The Stone From the Green Star

by Jack Williamson

  A HUNDRED days after they had left the Dark Star a bright speck of light flashed past them which, Don said, was Zulon, the outlying sun, from which he had set out on his search for the catalyst. Before them were only a few stars, far-scattered, speckling the inconceivable vastness of extra-galactic space.

  They were plunging from the crowded star-streams of the galactic system, out into the frozen, empty void of space—the space between universes, trackless, desolate, dark beyond conception.

  Two days later they darted near the strange red sun of which Don had told them, the red sun encircled with rings of sapphire blue, and on, past it, toward a great binary star.

  It was a week later when they plunged through the net of planets of that vast, far-off solar system that Don had explored, finding the colossal ruins of a dead civilization on one world, and teeming, savage jungle life on others.

  On they flashed, toward the weird Green Star, which swam unseen in the illimitable, midnight void beyond.

  Again and again, with the most powerful of their instruments, they searched the sky behind them, where the Galaxy was a broad bar of silver light, seeming to be set with tiny glittering brilliants—searched for the Dark Star, the planet that was plunging in mad flight after them. They did not see it.

  But Dick was uneasy. They had started directly for the Green Star, before they had known they were followed. The invisible agents of Garo Nark, spying upon them back at Bardon, on the earth, had probably heard Don Galeen’s story of his voyage, of the stars he had passed which served as landmarks.

  Even if they had outrun Garo Nark, might he not be able to find the Green Star?

  Two days after they had left the great blue sun, with its many spinning worlds, a tiny speck of green radiance became visible in the black abyss before them. A tiny point of green that grew slowly brighter.

  The Green Star!

  It grew as the hours went by. It expanded to a tiny globe, a sphere of frozen emerald light. And the green sphere swelled. They could see long ranges of barren, rugged hills—glowing as if cut from darkest jade. They saw immense, desolate wastes of snow—shimmering with dim green light like dust of beryl.

  And on a high, mountain plateau, almost at the north pole of this weird planet, strange blue light was gleaming. Cones of blue flame seemed to rise from the rugged mountain tops.

  Don Galeen seemed queerly affected. His brown eyes, usually so alight with humor or flashing with dauntless courage, were wide and strange, filled with nameless horror. His mighty muscles were tensed, as if in a silent battle with terror. His breath came in quick, short gasps.

  “Those cones of blue light!” he whispered hoarsely. “They are the homes—the cities of the things! Things I cannot describe! There is horror in them. Horror that I am not anxious to face again. We must land far away, and study them before we go near.”

  Nervously he fumbled for the black wooden cylinder in which he smoked the tian. Pity in her eyes, Thon helped him roll the little green pellet into it, and forbore to sniff at the reeking fumes that Don exhaled, as he sank back into the dreamy oblivion of the drug.

  It was left for the others to choose the landing place.

  “It must be somewhere,” Dick suggested, “where we can remain hidden, while we learn something about the planet. And it should be as near as possible to the part inhabited by these monsters that are guarding the catalyst, so we can observe something of their habits.”

  “A very good plan,” Midos Ken agreed.

  “I see the very place!” Thon cried, looking at the telescope screen. “South of the high plateau where we see the cones of light, there is a vast, flat green desert—a plain covered with the luminous snow. And south of that plain is another range of hills. Let’s land in those hills, with the desert between us and the cones of light.”

  The others agreed that the spot was well chosen. Thon brought the flier down in a swift dart toward a little ravine that opened upon the flat waste of snow. A few moments and they were upon the Green Star!

  The Ahrora lay in a narrow canyon, a mere crack in the mountains. The rugged walls that rose dark about her gleamed faintly with green luminescence. She lay upon a bank of shimmering green snow that covered the bottom of the gorge. The snow was not brilliantly green; it was no brighter than snow on the earth beneath full moonlight. The sky above them was dark, filled with a dim greenish dusk.

  They had hardly landed when Dick noticed a strange thing. Thon, standing near him in the control room, began to glow with faint green light. A luminous green mist seemed to gather about her skin, her hair, even her garments.

  Other objects in the room, the instruments, were aglow with faint viridescence. A mist of emerald dust seemed to hang about the room. He put up his own hand, found it outlined in dim green flame.

  “An extraordinarily penetrating radiation!” Thon was saying. “Or it could not enter through our neutronium walls. Even the cosmic ray could not affect us in here.”

  “This is damnably queer!” Dick broke out. “It looks like everything is afire. Even we!”

  “It’s easy enough to explain,” the girl said. “This planet evidently has a core of some radioactive material, which emits radiations of short wavelength and very high penetrating power. Everything they strike phosphoresces under them, as zinc sulphide under the emanations of radium!”

  Then it was that Dick was first conscious of the horror.

  Suddenly it seemed to him that the green fire was cold, that it was chilling him. He trembled involuntarily, and drew his garment close against his body. Apprehensively, he looked at the little gauge on which was recorded the temperature of the air inside the flier.

  The tiny needle had not moved; the air was really as warm as ever.

  But he shivered. Goose flesh roughened his skin. Icy lances of cold ran through him. A peculiarly unpleasant numbness came over his limbs; he felt a dull, throbbing ache in arms and legs, as if cold had penetrated to his very bones.

  He felt as if he were rapidly freezing to death, even though the little thermometer told him the inside of the ship was as warm as ever.

  Then a strange paralysis came over him.

  “I’ll jump up and down,” he was muttering through lips that felt stiff with cold, numb and leather-like. “Slap arms against sides—that will—”

  Abruptly it seemed as if an icy needle had been thrust through his throat. His voice died in a gasp. He tried to raise his arms, to flap them against his sides.

  And he could not move them!

  He could make his hands jerk, twitch slightly. But he could not lift them. Too cold to move, he thought. Frozen solid! But his eyes still moved. He looked at the little thermometer; still it had not changed.

  Then came sensations still more unpleasant.

  He felt that he was falling. His conscious mind still knew that he was standing in the bridge-room. But he had a sickening sense of plunging down headlong through infinite abysses of space, spinning dizzily as he fell. The nausea, the helplessness, the horror of it overcame him. He longed with all his mind for relief, even for the impact when he struck. But there was no crushing impact—it seemed that he was plunging down forever through illimitable voids of space.

  Then another vision. He knew it was a dream, for he could see the familiar bridge-room still about him, and the little thermometer and the other instruments. He could see Thon standing near him, a peculiar grimace of horror frozen on her lovely face.

  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 f
aint 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 f
or 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.