Collected short fiction, p.88
Collected Short Fiction, page 88
About the ship were hundreds of men. He could see them by flares they were lighting, and in the glare of searchlights that were turned upon the flier. Near them was a strange machine, looking a little like a huge searchlight, Dick says, but probably a weapon erected to be ready for use when the ether should return. A group of men were busy about it.
Then Thon came bounding into the control room.
“Quick, the lever!” she cried.
Before Dick had had time to move, her fingers were upon the little control lever, with its white accelerator button. Upward they flashed from the surface of the planet. When Dick looked for it a few minutes later, the Dark Star was but a tiny speck of light lost in the hosts of the unfamiliar firmament.
“How are you?” the girl asked solicitously.
“Oh, I’ll be good enough after a bath and a shave and some clean clothes and a little breakfast,” he said, grinning. “And how are you? You seem to have enjoyed most of those things already—except of course, the shave!”
For Thon Ahrora was beautiful, her lithe body clean and glowing from a bath, clad in a garment of the brilliantly blue silk which was her favorite.
“Yes, I got up when it was still dark,” she was saying, when Midos Ken and Don Galeen came up to the bridge. The two of them had slept in the larger stateroom of the old scientist, Don occupying an extra berth.
Don Galeen, tanned and powerful, clad in his soft brown leathern garment, seemed unaffected by their terrible journey back to the flier. His weather-beaten face glowed with smiling good humor. He greeted Thon with such unfeigned and unhidden admiration that Dick, to hide his jealousy, hurried out, on the pretext of making himself presentable again.
It was an hour later when he returned to the bridge, shaved, washed, and freshly clad.
He found Thon conferring with her father, and making intricate computations on a huge sheet of that white material used as paper. Don Galeen was looking on, evidently supplying information and suggestions.
“We are plotting our course for the Green Star,” Thon told him. “Don is helping make a map of that part of the universe in which it lies.
“So we are off for the Green Star, now?”
“We are already driving toward it with the full power of the generators,” Midos Ken told him.
“How soon should we get there?”
“It is well over fifty thousand light years—it should take over one hundred days, perhaps four months.”
Thon, Dick, and Don Galeen were to stand regular watches of four hours each. On Dick’s first watch, a few hours later, he fell to observing the Dark Star through the ship’s telescopic instruments. At first the faint speck of light that was the pirate planet slowly grew more indistinct, as they drew away from it. But presently it seemed to lose no more in brilliance.
“Something must have happened to the generators,” Dick muttered. “We aren’t leaving it as we should!”
A few minutes later, a little disturbed, he called Midos Ken into the bridge.
“I’ve been watching the Dark Star,” he said. “And it doesn’t seem to be getting fainter as it should. Can there be something wrong——”
“The Dark Star still in sight?” the old man was astonished.
“It is.”
“Then Garo Nark has beaten us again!” _
Surprise and dazed apprehension in his manner, Midos Ken called Thon. She looked at the Dark Star, still visible in the instrument and growing no fainter, and consulted her charts.
“Yes, Dad,” she said at length. “The Dark Star is following us.”
“The Dark Star is following us!”
Dick shouted the words, in incredulous amazement.
“Following us? What do you mean?”
“The planet is moving behind us,” Thon told him.
“Garo Nark’s scientists must have developed K-ray generators powerful enough to move their planet like a ship,” Midos Ken added. “It has been known, for ages, of course, that the energy of atoms is powerful enough to swing planets from their orbits. But never before has it been done in practice—no K-ray generators large enough to accomplish such a feat have ever been built—or had been built, rather, until Garo Nark built them!
“The Lord of the Dark Star wishes to seize the fruits of our work for his own evil ends, of course. He wants the secret of life; wants endless youth for himself and his favorites.
“He would rob humanity of the secret of immortality for his own benefit!
“He is following us! Following with a whole planet. Our best chance is to lose him, and beat him to the Green Star.”
CHAPTER IX
Fire of the Green Star
LONG days went by, endless and monotonous. The Ahrora was flashing through interstellar space with her generators developing their utmost power. The little white cylinder of the accelerator was kept locked down. Thon, Don Galeen, and Dick stood watch after watch, as the little flier hurtled forward.
Faint flecks of light appeared in the abyss of utter midnight before them and grew swiftly brighter, until they became dazzling stars, became flaming suns, flashed past, and dwindled behind them.
Directly behind them hung always a dim speck of light, invisible without the highest power of their telescopes. It was the Dark Star, a planet plunging after them in a titanic chase through space.
As soon as they had found that the pirate planet followed them, their direction of flight had been changed a little, so that it would not give a clue to the location of the Green Star. But the damage, Dick thought, had already been done. The planet must have been moving for several hours before they discovered it.
Thon and Don Galeen spent hours in the narrow generator room in the tail of the flier, nursing the throbbing apparatus, trying to make the generators deliver an extra ounce of power.
Midos Ken spent days in thought, trying he said, to devise some way of making their ship invisible as Garo Nark’s fliers were. For it was evident that powerful telescopes upon the Dark Star must be following them. The ether-exhausting bombs would have met the need, but for the fact that they would stop the generators and make them helpless. Finally the old scientist had to admit that here was one problem that he could not solve.
For weeks that tremendous race continued. A planet plunging through interstellar space, headlong, in pursuit of a tiny ship! An empire of pirates pitted against three men and a girl!
Slowly the Ahrora drew ahead. The point of light that was the Dark Star dimmed slowly through the weeks. At last, five weeks after the astounding chase had begun, the image of the pursuer vanished from the screen.
For two weeks more, for the sake of safety, the little flier was kept on the same course. Then the direction of the hurtling flight was changed.
They drove straight for the Green Star.
Don Galeen provided most of the entertainment for his companions during the interminable months of the voyage. Ordinarily he was not a great talker. But his life had been one long adventure, on many planets—he had even been born on a K-ray liner, flashing from sun to sun. And he told long stories, for the edification of Dick and Thon and Midos Ken. Stories of voyages with his father, who had been owner of a small K-ray flier trading among the planets of several suns. Stories of the mutineers who had killed his father and captured the ship, forcing Don, then about twelve years old, to become a member of their crew. Stories of his life upon the jungle-ridden inner planet of Sirius, where he had been a driver of monstrous beasts of burden, and had learned to smoke the tian—the malodorous drug which he still used frequently, sitting in front of the intake fan of the ventilating apparatus, to keep the fumes from asphyxiating the others. Stories of other long years of adventure, of the search for the lost K-ray liner, of the ill-fated attempt to smuggle escaping prisoners from the Dark Star.
Several times he told them again of his quest for the catalyst of life, of the discovery of the Green Star, of the strange green fire that shone from its barren hills and its desolate wastes of snow, of the horrors that he had met upon that weird world, of the cones of blue flame that were its cities, and of the alien and indescribable entities that ruled it, guarding the catalyst.
But Don Galeen seemed reluctant to talk about it. Horror seemed to fill him at the very thought of what he had experienced there—though he was always glad enough to tell of hair-raising adventures on other worlds. Always he hastened through his story, telling them that the Green Star and its beings were so far beyond human experience as to be indescribable in terms of human thought. He hastened to finish his story, and fall into the drugged forgetfulness of the tian.
By this time Dick realized fully that he was in love with Thon. His heart leapt at sight of her in the bridge-room—cool and lovely in her shimmering blue garment, body strong and softly curved, skin smooth and aglow with health, wavy hair falling in a glistening cascade of brown and ruddy golden gleams to her white shoulders, her keen blue eyes alight with humor and the zest of living. He thrilled deliciously at the contact when he brushed past her in the narrow corridor. When he slept he had dreams of her—dreams so vivid that they disturbed his waking hours.
Several times he was on the point of telling her what he felt. But the old inhibitions of his own age clung to him. He had a sense of his ignorance of the culture of this marvelous universe, even of an intellectual inferiority to Thon. There had been two million years of human evolution since he was born, he thought. Did he seem to these people, as Garo Nark had taunted him with being, an ape? True, he could see only slight physical differences; but he could not be sure.
And Thon and Don Galeen seemed to be closest friends. Dick had seen the admiration in the rugged adventurer’s eyes when he looked at the lovely girl; he knew that Don fairly worshiped her. And Thon, having known the rugged fellow since her childhood, seemed to return his devotion with warmest affection.
Dick said nothing of his love. His mental state was far from tranquil. But being a normal young man, he kept in robust health, with an excellent appetite.
At her hurtling pace, the Ahrora carried them swiftly beyond the limits of the galactic stellar system. The Milky Way was no longer a great circle about the hollow celestial sphere—it became a broad bar of misty white behind them. Ever the midnight curtain before them was studded with fewer stars. The strange constellations widened, brightened, flashed past as flaming suns, and left black and empty space before the plunging ship.
A HUNDRED days after they had left the Dark Star a bright speck of light flashed past them which, Don said, was Zulon, the outlying sun, from which he had set out on his search for the catalyst. Before them were only a few stars, far-scattered, speckling the inconceivable vastness of extra-galactic space.
They were plunging from the crowded star-streams of the galactic system, out into the frozen, empty void of space—the space between universes, trackless, desolate, dark beyond conception.
Two days later they darted near the strange red sun of which Don had told them, the red sun encircled with rings of sapphire blue, and on, past it, toward a great binary star.
It was a week later when they plunged through the net of planets of that vast, far-off solar system that Don had explored, finding the colossal ruins of a dead civilization on one world, and teeming, savage jungle life on others.
On they flashed, toward the weird Green Star, which swam unseen in the illimitable, midnight void beyond.
Again and again, with the most powerful of their instruments, they searched the sky behind them, where the Galaxy was a broad bar of silver light, seeming to be set with tiny glittering brilliants—searched for the Dark Star, the planet that was plunging in mad flight after them. They did not see it.
But Dick was uneasy. They had started directly for the Green Star, before they had known they were followed. The invisible agents of Garo Nark, spying upon them back at Bardon, on the earth, had probably heard Don Galeen’s story of his voyage, of the stars he had passed which served as landmarks.
Even if they had outrun Garo Nark, might he not be able to find the Green Star?
Two days after they had left the great blue sun, with its many spinning worlds, a tiny speck of green radiance became visible in the black abyss before them. A tiny point of green that grew slowly brighter.
The Green Star!
It grew as the hours went by. It expanded to a tiny globe, a sphere of frozen emerald light. And the green sphere swelled. They could see long ranges of barren, rugged hills—glowing as if cut from darkest jade. They saw immense, desolate wastes of snow—shimmering with dim green light like dust of beryl.
And on a high, mountain plateau, almost at the north pole of this weird planet, strange blue light was gleaming. Cones of blue flame seemed to rise from the rugged mountain tops.
Don Galeen seemed queerly affected. His brown eyes, usually so alight with humor or flashing with dauntless courage, were wide and strange, filled with nameless horror. His mighty muscles were tensed, as if in a silent battle with terror. His breath came in quick, short gasps.
“Those cones of blue light!” he whispered hoarsely. “They are the homes—the cities of the things! Things I cannot describe! There is horror in them. Horror that I am not anxious to face again. We must land far away, and study them before we go near.”
Nervously he fumbled for the black wooden cylinder in which he smoked the tian. Pity in her eyes, Thon helped him roll the little green pellet into it, and forbore to sniff at the reeking fumes that Don exhaled, as he sank back into the dreamy oblivion of the drug.
It was left for the others to choose the landing place.
“It must be somewhere,” Dick suggested, “where we can remain hidden, while we learn something about the planet. And it should be as near as possible to the part inhabited by these monsters that are guarding the catalyst, so we can observe something of their habits.”
“A very good plan,” Midos Ken agreed.
“I see the very place!” Thon cried, looking at the telescope screen. “South of the high plateau where we see the cones of light, there is a vast, flat green desert—a plain covered with the luminous snow. And south of that plain is another range of hills. Let’s land in those hills, with the desert between us and the cones of light.”
The others agreed that the spot was well chosen. Thon brought the flier down in a swift dart toward a little ravine that opened upon the flat waste of snow. A few moments and they were upon the Green Star!
The Ahrora lay in a narrow canyon, a mere crack in the mountains. The rugged walls that rose dark about her gleamed faintly with green luminescence. She lay upon a bank of shimmering green snow that covered the bottom of the gorge. The snow was not brilliantly green; it was no brighter than snow on the earth beneath full moonlight. The sky above them was dark, filled with a dim greenish dusk.
They had hardly landed when Dick noticed a strange thing. Thon, standing near him in the control room, began to glow with faint green light. A luminous green mist seemed to gather about her skin, her hair, even her garments.
Other objects in the room, the instruments, were aglow with faint viridescence. A mist of emerald dust seemed to hang about the room. He put up his own hand, found it outlined in dim green flame.
“An extraordinarily penetrating radiation!” Thon was saying. “Or it could not enter through our neutronium walls. Even the cosmic ray could not affect us in here.”
“This is damnably queer!” Dick broke out. “It looks like everything is afire. Even we!”
“It’s easy enough to explain,” the girl said. “This planet evidently has a core of some radioactive material, which emits radiations of short wavelength and very high penetrating power. Everything they strike phosphoresces under them, as zinc sulphide under the emanations of radium!”
Then it was that Dick was first conscious of the horror.
Suddenly it seemed to him that the green fire was cold, that it was chilling him. He trembled involuntarily, and drew his garment close against his body. Apprehensively, he looked at the little gauge on which was recorded the temperature of the air inside the flier.
The tiny needle had not moved; the air was really as warm as ever.
But he shivered. Goose flesh roughened his skin. Icy lances of cold ran through him. A peculiarly unpleasant numbness came over his limbs; he felt a dull, throbbing ache in arms and legs, as if cold had penetrated to his very bones.
He felt as if he were rapidly freezing to death, even though the little thermometer told him the inside of the ship was as warm as ever.
Then a strange paralysis came over him.
“I’ll jump up and down,” he was muttering through lips that felt stiff with cold, numb and leather-like. “Slap arms against sides—that will—”
Abruptly it seemed as if an icy needle had been thrust through his throat. His voice died in a gasp. He tried to raise his arms, to flap them against his sides.
And he could not move them!
He could make his hands jerk, twitch slightly. But he could not lift them. Too cold to move, he thought. Frozen solid! But his eyes still moved. He looked at the little thermometer; still it had not changed.
Then came sensations still more unpleasant.
He felt that he was falling. His conscious mind still knew that he was standing in the bridge-room. But he had a sickening sense of plunging down headlong through infinite abysses of space, spinning dizzily as he fell. The nausea, the helplessness, the horror of it overcame him. He longed with all his mind for relief, even for the impact when he struck. But there was no crushing impact—it seemed that he was plunging down forever through illimitable voids of space.
Then another vision. He knew it was a dream, for he could see the familiar bridge-room still about him, and the little thermometer and the other instruments. He could see Thon standing near him, a peculiar grimace of horror frozen on her lovely face.
