What cosmic cataclysm, what interplanar warp, could have led to such an impossible thing? Were these entities from one of the myriad consciousness-planes who, in some unknown manner and for some unknown reason, had brought about this unthinkable misalliance of consciousness and matter?
He tried to concentrate his perception on a single entity, but the myriad emanations of thought from the planet’s surface were too many and confusing to let him do so.
He descended toward the solid surface of the sphere, penetrating its outer gasses. He realized he would need to come near one of the beings in order to tune out, as it were, the jumbled confusion of the thoughts of the many.
The gas thickened as he descended. It seemed strangely agitated as though by intermittent but frequent concussions. Had not sound and hearing been things foreign to an incorporeal entity, the Stranger might have recognized the sound waves of explosions.
The mass of smoke he recognized as a modification or pollution of the gas he had first encountered. To a creature who perceived without sight it was neither more nor less opaque than the purer air above.
He entered solidity. That, of course, was no barrier to his progress, but he perceived now that he was on a vertical plane roughly coincidental with the surface of solidity; and that from that plane, on all sides of him, came the confused and mystifying emanations of consciousness.
One such source was very near. Shielding his own thoughts, the Stranger moved closer. The consciousness-emanations of the nearby entity were clear now—and yet not clear.
He did not know that their confusion was due to the fact that agonizing pain muddled or blanked out everything but itself. Pain, possible only to an alliance of mind and matter, was utterly inconceivable to the Stranger.
He went closer, encountering solidity again. This time it was a different type of surface. Outside, it was wet with something thick and sticky. Below that, a flexible layer covered a less flexible layer. Beyond that, soft and strange matter, queerly convoluted.
He was nearer the source of the incomprehensible consciousness-emanations now, but oddly they were becoming fainter. They did not seem to come from a fixed point, but from many points upon the convolutions of softness.
He moved slowly, striving for understanding of the strange phenomenon. The matter itself was different, once he had penetrated it. It was made up of cells and there was a fluid that moved among them.
Then, with awful suddenness, there was a convulsive movement of parts of the strange matter, a sudden flare of the un-understandable pain-consciousness-emanation—and utter blankness. Simply, the entity that he had been studying was gone. It had not moved, but it had vanished utterly.
The Stranger was bewildered. This was the most astonishing thing he had yet encountered on this unique planet of the matter-mind misalliance. Death—deepest mystery to beings who have seen it often—was deeper mystery to one who had never conceived as possible the end of an entity.
But more startling still, at the instant of the extinguishment of that incoherent consciousness, the Stranger had felt a sudden force, a pull. He had been shifted slightly in space, sucked into a vortex—as air is sucked into a sudden vacuum.
He tried to move, first in space and then in time, and could not do so. He was trapped, imprisoned in this incomprehensible thing he had entered in search of the alien entity! He, a being of thought, had in some way become inextricably entangled with physical matter.
He felt no fear, for such emotion was unknown to him. Instead, the Stranger began a calm examination of his predicament. Throwing his perception-field out more widely, alternately expanding and contracting it, he began to study the nature of the thing in which he was held prisoner.
It was a grotesquely shaped thing, basically an oval cylinder. From one corner, as it were, projected a long jointed extension. There were two shorter but thicker projections at the other end of the cylinder.
Strangest of all was the ovoid thing at the end of a short flexible column. It was inside this ovoid, near the top, that the focus of his consciousness was now fixed.
He began to study and explore his prison, but could not begin, as yet, to understand the purpose of the weird and complex nerves, tubes, and organs.
Then he felt the emanations of other entities nearby, and threw still wider the field of his perceptions. His wonder grew.
Men were crawling forward across the battlefield, passing the shattered body of Johnny Dix. The Stranger studied them and began, dimly, to understand. He saw now that this body he was in was roughly similar to theirs, but less complete.
That such bodies could be moved, subject to many limitations, by the entities that dwelt within them, even as he now dwelt within this body.
Held prisoner to the surface of solidity of the planet, nevertheless these bodies could be moved in a horizontal plane. He pulled his perceptions back to the body of Johnny Dix and began to probe for the secrets of inducing it to locomotion.
From his study of the things that crawled past him, the Stranger had sought and found certain concepts that were now helpful. He knew the projection with the five smaller projections was «arm.» «Legs» meant the members at the other end. «Head» was the ovoid in which he was imprisoned.
These things moved, if he could discover how. He experimented. After a while a muscle in the arm twitched. From then on, he learned rapidly.
And when, presently, the body of Johnny Dix began to crawl slowly and awkwardly—on one arm and two truncated legs—in the direction the other crawling beings had taken, the Stranger didn’t know that he was performing an impossible feat.
He didn’t know that the body he caused to move was one which never should have done so. He didn’t know that any competent doctor would not have hesitated to pronounce that body dead. Gangrene and decay were already setting in, but the Stranger’s will made the stiffening muscles move despite them.
The mangled thing that had been Johnny Dix crawled on, jerkily, toward the Chinese lines.
Wong Lee lay prone against the sloping side of the shellhole. Above it projected only his steel helmet and the upper half of the goggles of his gas mask.
Through the hell of smoke and fire before him, he peered toward the American lines from which the counterattack was coming. The shellhole he occupied was slightly behind his own front lines, now under the barrage of American fire. With eight others, he had left shelter five hundred feet behind to reinforce an advance position. The eight others were dead, for shells had fallen like rain. Wong Lee, loyal though he was, had seen that he would be serving his leaders better by waiting here than by accepting certain death trying to make the last hundred feet.
He waited, peering into the smoke, wondering if anyone or anything could survive in the holocaust up ahead.
A dozen yards away, dimly through the smoke, he saw something coming toward him. Something that did not seem quite human—although he could not yet see it clearly—had crawled through that hellish rain of steel, and still crawled slowly. Tattered shreds of an American uniform clung to it here and there.
Already he could make out that it wore no gas mask or helmet. Wong Lee gripped a gas grenade from the pile of equipment beside him and lobbed it high and straight. It fell true, scarcely a foot in front of the crawling thing. A white geyser of gas mushroomed up—a gas of which a single whiff caused instant death.
Wong Lee grinned a mirthless grin and told himself that that was that. The gas maskless figure was as good as dead. Slowly the white gas dissipated itself into the smoky air.