Collected Short Fiction, page 122
Suddenly the outer walls of the rocket, and even the exposed surfaces of the quartz windows, glowed with intense blue flame—with a chill, pure light of cyanic blue. Kerak and Sharothon were only dimly visible through the blue fire which covered the crystal panel through which we watched them.
Still, we saw something amazing—heart-breaking.
The lovely girl suddenly shrugged, as if yielding complete victory to Kerak. She smiled dashingly up at him—while Eric, beside me, cursed under his breath.
Then she raised her emerald rod, beside the black staff of Kerak.
White flame jetted from it, toward the rocket!
Then the blue light outside the windows became so dazzlingly brilliant that we could see nothing. Cold flame of sapphires seemed even to enter the rocket, to bathe the two of us.
Staring in astonishment at Eric, I saw his powerful body mantled in a nimbus of intense azure light, much like the violet radiance which surrounded Sharothon. And I was aware that there was a similar condensation about me—blue luminosity seemed to flow like a liquid over my body, to drip from my fingers.
“Hell, what’s happening?” Eric burst out. “Kerak’s sweet revenge, I guess. I wouldn’t mind it so much, if Sharothon—if she weren’t helping him!”
Black despair was in his voice.
I expected death. But thought of dying had become no stranger to me in the strange and terrible days since we had left Earth. I was frightened, of course. My heart was pounding, and I was breathing quite rapidly. But I was still enough master of myself to take a keen interest in the manner of my passing.
The Rocket Is Melting
AND, like Eric, I regretted more than anything else that Sharothon had smiled at Kerak, submitted to his embrace, and raised her weapon along with his.
“The rocket is melting!”
Eric cried it out suddenly. There was more of hurt, dazed surprise than of terror in his voice. I could say nothing. I was staggered, bewildered, helpless.
But I saw that the blinding blue luminosity seemed to be consuming the rocket. Great, ragged holes were coming in the metal plates, on the side next Kerak and the girl. Patches of black, star-gemmed space were visible, where metal had been.
The jagged, irregular edges of the plates retreated swiftly, apparently consumed by the intense, cyanic blue radiance that bathed them. The instruments, and other small objects within the dome, were flashing suddenly into azure radiance, vanishing—annihilated!
Of course, all the air within the rocket must have rushed out into space as soon as the first hole came in the shell. But, in my fear and bewilderment, that did not occur to me. I did not find time to wonder, until afterward, that I still lived, still breathed.
I had expected quick death, had prayed it would not be too painful. I felt a sort of mute surprise, as objects about me continued to dissolve beneath that blue flame, and I felt no pain.
In a very few minutes the last fragment of the rocket’s metal hull was disintegrated. A sort of ash seemed to have been formed by the consumed metal. A cloud of fine, blue-gray dust was swirling about me, hiding Kerak and Sharothon from my view, and completely obscuring the flaming wonders of space all around us.
And Eric was floating beside me, unharmed. At the moment, it did not seem very strange to me. It was only later that the full wonder of it burst upon my slowly gathering senses.
For long moments we floated there, swimming free in the cloud of blue dust, which was brilliant with the reflected light of the blinding sun of the void. The last flaming fragment of the rocket had been annihilated.
Eric, drifting beside me, moved suddenly, pointed. And his words came to me curiously.
“Look, they are going away! We’ve got the sack! I didn’t think she would treat us this way!”
Through a new rift in the swiftly dissipating cloud of blue-gray dust, I saw what he had seen. And the sight brought me black, utter despair.
Kerak and Sharothon!
Their arms were entwined. The violet nimbus of the girl was mingled with the purplish aura that surrounded the man. Together, they were leaving us. They drove upward, across the spangled blackness of the cosmic void. They dwindled . . . became a single fleck of pale light drifting athwart the cold, still stars . . .
Vanished.
CHAPTER V
Yothanda, City of the Void
“GOSH, Higdon, why aren’t we dead?”
Eric’s sudden query was startling. It brought me to realization of the fact that we were floating about in space, beyond all trace of breathable atmosphere, where our tissues should be robbed of moisture by the universal vacuum, and frozen, by unchecked radiation, into masses harder than steel.
But I was still breathing pure air, I discovered, and had been unconsciously doing so all the time since the strange destruction of the rocket. And I was still comfortably warm.
I twisted my body, brought a hand up before my face. And then, for the first time, I discovered that I was miraculously clad in a garment of some smooth, transparent, elastic substance. It was almost invisible, but it glistened faintly in the light of the strange and blinding sun that burned supernally, hanging between majestic wings of flame, far-off in the void.
“I have something on!” I called excitedly to Eric. “A sort of suit. Made of something like flexible glass. But how the deuce did it get on me?
Incredulously, he twisted his head, looked down at his body, rubbed his hands together.
And looking closely, I could see a transparent envelope about his body, outside his wrinkled garments. A loose, elastic covering. There was a crystal-clear cylinder about his head, in which were mounted, at the back, twin cubes of milky white, with a spiral tube between them. They must have been the means of revitalizing the air we breathed.
“Yes,” came Eric’s cry. “I feel the thing about me. And I can see yours. Sharothon—” He paused a moment, and then finished excitedly, “Sharothon materialized these things on us, to protect us. When she was pretending to help Kerak wreck the rocket. Drew them from the energy she called ytlan, just as she did the little thought-transmitters! And I thought that she—”
“And it is the thought-instruments that enable us to talk,” I remarked. “It has just occurred to me that I cannot actually hear your voice, though at first it almost seemed that I did.”
“Of course. And Sharothon must be some scientist! Condensing these suits out of pure energy, with us inside them—and without our knowing what she was doing! Think of it!
“And it was one clever trick,” he went on, “that she put over on Kerak! A great girl, Sharothon!”
I admitted that she was.
“And soon she will be coming back!”
Already the blue-gray cloud, which must have hidden us from the eyes of Kerak, had dissipated into the airless void—vanished. We hung in infinite emptiness. In every direction stretched the striking panorama of cosmic space. The cold, motionless, many-colored stars, hung against utter blackness. The huge, mistily green, lovely sphere of the earth. The cold, harshly brilliant argent moon. The blinding, white-winged eye of the sun, surrounded with writhing red prominences. The hazy, softly white paths of the Galaxy, and of the Zodiacal Light.
It gave me a throbbing ache of unutterable loneliness to realize the unthinkable vastness of the void abyss in which we hung. Even conversation with Eric, who hung still beside me, brought scant relief—he would talk of nothing save Sharothon, and when she might come back, and what she might do for us.
It seems strange to confess it. But at last even the incredible wonder of the cosmic universe, and the poignant loneliness the sight of it gave me, and my eager expectation of Sharothon’s return, could keep me awake no longer. It seems astounding, but I went to sleep, floating there in the universal gulf.
“Hey, Higdon!” Eric roused me. “Do I have to throw the moon at you to wake you up? You’d sleep through the Judgment Day! Sharothon has come, to take us to Yothanda!”
I stretched myself, reluctantly opened my eyes, to find the lovely girl swimming up beside us, in her nimbus of pale violet. She still wore the green tunic, or a similar one. Still she had the silvery girdle and the green staff. She was smiling, and a great and eager light filled her candid blue eyes.
“Great work, the way you put that one over on Kerak!” Eric called to her—even when we were using the thought-transformers, we always spoke naturally, though, of course, the actual sound of our voices did not penetrate beyond our insulating suits.
“Yes, I tricked him,” came the thought-forms of the girl. “But no chance will I have to do so again—if he discovers that you still live. Then he will be angry indeed! And the danger is not small—if I try to take you to the hiding place I have ready, in the city of Yothanda.
“I could not save you so easily, again. If you fear death, it is perhaps better that I set you back upon your own earth. There you can live out your lives as though I and my people had not been—”
“Nothing doing!” Eric broke in. “We stick to the bitter end, and take whatever risks come in the line of duty! Eh, Higdon?”
He looked at me. I nodded.
A flood of joy seemed to pour into Sharothon. She smiled dazzlingly. Her glorious eyes flashed eagerly. She floated up to Eric, put a slender arm about his shoulders, drew him into the violet radiance that clothed her.
“I am glad. Glad!” Her thought-images seemed almost a song. “To Yothanda we go, to take our risks together! And not again will I speak of giving you up. For a great light would have gone from my life, had you chosen to return!
“Higdon,” she addressed me as Eric always did, by the last name, “put your arm about me, with Eric’s and we start toward Yothanda.”
She reached out an arm, caught my hand, drew me to her. I put one arm about her slender shoulders, beside Eric’s. I watched her tapering, white fingers play over the silver keys upon the upper end of the emerald crystal rod. Thrusting white flame jetted from it, downward.
And we plunged upward through space.
WHILE I have no way of estimating our speed, I know that earth and moon dwindled rapidly behind jus, and drew together. Our velocity must have been far above that attained by the rocket in which we had left the earth. I felt, however, none of the crushing effect of acceleration that I had experienced upon the rocket. The power that moved us must have been applied to our bodies in a way yet unknown to terrestrial science.
Very soon, it seemed, came Sharothon’s announcement, “Before us lies Yothanda!”
I searched the spangled blackness ahead and saw—Yothanda, the City of the Void!
A many-faceted gem of rose quartz, floating in splendid Orion.
In form, it was a polyhedron of curious shape, bounded by many smooth surfaces of roseate radiance. A many-sided jewel of rosy light, translucent and luminous.
At first, it was tiny among the stars. But it expanded Titanically as we drove toward it—the diameter of the space enclosed by those brilliant rosy walls must have been tens or hundreds of thousands of miles.
In minutes, it was looming ahead of us like a planefaced planet of coralline light. Then, queerly, it seemed to swing abruptly beneath us; and we were dropping swiftly toward it.
“The Portal!” Sharothon announced.
We had reached a rosy facet, were suddenly standing upon a level, polished surface, which was like a plate of pink glass, and seemed to extend illimitably in all directions. We must have been held to it by some force of artificial gravity, generated by the mechanism of Sharothon’s marvelous girdle, for we were able to stand upright, and to walk.
Before us, quite near, a circle of gigantic purple pillars—like colossal shafts of amethyst, unflawed and crystal-clear—leapt up from the rosy floor. They supported a Titanic golden disk, which must have been miles in diameter.
The Portal, Sharothon had said. Suddenly it came to me that, within the circle of mighty pillars of transparent purple brilliance, beneath the enormous yellow disk, was the entrance—to Yothanda!
As we stood there on the level rosy surface, staring in wonder at the Cyclopean majesty of the Portal, Sharothon slipped from our arms. Her fingers fell to the silvery girdle, ran deliberately over the ruby studs.
“Now I must change our bodies in a certain way,” she informed us. “I must generate a ray which will alter our tissues, by photo-chemical means, so that they will not absorb light, or reflect it, or refract it. Thus we will be invisible.
“There are watchers within the portal, set to enforce the law which forbids our people to come out. To make us invisible is not easy—it is a new art, and one not fully perfected, nor known to many. There is pain in it, and danger. But only so can we pass the watchers, and go unseen through the city’s throngs to the hiding place I have ready.”
Suddenly I felt a sensation of burning heat, of blistering radiation beating against all my body. I could not help flinching, crying out.
“Try to bear it,” Sharothon pleaded. “Painful it is—the effect of light passing through the transparent body. And dangerous, if it be long continued. But there is no way to avoid it.”
Still her fingers moved over the ruby projections on the silver girdle. Suddenly, watching her, I saw her become unreal—misty. A vague, gray shadow. Then she was transparent. The Titanic pillars of the Portal were visible through her body.
Startled, despite the explanation she had given of what she was about to do, I looked about for Eric. Fie, too, was gone. I looked down for my own body.
I was invisible!
I had a curious and most uncomfortable feeling that my body had ceased to exist, that I was a disembodied entity, floating alone in space. I felt of myself, anxiously.
“Damned queer feeling, isn’t it?” Eric’s comment was infinitely reassuring.
“Put your arms about me again,” came from Sharothon. “And we will enter. We must go quickly, or the rays will destroy us!”
It brought me vast relief to feel her body against me, outside the flexible, transparent suit that she had materialized about me.
At once, the rosy surface dropped beneath us. We floated toward the colossal purple pillars of the Portal. Then, within the vast ring they formed, beneath the huge golden disk, I saw a broad, circular opening.
The gate to—Yothanda!
The burning pain of the invisibility rays still throbbed almost unendurably from all my body. But I was able half to forget it, in my wonder at the incredible city into which we were slipping, unseen, past dangers that I could not imagine.
Yothanda is a wonderful place. Its description is the supreme test which I must face in the writing of this narrative.
Suppose that the five-year-old child of an Australian blackfellow should be picked up from the bush in an airplane, carried directly to New York City, allowed to live a week among the wonders he would find there, and then dropped back into his native desert. He would have had an experience very interesting to him. But he would face vast difficulties in giving the rest of his tribe any idea of his experience. I face a similar difficulty in any description of Yothanda.
We dropped, invisible, through the Portal, safely passed the watchers, into the world of wonder within the rosy shell.
Vast distances. Unbelieveable vistas of light arid color. Cyclopean columns of pure, frozen light; Titanic pillars aglow with the fires of unknown gems. Gigantic disks and spheres and cylinders of polychromatic luminosity, spinning in regular courses, planet-like, through infinite open spaces.
In Yothanda, there is no up, or down!
To be sure, there are vast flat areas, some of them many thousands of square miles in extent. I might call them floors. Vast columns and carved arches and flaming spires, gem-bright, gem-hued towers, and fluted domes rise from them. Majestic fountains of liquid flame, breaking into glittering drops that are like rubies and emeralds and sapphires and multi-colored diamonds, spray up from them. Upon them are whole cities of fantastic, lovely buildings, and gigantic statues that glow with the colors of life, and elfin forests that seem fashioned of frozen lights of jewels.
The people of Yothanda sometimes hold themselves to those floors with artificial gravity, and walk upon them as we do upon the earth—though more often they drift through the empty space above them, driven by the thrusting power of the ytlan rods.
But those floors are arranged through that world of space at a hundred different angles, held in position with walls and pillars of light. Upon those walls and pillars are strange and exotic carvings, or bright, stereoscopic pictures which change and move continually, portraying the history and the deathless romance of the people of Yothanda.
As we were flying swiftly and unseen, through that bewildering city of wonder, Sharothon pointed out the noble lives, the great adventures, the mighty loves, the stern sacrifices depicted in those living pictures.
“And notice the throngs of my people,” she went on, “among whom we are passing. You see some few that toil upon a work of art—merely to record a great deed of an olden time. Some few that float alone, in silent meditation—probably thinking out vain and futile sophistries. Or dreaming idle dreams.
“But most, you see, do not even do so much. Watch them! Swimming in twos and threes. Men and women embraced. With thought for nothing but pleasure, seeking idle delights in one another, without the consecration of love. What good do they bring into being? Not even new lives, save reluctantly, at the command of the Nine!
“How different were the great days of old, when our mighty fathers came from the shattered fragment of a broken planet, to wrest life from a hostile void!”
SWIFT and unseen, we drove among the careless throngs—numberless millions—whom Sharothon eyed with such hearty scorn. Through vast arches gorgeously splendid as if cut from flawless gems large as worlds, into new scenes of untold wonder. Among carved and glowing cubes and spheres and cylinders and other shapes of frozen light, that spun in fixed orbits, among Cyclopean columns, and incredibly magnificent fountains of colored flame.
