'So I prepared for it.'
'How?'
'I made a field-of-force generator a man could carry into a vault, dodging those bars. He could dematerialize anything I wanted and bring it back without materializing the Mole inside at all and even without the Mole's entering it. It's a good trick. I can take things out of a drawer or the smallest safe, now. A neat answer to your suggestion. My men can walk about and pick up anything they want.'
Again Jack nodded grimly at the cloudlike earth. 'No man can walk about on that.'
'Oh, yes, a man can! You'll see! The same trick as the sustaining screws that hold this ship up, a thin coating of thorium. I made snowshoes, my dear fellow, on the same principle. Frames covered with cloth, which is painted with radioactive paint. We are going to get a pair of those snow-shoes for you. Earth-shoes would be a better name. With them upon your feet you can walk wherever you like. You can assuredly stay on top of the ground, even in your present state of dematerialization. Take my word for it - you can!'
Jack's eyes burned.
Gail stared, and then cried desperately: 'But - but you're cheating! He'd starve! And - and only as long as he kept moving. You're cheating! You'd be killing him as surely and - more horribly than if you just flung him out to drop.'
'But,' said Durran, and chuckled, 'I am holding to the strict letter of my bargain. I confess it seems to me an excellent joke. You have five minutes more, Hill, before you begin your interesting walk, unless you wish Miss Kennedy to have that freedom instead. How about it?'
Jack said grimly: 'Supposing you observe the proprieties and let a condemned man have a little indulgence. I want to talk to Gail. Clear out!'
Again Durran chuckled. 'And I'll do even that, instead of spending my time making just complaints about the manner in which you constructed the ship for me. My dear Hill, do you know that is is necessary to run the sustaining screws ten revolutions a minute faster than at the beginning? Why is that?'
'Repeated dematerializations,' snapped Jack. 'Clear out!'
He waited, his jaw set. Durran moved away, amused. It could not matter what Jack and Gail might say to each other. In five minutes more, Jack would be more utterly alone and more irrevocably doomed than any other man since time began. And Gail would remain in the Mole.
The cloudy shapes in the harsh red light without came to an end. The shadow of a house appeared, and beyond it a low and level mist more tenuous than that of earth. It would be the water of a lake.
The Mole swam smoothly up to the house. Then it seemed to glow in every particle with a strange white light, which gradually diminished and died. And as it diminished, the world without became more solid. When it ended, the shadow house became a bungalow. The cloudy earth was covered with green grass. The light was vastly brighter. And this normal, natural world looked infinitely desirable.
The rat-faced man got out of the ship and went casually into the house. Squeals of delight came out. Women appeared, five of them. And they were pretty women, in their fashion. But Jack looked from them to Gail and ground his teeth. The sight was too bitter.
The rat-faced man came back, carrying two cloth-covered frames which were nothing more or less than snowshoes of entirely familiar pattern, with painted canvas stoutly sewed to the rawhide webbing. He had told the women something. They laughed shrilly. He came into the Mole again. Again the flash of eerie, whitish light. The Mole swam on smoothly.
And then Durran threw a switch and reversed the tail screw. The moving procession of shadows in a world of harsh red light slowed down and stopped.
Durran opened the door of the Mole. 'And now I keep my promise,' he said blandly. 'You are free to go. In fact, if you don't go you'll be thrown out.'
Two men kept guns trained upon Jack as a third cut loose his hands. He put on the strange devices for walking in a world which was all vapour, all shadows, without substance or reality. To fight was not only hopeless, it would please Durran. And Jack had no hope, but he would not admit it. He pretended a confidence he did not feel, simply to make things easier for Gail.
'I'll see you later, Durran,' he said without intonation. 'I'm inclined to think you won't harm Gail, because I know what ransom you'll want. But I'll see you later!'
He stepped grimly out of the door. The stuff underfoot was soft and yielding and springy, but it seemed to give slowly from his weight. Actually, that was the thinly coated cloth sinking through the substance of the ground. If Jack stood still, he knew, he would sink down and down as into a quicksand. The earth was semisolid only to the devices upon his feet. To his body it was thin as air. If he stumbled, he would hang head down, swinging, and ultimately he would sink.
And then -
But he stood, balancing himself in a world all harsh red light and unreal shadows, with his weight resting upon the appearance of vapour. In all this universe only the Mole seemed real, because only the Mole was unreal where this world was actual.
Durran stood at a window and laughed at him. The door closed. The Mole swam away. Presently it was lost to sight amid the shadows of innumerable phantom trees. Jack was alone as no man had ever been alone before. He walked upon vapour, and about him were only ghosts.
IX
The silence was ear-cracking. Silence, in the normal world, is a compound of minute noises, each one of which contributes to a blended impression of quiet Here there was an absolute absence of sound. It was startling. It was bewildering. There was constantly a shocked impression of one's own deafness.
Stranger still, of course, was the landscape. It was like a madman's dream. The sun was visible, to be sure, but as a ball of red so dark that it was almost purple. The unearthly light which filled this place was far down the scale, nearly in the infra-red. It was the darkest tint the human eye could see. In it, the trees were more than merely translucent.
Jack was seeing by rays which normally are blanketed out by the visible spectrum. The trees seemed so tenuous, so infinitely fragile that their immobility was not credible even when Jack saw it. And their branches went away to threads and their foliage stopped so little of the strange faint light that it seemed that overhead there was only the faintest of mist. Jack saw stars shining dully in an almost-black sky.
He had stopped, rather grimly, to orient himself. Now he essayed to move. And the ungainly things strapped to his feet were fast in the earth below him. That earth seemed vapour, to be sure. But there was radioactive paint upon these weird earth-shoes. That worked the miracle.
The flying alpha particles from that paint bombarded the dematerialized substance which alone in the world was real to Jack. The effect was 'that of temporary, partial materialization, so that the substance of the earth-shoes was partly 'real' in both states of matter.
Yet it was only partly 'real' so that it could still penetrate reality. But it did so slowly. Jack's earth-shoes had sunk a little, a very little, into the ground. But they would rise no more easily than they sank.
He felt a flash of panic, as a man might be expected to feel with a quicksand tugging at his legs. Then he forced himself to coolness. His feet had sunk perhaps six inches into the earth. He could not lift them. But he could slide them forward. He did. And the turned-up toes of the snowshoes helped, and a little later he strode forward through the impossible, a man walking upon a cloud, through shadows, beneath a sky and sun which did not seem of earth. He walked and moved, in fact, upon a world which had become itself a ghost in a universe that was phantom.
It was nightmarish, of course. It was worse than any nightmare. It was like insanity come true. And always, if he stood still, he would sink into the nightmare and strangle in the impalpable cloud which was the earth itself, and at last fall dizzily, twisting a little, down into the eternal fires which burned sullenly perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred miles below him. But to think of that caused vertigo.