Then an idea struck him. He could give himself more time before the police hunted actively for him. He stepped into a phone booth and dialed his original hotel.
“Desk?” he said briskly. “Todd speaking. I have suite 406, you know. I’ve been suddenly called out of town. Cleveland and possibly Chicago afterward. Hold my mail for a forwarding address, won’t you? I’ll wire it.”
The desk-clerk said hurriedly: “Yes, sir. But Mr. Todd! Your secretary has called three times in the past hour. She says it is desperately important for you to call her at once, sir. Extremely urgent.”
Sam’s hair stood upon his head. Nancy Holt was his secretary. Four days ago she’d vanished in a pool of quicksilver. And nobody who vanished like that ever came back. Nobody! It would be a trap—
“Very well,” said Sam Todd, his throat tightening. “I’ll call her. Did she leave a number?”
“No sir.”
“Thanks,” said Sam.
He hung up, his lips twisted. Then the oddity of it hit him. Nancy hadn’t left a phone number. She didn’t need to, of course. He knew the number of her phone. But anybody impersonating Nancy, or Nancy under duress, would have left a number. Anybody who forced Nancy to call would think it suspicious if she didn’t leave a number Sam could call. So—incredibly enough—it was possible that it was straight. Or it was possible that some compulsion more terrible than he could guess at would have enslaved Nancy’s mind as well as her body.
It was a decision of importance vastly greater than merely his own safety. Sam felt that the wrong decision might mean slavery and degradation and shame and horror for generations yet unborn. He had to play it out.
He called her number from the other side of town, with a taxi waiting to carry him away the instant he dashed out of the booth. He heard the crisp buzzings that meant her phone was ringing. Then her voice. It was unquestionably Nancy’s voice, strained and tense.
“Hello?”
“Nancy!” he said hoarsely. “This is Sam Todd.”
He heard her give a cry of pure relief.
“Sam! I’ve been going crazy, trying to reach Dick, and I couldn’t—the Museum doesn’t know where he is—and—”
“He went after you,” said Sam flatly.
She laughed without amusement, almost hysterically.
“He couldn’t. He couldn’t, Sam! He’s going to think I’m crazy—”
“Another world,” said Sam. “Manhattan Island with no buildings on it. Slaves. Animals like dogs or wolves that have as much sense as men. Jungle all around. Right?”
“Sam!” she gasped. “How did you know?”
“Dick’s gone there,” he repeated. “The people who live there just kidnapped Maltby. How’d you get back?”
He kept listening for a false note in her voice. There weren’t any false notes. Either this was the first escape in five thousand years, or it was Nancy made into a traitor to Earth and all her kind.
“Sam!” she panted. “They have ways like doors from that world to this. They set traps for people to drop into!. I—I got back through one of those traps. It was—like the one I fell into when I was on the street with you. If—you hurry we can get the trap and—”
Sam said flatly, “Where is the trap? In terms of this world, Nancy. Where were you when you got back?”
“A little alley between two old houses—” She told him, almost incoherently, the exact location. “Why?”
“I’ll be seeing you,” he said. “Right away. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Y-Yes. I brought back a slave with me. A man who was a slave there. Where are you, Sam?”
“I’m on the way,” said Sam grimly. “I’ll be right over,”
He hung up. He went out and got into the cab. He stopped it two blocks from where she said she’d come back to earth. There was again an office building handy. Sam bribed an elevator operator and was admitted to a men’s room normally accessible only to tenants of the building. In privacy, there, he peered through his peephole. He looked directly into the Other World from a height above the jungle trees. At first he saw nothing, but there was a small gap among the branches through which he glimpsed squared, fresh lumber. It was a crude and clumsy cage, of hand-hewn timbers mortised together so that anything inside could not possibly get out. He stared at it, and saw a movement nearby. There were beasts around it. The wolf-like beasts he’d seen at the villa and engaged in the galley fight of that morning. There were several beasts. At one time he saw three, one lying peacefully on the ground, and one sitting up thoughtfully licking at its paw, and another pacing restlessly up and down.
He went very pale indeed. He went down to the street again and rode the six blocks to Nancy’s home. He approached it cautiously, several times using the peephole in his handkerchief as if he had a speck of dust in his eye.
The part of the Other World corresponding to Nancy’s apartment-house was empty of beasts or cages or beings of the Other World. The space corresponding to her apartment itself was empty of anything but tree branches. But there were Other World beasts waiting where she said she’d returned to Earth. And she’d brought back a man.
It was Sam’s duty to be suspicious, but he felt rather sick. He liked Nancy. He’d been naive before, when he went to Brooklyn, and he’d almost been picked up. There were just two possibilities here. It might be quite straight, and a break of incredible importance, or—Nancy had been in the Other World for four days, and she might have been the victim of contrivances or concoctions developed during five thousand years of pure villainy, and she might have become enslaved in the most literal possible sense.
Sam took a deep breath. He hoped desperately that everything was all right. But he held his pistols fast as he went into the apartment-house. He was unhappily ready to kill Nancy as an act of kindness, if it should be necessary.
There was sunshine streaming in a window. There was dust on a polished table on which the sunbeams smote. There was a man with shaggy, uncombed hair and beard seated at the table, clad in a quilted dressing gown which obviously belonged to Nancy. He was eating ferociously with his fingers. Nancy was nowhere in sight. The man looked up. Sam backed against a wall and said: “Well?”
His fingers were very ready to pull the triggers. The man stared at Sam. He swallowed convulsively and spoke. “You Sam Todd?”
“Yes,” said Sam. “I am. Who’re you?”
“Name’s Kelly,” said the long-haired man huskily. “I been a slave—yonder. She got me back here. She’s—washin’, I guess. She said she felt filthy.”
Nancy’s voice called, “Sam?”
“Here!” said Sam. It didn’t seem like a trap.
“Just a minute!” she called. “Get Kelly to tell you!”
“Right. Go ahead,” said Sam to the man. But he kept his back against the wall.
“I was a slave,” said the man in the dressing, gown. “I— here!” He stood up and slipped off the garment. He wore a loincloth underneath, and nothing else. There were horrible, crisscross, purplish marks upon his back, laid over and over each other. “They’re floggin’s,” he said briefly. “The overseer said I was hard to break an’ the ruhks’d get me sure. But they didn’t. I was choppin’ wood when this ruhk come up an’ told my guard a master wanted me. So I went with the ruhk.”
“What’s a ruhk?” asked Sam warily. The man drew the dressing gown about his shoulders and sat down again.