He had watched with a fascinated wonder. In what way did this little battle, in a ten-mile patch of winter-world under a dome, fit in with the general mystery?
And then York saw the finale. From the distance, where they had been concealed by a mound of snow, came a group of naked hypno-beasts! No extreme of environment seemed to bother them. They passed among the victorious attackers, who advanced robotlike into the village. This was hypnosis control on a large scale. The hypno-beasts had directed an army of the bird people against the bird people’s own kind! The beast-masters browsed through the village, probing their tentacles into dead bird-men, feeding well of victims killed by their own brethren.
York ground his teeth in loathing and rage at the hypno-beasts. Surely in all the two universes, there could not be a more revolting, dangerous form of life. For a mad moment he beat with his gauntleted fists at the transparent wall that separated him from the monsters, as though to charge in and challenge them. The shell felt as solid and unshakable as foot-thick steel.
“Tony, control yourself!”
York relaxed. “Vera, there’s some answer to this. I won’t give up. I’m going to the next dome—and the next—”
Three days passed. York again went sleepless and without food, drawing on the super-vitality with which the elixir of immortality had endowed him. He visited a dozen more domes.
In those dozen domes were the environments of a dozen different worlds. The creatures who roamed within ranged from wormlike crustaceans to great, scaly dinosaurian forms. Intelligence reposed in anything from a dog-si
zed spider to a ten-foot high mammoth.
In one dome, blobs of liquid life were held together by thin skins. Rolling through a noisome, swampy purgatory, they devoured everything after spraying out a vicious poison whose touch was fatal.
Most of the intelligence levels were low, held back by inhibiting environments. But in one dome, tailed and fine-fingered beings had mastered a great science. Here too was civil war, with most of the beings dominated by the hypno-beasts, slowly conquering the rest.
The hypno-beast was in every dome! It was the sole common denominator of the baffling mystery. But what could be the purpose of the builders?
TRUDGING to the next dome, a queer phenomenon overtook York. With the suddenness of a dream ending, the flimsy life forms of the planet faded away. York watched the horizons melt down, as all the vegetation went to seed, dried to brittle dust. He looked up. The Cepheid sun had passed its maximum. Temperature was declining rapidly, and the short “winter” was approaching.
In the space of a few hours, the planet’s surface was bare, wind-swept, as he had first seen it. He was on a high knoll, and when he looked around, he gasped. Within his range of vision now were dozens—no, hundreds—of the domes, in all directions. They marched down the horizons as though beyond them were hundreds more.
York was suddenly struck by something vaguely familiar in the sight. He squinted his eyes so the wide sweep of the planet below and the sky above were narrowed.
“Vera!” he telepathed excitedly. “I think I know now, partially. This is like a vast laboratory. Those domes are bell jars, in some stupendous series of experiments. The dome builders are the scientists. The creatures within are guinea pigs of this macro-cosmic research!”
“That sounds logical, Tony,” Vera returned. “But for what purpose? And why should there be hypno-beasts in every dome?”
York pondered.
“The answer might be simpler than we suspect. The builders must be super-scientists, greater than any we’ve yet met. I am not excluding the Three Eternals and ourselves. They have roamed all through this universe, carrying back ‘samples’ of various worlds. Like biologists breeding cultures of mice or fruit-flies, they are carrying out a tremendous observation of hundreds of life forms. This must have taken centuries. The purpose behind it must be something vital to them. What can it be? Hundreds of life forms from all over their universe, pitted against the frightful hypno-beasts—”
“From our Universe, too!” interposed Vera. “I remember that winter-world of sixty-one Cygni clearly. The one under the third dome you visited was from there. Tony, what does it all mean?”
York had now approached the next dome.
He glanced in. Again he gazed upon an alien scene. Leafy green trees dotted a woodland sward of rich emerald grass. The air above was blue. Puffs of soft clouds drifted down from an apparatus at the dome’s peak.
Not far beyond, a field of golden grain rippled as a warm breeze rustled over it. Several four-legged, horned and hoofed bovine creatures grazed on the grasses beside a brook that wound through sylvan glades. Little bright-colored birds piped from high branches, though York heard no sound through the transparent shell. A red-furred animal crept forward and suddenly leaped. A startled white-furred creature bounded away like a rabbit—
“Tony, don’t you recognize it?” Vera’s psychic voice was tense, as she read his transmitted description. “It’s our own Earth!”
CHAPTER IV
In Earth’s Dome
YORK jerked violently. He had been staring impersonally, as he had at all the other alien environments, without realizing it was shockingly familiar. The blind spot in his brain had suddenly been dissolved.
“Vera, you’re right!” His telepathic voice was a whisper. “It’s a ten-mile section of our own native world, down to the last blade of grass. Good Lord, if there are Earth people here, and hypno-beasts also—” Abruptly York’s whole perspective changed. Before he had been scientifically fascinated, altruistically enraged at the dominance of the hypno-beast in each dome over races with which he felt no kinship. Now the hot blood pounded in his veins. In here must be his own people, his own kind. The race that had given him birth. The people with whom, though he was half a god above them, he felt the ties of blood brotherhood.
“The builders!” he shouted aloud in his suit, stunning his own ears. “Where are they? I must find them. They can’t do this—”
He broke off. Something within the dome had caught his eye.
A man and a girl emerged from the shadowy forest, scaring away what York now recognized as a fox and a rabbit. They peered carefully in all directions and then advanced into the field, toward the cows. The man carried two empty buckets. Over his shoulder was slung a riflelike weapon, and in his belt was an unsheathed knife.
Both were dressed in hides and woolens, he setting was pastoral, very near to the ancient pioneering days of America in the remote nineteenth century.
York knew nothing of those days personally. Earth for two thousand years had advanced to a much more scientific civilization. But the scene struck chords of aching kinship. This was a part of Earth, no matter if from a far past, and those two were his own people. If he could talk with them, they might explain this incredible mystery.
He pounded on the glass of the dome with his gauntlets and shouted, hoping to attract their attention. They were within a few hundred feet, but they took no notice. York desisted. Perhaps the dome was so polarized that they could see nothing but a blank gray wall.
York watched.
The couple reached the cows. The girl began milking, while the young man stood on guard, peering about cautiously. But gradually he became lax. His eyes wandered toward the girl herself. He spoke to her, smiling, and she smiled back. At times they laughed and he bent over once to touch her hair.
THE love of a man and a maid—It was here, too, under this prisonlike dome, on an alien world, in an utterly strange universe.
“Tony, it’s wonderful and it’s horrible,” Vera said. “Wonderful that love can survive any twist of space and time, but horrible that these two have been taken from their home world. Do you suppose the builders watch somewhere, through some instrument, as if at ants?”
“Hush!”
York spied a slinking form among a patch of trees at the edge of the pasture. It was another man. He had unslung his rifle. He was kneeling now, taking aim for the man beside the girl.
York pressed his face against the dome glass and searched back of the man. He saw it suddenly, the pink-skinned, oily bulk of a hypno-beast. The man kneeling and shooting was under the beast’s dominance, ready to kill at his bidding!
York screamed in warning. Then, realizing the uselessness of that, he concentrated on hurling a powerful telepathic warning. In all his wanderings throughout the universe, he had never yet heard of a substance that could stop the super-penetrative radiations of thought. But the dome did. His psychic vibrations rebounded with such force that they stunned his mind like a sledge-blow.
Yet perhaps the tiniest of thought impulses wormed through. The young man beside the girl turned uneasily, gripping the stock of his rifle. That move saved him for the time being. The shot ripped through the air from the ambusher, grazed his shoulder. Instantly he ducked, shouting to the girl. She flung herself flat in the grass, overturning the milk. The two cows lumbered away, lowing in fright at the sharp report. York filled in the sound sequences in his own mind.
Flat on his stomach, the young man unlimbered his rifle and cautiously raised his head, searching for his enemy. A puff of smoke from behind a bush and a shot that whined over him gave him the clue. He fired back. A dozen shots were exchanged. One or the other was marked for death.
York ground his teeth when a shot from the attacker struck. In agony the young man doubled up, forming a better target. A second shot mercilessly crashed through his head. He sprawled out in death. The girl leaped up and flung herself on the body, weeping. Then she sprang to her feet and ran, as the vic
tor came racing up, evidently to capture her alive.
BLINDLY the girl ran toward the dome shell. The man had cut her off from the concealing forest. Back of them the hypno-beast, who had instigated the tragedy, waddled up to the corpse. It occupied itself with its vampirish meal, as its brothers had over and over again in the other domes.
The girl was trapped. She ran to the dome wall and beat against it with her tiny fists, screaming. York moved to the spot. He saw her clearly, but she obviously saw nothing beyond the wall. She did not see that York stood there nearly mad with helplessness and fury. He could not answer the girl’s pitiful cries for help.
She turned her back to the shell as the man came up. He was young, too, not vicious in appearance at all. But behind his youthful features was the mark of mental slavery. He was the living zombie of the hypno-beast. He spoke to her, and his face was strangely gentle.
York, no more than ten feet away outside the wall, was able to read their lips.
“Mara, why do you run from me? You loved me once. Come with me to our village.”
“Yes, I loved you once,” returned the girl, looking at him in pity rather than fear. “But now you are a slave of the Beasts. And you killed Jorel ruthlessly.”
“But only at the command of my master. I did not want to.” His eyes were pained and pleading. “Forgive me, Mara, and come to live with me. You did not love Jorel. What else have we to look forward to, save a little happiness, in this tiny world of ours?”
The girl’s eyes blazed. “Why did you not kill the Beast, Mantar? Look, he squats there, unsuspecting. Shoot him!”
“I cannot!” The man shook his head. “Mantar—for me!”
He looked at her and suddenly his face grew determined. Whirling, he flung up the rifle, taking aim at the feeding bulk a hundred yards away. It was a large target. He couldn’t miss. York’s heart leaped in hope, as the girl’s must have.
But before a shot rang out, the Beast’s serpentine neck twisted. Its saucer eyes turned hypnotically on them, as though it kept mental tab on its slave. Mantar made a tremendous effort to press the trigger. His whole body trembled. But with a groan he lowered the weapon. The girl attempted to seize it, to do it herself. Now Mantar, under dominance, resisted her.
