The Time Trap by Henry Kuttner Page A

it with frantic haste, the clamoring monsters almost within arm’s length. In the ravine Mason pointed up.
    “The ladder, Alasa. I’ll hold ’em back and then come after you.”
    She hesitated, and then obeyed. Mason’s inattention was almost his undoing. A talon-like hand seized his foot, almost overbalancing him. A frightful skull-face rose out of the pit, screaming with wordless, dreadful hunger. Mason sent the metal bar smashing down, sick revulsion clawing at his stomach.
    Bone and brain shattered under the blow. Blindly the thing tried to crawl up, though its head was a pulped, gory horror. The mouth of the pit was choked with dozens of the Deathless Ones, greedy for flesh to feed their avid maws, heedless of blows, pushing up and up…
    Mason battered them down, till the very weight of the monsters bore them in a tangled heap to fall back into the passage. Then, gripping the bar in one hand, he ran swiftly up the ladder and rejoined Alasa on the surface.
    “I’ve an idea,” he said, grinning feebly, swaying on his feet. “Those things can’t be very intelligent. The plant-men are, but—”
    Mason stooped, pulled up the ladder. A group of Deathless Ones emerged from the pit, roaring menace. Spying Mason, they tried to climb the walls of the ravine, but failed. Presently a few of them set off to right and left.
    “There may be another way out. We’d better scram—depart, I mean,” Mason said at Alasa’s puzzled look. “Come on.”
    “But—where?”
    The man scanned the dark sky. A wan Sun glowed huge and red. The Moon had vanished. A chill wind blew over a plain of wet, featureless silt.
    “I don’t know. Away from the coast, anyway. If we can find Murdach and the ship…”
    Silently they set out, trudging across the lonely waste, shuddering in the icy wind that rushed bleakly over the surface of a dying planet.

Chapter IX

Tower of the Mirage
    For hours the two struggled through the sticky ooze, up the slope of a slowly rising plain. In the thin air their lungs pumped painfully. Twice Mason saw something flying overhead, vague in the distance, but he could not make out its nature. It was apparently winged, and was clearly not the time-ship.
    “Yeah,” Mason nodded. “And I’ve just thought of something. That hole in the roof. We’d better be careful, or we’ll both vanish for good. There may be a stairway going down it, though.”
    Trying to remember the location of the gap, he stepped forward cautiously, gripping the girl’s hand. They waded through intangible rocks that sometimes came up to their waist. It was fantastic, incredible science of an alien world.
    And suddenly Mason felt a mighty throbbing that grew and pulsed all about him. The wilderness of barren rock trembled and shivered, like a painted curtain rustling in the wind, and abruptly it—changed! Like a motion-picture fading from one scene to another the panorama of rocks that seemed to stretch to the horizon grew vague and disappeared, and in its place grew another scene, a weird, alien landscape that hemmed in the pair as though they had been transported to another world.
    All about them now was a tangled forest of luxuriant vegetation and the bark of the trees, as well as the leaves, the thick masses of vines, even the grass underfoot was an angry brilliant crimson. Nor was that the worst. The things were alive!
    The vines writhed and swung on the trees, and the trees themselves swayed restlessly, their branches twisting in the air. No wind stirred them. They were living beings, and even the long, curiously serpentine red grass at their feet made nauseating little worm-motions.
    There was no Sun—just an empty blue sky, incongruously beautiful and peaceful amid the writhing horrors that hemmed them in, the forest that was as immaterial as the phantom rocks had been.
    “Wait a minute,” Mason said. He took a few steps back, for a curious theory was forming in his mind. And again came the mighty throbbing and the strange