The Time Trap by Henry Kuttner Page B

crawling and shifting of the red forest, and as he retreated it melted swiftly into the familiar wilderness of jagged rock. Alasa had vanished. Looking over his shoulder, Mason could see the time-ship beside the great boulder. He moved forward again and Alasa sprang into view, her golden eyes wide and frightened.
    “Okay,” he told her. “Let’s hunt for the hole, eh?”
    “Here it is, Kent. I almost fell into it. She pointed at the wormy tangle of red grass near by. Mason stared. Of course, he could not see down into the gap. The scarlet, vegetation hid it. He knelt and, overcoming his repugnance, thrust his face down through the twisting grasses. He was in empty blackness—below the ground level in the world of the red plants, Mason knew.
    A curious conviction came to the man that these scenes, the strange mirages on the tower, were not merely created phantoms, but actual reflections of real worlds that exist, or did exist, or will exist in the future. He circled cautiously about the gap.
    It was about twenty feet across. His fumbling hands found an incline going down into the darkness, slippery and too steep to walk upon. It went down at an angle of about forty-five degrees, as well as Mason could judge, crawling on his hands and knees and feeling there in the empty darkness.
    “Kent,” the girl said with quiet urgency. “Listen!”
    “Eh? What—”
    Then he heard it—a harsh, very loud scratching noise. It came from the depths of the invisible shaft. It grew louder, and a sudden premonition made Mason seize Alasa’s hand and retreat swiftly. It was lucky that he did.
    The thing came out of the shaft, and first they saw a bristle of waving antenna, and two huge claws jerking convulsively in empty air. It came rising inexorably out of the ground, and in a moment they saw the whole frightful being.
    “An ant!” Mason heard himself whispering. “A winged ant!”
    But it was a colossus. Twenty-five feet long it towered, mandibles clashing, wings outspread, rustling dryly as they clashed against the wing-cases, crawling up blindly.
    The creature moved forward. It was blind, Mason guessed. No eyes were visible, but the antennae apparently took their place. The claws clicked menacingly.
    Horror turned Mason cold. As the thing advanced he flung himself back, pulling Alasa with him.
    “The ship!” he said unsteadily. “Come!”
    The white-faced girl nodded, kept pace with him. At a venture Mason raced in the direction he thought the ship lay. His guess was wrong.
    Almost immediately he heard the throbbing and saw the wavering and shifting, and then they were rushing through—nothingness! Empty fog, gray billows of thick stuff that were so turbid he was completely blinded. Thinking with lightning speed, Mason turned at right angles, dragging Alasa, and cut across in a frantic attempt to locate the ship.
    He heard a clashing, a dry rustling—the giant ant, hurrying in pursuit. Madness of fear tugged at Mason’s brain. It was the quintessence of horror, wading through rocks he could not feel, racing through trees that did not exist. The ant trailed its prey by scent, or by some less familiar sense, and as it was blind the shifting three-dimensional mirages made no difference to it. They had been created, apparently, to confuse the enemies of the ant-monsters.
    Mason and Alasa would be sprinting through what seemed to be a field of emeralds, glinting under a hazy sky with a low-hanging moon, when there would come the shifting and throbbing, and the panorama would fade away like the mirage it was. And in its place would come, perhaps, a vast field of frozen white, with not an object visible and a black, starless sky overhead. Once they were hurrying through a green swirl of water, with seaweed drifting by and curious creatures swimming past them—through them! A thing like a great opaque white ball, pulsating and writhing, drifted at Mason, and he leaped aside, shuddering.
    Then they would hear the dry rustling,