The fog of their world matched the fog in
their minds. Rebelling against science, they
smashed it, dragged their people down into
the ancient mists. But Ho Dyak wanted light.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1946.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The fog sea thinned before Ho Dyak, and he could see the dank rocks ofthe cliffs he scaled a scant twenty feet beneath his feet. The networkof blue-veined pale vines that he climbed thinned even as the airitself thinned. Far below him in the lowlands the mat of agan vineswas three hundred feet in depth in many places.
Higher and higher climbed Ho Dyak, his long pale face, with its fullred lips and great thick-lidded purple eyes, drawn with pain. For theair of the uplands was chill. As the fog thinned, so too dropped thetemperature.
Ho Dyak gripped tighter the pouch of flayed drogskin, in which fiveof the forbidden foot-long cylinders of metal skins nestled, as hepaused for a moment to rest. It was because of them, the forbiddenscrolls stored in a musty forgotten chamber of the Upper Shrine ofLalal, the One God of Arba, that Ho Dyak was now climbing into thefrigid death of the cloudless uplands.
The ivory-skinned body of the man was swathed in layer upon layer ofquilted and padded garments of leather and fabric. His two feet, withtheir webbed outstretched toes, and his short stubby middle limbs,strong-fingered webbed hands at their ends, were encased in sturdymitten-like moccasins. Only his long upper hands were encased in stoutleather gloves with four divisions—one for the thumb and the otherthree for his four-jointed fingers.
Over his grotesquely swollen bulk, for which his myriad garments wereresponsible, Ho Dyak's sword belt and the filled sheath of javelin-likedarts were belted. To his crossed belts also were attached hisbroad-bladed machete-like knife and the throwing stick for his dwarfishspears.
No longer did he fear pursuit. The fighting priests, the dark-robedorsts of Lalal, had brought with them none of the warm garments HoDyak wore. Their shouts and sacred battle cries had died away on theslopes a mile or more beneath where he now perched. For the moment hewas safe from their vengeance.
"I will see what lies above the fog sea," said Ho Dyak to theunresponsive ladder-like network of agan he climbed. "Perhaps I can,for a few short hours, see the vast plateaus that once my people ruled."
The agan made no answer, as Ho Dyak had expected it would not, buthe bent his gaze more closely upon its smooth stems. A greenish tingelay upon them, a tinge that in the lowlands only the rocks or tarnishedmetals bore. The man's heart beat faster despite the chilling cold. Hewas approaching an unknown zone of life!
The fog sea split apart abruptly. His broad shoulders and then histhickly padded middle came above the last remnants of the mist. Andhe sensed a warmth that came from above—not a pleasant warmth, but astrangely stinging heat. He turned his hooded eyes skyward and painfilled his brain at the glaring redness of the lights that blazedthere. Three suns, one huge primary and its offspring, that hung in thecloud-banked blue heavens overhead.
Darkness dwindled into grayness and he could see. He was looking outacross a level rolling expanse of fleecy nothingness. A soft sea offoggy mystery from which vagrant hills of vapor drifted upward lightlyand settled back again. Down beneath that impenetrable damp blanket, heknew, lay the pleasant stone buildings and palaces of his people, and