Roverton dodged, and would have lost his footing as he teetered within an inch of the verge, if Volmar, standing close behind, had not put out an arm to steady him. Missing, the third dwarf ran headlong upon Roverton’s weapon, which pierced him through till his body hung impaled on the ebon shaft. Roverton disengaged it, and kicked the falling corpse aside to join its companions in the gulf.
The earth-men reached the opposite building without further interruption; but their pursuers had gained appreciably during the combat and were dogging them closely as they plunged into the new edifice.
This building, as far as they could tell, was wholly deserted; and it differed materially in its furnishings and apparent use from the one they had left. The unpeopled rooms into which they glanced as they hurried along a main hall, were panelled with fantastic paintings and designs that might have been astronomical maps. In some of them, there were huge globes and hemispheres of metal, and appliances like alien cosmospheres and planispheres.
An angle of the hall took the men temporarily beyond sight of their pursuers.
“Quick! Let’s find a hiding-place or a stairway,” whispered Roverton.
They hesitated before a little door which gave on a dark chamber where the beams of the red fires in the hall were powerless to penetrate. Then, in an alcove, they perceived a flight of stairs.
Trusting that their pursuers would continue along the corridor, they began to ascend the stairs, taking three or four of the tiny steps at a leap. They would have preferred to descend, with the hope of eventually finding themselves on some sort of Terra Firma, but were deterred by an inexplicable noise, a metallic whirring and jarring, that suddenly started on the floors below. Above, there was utter silence.
“Haven’t these people any elevator systems?” asked Roverton, after they had climbed steadily for several minutes. “It must take them all eternity to go up and down in their skyscrapers like this.”
“There may be some other method of transit, though probably it wouldn’t be of any use to us without special knowledge regarding its mechanism.”
For hours, it seemed, the earth-men toiled from story to story of that interminable edifice. The sounds of pursuit had died out; and apparently the dwarfs were still seeking them on lower levels. They met no one in all that endless range of red-lit stairs and rooms. All had grown silent, except for the subterranean rumblings from beneath the city, which became fainter as they went upward. They must have been in the heart of the building; and at no time did they approach the outer rooms and balconies or attain even a far-off glimpse of sunlight. They ceased to count the number of floors they had ascended, and it seemed to them that they were lost in some awful, topless tower of eternity and infinity. They marvelled at the mania for space and magnitude which must have prompted this tiny people to rear such colossal structures.
Their legs were turning to lead, and each added step was like the heaving of a mighty weight. They gasped for breath within their aerated helmets, and heard the pounding of heavy pulses in their temples like the roar of driven torrents.
“Where are we going, anyway?” questioned Roverton, as they paused for a momentary respite. “And why are we going there? The end is a foregone conclusion, with all the cards that are stacked against us. There must be about a million deadly contingencies, I should think. We’ll do well if we live long enough to exhaust our present supply of air.”
“The air of this particular world might not be fatal to us,” said Volmar. “We haven’t sampled it yet, if you’ll remember. Our dwarf friends were considerate enough, evidently, to re-fill our tanks with a chemical synthesis of the same air that they found in them.”
“Well, I’d rather not try the local atmosphere till I have to. But what’s the use of climbing any further? We’ve got the whole planet against us. Probably there are billions of these dwarfs with their devilish chemistry, all of them ready to hunt us down like wild beasts.”
“Why worry about a little thing like that? Come on—there should be a good view from the top of this tower of Babel, when we get to it.”
Following the slow, tedious spiral of the stairs, at length they saw a gleam of purple daylight above them, and came out on the building’s roof, where a single central spire continued to escalade the heavens. The flat roof itself was crowded with orb-like mechanisms that were perhaps used for the observation of solar and stellar force. Crystal wheels and spheres were turning silently within larger spheres of the same substance.
No one was in sight, and the roof was seemingly unoccupied. But several air-craft were approaching, and fearing to be seen by their occupants, the earth-men entered a door in the great spire. Here they found a staircase, and resumed their eternal climb.
At the top they emerged in a curious open cupola whose lofty dome was filled with large perforations. The place was lined with instruments that were doubtless astronomical. There were cosmolabes and armillaries designed for a universe not measured heretofore by man; there were strange double and triple mirrors of white mineral with surfaces of baffling convex angles; there were lenses arranged behind each other in curving, semi-circular frames, and adjusted to an unhuman vision. In the center of the alabastrine floor, the men perceived a sable disk, perhaps four feet in diameter, and depressed about six inches below the floor-level. From the middle of the disk, and close together, there rose two upright rods.
At first they did not see that the cupola was occupied. Then, behind the litter of strange appliances, they perceived a wizened and aged-looking dwarf, bowed above a sort of dial on which was slanting rows of rubricated ciphers. He was unarmed, and did not hear the earth-men till they were close upon him. Then he turned and saw them.
Ungovernably startled, it would seem, by the apparition of beings who must have been supremely monstrous from his view-point, he darted away from the dial and sprang toward the black disk. Roverton intercepted him, being dubious on general principles regarding the intention of this movement. Terrified by the glowing weapon which the earth-men waved in his face, the dwarf circled back among the crowded instruments and contrived to elude both Volmar and Roverton and win the head of the stairs. There he disappeared from their ken at breakneck speed.
“Too bad we didn’t get him,” said Roverton. “I wasn’t anxious to hurt that fellow, but now he’ll spread the good word among the others as to where we are hiding. The whole pack will be here presently, if not sooner.”
“Well, let’s take a look at the view anyway, being as we’re here.”
They stepped to the verge of the open cupola, which was supported on a circle of thin pillars, and looked out on a staggering scene. They could see the whole extent of the mighty city, which reached for many miles in every direction, lying below them at a depth which turned the people in its streets to microscopic motes. Around the city was a landscape of ineffable bizarrerie, with wide canals of blood-red water that intersected each other to form terraced isles, and then wound away through fields and forests of a vegetation whose coloring was more violent than that of futuristic paintings. Beyond it all, in sharp, airless outline on the violescent heavens, were horn-like mountains of jetty black and others of a whiteness more dazzling than that of Pentelic marble.
“Golly,” was Roverton’s ejaculation. “The outlook is almost worth the climb. But I’d rather be seeing it from the Alcyone.”
There came a confused babel of shrilling voices, and a horde of dwarfs emerged on the roof below them and streamed toward the central spire.