“Well,” observed Markley, after contemplating this milieu with a troubled frown, “the problem of how we got here is equaled in its abstruseness only by the problem of how we are going to get away. It’s beyond me—I pass it up. The whole business is wrong and impossible. And this crazy landscape isn’t the only joker, either. Our nitrone fuel simply won’t explode—there’s something—hell knows what—that prevents combustion.”

“Sure the tubes are all right?” queried Morris. “Maybe we’ve run short of fuel.”

“Huh!” the tone was superbly contemptuous. “I know this boat. There’s nothing the matter with the rocket mechanism. And I loaded up to the limit with nitrone before we started. We could have chased Sakamoto to the Great Wall of China and back again, if necessary, without re-fueling. I tell you, we’re up against something that was omitted from the text-books. Just look at this ungodly hole, anyway. It’s like the scrambled hallucinations of a hundred cases of delirium tremens.”

“I’ve monkeyed with hashish and peyote beans in my time,” said Morris, “but I’ll admit that I never saw anything like this. However, we’re probably missing a lot by staying in the ship. What do you say to a little promenade? Sakamoto and his friends may be somewhere in the neighborhood, too; and if they are, I’d like to get a line on them.”

Very cautiously, the two men unstrapped themselves from their seats and arose. In spite of their heavy garments, they felt a queer physical lightness that argued a lesser gravitation than that of Earth, and which no doubt accounted for the leisurely fall of the plane. They almost seemed to float around the hull; and found great difficulty in controlling and calculating their movements.

They had brought along a few sandwiches and a thermos bottle of coffee. These, their sole provisions, they decided to leave in the plane. Both carried automatic pistols of a new type, firing fifteen shots with terrifically high-powered ammunition, and having almost the range of rifles. Making sure that these pistols were ready in their holsters, which formed part of the leatheroid garments, and re-testing their oxygen-tanks and helmets, the men opened the sealed door of the hull by means of a spring-apparatus, and emerged.

The air of the valley, as far as they could tell, was still and windless. It seemed to be quite warm, and they were forced to shut off the heating mechanism in their suits, which they had turned on against the zero of the stratosphere. Almost vertically overhead, a heavy and lob-sided sun glared down, pouring out its light like a visible flood of reddish-brown liquid. A few clouds, with unearthly forms, floated idly about the sun; and far off in the lower heavens, above dim hills and crags, other clouds went racing by as if driven by a mad tempest.

Trying to determine the course of their descent into the valley, Morris and Markley perceived an aerial blur at one point in the heavens—the same blur, it seemed, into which they had flown above Nevada. It occurred to Markley, in his mounting bewilderment and consternation, that this blur was perhaps formed by the meeting or overlapping of two kinds of space, and was the entrance between their own world and some alien dimension into which they had been precipitated. It was visible in the reddish air like the “ropiness” or cloudy nucleus that sometimes appears in a clear wine.

From Markley’s viewpoint, this explanation of their dilemma was extremely wild and fantastical. But he could not think of any other.

“Which way shall we go?” he queried, as he and Morris surveyed the valley on all sides. At the end that had been previously invisible from the plane, the vari-colored stream emerged from a defile of madly tilted cliffs and pinnacles, hued as with petrified rainbows. On both sides of the valley were long, uneven slopes and barren bluffs, looming vaguely above areas of fantastic forestation. One of these areas, lying on the right hand, approached in a sort of arc to within a hundred yards of the rocket-plane.

“I move that we head for the nearest timber,” said Morris, indicating this mass of grotesquely varied growths. “I have a feeling, somehow, that I’d like to get under cover as quickly as possible. I may be wrong, of course, but something tells me that Sakamoto and his compatriots are somewhere in the vicinity.”

“Their visibility is pretty poor, if they are,” commented Markley. “We may have lost them altogether—maybe they got safely through that atmospheric blind spot.”

“Well, I’m not taking any more chances than I have to. I don’t care for the idea of a soft-nosed Japanese bullet in the back.”

“If rocket fuel won’t explode in this world, there’s no certainty that cartridges will either,” Markley pointed out. “But anyway, we might as well take a look at the woods.”

They started off toward the forest, trying to control the absurd lightness that sent them bounding for twenty feet or more. After a few paces, however, they found that their weight was increasing rapidly, as if they had entered a zone of stronger gravitation. They took one or two steps that were almost normal—and then floated off in ludicrous leaps of a dozen yards that were checked suddenly as if by another belt of increased gravity.

The trees, which had seemed so near, retreated in a strange and disconcerting fashion. At length, after many minutes of variable progression, the men saw the wood looming immediately before them, and could study its details. High in the heavens, above all the other growths, there towered two incredibly elongated boles such as might be seen in the delirium of hashish; and about them a medley of lesser forms, no two of which displayed the same habit, leaned and crawled and squatted or massed themselves in monstrous tangles. There were single plants that combined enormous moon-shaped leaves with others that were fern-like or lanceolate. Gourd-like fruits grew on the same tree with others in the form of tiny plums and huge melons. Everywhere there were flowers that made the most ornate terrestrial orchids appear simple and rudimentary as daisies in comparison.

All was irregular and freakish, testifying to a haphazard law of development. It seemed that this whole chaotic cosmos in which the earth-men found themselves had been shaped from atoms and electrons that had formed no fixed patterns of behavior. Nothing, apparently, was duplicated; the very stones and minerals were anomalous.

So far, they had met nothing in the form of animal life. Now, as they neared the forest, a creature that was like a poddy and spider-legged serpent came down as if from the heavens on one of the preposterously tall boles, running swiftly. With curiosity tinged by a nightmarish horror, the men stepped toward the tree, unable to decide which end of this curious creature was the head and which the tail.

Astoundingly, in a mirage-like fashion, the forest faded away with their change of position; and they saw its baroque tops at a seeming distance of several hundred yards, in a diagonal direction. Turning, they found that the whole valley, during their brief journey, had shifted about and had recomposed itself beyond all recognition. They were not able to locate the rocket-plane for some moments; but finally, in an opposite quarter, and seemingly much further away than they had supposed, they discerned the gleaming of its wings and hull.

Before them, in lieu of the forest, was an open space in which the vari-colored stream had mysteriously reappeared. Beyond the stream arose plots of scattered vegetation, backed by opalescent cliffs.

Markley and Morris felt an indescribable confusion, a terrible and growing dubiety that involved the veraciousness of their own senses. Their very sanity was challenged by the labyrinth of impossible and illusory images into which they had wandered. For perhaps the first time in their lives, they knew the sensation of being utterly lost, in a bournless world of incertitude. Their habitual buoyancy and jauntiness began to evaporate, giving place to a furtive, unacknowledged terror.