The Stone From the Green Star, Page 2

  Then they both faced toward the wall from which the deep, golden note had rung. Dick slipped quickly from the broad black table, and stood beside the girl, in his rough seaman’s garb, looking with them.

  A circular section of the green wall grew silvery, glowed with a gray light. It lost its smooth flatness, a misty shadow of silvery fog seemed to cloud it for an instant—then it vanished. For an instant Dick looked through a huge round hole in the green, glowing wall, down an infinite dark corridor, down an endless tunnel obscured with drifting silver mist.

  Then the dark tunnel vanished, and it seemed that they could see into another room, just beyond the wall.

  “Nothing but television,” Smith muttered, struggling to brace himself against a tide of dazed wonder that threatened to sweep away his balance of mind.

  But it seemed impossible that he looked merely at a shadow on a screen. The room seemed startlingly real, three-dimensional, vivid and bright.

  It was a throne-room, evidently, gorgeous and splendid beyond Dick’s imagination. The long floor had the yellow gleam of gold. The high walls were crystal, green and glowing with inner fires—they were walls of emerald! Set deeply into them were broad red panels, burning with intense, sullen crimson fires—panels of ruby! Strange patterns, grotesque designs based on scenes or objects unfamiliar to Dick, were inlaid in the red crystal—inlaid with sapphire, and silver, and jet. And the ceiling of the long hall, lofty, groined, and vaulted, was white, pure and glistening; it was whiter than the finest marble, white as crystal snow.

  Along each side of the vast room was a row of men, standing at rigid attention. Dick noted that they were all splendid physical specimens, apparently of the same type of mankind as Midos Ken and Thon Ahrora. Each wore a single scant garment of black, fastened over the left shoulder and falling to the knee, held about the waist with a broad girdle of scarlet. And each had, leaning beside him, a heavy-looking black tube, apparently about six feet long and two inches in diameter—weapons, Dick supposed them.

  BUT of all these things he was only vaguely conscious, for his glance went at once to the man seated in state just beyond the center of the huge room. He was upon a huge, massive throne of deeply purple crystal—its fires were richer, darker, more intense than those of any amethyst.

  The man on the throne was huge, massively built, evidently in the prime of life. His slight garment of shimmering scarlet, gathered with a black girdle, revealed the full, mighty thewed strength of his limbs. His hair and his eyes were black. Pride, lust, and power were written large upon his face, with its broad, cruel mouth and heavy nose. They flamed evilly in the black depths of his deep-set eyes.

  For several minutes, it seemed to Dick, nothing was said. The blind man and the lovely girl beside him were silent, waiting. They seemed a little frightened, or at least, dismayed. But he read courage and defiance in the proud, erect attitude of the old man, and in the girl’s flashing blue eyes.

  The man on the purple throne stared into the room. His black eyes, bold and imperious, roved over the green-walled room. He took but a single interested glance at the black table and Dick in his garb of another world. But he eyed the old man long, with hate and challenging scorn. And Dick’s blood boiled at the bestial, hungry quality of his gaze when it rested on the lovely girl beside him.

  Then he bent, whispered something to a burly attendant beside him, who bellowed his message out in the direction of the three by the black table. Dick did not understand the words, of course, so he watched his companions for a clue to their meaning.

  The girl gasped, and went white, as if insulted. Quick anger flamed in her clear eyes. The old man clenched his hands, then reached out and grasped the girl’s smooth arm, as if she had been about to leave him. A moment, and Thon Ahrora had shouted her reply, in a liquid, pealing voice, bugle-clear. While Dick did not understand it, it was clearly emphatic, defiant, challenging.

  The man on the throne purpled in anger. He sprang to his feet, shaking a mighty fist. Depending upon the herald no longer, he used his own voice to shout something in harsh tones, strident, hoarse with menace.

  Even as he shouted the threat, Thon Ahrora turned her delicate head, voiced a single clear musical note. Evidently it controlled the marvelous television apparatus, for Dick’s view of the magnificent throne-room was abruptly cut off by a shadow, or rather a gleam of misty silver radiance. And the silver cloud dissolved, leaving the glowing green wall in view, smooth and unbroken.

  “I don’t know what it’s all about,” Dick thought, “but somebody has his hat in the ring!”

  He turned to the girl beside him. “I guess you can’t understand me,” he said, “but I’m for you just the same! And here’s hoping that some day I get the chance to land that guy a smash on his big nose!”

  The lovely Thon Ahrora smiled, nodding in quick understanding.

  CHAPTER II

  Two Million Years

  RICHARD SMITH, it seems, was in that amazing world of the future for at least a year before he began to keep his diary. It would be most interesting, certainly, to have a detailed account of the events of this period, with a full description of each of the wonderful things he found. Instead, he has given us only a brief summary. And he has a disconcerting way of mentioning the astounding inventions of futurity as commonplace things, as if his readers should already be familiar with them.

  Most of his time, of course, at least in the first months of this year, was spent in learning the oddly musical speech of those about him. It was plainly derived from modern English, but changed in so many ways as to be hardly recognizable. Many simple expressions, which have descended to us almost unchanged from the Saxon, were still much the same. But the language had taken on an immense load of new words, to meet the demands of science. The alphabet had been reformed, to make spelling phonetic, and to make it possible to indicate more exactly the sound of spoken words. And the pronunciation of words had changed, so that English, once a harsh tongue, had become as liquidly beautiful as Spanish or ancient Greek, with the loss of none of its masculine power of expression.

  Dick has given us his impressions of the moment when Thon Ahrora led him under the pointed arch of the green room’s door. They stood outside on a hard gray pave; and Dick stared at surroundings that were weirdly unfamiliar, and strangely beautiful.

  The silvery towers of the building from which they had emerged leapt straight up for a thousand feet, behind them. A cluster of hexagonal towers, of varying heights, side by side, joined, each capped with a steep, pointed cone. Of a white metal, they gleamed like new silver.

  The reader may get some idea of the shape of the building by sharpening a dozen or so six-sided pencils of different lengths, and holding them in a compact bundle with eraser-ends on a table, the longer pencils being in the center of the bundle.

  They had stepped from a wide portal, shaped like a pointed Gothic arch, cut in the side of one of the lower towers. Stepped into a fairyland of color and beauty!

  The air was just cool enough to be pleasantly invigorating—Dick saw the reason for the loose, simple garments of these people. And it was subtly spiced with a delicate perfume, a faint, tantalizing odor borne from some unseen garden of unfamiliar flowers.

  The building stood upon the summit of a low, rolling hill, whose sides were covered with magnificent oaks, and with tall, majestic trees, that Dick took to be fir of some unfamiliar variety. From the base of the hill stretched broad, green meadows, bright with patches of blue and yellow bloom, broken with stately groves of dark-green trees. Here and there were low, forested hills, meandering silver brooks bordered with emerald verdure, glistening, azure lakes.

  In college, Dick had majored in “art,” drawing frequent cartoons for the school paper. Now his aesthetic sense was delighted by the landscape below him. Its beauty was ideal; its perfection beyond that of nature. He wondered as he admired. Then the true meaning of it burst upon him. His whole prospect was a prodigious piece of landscape gardening! The whole
world before him was a garden!

  Beautiful towered buildings were set upon distant hills. All of them were separated by miles of the lovely, park-like woodland and meadow, yet scores of them were in his view. The population of this world, Dick thought, must be very great, if its whole surface were so scattered with such great buildings.

  No two of the huge structures that crowned the hills were alike, either in plan or material. Some were tooled with gleaming domes, some were topped with slender spires and minarets, some were fantastically turreted. Cylindrical, some of them were, and others had square or many-sided walls. Glittering with silvery whiteness and golden yellow, glowing with lights of red rubies and cool green emeralds, gleaming with the blues of sapphire and jade and lapis lazuli, shining with the prismatic whiteness of marble and the brilliant black of jet, they shimmered like elfin palaces built of rarest gems.

  Here and there about the brilliant landscape rose black, cylindrical towers, domes of dazzling white flame jetting from their tops to crown them in diamond splendor. They, as Dick soon learned—but when, he neglects to mention—were the climate-controlling machines, which tempered the air to its quality of never-ending springtime.

  Eastward rose a serried wall of mountains, massive and majestic; veiled in blue haze of distance. Green clothed their lower slopes. Gleaming diadems of snow crowned the rows of higher peaks, dully crimsoned with the somber bloody gleams of sunset.

  To the west, and far away, was an ocean, its surface hidden in soft gray haze save where the red light of the setting sun gleamed from a broad sheet of it, ruddy and bright, like a burnished copper shield.

  The sun itself hung low in the west, in a sky that was clear and darkly blue, almost violet. It was smaller than Dick remembered it, and red. It was like a blood-red disk, slipping down the sky. He could watch it with his naked eye, unblinded.

  The sun, cooled and shrunken, gave him his first real clue to the fact that he was miraculously in the world of the far future. Looking at it, he wondered at the delightful warmth of the air, which should, he thought, have been normally bitterfully cold. Not until later did he learn the function of the machines which warmed it.

  As he was watching, Thon Ahrora touched his shoulder with a gentle hand, and pointed up at the summit of the highest peak in the east, beyond the second range. The pinnacle was crowned with a jeweled tiara of green metal, set with flashing purple gems. Or so it seemed to Dick, for he saw a glistening green dome, with lanced, scintillant purple rays leaping from it like arrows of amethystine flame into the deep violet sky.

  Smith has told, too, of a sight-seeing trip he made to this place, with Thon Ahrora. Though he does not say, it must have been several months later, for they were able to converse with a fair degree of freedom.

  The vehicle was shaped like an elongated egg of white, glistening metal. That is, it was stream-lined, round and blunt in front, tapering almost to a point behind. Many rectangular windows were set into it, allowing an almost unbroken view of surrounding objects. It was small, about four feet in diameter and seven long, with a single seat across it. The machinery—what Dick afterwards learned about it is covered by his notes—was entirely concealed. It was almost automatic. Thon Ahrora controlled the little craft by voicing occasional musical notes.

  When they were seated side by side within it, the lovely girl spoke or sang a single, trilling note. The door closed, and the little craft, silently, and with no means of propulsion visible to Dick, rose swiftly into the air to a height of several hundred feet. Three more soft, liquid notes, and they darted off toward the strange coronet of green metal and purple fire upon the peak, at a speed that Dick estimated to be well over a thousand miles per hour.

  “That is a space-port, where the ships come in from the stars,” the girl said. (Of course, all conversations recorded in Smith’s notes have been translated into our English—if they were not, no one would be able to read them.)

  “Ships from the stars!” Dick ejaculated.

  Thon Ahrora smiled at his astonishment. “Yes, men travel across interplanetary space as they crossed the seas in your time,” she said. “Even more easily, perhaps.”

  Smith’s imagination was staggered. In all the wonders in which he had found himself, the possibility of interplanetary travel had not entered his head.

  “You mean that ships go to the moon, and Mars and Venus!”

  Thon Ahrora laughed. “No, the ships from the mountain go only to the planets of other suns. But this little flier would take us in a day to any planet in the solar system.” She looked at him with keen, twinkling eyes. “We can go to the moon now, if you wish. It would take but a few minutes.”

  “No, thanks,” Dick said hastily. “I’d rather not. Some other day, perhaps.”

  HE felt a strong need of a quiet hour or so to think over this astounding proposition of taking a ship for another solar system. It was bewildering, overwhelming.

  “So other suns have planets with people on them?” he said at length.

  “Yes,” said Thon Ahrora. “Most of the stars of the Galaxy have many planets. Tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, hardy pioneers from the earth colonized some of these planets. It was a hard struggle; there were differences in gravity to contend with, and in the composition of the seas and atmosphere. Some were too hot, some too cold. There was alien life to be conquered on many!

  “But science has always won! Every planet is a garden, like the earth. If there was no air, men made it. If oceans were lacking, the mountains were melted into water with the El rays. If it was too cold, heating plants were built, like ours, liberating heat from atomic energy. If too hot, gases were generated in the air which reflected heat.”

  “You mean there are people like us on the stars—people that talk as we do, think the same way!”

  “There are. In your time was the beginning—the most interesting age of history, when science came to a race just emerging from barbarism, giving them more power than their gods. The English language was just becoming the universal tongue, to be fixed, by mechanical records, so that it remained the same through all the ages, the speech of all the races—not always changing, as purely spoken languages are.

  “Now, with our radio and television, men can see each other over all the Galaxy—men can talk from sun to sun!”

  “But how is it?” Dick broke in, recalling something he had learned back in Physics, 203. “There are stars that it takes light thousands of years to travel between.”

  “I know that light is slow,” Thon Ahrora said. “Our speech, and our television pictures, and even our ships, are carried on the wings of the K-ray. Light is an electronic phenomenon. The K-ray is a vibration of a higher order, a phenomenon of the particles that make up electrons. It reaches instantaneously to the farthest star.

  “But you have seen it!” she added suddenly. “Remember, on the day we brought you! You heard the voice of Garo Nark, from the Dark Star, across a void that light could not pass in a hundred thousand years!”

  “I remember,” Dick replied, having often thought of the man on the purple throne, and the threat he had evidently made to Thon Ahrora. “But I had supposed him on this earth. Perhaps it is good that he is so far away. He seemed no friend of yours?”

  “He is not!” the girl cried, clenching the little hands at her sides. “An enemy of mine, and my father’s! Mighty, he is. Lord of the Dark Star! Now, after he has scorned my father, and fought us for years, he wants me for one of his queens!”

  Her lovely face, flushed with anger, was more beautiful than ever. Dick felt a sudden strong desire to kiss her; but forced himself to look straight ahead, at the rugged mountains rushing so rapidly to meet them, with hands on his knees.

  “The Dark Star,” Thon Ahrora explained, “is a huge planet, which circles no sun, drifting alone through the night of space. Because it was so cold and desolate, with seas frozen solid, and atmosphere fallen in a crystal snow upon its barren mountain ranges, the colonists avoided it. It becam
e the haunt of pirates of space, who carried their plunder and their captives there, to hidden retreats in its dead, frozen wildernesses.

  “Among the pirates were scientists; and they captured others whom they forced to join them. Many times the fleets of the Union descended upon them, but always they brought forth new weapons, and held their own. For tens of thousands of years, the pirates have held the Dark Star, waging war on the Union of Man.

  “Garo Nark, whom you saw, is Lord of the Dark Star, sole ruler of a mighty empire of pirates; he is the master of an outlaw planet. His fleets battle those of the Union on equal terms. Only the skill and genius of my father kept him from success in the conquest of the planets of another sun, in a great war of space waged twenty years ago—that is why he hates us.

  “And on that day, when you saw him, he was demanding that I come to the Dark Star, to be one of the women whom he calls his queens!”

  “Well, I’ll give him a run for his money!” Dick muttered in his old English.

  Thon Ahrora, thoroughly angry and altogether adorable, suddenly roused herself, to intone a soft musical sound which brought their amazing vehicle to a halt, and let it drop a few thousand feet, to land near the huge crown of fire upon the mountain.

  When the two of them stepped out upon the mountain-top, which was flat as if it had been truncated with a huge knife, Dick was astounded at the colossal size of the thing that had looked like a crown. It was a hemispherical dome of green metal, twenty-five hundred feet high, and well over half a mile across, at the base. Its surface seemed to be studded with black circles—which were round orifices, a hundred feet in diameter. Broad, brilliant purple rays spurted from them at intervals, stabbing into the sky.