He leaped outward and up, and his head came through the hoop and the upper part of his body and then he went "Whoof!" as his belly struck on the edge of the hoop. He reached out and gripped the stone with his fingertips and pulled himself on through. For a while, he lay on the stone until his heart resumed its normal beat. He saw that the bell was above him and the beamer was on the floor of the island only a foot from him.
He rose and examined the bell. It was indestructible, and the tips of the antennas were encased in the same indestructible stuff. When the antennas were withdrawn, the tips plugged up the two tiny holes at the base of the bell. But the antennas themselves were made of less durable metal, and they had suffered damage from the blast. Or so he supposed. He could see no damage. In fact, he could not even see the antennas, they were so thin, though he could feel them. But the fact that the Beller had not sent the bell ahead through the gate proved to Kickaha that something had damaged the bell. Perhaps the blast had only momentarily impaired the relatively delicate brainwave and flight-governing apparatus inside the bell. This was, after all, something new, something which the Beller had not had time to field-test.
Whatever had happened, it was fixed at its altitude above the island. And it still put up a weak resistance against a horizontal push. Kickaha presumed that its antennas must still be operative to some degree. Otherwise, the bell would net know how to maintain a constant height from the ground.
It gave him his only chance to get to the ground several thousand feet below. He did not know how much of a chance. It might just stay at this level even if the ground beneath it were to suddenly drop away. If that happened, he still might be able to get to the top of the stone pillar.
He put the strap of the beamer over one shoulder, hugged the bell to his chest, and stepped out through the hoop.
His descent was as swift as if he were dangling at the end of a parachute, a speed better than he had hoped for. From time to time, he had to kick against the sides of the pillar because the bell kept drifting back toward it, as if the mass of the pillar had some attraction for it.
Then he was ten feet above the river and released his hold on the bell. He fell a little faster, hit the water, which was warm, and came up in a strong current. He had to fight to get to shore but managed it. After he had regained some of his strength, he walked along the shore until he saw the bell. It was stopped against the side of the pillar, like a baby beast nuzzling its gigantic mother. There was no way for him to get to it nor did he see any reason why he should.
A few yards on, he found the body of the Beller. It had come to rest against a reef of rock which barely protruded above the surface of the small bay. Its back was split open, and the back of the head was soft, as if it had struck concrete instead of water. The knife was still in its solar plexus. Kickaha pulled it out, and cleaned it on the wet hat of the Beller. The fall had not damaged the knife.
He pulled the body from the river. Then he considered the giant gates set hoop-like in the rock like the smaller one in the island in that other world. Two were on this side of the river and two on the other. Each was at the corner of a square two miles long. He walked to the nearest one and threw a stone into it. The stone went through and landed on the rock on the other side. It was one of Red Orc's jokes. Perhaps all four were just hoops and he would be stuck on this barren world until he starved to death.
The next hoop, in the northeast corner also proved to be just that, a hoop.
Kickaha was beginning to get tired and hungry. He now had to swim over the river, through a very strong current, to get to the other two hoops. The walk from one to the other was two miles, and if he had to test all four, he would walk eight miles. Ordinarily, he would not have minded that at all, but he had been through much in the last few hours.
He sat down for a minute and then he jumped up, exclaiming and cursing himself for a fool. He had forgotten that gates might work when entered in one direction but not work in the other. Picking up a stone, he went around to the other side of the big hoop and cast the stone through it. The hoop was still just a hoop.
There was nothing to do then but to walk back to the first hoop and to test that from the other side. It, too, gave evidence that it was no gate.
He swam the river and got to the other side after having been carried downstream for a half-mile, thus adding to his journey. The beamer made the swimming and the walking more difficult, since it weighed about thirty pounds. But he did not want to leave it behind.
The southwest hoop was only a huge round of metal. He went toward the last one while the sun continued westward and downward. It shone in a silent sky over a silent earth. Even the wind had died down, and the only sound was the rushing of the river, which died as he walked away from it, and his own feet on the rocks and his breathing.
When he got to the northwest hoop, he felt like putting off his rock-throwing for a while. If this proved to be another jest of Red Orc, it might also prove to be the last jest that Kickaha would ever know. So he might as well get this over with.
The first stone went through and struck the rock beyond.
The second went through the other side and fell on the ground beyond.
He jumped up and down and yelled his frustration and hit the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. He kicked at a small boulder and then went howling and hopping away with pain. He pulled his hair and slapped the side of his head and then turned his face toward the blind blue sky and the deaf bright yellow sun and howled like a wolf whose tail was caught in a bear trap.
After a while he became silent and still. He might as well have been made of the light-red rock which was so abundant on this earth, except that his eyelids jumped and his chest rose and fell.
When he broke loose from the mold of contemplation, he walked briskly but unemotionally to the river. Here he drank his fill and then he looked for a sheltered place to spend the night. After fifteen minutes, he found a hollow in the side of a small hill of hard rock that would protect him from the wind. He fell asleep after many unavoidable thoughts of the future.
In the morning, he looked at the Beller's body and wondered if he was going to have to eat it.
To give himself something to do, and also because he never entirely gave up hope or quit trying, he waded around in the shallows of the river and ran his hands through the waters. No fish were touched or scared into revealing their presence. It did not seem likely that there would be any, especially when there was an absolute absence of plant life.
He walked to the top of the hill in the base of which he had slept. He sat on the hard round peak for a while, moving only to ease the discomfort of the stone on his buttocks. His situation was desperate and simple. Either Red Orc had prepared a way for his prisoner to escape if he was clever and agile enough or he had not. If he had not, then the prisoner would die here. If he had, then the prisoner-in this case, Kickaha -was just not bright enough. In which case, the prisoner was going to die soon.
He sat for a long while and then he groaned. What was the matter with his brain? Sure, the stone had gone through the gates, but no flesh had passed through them. He should have tried them himself instead of trickily testing them only with the stones. The gates could be set up to trigger only if matter above a certain mass passed through them or sometimes only if protein passed through them. Or even only if human brainwaves came close enough to set them off. But he had been so concerned with traps on the other side that he had forgotten about this possibility.