Outside the Universe

by Hamilton Edmond

With lightning swiftness now Jhul Din was injecting in the last of our followers the restorative red fluid, and then as those last ones stumbled up into consciousness beside us, we raced toward the door, out into the corridor. There, abruptly, we stopped short, our last wild hopes of escape in that instant blasted. For less than a thousand feet down the great corridor from us, pouring out into it from every quarter of the vast building's interior in answer to the hissing cries of alarm, there was racing down upon us a great mass of hundreds upon hundreds of the writhing serpent-creatures.

9: A Dash for Freedom

Doom stared at us in that instant as the serpent-creatures rushed down the great corridor toward us, for well we knew that never could we win our way down the long street to our waiting ship with that pursuit behind us. For a flashing moment as we stood there, stunned, it seemed that recapture was inevitable, and then as a sudden thought flared across my brain I cried out to my companions.

"Get out of the building!" I cried. "I can hold them here-"

They hesitated, and then sprang down the corridor toward the street, while at the same instant I leapt into the great museum-hall from which we had just emerged. With a single bound I had grasped the needle and tube of restorative red fluid and was at the great transparent cases, ripping the sides open frantically and stabbing the needle with lightning swiftness into their occupants. Those in a dozen or more cases I had swiftly treated thus before I dropped the tube and needle and leapt back to the door, into the corridor. As I did so I had seen the first of the strange, terrible shapes I had touched with the needle beginning to stir, to move from their cases.

As I sprang back out into the corridor, though, the racing masses of the serpent-creatures were but a scant hundred feet behind me, my own companions racing out of the building ahead of me, now. The serpent-things loosed no rays upon us, desiring, I knew, to return us to that hell of living death from which we had escaped, but as I sprang down the corridor they were so close behind that another moment, I knew, would see my capture and that of my friends ahead. Then, just as the serpent-creatures, racing behind me, reached the door of the museum, they halted, recoiled. For out into the corridor from that museum-hall had flopped a great, terrible shape, the mighty disk of pale flesh with a single central eye that my needle had been first to revive.

Instantly it had moved upon the serpent-creatures upon whom its glaring eye fell, and before they could escape had thrown its vast disk of flesh about a mass of scores of them, bunching its body swiftly together then with terrific power and crushing them within it. At another mass of them it leapt, ravening with terrific fury after its prisonment of untold ages of living death, while out of the museum there came after it the other shapes I had revived, awful insect-beings that leapt upon the serpent-creatures with terrible claws and fangs, heedless of the death-beams that flashed toward them, many-limbed things of flesh that whirled forward as fiercely to the attack, grotesque, terrible monsters of a dozen different sorts that leapt now upon the serpent-creatures who had prisoned them for ages with inconceivable raging power, heaping about them great masses of crushed and mangled serpent-dead.

Only in a glance over my shoulder did I glimpse that massacre of the serpent-creatures behind me, for I was racing on down the corridor and out of the building into the narrow street, where my friends awaited me. With a word I explained to them what had happened, and instantly we set off down the street, between the great, towering buildings of beaming blue force that lay silent and dead now in the dusky darkness, only their own flickering light and that of the vast, dim-red sun that swung in the black heavens above lighting us forward as we raced on. Behind, though, in the great building from which we had fled, were rising appalling cries, the hissing utterances of the serpent-creatures and the strange and awful cries of the things with which they battled.

Now about us were rising other cries as the serpent-creatures across all the city began to rouse beneath the terrific din of the wild fight in the central building. Behind us, as we raced on down the narrow street, we saw them emerging from the buildings, gazing about, and then as we were glimpsed, fleeing toward the landing-circle where lay the ships, other cries went up and after us leapt the serpent-things from all along the street, pouring into the street from its buildings and from adjacent streets and racing after us.

But a few hundred yards ahead lay the landing-circle, and as we ran on we could make out the gleaming, great shapes of the oval ships lying upon it, could discern the shape of our own awaiting ship, at the circle's edge, its door open before us. Toward that black opening, as toward some tremendous magnet, we stumbled on with the last of our strength, but close behind came the serpent-creatures in ever-increasing masses, the alarm spreading now over all the gigantic city about us, and there lay still a distance that seemed infinite between us and that open door. Then, when we were but a scant hundred feet from it, the serpent-creatures hardly more than that behind us, Korus Kan slipped, stumbled and went down.