A little shell of green metal, it was, no larger than a coin, with a narrow strap to hold it upon the wrist. A slight whirring sound, almost inaudible, came from each. When Dick fastened the device about his arm, he felt a not unpleasant tingling sensation where the metal touched him. Throbbing force seemed to run over his body from it.
“This is a modification of the scientific trick that defeated Garo Nark in the Avar,” Midos Ken said. “The little generator charges the body with a force that neutralizes the El Rays. It is rather well known now, and I have developed other means of protection. But under the present circumstances, Ave can afford to risk no more than necessary.”
“Feels queer, does it?” Thon asked. “Well, it will do no harm, anyhow. It makes a person slightly luminous in a dark room—the discharge of the force. Electrical phenomenon.”
At five minutes to midnight they left the suite, talking and laughing carelessly as if merely out for adventure, and tried to lose themselves in the feverishly gay throngs of passengers. Music throbbed from the orchestra, music with a mad, sensuous, emotion-exciting rhythm. Dancers spun wildly about the saloons, in passionately close embrace, faces flushed with wine and the careless abandon of the hour. Voices hummed, high and shrill; hysterical laughter rang out.
As quickly as they could do it without displaying haste, the three passed through the saloons and promenades and drawing rooms toward the entrance of the main elevator, on the lower deck. Once they paused as if to drink, but left their glasses after the merest sip.
By the stroke of twelve they stood before the elevator. The broad deck or floor behind them, used for athletic games, was all but deserted, though strongly lit by a clear green light from the ceiling. The door was tall, oval, massive as the door of a bank vault. And it was locked.
Quickly, Thon dipped a hand into a pocket of her blue silken garment. She drew out a slender rod of black, glistening crystal, the size of a lead pencil. About it was a sliding, silver ring.
She bent over the massive bar of white metal that held the great door locked. The little black rod—now Dick recognized it as a miniature El Ray projector—glowed with a violent fire that seemed to pulse down its length, to reach beyond the end in a narrow, quivering tongue of flame.
Beneath Thon’s fingers, the little lance of violet fire cut through the white metal of the bar as an oxy-hydrogen torch cuts iron or steel. Hissing jets of steam rushed out of the fissure, and rose above them in a white cloud.
The El Ray turned the metal to water!
One end of the bar was cut through. She turned to the other. She had cut it half way through when Midos Ken, who had been listening sharply, turned with a little warning cry.
DICK had been trying to stand in a lounging attitude, in such a position as to hide the stooping girl from any invisible guards who might be about. But the hissing white clouds of steam, rising many feet above them, he had been unable to hide.
Now, as Midos Ken turned, he searched the room again, but saw nothing to alarm him.
Then, an intense beam of violet radiance flashed about them. An El Ray, which seemed to come from a point not twenty feet away! It was the same bright beam, thrown by an unseen man, that had turned others on the ship into billowing clouds of vapor.
But the pirates had dealt with Midos Ken before.
The violet ray flashed upon them, harmless as a ray of light.
A gasp of surprise, and a muttered curse, came out of the air behind the beam.
Then Midos Ken thrust out toward the sound what looked to Dick like a polished cylinder of yellow topaz, an inch thick and about two inches long. He thinks it was a vacuum tube of some kind, with an atomic power generator inside it. He saw no visible ray or projectile come from it.
But there was a voiceless, inarticulate cry of pain from behind the violet beam. And the El Ray flickered out. There was a clatter as some unseen instrument—probably the El Ray projector, covered with the chameleon-like pigment of invisibility—fell upon the floor. Then a dull thud, as a human body fell beside it.
A moment later Thon had finished the second cut in the bar. The middle section of it fell with a clang. Dick stopped and lifted it aside. The door was free to open. Thon turned a little knob, and it swung outward.
One by one, Thon first, then Midos Ken, then Dick, they leapt into the down-rushing current of air within the tube. It gave Dick a strange feeling to leap, when his turn came.
“Too much like jumping in a well in the dark!” he muttered.
But he did not hesitate.
All gravitational force was cut off, within the tube. The current of air carried them gently down. Luminous numbers flashed past, and glistening handrails which one might grasp to stop at any floor. Thon and her father had vanished ahead of him, in the dark tube. He had a sudden feeling that he was lost, that he did not know where to stop.
Then Thon’s white arm flashed out of a dark opening, caught his shoulder. He clutched a rail, drew himself toward her. Suddenly he was standing on a floor again, and felt gravitational force drawing him against it.
They were in a huge, dark space. Dick could see nothing plainly. He knew that they were in the cargo hold only by the curious, mingled fragrance of many kinds of merchandise, which he had noticed when they had left the Ahrora here.
“Here we are safe!” Thon whispered swiftly. “But come. They will find the dead man; follow. We dare not make a light. Dad will guide us.”
Pale, roseate luminosity clothed their bodies.
Midos Ken was in the lead, they stumbled forward, among piles of cases, drums, sacks, and bales of a thousand commodities. Dick was guided by the light fingers of Thon upon his arm. Despite them, he stumbled, and ran into a wall of boxes.
Suddenly there was light, dazzling, blinding, painful. An intense white beam wavered across the vast, crowded hold, casting flickering, fantastic shadows of the piled merchandise. They heard the rush of footsteps and low voices. There was a cry of “Here! They went this way!”
Violet gleams flickered behind them. White clouds of steam billowed up, here and there, where the El Rays reduced a pile of cargo to water vapor.
“There! I see ’em!” cried a voice behind. “There they go!”
There was another clatter of feet.
“Give ’em hell!” came a harsh command.
Dick was still struggling forward, led by Thon, too much blinded by the sudden dazzling light to profit by it.
“I’ll stop that!” Midos Ken muttered, ahead of him.
Dick heard a faint tinkle of shattering glass. And abruptly he was in utter darkness. The dazzling searchlight was gone. The hold was absolutely black. Another of the ether-exhausting bombs, he knew. Thon led him on through the blackness.
Curses of irritation and alarm came from behind them. They could hear men stumbling, blundering into the piled cargo.
“What’s the matter with the damn searchlight?” a harsh voice demanded.
“Here we are!” Thon breathed suddenly.
They stopped against the smooth side of the Ahrora. Midos Ken fumbled with the fastening of the door—a sort of combination lock which prevented others from entering in their absence. He voiced low, musical notes which controlled it. Then it was open. Thon guided him through, closed it again.
“Safe!” she cried. “They couldn’t get us out of here in ten years!”
Within, it was as utterly dark as without. They groped their way along the narrow corridor, and “up” into the little domed bridge at its end.
“What about some light?” Dick muttered.
“My bomb exhausted the ether in here as well as outside,” Midos Ken told him. “And since light is a vibration of the ether, there is no light. Even our K-ray generators will not work until the ether has had time to flow back. It will be five minutes, perhaps.”
They waited in utter darkness. Dick found it vaguely disturbing not to be able to see at all. He put out a hand, touched Thon’s cool fingers. They grasped his hand, squeezed it reassuri
ngly.
“What do we do when we get outside?” Dick asked. “Go after Don?”
“Yes,” Thon cried. “Off to the Dark Star, to rescue Don Galeen! We ought to gain a week on this liner, with our new generators.”
Abruptly the darkness vanished from about them. The domed wall bathed them in soft, mellow green radiance. Dick looked about at the maze of complex apparatus on the circular table against the wall, at the little stand in the center, with the telescopic vision screen that showed what lay directly ahead, and the little control lever of polished metal, with the white cylinder set in its top.
Thon put her slender fingers on the little lever, pushed it a little to one side, pressed suddenly on the white cylinder. Then, smiling, she raised her hand.
“What’s the matter?” Dick asked, puzzled. “Can’t we smash the way out?” He had felt no sense of motion.
Once again Thon told him, smiling, to open a window and look.
He swung open the metal shutter of one of the portholes. Once more the splendor of interplanetary space was before him, a curtain of midnight velvet, sewn with glittering diamonds, and dusted with silver. But the familiar constellations seen from our own earth were completely lost. In fact, he was so far toward one side of the Galaxy that most of the stars seemed to be on one side of the sky.
“We have really escaped!” he cried. “But how is it that we felt no shock when we broke through the wall of the liner?”
“Our K-ray mechanism transmits all shocks and pressures equally to every particle of matter on the ship,” Midos Ken said. “Thus there is no pressure of one particle against another, in any gain or loss of speed.”
Thon was pointing to the little screen on the center of the upright stand. There was mirrored a section of the star-strewn space without. In it floated the long silvery hull of the K-ray liner, looking to Dick like a Zeppelin tossed up among the stars. The faint purple glow of the K-rays clung about her stern. In the middle of her side was a black, round spot—it looked no bigger than a bullet hole.
“That is where we came out,” Thon said. “They will have it patched up in a few hours. See, they are already at work!”
She pressed a button beside the screen. The image of the liner seemed to swim closer, until they could plainly see the ragged hole torn in the white metal plates. Half a dozen men, in grotesque metal space suits, were busy about it. Queer figures, weightless, hauling themselves about on lines.
“And now we are off for the Dark Star, after poor Don!” Thon said.
She inclined the little metal lever. The ship vanished from the screen. Stars raced across it. Presently, with a bright binary in the center of the screen, she raised the lever to hold it there. And she pushed the white cylinder down to the bottom of its socket in the lever.
Dick had no sensation of motion, but he knew that he was rushing through space at an inconceivable velocity.
FOR six days they flashed through space. On the third they shot between the twin suns of the double system, both young stars, huge and blue. On they went toward another faint star that, Thon told him, was Anral, which had been the destination of the liner.
Dick and Thon stood alternate watches of four hours each. Piloting the Ahrora, he discovered, was not a strenuous task. The white cylinder could be locked down to keep the generators going at full power. It was necessary only to watch the star toward which they were flying, and move the little lever at intervals, to keep the star in the center of the telescope screen.
Dick had been alarmed, at first, about the danger of collision with meteors. But Thon told him that no meteor could damage their neutronium hull. And the K-ray “shock-absorber” which protected them from the effects of acceleration, would make it impossible for them to feel the shock, she told him, even if they ran into a planet.
Despite the small size of their quarters in the Ahrora, they were able to live quite luxuriously. Ventilation was good, for a fresh current of air, dried, purified of carbon dioxide, and warmed to the proper temperature, blew continually from the revitalizing device. The carbon dioxide, as well as garbage and other waste, was reduced to water by El Ray apparatus. And this water was stored in tanks below the floor, to be turned into oxygen to replenish the air, or into a delicious variety of synthetic foods for the table.
There was scant room for exercise, but Thon, herself a superb athlete, insisted upon regular calisthenics in the corridor.
At the end of the sixth day the course was changed again. Thon manipulated the little lever to bring a faint speck of light into the telescope screen on the little stand. So faint it was that the highest power of the instrument had to be used to make it visible at all.
“That is the Dark Star!” she told Dick. “We are comparatively near it now; we shall reach it in ten hours!”
Her blue eyes flashed with excitement. She smiled as if it were a pleasure to slip down in a daring raid upon a pirate planet. Dick trembled lest the audacity of the girl should sometime get her into a predicament, from which even her quick mind and the science she had learned from Midos Ken could not extricate her.
“What will we do when we get there?” Dick asked. “Can you tell me something more about this Dark Star?”
“It is a planet without a sun! Thrown off, perhaps, from its parent star by some forgotten cataclysm. It was floating alone in space when men found it, a dead, frozen world of endless night. Such it was when the pirates of space first made retreats in its barren icy wildernesses.
“A huge planet. Twice the diameter of the earth, with four times the area. But the force of gravity there is only a little greater, since it is not so dense as the earth. Vast, frozen seas cover nearly half of it; there are lofty mountain ranges, wilder than any on the earth.
“Now it has a population of billions—all degenerate slaves of Garo Nark, Lord of the Dark Star. An empire of pirates, covering a whole planet. They brought their prisoners there, forced them to colonize its bleak wildernesses.
“Much of the surface of the Dark Star is warmed and lighted with atomic power—with machines like those that control the weather on the earth. But the population is mostly concentrated in a few large cities, instead of being spread uniformly as it is on the earth—probably to simplify the problem of defense against the Union Patrol.
“The inhabited region is a broad belt about the equator. The polar regions—no colder, originally, of course, than any other part of the dead planet—are uninhabited. They are mostly covered with frozen oceans, or rugged mountains.
“There is a barren mountainous region only a few hundred miles north of Nuvon, which is Nark’s capital city. We can land there, I think, without being discovered.”
“You seem to know a good deal about it,” Dick remarked. “Are visitors allowed there, to carry information to the rest of the Galaxy?”
“No,” Thon said. “It is through one of the adventures of Don Galeen that I learned about it. There are few dangerous places that he has not been in. It seems that Garo Nark is not an ideal ruler. His subjects are not all satisfied; many of them wish to escape from the Dark Star.
“A few years ago, Don joined some other adventurers, on a project to aid the escape of a few of Nark’s unsatisfied subjects who were able to pay generously for passage to another planet. They had a K-Ray flier.
“Don, with another kindred spirit, was dropped on the Dark Star to find the passengers and collect the fare—which, of course, was rather high—to one of the planets of Anral. The flier was to land again, in a few weeks, in the mountains north of Nuvon.
“They found the passengers—many more than they could take—ready enough to come. Don was busy guiding parties of them through the frozen darkness of the mountains to the cavern where he hid them, with their chests of diamond tokens, to wait the flier.
“But Garo Nark seems to have a good intelligence service. He found what was going on. One of his ships raided the camp. The diamond tokens that were to pay the expenses of the venture were confiscated. The passengers—e
xcept a woman or two who struck the fancy of the ship’s officers—were dispatched with the El Ray.
“Don escaped, happening to be out with the last group of passengers. He sent them back and hid in the mountains. Nark’s ship was waiting in ambush to trap the flier. But Don got into television contact with it, gave his warning, and arranged to be picked up, a month later, at the edge of one of the frozen seas.
“It is four years ago that that happened. It was not long after that Dad sent him in search for the catalyst.”
Dick had watched Thon as she spoke, noting the vivacity of her lovely face, and the admiration that flashed in her eyes as she spoke of Don Galeen and his exploits. But who would not worship a hero who had braved the dangers of a hundred wild planets, he wondered. And what could he offer, against the claims of this adventurer, who was so brave, so handsome of face and mighty of body, so resourceful in dealing with his enemies?
On they flashed toward the Dark Star.
Presently Thon retired to her stateroom. Dick stood a long watch, to give her time to refresh herself to meet the perils of landing. They were only two hours from the Dark Star when she entered the bridge again. But it was still only a faint speck of light on the screen.
Thon drove the flier the rest of the way. The Dark Star grew presently to a tiny, dim-lit sphere, visible upon the screen. A broad belt about its equator was lighted; there were brighter white patches that were cities, and dim green areas that were forests and parks. To the north and the south of this lighted equatorial belt, the planet was dark.
Thon checked their speed a little, while she located the black area that was the mountainous district north of Nuvon. Then, having her bearings upon it, she drove the flier down at the limit of its power, to flash past any watch that Garo Nark might have on duty. Dick got few impressions of the landing. It seemed to him merely that the little image of the planet, on the screen, expanded, blurred, and faded. Then Thon raised her fingers from the control lever, he said,
The Stone From the Green Star Page 9
