He fumbled in his pocket. The only suitable container was his wallet. He emptied that and put his message inside it. He put the end of his handkerchief between the zipper teeth and caught the cloth firmly. He rolled up the wallet into a cylinder and managed to squeeze it through the tiny round alloy doorway which corresponded to the alloy eye. Feigning to drink at the drinking fountain, he released the handkerchief by which the wallet dangled in the Other World. Then, through the peephole, he watched. The wallet fell at the foot of the very tree in the Other World to which Dick’s report and demand for arms was fastened. Dick could not fail to find it when he came to make sure his message had been retrieved by Sam. The handkerchief showed up plainly.
As an emergency way to explain to Dick why his message hadn’t been removed, and to arrange a better means of communication, it was an excellent idea. But it did not take into account certain facts.
The ruhks were slave guards. The slaves were cowed. But sometimes pure horror made them cunning. So the shoreline of Manhattan Island was trotted over, at least once in twenty-four hours, by a keen-nosed ruhk with the intelligence of a man. Being beasts with undiminished feral instincts, they made those rounds with all the satisfaction of hunting animals. They savored the smells of the jungle. Sometimes they snapped up an unwary wild thing and devoured it. But discovery of the scent of man on the shoreline was the purpose of the patrol.
Two hours after Sam dropped his message for Dick to find, a ruhk came padding through the darkness on that particular errand. He picked up instantly the scent of Dick’s footprints where he had landed and selected a tree to hold his message. Slavering a little—because unaccompanied humans on unlawful errands were the lawful prey of ruhks—the beast followed the human trail. He did not find Dick. He did find two messages. One was impaled on a thorn on a tree-trunk. One was the wallet on the ground.
The ruhk made sure that Dick had returned to the water. Then he picked up the wallet and set off at full speed to find the nearest overseer. The conversational noises of the ruhk were quite equal to an exact account of what he had found, so that an overseer and ruhks soon retrieved the other message. Both were sent across the river in a double-banked galley, specially summoned by light-signals from the shore.
The master of all the slaves and ruhks of these parts, and the lord of all local overseers, had already had two frights that day. One was the unprecedented appearance of an armed free man in the Other World, a matter of great gravity. The other alarming event had been the appearance of a between-worlds peephole in his very palace, as if enemies capable of interdimensional travel spied upon him for purposes of their own.
He had the notes translated, because he had never bothered to learn any language but the language of his ancestors. He puzzled over the interpretation of the two. He was annoyed, and he was frightened. He gave orders for the finding of the place where—according to Sam Todd—a doorway for passage between worlds was to be opened by those who were not of his race and hence were enemies to him and all his kind. He gave explicit commands about that. Then he ordered an adequate ambush prepared about the place where the messages had been left.
Then the master of the villa relaxed again, as bustling preparations began for the execution of his commands. But he could not relax completely. He wondered if the disappearance of six ruhks with no explanation whatever —some three days before this most upsetting day—had any connection with today’s events.
He was not aware that just before the six ruhks disappeared, Nancy Holt had vanished from the sidewalk where she waited for a taxicab. Nor was he aware that as she vanished Sam Todd had stared helplessly at a dwindling pool of quicksilver. But the master, in his palace on the Brooklyn shore, wouldn’t have thought that matter significant even if he’d known about it.
Sam Todd was in the parkway beside the East River Drive at sunrise. He was unreasonably uneasy. He had been unable to sleep. He sat on a dew-wet park bench shivering a little with the morning chill. As the dawnlight strengthened, he put the peephole to his eye.
The sun came slowly up over the eastern edge of the Other World. Splendid sunrise colorings silhouetted the green forests of the Brooklyn hills, almost solid at the upper surface save where giant trees of a species unknown on earth threw up lacy fountains of foliage like spray. The surface of the East River was oily smooth, and reflected the reds and golds and violets of the fading night sky so that it looked like rainbows going into solution. Mists hung here and there over the treetops, and seeped out from the jungle’s edge to make the shoreline mysterious.
Dick Blair’s small squadron crept along the shore, barely out from the beaches. The rowers strove to be silent. Often they were hidden in the mists, and sometimes they were only vaguely visible, like ghosts. But now and again the sun’s red rays smote fully on them. Then the crimson light made their bodies the color of blood.
Presently, the two oared boats checked their motion. One turned in toward the land. Its bow touched, and Dick Blair stepped ashore. All was stillness and silence. Somewhere a fish leaped, and the “plop” of its splash was somehow shocking. The rowers seemed not to breathe. Dick looked, and listened, and then in the fathomless hush of morning his nostrils wrinkled suddenly. He smelled something. The hair rose by instinct at the back of his neck. He smelled beasts.
He stood still on the beach. He spoke in a low tone to the men behind him. They had been tense. Their bodies grew tenser still.
He stepped into the underbrush.
The silence held, save that somewhere in the forest far away a staccato bellowing noise set up and almost instantly thereafter ceased. Something stepped delicately into view on the shore of the island out in the river, spread long, angular wings, and suddenly soared out over the water barely two yards above it. A tiny twittering noise came from a treetop. One of the men in the boats shifted his position suddenly, and his oar splashed.
As if that small sound had been a signal, all hell broke loose where Dick had disappeared. There was the startling, thunderous crash of an explosion, which echoed and reechoed among the trees. A beast screamed. A second shot and a third, and then an automatic pistol roared itself empty and another took up the unholy task—and then there was a ghastly uproar of snarlings and screams and men shouting and more shots. Then the deeper bellowing of a sawed-off shotgun.
Dick came plunging from the brushwood, grinning savagely. Leaping forms came after him. He halted to fire twice, plunged on again, and splashed into the water and the bow of the beached boat.
The naked men shoved off in panic. He stepped along to the stern and sat down, saying composedly, “Don’t get too far away! We’ve got a chance to kill some ruhks, now.”
He began to reload his weapons. The brush erupted snarling forms. They howled their fury. Dick said: “Act confused and scared. Make it convincing!” The rowers of his own boat splashed and fumbled. Some of their awkwardness was confusion in reality, but not all. Neither cutter was more than ten yards from the shore, and both looked as if their crews were helpless from pure terror. Men bellowed from the brush, and the ruhks plunged into the water. Dick said hungrily:
“Out a little farther! Lure ‘em! We’ll kill ‘em if we can get ‘em swimming!”
The two cutters, splashing and clumsy and in seeming hysteria, went erratically out from the shore into the brightening dawn. Snarling beasts, intelligence forgotten in the instinct to kill, swam after them.