Without waiting for a reply, he darted out into the open. From the corners of his eyes, he was conscious as he ran of huge gray Monsters materializing out of the whiteness on all sides. Those things could move fast when they wanted to! And in relative silence, too—the floor was vibrating no more than it had this morning when the creature watching them had walked away.
He ran fast, forcing every bit of speed out of his legs, not at all aware now of the openness of the space he was on. The only thought in his mind concerned the Monsters all about him. Would he be stepped on? When? Would he feel it when it happened—or would it be over too fast?
A moment before he reached the other set of rods, somebody passed him and leaped into hiding among the posts of the structure. Roy the Runner, starting late, had the legs to make up for lost time. Then Eric was there too, cowering behind a rod. He watched Walter the Weapon Seeker stumble the last couple of paces and fall gasping two rods away from him.
But the rest of the expedition was in trouble. The men scrambled about, mindlessly, shrieking, inside the rod structure they had quit. Five Monsters now stood around it in silence, making any escape to the outside almost impossible.
The Monsters had known where the expedition lay hidden—they had made directly for it. And they were doing something in an organized fashion. What?
Eric strained his eyes to see, but the movements of the gray bodies were unfamiliar and unclear. Suddenly, from each one of them, a long green rope dropped to the floor. The ropes seemed almost alive: as they lay on the floor they quivered and bits of darker color slid up and down their coils.
There was a click from one of the Monsters, then a long, scraping musical note. The ropes began acting even more like live things. They slid into the rod-like structure and among the upright posts. Wherever they touched a man, they turned completely dark and he was carried along with them, apparently stuck to their surface.
“All together, now!” Eric heard Arthur the Organizer yelling. “Stay together and work on these ropes. All we have to do is get each man free—” Then a rope touched him in passing and he became just another shrieking attachment, alternately tugging and pushing at it. In a few brief moments, every man m the other structure was a madly wriggling prisoner.
“They seem to want us alive,” Walter whispered to Eric. “And do you notice how these Monsters move around? They’re a lot more deliberate than any I’ve ever seen before.”
With their clusters of screaming, arm-waving humanity, the green ropes were picked up one at a time by the Monsters. Eric saw that the long necks came down and the pink tentacles near the head did the grasping. The tentacles, then, were the equivalent of hands—or fingers.
“There goes the entire expedition!” Roy called out hysterically. “What do we do now? What the hell do we do now?”
Walter shot an angry scowl in his direction. “Keep your voice down, you damn fool! If you lose control of yourself, we’re all three dead.”
As if in corroboration, a long neck twisted down out of the whiteness above, and a -Monster’s head swung to and fro inquiringly outside the rod-like structure in which they were hiding. It was only a man’s height above the floor and Eric, nauseated with fear, felt that the eyes, in each of which a narrow, purple iris swam, were staring directly at him. And that pointed, stinking mouth—at least three men could disappear into it without creating a noticeable bulge!
He forced himself to stand absolutely still, although every muscle in his body yearned to leap off and make a run for it. Those pink tentacles—this close, for the first time, he saw how incredibly long they were—they could probably grab him up with ease.
But the monster, though staring directly in his direction, did not seem to see him. The head poked around among the rods and a corner of it touched Roy where he stood rigidly a short distance away.
The Runner threw his hands up, screamed—and ran. Instantly, the head was pulled up out of sight. Roy flung himself to the other end of the structure.
“Now we’re in for it,” said Walter the Weapon-Seeker grimly. The two of them saw a rope drop among the rods near Roy. It slid toward him smoothly, caught him—and kept going. It was going for them.
“We scatter,” the Weapon-Seeker ordered. “Good luck, kid.”
They leaped apart in opposite directions. Eric bent over, trying to keep his body low, for minimum visibility, and sped in a zigzag course among the rods. If he could get to the other side, there might be another structure nearby–
He heard Walter yell, and he spent a precious moment on a look. The Weapon-Seeker was now caught on the green rope only a few paces from the struggling Runner. And the rope was sliding swiftly at Eric, pulling both men along with it.
Eric straightened. Visibility was unimportant now—he might as well be running as fast as he could.
He heard the yells of Walter and Roy coming closer and closer behind him. He could not run any faster. He just could not run any faster…
Swift, terrible cold touched his side and he was pulled off his feet. He found himself screaming. He hammered at the green rope, dark black where it was attached to his hip. It was like a part of him—it couldn’t be pulled off. He screamed and screamed and screamed.
A Monster head came down and one of the pink tentacles grasped an end of the rope. Up they went, the three of them, screaming, flailing their arms and legs, beating against the rope with their fists, up they went, higher wad higher, into the dizzying whiteness, up, up they went to where the floor was no longer visible, to where the Monsters could examine them, the Monsters whose prisoners they were.
15
Eric was never able to remember clearly what happened afterward. It was as if a massive hysteria had crashed into his mind and obliterated most of the record. There were isolated, scattered impressions: the rope from which he hung being passed from one neckful of pink tentacles to another, a great purple eye coming intently close, a gust of stinking, suffocating Monster breath—but over all beat the memory of men screaming as they dangled from the heights in clusters all around him, his own will and self-awareness completely lost in that hoarse, unending chorus of the doomed.
The impressions he retained of that moment became coherent only after the rope to which he, Walter and Roy were attached had been dipped by a Monster into a large, transparent box and he suddenly found himself able to walk again on a floor. Near him, the other two scouts were getting to their feet, yells subsiding into painful, sobbing breaths; while over their heads, the rope, of which they were at last gratefully free, was being pulled back into the heights, its color no longer bright but a dirty greenish gray. A large proportion of the expedition was already standing all around him, and the rest arrived in the next few moments as rope after rope was lowered into the transparent box, discharged its prisoners, went limp and was pulled away.
Boxes? Transparent boxes? Eric stared down intently. Through the bottom, he saw layer after layer of intersecting rods under his feet. Every once in a while, at the junction of a set of rods there would be a large box, such as the one he was in. Some of the boxes contained humans; others were empty.
Walter met his eyes when he looked up. “Sure,” the Weapon-Seeker said with a grimace. “Those shiny boxes with shadows in them. The shadows were men. The boxes are cages.” He cursed. “Walter the Weapon-Seeker, they call me. And this big, new weapon I was going to get from the Monsters turns out to be—We got it all right. We got it good.”
The other men had been listening. Manny the Manufacturer came up, holding a forefinger in the air. He looked right past them, his old, wrinkled face heavy with thought. “Cages,” he muttered. “There was a legend about these things in the old religion—in the Ancestor-Science we used to believe in. What was it? Something about what happened to people who fooled around with Alien-Science, who had too much to do with the Monster’s—Let me remember—”