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door on the other side.
He stepped away from it just as the center of the door became cherry red and began to melt. The
redness spread, became white, and then the center disappeared, leaving a hole the size of a dinner plate.
By then, Kickaha was crouching behind the sofa and looking out around its corner. He saw an arm reach
in through the hole and the hand grope around the side. Evidently it was trying to locate a lock. There
was none, so the arm withdrew and a moment later the edge of the door became cherry red. He
suspected that a beam was being used on it, and he wondered what the metal was. If it had been the
hardest steel, it should have gone up in a puff of smoke at the first touch of a beam.
The door fell inward with a clang. A man jumped in, a big cylinder with a bell-like muzzle and a
rifle-type stock in his hands. The man was one of the kilted servants. But he carried on his back a black
bell-like object in a net attached to the shoulders with straps.
Kickaha saw all this in a glance and withdrew his head. He crouched on the other side, hoping that
the intruder had not seen him and would not, as a matter of precaution, sweep the sofa with the beamer
to determine if anyone would be behind it. He knew who the man now was. Whatever he may have
been, he was now the Black Beller, Thabuuz. The mind of the Beller was housed in the brain of the
servant of the Lord, and the mind of the servant was discharged.
Somehow, the Beller had gotten the bell and managed to transfer his mind from the wounded body of
the Drachelander to the servant of the Lord. He had gotten hold of a powerful beamer, and he was on his
way out of the stronghold of Red Orc.
The odor of burned flesh filled the room; there must be bodies in the next room.
Kickaha wanted desperately to find out what the Beller was doing, but he did not dare to try to peek
around the corner of the sofa again. He could hear the man's breathing, and then, suddenly, it was gone.
After waiting sixty seconds and hearing nothing, Kickaha peeked around the corner. The room seemed
to be empty. A moment later, he was sure of it. The other door, the door by which Kickaha and Orc and
his men had originally entered, was standing wide open, its lock drilled through.
Kickaha looked cautiously around the side of the opposite door. There were parts of human bodies
here, arms, trunks, a head, all burned deeply. There seemed to have been four or five men originally.
There was no way of telling which was Red Orc or if he was among the group, since all clothes and hair
had been burned off. Somewhere, softly, an alarm was ringing.
He was torn between the desire to keep on the trail of the Beller so that he would not lose him and
by the desire to find out if Red Orc was still alive. He also wanted very much to confirm his suspicions
that he was not on the Earth he knew. He suspected that the door through which he had entered was a
gate between the two worlds and that this house was on Earth Number Two.
He went into the hallway. There were some knives on the floor, but they were too hot to pick up. He
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went down the hall and through a doorway into a very large room. It was dome-shaped, its walls white
with frescoes of sea life, its furniture wooden and lightly built with carved motifs he did not recognize, and
its floor a mosaic of stone with more representations of sea creatures.
He crossed the room and looked out the window. There was enough light from the moon to see a
wide porch with tall round wooden pillars, painted white, and beyond that a rocky beach that sloped for
a hundred yards from the house to the sea. There was no one in view.
He prowled the rest of the house, trying to combine caution with speed. He found a hand-beamer
built to look like a conventional revolver. Its butt bore markings that were not the writing of the Lords or
of any language that he knew. He tested it out against a chair, which fell apart down the middle. He could
find no batteries to recharge it and had no way of knowing how much charge remained in the battery. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]