He could not move.
VII
Combat
Relentlessly the Mountain which had opened to receive them had closed again, gently and solidly. The little group of captives hung frozen in the very postures of flight, spread-winged, hair still blowing in a wind which no longer moved past them. They were frozen as if in a moment of eternal Now, as if time had ceased to move and their own motions had ceased with it.
And then before them in the opalescent cloud of the Mountain a thin coil of light began to glow.
Swiftly it grew clearer. And Kern looked with the eyes of the body upon that which he had seen before with the eyes of the mind. He felt the malevolence beat out at them before the fire itself came wholly into focus, strong hatred, curiously impersonal. It was the hatred of a Mountain, a cloud, not a human hatred.
The lazy, coiling ribbon moved through the solid fog, the foggy solid glass, somewhere ahead of the captives. It was impossible to gauge distances here, but the thing was close enough to see in every detail. Its slowly writhing coil that drew in and out of its own folds with a leisurely, never-ending motion. Its burning color that was hot to the eye and hot to the perceptive mind with the heat of its consuming hatred.
Something lay within the coils. It was drawing its ribbon-folds caressingly about that something. They could not yet see what.
For an instant or two the great, slow, burning thing moved in its long folds before them, blind and impersonal and hating. But then came a new change. Then it looked at them.
Spots of luminous darkness began to swim slowly through the coils. They came and went. Whenever a coil moved itself to face the captives in the solid glass, eyespots swam upon that coil, flickering out again as the fiery curve moved on.
It watched. It waited and hated and was silent.
That which lay within it, bathed in the caressing coils, began to move. The coils altered their pattern to leave what they supported visible. And Kern felt a shock of emptiness within him that made the vision blur for a moment. When he looked again it was unmistakable and clear before him.
Bruce Hallam, lying quietly on the supporting coils, his eyes open and regarding them as impersonally as the eyes that came and went upon the ribbons of fire.
“This—” Bruce Hallam said clearly “—is my world.”
The words came to them as if through empty air, with a cold clarity that allowed of no mistake. For it was not wholly Bruce Hallam who spoke. It was a voice of fire too. Hatred and blinding light coiled through the words as it coiled through the fog before their eyes. Two beings spoke with the single voice, but two beings who were now one.
Sudden memory flashed through Kern’s mind. He saw the long-ago, faraway room again, where the little group of mutants had stepped from one universe to another. He saw Bruce opening his steel door upon a waiting world, searching it with his eyes, closing the door again. He understood now. Bruce had known. Somehow, he had known in the single glance which world held kinship for him and which did not.
Bruce, with his mutant’s uncanny skill at creating out of any means at hand the more-than-machinery which would do his bidding, had recognized this world. Kern remembered with shock his own blindness when Elje had described to him what the Mountain’s slaves, under its guidance, could do with any material at hand—how, when they still suspected Kern of complicity with the enemy, they had cleared his room of any matter out of which he might build a weapon to destroy them.
Yes, this world was Bruce Hallam’s—not Kern’s after all. A winged world, yes, but a world under dominance. And Bruce’s was the dominant realm.
All this flashed through his mind with the swiftness of a single thought, while Bruce’s coldly burning words still sounded in their ears. He was remembering how impersonal Bruce had always been, how remote from human feeling, when he heard the cold voice again.
“There is no place in my world for you,” Bruce told them calmly. “There is room only for the winged people—and Me. You come from malleable flesh, a malleable heritage. I can not trust you here. My coming into the world made a cyclone here in the Mountain, drawing out forces better left untouched. I was helpless then. I could not save—myself—until I was out of your reach. The time has come to destroy the last remnants of those who defy me. And you mutants whose flesh I can not control must go with the rest.”
He did not stir, but the coiling flame moved with sudden quickened speed, flowing toward them through the imprisoning glass which held the humans so inflexibly. Bruce, then, was only the voice of this dreadful duo. The ribbon of flame was the body.
A long loop of it moved lazily forward, falling gently like a silk ribbon through air. After it the fiery length followed gracefully, weaving in and out of its own folds, and within the folds, always caressed by them streaming over and around his body, Bruce Hallam moved too, rigidly, supported on the coiling loops, not a muscle of his own limbs stirring.
Kern watched them come. He had no idea what would happen when the burning coils touched the first human, but he could feel the white heat of its malevolence flow before it. Helpless, voiceless in the grip of the unyielding glass, he strained fiercely for—for—he did not know what. Only to be free to fight even uselessly against the oncoming enemy.
Sharply the thought in his mind broke in
