Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 41: what you’re looking at

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

and twisted it, boring out a mighty hole through’ which the snow-castles of a race of children were falling eternally in flakes of snow and ruin. Above, past the vainly whirring helicopter blades, the bore of the pit ran up to the rapidly disappearing opening dimly lit with a rosy light, where the world lay dying. Then it had gone, and for a long time we fell in a dull twilight, filled with the flashing of falling lights. At last, below, miles below, another dim light brightened, a different light, pale and’ phos- phorescent with something of the hue of the Indian Pipe that one finds growing in slowly rotting woodlands. There lay another world, a world where the thing that had cleft the city had originated. What was it like? What Things lived there that had planned this destruction of the upper world? We forgot, Doc and I, that we were but onlookers. The crew of the aero could have felt no more strongly the horror of the moment, and the awed, high-pitched wonder of it set our nerves on edge. Pee at least ai hour we fell, the camera seemingly acting automatically, while the dead white light swelled from a pin-prick to a gleaming eye in the darkness, and the rosy twilight faded around us. Then, of a sudden, the wind ceased and the little aero was whirled here and there like a bit of thistledown in the maelstrom of the winds! The Things below had | closed the opening through which air was being sucked into their airless or highly rarefied world. Like a chip in a torrent we were tossed help- lessly, the voice of the winds once more an exulting shriek, until at last the black wall spun close, there was a rending of metal and crystal, and we were tumbling dizzily down toward the pale white light! Exploring aeros must have found the camera there, lying amid the debris of the upper world upon the vast disk of pure crystal, half a mile across, that filled the bottom of the hole, found it and brought it back to have its film run off by another aero-crew. For after one short, vague glimpse of a heaving sea of billowing luminous waters, and a wilderness of jagged black rock, smeared with red lichens, and covered with the crushed rem- nants of a once-mighty city, there was blackness, blackness that opened on another scene. It was the city again, the shattered, torn remains of the once glorious metropolis, with that great gaping pit staring at us like a dead sunken eye. The roads that led from the four outer gates were thronged with human beings, four broad living rivers of writhing color stretching out over the level plain between matted fields of pale green grain. Cars, pedes- trians, even crude man-drawn carts heaped with furniture and. provender, all passing endlessly on, ever away from the city, the homes forever lost to them. We were in a closed aero now, one of myriads that thronged the air or hovered over the roads, watching. Higher still, in the traffic lanes, were mighty commercial ships, filled with freight and packed with staring, frantic humanity. Here and there, traveling in little groups or long drawn-out rib- bons were the private aeros. Apparently ours was a news-aero, filming the a comicbooks.con