“Listen! Do you hear planes?” the old man said. “It’s time, children. You must go.”
There was silence. Every eye watched the lighted panel. Colors hovered there to and fro through the spectrum. A faint ruddiness began to glow again.
“This time we’ll take it if it looks all right,” Bruce said, and laid his hand again upon the lever.
The light turned red. Soundlessly the round door swung open.
Sunlight came through, low green hills, and the clustered roofs of a town were visible a little distance away in a valley.
Without a word or a backward glance Bruce stepped through the door. One by one the others moved after him, Kern last. Kern’s lips were pressed together and he did not glance behind him. He could have seen the hills of earth beyond the windows, and the blue October sky. He would not look at them. He shrugged his wings together and stooped to enter the gateway of the new world.
Behind them the old man watched in silence, seeing the work of his lifetime ending before his eyes. The gulf between them was too broad for leaping. He was human and they were not. Across a vast distance, vaster than the gulf between worlds, he saw the family of the mutations step over their threshold and vanish forever.
He closed the door after them. The red light faded above it. He turned toward his own door where the knocking of World Council’s police had already begun to summon him to his accounting.
II
His Own Kind
Above them, the sky was blue. The five aliens who were alien to all worlds alike stood together on a hilltop looking down.
“It’s beautiful,” Kua said. “I’m glad we chose this one. But I wonder what the next one would have been like if we could have waited.”
“It will be the same no matter where we go,” Byrna’s infinitely sweet voice murmured.
“Look at the horizon,” Bruce said. “What is it?”
They saw then the first thing that marked this world alien to earth. For the most part it might have been any hilly wooded land they knew from the old place; even the roofs of the village looked spuriously familiar. But the horizon was curiously misted, and before them, far off, rose—something—to an impossible height halfway up the zenith.
“A mountain?” Kern asked doubtfully. “It’s too high, isn’t it?”
“A glass mountain,” Kua said. “Yes, it is glass—or plastic? I can’t be sure.”
She had uncovered her single eye and the shining pupil was contracted as she gazed over impossible distances at the equally impossible bulk of that thing on the horizon. It rose in a vast sweep of opalescent color, like a translucent thundercloud hanging over the whole land. Knowing it for a mountain, the mind felt vertiginous at the thought of such tremendous bulk towering overhead.
“It looks clear,” Kua said. “All the way through. I can’t tell what’s beyond it. Just an enormous mountain made out of—of plastic? I wonder.”
Kern was aware of a tugging at his wing-surfaces, and glanced around in quick recognition of the strengthening breeze. He was the first to notice it.
“It’s beginning to blow. And listen—do you hear?”
It grew louder as they stood there, a shrill, strengthening whine in the air coming from the direction of the cloudlike mountain. A whine that grew so rapidly they had scarcely recognized it as noise before it was deafening all about them, and the wind was like a sudden hurricane.
That passed in a gust, noise and wind alike, leaving them breathless and staring at one another in dismay.
“Look, over there, quick!” Kua said, “Another one’s coming!”
Far off, but moving toward them with appalling speed, came a monstrous spinning tower of—light? Smoke? They could not be sure.
It whirled like a waterspout in a typhoon, vast, bending majestically and righting itself again, and the air spun with it, and the wild, shrill screaming began again.
The vortex of brilliance passed them far to the left, catching them in its shrieking hurricane of riven air and then releasing them again into shaken silence. But there was another one on its way before they had caught their breath again, a whirling, bowing tower that spun screeching off toward the right. And after it another, and close behind that, a fourth.
The noise and the violence of the wind stunned Kern so that he had no idea what was happening to the others on the hilltop. He was susceptible because of his wings. The hurricane caught him up and whirled him sideward down the slope—shrieking in his ears with a noise so great it was almost silence, beyond the range of sound.
Stunned, he struggled for balance, leaning against the rushing wall of air as solid as a wall of stone. For a moment or two he kept the ground underfoot. Then his wings betrayed him and, in spite of himself, he felt the six-foot pinions blown wide and the muscles ached across his chest with the violence of the wind striking their spread surfaces.
The horizon tilted familiarly as he swooped in a banking curve. The glass mountain for a moment hung overhead and he looked straight down at the wooded hills, seeing tiny blowing figures reeling across the slopes in the grip of the hurricane winds. Hanging here far above the treetops, he could see that the monsters of whirling light were coming thicker and faster across the hilltops, striding like giants, trailing vortices of wind and sound in their wake. For an instant he swung in the grip of the hurricane, watching the vast whirling spindles moving and bowing majestically across the face of the new earth.
Then the vortex caught him again and he was spun blindly into the heart of the whirlwind, deafened with its terrible screaming uproar, wrenched this way and that upon aching wings, too dizzy for fear or thought. Time ceased. Half senseless, he was whirled to and fro upon the irresistible winds. He closed his eyes against flying dust, locked his hands over his ears to
