He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below. It struck. He heard the sizzle of annihilated matter. He saw the trunk quiver convulsively from the very roots, and the whole fabulous Tree shook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiver up the branches to him the hum of the living dynamo which was closing round his body shrilled up arcs of pure intensity into a thundering silence.
Then without a moment’s warning the world exploded. So instantaneously did all this happen that the gun-blast’s roar had not yet echoed into silence before a mightier sound than the brain could bear exploded outward from the very center of his own being. Before the awful power of it everything reeled into a shaken oblivion. He felt himself falling.…
*
A queer, penetrating light shining upon his closed eyes roused Smith by degrees into wakefulness again. He lifted heavy lids and stared upward into the unwinking eye of Mars’ racing nearer moon. He lay there blinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rouse him. Then he sat up painfully, for every fiber of him ached, and stared round on a scene of the wildest destruction. He lay in the midst of a wide, rough circle which held nothing but powdered stone. About it, rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgotten Illar loomed.
But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty of the city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man’s explosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their beds that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling them into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.
He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it seemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations. And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wrought such destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosive known to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc upon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through the living dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent to enclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.
Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold the twilit world, and nothing but Thag’s living power could have held it so bent to segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.
Then when the Tree’s roots parted, Thag’s anchorage in the material world failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warped space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snapped back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers into—into— His mind balked in the effort to picture what must have happened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must have vanished.
Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag’s very essence, the intolerable power of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curve ceased to be, and Thag’s hold upon reality failed, he must have been dropped back out of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree had stood in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floor into the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim land’s dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of the explosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself through the walls of changing energy into his own far land again.
Smith sighed and lifted a hand to his throbbing head, rising slowly to his feet. What time had elapsed he could not guess, but he must assume that the Patrol still searched for him. Wearily he set out across the circle of havoc toward the nearest shelter which Illar offered. The dust rose in ghostly, moonlit clouds under his feet.
Birthmark
by Seabury Quinn
Last minute shopping at Liberty’s and the Garelies LaFayette had taken more time than I’d reckoned, and the six-seated compartment to which I’d been assigned on the Treves rapide was nearly filled when I finished checking through the provost marshal’s booth at the Gare del’Est and scuttled down the inner platform. Three of the four early arrivals I recognized: Amberson, who as a former New York police lieutenant had been assigned to the Intelligence; Weinberg of the Medical Corps, like me assigned to base hospital work in Treves; and Fontenoy apKern, an infantryman about to take up duties at the provost marshal’s office at the old walled city.
The fourth man was unknown to me and, for no reason I could think of, I disliked him with the sudden spontaniety of a chemical reaction. The double braid on his cuffs marked him as a captain, and where the raccoon collar of his short coat was thrown back, I saw crossed rifles on the neckband of his blouse. His uniform was well-cut and expensive—English-made, I guessed—his blond hair neatly trimmed, his slim, long, white hands sleekly manicured. More of a fop than a soldier he seemed, some dandy from the fashionable East Fifties with a bullet-proof commission going from the secretariat at Paris to staff headquarters at Coblenz; but in the army one goes where he is sent and does the work they set him at.
It wasn’t mere resentment of a grime-and-blood veteran for a pantywaist soldier that stirred my quick, instinctive dislike. It was the smug arrogance of him. Clear-cut as the image on a coin, his profile silhouetted against the window, high-cheeked, hard-eyed, sharp-chinned. Prussian as an oberleutnant of the Elite Guards Corp, that face would have seemed more in its proper setting above the field gray of a German uniform than the olive drab of our army.
The stranger glanced up quickly at my advent, and I had a momentary glimpse of faintly sneering mouth and hard, cold, haughty eyes, then he resumed his reading of the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail.
Greetings were in character: “Hullo,” said Amberson, sweeping me with the quick look of suspicion which is the mark of the professional policeman.
“Thought you’d gone A.W.O.L.,” grinned Weinberg. “Wouldn’t blame you if you had. Lot o’ flu up Treves way; lots o’ work for us poor suckers in the M.C.”
“Hi lug!” apKern saluted me. “Mopped ‘em all up on the Paris sector and goin’ up to croak a few in Germany?”
The blond captain of infantry took no notice of me, nor any of us.
I stumbled over an assorted lot of feet, stowed my duffel in the rack above my seat, and dropped down on the hard cushions. The place across from me was vacant, but a white card indicated it had been reserved. “Wonder who’ll draw it?” apKern wondered. “Pity the poor bloke, havin’ to look at your ugly mug from here to Treves. Gosh, when I came to up at Catigny and saw you starin’ at me, I thought I still was under ether and havin’ a bad dream! If I could a’ talked I’d a’ asked the nurse to slip me a fresh dose of anesthetic—”
“Quiet!” cut in Weinberg. “Who’d know when you were conscious or anesthetized, anyhow? If I’d been there, I would a’ operated on you as they brought you in, you—” His amiable insults stopped half uttered, and a sudden blankness wiped expression from his face as he looked past apKern to the compartment door.
Followed by a railway porter, a girl stood at the entrance. I felt my own heart skip a beat as I looked at her. Mentally I commented, “There ain’t no such animal.”
She was quite young, not more than twenty-three or -four, quite breathtaking in her loveliness. A red cross gleamed upon her overseas cap, and beneath her heavy dark coat with its wide fur collar showed a white stock and the well-cut, smoothly-fitting whipcord uniform of the Red Cross Motor Corps. Three service chevrons on her left cuff showed she was no post-Armistice importation, and her utter lack of self-consciousness showed she was at home with soldiers. More like an effeminate boy than a young woman she seemed as she stepped lissomely between the rows of booted feet and dropped down in the seat across from me. I realized her eyes were golden, a light brown