The Stone From the Green Star

by Jack Williamson

  They had alighted near the edge of the dome. The girl took him forward, through an arched door in the green metal wall. Never had Dick imagined such a scene as met his eyes. The lofty green hemisphere was luminous on the inner surface, shedding a soft green light, which illuminated the amazing machines and the scene of furious, bustling activity within.

  From each of the black openings that studded the dome sprang inward a huge, straight, transparent tube—a great pipe of glass-like substance, a hundred feet in diameter, and a thousand in length. The inner ends of these colossal, cannon-like tubes of crystal were fastened in a huge frame of silvery metal that rose five hundred feet in the center of the dome, a frame filled with machinery complicated beyond Dick’s ability to describe it. He only gives the impression that the apparatus connected with each tube resembled that about the carriage of a modern naval gun—providing means, doubtless, for training the tube, and for absorbing any recoil. Immediately behind each tube was a sort of reflector, polished and silvery, carrying inside it something resembling an enormous, S-shaped neon tube, which burned with a bright purple glow while the tube was in use.

  Outside this great mechanism in which the bases of the crystal tubes rested, an upright silvery cylinder rose from the floor to the side of each of them. These cylinders, Thon Ahrora informed him, were elevator shafts up which freight and passengers were brought from subway terminals cut in the living rock of the mountain below.

  “Watch!” the girl cried suddenly, pointing to a great, transparent tube above them, in which a purple glow had suddenly sprung up. “See, the K-ray is in the tube! A ship is flashing down the beam, to earth from another planet of a far-off star!”

  Suddenly, the red-violet light went out. And nearly two-thirds of the length of the tube was taken up with a great cylindrical ship of gleaming white metal, a hundred feet in diameter and six hundred in length.

  A gangplank was thrown across, from an opening in the end of the vast ship, through a sliding door in the transparent tube, to the upright cylinder of the elevator shaft. Dick saw a broad stream of passengers surging across it, many of them carrying packages of various kinds. Thousands of them poured out, vanishing into the elevator shaft, which, he thought, must have a sort of endless chain arrangement, in order to be able to accommodate so many. Then came a river of trucks, bearing boxes and bales and barrels—rich merchandise of foreign worlds, treasures of far-off planets, brought in the holds of this great argosy of space.

  Half an hour he watched, thrilled, amazed, and wondering, before the stream of men and goods dwindled and stopped. Immediately a counter-current set up in the opposite direction. A second crowd of passengers rushed into the ship. The endless rivers of trucks brought back innumerable loads of cargo.

  Then the gangplank was drawn back, the opening closed in the silver side of the ship, the sliding door in the crystal tube fastened. A purple glow lit the S-shaped tube behind the great ship, flowed up about it, filling the crystal cylinder. And abruptly the ship was gone, off to another planet.

  Smith had much to fill his thoughts as the little vehicle shot back with them to the huge building of silver towers, upon the green, forested hill.

  He has given us an account, also, of a conversation with Midos Ken, the blind father of Thon Ahrora, about the means by which he was brought to this astounding world of futurity.

  “Your coming to Bardon,” the old man said, “was an accident. Or at least it is an accident that you were selected instead of some rock or other dead object. But now that you are here, you need not fear for your welcome.” A warm, kindly smile lit the lined face of the old man.

  “I am a scientist, you know,” he went on. “The years of my life, even my eyes, I have given to find knowledge—knowledge that will aid mankind to live happily. Of late years, my daughter has been my eyes and my hands; and we have labored together.

  “One great quest has been ours—a search for the one great secret that still evades us. The one secret that will banish the fear that weighs like a load on every man, that will fill the long days of humanity with complete happiness.

  “Our experiment has always failed. One substance there is, which we must have, and which we cannot make in our laboratories—Thon is planning to try again; but I have no hope of her success. Failing to synthesize it, I thought to reach forward or backward into Time, to find it already in existence—for Nature, which is infinite, must sometime have formed it.

  “For Time is merely another magnitude, a dimension at right angles to the three we move in. The theory was good. The experiment worked to the extent that it brought you to us—you were snatched up and drawn through time by a field of force generated by the domes of flame at the ends of the black table.

  “But even that experiment failed of its object, for it takes a tremendous amount of force to change any object in the past. Even I can hardly understand this unexpected inertia—but it must be due to the fact that the events of one day influence those of the next, and thus, to move an object in the past, I had to change a chain of consequences reaching through the whole expanse of time.

  “To bring you here, out of the past, consumed energy enough to stop the earth in its orbit, and send it crashing into the sun!

  “Exploration of the future failed even more completely, as certain metaphysical considerations will show that it must, because of the way the future is dependent upon the present.

  “Thus, we are able to search only in the present time for the substance we need. It does not exist on any planet that has been explored. I have sent scouts to prospect for it on those few and distant planets where man has never gone. And Thon Ahrora is going to try once more, at our great laboratory back in the mountains, to synthesize it from pure energy!”

  “So I am in the future, after all!” Dick said.

  “From your old point of view,” Midos Ken agreed with a smile. “You might consider it the present, now, however. It would be quite beyond the power of our apparatus to send you back, though we might send a message, or something of the kind.”

  “Who wants to go back, anyhow?” Dick grinned. “But how far in the past did I come from?”

  “I can’t tell you exactly,” the old man said, “since the historians are a little uncertain in their chronology. But it is a bit more than two million, twenty-five thousand and eighty years!”

  Dick whistled, and stood a while in dazed silence. But he recovered quickly, being by this time used to such staggering facts, and asked another question.

  “Tell me, what is this great experiment?”

  Midos Ken smiled, rather sadly and wistfully, Dick “thought.

  “Wait, son, and you shall see,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER III

  The Day of Failure

  ON his second day in this new world, Dick had cast aside his old clothing, which would have been uncomfortably warm in the eternal summer that prevailed. Thon Ahrora had provided him with the short, sleeveless garments that seemed the universal garb. He had been welcomed into the simple household of Midos Ken—which consisted only of the blind scientist and his daughter. They occupied only a part of one of the towers of the huge building, which housed a small city. Its name was Bardon.

  Smith was intensely interested in the social system and the government of the world about him. Much space in his notes is devoted to such topics, though we can only glance at them here.

  Food, in a variety of delicious forms that was bewildering to him at first, was manufactured in great laboratories, synthetically, and distributed freely to the entire population, whether they labored or not.

  The entire industrial machine was owned by the state, from mines and factories to stations where the products were distributed to the consumer. Every citizen was permitted to work as much or as little as he desired, at whatever task he performed most efficiently, being paid proportionately to the value of his services and the time he worked, in tokens of exchange. The entire production of industry was thus returned to the workers, physica
l and mental, except such a part as was necessary to maintain the equipment, to provide the necessities of life to all, and to pay government expenses such as that for maintaining the climate-control stations.

  Laws were few and crimes fewer, he learned. Education took the place of policemen. Since the necessities of life were free to all men, and its luxuries might be had abundantly for a little work, men were not driven to crime by unemployment and resulting need, as they are in our day.

  And to make their lives most valuable to themselves and to society, an elaborate system of education, whose officers were carefully trained, had full and sole charge of children, almost from birth to maturity. Thus the talents of every person were discovered and developed. And no child was born into a squalid sink, to grow up a professional criminal. Competent parents were permitted to rear their own children.

  Once, while the lovely Thon Ahrora was instructing him in the written language of her race, and plying him, at the same time, with questions about his own time, which, it seemed, had been pretty well forgotten in the course of two million years, it entered Dick’s head to write a history, covering what he remembered of our age.

  He disliked to accept the hospitality of the girl and her blind father without making some repayment, though they assured him that the burden was slight, food and shelter being supplied by society. He had applied to the state agency for employment, with poor results. It seemed that the schools trained every person in one or more useful occupations which he might choose. Dick had not been so trained. He volunteered to dig ditches, only to discover that ditches were now dug with a rather complicated device which dissociated the electrons of earth and rock, reassembling them into atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to make water vapor, which was condensed and piped away. He had had no training in the handling of this El Ray. Finally he had been put to digging up some blue flowering plants that had spread into a meadow where they did not belong—he could do this, even without the artistic training of a landscape gardener. Thon Ahrora had found him and made him come away, when his wages amounted only to a single little disk of green crystal—the token of exchange lowest in denomination. The girl had generously offered him a handful of them, with a few of the blue disks of greater value. But Dick refused, knowing that, like most scientists of our day, she and her father had few resources to spare from their experiments.

  Now, it struck him, if others were as much interested in his own times as Thon Ahrora, he could write a book of history and sell it. The girl was delighted with the idea. She assured him that an interesting book would be paid for. And she offered to help him get it properly expressed in her language, and to help him interpret his facts from the point of view of her age—it is doubtful if his work could have succeeded without such assistance.

  He immensely enjoyed the months while they were working on the book—though, to judge from his diary, he did not realize even then that he had fallen in love with the girl.

  Besides the text, Dick was able to provide illustrations, making use of his college training in art. First he had thought of simple drawings to show the machines, the costumes, and the animals of his time—most of our domestic and wild animals being extinct, it seems. But Thon Ahrora produced a broad sheet of black material, and a small instrument which, by electrochemical means, could produce any color of the spectrum, or any combination of them upon the sheet. After he had mastered the use of it, he produced illustrations in full color for the work. Here, too, he had the girl’s assistance—she was a rather better artist than himself, it seems.

  It would be interesting to see a copy of this book—which was printed on white sheets of the same material as the notes are written on. But Smith did not send one back. The writer would like to know how our civilization was interpreted in terms of that much higher culture of the future. Smith admits that his facts were not very accurate; he did not study his college history half so well as he should have done, he says. Even his illustrations must not have been strictly reliable—he mentions a difficulty in arranging the horns and ears of a cow.

  Thon Ahrora took the work for him to the state department of publications, where it was printed. Dick was pleased to discover that all profits, above a certain part deducted as a sort of tax to support the general activities of society, would be his own—no publisher would profiteer upon his efforts.

  THE book was successful—far more so than either of them had anticipated. Not only did the many billions of the earth’s population read it eagerly. It was sent by television to the planets spinning about a million other suns, and read by their uncounted multitudes, who were of the same race, speaking the same tongue, and maintaining the same interests as the people of the earth.

  Any man, Dick found, who can aid or amuse a great many people, if only slightly, has done more good and is paid more highly than he who does much for a few. The amount of the profits which poured in from the far stars of the universe was astounding.

  The tokens of exchange were little disks, much like our coins, with designs engraved on them. But they were of crystal substances, which, Dick learned, were synthetic gems. Green disks of emerald were used for small change. Sapphire tokens were more valuable; those of ruby more precious still. But the diamond disk was of the highest denomination, and the standard of value.

  A whole high room in the habitation of Thon Ahrora and her father was soon piled full of coffers of these scintillant diamond coins. Dick kept one open where he could run his hand through the cold gems, letting them fall through his fingers in shimmering torrents of fire.

  “It is wonderful!” Thon Ahrora told him, with shining eyes. “No book has ever been so famous! No man has ever earned so much! What will the stupid officials think, who put you to digging weeds?”

  “You mean I am really the richest man in the world—in the universe?” Smith said in surprise.

  “You are many times richer than any man in the Union,” she told him. “For each man has only what others are willing to give him in exchange for his own efforts. Men do not seize the machinery of industry, and rob others of the just fruits of their toils, as some did in your day.

  “No, you are rich beyond imagination. You might buy anything that men desire. You could build an interplanetary flier, finer than has ever been made, hire a crew, and go exploring to the ends of the universe if you wished. Your smallest coffer would pay for that!”

  “I’ll think it over,” Dick said. “But, you know, I’ve been having a very interesting time right here on earth—” he paused, then ventured to add—“with you!” The girl said nothing, but smiled at him with an odd light in her glorious blue eyes.

  “By the way,” Smith asked after a little time, “what are you going to do with your share?”

  “My share?” Thon repeated in surprise.

  “Half of all these boxes of diamonds are yours, you know,” he said. “We were partners in the undertaking, you remember.”

  “No I can’t take it,” the girl objected. Oddly, tears stood out in her eyes, glistening. She choked back a little sob. Suddenly, to Smith’s confusion—and to his intense delight—she threw her strong, smooth arms around his neck, and kissed him on the lips. He was dumfounded at the moment; later he reflected that it was not amazing that human emotions had a bit more freedom of play after two million years—and that Thon was a rather straightforward sort of person, apt to show her feelings openly.

  Now she drew back suddenly, with a hurt look, noticing his astonishment. “Oh, I’m sorry—if you care!” she cried in a pained voice. “You look—”

  “Not a bit,” said Dick. “I like it. Just surprised. I’m not used to things here, you know.”

  “Forgive me! I didn’t mean to hurt you!”

  “Nothing to forgive,” Dick said, looking into her blue eyes. “Just try it again. I’ll try to behave better, next time!”

  Thon stepped back, her smooth skin flushed a little. “Don’t make fun of me!” she cried, almost angrily. “I didn’t think—And it was so good of you t
o offer me the share of the tokens!”

  “They are yours!” he responded. “I’ll never look at any of them again, unless you take half. I couldn’t have written the book without you, and you know it! And if you go broke, I’ll lend you part of my share!” The lovely girl turned suddenly and hurried away—to keep him from seeing that she was crying, Smith was sure.

  Dick had been a year in the world of the future when Midos Ken and his daughter performed the great experiment of which they had spoken. The apparatus had been built with part of Thon Ahrora’s share of the treasure of diamond tokens, which Dick had forced her to accept, in the end.

  Early one morning, crowded into the little, swiftflying vehicle in which Smith and the girl had visited the space-port, they set out for the lofty range of mountains in the east—it is impossible to identify these with any mountains of the present day; when Smith examined an atlas, he found the continental outlines strange to him; Bardon is located, he thinks, on a continent risen from what was once the floor of the Pacific.

  “Father, dear, I’m certain that today we will succeed,” Thon cried, after she had started the little ship toward their destination with a few musical notes. “Isn’t it wonderful—after so many years of disappointment!”

  “I’m not so sure, child,” the old blind scientist said slowly. “Many times I have thought myself on the verge of success. For sixty years, you know, I have toiled to that one goal. For a quarter of a century I have known we must have that catalyst—though only a few ounces would be enough. I have failed a hundred times to synthesize it; I feel that we may fail again today. Then there is no hope; even most of the scouts I sent to explore the unknown planets, as a last resort, have returned without an atom of the precious substance.”

  “Cheer up, dad!” the girl encouraged him. “I know we’ll win! The experiment cannot fail!”

  “What is the experiment?” Dick asked, for the second time.