Collected short fiction, p.80
Collected Short Fiction, page 80
“I’m going to show you how it works,” Thon Ahrora said. “I’m going to make something for you.”
She continued to study his head, his features, as if making a painting of him. Suddenly she made a surprising request.
“Will you please slip off your garment, for a moment?” she asked Dick.
He thinks he turned very red; he is glad that the girl was bent over her banks of keys at the moment, and did not see him. He turned from her, and thought swiftly, while pretending to be tugging at the strap. Evidently, ideas of modesty had changed a bit in two million years. “While in Rome, do as the Romans do,” he muttered, fearing that a refusal would hurt her feelings as had his evident surprise when she had kissed him.
He unfastened the shoulder-strap of his single simple garment, and let it fall to his feet.
He tried to keep his face impassive as she had him turn from position to position, while she critically eyed his body, and continued to let her swift fingers play over the many rows of keys. But it was with distinct relief that he got back inside the scanty garment, when she signified that she was through.
Still the blue, radiant current of force seemed to stream across from the sapphire disk to the one of green metal. A dense glowing condensation of azure luminosity had gathered midway between them, on the glistening surface of the black platform. Now she moved a final lever, and the blue gleam vanished. The crystal disk faded and the throbbing sound was hushed.
“They are finished,” she said.
With childish eagerness, she moved a handle on the wall. A slender metal walk, a sort of lifting drawbridge, was dropped across from the high stage where they stood to the jet platform. Thon Ahrora led the way across, ran to the center of the vast, glistening surface.
Standing there, side by side, were three tiny statuettes of Smith, exquisitely finished and colored in all the hues of life. It is one of them that he put in the little black case, with his notes.
“See!” the girl cried, presenting him with one of them. “Aren’t they lovely?”
“The rays are focused sharply, to build up the atoms in a predetermined spot,” Midos Ken informed him. “Any object can be formed, directly—no manufacturing processes are necessary. It is even possible to plate a thin film of one metal over an object of another. Thon could build a space flyer on that platform, complete, provisioned and ready to leave the earth, merely by controlling the formation of the electronic energy into atoms, through this keyboard.”
“Now for the experiment!” Thon cried, when she had ceased admiring the little statuette of Dick. They went back to the stage, and again she manipulated the banks of keys. She had cryptic notes before her, and held long consultations with Midos Ken, in terminology so technical that Dick made nothing of it.
HOUR after hour she labored, while the great hall rang with the deep, vibrant music of humming generators, and the great disk shimmered with the blue-violet radiance that streamed toward the green plate in a pure stream of force.
Again and again they returned to the great table of jet, to examine the results of the experiment. Always it had failed. They found only little piles of gray, ashlike substance, sometimes filled with tiny, glistening globules of fused metal.
It was terrible to Dick to see their slow waning of hope. He had come to feel deep affection for both of them; and he shared their vision of the boon they struggled to grant humanity.
“I cannot synthesize it,” Thon admitted at length. “It is hopeless,” Midos Ken agreed.
“No! It isn’t hopeless!” the girl rejoined, with unbroken confidence. “As you have said so often, Nature is infinite. We know the catalyst we seek is possible. Somewhere, Nature must have formed it!”
“If only we can find it!”
They returned to Bardon. That evening, they were sitting in the simple living room of Midos Ken’s apartments in the silver tower. The fragrant breath of the night entered through wide windows. Soft, restful radiance streamed from the luminous green walls, over the long couches upon which they reclined.
Dick, through half-closed eyelids, had been admiring the slender form of Thon Ahrora, as she lay at full length on a rich, yet simple divan, staring dreamily at one of the little statuettes of Dick, which she had placed on a low, massive table of what looked like white-veined green marble, standing at the side of the room. She had been discussing with her father the failure of the experiment.
“You can have those boxes of diamonds piled in yonder,” Dick was saying, “if you need them to carry on the good work. To the last token!”
A low, gutteral laugh rang behind him. A harsh, unpleasant voice spoke mockingly, jeeringly.
“Never mind! I’ll take charge of the diamond tokens!”
Dick saw Thon whiten with sudden fear. Old Midos Ken had sprung erect beside his couch, holding his head as if trying in vain to see. He had heard the intruders an instant in advance of the others.
By the time the sneering speech was ended, Dick was on his feet.
His eyes met black, malignant orbs. A powerful man, clad in a brilliant crimson garment, with a girdle of black, was striding toward the center of the room. His heavy face, with jutting nose, and cruel sensuous mouth, was vaguely familiar to Dick.
Behind him stood a dozen soldierly figures—men in black, with scarlet belts, and long, glistening, ebony tubes. More were crowding through a broad, open window, stepping, evidently, from the end of a metal gangplank. It led, Dick knew instinctively, to some flying ship moored or floating close against the wall of the building.
Like Thon Ahrora and her father, he was petrified with surprise and sudden fear. Such a danger he had not dreamed of.
“A cool welcome!” the taunting voice rang out again. “Do homage, slaves! Do homage to Garo Nark, Lord of the Dark Star!”
Recollection flashed upon Dick of the amazing television picture he had seen upon the day of his coming, recollection of what Thon Ahrora had told him of this man, with his hatred of her and her father. And here he was in the very room, come across a hundred thousand light-years of space! Come to take the girl?
At the thought, Dick saw red. The man was striding forward with insolent confidence, only a few feet away. Dick sprang at him with panther-like quickness, swinging a right at that proud, evil face, with all the savage force born of scornful anger.
Garo Nark made no attempt to guard himself, but it is unlikely that he could have evaded that fierce blow if he had tried. It connected squarely on his jutting chin. The force of it carried him staggering backward, to crash upon the floor.
“How’s that?” Dick demanded, staring belligerently at the row of black-clad men behind their fallen leader, who, apparently dazed with horror at what he had done, were raising their thick, jet-like tubes in a threatening manner.
CHAPTER IV
The Man from the Green Star
AFTER a moment, a tiny, bony man, with a scraggy yellow beard and glittering, greenish, snake-like eyes, stepped forward importantly. A second in command. He glanced at the still body of Garo Nark, jerked out a word which brought two men up to pick him up.
Dick held his ground over the fallen figure. He shook his fist in the thin man’s face.
“Stand back!” he muttered. “Or I’ll smash your face!”
He was beside himself with anger, filled with a curious intoxication of elation at having felled Garo Nark. Caution was forgotten.
The little, scrawny man voiced a quick order to the soldiers behind him, who were uncertainly holding their black tubes pointed toward Dick. At the word, they steadied the weapons, which looked like cylinders of jet crystal two inches thick and six feet long. Their fingers sought sliding rings of silver, about the middle of the tubes. Violet fire seemed to glow deep within the crystal bars.
“Oh, Dick!” Thon cried. “They will kill you! Come back!”
She ran forward, seized his arm, pulled him back.
The scraggy man jerked out another order, and the men lowered the black crystal rods. The violet flames died in them.
The two men in black lifted Garo Nark to his feet. One of them produced a little brown pellet, which he ground between his fingers, and held under the nostrils of the unconscious man. After a moment, a tremor shook his great body; he groaned and turned his head aside. In an instant more he seemed to have fully recovered his senses.
Thon Ahrora still stood beside Dick, grasping his arm. Her strong fingers were closed about it almost painfully. Dick looked down at her with what he tried to make a reassuring smile. Her blue eyes flashed back courage.
Garo Nark seemed to be seething with rage. Glaring evilly at Dick, he bent to whisper something to the scrawny, green-eyed man, whom he called Pelug.
“So you are the fish that our blind fool caught out of the past, eh?” he sneered at Dick. “A savage who fights with his hands, eh? Well, we’ll show you the weapons that modern men use!”
He grunted to a man behind him, who raised a long bar of black crystal. Violet flame pulsed inside it, through its length.
“The El Ray,” the jeering giant went on. “We will turn your feet to water with that! I dare say we can demonstrate the use of half a dozen weapons upon you, before you are used up!
“You are the great historian, eh, who wrote the history that earned so much? Ha! I wager our pretty Thon wrote the book for you! Well, I shall take the lady and the diamonds. Yes, and show you how our weapons work!”
Dick’s blood was boiling under the taunts. He longed for a revolver, a knife, for any sort of a weapon. He burned with a hot desire to send his fist crashing against that swollen jaw once more. But Thon’s firm grasp on his arm restrained his mad anger. He grinned with savage joy when the gigantic Garo Nark had to pause to spit blood.
The black, evilly blazing eyes of the giant turned to the slight figure of Thon Ahrora.
“Yes, my darling Thon,” his harsh jeering tones continued mockingly, “you are coming with me to the Dark Star! To be one of my queens! No, your father will not grieve for you! He will never think of you again! For now you are going to see him melt into water, beneath the El Ray!”
The Lord of the Dark Star turned to hiss an order to the scrawny Pelug.
At the instant, Dick’s eye caught a movement from Midos Ken. The old scientist, with one single motion, snatched from his pocket in his dark-green garment a long, slender vial or tube, which he held hidden under his hand. In the glimpse Dick had of it, it seemed utterly black, seemed to absorb all light that struck it. The motion had been cautious, not even the soldiers, listening to the words of Garo Nark, had noted it.
“You wonder, perhaps, how I come here, from the planet I rule?” the Lord of the Dark Star addressed Midos Ken. “Before I turn you to a cloud of steam, I shall have you know that you are not the only scientist in the Galaxy. Our new war fliers are equipped with K-ray rockets that will drive them through the distance in a month, even if we cannot ride the ray from planet to planet.
“Oh, we have science upon the Dark Star! Your passing, unfortunate as it is, will not wholly blot the light of learning from the universe! And how did we slip through the Patrol, you wonder? Our new fliers can make circles about the clumsy vessels of the Union! In fact, they did not even see us! My scientists have developed a new substance that reflects no light at all. Our ships are armored with that. It made them invisible, in the darkness of space!
“Something more that you did not discover, Midos Ken! And a wonderful thing. Even a man, with his garments and his body painted with it, would be almost invisible, in the proper surroundings. So you are not the only scientist!”
Garo Nark was standing forward boldly, flanked by his men, their El Ray tubes raised to execute his threats. Thon Ahrora still held Dick’s arm, as if to hold him from unwise violence.
Midos Ken still stood beside his couch, erect and motionless. He had not moved or spoken. His calm, blind face had shown no feeling, under either the threats or the taunts of the pirate emperor. The black tube he had so unobtrusively snatched from his pocket was hidden in the hand hanging still at his side.
But Dick heard suddenly a tinkle of shattering glass. He knew that the old scientist had dropped the little vial upon the floor.
“Fire!” Garo Nark shouted at the same instant to his men.
Then blackness came suddenly around Dick. Absolute darkness, complete, indescribable. It pressed upon him in a wall of rayless obscurity. Stunned, bewildered, terrified, he clapped a hand to his eyes. It made no change—there was no faintest ray of light for his hand to stop.
A clatter reached his ears through the pall of utter midnight. A soldier must have dropped his weapon in surprise. Shouts of confusion and fear came from the men.
“Fire!” Garo Nark shouted again, apparently undismayed.
“Come!” Thon uttered a voiceless whisper in Dick’s ear. Tugging at his arm, she led him swiftly to the side of the room. “Quietly!” she added. “Father is used to the dark. He can find the way alone!”
A low laugh came from behind them, from Midos Ken. “No good to fire, Nark,” he said, speaking for the first time. “I have exhausted the ether about us. No electromagnetic radiation can reach through an inch of this darkness! And who is the scientist now?”
Garo Nark was urging his men forward. There were shouts, sounds of motions. Men were running against each other, seizing one another, stumbling over furniture.
Then Thon and Dick had reached a sort of trap-door in the corner of the room. Hidden as it was, Dick had not learned of it before. It sprang open to the girl’s touch. She guided Dick through. He dropped to a floor ten feet beneath, caught the girl in his arms as she fell after him.
Another instant, and Midos Ken, to whom the darkness made no difference, had dropped cat-like and silent beside them. They hurried off down a long, sloping passage. A hundred feet, or more, they had gone, before they stepped from a solid wall of dense blackness into the soft green light that fell from the luminous walls of the narrow corridor.
They reached a tiny, windowless chamber at the end of the passage, unfurnished save for a bench along one wall, and a television device built into the other. Midos Ken put the latter into operation; spoke loudly into it.
“I’ve called the Union Patrol,” he said, turning. “My little cloud of darkness will last five minutes. The fliers will be here in ten. Garo Nark will have no time to look for the hidden door that leads here—he may think we have vanished with some scientific trick.”
For a dozen minutes, they waited in tense, anxious silence. Thon was staring intently at the dark television screen on the wall opposite from where she sat. Midos Ken was listening intently. He seemed to be able to tell the movements of the pirates by the sounds they made, though Dick could hear nothing. His hearing seemed preternaturally acute; Dick wondered if he had a sort of microphone concealed about his person.
“The darkness is gone,” the blind man whispered. “Garo Nark is telling his. hellions to search for us.” For minutes he was silent. “They are carrying out the chests of diamond tokens,” he said again. Then he cried out, almost in alarm, “A man is near the hidden door!”
A SOFT cry escaped Thon Ahrora. The television screen had brightened. Upon it was the bust of a man, in a curious uniform. Behind him was the complicated apparatus of the bridge of a space cruiser.
“We are above Bardon,” the officer said briskly. “Was the call a mistake? Or have the pirates gone.”
“They are still here!” Midos Ken cried. “I hear them!”
“Their ship is covered with a substance that makes it almost invisible,” Dick spoke up, remembering the leering boasts of the Lord of the Dark Star.
“Their lookouts must have seen the cruiser,” Midos Ken spoke quickly. “I hear them rushing from the room. Make haste!”
The man on the screen turned, spoke orders to unseen assistants, spun wheels and dials on the apparatus that filled his bridge. It was minutes before he turned back.
“My detectors picked up the etheric disturbances from their generators,” he said. “So I know they got past us. But we could see nothing. And they got quickly beyond the range of the detectors.”
“It is Garo Nark, Lord of the Dark Star!” Midos Ken cried. “Something must be done! Is that prince of pirates to rule the Galaxy?”
“Word will be passed to the Union Patrol captains,” the officer said, “that he is cruising in this part of the Galaxy. But if his ship is invisible and as speedy as it seemed to be when he shot out past us a moment ago—well, I see little hope!”
A few minutes later the three had climbed back through the hidden door. The apartment was empty, deserted. Dick and Thon ran to the room where the diamond tokens had been. They were gone! Only a glittering handful remained, scattered across the floor, which the pirates had spilled and had had no time to pick up.
“No hope now, for a cruise through the universe, to find the catalyst!” Midos Ken groaned.
“Why?” asked Dick. “I thought you said that Thon could build our space ship cut of nothing.”
“Not out of nothing,” said the girl. “Out of energy. And we can’t have the energy without the tokens to pay for it!”
Three days later a stranger entered the apartment and walked up to Midos Ken. Each placed his right hand on the other’s shoulder, in salutation. Dick liked the newcomer at a glance.
Tall he was, and powerfully built. His skin was bronzed by the rays of a thousand suns and the storms of a thousand savage planets. Dauntless courage and ironic humor gleamed in his wide-set brown eyes. His hair, long, jet-black, glistening, fell to his shoulders. It was held from his face by a broad band of vividly blue, velvet-like stuff, fastened about his forehead.
