The Stone From the Green Star

by Jack Williamson

  “We are dealing with an utterly alien world,” Midos Ken said several times. “There is sentience here—but sentience in no familiar body. We must be prepared to deal with manifestations of intelligence that are unfamiliar or even inconceivable to the human mind.”

  Not being qualified as an experimenter, Dick was pressed into lookout duty. He dressed himself in garments insulated against the bitter cold of this sunless world, and heated with atomic power. Every day he tramped down to the mouth of the narrow gorge in which they had landed the flier, and concealed himself to watch across the snow to the north.

  He was to report any unusual phenomenon over a television disk he carried. His atomic pistol was at hand, for defense if he happened to be discovered.

  Still he dreams of those long vigils, he says.

  He lay on his face in the snow, in a crack between two boulders,. He had raised a little wall of snow before him, for farther concealment. The boulders, and the mountain walls behind him, gleamed with a faint green light. And the vast desert of snow, stretching flat before him as far as his eye could reach, shimmered with soft emerald fire. An immense expanse of faintly glowing green snow it was, desolate and lonely, reaching away to the northern horizon.

  There were no stars—and, of course, no moon or sun. The sky was dark, but faintly suffused with the green radiance of the snow. It was a green pall of gloom, dark and dusky.

  For endless hours Dick stared across toward the north, across that waste of barren, glowing snow. He had a little lens, of variable magnifying power, which he used as a field glass or telescope.

  It was three hundred miles and more, across that desolate waste of luminous snow, to the rugged mountain plateau where they had seen the strange cones of blue flame, which, Don Galeen said, were the “cities” of the alien inhabitants of this world. Due to the curvature of the planet’s surface, those mountains were below Dick’s horizon—not a single peak rose high enough to be visible.

  But sometimes he could see a blue gleam in the dusky emerald sky above them. And sometimes there was a flicker of other colors, of moving shapes of light. Once he saw something reach up, that looked oddly like a hand of purple fire. It seemed to clutch something, and draw it down again.

  And sometimes he saw tiny bright lights driving through the green gloom above the shimmering wastes of snow. High and swift, they hurtled in long, arched flights. He could only suppose them to be the lights of some flying machine.

  All these things he reported to the others as soon as he observed them, speaking cautiously into the television disk. There was, so far as he knew, no good reason for whispering his words. But something in the alien weirdness of the world about him forbade him to raise his voice.

  This lone, strange planet was far outside the streams and clusters of stars that make up the Galaxy. The sky was dark, with a depressing green darkness. No stars were in view. Above the wastes of snow was an empty void of gloom.

  But, on the evening of his fourth “day” of watching—since the Green Star revolved about no sun, it had no actual days, of course—Dick saw a surprising thing as he was tramping back up the canyon to the flier, over banks of luminiferous, green snow.

  He saw a star rise in the green-black sky, coming slowly up over a dully glowing, jade-green mountain wall.

  A star, where none had been before!

  He ran through the snow to the flier. Thon opened the massive door for him; he sprang into the gratefully warm interior of the ship.

  “I see a star!” he cried. “A dim star has come up over the canyon wall! Can it be—”

  “The Dark Star!” she finished for him, after a pause. Her face went a little white, but she kept any trace of panic from her voice. “Garo Nark has found us, after all!”

  They hurried to the bridge-room; Thon called to her father and Don Galeen.

  Hastily, they trained the instruments on the tiny speck of light rising so slowly into the green blackness of the sky.

  “Yes, it is the Dark Star!” Midos Ken said presently. “Garo Nark lias followed us here, with all the billions of his pirate empire, and the resources of his outlaw scientists. And here, outside the galactic universe, I suppose we shall play the game to the end.”

  Thon turned from a little device in which she had been following the motion of the new star; she seized a writing instrument and made a few brief calculations.

  “The Dark Star is now following a regular orbit about this planet,” she said. “The two of them will revolve about their common center of gravity like the components of a double star. The space between is several million miles, of course. But Nark’s fliers can flash across it in a few hours!

  “We can expect visitors from the Dark Star!”

  “What are we going to do about it?” Dick demanded.

  “We can do no better than to stay here until our researches are finished,” Midos Ken said, after a pause. “We are pretty well hidden; Nark is likely not to discover us.”

  CHAPTER X

  The Thing of Frozen Flame

  THIS chapter is exceedingly difficult to write intelligibly and convincingly. Dick covers the incident quite fully in his notes, of course. But the task of converting his rather rambling and disjointed discussion into concise, coherent narrative, always difficult, is made harder in this case by the nature of the material.

  The difficulty, I suppose, lies in the natural limitation of the human mind. We think in terms of experience, recalling images of things we have seen, and that have been pictured to us. When one comes to deal with something quite outside human knowledge and human experience, it is very difficult to find terms with which to describe it. And the thing I must write of now is, from its nature, almost inconceivable to the human mind.

  Even after weeks spent in the study of this section of Dick’s manuscript, I am fairly sure that my own images of what he describes are not entirely accurate. For the sake of accuracy, I have ventured to introduce no new terms of my own. I have limited myself almost entirely to the use of Dick’s phrases, merely editing them, and for the sake of brevity, omitting extraneous matter.

  Many times, in the foregoing pages, I have been called upon to deal with strange and amazing things. But, for the most part, those astounding creations of the future are things that men have already dreamed of in our own day. The idea of travel through space, for example, is familiar enough, even if the fact is amazing; but now we must deal with something so new and strange that the very conception of it is hard to grasp.

  ‘About twelve hours after Dick had returned to the flier with his news of the Dark Star’s coming, he replaced his heavy garments, and went down to the mouth of the canyon to watch again. He had slept and eaten well. The experiments in the flier seemed to be proceeding satisfactorily. The Dark Star, wheeling slowly across the sky, had set—without giving them any reason to fear that they had been seen. Dick set out in a cheerful, confident frame of mind, with the lilting notes of Thon’s farewell ringing in his ears.

  But no man could be cheerful long, under the gloom of that green-black, starless sky, in a world where mountains and deserts of snow glowed with ghostly fire. Dick felt oppressed with the strangeness of it; despite Midos Ken’s injection, he felt a slight return of the horror that had seized him when they landed.

  And he was beginning to suffer from a strange delusion or hallucination. It seemed to him that the very planet was alive! Beneath those weird luminous mountains, and those barren, lifeless wastes of snow, he thought he could sense an intelligence, hostile and malignant. He felt that unseen eyes were watching him.

  But this, he thought, was merely a foolish idea. It came to him again as he tramped back through the strangely shining snow to his hiding place; and he tried resolutely to thrust it from his mind.

  He reached his crevice between two boulders, repaired his little bulwark of snow, and lay down behind it, letting his eyes rove over the endless ocean of shimmering green snow to northward, stretching away desolate and dead to the black rim of th
e gloomy sky.

  Hundreds of miles across that ocean of snow were the “cities” of the beings that ruled this planet. Those mountains, and the cones of blue flame they had seen upon them, were below the line of Dick’s vision. Even the sky above them was dark; there were none of the moving lights he had seen before—not, at least, for several hours.

  He lay there in his covert, waiting. Three times Thon called him on the television disk, having grown anxious about him. He assured her, each time, that he was safe—and prolonged the conversation until the demands of her experimental work called her away.

  He had been there many hours when he first saw the thing.

  First it was a tiny point of light. It drifted up from the point on the horizon where he knew the alien “city” was; it arched in swift flight above the rim of the green snow.

  It did not drop from sight as others had done. It continued toward him, obliquely. It became a bright speck of fire, driving through the obscurity of the sky.

  Dick watched for several minutes. First in interest and wonder—then with numbing fear, as it came nearer over the endless expanse of gleaming snow.

  Suddenly he thought of the little telescope that Midos Ken had given him—it seemed to be no more than a pair of simple lenses, which could be adjusted to vary the power of magnification. Quickly he raised the little instrument, and adjusted it.

  The thing must have been flying rapidly, but it was still so far away that he was able to keep it in focus with ease. And it was a thing so astounding, so alien, that he fell into a sort of paralysis of wonder and fear. He was so astounded that he quite forgot the little television disk in his hand, over which he should have reported the coming of the thing to Midos Ken.

  The difficulty I mentioned above begins with the description of that thing. It was like nothing that has ever existed on earth; but Dick, in his notes, could describe it only in terms of earthly experience. We have only his description.

  The body of it, he says, was like a worm or snake. It was slender, long and writhing. And transparent, or at least semitransparent. And it was green. The surface of it was glittering, somehow granular or crystalline and sparkling with green light. Dick says that a worm moulded of green, translucent jelly, and rolled in powdered emerald would present the same appearance—though that seems a rather clumsy comparison.

  And green lights were pulsing through this transparent body, he says, like blood in a living animal. Its rhythm was, he says, like that of the blood in the translucent membrane of a frog’s foot, seen through the microscope.

  The thing had wings—or delicate structures that resembled wings. They were gauzy and transparent, glistening with cold iridescent lights. They were so delicate that they looked unreal like lacy webs of frozen rainbow. And they did not beat as the thing flew; they remained stiffly extended. The thing seemed to glide along.

  There was a head or face of a sort. Two eyes, high at the upper corners, red and malignant. Their fire was strangely cold and malevolent. Dick found it unpleasant even to look at those scarlet orbs through the telescope.

  Between the eyes and below them was a strange organ, a sort of flat disk of the green, semitransparent substance of the thing.

  And on each side of the face was a bright oval spot that glowed with purple light.

  THAT completes Dick’s first physical description of the thing. He says himself that it is unsatisfactory, that it gives no real idea of the monster that he saw bearing down upon him. He adds comments.

  The substance of it did not look exactly like real matter, it seems—not like the matter of our universe. It was bright, and luminous, and semitransparent, with strange colors pulsing through it. And it seems that it gave Dick the impression of being very cold—cold as the absolute zero.

  Frozen flame is the best phrase Dick found to describe the body of that alien being. It had the brilliance of flame, in its glistening green body, and shining, malignant red eyes, in its shimmering iridescent wings, and the ovals of vivid purple at the sides of what Dick called a head. And the transparency of it, as well as other qualities more illusive, made it as different from any matter of our universe as flame is different from red-hot iron. It was real and substantial enough, however. And there was something about it that made it seem frigidly cold, colder than the frosty air of the sunless planet of its abode.

  Dick refers to it subsequently as the Thing of Frozen Flame.

  It was flying toward him very rapidly.

  In a few minutes the image of it filled the lens through which he looked. It blurred suddenly, and he lowered the little telescope.

  To his consternation and horror, the creature was no more than a mile away, flying swiftly toward him, above the shimmering ghostly desert of snow. Its brilliant colors were very bright against the gloomy green-black dome of the sky.

  He could see it very plainly, at that distance. The writhing snake-like body, green, glistening, and the motionless gauzy wings, glinting with flashes of cold iridescence. The red eyes were hard and cold and malignant as frozen rubies. There were strange, oval spots of purple light on the sides of its head.

  Though it was moving very rapidly, the wings did not beat. Dick somehow got the impression that it moved through the agency of some invisible force. The frail wings seemed merely to guide it.

  He knew that it had seen him, that it was coming toward him. Cold sweat of fear bathed his body. Horror claimed him for a moment; it took all his will to shake off the numbing paralysis.

  He snatched up the little television disk.

  “Something is coming toward me!” he gasped into it, when Thon’s face appeared, nervously questioning. “It’s seen me! It’s coming after me! See!”

  He held the disk a moment so that she could see the weird entity rushing down upon him at such appalling speed. Then he flung it aside, and sprang to his feet.

  He started over the snow, back up the canyon toward the flier, running with stumbling steps. Despite his utmost efforts, it seemed that he could not exceed a snail’s pace.

  Panic overcame him. Wild fear surged through his mind. Heart pounding wildly, he bent forward and ran at the limit of his speed. And it seemed that he was hardly moving. He muttered curses, and breathless gasps of fear.

  Then he stumbled over a boulder, and sprawled on his face in the luminous green snow.

  He scrambled breathlessly to his feet, looking back. Some of his self-possession was restored.

  “Damn fool, to lose my nerve and run like that!” he muttered. “If it gets me, I can die like a man, anyhow!”

  Though he had run only a score of yards, the amazing being of frozen flame had covered fully half the distance between them. It was now not over a half a mile away. The frozen red eyes, glittering and cold, were fixed upon him in a bright, hypnotic stare.

  Dick’s atomic pistol was in a belt at his side. Now, with a quick, instinctive motion, he snatched it out, threw it up.

  Trying to hold it on the incredible thing before him, he pressed the trigger as rapidly as he could. The weapon made no sound; there was no recoil. But a faint spark of purple fire seemed to leap from it with each stroke of the trigger.

  His target was too far away, and moving too swiftly, to be an easy mark. Anyone who has practised with an automatic will realize the difficulty of hitting a comparatively small object, half a mile away and moving rapidly, with such a weapon. And Dick’s atomic pistol, while its amazingly destructive projectiles carried many times farther than a pistol bullet, was no more accurate than an ordinary automatic.

  He had little hope of scoring a hit with those first shots, except by a freak of luck. But he knew that his aim would be deadly within a hundred yards or so.

  He did not get to try his skill, however, at such a range.

  He had pressed the trigger hardly half a dozen times when a writhing, tentacular shape of luminosity was suddenly extended from one of the curious ovals of purple light at the sides of the monster’s head. A twisting bar of purple flame was thrust o
ut.

  And it became detached from the creature. A bar of misty luminosity, of frozen purple flame, floating free. It straightened, and came toward Dick in swift, arrowed flight.

  A straight bar of cold, red-blue fire darted at him like a lance of flame hurled from the purple oval on the head of the Thing of Frozen Flame.

  It struck him. And it seemed alive. Snake-like, it coiled about his body. A rope of cold purple fire, it wrapped itself about his feet, entwined his body, drew down his pistol arm.

  It is hard for us to imagine it. A living rope of flame, thrown about a man from a distance of half a mile. Dick says it was some two inches in diameter, and several yards long—long enough to wrap itself about him several times. It was almost completely transparent—there was a bright, hard line of purple fire down the center, with a shining red-blue mist about it, brighter toward the core. And little pulsing fluctuations of brilliancy seemed to throb along it, as if it were an artery pulsing with blood of fire.

  It is almost inconceivable to our minds that those weird beings of the Green Star should be able to separate such living matter from their bodies, and control the motions of it at great distances from them. The control of mind over material things is familiar enough to us. It is nothing amazing when a man’s hand closes in response to a message from his brain. But, with us, a man’s control over his hand ceases if that hand is severed from his body.

  The Thing of Frozen Flame, as Dick called it, was of a different kind of matter from that found in our universe. And its mind—for it was intelligent, in an alien, dreadful sort of way—controlled the matter of its weird body. But that control, apparently, was not over physical nerves, but by the agency of some force, probably some form of etheric or electromagnetic vibration, that is independent of a material medium.