They had reached a place where the cold faint illumination welled up from a two-foot-high slit running along the floor. Above them, plaster walling towered into dizzy heights, dark and creepy with the unknown.
“This is House Five-Eight-Nine-Stroke-Charley,” said Old Chronic, hands creasing his maps. “Ground. Let me see, now… h’mm. Well, Thorburn, you took a Regulation load from here—do you intend to go into the open?”
“Must do to fill sacks.” Thorbum treated the question with tolerance. Old Chronic worried over trivialities at times and passed matters of grave importance. “I’ll go and take Stead.”
“That means me, too,” said Vance.
“Sims and Wallas. Rest of you, stay here.”
The five men slipped under the two foot high slot, stood up. Automatically, without conscious thought, horrified, stricken with a panic he had never known he could experience, Stead grasped with one hand for Thorbum, with the other covered his eyes.
“No! no!” he said, his voice a gargling whisper of pain.
Thorbum wrenched the hand covering his eyes away. He took his head between his hands—Sims and Wallas and even Vance were there, holding him, forcing his head back, pricking his eyes open with something sharp—making him look up.
Look up!
But… there was nothing up there!
Nothingness—a vast white glaring expanse of emptiness, sucking the blood from his body, drawing out the soul from his breast, tearing him, calling him, entreating him to rise up and up and up.
“No!” screamed Stead into the homy palm that clamped across his mouth. His eyes bulged. He felt every inch of his body open and inflamed, excoriated by the awful lack of substance above his head. “Don’t… Stop… No! I can’t go out there!”
“Half a minute, Stead, that’s all.” Vance spoke gratingly.
Thorbum said, “Feel your feet, Stead.”
Someone trod on his foot.
He yelped with the abrupt little pain, and felt the ground beneath his feet. But still they held his head back, his face up, still they pricked his eyes open, forcing him to look up to… to what? Was there something there? What horror really dwelt up there, wherever up there was?
“Yes, Stead.” Thorbum’s rich voice burred in Stead’s ears. “There is something up there. But it’s a long way off and it’s painted white and it isn’t easy to see. But it’s there, Stead, it’s there. It’s a ceiling, Stead, a roof. Only it’s a long way off. D’you understand?”
Understand? Dimly in the cold and pallid illumination, Stead saw the white wide sweep of roof, felt again the breath of rationality swing back as he realized that of course, there must be something above. How could there not be?
“I’ll be all right. Sorry. Silly of me. For a half minute there I thought the roof had fallen off the world—stupid. That couldn’t be.”
No one argued that. But Thorbum had to say, “We’ll see you right, Stead. We’ll be going Outside one of these days.” An uncomfortable silence. Then Honey poked her head through the slot, stared up.
“Haven’t you gone yet? Well, that’s good. Signal from Blane. He’s somewhere near here; he got twisted around somehow.”
“He never did have a good navigator,” came Old Chronic’s sardonic whisper from the slot.
“Well, Honey?” Thorbum slowly let his grip on Stead slacken. Stead took two great lungsful of air.
“Blane reports a Rang loose in this House.”
At once the electric stir of tension, of alarm, of an apprehension approaching panic that shot through them was completely understandable to Stead.
Rangs meant sudden death, or, maybe, a death not so sudden but just as sure.
“Step on the beastly thing!” exclaimed Thorbum, as much enraged as frightened. “This was a smooth operation up until now. This really fouls it up.”
Inevitably, it had to be Old Chronic who said, not without a tang of meaning, “Orders, Thorbum?”
“I’m not going back without full sacks.” The stubborn set to Thorburn’s mouth chilled the watchers. “I went back with empty sacks that day we found you, Stead, and since then I’ve never gone back without every sack being full. Right. Cardon, you and Old Chronic stand by the slot here. We’ll go in. You may have to cover us on our way out.”
Vance ostentatiously unlimbered his gun and checked the magazine.
“Make sure your cape’s tight,” said Thorbum, sharply. “That’ll be of more use than a gun now.” He turned to Stead. “You’re an encumbrance I can’t risk. Stay here.”
“But—”
Vance slung his gun. “I stay with him too.”
For another moment of meaning no one said anything. Then Old Chronic smothered a snigger and spread himself out under the slot. “Come and join me, big Hunter,” he said, and the tone shot a stiff jolt into Vance’s sullen face.
Thorbum looked at Sims and Wallas. Then the three Foragers moved out into that pallidly eerie illumination. Their figures dwindled with distance. Then they vanished behind a tall cubical tower of wood that towered above, topped by a wide and flat expanse like… like what? Stead thought he knew, but he couldn’t bring it into his mind.
With a fierce thrill of longing he wished he had gone with the three out into that great unknown.
Honey crouched down with earphones clamped over one ear. Her face was twisted with concentration.
“Blane’s calling again… Hard to hear. He’s in trouble… but this interference is wicked. Howling all over the bands—”
Julia interrupted in a firm voice. “Here come Thorbum and Sims and Wallas. Full sacks. Now maybe we can pull out of here.”
The three were running fast. They panted across the floor, heading for the slot, and ever and again they swiveled their heads around to stare behind them.
Out there in the great emptiness that that cold and chillingly eerie illumination made only a vast cavern of strange shapes and tall distorted shadows, a form moved.
Something big and looming bearing down out of shadows pouncing down on the running men.
Stead heard a shrill, painful hissing, a gargantuan wrathful spitting, a clicking as though of metal on stone. Looking up in appalled horror he saw a monstrous shape with four round and enormous eyes, shining balefully in that strange radiance, a blasphemous form from nightmare, lunging clumsily forward on sixteen stubby legs that moved with a rippling repulsive unison.
“A rang!” screamed Julia. “No… Thorbum—”
Cardon and Vance were firing now, a lethal hammer of sound rolling from their guns. Quickly Stead aimed his own splutter gun, cocked it, pressed the trigger. He aimed for one of the four eyes. He saw the shining orb sprout crimson and blackness, the shine shimmer with liquid and then dull and relapse into a matted grayness.
His lips were dry, his mouth sandpapery, his hands clammy. Two other eyes went out. Three streams of lead struck the remaining eye and blotted it out as a man stepped on a blood-sucking pest. But still the rang hurtled on, spitting and snarling, great jaws opened wide and streaming saliva, pounding on by sheer momentum.
A long raking claw slashed. Sims, ducking, struck on the shoulder, stumbled and fell. He did not release his stubborn grip on his sack. At once Wallas turned, hoisted his comrade up, pulled him along.
Thorburn brushed them both aside in a slithering rush of action. The rang, sightless, screaming madly in pain, raging, hurled itself full at the wall above the slot. A thick coarse wall of fur sprang into life before the slot, blotting out the light.
“Along its side—hurry!” That was Old Chronic.
The men and women dashed aside, scrambling over the litter beneath the wall. Thorburn appeared, staggering, waving his gun. Sims fell through and then Wallas. They were snatched up, their sacks slung; eager hands propelled them into the sheltering darkness of the cranny behind the wall.