“We goin’ to take that boat?”
“Yes,” said Dick. “I want to find out about that girl.”
The voice said hungrily:
“Fella—let me have anyway that spear! I’m dead anyways, now, but maybe—”
Dick silently passed it to him, and he seized the haft of it without slackening his stroke on the oar.
The other boat was a hundred yards away. A voice called from it in a language Dick did not know. He did not answer. It was fifty yards away. Twenty-five. Its helmsman called again, this time obsequiously, as if the arrogance of a boat holding to a collision course implied that some mighty personage must be in it. Dick grimly shifted his own tiller as the other boat gave way, to keep collision inevitable. Under his breath he said:
“Pull hard!”
The helmsman of the other boat snapped agitated orders. There came animal noises from it. Sounds which were neither yelps nor snarlings, but something in between and somehow conversational. The ruhks in the other boat were calling to supposed fellow beasts in this.
Then, in panic, the other helmsman swung his boat clean around to avoid a head-on collision, and Dick swerved and crashed along the other craft’s stern. So near, he could see a robed figure at the tiller and two uneasy ruhks balancing themselves as if to spring and regarding him and his craft with anxiety.
As the stern of his own boat scraped the other, Dick fired twice, point-blank. Then there was screaming, snarling uproar, and a man rose, grabbing at his pistol-holster, and there was deadly battle in the waist of Dick’s boat where a wounded ruhk had sprung on board. Dick fired again, and the thing was ended.
He called sharply to the other crew: “Hold up, there! Back water! Try to get away and we’ll sink you!”
The captured craft lay still, its chained rowers shivering and in dread.
Of course, Nancy wasn’t in it. They’d never heard of her.
Dick had tried not to think of this possibility, but he could not help it. There were two slave pens on Manhattan Island, but Nancy had not been taken to either of them. She had not been carried to the palace of the masters on the Brooklyn shore in either of the now-captured cutters. Of the remaining possibilities, for her to have been devoured by ruhks because of an injury was most likely, and the bare suspicion drove all thoughts of humanity out of Dick’s mind.
Certainly the slaves of this Other World knew nothing of her. There was but one way to learn definitely—no, two. If Dick could capture an overseer alive, he might force the man to tell him Nancy’s fate if he knew it. And if that failed, then the palace itself—
Now, though, he had two dozen men to command. They were doomed, of course. No slave who had witnessed the killing of an overseer or a ruhk could be allowed to live, because his tale would inspire the others to wishful thinking. More, no slave who had seen an armed free man could be allowed to spread such tidings of hope.
So Dick acted with the ruthlessness that knowledge justified. He now had twenty-four followers, chained to their seats in the two cutters. He did not free them from their shackles. Instead, with the second boat following docilely because its crew could do nothing else, he made for a point on the Manhattan shore close to that small splinter of rock which lies southward of Welfare Island. As the boats headed for that spot, he took a notebook from his pocket and wrote grimly in its pages. It was a report to Sam Todd. It was a demand for arms. It told very curtly what had happened, but essentially, primarily, emphatically, it was a demand for arms to make a slave-revolt not only possible but successful. Arms with which, by massacre, to make this Other World no longer a place from which thieves and slavers preyed on the world of men. Now that five thousand years of mysteries and crimes were solved, those mysteries and crimes must end. They must!
He landed on Manhattan opposite the little splinter-islet. He tore out the pages on which he’d written his account and pinned them to the bark of the largest nearby tree with a thorn longer than his hand from a nearby bush. Sam would hunt the tree-trunks hereabouts from Earth, looking through his peephole from the equivalent space—it was a park in New York—as early as tomorrow morning. He might even hunt them up tonight. When he saw a message at the arranged place, he would use the doorway Maltby had contrived, and retrieve it. He would obey it as nearly as he could.
Then Dick took his two boats up the river past all observation. He found a secure hiding-place for both boats on a shore which should have been the Bronx. Then, and only then, he began to free his followers from their shackles. He had delayed that until he could tell them confidently that the means of fighting would soon be on the way.
It was late, by the time they were well hidden and free. The slaves had among them now two spears and two automatic pistols, besides Dick’s own. These were not arms enough. So Dick commanded them to cut saplings and make substitute spears, sharpening the points with the steel blades of the spears. And if any could make bows or arrows—but that would take time.
Time was of the essence, of course. And arms were essential. At the moment they were probably safe. There would be no regular patrol of men or ruhks on the mainland, where no slave pen lay. But they could be found, and ultimately would be. If the freed slaves tried flight inland, of course they would be tracked down. That was a function of the ruhks.
So he asked grim questions of his followers. He began to outline the beginnings of his plans. The men were cowed, and they had been almost spiritless. But they were desperate beyond the desperation of mankind. Their hate was a burning flame. So Dick made plans to utilize their desperation and hate as substitutes for the spirit that had been driven out.
Back on Earth there was the barest beginning of a possibility of change. Sam Todd—still sweating when he thought of his experience in Brooklyn—went to the park which was the Manhattan shore opposite the splinter-island south of Welfare. It was dark when he arrived, but he sat on a bench and put a copper alloy peephole inconspicuously to his eye. He did not at first see the sheets of paper that Dick had pinned to the trunk of a tree for him to find. There was no light but moonlight in the forest where the big tree stood. But even so, Sam made a discovery which was disheartening. In the world of men there had been a fill-in at that spot. The park area had been raised in level by earth piled high, with grass and concrete walkways laid on top. Fifteen feet back from the shoreline of the Other World, the ground-levels in the other world were completely different. Sam discovered, even before he saw the impaled sheets of paper, that any message Dick had left for him would be buried deep beneath publicly maintained park lawn. Actually, the scribbled sheets were stuck to a tree trunk under a drinking fountain on Earth. To get at them would have required an excavation besides an interdimensional door, and it could not be accomplished without either permission or discovery. In short, Sam simply could not pick up Dick’s message at all.
But he had the twin to the metal peephole. It was a miniature interdimensional door. Maltby had made it to be sure he could. And sitting on the park bench Sam wrote painfully in his turn:
“There’s an earth-fill covering up your papers. I can’t get to them. But I have been looking around Maltby’s place. Two miles northeast of here there is a pond in the world, you’re in. There is a cart-trail past it. Just beyond the first bend in that trail to northward of the pond, there is an unusually large tree with mottled bark. That tree grows through the space Maltby’s apartment occupies on Earth. Come there. I’ll have something fixed up so you can come back—with Nancy, I hope.—Sam.”