III
Kimball's right shoe caught in a burrow and he fell again. This time the expected shock came late; evidently he had been on the brink of a pit of some sort, for his shoulders slammed against the hard ground with an unexpected impact, and he slewed down a long decline. He lay at the bottom for an indefinite period—neither time nor distance had any meaning in this blackness—and then got up again.
Through the steady, muted roaring which had been in his ears ever since he had dropped from the torus coil, a roaring like the sound in a seashell, multiplied to the point of madness, a leathery muttering sound began to grow. He yanked his flashlight from the belt-clip and shot a cone of light upward.
He was rewarded with a ululating, deafening scream, and something winged and huge sheared off from the beam. The muttering of the wings faded again, and with it went a sticky blubbering, like the crying of an idiot child. Sick at his stomach, he pumped a shot after it, and was surprised to hear it scream again.
That would hold them for a while. They weren't very cautious about the automatic, for they seemed to expect that he would score a hit with it only by rare chance; but they hated the flashlight. They'd not try that dive-bombing stunt on him soon again.
He could hear them settling around the rim of the pit. Deliberately he lit a cigarette. For a second he could see the bulky, pasty bodies and the blinded heads arching above him; then they all whispered with agony and drew away out of sight. Even the dim coal of the burning fag was too much for them.
But before long the batteries of the flashlight would be drained, the cigarettes gone, the matches exhausted. When that time came, Kimball knew, he would be torn to tatters, but it didn't bother him much now. He had been almost unconscious with fatigue when the badly-adjusted master machine had dumped him into this nightmare; but the beasts, savage though they were, had been curious. For a while they had questioned him with very little hostility, and had aroused his interest enough to give him second—or had it been twenty-second?—wind. Their upsetting version of telepathy, which projected subtly different emotional states instead of ideas, had awakened him thoroughly.
He had just realized that he had arrived inside the Earth, probably in a space-negative state to boot, when he had felt the urge for a cigarette....
He sighed and stood up. There was no way to tell how long he had been in this midnight universe, but if he could only stick it out until a full twenty-four hours were up, the master machine would act on him again. The faulty windings of its coils would prevent it from returning him to the abandoned grocery as it was supposed to do—but at least it would throw him out of this black, demon-haunted universe.
At his movement, the beasts rustled eagerly back to the rim of the pit, scarcely audible in the mass echo which was as natural to the hollow world as air. He turned on the flashlight, pointing it at the ground—he did not care to hear them all scream at once. There was a thundering flurry of wings above him; then silence.