Huth's voice spoke in his helmet-phone. "We hear you, Nelsen! Hold out... We'll be there in forty minutes..."
Yeah—forty minutes.
"It's—it's silly to be so scared, Frankie..." he heard Nance stammer almost apologetically. Dear Nance...
Screaming, he kicked out again and again with his heavy boots, and got both her and himself loose.
It wasn't any good. A shape loomed near them. A thing that must have sprung from them—someway. A huge, zombie form—the ugliest part of this night of anguish and distortion. But he was sure that it was real.
The thing struck him in the stomach. Then there was a biting pain in his shoulder...
There wasn't any more, just then. But this wasn't quite the end, either. The jangled impressions were like split threads of consciousness, misery-wracked and tenuous. They were widely separated. His brain seemed to crack into a million needle-pointed shards, that made no sense except to indicate the passage of time. A month? A century...?
It seemed that he was always struggling impossibly to get himself and Nance somewhere—out of hot, noisesome holes of suffocation, across deserts, up endless walls, and past buzzing sounds that were mixed incongruously with strange harmonica music that seemed to express all time and space... He could never succeed though the need was desperate. But sometimes there was a coolness answering his thirst, or rubbed into his burning skin, and he would seem to sleep... Often, voices told him things, but he always forgot...
It wasn't true that he came out of the hot fog suddenly, but it seemed that he did. He was sitting in dappled sunshine in an ordinary lawn chair of tubular magnesium with a back and bottom of gaudy fabric. Above him was a narrow, sealed roof of stellene. The stone walls showed the beady fossils of prehistoric Mars. More than probably, these chambers had been cut in the living rock, by the ancients.
Reclining in another lawn chair beside his was Nance, her eyes closed, her face thin and pale. He was frightened—until [p. 131] he remembered, somehow, that she was nearly as well as he was. Beyond her was a doorway, leading into what seemed a small, modern kitchen. There was a passage to a small, neat garden, where Earthly vegetables and flowers grew. It was ceiled with stellene; its walls were solid rock. Looking up through the transparent roof above him, he saw how a thin mesh of fuzzy tendrils and whorls masked this strange Shangri-la.