“I’ve already ordered the perfume made up,” said Nancy crisply. “I phoned a drugstore that makes it up for me. This time I ordered all they could make. It should be ready any minute.”
“Then—clothes for Kelly,” snapped Sam, “so we can get to the trap and into it, and we’ll go. Call and nag them about the scent while I see what I can do.”
He went downstairs and found the superintendent of Nancy’s apartment house. He bargained with him extravagantly. He came back with a coat and sweater and trousers—none of them clean.
“No shoes,” he reported. “You’re a nature-boy, Kelly, but in this part of town it’s allowable to be a little crazy. The scent?”
“It’s ready,” said Nancy.
They went out together, Kelly wriggling a little from the unaccustomed feel of clothing on his legs and body.
They got the scent-stuff from the drugstore, where it had been compounded, and a number of smaller empty bottles to transfer it to for dispensing.
“Now,” said Sam, as the cab started off again, “Here’s some money. It’s advance salary. Nancy, I want you to go to some small town and stay there until Dick and I get back. New York City isn’t safe for you. But it’s not likely that there’ll be ruhk-Egyptian set-ups anywhere but near big towns. You’ll be safest in a small one.”
Nancy said firmly, “I’m safe in the Other World, Sam. Ruhks would fight for me. And Dick’s there!”
“I could give you the peephole so you could watch out,” said Sam miserably, “but I can’t hope to get what we’ll need without it. If from this world I can look into the Other World with it, from the Other World I should be able to look back into this. And I’m going to need to do just that!”
“Of course you will!” agreed Nancy comfortably. “But since Dick went after me, not even knowing what he’d find, it’s only fair for me to go after him, since I do know! I’m going!”
Kelly said woodenly:
“Even with the stuff on me, fella, they minded her better than me. She’s right that they’ll fight for her. If you got a gun for her—we need her. And fella—for what I’m goin’ back there for, I’ll take anybody along that’ll help!”
Sam fumbled out pistols and shells for Kelly. He’d made himself into a walking arsenal, and he proved it. The cab swerved suddenly and stopped. The driver looked around. He saw the weapons being passed over. Sam’s eyes fell upon him and he swallowed and said:
“I—didn’t see nothin’. I didn’t see a thing!”
But Sam knew that he had seen. And the passing-out of pistols in a taxicab in New York has only one meaning. People who are not planning hold-ups do not exchange or examine pistols in taxicabs. But Sam could do nothing. He shrugged his shoulders and passed over a twenty-dollar bill. No matter what the driver did or did not do, if the cage-trap doorway was where it had been, and if the beasts were subject to Kelly and himself, it wouldn’t matter about the police. It wouldn’t matter anyhow, after he’d vanished in a pool of quicksilver.
They got out of the cab, and it jerked away with the flag still down. The brakes squealed at the corner, where a traffic cop was on duty. Sam saw the cab stop within inches of the cop, and saw the chauffeur jabber excitedly. The cop jerked his head around. He fumbled at his hip and started toward them.
Sam put the peephole to his eye. Yes. The cage-trap, with its doorway open. Six beasts—ruhks—waited on the ground about it. Sam saw exactly where the doorway was, and how it was contrived to work.
The cop blew his whistle shrilly. A radio-car, going crosstown, swerved sharply. It turned against all traffic rules and darted toward Sam. The taxi stayed in the middle of the intersection, the driver staring avidly back.
“Okay, Kelly,” said Sam wearily. “We go through the door, and fast. Nancy, you haven’t a gun and they can’t do a thing. Just act dumb. Come on, Kelly! Here goes!”
He stepped into place, Kelly beside him. Something seemed to flash into being over their heads and to drop soundlessly upon them. As the other cosmos came swiftly into view—actually, it seemed to be unveiled about them —Sam knew that to Nancy they had seemed to vanish in a double pool of quicksilver.
Bloodcurdling snarls filled the air. Six ruhks gazed at him with feral, deadly eyes. They were monstrous creatures, far larger than any wolves could be. Sam felt an angry horror of them. Then Kelly said harshly:
“I washed! Damn! Where’s that smell-stuff?”
Sam fumbled, and went cold. He’d been watching the driver. Then he’d been watching the traffic cop. He’d been scared for Nancy. His blood felt icy in his veins as he realized that he hadn’t even brought the scent-stuff out of the cab. He said bitterly:
“We muffed it! But they’ve got to come in the door, these beasts. Maybe we can kill them all before they call somebody—”
But he didn’t even hope it. And then something fell against him, hard, and Nancy was with them in the cage, and the snarling of the ruhks did not change at all but rather grew louder. Because she didn’t have the master-scent on her, either. She too had bathed and changed.
The galley lay at anchor in the Hudson, having stroked its way past the top of Manhattan Island. The two cutters trailed astern. Men fished, moved restlessly about, and uneasily scanned the river and the shores for signs of pursuit. But most of them talked. They babbled. They shouted, perhaps because as slaves they had been forbidden to speak.
Some had been so long enslaved and so broken in spirit that they babbled hysterically and then were struck dumb and cringed and looked fearfully over their shoulders. But there was one group in earnest, low-voiced discussion, and there were a few in grim consultation with Dick.
There had been only the three boats in all the harbor which should have been New York. The cutters had been used as ferries from Manhattan to the villa on the Brooklyn shore. The larger galley carried heavy stores, and on rare occasions one of that family of aloof and remote persons who were the masters of the palace and the overseers and the slaves and ruhks. But there were no motor-boats. There were no airplanes. There were no cars or other means of fast transportation—or pursuit.
“Ruhks, prob’ly, can keep pace with us on shore,” said a man with a crooked nose, “but there’s nothin’ else that can. We can go any place we want an’ they can’t stop us.”
Another man said sourly:
“Go what place? An’ do what when we get there?”
There was silence. A shout astern, A fisherman hauled to the deck a fishlike creature almost his own length. It writhed and snapped on the planking.
“The masters can get all the boats they want,” pointed out Dick. “They can drag PT boats into this world if they feel like it.”
“Who’ll run ‘em?” demanded a man with a scarred face. “Not slaves! They don’t even know which of us knows how to do what, and they can’t run machinery! It didn’t matter when all they wanted was slaves to row and dig and cut wood. They didn’t use PT boats then, and they can’t use ‘em now. They can’t even use galleys until they train new crews—if they know how to do that!”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Dick. “It makes sense, though. But we can count on their having plenty of guns. Maybe grenades. Certainly machine-guns.”
“Yes?” demanded the man with the scarred face. “They’d have to get slaves to teach ‘em how to use grenades. They’d have to find slaves who knew how. And then —would they trust grenades in slaves’ hands, or use them themselves on slaves’ instructions? And how about machine-guns? They can’t use them and don’t dare trust slaves to teach them. They’ll stick to regular guns. What we can’t lick are the ruhks.”