She shrugged again.
“If I could get you a gun,” Dantan said. “A force-ray—”
“What are they?”
He described the weapons of his day. But Quiana’s smile was a little scornful when he finished.
“We of Zha have passed beyond the use of missile weapons—even such missiles as bullets or rays. Nor could they touch my Enemy. No, we can destroy in ways that require no—no beams or explosives. No, Dantan, you speak in terms of your own universe. We have no common ground. It is a pity that time eddied between Sanfel and me, but eddy it did, and I am helpless now. And the Enemy will be upon me soon. Very soon.”
She let her shoulders sag and resignation dimmed the remembered vividness of her face. Dantan looked up at her grimly, muscles riding his set jaw. It was almost intolerable, this facing her again in need, and again helpless, and himself without power to aid. It had been bad enough that first time, to learn long afterward that she had died at enemy hands while he was too far away to protect her. But to see it all take place again before his very eyes!
“There must be a way,” he said, and his hand gripped the lever marked “door” in the ancient tongue.
“Wait!” Quiana’s voice was urgent.
“What would happen?”
“The door would open. I could enter your world, and you mine.”
“Why can’t you leave, then, and wait until it’s safe to go back?”
“I have tried that,” Quiana said. “It will never be safe. The Enemy waited too. No, it must come, in the end, to a battle—and I shall not win that fight. I shall not see my own people or my own land again, and I suppose I must face that knowledge. But I did hope, when I heard Sanfel’s signal sound again. …” She smiled a little. “I know you would help me if you could, Dantan. But there is nothing to be done now.”
“I’ll come in,” he said doggedly. “Maybe there’s something I could do.”
“You could not touch him. Even now there’s danger. He was very close when I heard that signal. This is his territory. When I heard the bell and thought Sanfel had returned with a weapon for me, I dared greatly in coming here.” Her voice died away; a withdrawn look veiled her eyes from him.
After a long silence she said, “The Enemy is coming. Turn off the screen, Dantan. And goodbye.”
“No,” he said. “Wait!” But she shook her head and turned away from him, her thin robe swirling, and moved off like a pale shadow into the dim, shadowless emptiness of the background. He stood watching helplessly, feeling all the old despair wash over him a second time as the girl he loved went alone into danger he could not share. Sometimes as she moved away she was eclipsed by objects he could not see—trees, he thought, or rocks, that did not impinge upon his eyes through the protective helmet. A strange world indeed Zha must be, whose very rocks and trees were too alien for human eyes to look upon in safety. … Only Quiana grew smaller and smaller upon the screen, and it seemed to Dantan as though a cord stretched between them, pulling thinner and thinner as she receded into danger and distance.
It was unbearable to think that the cord might break—break a second time. …
Far away something moved in the cloudy world of Zha. Tiny in the distance though it was, it was unmistakably not human. Dantan lost sight of Quiana. Had she found some hiding place behind some unimaginable outcropping of Zha’s terrain?
The Enemy came forward.
It was huge and scaled and terrible, human, but not a human; tailed, but no beast; intelligent, but diabolic. He never saw it too clearly, and he was grateful to his helmet for that. The polarized glass seemed to translate a little, as well as to blot out. He felt sure that this creature which he saw—or almost saw—did not look precisely as it seemed to him upon the screen. Yet it was easy to believe that such a being had sprung from the alien soil of Zha. There was nothing remotely like it on any of the worlds he knew. And it was hateful. Every line of it made his hackles bristle.
It carried a coil of brightly colored tubing slung over one grotesque shoulder, and its monstrous head swung from side to side as it paced forward into the screen like some strange and terrible mechanical toy. It made no sound, and its progress was horrible in its sheer relentless monotony.
Abruptly it paused. He thought it had sensed the girl’s presence, somewhere in hiding. It reached for the coil of tubing with one malformed—hand?
“Quiana,” it said—its voice as gentle as a child’s.
Silence. Dantan’s breathing was loud in the emptiness.
“Quiana?” The tone was querulous now.
“Quiana,” the monster crooned, and swung about with sudden, unexpected agility. Moving with smooth speed, it vanished into the clouds of the background, as the girl had vanished. For an eternity Dantan watched colored emptiness, trying to keep himself from trembling.
Then he heard the voice again, gentle no longer, but ringing like a bell with terrible triumph, “Quiana!”
And out of the swirling clouds he saw Quiana break, despair upon her face, her sheer garments streaming behind her. After her came the Enemy. It had unslung the tube it wore over its shoulder, and as it lifted
