Free The Deadly Sky by Doris Piserchia

Timbrini.
    Thirty minutes later I was back where I swore I would never be again, at the barracks compound in the company of a host of drells and people who seemed to be walking stiffly.
    I landed in a section I had never seen before beside a squat building that occupied a solitary place near the crack. The clouds were so dense that I was unable to see the metal corridor sitting on a butte and sticking up into the sky. It was the doorway or hallway into the alien dimension. Before long I would become closely acquainted with it.

    Falloway escorted me from the plateau to a small empty room. I didn’t see anyone else and I waited anxiously, wondering if Grena bad been told of my return, trying to decide if it mattered whether she knew or not.
    A drell came in, walked up to me and stuck out a glass hand. “How are you today?” he said. “My name is Mills Suttler.”
    The little finger on my left hand tingled with old pain. I didn’t shake with him. I didn’t say anything either. Avoiding him altogether, I moved to one of the chairs in the room and sat down. No matter what name he chose to call himself, he belonged to my father, bought for cold cash.
    “A man can’t be bought or sold,” he said, moving up beside me. He might have been reading my mind.
    “You took his money,” I said.
    “Because he insisted. He wouldn’t believe that I was willing to come into his household for nothing. The money is waiting for him or you whenever you care to claim it.”
    I looked up at him coldly. “Mills Suttler? I thought he died three hundred years ago.”
    “I did,” he said. “Will you come with me, please?”
    “Why should I?”
    “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” I got up and followed him through a far door into another room that had a dark tunnel where one wall should have been. There was a variety of machinery here, some tall, some low, all glittering and expensive-looking. On another wall was an image of the ever-present weapon that sat just beyond the crack in the sky outside.
    Sargoth or Mills Smiler or whoever he was paid no attention to the drells but led me straight toward the tunnel.
    “Go on in,” he said.
    To say that my heart was in my mouth was an understatement. Here I was and this was it, and what distressed me more than anything else was that no one in the room seemed to think much of the fact that I was about to step into Hell. Not even Sargoth. Mills Suttler. Long-dead educator, figure of state, scientist, man of letters, respected has-been. But I had lived with this glass man nearly half my life and I supposed that some kind of feeling had grown between us.
    My rage was a hot ball in my throat as I cast a contemptuous glance around me. Their experiments were doomed from the start. They hadn’t a hope of saving mankind when they held the individual in such little esteem.
    I walked past Sargoth into the dark tunnel. “You might not make it,” he said, but I paid him no heed. Naturally I would make it. Hadn’t Fallowáy predicted that I would, even before I was born? Wasn’t that why they sent a drell into my father’s house, to watch the developing recruit and see that nothing happened to him? Until they could pitch him into their devil’s maw?
    It frightened me more than I had ever dreamed I could be, but I continued walking into the tunnel that extended for a hundred feet before suddenly narrowing. The metal walls caught the sounds of my rapid breathing and sent them echoing back along my trail. I didn’t care if they knew I was afraid. What did it matter since I probably wouldn’t be coming out again?
    I kept walking through the tunnel and suddenly I wasn’t there anymore but was suspended in midair. Still I made walking motions to progress through a thick gray cloud. When I passed from one dimension into the next I was well aware of it. One made total sense while the other did not. One was beloved while the alternative was not.
    There was no longer anything solid for me to