Collected short fiction, p.89
Collected Short Fiction, page 89
BUT all of that had become dim, shadowy, unreal.
Thon was but a phantom. Even his body was a dead, stiff thing, standing there in the little control room. He was apart from it. The freezing cold still pierced him. And he still fell vertiginously, affected with nausea. He was outside his body, falling through giddy space, yet oddly he remained beside it.
It seemed to him that he was in another space, another dimension from the vague room and the dim shadow of Thon. He was falling through another space, falling dizzily and without end. It was a space filled with faint blue light, a sort of frigid, blue gloom.
And monsters writhed through that dusky azure light, slipping past him, clinging to him with hideous tentacles. Long, worm-like things, they were, slimy, cold to the touch as the frozen winds of Antarctica. Green writhing worms, many yards long, coiling horribly about him as he plunged down through unlimited abysses.
Huge green worms, that swam about him in that dim blue light, and stared at him with eyes that were red and utterly malignant, and hard and cold as frozen hearts of rubies.
Huge green worms, that wrapped him in their coils, clung to him with tentacles utterly cold—and fed upon him! They pressed loathsome mouths against him, sucked out the very essence of his being.
Ages seemed to pass. Ages of hellish torture. He felt himself plunging down through sickening immensities of space. Through blue fire of cold inconceivable. Upon hideous monsters that stared at him through huge, malign orbs of frozen crimson, and fed upon his life.
But still he knew that it was only a sort of nightmare dream, for he could see the familiar room about him. But what good was it to know that it was but vision, when he could not move or speak or get aid to stop it?
Tormented ages passed.
Then he saw Don Galeen, who had been sunk in a seat by the wall since long before they had landed, deep in the drugged oblivion of his tian, move and struggle to his feet. Even he seemed half paralyzed. He walked like a man numbed with cold, or like one struggling through a solid wall of some invisible substance that impeded every motion.
Dick saw him get out the little cylinder of polished black wood, in which he smoked the drug. Patiently he watched the struggle to roll a little green pellet into it from the vial; he tried to forget his own agony, to watch and think of something else.
At last Don Galeen had the pellet in place, the cap over it. He put the tube to his lips, and drew. A moment more, and his movements seemed free again. The drug seemed to have given him relief from the horror that had frozen him.
Swiftly he strode to Thon, put an arm about her shoulders, forced the little black tube between her lips. Dick, watching with painful intentness, saw the slight heave of the breast that drew the first whiff of the vapor into her lungs. He saw the frozen mask of horror vanish from her face. Thon smiled in weary, grateful relief, inhaled eagerly through the black wooden tube.
She, Dick knew, had been suffering the same horror as himself. And the drug had given her freedom.
Suddenly she relaxed in the strong arms of Don Galeen, sunk in the dreamy stupor induced by the tian. Gently the mighty man lifted her, laid her tenderly where he had been lying.
Then Don hurried to Dick, put the end of the little cylinder between his lips. Dick struggled to inhale it, fighting the paralysis of his muscles with all the power of his will. At last a little of the pungent vapor came into his lungs.
The change in his sensations was marvelous.
The sense of falling stopped—he was once more in his body, standing firmly on the floor of the bridge. The dusky blue light, and the unthinkable monsters that swam through it troubled him no more. And a delicious sensation of warmth came over his body, sweet beyond understanding. The numbing pain of cold was gone.
With these feelings came a great sense of security, of freedom and relief. And a great weariness and desire for sleep.
Eagerly, as Thon had done, he inhaled the pungent vapors of the tian, and soon fell back into the drugged slumber it induced.
In his notes Dick has devoted a considerable amount of space to tian, and the physiological effects of its use. It is derived from the distillation of the kernels of a certain small shrub found originally on the inner planet of Sirius. It is a narcotic alkaloid, and seems to afford the habitual user much the same satisfaction as some alkaloids known in the present day; morphine, for example. The pleasure of its use seems to be even more intense. And its use is free, to a great extent at least, from the degenerative effects of the narcotics now known.
It seems to have induced marvelous dreams of delight and satisfaction. These dreams were remarkably detailed and vivid—so much so that the dreamer, upon awaking, recalled them almost as realities. They seem to have afforded gratification of all wishes, conscious or repressed.
Dick has given a detailed account of his own dreams on this occasion, attempting to account for them psychologically. Space forbids detailed quotations. It must suffice to say that at the moment of waking he thought himself married to Thon Ahrora, and living with her in his mother’s old house near Dallas, Texas.
HE woke, to find himself lying on his bunk, in the little stateroom he occupied in the flier. Midos Ken was just entering the room, holding a little instrument resembling an hypodermic needle.
“Hold out your arm,” the old scientist said. “I’m going to give you an injection to protect you from the radiations of this planet.”
“You mean you have something that will act like the tian?” Dick cried eagerly, as soon as he was wide enough awake to forget his dream of Thon and recall his recent terrible experience. “Something that will keep me from feeling that terrible cold, and the endless falling? Something that will keep off those monsters?” He shuddered at the recollection.
“Yes,” Midos Ken assured him, “it will do all that. The planet must have a core of some unknown radioactive substance. Its emanations upset our bodies. The sensory nerves were somehow stimulated to give a sensation of cold that did not exist. It somehow induced that dream of falling, which is common enough. The vision of the monster, I did not understand—ar-r-r-r, they were hideous!”
The old man himself trembled, and whispered his last words through chattering teeth.
“Then you saw them, too?” Dick cried.
“I did. And so did Thon. We were helpless in that horror, as you were, until Don Galeen reached us with his tian. The alkaloid neutralized the effect of the radiations, and released us from the horror. I did not inhale the fumes as deeply as you and Thon did. I have been awake some time, preparing these injections. A radioactive salt, in solution, which, I hope, will give complete relief for several days.
“But those monsters! I don’t understand why we should all see them. Dick, this planet is an alien world! There is nothing like it in our universe. It is a wanderer in space, from another universe! We are face to face with things beyond our understanding, things utterly weird and strange!
“We have before us such a battle with the unknown as men have never fought before.”
He stopped, and stood there in the tiny room, silent and thoughtful. Dick lay back on his berth, trying to absorb the astounding and terrifying import of the blind man’s words.
Suddenly the old man stirred, thrust a gnarled hand into a pocket and brought out a little object which he handed to Dick. It resembled a pocket compass more than anything else. That is, it was a little metal case with a transparent cover, with a needle pivoted inside. A tiny red needle, swung on a very delicate pivot. Just below the pivot was a miniature parabolic mirror, with a coil of fine wire inside it, glowing with a red light.
“You see the red needle?” Midos Ken asked. “I cannot, of course. But notice which way it points.”
Dick held the little case level on his palm. And the red needle swung slowly about, and pointed toward the north—or almost toward the north. It vibrated a little, like a compass needle, then held steady.
“It points toward the north,” he said. Then he added, almost shouting in excitement, “It points toward those cones of blue fire we saw!”
“That is the detector which reveals the catalyst we are seeking,” Midos Ken told him. “It points to the substance which will give immortal life to all humanity! The little instrument picks up and amplifies a slight radioactive emanation from the catalyst.”
“Then we are near success!” Dick cried.
“Near success and near failure,” the old man told him solemnly. “We are on an alien world from another universe. Here are powerful forces, tremendous potentialities for good and for evil. If we win, we will bring humanity the greatest boon conceivable.
“But we have roused forces—intelligences!—that we do not understand. If we fail, we may bring death—or some horror worse than death!—to all the planets of our universe.
“Those monsters that we dreamed of are not all dream! They are real! They are the guardians of the catalyst! And they are our enemies!”
In a few moments Thon came into the room, with a cheerful greeting to Dick. She seemed recovered from the horrible effects of the planet’s sinister emanations. With a smile, she took the needle from her father, made Dick extend his arm, and injected something into it.
“Now Don won’t have to share his precious tian with us!” she cried, laughing.
Dick did his best to be cheerful, and to answer her sallies in the same spirit. But he felt himself rather unsuccessful. He did not believe in premonitions. But he felt a shadow of doom upon them all.
The Green Star was simply not a normal environment for our kind of life at all. Every feature of it was alien, hostile, menacing. It was a world from another universe, where unfamiliar laws prevailed, and strange forms of intelligence held sway.
Presently they went to the little galley, where Don Galeen had set out for them a sumptuous repast of synthetic foods. But Dick had little appetite. Though Midos Ken’s injections had driven the green luminosity from their bodies, the very dishes on the table, and the foods they ate were aglow with faint green fire.
THEY were in a weirder world than men had ever dreamed of. The uncanny strangeness and the alien horror of it were continually present; they were oppressive.
For many days they stayed there deep in the canyon. Thon and Midos Ken were making scientific researches that Dick did not clearly understand. One of their objects was to analyze and determine the cause of the strange and sinister radiations that penetrated upward from beneath the crust of this planet, causing all objects that they struck to phosphoresce with the green light. There were other and more involved investigations relative to their dreams or visions of the monsters swimming in a haze of dim blue light.
“We are dealing with an utterly alien world,” Midos Ken said several times. “There is sentience here—but sentience in no familiar body. We must be prepared to deal with manifestations of intelligence that are unfamiliar or even inconceivable to the human mind.”
Not being qualified as an experimenter, Dick was pressed into lookout duty. He dressed himself in garments insulated against the bitter cold of this sunless world, and heated with atomic power. Every day he tramped down to the mouth of the narrow gorge in which they had landed the flier, and concealed himself to watch across the snow to the north.
He was to report any unusual phenomenon over a television disk he carried. His atomic pistol was at hand, for defense if he happened to be discovered.
Still he dreams of those long vigils, he says.
He lay on his face in the snow, in a crack between two boulders,. He had raised a little wall of snow before him, for farther concealment. The boulders, and the mountain walls behind him, gleamed with a faint green light. And the vast desert of snow, stretching flat before him as far as his eye could reach, shimmered with soft emerald fire. An immense expanse of faintly glowing green snow it was, desolate and lonely, reaching away to the northern horizon.
There were no stars—and, of course, no moon or sun. The sky was dark, but faintly suffused with the green radiance of the snow. It was a green pall of gloom, dark and dusky.
For endless hours Dick stared across toward the north, across that waste of barren, glowing snow. He had a little lens, of variable magnifying power, which he used as a field glass or telescope.
It was three hundred miles and more, across that desolate waste of luminous snow, to the rugged mountain plateau where they had seen the strange cones of blue flame, which, Don Galeen said, were the “cities” of the alien inhabitants of this world. Due to the curvature of the planet’s surface, those mountains were below Dick’s horizon—not a single peak rose high enough to be visible.
But sometimes he could see a blue gleam in the dusky emerald sky above them. And sometimes there was a flicker of other colors, of moving shapes of light. Once he saw something reach up, that looked oddly like a hand of purple fire. It seemed to clutch something, and draw it down again.
And sometimes he saw tiny bright lights driving through the green gloom above the shimmering wastes of snow. High and swift, they hurtled in long, arched flights. He could only suppose them to be the lights of some flying machine.
All these things he reported to the others as soon as he observed them, speaking cautiously into the television disk. There was, so far as he knew, no good reason for whispering his words. But something in the alien weirdness of the world about him forbade him to raise his voice.
This lone, strange planet was far outside the streams and clusters of stars that make up the Galaxy. The sky was dark, with a depressing green darkness. No stars were in view. Above the wastes of snow was an empty void of gloom.
But, on the evening of his fourth “day” of watching—since the Green Star revolved about no sun, it had no actual days, of course—Dick saw a surprising thing as he was tramping back up the canyon to the flier, over banks of luminiferous, green snow.
He saw a star rise in the green-black sky, coming slowly up over a dully glowing, jade-green mountain wall.
A star, where none had been before!
He ran through the snow to the flier. Thon opened the massive door for him; he sprang into the gratefully warm interior of the ship.
“I see a star!” he cried. “A dim star has come up over the canyon wall! Can it be—”
“The Dark Star!” she finished for him, after a pause. Her face went a little white, but she kept any trace of panic from her voice. “Garo Nark has found us, after all!”
They hurried to the bridge-room; Thon called to her father and Don Galeen.
Hastily, they trained the instruments on the tiny speck of light rising so slowly into the green blackness of the sky.
“Yes, it is the Dark Star!” Midos Ken said presently. “Garo Nark lias followed us here, with all the billions of his pirate empire, and the resources of his outlaw scientists. And here, outside the galactic universe, I suppose we shall play the game to the end.”
Thon turned from a little device in which she had been following the motion of the new star; she seized a writing instrument and made a few brief calculations.
“The Dark Star is now following a regular orbit about this planet,” she said. “The two of them will revolve about their common center of gravity like the components of a double star. The space between is several million miles, of course. But Nark’s fliers can flash across it in a few hours!
“We can expect visitors from the Dark Star!”
“What are we going to do about it?” Dick demanded.
“We can do no better than to stay here until our researches are finished,” Midos Ken said, after a pause. “We are pretty well hidden; Nark is likely not to discover us.”
CHAPTER X
The Thing of Frozen Flame
THIS chapter is exceedingly difficult to write intelligibly and convincingly. Dick covers the incident quite fully in his notes, of course. But the task of converting his rather rambling and disjointed discussion into concise, coherent narrative, always difficult, is made harder in this case by the nature of the material.
The difficulty, I suppose, lies in the natural limitation of the human mind. We think in terms of experience, recalling images of things we have seen, and that have been pictured to us. When one comes to deal with something quite outside human knowledge and human experience, it is very difficult to find terms with which to describe it. And the thing I must write of now is, from its nature, almost inconceivable to the human mind.
Even after weeks spent in the study of this section of Dick’s manuscript, I am fairly sure that my own images of what he describes are not entirely accurate. For the sake of accuracy, I have ventured to introduce no new terms of my own. I have limited myself almost entirely to the use of Dick’s phrases, merely editing them, and for the sake of brevity, omitting extraneous matter.
Many times, in the foregoing pages, I have been called upon to deal with strange and amazing things. But, for the most part, those astounding creations of the future are things that men have already dreamed of in our own day. The idea of travel through space, for example, is familiar enough, even if the fact is amazing; but now we must deal with something so new and strange that the very conception of it is hard to grasp.
About twelve hours after Dick had returned to the flier with his news of the Dark Star’s coming, he replaced his heavy garments, and went down to the mouth of the canyon to watch again. He had slept and eaten well. The experiments in the flier seemed to be proceeding satisfactorily. The Dark Star, wheeling slowly across the sky, had set—without giving them any reason to fear that they had been seen. Dick set out in a cheerful, confident frame of mind, with the lilting notes of Thon’s farewell ringing in his ears.
But no man could be cheerful long, under the gloom of that green-black, starless sky, in a world where mountains and deserts of snow glowed with ghostly fire. Dick felt oppressed with the strangeness of it; despite Midos Ken’s injection, he felt a slight return of the horror that had seized him when they landed.
And he was beginning to suffer from a strange delusion or hallucination. It seemed to him that the very planet was alive! Beneath those weird luminous mountains, and those barren, lifeless wastes of snow, he thought he could sense an intelligence, hostile and malignant. He felt that unseen eyes were watching him.
