Collected Short Fiction, page 120
A woman—a girl—floating swiftly toward us through the awful emptiness of space. Already she was very near—perhaps forty feet beyond the window—and drifting slowly closer. I could distinguish every detail of her superb form and of her strange or fantastic garments and equipment.
Against the utter blackness of space, her white body seemed almost luminous of itself—that is the reason, I suppose, that Eric afterward called her the Lady of Light.
Slim, firmly molded, statuesque, she was lightly swathed in sheerest fabric of brilliant green, in filmy webs of emerald flame. The green, gauzy tunic was held about her slender waist by a curious girdle, studded with tiny ruby cylinders, and looking as if it were made of polished silver. In one white hand she grasped a long, thin staff or rod of bright green crystal, from which little silvery levers projected beneath her tapering fingers.
A faint haze or nimbus of violet luminosity surrounded her—she was swimming in a little cloud of pale violet light, which moved with her.
The lower end of the emerald rod was pointed behind her, and little irregular jets of vividly white flame were issuing backward from it—somehow I got the impression that the white flame was thrusting, that it pushed her, as the flaming discharges of our rockets had hurled us from the earth.
Sun-golden hair was massed about her lovely head. She was looking at us, as if intensely interested, wonderingly. Her level eyes were deeply blue as great sapphires—not gem-cold, but warm and kind.
Slowly she drifted nearer, clothed in her wondrous aura of violet light, until she floated just outside the quartz windows of the rocket’s dome, eyeing us in fascination deep as ours.
At first my brain had been dazed with incredulous wonder. Now I became articulate.
“She’s impossible!” I burst out. “Eric, we’re seeing things! She contradicts all we know of space. Life is impossible out there. The temperature is unthinkably cold—hundreds of degrees below zero! There is no air, no oxygen to support life. And the vacuum of space would quickly suck all the moisture from any living thing. Anything alive would be dried and frozen before—”
“Can it, Higdon!” Eric gasped. “On the day of Judgment, you’ll be trying to prove that the angels can’t fly, because the air in heaven hasn’t sufficient density. Look here—”
His voice died away, as he was once more eagerly devouring with his eyes the radiantly wonderful being outside the window.
Suddenly, with excited curiosity burning in her glorious eyes, the strange woman floating beside us in space pointed through the broad window at us, then swept her smooth white arm backward—toward the earth. She watched us, with a question in her eyes.
I was puzzled for a moment—my brain was dull with the exhausted air in the rocket. But Eric nodded at once. He made a gesture to include us and the rocket, then pointed earthward.
“She’s asking where we came from,” he muttered to me.
Suddenly he was silent. I saw that he and this wondrous denizen of space were looking into each other’s eyes—deeply, eagerly, thirstily, as if in strange rapture. The girl was motionless. Her fair cheeks seemed flushed a little and her carmine lips were unconsciously parted to reveal even, flashing teeth. Eric seemed strangely pallid. His gaze was riveted upon the girl; he seemed hardly to breathe.
I almost felt a physical current passing between them.
Minutes must have passed, as Eric and the girl were transfixed in this strange communion. I realized that we were swiftly consuming the last of the precious oxygen, which Eric had liberated when he had seen the girl. The air was fast becoming unbreathable. I relaxed, floating weightless in the dome, gasping painfully for breath.
Suddenly Eric seemed to collapse. His dark eyes closed, his face went very white, and he fell against the window. It was asphyxiation, from which I feared that he would never recover.
I dragged myself to him. He was still laboring, though feebly, for breath. His pulse was terrifyingly weak. His hands were very cold, and I began trying to chafe them. But my own body was feeling leaden heavy. My head swam dizzily, and I feared that I might also collapse at any moment.
In my dull apathy of exhaustion and despair, I had, for the moment, forgotten the strange being who was floating outside the window. Now my attention was drawn by a tapping sound. I looked up, saw that she was watching anxiously through the crystal panel, and tapping with the emerald staff on the rocket’s metal wall.
Compassion and horror filled her deep blue eyes; tender pity was on her lovely face. And from that instant I loved her. I knew that she was all human, all kindness. Wonder, I had for her still—but her strangeness was gone.
She made curious gestures with her white hands, as if swinging open the quartz window, entering the rocket. She wanted to come inside the machine!
I pointed to the massive mechanism of the air-lock, in the top of the dome. She gazed at it a moment, then nodded in quick comprehension. White flame jetted from the emerald rod, and she floated up beyond my view, toward the entrance.
I was reeling, blind, far gone in suffocation. Fighting with all my will the leaden inertia that was seizing me, I drew myself to the wheels that controlled the massive valves, began spinning them to seal the inner one, open the outer one.
Each movement, I felt, must be my last-. But finally the task was done. Watching through the oval panel of quartz in the inner valve, I saw the strange girl slip into the chamber. Then I began the grim labor of sealing the outer door, and opening the inner one. Alone, I could never have accomplished it. But suddenly Eric, having recovered consciousness by some miracle of his rugged strength, had dragged himself up beside me, was toiling silently with me.
Then the inner valve was open, and the wondrous girl had floated down beside us. In my dull pain of utter fatigue, I had no idea what she might do. to aid us. But I knew, somehow, that she would save us.
Eric had collapsed, again unconscious. I watched her eagerly.
Her slender, white fingers played for a moment over the tiny silver keys or levers which projected from the upper end of the green crystal rod, which was perhaps an inch in diameter, and five feet long.
A dazzlingly brilliant, blue-green glow came upon the lower end of the staff. I heard a curious hissing or whispering sound from it. Then my nostrils caught a whiff of fresher, purer air than I had breathed for many days.
EAGERLY, trembling, I bent forward, drawing in full breaths of the cool sweet air that came, as if by magic, from the end of the green rod, filling my lungs again and again, almost to the point of bursting. The effect was marvelous. A weight of oppression seemed to slip from upon me. By brain cleared. I felt my heart beating faster, pumping fresh blood to all my worn body. I experienced a miraculous tide of new strength and vigor.
Eric was still hanging inert, floating motionless in the air.
The wonderful girl reached out a slender hand, drew him very tenderly into the faint mist of violent radiance that bathed her, moving with her body. Supporting him within the curve of the arm that held the emerald staff, she gently caressed his brow with a small hand, while her great eyes looked down on him in tender compassion.
Then his dark eyes opened slowly. A quiet smile. came over his rugged face . . . and he looked up into her eyes. . . .
“Thanks for the free air,” he said in a moment, slipping from her arm, to turn and absorb her beauty with eager eyes. “It was never more welcome!” He seemed marvelously restored.
The girl pursed her lips curiously. In a moment a low, hesitant, charming voice came from them.
“Tankth fo’ th’ flee ah?” Several times she repeated it, questioningly, before I even understood that she was imitating Eric’s “Thanks for the free air.”
“She wants to talk, and doesn’t know how!” I cried.
“Naturally, she doesn’t.” Eric said. “Speech would evidently be out of the question in space, with no air to convey sound waves. Let’s see.” He paused. “We might try pictures.”
He fumbled in the pockets of his clothing, produced a fountain pen, and a tattered notebook. The great blue eyes of the girl followed his hands with intense interest as he unscrewed the cap of the pen, shook it to start the ink, and began making a rude sketch of the rocket’s interior upon a blank sheet.
Having watched Eric’s extremely poor drawing, for a few moments, she impatiently took the pen from him, smiling. After a brief examination she shook her head, and handed it back, as if it were useless. Then she lifted the slender green rod she carried, pointed it toward the other side of the tiny dome, and motioned for us to watch.
Her slender fingers flew over the little silvery keys or projections on the upper part of the rod. A pale, flickering ray of blue-white light shone from the end of the rod. And the ray appeared to condense into a madly swirling vortex of bluish fire, which slowly reached an intense brilliance, as the girl continued to depress the tiny levers.
Abruptly the pale ray flickered out. The rotating spirals of blue flame vanished suddenly. And where the light had been most intense, two tiny, glittering objects reposed on the floor of the dome—created as if by a magic wand.
The girl glided lithely forward, picked up the tiny things she had made so marvelously. Each of them was composed of two thin disks, perhaps an inch in diameter, of a darkly, richly blue substance resembling polished specimens of the copper ore called azurite—twin disks connected, as radio phones are connected, by a thin, flexible black band.
One of the objects she fitted upon Eric’s head, the blue discs pressing upon his temples, the black, elastic band on his head to hold them in place. And the other one she quickly slipped upon my own head.
“Now we can talk. I want you to tell me who you are, and all about your coming here, and where you were going.”
The words came to me from the lovely girl, plainly as any uttered speech—though her lips did not move! I had even an impression of a very pleasant tone of voice, though I knew she had not actually spoken. It was amazing.
“What is this?” I demanded, excitedly.
Again the girl’s voice seemed to come to me, though I knew she was not actually speaking. “It is a device which my fathers perfected when first they came into the void, from the ancient planet that had been their home. It transforms thought-waves into vibrations which penetrate empty space, or picks up those vibrations and converts them back into such form that the brain can receive them.”
“And how did you make it?”
“I drew from space the ytlan, fixing the fluid energy in the frame that is called matter, for matter and energy are the same—”
“Interesting subjects of conversation, to begin with,” Eric broke in, with rather a savage glance at me. “I suppose we’ll pretty soon be around to something thrilling—the multiplication table, for instance?”
The girl smiled at him.
“Of what do you choose to talk?” I felt, rather than heard, her question.
He looked at her oddly, for a long moment. He said nothing. But she must have understood something of his thought. For she smiled as if delighted. And her words came to me,
“That, indeed, is far more interesting!”
Eric flushed a little, and lowered his eyes.
“You come from the earth?” the girl’s words, or perhaps I should say thought-images, once more reached my mind. “Why did you come? What did you seek? Did you not know the danger in leaving your world, with so crude a machine?”
“Yes, we knew it wasn’t going to be a Sunday School party,” Eric said. “And we come from the earth, all right? We were trying to go to the moon—and we’d have made it, if the darn pump hadn’t blown up. But, you know, I’m very well satisfied with things as they happened—since we’ve found you.”
She met his level eyes, smiled frankly back at him.
“A brave thing,” her thoughts came. “It was a brave thing to do.”
“Now,” Eric said, “tell us where you come from, and how you came to find us.”
“I will tell you,” came her reply, “if time is given me. But I may have to leave you soon. I have broken a law of my people, in coming to you. And there is one who has claim upon me, who watches me very jealously. He may find that I am gone from my place, and come to seek me. For me it does not matter. But his coming would mean great danger to you. His anger is not slight!”
“Don’t worry about us,” Eric told her. “Our lives aren’t matters of very great concern, in the present circumstances, anyhow. But, admitting that it’s none of my business, who is this heavy?”
“Wait,” came the thought-message from the girl, “and I will tell you of my people and myself. It will be amazing to you, for it is long ages since my fathers lived upon a planet, as you do.
“And if the one I fear comes while I tell the story, I will do my best to save you.”
She paused a long moment, looking at Eric with a strange light in her glorious blue eyes. And then she shook her head.
“No,” she went on, “the danger is too great. His power is next to that of Luroth. And Luroth, though my friend, is too aged to be worried with my problems. I will mend your broken machine, so that it will take you back to your planet—that will take but a moment, with the power of the ytlan. Then I will leave you, before Kerak comes.” After a moment she added, “Though I am sorry to see you no more.”
Eric looked questioningly, pleadingly, at me.
“I’ll stick,” I told him. He smiled instantly, in vast relief.
“Then we’re staying,” he said to the girl. “You couldn’t drag us back to the old world with a ten-ton tractor! And if Kerak, as you call him, turns up, we’ll take our medicine. And by the way, what’s your name?” he added.
“I am glad that you will stay,” came from the girl “and I knew you would. Kerak will not harm you if I can avoid it. And my name is Sharothon.
“This is what I would tell you, of my people and of myself:
CHAPTER III
People of the Void
“MY fathers sprang up upon a planet which now exists no longer,” Sharothon began. “Upon the planet that once was the fifth from the sun, next outside the red world which you call Mars. Now it is shattered into ten thousand fragments which wander through the gulf—”
“The asteroids!” I cried. “You know the theory of the Lost Planet, which must have been disintegrated by some unimaginable cataclysm to form them!”
Eric nodded.
“Yes, it is that world which I mean,” Sharothon continued. “It was the science of my own race that wrecked that planet. And it was the science of the few who survived, that enabled them to migrate into space, and there make new homes for themselves, far more splendid than any city that had been built upon the doomed planet.”
As I record this history, I cannot help but long for a more facile expression of thought. I cannot but wish for the persuasive ability of the great artist, to give the reader a living picture of the strange and lovely Sharothon, and of our surroundings, as she gave us, through the remarkable medium of the thought-transmission mechanism, the amazing story of her race.
The tiny, cramped, dome-shaped room, with its padded floor and walls, the masses of gleaming brass instruments, the bright crystal windows revealing the wonders of the jet-black, star-jeweled universal void—Eric and myself, floating in the air within the dome, in almost erect positions—two grimy individuals, clothing wrinkled and torn, faces pale and drawn from days of hardship. And resting in the air before us, splendid as an angel of light—
Sharothon!
Her incomparable body lightly clothed in luminous webs of green. The strange, silvery girdle about her waist, with tiny, polished cylinders or studs of bright ruby projecting from it. The long emerald rod held lightly, in a fair hand. Her azure eyes, watching us with keen and friendly interest, from her lovely oval face that was richly framed in softly glistening hair of russet-gold.
Her thoughts coming to us through the tiny blue disks that we wore upon our temples.
“Ages upon ages ago,” her message came on, “my fathers won the mastery of that fifth planet, which now is shattered into countless fragments. Dead Mars was a young world then, with its strange creatures, but beginning the long climb that was to end in a hopeless battle to prolong the days of a dying world. And your earth was a planet of hot seas and steaming jungles, upon which hideous monsters reigned—there was scarce a beginning of the development of man.
“My people sought to release the boundless energy of matter—which they did not fully understand. The scientist who attempted it was killed. And strange green flame ate from his laboratory into the heart of the planet, and burst it asunder.
“All but a few of my kind died instantly. But a few among the scientists were warned, and prepared to face the cataclysm. When it was done, they found themselves living—and little more!
“For they were flung away into the void upon one of the bits of the lost planet, which you call asteroids. No air nor water could be held by the weak gravity of that tiny, fire-born world. Nor could plants be grown upon it for food.
“But two things were left for my people.
“They would either have to learn to live in a new way—or they would die!
“Great scientists were among them—and brave men. They lived.
“In space there is a great energy, which comes not from the sun, but fills all the void—that energy which we call the ytlan, which you call the Cosmic Ray. Though it is very powerful, the atmosphere of your world is largely proof against it—”
“Yes, I know how they have to go up on mountains to experiment with it,” I put in. “Yet the ray will penetrate eight feet of lead.”
“The ytlan,” Sharothon went on, with a smile and a nod at me, “was at first harmful to my people, beating upon the tiny new planet, which was unshielded by any atmosphere.
Many there were that weakened and died.
“But some lived on, and found ways to use the limitless power of the ray.
