A rush of air came out. It had the high, sharp tang of ozone, and something unfamiliar.

Newlin stood inside what was obviously an airlock valve. A door inside had opened soundlessly.

He went on. Beyond the inner doorway was a large circular room. Its dimensions seemed far greater than Newlin would have guessed from the exterior of the building.

This was no mere dwelling, no laboratory or workshop. It was a s.p.a.ceship of radical design. Elfin stair-ladders spiralled up and down. The girders seemed impossibly delicate and fragile, as if their purpose was half-decoration, half-functional; and stresses involved were unimportant. Such support framework was insane--in any kind of s.p.a.ceship. It had the quality of fairyland architecture, a dream ship woven from the filaments of spiderwebs.

But there was hidden strength, and truly functional design, as may be found in spiderwebs. Newlin was no engineer, but he sensed solidity and sound mathematics behind the toy structure's delicacy.

The stair ladder supported him without vibration, without give or any feeling of insecurity. He climbed.

Walls and the floor and ceiling bulkheads were rigid to his touch, supported his weight firmly, despite their eggsh.e.l.l-thin appearance of fragility. There were no corners; everything fused together seamlessly in smooth curves. Walls were self-luminous and oddly cool.

The lower chambers were bare of all furnishing. Higher levels contained a hodge-podge of implements, all in the same light, strong formula of design. But none familiar, either as to material or their possible function. There were machines, but all too simple. Neither the bulk of atomic engines nor the intricate complexities inseparable from electric or combustion motors.

Newlin was puzzled.

He stopped to listen, feeling like an intruder into a strange world. The building, or s.p.a.ceship, ached with silence.

Another stairwell beckoned. He climbed, slowly, with increased caution.

It would do no harm to have the gun in hand, ready. Where was the man who lived in such a place? And what sort of man could he be? What would he have in common with the frightened, haughty girl outside? The obvious explanation no longer satisfied.

As Newlin ascended, another floor opened and widened to his vision. The stair-ladder ended here. It was the top floor. But this chamber seemed infinitely larger than the others. At first there was no sight of the man. Newlin stood alone in the center of a vast area. He did not seem indoors at all.

Endless vistas extended to infinity in all directions. In all directions save one, in which stood a tall shadow. Newlin gasped. It was his shadow, detached, seemingly solid.

Three-dimensional, it stood stock still. It moved when he moved. He gasped, then found the answer. By the shadow's echo of his movements, he could trace a vague outline of encirclement.

The walls were a screen, a circle about the room upon which were cast pictures so perfect that the beholder had illusion of being surrounded by eery, exotic landscapes. The scenes were panoramic, all taken at the same angle, by the same camera, and so cunningly fused into a whole that the effect was beyond mere artifice. For a moment, Newlin had stood within the strange world, its crystalline forms and strange jeweled life as tri-dimensional and real as himself.

It was a large screen, alive with light, alive with dancing, flickering figures. There was no visible projector, and the images were disturbingly solid and real. There was depth, without any perception of perspective. It was a reflection of reality, cast upon the plane of circling walls.

Then a man stepped from the screen. He had been invisible, because the projected images had flowed and accommodated themselves to his metal-cloth smock. For the moment, he had been part of the screen.

Newlin could not tear his eyes from that glaring plane of illusion.

Something about the glare played havoc with nerves, and a faint hint of diabolical sound tortured his brain. No such world could exist in a sane universe. Not even with its terrible and heartbreakingly poignant beauty. It was a vision of h.e.l.l, bright with impossible octaves of light, splendid with raging infernos of blinding color, some of it beyond the visible range of human sight. And there was sound, pouring in maddening floods, sound in nerve-shattering symphonies like the tinkling clatter of many Chinese windbells of gla.s.s, all pouring out cascades of brittle, crystalline uproar.

Sound and light rose in storming crescendos, beyond sight and beyond hearing. They ranged into madness.

Newlin screamed, tried to cover eyes and ears at once. He tried to run, but nerve-agony paralyzed movement. He was chained to the spot.

Sound and color descended simultaneously into bearable range.

He stared at the man he had come to see. He stared and the man stared back.

"Genarion?" Newlin asked, his voice thin and vague among the tumultuous harmonies bursting from the screen.

"Who are you that calls me by _that_ name?" cried Genarion. He spoke in the same curious manner as the girl. He showed amazement, mixed with an ugly kind of terror. "You're not one of _them_!"

"Them?" Newlin said, striving for sanity as sound and light swelled again. His brain reeled. "Songeen sent me--!"

Speech itself was a supreme effort.

Genarion was beyond speech. Tigerishly, he moved. He leaped upon Newlin and thrust him back. Newlin sprawled painfully, his back arched and twisted by invisible machinery.

Genarion stood with a gun in his hand. Aiming hastily, he pressed trigger. The beam flashed and licked charred cloth and smoking leather from Newlin's sleeve. There was an odd jangle from the invisible machinery which gouged so tangibly into Newlin's body.

Instinctively, Newlin fired. He did not bother to aim. For him, such a shot was point blank, impossible to miss.

Genarion staggered. Part of his body vaporized and hung in dazzling mist as the projected images of light played over it.

Dazed, Newlin scrambled to his feet. He was sick. But the screen held him. He stared, hypnotized. Images jigged and flowed in constant, eery rhythms. They moved and melted and rearranged themselves in altered patterns, without ever losing their ident.i.ties or the illusion of solidity. The scene was not part of Venus, or of any world Newlin had seen. He had seen every planet or moon in the Solar system. But this was different, alien, frightening.

And the screen was not really a screen at all, for the body of Genarion, hideous in the distortion of death, lay halfway through its plane. And it was changing, subtly, as he watched. It was no longer even a man, totally unhuman, as alien as the world it lay partway in. The body flowed, molten, hideous.

The screen was a surrealist painting, come alive, solid and real. And the solid, physical body of Genarion was part of it. He was dead, but real. His alien form was a bridge between two worlds, and now dead, Genarion was alien to both of them.

It was madness. The madness of the screen communicated itself to Newlin.

Before his shocked eyes, Genarion's body began to steam and rise in a cloud of vaporous, glittering crystals. Swiftly the haze dissipated. It was gone, gone invisibly into the alien world. Whatever Newlin had killed, it was not human, not a man.

Newlin turned and fled down the fairy stair-ladder.

He went through the still-open airlock doors and out into the screaming night. Behind him alarms were ringing frantically. Now they would be ringing in the stations of the Protection Police and call orders would go out to the radio-equipped prowl cars. Police would converge swiftly.

Sound shattered the night stillness. From far away, coming closer, was the shrill wail of a siren. Other sirens.

There was a harsh bleat of police whistles, near at hand. Newlin's imagination quivered with the possibility of blaster beams thrusting at his back. He fled.

The alarms had burst into sound too quickly. Had the girl set the police on him, waiting only long enough to make sure he would accomplish his mission?

Whatever he had been set to kill, had not been human. Not a man.

Intuitively, Newlin realized that the girl had antic.i.p.ated everything.

She knew what would happen, he reflected bitterly. She had promised payment only on delivery of a corpse, when there could be no corpse.

Spud Newlin, Sucker No. 1.

Conscience did not trouble him. After all, the man--or the thing--had fired first, without warning, without waiting to hear him out. Without waiting for details like ident.i.ty, or even asking to hear the message he brought. It was self-defense, in a peculiar way.

Newlin ran and tried to lose himself in the shadowy fastness of Monta Park. He was not surprised that the girl had not troubled to wait and meet him.

He was not even angry. It was part of the game.

The Protection Police radios were carrying the alarm. Soon the Security Police would take up the hunt. If the girl had turned him in, she would be able to give a detailed and accurate description. Newlin guessed that he would be lucky to last even the few hours till daylight--or what pa.s.ses for daylight on cloud-shrouded Venus.