The Stone From the Green Star

by Jack Williamson

  “Here’s one storm that the weather stations didn’t stop!” Dick muttered.

  He looked about for such stations. Half a dozen were in view. Two on peaks above the valley, almost under the strange cloud. Another on a summit above the valley’s opposite wall. Three standing on the level plain below. Cylindrical towers, tall and black. Usually they had jets of white flame burning at their tops—jets of the atomic energy that warmed the air.

  But the spreading jets of fire were not white now—they were red, a sullen, angry crimson!

  Was something wrong, Dick wondered? The stations, he knew, controlled the motion of the air by changing its temperature and its density. Light, warm air rises; cold air, being heavy, settles downward, or flows to replace rising warm currents. Had the stations gone out of commission to cause the storm? Or was their change due to the fact that they were being used in an attempt to stop it?

  The storm had grown amazingly, alarmingly, when he looked at it again. It was a huge, angry black pall, its edges riven with ragged lightning. The rumble of thunder among the cliffs had become continuous. Even as Dick looked up, a dark wall of vapor, spreading from the cloud, rushed across the sky above with astonishing speed. Ominous darkness fell suddenly upon him.

  The cloud looked oddly like a picture Dick remembered having seen during his life in our world, a picture of Vesuvius in eruption, with an enormous, threatening, mushroom of black vapor rising above its cone. It was growing with terrible swiftness.

  The black masses that composed it seemed to boil. Vast, whirling vortexes sprang up, rolled to the edge of the cloud, were lost in long, ray-like streamers that were stretching out to the horizon.

  Then gray, leaden veils dropped suddenly from the dark blue cloud to the floor of the upper valley. A new sound reached Dick’s ears, along with the roll of the thunder. A steady, drumming roar. The roar of rain and hail beating from the cloud.

  Alarm seized him. Would not a heavy fall of rain in the valley cause a dangerous rise in the little stream that coursed down it, to leap over a precipice in the lacy fall?

  He ran back into the huge building, and up the stair to the stage where Thon was still busy over the keys.

  “We had better get out of here!” he cried. “I think there’s a flood coming. Big storm up the valley! I can hear the roar of the rain!”

  Thon, furiously busy, paid no heed.

  “Yes, I know about it,” Midos Ken told him. “We have just received a warning, by television. It is the weather-control stations that caused it. They don’t understand it. They have just found the operators murdered in the central control office. And the controls were set to produce a terrible storm, that will sweep down this valley.

  “It is too late to stop it. The warning stated that it would sweep everything before it. Aircraft are advised to avoid it, and buildings below the valley must be vacated at once.”

  “Then we had better be getting out!” Dick cried. “We have the little flier here.’”

  “It’s too late for that,” Midos Ken said. “It could never live in such a storm as this! When man goes to using storms as weapons, he improves considerably upon nature. The new space flier is our only hope. Thon is working to complete it. It could survive any storm!”

  The air had been still, but now a shrieking wind interrupted Midos Ken’s words. The roar of rain and hail beat suddenly upon the heavy metal walls of the great building, raising an appalling, deafening din.

  “Men fighting with storms!” Dick shouted at the top of his lungs to make the old man hear above the roar. “What——”

  “It is Garo Nark!”

  “He is making the storm?”

  “Once again I have let him beat me. I knew that my science would defeat any direct attack by him. Being blind myself, I had no fear of his invisible men. But it never occurred to me that they might seize the weather-control mechanism and attack us with storm and flood!”

  “How soon will the Ahrora be finished?” Dick shouted.

  But the scream of the hurricane, and the thunder of rain and hail upon the great building drowned the answer of old Midos Ken.

  CHAPTER VI

  K-Ray Riders

  THE storm grew continually worse. Dick was thankful for the white, metal walls, heavy as a battleship’s armor, that sheltered them from the force of raging elements loosed upon them by an evil genius who had stolen the scepter of science.

  Thon was still furiously tapping the keys, a whole sheet of the functions before her not yet set up. Dick tried again to talk to Midos Ken, but the thunder of the tempest made conversation out of the question. The blind scientist, for all his wonderful hearing, seemed unconscious of the shout.

  Dick ran down again to the open, arched door of the building. He could see but a short distance without. The resistless wind drove white, misty streamers of rain straight before it—it carried also green leaves, branches of trees, and even pebbles. Huge hailstones, crashing down, rang appallingly upon the metal building, and covered the ground with white, until wind and rain could sweep them away.

  Even as Dick was watching, the roar increased again. A mighty, irresistible wall of gray water came sweeping down the valley before him, its front a foaming white crest fifty feet high. Mangled trees were tossed upon it. The earth trembled as huge boulders came grinding past, driven by the rushing water.

  In a moment a broad river rushed before the door, white streaks of hail beating its wind-torn surface into flying foam. Its level rose with terrifying swiftness. It reached the door of the vast metal building. It poured through, washed him to the knees in an icy torrent.

  Hastily, Dick retreated up the ladder again, to the stage where Thon was working. Water rushed in after him, in an angry flood, covering the great floor.

  Swiftly it rose, covering the stair, step by step.

  The colossal metal building had been shelter enough from the wind and the hail. But the whole floor of the valley, Dick knew, would soon be covered with the rushing flood from the cloud-burst. The building could never stand against the mad force of the torrent that swept huge boulders along with it, grinding like mighty millstones. And even if it did, they would be drowned within it like the proverbial rats in a trap.

  “Looks pretty bad!” he muttered. “And no chance even to die fighting!”

  He glanced at his two companions. Midos Ken stood erect and calm as usual. His blind face, drawn with tension, was composed. The old scientist, even though his life had been devoted to a quest for immortal life, did not seem afraid to die.

  Nor did Thon Ahrora seem much frightened. Her lovely face was a little flushed. She seemed to be breathing rapidly; her breast rose and fell with quick little motions. But her flying fingers manipulated the keys with the same accurate, unhastened skill as before the storm had risen.

  He looked down again at the troubled, angry sea below. The water had covered the door. It was halfway up the stair. The complex apparatus beneath the great jet table was already partly flooded. The steady, vibrant drone of a generator suddenly became irregular, stuttering. An alarming flicker was in the sapphire disk.

  Still Thon bent over the keys in feverish absorption.

  The water was not ten feet below them. The walls of the mighty building trembled with the terrific force of the raging flood that rushed against them.

  The grinding roar of a huge rolling boulder became audible against the thunder of the storm. It apparently crashed against the end of the building, for a corner of the wall was crushed inward, and the roof above it sagged alarmingly. The water rose suddenly, almost to the level of the stage and of the jet platform.

  Then, with a smile of triumph, Thon flung down a lever. The light of the blue crystal disk flickered out. The space flier lay complete on the vast black table. A long red cylinder, graceful, tapering, bright and glistening like Chinese ruby glaze. Its forward end, blunt and rounded, was studded with small windows, round and black. A massive round door swung open in her side. The rear end tapered gracefully,
almost to a point.

  The metal bridge fell to span the water that rushed angrily between the platform and the stage where they stood, water that was still rising rapidly. Thon seized her father’s hand, led the way swiftly across it.

  The great building seems to have fallen just as they reached the door of the red ship. The water was just lapping over the edge of the black platform. Then, suddenly, the platform was reeling, and the metal roof was crashing down upon them.

  Dick seized Thon and Midos Ken in his arms, and made a plunge through the round door—using tactics borrowed from his football experience. He got them safely inside, and the girl touched a lever that closed and locked the massive door.

  Then, it seems, they were tumbled about somewhat. But the interior of the Ahrora was thickly padded; and her neutronium armor was indestructible.

  The building must have gone down before the combined force of the mad torrent and a rolling boulder. The Ahrora fell, probably, from the black platform to the floor. Possibly the boulder struck her—meeting one object that it could not grind beneath it. The flier may even have been carried for some distance by the raging flood.

  Then, almost before Dick realized what was happening, everything was oddly still. The ship had evidently come to rest. He found himself braced against a padded wall, with a supporting arm about the shoulders of old Midos Ken. Thon had vanished.

  They were in a low corridor. One side of it had the curve of the ship’s hull, the other was straight, broken with doors at close intervals. Just behind them in the curved wall was the massive mechanism of the flier’s door. The narrow way seemed to run along one side of the vessel, from end to end, giving entrance to the various compartments. Soft, green, shadowless light fell upon them from a luminous substance on the softly padded walls.

  “Come here, Dick, and look!” a soft call in Thon’s voice came down the corridor. He hurried down it, his shoulders almost brushing the wall on each side.

  His sense of which direction was down changed oddly as he reached the end of the passage. For most of its length he walked along normally. But as he neared the end, it seemed that he was climbing. He had to climb through a sort of hatchway at its end.

  He emerged inside a small, dome-shaped room—it was, he knew, the nose of the flier. The curving wall above his head was also padded, though its surface was smooth and glowing with soft greenish radiance. It was broken with the numerous little portholes, closed with shutters of white metal.

  A narrow bench encircled the room. Upon it, and the curved wall above it, was a bewildering complexity of dials with trembling needles, of flashing bulbs and glowing tubes, of wheels and levers and spinning disks, of coils and purring apparatus that he could not describe.

  In the center of the room was a small stand, and above it a white metal tube leading to the middle of the dome above—suggesting, to Dick, a periscope. Below the end of the tube, centering the top of the stand, was a gray screen. About it was a circle of variously colored keys.

  At one side of the stand was a little upright lever of polished metal, with a white button on its top. Thon stood with her fingers lightly upon it.

  “What happened?” Dick burst out. “Are we lodged on the bottom of the river?”

  The girl laughed. She flashed him a tantalizing smile.

  “Open a window and see,” she said, pointing to one of the closed portholes.

  DICK flung open the shutter. He was dazed, staggered, by the sight that burst upon him through the crystal disk.

  He looked into interplanetary space!

  The sky was black, utterly, inconceivably. Blacker than anything he had ever seen or imagined. And studded with a million diamonds. Hard, bright points of fire burned cold and motionless in it. White and red, orange and blue and green, dazzling pin points of light. And scattered among them, against the absolute blackness, were silvery sheets and clouds and spirals of faint nebular radiance.

  He saw the heavens as he had never seen them in his own age. He saw them as they appear to one beyond the veil of air and cloud and dust that always hides most of their splendor from us.

  Swimming in this void of diamonded midnight he saw a huge, luminous-globe. A greenish sphere, larger than the moon, its surface liquidly indistinct. It was irregularly splotched with clouds of dazzling white, with vague brown and blue areas. Here and there was a brown-green outline that looked vaguely familiar.

  “What is that, Thon?” he asked, pointing. “Where are we, anyhow? And how did we get here?”

  Thon laughed again, delightfully.

  “That is a planet called the earth,” she told him. “It is the original home of a race of small beings who call themselves men. Haven’t you heard of it?”

  “Be serious!” he pleaded. “Is that really the earth?”

  “Oh, I know it looks small and insignificant!” she said airily, with a gleam of mischief in her blue eyes. “But it’s still rather out of its true proportion.”

  She pressed a finger upon the little white button.

  Dick felt no sensation of motion. (The K-ray, as Midos Ken had explained, applied its power equally to every particle of matter on the ship, so there was no effect of acceleration.)

  But the earth dwindled suddenly. A tiny white crescent—the moon—came into Dick’s field of view beside it. They shrank to a single dimepoint of light—vanished! A very bright star, blue-white, dazzling, crept into the window. At first Dick did not recognize it.

  “The sun!” he muttered after a puzzled moment.

  And the sun dimmed, until after a short time it was little brighter than blue-white Vega.

  “A few more at this rate, and the sun itself would vanish!” Thon informed him.

  “But how did we get out of the flood?” he persisted.

  “I managed to get to the controls,” Thon told him. “Then it was easy. We just drove up through the wreckage. Our K-rays generate enough power to drive the ship through solid rock!”

  She beckoned him to stand beside her. “Come,” she said. “Let me show you how to drive the flier.” Her fingers rested lightly in the little silvery bar with the white button at its top. “You press this white button to increase the speed,” she told him. “Relax the pressure, and we continue to move forward through space, carried by our momentum, for there is almost no friction. But the button must be held down just slightly for that—when the pressure is altogether relaxed, the K-rays are thrown forward, to brake our flight and bring us to a stop.

  “And to turn in any direction, merely incline the lever in that direction. Now try it!”

  Dick was almost reluctant to try, for fear he would send them crashing into some sun or planet. Thon insisted, assuring him that space is very empty, and that he couldn’t guide the ship into a planet if he tried.

  He accepted the controls. His first inclination of the little lever was violent, and sent the Ahrora into a mad spin, from which Thon had to extract her. But after a few minutes he understood the mechanism, and got a huge amount of delight from the swift movement which he controlled so easily.

  The complex apparatus about the walls, Thon informed him, had to do with the generation of the K-rays, with the automatic recording and plotting of the flier’s course on long voyages, with purifying and drying the air and keeping it at the proper temperature and with the necessary proportion of oxygen. There was a flat floor or deck, and a flat ceiling in the part of the flier behind the domed bridge. The space between these and the curved walls was used for storing a reserve of atomic fuel for the generators and oxygen for the passengers.

  The space between the bridge in the nose of the flier, and the generator room in her stern, was divided into five tiny compartments—the miniature galley, in which their meals were to be prepared and eaten, three tiny staterooms, for Thon, Midos Ken, and Dick, and a storeroom aft, in which reposed the weapons Thon had condensed for Midos Ken, and various other equipment that promised to be useful to interplanetary adventures, such as air-pressure suits for venturing outs
ide the ship in space, tools, chemicals, and emergency rations.

  Presently Thon conducted Dick down the narrow corridor to his stateroom. A tiny space it was, just over six feet long, and about that wide. A comfortable berth was built out against the curved wall formed by the hull. The padded, smooth wall, glowing greenly, supplied illumination. There was mirror, toilet utensils, lavatory with hot and cold running water, a closet filled with fresh linen and clean garments.

  It filled Dick with fresh amazement to think that the little room had never been entered before, that Thon, with her wonderful science, had formed every article in it by merely tapping on a bank of keys.

  “What do you think of it?” she asked him as she showed him the various conveniences, all arranged even more cleverly and compactly than those of our own modern apartments. Pride was shining in her eyes.

  “It’s all wonderful!” Dick cried, repressing a strong desire to throw his arms around her and kiss her as she had once done to him—which is probably what she expected him to do.

  Presently she opened a little panel near the head of his bunk and showed him the weapon she had condensed for him. It was shaped like an automatic he had drawn for her. But it was covered with the same glistening red neutronic armor as the ship. The extra magazines were little cylinders which fitted up into the butt.

  He tried the balance of it, sighted down it, and laid it back in its compartment, smiling with satisfaction. It felt like a real weapon. And from what Midos Ken had said about it, it was!

  As they left the room, another thought crossed his mind. “How is it that we can walk here, away from the gravity of the earth?” he asked. “And why is it that here and in the corridor down is toward the side of the ship, while up in the bridge is toward the rear end of the ship?”

  “Gravity plates in the floor,” Thon said. “Gravity is just one of the vibrations on the order of the K-ray. We control it. Men used to fight with rays which cut off gravity and sent objects flying off into space. Such rays are used yet, on certain heavy, dense planets, to lessen the force of gravity in buildings, to make the human inhabitants comfortable.”