The Stone From the Green Star

by Jack Williamson

  “But you have aided me, Midos Ken. It was your science which paralyzed these monsters. And it was you who brought the stone out to me. And I am just. I will reward you for that!”

  Garo Nark laughed mockingly.

  “I will give you your life! And your liberty! I will leave you here. And the ape from the past with you! But your weapons and your garments are mine, as spoils of war. And if you should get cold, when this warm darkness is gone, if you should get hungry, if the monsters take you—well, remember that I warned you!”

  He laughed gloatingly. Pelug’s diabolical chuckle rang out, as did the approving grunts of other men.

  “And so, farewell. I make you Lord of the Green Star, with this ape to rule over—and the monsters who live in the cones! I wish you a long reign, Midos Ken. But I warn you! Now that they have lost the stone of life, the monsters will be hungry!

  “Thon Ahrora will go with me, to be one of the queens of the Dark Star. And Don Galeen I shall take, too. For it may be that I shall wish to know something of the stone, which I must persuade him to reveal.

  “One of my fliers was taken into a blue cone. But the other is near. We can reach it. When this night of yours is gone, and we can fly again, we shall be ready. We shall escape before the monsters recover.

  “And farewell to you, Midos Ken, Lord of the Green Star!”

  As the evil giant had boasted, his men had stripped Dick and Midos Ken, removing their weapons, their garments, the little devices on their arms which generated the electronic screens. As his thick, jeering tones died into silence, something was thrust under Dick’s nose, which reeked with a nauseating odor.

  He reeled, his senses swam. In vain he fought the influence of the stupefying drug. Swiftly he fell into insensibility. For a single instant Thon’s clear, undaunted voice checked his rapid narcosis.

  “Good-by, Dick!” she called. “I loved you!”

  With the beginning of a hoarse curse from Garo Nark ringing in his ears, he fell into complete insensibility.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The Derelict of Space

  DICK woke in utter darkness. Midos Ken had laid a hand on his shoulder. He sat up wonderingly, dropped back with a groan of black despair when he recalled the capture of Thon, with Don and the stone of life.

  The horror of their position burst upon him. They were alone in the frozen, rocky wilderness of the Green Star, a score of miles from where the Ahrora lay. Whenever the tenebrous pall of midnight lifted, the monsters of cold flame would be abroad to search for them. He knew that their drugged sleep had lasted many hours. Garo Nark must have Thon, and Don Galeen, and the precious crystal of life fastened inside his ship, secure from rescue.

  “Looks as if Garo Nark has beaten us,” Dick groaned. “We have one chance,” Midos Ken told him. “If we can make it back to the Ahrora—”

  “But we have no clothes, no shoes. And it must be twenty miles.”

  “I know. It will be hard. But we are both young men again—we have the fresh fire of life in our veins. The darkness may hold for several hours, yet. So long as it does, we will be protected from the cold and from the monsters. It is the only chance—”

  “All right,” Dick cried. “It looks hopeless. But count on me to the bitter end!”

  They started down the side of the mountain.

  The hardships and difficulties of that journey were incredible. The rays of the wondrous crystal had made supermen of them—otherwise they must have died in that mountain wilderness, or fallen victims to the monsters of frozen light.

  Hour after hour they stumbled forward, through utter blackness. They were not cold—then; the ether-less space did not carry heat from their bodies.

  But the rocks were sharp; their feet were cut to ribbons before they had gone a mile. Each step brought almost insupportable agony. Sometimes Dick lifted his feet, and felt their tortured soles with his hand. He could see nothing, of course. But his fingers came away sticky with warm blood.

  When they came to a smooth patch of snow, it was comforting to walk across its comparatively soft surface.

  Midos Ken’s hearing was almost uncannily acute. He was able to judge the distance and contour of an object by its echo. With this amazing faculty, he could follow the trail they had made in coming up the mountain side from the Ahrora.

  Dick had no idea how long they were in coming down the mountain. One’s sense of time does not operate when the mind is tortured with pain. It seemed to him that each step took minutes, that it was a bleak eternity since he had stood with Thon before the crystal of life.

  They were a mile from the Ahrora when the light came back.

  Despite the faintness of it, it was almost blinding to eyes used to total darkness. For a minute or so Dick blinked, stumbling along after Midos Ken, who had known of the change only by the sudden chill that smote into their unprotected bodies. Then Dick could see.

  He saw the massive boulders looming about them, dark, faintly gleaming with green radiance. He saw the occasional patches of shining snow, and the vast, desolate sweep of the weird desert to the south of them, shimmering with fantastic emerald radiance. He saw the rugged line of peaks behind them, rising slightly luminous against the green-black gloom of the glacial sky.

  And he saw the flier, a tiny red cylinder lying among the huge gleaming boulders, far ahead of them.

  With the passing of the darkness, the air became suddenly intensely cold—numbing, bitter and paralyzing. Dick took the lead, broke into a run, guiding Midos Ken by the hand.

  They ran desperately over the radiant green snow. Their breath formed white clouds, and froze into particles of ice that congealed upon their bodies. At first their bleeding feet left red prints in the green snow. Then they were too cold to bleed.

  The air they breathed in great gasps seemed to sear their lungs.

  Their bodies felt stiff, numb, as if clothed in unfeeling armor.

  And the horror crept slowly upon them as they ran; the vertigo of helpless, endless falling, of falling through abysms of chill blue light, where obscene, writhing monsters swarmed, clinging to them, sucking away their life.

  The cold penetrated with numbing, stiffening lances. The paralysis of cold and of unexplicable horror crept upon them. Hands and feet became numb and dead. And the numbness crept up their limbs.

  The last of their run was an incoherent nightmare to Dick. He could walk upright no longer. He crawled upon hands and knees. Sharp rocks cut his naked skin, but it did not bleed. Midos Ken crept along behind them.

  Then the red wall of the flier was above them.

  Dick pulled himself up to it, hammered futilely on it with his hands. They were too stiff to respond to the impulse of his will.

  In a gasping voice, Midos Ken sang out the series of notes which operated the mechanism. The massive door swung open. With a last desperate effort, Dick drew himself inside. He remembers trying blindly to help Midos Ken get in.

  Then he lost consciousness.

  When he woke, he was warm again—the automatic heat control in the Ahrora kept the air constantly at the proper temperature. Midos Ken was lying beside him in the floor of the corridor. He had been able to clamber inside and close the door.

  A strange figure, skin cut to ribbons, covered with dried blood. It seemed hardly possible that it could be alive. But Dick could see the regular rise and fall of the chest as it breathed. And he was in a similar condition.

  Presently he roused Midos Ken. They found antiseptic and healing drugs, among the supplies, and covered their wounds with these. Neither of them was able to walk upon his feet—the flesh had been cut off them to the bone. They crept about the flier on hands and knees.

  But the miraculous vitality that had streamed into their bodies from the stone of life still animated them. Their torn feet, under Midos Ken’s medical care, healed with amazing rapidity. The time of their exposure to the cold had been so short that no parts of their bodies were seriously frozen. In a surprisingly short time they were r
estored to health and strength.

  Only a few hours after they had recovered consciousness, they crept into the bridge. The red needles of the detectors spun uncertainly; Nark had taken the stone beyond their range. Dick tested the K-ray generators, and found them functioning with full efficiency. He drew himself up by the control stand, and drove the Ahrora out into space under full power.

  The Things of Frozen Flame must have been disorganized by the loss of the catalyst of life. They may have thought the Ahrora deserted. At any rate, it seems that they had set no watch over her. The little flier sped out into space unopposed by the beings of the Green Star.

  Dick brought the ship to rest when the Dark Star and the Green Star were but two faint points of light in the Stygian void.

  For many days they lay there, resting, until their wounds were healed, so that they could walk again. Those were terrible days to Dick, days of hopeless anxiety, of feverish pain that was more than half mental distress on Thon’s account.

  As they waited, they planned.

  “I THINK we shall be too late,” Midos Ken said many times. “Too late to do anything for Thon and Don Galeen. But we can get back the catalyst. You will take the stone of life back to mankind. And I am going to die. I am going to ride the Dark Star to a flaming doom, and rid the universe of the pirate planet!”

  “You don’t mean that—that you are going to sacrifice yourself?” Dick had cried. “I won’t let you do that!”

  “Yes,” the scientist had told him, solemnly. “I am going to take the Dark Star down to death with me. I am blind; life holds little joy for a blind man. I have lived only to find the secret of life for man. I have found it. I am ready to seek the merciful door of death. And I shall take the Dark Star through it with me.”

  On the day that they were able to stand upon their feet again, they drove the Ahrora down to the pirate planet. This time they did not land in the mountains. They entered the broad, bright belt about the planet’s equator, where its people lived in the warmth and brilliance of innumerable atomic weather-control machines.

  “Take us to Nuvon, the capital of the pirates,” Midos Ken told Dick. “Find the crystal palace of Garo Nark, and drive the flier into it through the arch. We will land before his throne!”

  Dick found the patch of brighter light that marked the city of the pirate emperor, drove the flier down toward it. He picked out the palace of Garo Nark, standing upon a hill in the center of the city. It was a building of gorgeous, barbaric splendor, a colossal dome of yellow gold, and long wings roofed with glistening, snow-white marble. The walls were of emerald crystal, and there were long colonnades with colossal pillars of burning ruby.

  He sent the little flier through the high arch of the entrance, into that vast throne room, which he had seen twice before, once on a television screen, once when they had come to treat with Garo Nark. There was the golden floor, the emerald walls, with deep-set ruby panels inlaid with fantastic designs in sapphire and silver and jet. There was the pure white, vaulted ceiling.

  He landed the Ahrora on the floor of glistening yellow metal, before the high throne of blazing purple crystal.

  The purple throne was empty.

  Hundreds of guards stood about the walls, holding the black tubes of the El-ray. Leveling them, they rushed forward, bathing the flier in flickering violet rays, that shimmered harmless on the red armor of neutronium.

  At a low word from Midos Ken, Dick swung a handle. The huge projector mounted in the flier revolved, sweeping the golden floor with a broad beam of intense, hot violet. The black-clad guards were destroyed like toys of ice before a furnace blast. Wisps of white steam drifted toward the high, white ceiling.

  “Find the detector,” the old scientist told Dick. “The red needle will show where the stone is hidden. We will find it. You will fly with it back to humanity. And I will drive the Black Star to its end.”

  “But Thon!” Dick cried. “We must find her! And Don Galeen.”

  “We are too late for that,” Midos Ken said grimly. “You don’t know Garo Nark as I do. They may be still alive—I fear that they are! If so, a swift and merciful death is all they desire. And I will give it to them! But find the detector.”

  Dick took the little instrument down from its place on the wall, leveled it. The needle spun uncertainly, failing to come to rest in any definite position.

  “It doesn’t register!” he cried. “It spins uncertainly—just as it did when we last used it on the Dark Star, after Garo Nark had carried off the stone.”

  “Doesn’t register?” Midos Ken echoed in dismay.

  For a long time the old, blind man stood in despair.

  “My life has gone for nothing,” he groaned at last. “The stone is not on the Green Star, for we tried the detector before we left. It is not here. Garo Nark must have destroyed it. Bathed himself and his friends in its life-giving rays, I suppose, and then turned an El-ray on it, for fear that humanity would learn of it and take it from him.”

  For a time he was silent again.

  Then he burst out fiercely. “The toil of my life is lost! But I can die more usefully than I have lived. I can free the universe from the Dark Star and its degenerate pirate hordes!”

  “How?” Dick asked in dazed wonder.

  “You remember the enormous K-ray generators which move this planet through space like a ship? I am going to find them, seize the controls, and send this world crashing into the Green Star. True, I am a blind man, and alone. But the pirates have no weapons that can penetrate my electronic armor. I have instruments which will lead me to the great generators—I made rude triangulations as we were coming in; they are located not a mile from this palace.

  “And you, Dick, are free to go back to the world of man, and tell the story of our adventure. Perhaps you can forget, and lead a useful life. I am sorry to part from you, my boy. I love you. I had hoped that you and Thon—”

  The old man’s voice broke suddenly. He set his lean jaws, and composed his face again. Himself almost overcome, Dick took his hand, gripped it hard.

  Quickly, Midos Ken turned from the room. Dick followed him, saw him go down the corridor to his stateroom, and emerge in a moment. The roseate nimbus of the electronic armor had appeared about his straight body, and he was fitting a strange little instrument into his pocket.

  Deliberately, yet swiftly, he swung upon the door of the flier and stepped out upon the golden floor of the palace.

  Suddenly Dick found his voice. “Stop!” he shouted, rushing forward. “You mustn’t do this. It’s insane!”

  He grasped at the scientist’s shoulder. Electric force struck him, hurled him back to the floor. The massive door of the flier swung shut before him with cold finality.

  He staggered to his feet, put his hand to the button that opened the door. Then, realizing that he could never make Midos Ken change his determination, he hesitated. In a moment he went up the corridor to the bridge, where he could look out.

  Midos Ken had just reached the arched entrance to the great hall. He was going out into the streets of Nuvon. A group of men were scattering wildly about him, while he held a little cylinder of topaz-yellow in his hand. Several had fallen before him.

  It was a strange figure—a tall, straight body, vigorous with the new youth from the stone of life, clad in a simple, dark-green garment, and wrapped in a wondrous nimbus of rosy flame. He was striding forward confidently, despite his blindness. One hand held the little bar of yellow crystal before him. Another was grasping a strange mechanism, which, Dick supposed, would guide him to the enormous K-ray generators which he sought.

  He passed out of sight around the emerald wall… .

  Out of sight, but not out of history… . For we know what he did… .

  It was several minutes before Dick moved the Ahrora. The fire of his life was dead. His light had gone out. He was heavy with hopeless despair. With Thon gone, and Don Galeen, and old Midos Ken, his interest in existence was ended. There was nothing left for h
im to do but to return to the inhabited universe and write the record from which this history is made.

  He did not move the flier until a party of men rushed into the magnificent throne room where it lay, pushing a strange weapon before them. That roused him from his lethargy of despair. He swung the powerful El-ray of the flier upon them, sent them and the machine hissing into a dense cloud of steam.

  Then he drove the Ahrora out through the high arch, and up into the black sky above the city of Nuvon—drove far out into the midnight of space, until the Black Star and the Green Star were two specks of light, distinguishable one from the other only by color.

  He stopped the flier, let her drift motionless in space while he watched. His black despair was too deep to permit a keen interest in the amazing spectacle he saw. He watched dully, without awe and without wonder. It seemed unimportant, an inane anticlimax to the tragic end of the great adventure. It did not matter.

  But it was wonderful enough. He had not been watching for an hour when the point of light that he knew was the Dark Star moved visibly—toward the Green Star. Midos Ken was succeeding in his colossal attempt to destroy two worlds, at the cost of his life.

  The Dark Star moved swiftly, with ever-increasing speed.

  Even so, it was hours before the two planets came together.

  Dick was looking when the fleck of white light and the fleck of dull green became one.

  There was a sudden flare-up of white incandescence. From the distance, it looked insignificant as the striking of a match. But Dick knew that both planets had been turned to white-hot vapor by the heat of their impact. In a single instant, all living things upon them had been consumed by the inconceivable heat of the cataclysmic collision.

  “At least,” Dick muttered, “it was merciful!”

  HE watched for hours longer, as the little sphere of white gas began to lose its heat and contract a little. Its vivid white dimmed a little, reddened.