Morris did not answer. Amazement checked the somewhat inconsequential remark that rose to his lips; for at that moment the Japanese rocket-plane appeared to enter the mysterious blur, vanishing immediately from vision as if in actual cloud or fog. There was a quick, tremulous gleaming of its hull and wings, as if it had started to fall or had abruptly changed its course—and then it was gone, beyond the hueless and shapeless veil.
“That’s funnier still,” commented Markley, in a puzzled voice. “But they can’t shake us by flying into any damned mirage or what-you-call-it. We’ll soon pick them up on the other side.”
Diving horizontally ahead at six hundred miles per hour, the vessel neared the strange blur, which had now blotted out a huge section of the sky and world. It was like a sort of blindness spreading on the upper air; but it did not convey the idea of darkness or of anything material or tangible. Both Morris and Markley, as they neared it, felt that they were peering with strained, eluded eyes at something that was virtually beyond the scope of human vision. They seemed to grope for some ungraspable image—an unearthly shadow that fled from sight—a thing that was neither dark nor light nor colored with any known hue.
An instant more, while the blur devoured the heavens with terrible momentum. Then, as the plane rushed into it, a blindness fell on the two men, and they could no longer discern the vessel’s interior or its ports. Ineffable greyness, like an atmosphere of cotton-wool, enveloped them and seemed to intercept all visual images. The roar of the rockets had ceased at the same time, and they could hear nothing. Markley tried to speak, but the oath of astonishment died unuttered in his throat as if before a harrier of infrangible silence. It was as if they had entered some unfamiliar medium, neither air nor ether, that was wholly void and negative, and which refused to carry the vibrations of light, color, and sound.
They had lost the sense of movement, too, and could not know if they were flying or falling or were suspended immovably in the weird vacuum. Nothing seemed able to reach or touch them; the very sense of time was gone; and their thoughts crawled sluggishly, with a dull confusion, a dreamy surprise, in the all-including voidness. It was like the preliminary effect of an anesthetic: a timeless, bodiless, weightless hovering in the gulf that borders upon oblivion.
Very suddenly, like the lifting of a curtain, the blindness cleared away. In a strange, flickering, brownish-red light, the men saw the interior of the hull, and beheld each other’s goggled helmets and leatheroid air-suits. They became aware that the vessel was falling gently and obliquely, with slanted floor. The rocket-explosions had wholly ceased, though Markley had not touched the controlling lever. He could not start them again, and the entire mechanism refused any longer to obey his control. Through the ports, he and Morris saw a multi-colored chaos of outlandish and incomprehensible forms, into which the plane was descending slowly, with incredible lightness, like a downward-floating leaf or feather.
Chapter II
The Valley of Mirages
“I don’t know what has happened, or where we are,” said Markley. “But I guess we might as well sit tight. There’s no need to jump—we couldn’t go down any more safely with parachutes. But what the hell have we gotten into, anyway?”
“Can’t say,” rejoined his companion, equally dumbfounded and at a loss. “Whatever or wherever the place is, it’s not the state of Nevada.”
Their descent toward the unknown, mysterious terrain seemed to occupy many minutes; and once or twice the vessel hung motionless for a moment, and then resumed its gliding with a jerk. Staring from the ports in ever-growing bewilderment, they began to distinguish separate forms and masses in the queer chaos of scenery. Irregular hills, mottled with grey, green, ocher and violet-black, lifted about them in the rufous light, and they perceived that they were settling into a kind of valley-bottom. The ground beneath them was partly bare, partly covered with objects that resembled vegetable growths rather than anything else. These plants, or plant-like things, as the plane settled closer above them, displayed a remarkable diversity of shape, size and hue, ranging from leafless, limbless stems to great tree-forms, with a crowded foliation that suggested some impossible crossing of araucaria and banana. The whole impression of this flora, even at that first glimpse, was one of lawless variety and illimitable grotesquery.
The vessel slanted slowly down on an open, level tract, narrowly missing the tops of some of the taller growths. It landed with a light jar, little more pronounced than if it had been checked by the usual process of careful deceleration. Markley and Morris peered out on a scene that amazed them more and more as they began to perceive its innumerable oddities of detail. For the nonce, they forgot the Japanese rocket-plane they had been following, and did not even speculate regarding its fate or whereabouts.
“Jumping Jesus!” cried Markley. “Mother Nature certainly was inventive when she designed this place. Look at those plants—no two of them alike. And the soil would give a geologist a nightmare.” He was now peering at the ground about the vessel, which offered a remarkable mosaic of numberless elements—a conglomeration of parti-colored soils, ores, and mineral forms, wholly unstratified and chaotic. It was mostly bare, and broken into uneven mounds and hummocks; but here and there, in patches of poisonous-looking clay or marl, peculiar grasses grew, with blades that varied in the same manner as the larger growths, so that one might well have imagined that each blade belonged to a separate genus. Not far away was a clump of tree-forms, exhibiting monstrous variations in their leafage, even when there was a vague likeness of bole or branch. It seemed as if the laws of type had been disowned, as if each individual plant were a species in itself.
A stream of some water-like fluid, varying strangely from peacock blue to cloudy umber in its course, ran past the fallen plane and meandered through the valley toward a barren slope at one end. From this slope another stream appeared to descend and join the first, flowing in a series of rapids and low cascades from a hill-top that melted indistinctly into the reddish-brown heavens.
“Well,” observed Markley, after contemplating this milieu with a troubled frown, “the problem of how we got here is equaled in its abstruseness only by the problem of how we are going to get away. It’s beyond me—I pass it up. The whole business is wrong and impossible. And this crazy landscape isn’t the only joker, either. Our nitrone fuel simply won’t explode—there’s something—hell knows what—that prevents combustion.”
“Sure the tubes are all right?” queried Morris. “Maybe we’ve run short of fuel.”
“Huh!” the tone was superbly contemptuous. “I know this boat. There’s nothing the matter with the rocket mechanism. And I loaded up to the limit with nitrone before we started. We could have chased Sakamoto to the Great Wall of China and back again, if necessary, without re-fueling. I tell you, we’re up against something that was omitted from the text-books. Just look at this ungodly hole, anyway. It’s like the scrambled hallucinations of a hundred cases of delirium tremens.”
“I’ve monkeyed with hashish and peyote beans in my time,” said Morris, “but I’ll admit that I never saw anything like this. However, we’re probably missing a lot by staying in the ship. What do you say to a little promenade? Sakamoto and his friends may be somewhere in the neighborhood, too; and if they are, I’d like to get a line on them.”
Very cautiously, the two men unstrapped themselves from their seats and arose. In spite of their heavy garments, they felt a queer physical lightness that argued a lesser gravitation than that of Earth, and which no doubt accounted for the leisurely fall of the plane. They almost seemed to float around the hull; and found great difficulty in controlling and calculating their movements.