The driver looked at him dubiously, and turned back to the wheel.
Sam reflected unhappily as the cab went uptown again. He re-examined the preparations that had been made for Dick’s adventure. He was dissatisfied. The need for speed was great, of course, and of course since Nancy had gone into the Other World somebody had to go after her as quickly as possible. But still things were wrong.
He piled Maltby out of the cab at his house. He dragged him to his apartment and dumped him on his bed. Then he picked up the little copper-alloy window that Dick had used for his preliminary survey of the Other World. He remembered the location Dick had assigned to the villa, which must be in some sense the headquarters of the local interdimensional thieves. He went downstairs and got a taxicab and started for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Huddled back in the cab, he glued his eye to the little peephole. As an experience, that ride was unique. The cab followed straight streets and traffic lanes in normal New York. But Sam Todd’s eyesight traveled in a straight line through jungle, a jungle of giant trees through which his vision seemed to float eerily. He saw brushwood of unknown varieties, and deep, shadowed glades where there was no undergrowth but only a carpet of rotted leaves. Once he came out into a tiny natural clearing and saw a relatively small tree, barely forty feet high, with foliage which was not green at all, but heliotrope; the other trees seemed to shrink from it as if its vicinity were poisonous. There were occasional glimpses of trails cut through the forest, but they were rare, and once Sam saw a wooden cage, rotting away, which had no meaning to him.
But then the taxicab seemed to leave the earth and soar upward, and he jerked his eye away from the metal window and saw that it was actually sweeping up the ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge.
In the Other World there was, of course, no bridge at all, so that Sam looked down from the viewpoint of a bird in flight. He saw the river which was the counterpart of the East River flowing beneath him. He saw the great brick villa on the gently sloping farther shore. He saw a galley—propelled by many oars—pulling away from a small dock, and he saw a luxurious, old-fashioned carriage with four horses moving back toward the villa with trotting four footed forms running beside it.
Then the taxi soared down from the crest of the bridge, and trees rose to engulf it, and Sam winced as his eye at the peephole told him he was about to crash into great masses of foliage.
Presently the taxicab stopped by the Navy Yard. He paid the driver and got out. He was excited, now, because he’d seen signs of more than untouched wilderness. He stuffed the window in his pocket and walked a block. Then he put the peephole to his eye again. He saw a garden, plainly artificial and plainly watered and tended with the prodigal use of labor. He stood still, gazing. When he lowered the peephole, he saw three children and a fat woman staring at him suspiciously. He hastily put away the bit of metal and walked on.
He went into a tiny confectionery store and into the phone booth. He dropped in a coin and dialed at random. In the privacy of the booth he looked into the Other World while the voice of a telephone operator exasperatedly told him over and over that there was no such exchange and would he please hang up the receiver. But he was seeing walkways of smooth marble leading through fancifully trained foliage, and fountains, and statuary, and—
He saw a slave. The slave was utterly unkempt, with uncombed beard and hair, with no garment save a loincloth. But he wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He worked busily at the fertilization of a vine of climbing roses which was a veritable blanket of blooms. He finished that task and walked seemingly within a yard of Sam Todd in a telephone booth in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn. As he passed, Sam saw ghastly scars upon his body. Some were the marks of lashes, and some were the marks of teeth.
There was somebody tapping on the glass of the phone booth door with a coin. Sam confusedly put the peephole in his pocket and went out. The woman who had tapped said acidly:
“When a person can’t get their number, it’s a pity they won’t let somebody else use the phone!”
The street outside was incredible. Sam had just seen enough of the Other World to make his own seem unreal. As he looked at dingy store-fronts, he seemed to see the wraiths of flowers and fountains and intricately trimmed shrubbery in the midst of shops and delicatessens. He had an idea of the location of the villa now, though. He oriented himself carefully and walked toward the place where the villa should be in the other cosmos.
A great, warehouse-like building blocked his way. But there was an office-building of sorts nearby. There was a phone booth in its untidy lobby. He took refuge in the booth and again surveyed the Other World.
He was within yards of the villa—which was gigantic— and within feet of a terrace where a little girl played with a kitten. She was a rather thin little girl, with delicate features, dressed in a healthily brief garment Sam could not identify. She treated the kitten with the extravagant affection normal in six-year-olds. But within two yards of her stood two giant, wolf-like creatures, watching her. A little distance back stood six men in knee-length robes, with swords and shields in an antique style, and highly incongruous automatic pistols in holsters at their waists. Behind them again there was an elderly woman with a worried air, and behind her a row of young girls with bare feet and arms, each of them carrying a toy.
The six-year-old played absorbedly, but presently dropped the kitten with a sigh of quaintly adult weariness and then clapped her hands. The kitten darted away. Instantly there was movement all about. The two wolf-like creatures moved nearer to the child. The worried-looking woman gave agitated, inaudible commands. The line of young girl slaves moved forward. As each drew near to the child, the wolf-like creatures regarded her coldly. Each slave, in turn, knelt and offered the toy she carried. The six-year-old contemplated them solemnly and waved them aside one by one. There was a girl with a swollen face, as if she had been struck a violent blow. She offered a squirming puppy. It was waved away. Extraordinarily elaborate dolls were offered. Every conceivable device for the amusement of a six-year-old girl was offered for approval by the row of slave girls who knelt abjectly, trembling, in their turns.
The child graciously accepted a mechanical toy of sheet-tin, brightly-colored. It was of the sort which is sold in five-and-tencent stores. The slave wound it and put it before the child. She backed away. The wolf-creatures moved back to their former positions. The child solemnly watched the toy perform its jerky, mechanical antics.
Then one of the wolf-creatures snarled suddenly. Its eyes were fixed upon Sam Todd’s tiny copper-and-bismuth window. The beast flung itself before the child. There was swirling, rushing movement, and the child had been caught up swiftly and was being raced away.
Sam blinked and drew back. He assured himself of his safety and turned to stare in all directions through the peephole.
In the Other World more beasts were racing into view. There must have been fifty of them who came boiling up from somewhere, fangs bared and snarling. Men appeared, racing, buckling on pistol-belts over their robes.
Then there was stillness. Sam was bewildered. He turned the peephole in every direction. In the Other World, the spot from which he looked out was the exact center of a circle of snarling beasts and cold-eyed men, who held weapons ready.
Then he swallowed. The peephole was evidently visible in that other world. They didn’t know that nothing could be shoved through it. They were prepared to fight—but he could not guess what they expected to happen next.
Then an extraordinary device came into view. It was thin and spidery and skeleton-like. It moved upon eight slender, shining wheels. A man in a robe ran panting beside it. He wore extraordinary goggles which should have blinded him. There was a curious, light, jointed girder at the forefront of the spidery device, and a large disk at its end. That disk could be set at any angle and moved in any direction by the girder. The man in the goggles shouted, but Sam could not hear him. The armed men, though, pointed. The spidery vehicle swerved straight at him.