He fell, rose, and fell again. In the end he crawled. He crawled to the foot of the cliff and dragged himself upright. He fell forward, as though trying to press his body against the towering wall that lifted to the writhing grey clouds—
Fell—through the stone!
He toppled through the rock curtain as though it were nonexistent! Instantly intense blackness closed around him. Hard stone was under him.
His mind was too dulled to wonder. He knew only that the way north was still open. He crept on through darkness, leaving a trail of blood behind him. …
The ground dropped from under him. He crashed down on a mound of moulded vegetation.
Before the shock had passed, the living dead man was moving again. He crawled forward until his way was blocked by a perpendicular wall. Gasping dry-throated sobs, he clawed at the barrier with broken, bleeding fingertips.
To left and right, an arm’s length away, were other walls. He was in a pit. The sane part of his brain thought: “Circle around! There may be some way out!”
But Vanning could not circle. He could only move in one direction. That was north. He fumbled blindly at the wall, until unconsciousness came at last. …
Twice again he awoke, each time weaker, and twice again he slept. The fever, having passed its peak, dwindled swiftly.
At last Vanning awoke, and he was sane. No longer did he feel the relentless urge to turn north. He lay for a little while staring into the blackness, realizing that he was once more in full command of his traitorous body.
There was little life left in him. His tongue was blackened and swollen till it filled his mouth. He was a scarecrow, nearly naked, his bones sharply defined through his skin.
It was an effort even to breathe. But death would not be long in coming—now. …
II
Dying is an uncomfortable business, unless a man is drugged or insensible. Vanning found it so. Moreover, he wasn’t the sort of man who would give up without good cause. Weak as he was, nevertheless he was still too strong to lie in the dark, waiting.
Laboriously, he got to his hands and knees and commenced a circuit of the pit. He expected nothing. But, at the southern end of his prison, he was astounded to find a hole in the wall easily large enough to admit his body.
Feeling into the blackness, he discovered the smooth floor of a passage. Good Lord! It had been there all the time, during his tortured imprisonment in the pit. If he had only searched before—
But he could not have done so, of course. Not with the North-Fever flaming in his veins.
The tunnel might lead anywhere. All the chances were against its leading to safety. Sooner or later, there would probably be a dead end. Nevertheless, there was a chance. That chance grew brighter as Vanning’s fingers discovered that the walls bore the marks of tools.
The tunnel had been made by—perhaps not humans, but at least by some intelligent race!
It grew higher as he went on, but Vanning was too weak to rise. He realized dimly that the passage made a sharp hairpin turn.
Through the dark the distant clangor of a bell roared.
Vanning hesitated, and then resumed his weak crawl. There was nothing else to do.
The ground dropped from beneath him. He went rolling and slipping down an inclined slide, to stop with a jolt against a softly padded surface. The shock was too much for his exhausted mind and body. He felt consciousness leaving him.
But he realized that it was no longer dark. Through a pale, luminous twilight he caught a glimpse of a mask hovering over him—the mask of no human thing. Noseless save for tiny slits, gap-mouthed, round-eyed, the face was like that of a fish incredibly humanized—fantastically evolved. A patina of green scales overlaid the skin.
The gong thundered from nearby. The monstrous mask dissolved into the blackness that swept up and took Vanning to its heart. Nothing existed but pain, and that, too, was wiped out by the encompassing dark. …
He was very sick. Complete exhaustion had almost killed him. He was lying on a soft pallet, and from time to time the stinging shock of a needle in his arm told him that he was being fed by injection. Later, water trickled down his throat. His swollen tongue resumed its normal shape. Sleep came, tormented by dreams. The mask of the fish-like thing swam at him from gray shimmering light. It gave place to a great bell that roared deafeningly.
Then the face of a girl, pale, lovely, with auburn ringlets clustering about her cheeks. Sympathetic blue eyes looked into his. And that, too, was gone. …
He awoke to find—something—standing above him. And it was no nightmare. It was the thing of his dreams—a being that stood upright on two stocky legs, and which wore clothing, a shining silver tunic and kirtle. The head was fish-like, but the high cranium told of intelligence.
It said something in a language Vanning did not know. Weakly he shook his head. The fish-being launched into the Venusian dialect.
“You are recovered? You are strong again?”
Vanning sought for words. “I’m—all right. But where am I? Who—”
“Lysla will tell you.” The creature clapped its huge hands together as it turned. The door closed behind its malformed back, opening again to reveal the auburn-haired girl Vanning recognized.
He sat up, discovering that he was in a bare room walled with gray plastic, and that he was lying on a pallet of some elastic substance. Under a metallic-looking but soft robe, he was naked. The girl, he saw, bore over her arm a bundle of garments, crimson as the kirtle she herself wore.
Her smile was wan. “Hello,” she said, in English. “Feel better now?”
Vanning nodded. “Sure. But am I crazy? That thing that just went out—”
Horror darkened the girl’s blue eyes. “That is one of the Swamja. They rule here.”
“Here? Where’s here?”
Lysla knelt beside the bed. “The end of
