The Skylark of Valeron

by E. E. Smith

Seaton's glance leaped to his beloved Dorothy. Drooping yet rigid she stood there, unmoving, corpselike. Accustomed now to seeing four-dimensional things by consciously examining only their three-dimensional surfaces, he perceived instantly the waxen, utterly inhuman vacuity of her normally piquant and vivacious face—perceived it, and at that perception went mad.

Clutching convulsively the length of hyperchain by which he had swung into the control room he leaped, furious and elementally savage.

So furious was his action that the chain snapped apart at the wall of the control room; so rapid was it that the hyperguard had no time to move, nor even to think.

That guard had been peacefully controlling with his trident the paralyzed prisoner. All had been quiet and calm. Suddenly—in an instant—had appeared the two monstrosities who had been taken to the capital. And in that same fleeting instant one of the monsters was leaping at him. And ahead of that monster there came lashing out an enormous anchor chain, one of whose links of solid steel no ordinary mortal could lift; an anchor chain hurtling toward him with a velocity and a momentum upon that tenuous hyperworld unthinkable.

The almost-immaterial flesh of the hyperman could no more withstand that fiercely driven mass of metal than can a human body ward off an armor-piercing projectile in full flight. Through his body the great chain tore; cutting, battering, rending it into ghastly, pulpily indescribable fragments unrecognizable as ever having been anything animate. Indeed, so fiercely had the chain been urged that the metal itself could not stand the strain. Five links broke off at the climax of the chain's black-snakelike stroke, and, accompanying the bleeding scraps of flesh that had been the guard, tore on past the walls of the space ship and out into the hypervoid.

The guard holding his tridents in Crane and Shiro had not much more warning. He saw his fellow obliterated, true; but that was all he lived to see, and he had time to do exactly nothing. One more quick flip of Seaton's singularly efficient weapon and the remains of that officer also disappeared into hyperspace. More of the chain went along, this time, but that did not matter. Dropping to the floor the remaining links of his hyperflail, Seaton sprang to Dorothy, reaching her side just as the punishing trident, released by the slain guard, fell away from her.

She recovered her senses instantly and turned a surprised face to the man, who, incoherent in his relief that she was alive and apparently unharmed, was taking her into his arms.

"Why, surely, Dick, I'm all right—how could I be any other way?" she answered his first agonized question in amazement. She studied his worn face in puzzled wonder and went on: "But you certainly are not. What has happened, dear, anyway; and how could it have, possibly?"

"I hated like sin to be gone so long, Dimples, but it couldn't be helped." Seaton, in his eagerness to explain his long absence, did not even notice the peculiar implications in his wife's speech and manner. "You see, it was a long trip, and we didn't get a chance to break away from those meat hooks of theirs until after they got us into their city and examined us. Then, when we finally did break away, we found that we couldn't travel at night. Their days are bad enough, with this thick blue light, but during the nights there's absolutely no light at all, of any kind. No moon, no stars, no nothing—"

"Nights! What are you talking about, Dick, anyway?" Dorothy had been trying to interrupt since his first question and had managed at last to break in. "Why, you haven't been gone at all, not even a second. We've all been right here, all the time!"