At last he stirred and picked up the little detector which he had dropped on the floor of the bridge, upon the discovery that the stone of life was not on the Dark Star. He had let it fall in the dismay of the moment.
Now he balanced it idly on his hand, carelessly watching the scarlet pointer. It vibrated, then steadied, became fixed, pointing off into the black void of space.
At first it did not seem strange to his despair-deadened mind that the needle should do this. The import of it came to him slowly. Then he shouted in wild astonishment:
“The stone out here! It can’t be!”
Great weakness came over him suddenly. His limbs trembled. Sweat broke out upon his brow. His heart beat hard and fast, up in his throat. He felt a curious dryness of the tongue. His breath came in quick, short gasps.
“The stone! The ship! Garo Nark!”
He almost babbled the words. His brain was a mad whirl of fear and hope. A storm of emotion had shattered the tragic calm of his despair. If the stone were out here in space, it must be in Garo Nark’s ship. And if the ship were here Thon and Don Galeen might still be in it. Might be safe!
A slender hope. It swept over his body like a swift flame, quickly quenched by a black flood of fear.
He fought to control his trembling limbs. Holding the little indicator in one hand, watching the red needle, he sought the control lever of the flier, and swung it about until the bow was pointed in the direction the scarlet needle indicated.
Then, eyes on the telescope screen and the red pointer, alternately, he pressed down the white cylinder of the accelerator. With the full power of the K-ray generators on, he flashed through space, following the scarlet needle.
Mad hope and crushing fear racked him.
Minutes went by—minutes of tense, throbbing anxiety—minutes that seemed doubt-laden years—minutes of straining attention, of feverish hope, of blasting fear. Then he saw the flier.
It was almost invisible; he would never have discovered it without the red pointer to guide him. He saw it first by swinging about, so that it came between him and the little, reddening sun which was all that remained of the two planets Midos Ken had sent hurtling together in cosmic cataclysm.
A little black cylinder against the dull red disk of light.
He flashed down to it, brought the Ahrora up beside it.
The walls of the flier were black, unbroken. Her navigating lights were dead. No faintest gleam came from the ports, or from the observation windows of the bridge. She was not moving. There was no purple glow about her stern; the K-ray generators were stopped.
The ship seemed deserted, a derelict of space.
But the red needle showed that the precious stone of life was inside her.
Dick’s fresh hope fell low. There was no sign of life about the ship. Had the Things of Frozen Flame contrived to reach out into space and annihilate those aboard her? Or had some accident stopped the ventilating system, or released poison gases, or destroyed the power plants?
He maneuvered the Ahrora to the black side of the huge vessel, left it to be held by gravitational attraction. He hurried to the store-room, donned an air-tight space suit, fitted with atomic heating pads, oxygen-generator, and air-purifier.
In feverish haste he selected a small El-ray tube, opened the massive door of the flier, and walking across the hull of the black flier, held to it by its gravitational pull, he selected a site of operations.
A movement of the sliding silver ring on the little black tube produced a brilliant cone of violet light flickering from its tip. He brought the tongue of flame against the black wall of the flier.
The black, light-absorbing pigment of the invisibility compound vanished in a hissing wraith of steam. Beneath was white metal, and the metal was swiftly cut away by the ray. Clouds of. steam swirled up, condensed in the cold of interstellar space, become a ghostly cloud of snow, hanging above the side of the vessel.
Around and around Dick moved the cutting ray, controlling it with impatient fingers. He was cutting a two-foot circle, leaving a little uncut section on the side opposite the place where he stood. He worked in tense, grim haste, feverishly excited.
Abruptly there was an explosion beneath him, as the pressure of the air within the flier blew out the disk of metal, which was still attached on one side by the section he had not cut. The blast of air caught Dick, sent him spinning many yards out into space. As he drifted slowly back to the black hull, it was freezing about him, in a white mist of tiny crystals.
He dropped through the hole, into the hull of the flier.
Like most interplanetary ships, it was divided into many compartments, with air-tight bulkheads between. Air-locks connected them, so that it would be possible for men in space suits to enter compartments which had been broken, to repair leaks made by meteors or otherwise.
This compartment seemed to have been part of the quarters of the crew. It was crowded with berths. In them were many dead men. Dick examined one of them, and recoiled in horror.
The man in the bunk had not died from suffocation, because of the air’s escape through the hole in the ship’s hull which Dick had made; his first supposition was wrong. The man had been dead many days.
The flesh was a ghastly yellow-green.
He looked at the still figures in the other berths.
They were the same. Skeletons, covered with decaying, yellow-green corruption.
A ship of death!
He knew now why it had been dark and silent, with dead lights and extinct generators. A weird plague had wiped out the crew. Some hideous new bacteria, he supposed, which had been picked up on the Green Star.
His hope became despair again.
He passed through an air-lock, into the corridor that ran the length of the vessel. There he stumbled across three more skeletons.
He hurried to the bridge, in the nose of the ship.
The weird plague had been there.
A score of men were lying dead among the instruments. He found Garo Nark—distinguishable only by the crimson garment that covered his remains, and a skeleton very meagerly covered with the sickening corruption, he thought, must be Pelug’s, the green-eyed, scraggy individual.
Dick left, horror-stricken.
He searched the ship from nose to tail.
The plague had visited the sumptuous quarters of the officers, the dining rooms, the galley, the forecastle, the storerooms, the holds, the El-ray turrets.
At last he reached the generator room, in the tail of the ship. The air-lock leading to it was sealed. It resisted his efforts to break through. Once he paused in despair. Then, because he had found no remains that seemed to be those of Thon Ahrora and Don Galeen, he resumed the task, cutting away the fastenings of the airlock with his El-ray tubes.
The huge door swung open at last; he stumbled through into the generator room. A narrow space, crowded with the huge bulks of the K-ray generators which drove the vessel.
AS he entered he heard the clatter of a dropped tool, a sudden exclamation.
A cry in the voice of Thon Ahrora!
He ran across the room.
And he found Thon, and Don Galeen, startled at his sudden entrance and not recognizing him in his bulky space suit. They were clad in greasy garments, and black with motor oil. Don was tugging on a wrench, and Thon had dropped her tool upon Dick’s entrance.
They had been repairing some huge, delicate mechanism, which seemed to have been wrecked by an explosion.
They stared at Dick.
Swiftly he loosed the screws which held the grotesque helmet of the space suit, lifted it from his head.
“Dick!”
Thon cried out his name, in a voice so keen, so poignant with joy, that it was painful.
She ran across to him, threw her arms about the heavy armor that covered him, stood on tiptoe, and kissed his face.
Don Galeen dropped his wrench, and came to shake Dick’s armored hand, tears of relief and joy in his keen brown eyes.
&n
bsp; “How did it happen?” Dick demanded. “How did you come to be here, in a ship of the dead?”
“Ask Don!” Thon told him.
“First tell us how you came here,” cried Don, the greasy adventurer. “And where is Midos Ken?”
Thon was watching Dick’s face.
“Is he—dead?” she asked slowly.
“Yes,” Dick told her. “We got back to the Ahrora. When we were well, we flew to the Dark Star. We did not find you—or the stone. Midos Ken used the K-ray generators to drive the planet into collision with the Green Star.”
“He had done his work,” Thon said, controlling her evident sorrow and brushing tears from her eyes. “He was ready to die, and he died as he chose.”
“The stone of life is here,” Dick said. “The detector showed me the way.”
For answer, Don Galeen bent beside the great machine, lifted a shining case. He drew back the lid, to reveal the stone of life lying in soft wrappings within. The magnificent crystal of many prismatic colors was alive with wondrous fire.
“The greatest treasure of the universe!” he cried. “It will give deathless youth to all who desire it!”
“And now, my question!” Dick insisted.
“Well,” Don Galeen began modestly, “you know I was once a driver of beasts of burden on the inner planet of Sirius. That is where I learned to smoke the tian. There is a sort of fungus in those hot jungles that attacks the bodies of men, or of any living thing from other planets. Only the plants and animals that thrive in those jungles are immune to it.
“And the tian is hostile to those hideous, swift-growing moulds. Its use gives immunity. We had to use it there, to keep from turning into heaps of greenish corruption. That is why I use it—or why I began, at least.” He grinned.
“And I have always carried a few of those spores with me—spores of that deadly fungus—in a place where they are not likely to be found when I am searched. A useful trick we learned for protection against certain enemies that were likely to attack our pack trains.
“So when Nark had us aboard, and safely off into space, I crushed my little capsule of the spores. The seed of that swift-growing fungus was free in the air. The ventilating system carried it through the flier. Thon and I, having recently smoked tian, were immune, of course.
“In five minutes, almost before they realized what had happened, the men were falling dead.
“Nark discovered it too late to reach us—he had been saving us for the celebration of his return to the pirate planet with the stone of life. But he was able to press a button which wrecked this K-ray generator.
“We brought food and water in here, and sealed the air-lock—the men the fungus brought down are not pleasant company. And we have been working to repair the generator that Nark smashed for us.”
Dick said nothing. But he seized the hand of the resourceful adventurer of space, and crushed it in his armored grasp.
Then he stepped back, and looked from one to the other of the two before him—Thon Ahrora, slender, lovely being—Don Galeen, strong, tanned, calm, invincible.
“Tell me, Don,” Dick blurted out awkwardly, “do you love Thon?”
“Love Thon?” the giant echoed. “Of course!” He paused, staring soberly at Dick—then grinned. “Like she was my own little sister!”
And he burst into loud guffaws of laughter at Dick’s downcast expression at the first statement and his relief at the second.
In a moment he stopped his merriment to add, “I love you, too, my lad. And Thon loves you—she told me so herself. And it isn’t hard to guess that you love her. And I’d love nothing better than to see you happy together!”
Again he burst into roaring laughter.
Dick stepped up to Thon, laid his armored hands upon her slim white shoulders, and looked into her deep, warm blue eyes.
“Then it’s true?” he asked her breathlessly.
“It’s true. I love you, Dick,” she told him.
And disregarding the fact that Dick was encased to his chin in an air-tight fabric of stiff armor, they embraced.
* * *
LITTLE more is to be told of the story which I have gleaned from the voluminous notes sent me by Richard Smith. They will shortly be published in full, of course, under the title, “A Vision of Futurity.” Only a few more incidents may be mentioned here.
Dick returned to the Ahrora, brought space-suits which Thon and Don Galeen donned to go aboard the little flier. A few months later they were back on the earth.
The catalyst of life was placed safely in the hands of a group of scientists, who will supply the means of immortal youth to all the peoples of die far-flung planets of the Union of Man. The priceless gift of Midos Ken will be free to all.
Don Galeen tired of terrestrial life after a few months. He borrowed the Ahrora, secured a fresh supply of his inevitable tian, adventured off to explore the quadruple star—the group of four suns—toward which he had been cruising when he discovered the Green Star. Again he is adventuring in worlds where man has never been.
Dick and Thon Ahrora are married, living together in the city of silver towers, where Dick entered the world of futurity. At the time of Dick’s last writing they had a son and daughter, whom they have permission from the authorities to rear in their own home. It is, Dick says, a huge undertaking, but one which he is not going to shirk.
Thon Ahrora still indulges in a little scientific research, by way of recreation. She has developed her father’s time machine to a greater degree of perfection—the machine by which Dick was drawn into this world from our own age, through a fourth dimension.
She is able to cause the machine to hurl small objects back through space and time, to stop at any part of the world, and at any point and time, which may be determined beforehand. It is in this manner that the little case found its way to my library table—the little black case of the strange, flexible material, which contains Dick’s notes, and one of the little statuettes of him, which was made in the wondrous far futurity, by the lovely Thon Ahrora.
THE END
The Stone From the Green Star Page 20