Part 6 (1/2)

Alan and I must have hesitated, confused by the expanding scene--a slow, steady movement everywhere. Everything was drawing away from us. Even as we stood together, the creeping platform floor was separating us.

A moment pa.s.sed. Glora was urging us on vehemently:

”Come! You must not stand there!”

We started walking. The railing around the slab was knee-high. The slab itself was a broad, square surface. The fragment of golden quartz lay in its center. It was now a jagged lump nearly a foot in diameter.

The platform seemed to s.h.i.+ft as we walked; the railing hardly came closer as we advanced toward it. Then suddenly I realized that it was receding. Thirty feet away? No, now it was more than that--a great, thick rope, waist-high, with a huge spread of white surface behind it.

”Faster!” urged Glora. We ran, and reached the railing. It was higher than our heads. We ran under it, and cut out upon the white slab--a level surface, larger now than the whole dome-room had been.

Glora, like a fawn, ran in advance of us, her robe flying in the wind.

She turned to look back.

”Faster! Faster, or it will be too hard a climb!”

Ahead lay a golden mound of rock. It was widening; raising its top steadily higher. Beyond it and over it was a vast dim distance. We reached the rock, breathless, winded. It was a jagged mound like a great fifty-foot b.u.t.te. We plunged upon it and began climbing.

The ascent was steep; precipitous in places. There were little gullies, which expanded as we climbed up them. It seemed as if we would never reach the top, but at last we were there. I was aware that the drug had ceased its action. The yellow, rocky ground was no longer expanding.

We came to the summit and stood to get back our breath. Alan and I gazed with awe upon the top of a rocky hill. Little b.u.t.tes and strewn boulders lay everywhere. It was all naked rock, ridged and pitted, and everywhere yellow-tinged.

Overhead was distance. I could not call it a sky. A blur was there--something almost but not quite distinguishable. Then I thought that I could make out a more solid blur which might be the lower lens of the microscope above us. And there were blurred, very distant spots of light, like huge suns masked by a haze, and I knew that they were the hooded lights of the laboratory room.

Before us, over the brink of a five hundred-foot drop, a great glistening plain stretched into the distance. I seemed to see where it ended in a murky blur. And far higher than our hilltop level a horizontal streak marked the rope railing of the slab.

”Well,” said Alan. ”We're here.” He gazed behind us, back across the rocky summit which seemed several hundred feet across to its opposite brink. He was smiling, but the smile faded. ”Now what, Glora? Another pellet?”

”No. Not yet. There is a place where we go down. It is marked in my mind.”

I had a sudden ominous sense that we three were not alone up here.

Glora led us back from the cliff. As we picked our way among the naked crags, it seemed behind each of them an enemy might be lurking.

”Glora, do you know if any of Dr. Polter's men might have the drug? I mean, do they come in and out of here?”

She shook her head. ”I think not. He lets no one have the drug. He trusts not anyone. I stole it. I will tell you later. Much I have to tell you before we arrive.”

Alan made a sudden, sidewise leap, and dashed around a rock. He came back to us, smiling ruefully.

”Gets on your nerves, all of this. I had the same idea you had, George.

Might be someone around here. But I guess not.” He took Glora's hand and they walked in advance of me. ”We haven't thanked you yet, Glora,” he added.

”Not needed. I came for help from your world. I followed the Dr. Polter when he came outward. He has made my world and my people, his slaves. I came for help. And because I have helped you, needs no thanks.”

”But we do thank you, Glora.” Alan turned his flushed, earnest face back to me. I thought I had never seen him so handsome, with his boyish, rugged features and shock of tousled brown hair. The grimness of adventure was upon him, but in his eyes there was something else. It was not for me to see it. That was for Glora; and I think that even then its presence and its meaning did not escape her.

We reached a little gully near the center of the hilltop. It was some twenty feet deep.

Glora paused. ”We descend here.”