Their descent toward the unknown, mysterious terrain seemed to occupy many minutes; and once or twice the vessel hung motionless for a moment, and then resumed its gliding with a jerk. Staring from the ports in ever-growing bewilderment, they began to distinguish separate forms and masses in the queer chaos of scenery. Irregular hills, mottled with grey, green, ocher and violet-black, lifted about them in the rufous light, and they perceived that they were settling into a kind of valley-bottom. The ground beneath them was partly bare, partly covered with objects that resembled vegetable growths rather than anything else. These plants, or plant-like things, as the plane settled closer above them, displayed a remarkable diversity of shape, size and hue, ranging from leafless, limbless stems to great tree-forms, with a crowded foliation that suggested some impossible crossing of araucaria and banana. The whole impression of this flora, even at that first glimpse, was one of lawless variety and illimitable grotesquery.
The vessel slanted slowly down on an open, level tract, narrowly missing the tops of some of the taller growths. It landed with a light jar, little more pronounced than if it had been checked by the usual process of careful deceleration. Markley and Morris peered out on a scene that amazed them more and more as they began to perceive its innumerable oddities of detail. For the nonce, they forgot the Japanese rocket-plane they had been following, and did not even speculate regarding its fate or whereabouts.
“Jumping Jesus!” cried Markley. “Mother Nature certainly was inventive when she designed this place. Look at those plants—no two of them alike. And the soil would give a geologist a nightmare.” He was now peering at the ground about the vessel, which offered a remarkable mosaic of numberless elements—a conglomeration of parti-colored soils, ores, and mineral forms, wholly unstratified and chaotic. It was mostly bare, and broken into uneven mounds and hummocks; but here and there, in patches of poisonous-looking clay or marl, peculiar grasses grew, with blades that varied in the same manner as the larger growths, so that one might well have imagined that each blade belonged to a separate genus. Not far away was a clump of tree-forms, exhibiting monstrous variations in their leafage, even when there was a vague likeness of bole or branch. It seemed as if the laws of type had been disowned, as if each individual plant were a species in itself.
A stream of some water-like fluid, varying strangely from peacock blue to cloudy umber in its course, ran past the fallen plane and meandered through the valley toward a barren slope at one end. From this slope another stream appeared to descend and join the first, flowing in a series of rapids and low cascades from a hill-top that melted indistinctly into the reddish-brown heavens.
“Well,” observed Markley, after contemplating this milieu with a troubled frown, “the problem of how we got here is equaled in its abstruseness only by the problem of how we are going to get away. It’s beyond me—I pass it up. The whole business is wrong and impossible. And this crazy landscape isn’t the only joker, either. Our nitrone fuel simply won’t explode—there’s something—hell knows what—that prevents combustion.”
“Sure the tubes are all right?” queried Morris. “Maybe we’ve run short of fuel.”
“Huh!” the tone was superbly contemptuous. “I know this boat. There’s nothing the matter with the rocket mechanism. And I loaded up to the limit with nitrone before we started. We could have chased Sakamoto to the Great Wall of China and back again, if necessary, without re-fueling. I tell you, we’re up against something that was omitted from the text-books. Just look at this ungodly hole, anyway. It’s like the scrambled hallucinations of a hundred cases of delirium tremens.”
“I’ve monkeyed with hashish and peyote beans in my time,” said Morris, “but I’ll admit that I never saw anything like this. However, we’re probably missing a lot by staying in the ship. What do you say to a little promenade? Sakamoto and his friends may be somewhere in the neighborhood, too; and if they are, I’d like to get a line on them.”
Very cautiously, the two men unstrapped themselves from their seats and arose. In spite of their heavy garments, they felt a queer physical lightness that argued a lesser gravitation than that of Earth, and which no doubt accounted for the leisurely fall of the plane. They almost seemed to float around the hull; and found great difficulty in controlling and calculating their movements.
They had brought along a few sandwiches and a thermos bottle of coffee. These, their sole provisions, they decided to leave in the plane. Both carried automatic pistols of a new type, firing fifteen shots with terrifically high-powered ammunition, and having almost the range of rifles. Making sure that these pistols were ready in their holsters, which formed part of the leatheroid garments, and re-testing their oxygen-tanks and helmets, the men opened the sealed door of the hull by means of a spring-apparatus, and emerged.
The air of the valley, as far as they could tell, was still and windless. It seemed to be quite warm, and they were forced to shut off the heating mechanism in their suits, which they had turned on against the zero of the stratosphere. Almost vertically overhead, a heavy and lob-sided sun glared down, pouring out its light like a visible flood of reddish-brown liquid. A few clouds, with unearthly forms, floated idly about the sun; and far off in the lower heavens, above dim hills and crags, other clouds went racing by as if driven by a mad tempest.
Trying to determine the course of their descent into the valley, Morris and Markley perceived an aerial blur at one point in the heavens—the same blur, it seemed, into which they had flown above Nevada. It occurred to Markley, in his mounting bewilderment and consternation, that this blur was perhaps formed by the meeting or overlapping of two kinds of space, and was the entrance between their own world and some alien dimension into which they had been precipitated. It was visible in the reddish air like the “ropiness” or cloudy nucleus that sometimes appears in a clear wine.
From Markley’s viewpoint, this explanation of their dilemma was extremely wild and fantastical. But he could not think of any other.
“Which way shall we go?” he queried, as he and Morris surveyed the valley on all sides. At the end that had been previously invisible from the plane, the vari-colored stream emerged from a defile of madly tilted cliffs and pinnacles, hued as with petrified rainbows. On both sides of the valley were long, uneven slopes and barren bluffs, looming vaguely above areas of fantastic forestation. One of these areas, lying on the right hand, approached in a sort of arc to within a hundred yards of the rocket-plane.
“I move that we head for the nearest timber,” said Morris, indicating this mass of grotesquely varied growths. “I have a feeling, somehow, that I’d like to get under cover as quickly as possible. I may be wrong, of course, but something tells me that Sakamoto and his compatriots are somewhere in the vicinity.”
“Their visibility is pretty poor, if they are,” commented Markley. “We may have lost them altogether—maybe they got safely through that atmospheric blind spot.”
“Well, I’m not taking any more chances than I have to. I don’t care for the idea of a soft-nosed Japanese bullet in the back.”
“If rocket fuel won’t explode in this world, there’s no certainty that cartridges will either,” Markley pointed out. “But anyway, we might as well take a look at the woods.”
They started off toward the forest, trying to control the absurd lightness that sent them bounding for twenty feet or more. After a few paces, however, they found that their weight was increasing rapidly, as if they had entered a zone of stronger gravitation. They took one or two steps that were almost normal—and then floated off in ludicrous leaps of a dozen yards that were checked suddenly as if by another belt of increased gravity.
The trees, which had seemed so near, retreated in a strange and disconcerting fashion. At length, after many minutes of variable progression, the men saw the wood looming immediately before them, and could study its details. High in the heavens, above all the other growths, there towered two incredibly elongated boles such as might be seen in the delirium of
hashish; and about them a medley of lesser forms, no two of which displayed the same habit, leaned and crawled and squatted or massed themselves in monstrous tangles. There were single plants that combined enormous moon-shaped leaves with others that were fern-like or lanceolate. Gourd-like fruits grew on the same tree with others in the form of tiny plums and huge melons. Everywhere there were flowers that made the most ornate terrestrial orchids appear simple and rudimentary as daisies in comparison.
All was irregular and freakish, testifying to a haphazard law of development. It seemed that this whole chaotic cosmos in which the earth-men found themselves had been shaped from atoms and electrons that had formed no fixed patterns of behavior. Nothing, apparently, was duplicated; the very stones and minerals were anomalous.
So far, they had met nothing in the form of animal life. Now, as they neared the forest, a creature that was like a poddy and spider-legged serpent came down as if from the heavens on one of the preposterously tall boles, running swiftly. With curiosity tinged by a nightmarish horror, the men stepped toward the tree, unable to decide which end of this curious creature was the head and which the tail.
Astoundingly, in a mirage-like fashion, the forest faded away with their change of position; and they saw its baroque tops at a seeming distance of several hundred yards, in a diagonal direction. Turning, they found that the whole valley, during their brief journey, had shifted about and had recomposed itself beyond all recognition. They were not able to locate the rocket-plane for some moments; but finally, in an opposite quarter, and seemingly much further away than they had supposed, they discerned the gleaming of its wings and hull.
Before them, in lieu of the forest, was an open space in which the vari-colored stream had mysteriously reappeared. Beyond the stream arose plots of scattered vegetation, backed by opalescent cliffs.
Markley and Morris felt an indescribable confusion, a terrible and growing dubiety that involved the veraciousness of their own senses. Their very sanity was challenged by the labyrinth of impossible and illusory images into which they had wandered. For perhaps the first time in their lives, they knew the sensation of being utterly lost, in a bournless world of incertitude. Their habitual buoyancy and jauntiness began to evaporate, giving place to a furtive, unacknowledged terror.
“We’ll be lucky if we ever find our way back to the plane,” said Markley, in tones that were almost dismal, after a long silence. “Want to look any further for the Japs?”
Morris did not answer at once. His eye had caught a silvery glint, close to one of the far-off plots of vegetation beyond the stream. He pointed it out to his companion silently. Three dark, moving specks, doubtless the figures of men, appeared beside the glint as they watched.
“There they are,” said Morris. “Looks as if they were starting for a pasear themselves, or were just returning from one. Shall we try to interview them?”
“You’re the captain, old scout. I’m game if you are.”
Temporarily forgetting, in this glimpse of their quarry, the illusive refraction of the weird scenery, they started toward the stream. It appeared to be only a few paces away, and was seemingly narrow enough to be crossed at a step. By another astonishing shift, however, it moved away from them, reappearing in a different quarter, at a considerable distance; and the gleam of the Japanese rocket-plane and its attendant human specks had vanished from view.
“I guess we’ll play tag with some more mirages,” opined Markley in a tone whose ironic disgust was mingled with profound bewilderment and perturbation.
A nightmare confusion, a doubtfulness that implicated all things, even their own identity, returned and deepened upon them as they pressed forward, trying to relocate the enemy vessel. The changing zones of gravity made their progress erratic and uncertain; and the landscape melted and shifted about them like the imagery of a kaleidoscope. Like lost phantoms, they seemed to pursue a phantom foe through all the jumble and disorder of some incredible terrain of cosmic dementia.
A clump of crowded vegetation, rearing its anomalous boles and monstrous leafage as if from nowhere, leaped into place before them. Rounding the clump, which seemed relatively stable, they came suddenly in sight of the Japanese, who, in air-suits and helmets, were now standing on the opposite brink of the apparently nearby water.
Whether or not Sakamoto and his fellows had seen the Americans was uncertain. They were staring in the direction of Morris and Markley, who did not wait for decisive proof that the enemy had perceived them, but drew their automatics and aimed quickly, each choosing one of the two nearest figures.
Somewhat to their surprise, in view of the various baffling and topsy-turvy phenomena they had encountered, the pressure of the triggers was followed by a sharp double report. The Japanese, however, did not seem to realize that they were being fired at; and their apparent nearness and relative position were no doubt illusory.
Markley and Morris, recognizing the probability of this, did not shoot again, but sprang forward in an effort to approach the deceptive figures. The Japanese vanished; the whole valley seemed to swirl in a semi-circle and rearrange itself; and the two Americans found themselves at the foot of that barren slope from which, in their first remote view of the place, a second stream had appeared to descend and join the meandering creek.
From their new and close vantage, however, there was only one stream, which, flowing down the valley-bottom against the barring slope, ran turbulently uphill in a series of skyward-leaping rapids and cascades!
Chapter III
The People of Chance
Too astonished even for profanity, they stared without comment at this unique reversal of what they were accustomed to regard as natural law. For a considerable distance on either side of the stream, the acclivity was hollowed and worn smooth as if by landslides or a process of slow attrition. Occasionally, as the men stood watching it, a pebble, a lump of conglomerate soil, or a few particles of grit were loosened from the ground, to roll heavenward rapidly and disappear beyond the ragged crest of the slide together with the cascading waters.
Drawn by thoughtless curiosity and wonder, Morris stepped toward the beginning of the slope, which was perhaps ten feet away. It was like stepping over a precipice. The ground seemed to tilt beneath him, and the slope fell like an overturning world, till it pitched downward at a steep angle with the sky at its bottom. Unable to arrest his strange fall, he slid sidelong into the rushing water, and was carried roughly and dizzily down the rapids and over the cascades. Half-dazed and breathless, he felt that he was shooting across the world’s rim toward a nether gulf in which hung the fallen sun.
Markley, seeing his companion’s weird fate, also started toward the acclivity, with some dim instinctive idea of rescuing Morris from the inverted stream. A single step, and he too was seized by the skyward gravitation. Slipping, rolling and bumping as if in a steep chute, and unable to regain his foothold, he slid along the topsy-turvy slope, followed by a shower of detritus, without falling into the water.
He and Morris, passing the rim of the slide as if hurled toward the reddish-brown sky that was now beneath them, each experienced another bewildering bouleversement. Morris found himself floundering in a sort of hilltop pool, where the final cascade foamed itself into quiescence; and Markley, stunned and sprawling but with unbroken bones, was lying on a pile of rubble such as would ordinarily gather at the bottom of an escarpment.
Morris scrambled from the pool, which was only waist-deep, and helped Markley to his feet. The local gravity was almost normal from a terrene viewpoint; and plainly all objects that were drawn skyward along the deficiently attractive area were promptly arrested when they reached the top. Headlong and turbulent, the cascade curved over the rim into the level pool.
The earth-men, finding themselves quite unhurt, proceeded to examine their air-suits and helmets for possible damage. Since the local atmosphere was untested, and might well possess deleterious properties, a rift in the leatheroid fabric would perhaps be a serious mat
ter. The suits, however, were intact; and the tubes that supplied oxygen from flat tanks behind the shoulders were in perfect condition.
The height that they had climbed in a fashion so singular was really part of an uneven plateau that appeared to surround the whole valley. The plateau was divided by long hummocks of mottled soil and stone, which rose gradually into bleak uplands and low mountains at a seeming distance of several miles.
From their present vantage, the valley below was an immense sink. They saw the entire course of the tortuous stream, the areas of outré vegetation, and the gleaming of some metallic object which they assumed to be their own rocket plant. The Japanese plane was not visible, and was perhaps hidden by one of the plots of forestation. Of course, remembering the optical distortion and displacement which they had encountered so often in their wanderings, they could not be sure of the actual distance, perspective and relationship of the various elements in this bizarre scenery.
Turning again from the valley, they considered the plateau itself. Here the stream, running in a normal and tranquil fashion, entered a ravine and disappeared. The whole landscape was intolerably drear and repellent, with the same chaotic mineral formation as the valley, but without even the anomalous plant-life to relieve its deadly desolation. The lopsided sun, declining very swiftly, or else subject to the nearly universal optic transposition, had already fallen half-way from the zenith toward the horizon of amorphous mountains. The clouds had all melted away, but far off above the valley, the men could still discern the mysterious aerial blurred spot.
“I guess we’d better mosey back toward the boat,” said Markley. “That is, if we can find our bearings.” He tried to suppress a terror such as might be felt by a lost child, tried to collect his wildered faculties. “If we follow the rim of the valley, we ought to find a place where the gravitation won’t drag us the wrong way.”
The Maze of the Enchanter Page 11
