Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition), April 1944 — page 44: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

42 line of vision. There was the sound of timber crashing into position. Then the hairy thing came into sight again, grinning now. But when he spoke it was like a carnivore Spitting rage: “Tm gonna live here a million years, pen. drake, ’n’ all that time your wife’s gonna be one of my women.” Pendrake gritted: “You mad idiot, even if you win now, you'll die fast enough when the Germans come. And don’t think they won’t, either. You’re just a bunch of bandits to them, a nuisance that they won’t put up with for very long.” The words seemed not to touch the mind of the other. The man was, astonishingly, tugging at the throne platform. Pendrake watched, puzzled, as Big Oaf strained with all his enormous strength at the wooden thing. Abruptly, the structure lifted. It came up; and reeled over with a crash as Big Oaf flung it away from him. Where its timbered sides had been lay the entrance to a cave. “Those fools,’ Big Oaf said, with a withering contempt, “thought I had this platform here, and this stockade, because I wanted to play king. The blue men know the truth, but they won’t learn any language but their own, so they can’t tell even if they want to, which they don’t.” He was bending over Pendrake as he finished. With a grunt, he heaved him to his shoulder, and jumped down into the lighted cave. It was a twenty-foot drop. At the bottom, he tossed his prisoner unceremoniously to the cave floor, and climbed back to the surface. “Don’t get anxious,” he called back mockingly, “I’m just gonna let the platform down into place.” He landed with a thud a minute later, and picked Pendrake up again. “This cave,” he said then, grinning, “leads straight to the pit. ’'m gonna lower you down to my ole pal, the devil beast, and watch the fun. “It'll be some fun, feller, uh!” The cave sloped gently downward, and presently began to widen. It opened abruptly into a vast room filled with metal shapes. Machines! They shone in the reflected light of the cave walls and ceilings. They stood there, silent, secret witnesses to the glory of a people who had attained—not quite immortality, for they were dead—but a measure of greatness probably unequaled in the Solar System before or since and— “You could have had those machines to find out how they worked,” Big Oaf ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION taunted, “and you could have had your wife. But now I'll wait until some other guy comes along who knows about machines, and ain’t so fussy. “Maybe I'll give your wife to him, too,” he added as an afterthought, and bellowed with laughter. Pendrake remained silent. They were out of the machine room now; once more the cave was narrowing. But he scarcely noticed those facts. His mind was rocking back and forth like a swing swaying higher and more wildly with each surge. And every minute the load on that careening brain grew heavier. There was the engine, the unsus- pecting Earth, Eleanor— The thought ended as if it had been cut out of his brain with a knife. The blood drained from his cheeks. The muscles of his solar plexus drew so tight that it was like an acute appendix pain for—he saw the end of the cave. A moment later Big Oaf trumpeted: “Here we are!” He tossed Pendrake to the floor and stood over him, smirking down at him; there was no doubt at all that he was in the throes of sadistic joy. “This opening over the pit,” he grinned, catlike, “‘is nearly three hundred feet farther down than the surface, and about a quarter of a mile from where I showed you the devil beast. The only guys who’ve ever seen this cave are the ones that came too fast out of the machine from Earth. “You saw,” he confided gloatingly, “the way the machine’s only a few feet from the edge of the cliff. There was a time when everything that came through ran right over the edge. I was just walkin’, so I was able to jump back, but the devil beast and a lot of the animals it lived on until I came must have been runnin’ down that trail on Earth. “After I built the corral, and saved all the deer and buffalo and cattle that came through, I fed the beast the leavings; always I fed it myself, until now it knows my call. Lissen!”’ He stepped abruptly to the cliff’s edge, ten feet away, and uttered a low, piercing cry. For a long moment, then, he stood staring down, facing away from Pendrake, stood crouching, slightly bow-legged, a squat, hairy, inhuman shape, a man thing: spawned at the dawn of pre-history, a crea- ture out of a hideous, an impossible dream. But—facing away! Shaking in every Ccomiclooks.c©