When the Green Star Calls

Chapter 1 THE VOICE FROM BEYOND

Night after night, I heard that strange and inward call. It sang deep within me, as I tossed and turned, striving to sleep. It called and beckoned within my troubled dreams.

From the night sky it came. From the wintry dark, where cold stars blazed like ice-blue diamonds strewn upon black velvet. From the depths of space itself … from the farthest corner of the universe … where a Green Star flamed and a weird world hung amid the void.

Like some siren, calling from the dark and silent abyss between the stars, it sang. Exquisite and pure was the crystalline music of that siren’s song. It pulled at my heart; it sang within my very brain.

Only I alone, of all men, could hear the luring music of that voice calling from beyond; for only I, of all men, had voyaged thither, swift as disembodied thought, to that far and fantastic world of marvel and mystery. There, upon that strange world of eternal mists, of titanic trees and jewel-box cities, I had been born anew in the body of a gigantic warrior of legend. Together, he and I had embarked on the strangest adventure ever told, had ventured deep into the mist-veiled world, had loved and lost the most beautiful of princesses.

He had died, there on the World of the Green Star.

I—I had been drawn back across the star-spaces, to my empty envelope of flesh, to the world of my birth.

I was nearly dead when they aroused me from my trance-like slumbers. For too long had my wandering spirit been absent from my slumbering body. Almost had the dark gates of Death opened to receive me… but not quite.

For I still lived; but never could I return.

For weeks the doctors hovered about me, thrusting their needles deep into my veins, helping me to regain my withered strength, my exhausted vitality. During the enforced leisure of my long convalescence I passed the weary hours setting down in my journal an account of the marvels and mysteries I had witnessed on my journey to the Green Star, and the perilous adventures I had survived on that cloud-enveloped world of strange monsters and even stranger men.

Now, at last, they pronounced me fit and whole again. Or as fit and whole as any man may be, who has been confined to his wheelchair, a hopeless cripple since childhood.

The narrative of my explorations and exploits on the World of the Green Star I have locked away in a secret vault. No eye but mine shall ever look upon it until after my death; then the vault may be opened, the narrative brought to light—and the world may make of it what it will.

The savants will scoff at its fantastic marvels, and denounce it as the ravings of a lunatic. The men of science will put it down as an amateur’s venture into extravagant fiction; men of sanity and logic will ascribe its origin to the cravings of a helpless cripple to play the part of a man of action, if only on the written page.

The world may think what it likes of my tale. Only I shall ever know the truth of it, and the beauty of Niamh, Princess of Phaolon, whom I wooed and won in the body of another man, and in his name.

I do not mean ever to return to the Green Star; there is nothing for me to go back to. Nothing but futility and pain and sorrow… sorrow of broken dreams, the pain of a lost love, the futility of striving for that which cannot be regained.

Yet night after night…I hear the Green Star call!

Sometimes I ask myself, why did I record that narrative of my strange adventures on a distant world, since I mean never to voyage there again?

Perhaps it is, simply, that I wished to preserve the memory of those weird, unearthly experiences, before they began to fade from my memory—their brilliant colors dimming, like the fresh hues of a withering flower. I wanted to record it all as I remembered it, the awe and beauty, the strangeness and terror, the marvelous adventure only I had lived,

But now I am not sure; it may well be that to relive the marvels and mysteries of my venture into the unknown was a symbolic return to the Green Star—a voyage into memory, to retrace the voyage through space that I have sworn never to perform again.

My reasons are complex and illogical. But, after all, I am only a man. Logic is cold argument in matters of the human heart.

The trouble, quite simply, is this; I had ventured to the World of the Green Star, a disembodied spirit, and thereon had found a body awaiting my coming—or the coming of some other spirit from the vast deep. That body I entered, slipping into it as a hand enters a waiting glove. And thus I assumed the body and name and identity of a mighty hero of the mythic past, the great warrior Chong, whose spirit had been severed from its body by the malignant spells of an envious magician and cast away to drift forever among the nameless stars.

In that body I had loved the Princess of Phaolon—Niamh the Fair—and she had returned my love!

For love of her I had been thrust into a thousand perils, battling terrific monsters and wicked men to protect the flowerlike beauty who went ever at my side.

But in the end I had betrayed the child-woman I loved. I had failed of her trust, there at the last. Trapped among the outlaws of the sky-tall trees, helpless to face the wrath of the Amazon girl, Siona, I had been struck down in the hour of ultimate peril. And I had died, there on the World of the Green Star… leaving my princess helpless and alone amid a thousand terrors, hunted on all sides by merciless and ruthless enemies… while my sad soul went drifting back to the body it had left behind, on the planet of its birth!

How could I return to that far world again—and for what reason? To float, a disembodied spirit, in homage before the tomb of the girl I loved? Or to look on, helplessly, as she struggled against dangers and foes against which my hovering spirit was but a wisp of air?

These things were undeniably true—yet reason and sanity and logic are poor solace for a tormented heart. By day the memory of my lost love haunted my waking hours and by night, the Green Star called like a siren through my dreams…

Life on the planet of my birth held little to interest me. True, I am young and handsome, and wealthy—as most men measure wealth. The first is an accident of heredity, the second a matter of inheritance—neither have anything to do with me.

Crippled with polio as a child, in the years before the perfection of the Salk vaccine, I could live out my years in comfortable boredom, surrounded by every luxury that money can buy. The fortune of my father, the country estate of my family, these both are mine to enjoy. But I chafe against the weary futility of this life of cushioned ease; I yearn to be thrust into the wilderness, pitting my strength and courage and cunning against a thousand perils. For only in such moments have I found life worth living.

I was born for the life of wandering adventure… but fate chained me to the body of a hopeless cripple.

It was this longing for escape that first drove me to pursue the curious art the Oriental sages call eckankar—soul-travel—the liberation of the astral body. The secrets of that lost art were set down in Old Uighur in a strange and precious book written immeasurable ages before Narmer the Lion welded the Two Lands together under one crown, and Egypt was born.

With the resources of vast wealth mine to draw upon at will, I commissioned agents to scour the East for any trace of that age-lost and world-forgotten book. Seven years and two hundred thousand dollars later, it was found in an obscure, minor lamasery. Lost in the confusion when the Dalai Lama and his court fled the invading Red Chinese for refuge in India, the ancient codex had gone astray.

But wealth can open many a long-closed door. And thus, at last, the mysterious Kan Chan Ga came into my hands. In those parchment pages, a prehistoric sage had set down the occult wisdom of a forgotten civilization… with time, I made that wisdom mine.

Now that I had again regained the strength of body, mind, and soul, I hungered to taste the ecstacy of astral flight again… yearned for the intoxicating freedom to venture into far places, a drifting, invisible spirit!

Perhaps only one crippled as I am, can fully understand the intolerable lust for that freedom. One who, like me, has not taken a step since he was six years old, without mechanical aids. One who will never walk the world in this life, in this body… save through the timeless magic science locked in the cryptic pages of the Kan Chan Ga.

Day after day, I fought against that hunger.

Night after night, the Green Star called from the starry deeps!

And so it came to pass that, one winter’s night, I could resist no longer the summons of the Green Star.

I pretended to myself that I would merely venture upon this world… to see the Coliseum by moonlight, the Sphinx by dawn, the Taj Mahal under the brilliant noon.

I prepared myself for the adventure.

My suite is in a private wing of the old house in Connecticut that has borne my family’s name since 1790. Many is the time I have locked myself in my rooms for days on end, busy with my books, the servants forbidden to disturb my solitude.

This time should be no different.

My precautions taken, my housekeeper informed to avoid disturbing me on any pretext, I stretched out upon my bed and composed my limbs as if for slumber.

I emptied my mind of all trivial thoughts by the recitation of certain mantras. Closing my eyes, I visualized an ebon sphere, and fixed my attention upon it unwaveringly.

Gradually, so complete was my inner concentration, I lost all sense of my body.

All outer sensation faded. My extremities became numb. My chest rose and fell as, I deliberately breathed shallowly, and slowed my heartbeat by an effort of disciplined will.

I was now in a self-induced state of light trance.

Fixing my attention upon that black sphere, I now saw that it was not a material globe at all, but the circular entrance of a dark, unlit tunnel.

Into the mouth of that tunnel I fell.

Utter darkness swallowed me.

Deeper and deeper I descended into that black tunnel. At length, after an inestimable period of time, I perceived a minute flicker of light beneath me.

It was the light at the end of the tunnel.

I emerged from the darkness… and found myself floating in a dreamlike haze of unearthly silver radiance and absolute blackness.

For a long, wondering moment, I stared about myself.

For a moment I could not recognize my weird surroundings.

Then it came across my mind like a flash that what I looked upon was a broad, sloping lawn, mantled in newfallen snow, and the jeweled blackness of a midnight sky, arching above me.

Looking past the snowy expanse, I saw a great old house of rugged fieldstone, with tall towers and a peaked roof.

The house was my own.

I seemed to be floating sixty or seventy feet above the Earth, weightless as a gust of air.

From a gemmed black sky, wherein the silver rondure of a full moon blazed with glacial splendor, snow fell in shimmering flakes through an utter stillness.

The snowflakes fell… through me!

And then I knew my soul was free.

Chapter 2 THE THING ON THE MOON

Above, like a great jewel pinned to the breast of night, the full moon glowed with unearthly silver light.

A bodiless spirit, I could travel where I willed, swift as thought itself, faster than any beam of light.

To the moon itself, if I wished.

The thought entranced me. The moon glowed down like a staring and hypnotic eye. Men of my race had trod those cindery plains, and now would tread there no more. The last Apollo flight had departed from Taurus-Littrow and a chapter of history had closed… for our era, at least.

So the commentators said.

But I could prove them wrong, if I so willed.

The wish was father to the act. Even as the thought occurred to me, it seemed that I soared skyward at incredible velocity. The snowscape fell away beneath me, laced with black woods and webbed with spidery-thin lines that were highways, and jeweled, here and there, by the dwindling light-clusters that were towns.

Earth fell away beneath me until it transformed itself into a tremendous globe, sheathed in midnight. A diamond-glitter flickered; an arc of light circled the east. Then the daylight terminator blazed up in a dazzle of sunlight and I watched a dawn still hours in the future travel slowly across the Atlantic Ocean; an orb of incredible flame mirrored on a shield of burning gold.

I turned my vision skyward, and saw the moon.

Very beautiful it was, the immense face peering down at me as if puzzled to see a drifting spirit afloat on the soundless ether.

I ascended very high above the Earth.

I was not conscious of the slightest sensation. A man in my place would be a frozen corpse in the hundredth part of a second, the breath exploding from his lungs to freeze into a diamond-mist of ice particles. But I felt neither cold nor the need to breathe.

Those sensations I had left behind in my body, which slept in a trance many thousands of miles away, in a night-shrouded place called Connecticut.

And I—I was free! Free to span the very universe in a twinkling, if I wished!

Now the moon expanded before me, filling the horizon like a tremendous bowl. No more did I ascend skyward; now it seemed that I floated down into a colossal plain of glittering cracked glass, where a huge, black-ringed crater glared like a sightless eye.

The crater must have been miles across; the rays of sheeted glass that extended from it were like frozen rivers, flashing in the blinding sun.

Toward the black-ringed crater I descended.

And a moment later I seemed to stand in a great valley. To all sides, the horizon was ringed in by a jagged but circular and unbroken wall.

I looked down. The floor of the crater was naked rock, with a dull metallic sheen. It was littered with crumbling fragments of debris, and pockmarked with many craterlets, dozens, perhaps hundreds.

These differed in size from pits you could hide a Cadillac in, to small, circular holes only an inch or two across. The floor of the crater looked like a flat surface of heavy, slick mud upon which scattered raindrops had fallen—and the mud had then been frozen forever, preserving the impact craters.

The debris that lay tumbled about consisted of shards and fragments of broken rock—doubtless hurled about by whatever had scored the flat plain with those miniature craterlets; a meteor shower, I guessed.

The silence was unearthly.

Here there was no air, no rain, no snow. Nothing but the pitiless glare of eternal day, relieved by the transient darkness of eclipse, when the Earth passed between moon and sun.

Like a homeless ghost in Dante’s Inferno, I roamed the floor of this hell of frozen stone and glaring star’s.

And then I came upon a wonder.

It was set in the stone floor of the crater-plain. It soared ten or a dozen feet into the sky.

It was a pillar of iron.

Struck with awe, I drifted closer to look upon this marvel with the eyeless vision of the spirit I now was.

The metal thing was about two feet in diameter, as nearly as I could judge with the eye alone, having nothing of known size nearby against which to measure it.

The iron pillar was perfectly rounded and burnished smooth. I call it iron for want of a better word; a dark, blue-black metal, very reflective. If it was not iron, then I can put no name to the metal which composed it.

It was no freak of nature, this shining column of metal that thrust up against the flaring stars. Such perfection of rondure, such straightness, could not have been natural by any stretch of the imagination.

This was the work of man.

Peering closer, I saw the sides of the column were incised with narrow rows of cryptic letters. Strange, hooked characters they were, and like no Terrene alphabet of the many known to me.

If anything, they resembled Sanskrit.

I wondered whose hand had set this thing here, and for what unguessable purpose.

And what was the meaning of the inscription?

Were these the annals of a race unknown, star-wandering visitors from another solar system, envoys from the dim red spark of distant Mars?

Or had some prehistoric civilization of Earth’s forgotten dawn traversed the silent abyss between the worlds? Had some crystal vehicle from elder Mu drifted here before the birth of time, or some primal astronaut from lost Atlantis, risen through the seething mists of the Pleistocene, to dare the depths of space,

There was no answer I could put to these questions.

The iron column may have stood here a million years or more, bearing mute testimony to some vanished race that had been the first to voyage between the planets.

In the perfect vacuum of the moon’s surface, iron would stand eternal and unrusting, durable for eternity.

Were these mysterious inscriptions the imperishable chronicles of Mars in her prime, or a lost book from Atlantis? Was this message a greeting, flung across the aeons, or a timeless warning of some cosmic danger?

Absurdly, I thought of a “no trespassing” sign, such as Earthly farmers affix to tree or fence-post. Was the pillar of iron a warning to the men of my world that this satellite fell within the borders of some interplanetary empire?

Or was it, perhaps, a gravestone—the marker of some fallen king or hero of the Tertiary—inscribed with the record of his deeds?

Many, I knew, are the mysteries of time and space. Man has yet encountered but a few.

The Gupcha Lama—seventh of the “living gods” of Tibet—he who had translated the mysterious pages of the Kan Chan Ga into English for me, on my promise to deliver the priceless original codex to the Dalai Lama when the task was done, had confided to me many things during our peculiar friendship.

He had told me of one certain very ancient lamasery in a forgotten corner of Tibet, called Quanguptoy. There for a thousand years and more successive generations of mystery-priests had studied an age-old science by which pure thought can be made to traverse immensities of space.

The Quanguptoy lamasery had for centuries exchanged wisdom and knowledge with the strange denizens of far-off worlds, he confided. With a white, crawling, fungoid intelligence that dwelt on the twilight zone of tiny Mercury. With a sentient crystalloid entity who inhabited one of the lesser moons of Saturn. With a forgotten race of Insect Philosophers who once had lived in the moon’s core but died when the last oxygen reserves were exhausted—and who thrust their immaterial minds forth into the remote future, to assume the bodies of a post-human race of segmented arthropods who will inherit the Earth in One Hundred Million A.D.

The telepathic lamas had devoted a thousand years to the projection of thought, and from many distant worlds and strange beings had compiled a history of the universe itself.

An entity of living gas, who dwelt beyond the galaxy near the surface of a dead, wandering star, told them of the future, which it had explored by the sheer power of mind alone. Told them of man’s eventual extinction in an Age of Ice due in twenty-five thousand years; told them how the surviving remnant of mankind would migrate to Sirius and Tau Ceti from subterranean citadels, as Earth’s core-heat failed at last, guttering to darkness in the thirtieth century of the Ice Age. Told them how the first visitors from the young planets of Alpha Draconis, come flown hither in crude rocketships of indestructible crystal, would puzzle over the indecipherable mysteries of ruined New York and drowned Chicago and lava-sealed San Francisco, when at last the glaciers receded.

—Strange beyond the dreams of science fiction are the unplumbed mysteries of the universe!

There is a wizard who dwells on a dead world about Antares, in a dome of imperishable glass built above a mighty chasm wherein scarlet horrors slither hungrily. The last of his race he is, and that race sprung from the reptiles as we are sprung from the great apes. It is his peculiar curse that he is eternal and deathless, having in a rash moment immortalized himself. He has outlived the extinction of all his kind, and will live on until the energy-death of the universe itself, when the galaxy slows and comes apart, and the stars go out, one by one.

I turned from the iron enigma that stood against the stars, and drifted on my solitary way.

Perhaps no eye but mine would ever scan those rows of unreadable hieroglyphs. The mystery of the thing on the moon might never be solved.

I left it, thrusting up against the starry sky.

And in that sky—the Green Star blazed!

I saw it lift beyond the naked, fang-like peaks of the dead cold lunar horizon.

I knew it at once, with an instinctive recognition I can neither justify nor explain. And my heart leaped within me at the sight of that spark of emerald flame. For on that far world lay my destiny, my triumph—or my doom.

Whatever jest of mocking gods had spun the tangled skein of my days had woven into the woof a thread of jeweled green. Like it or not, my fate was inextricably involved with the fate of the distant folk who dwelt on that far world.

And all at once a longing surged within my soul to visit again that weird world of many marvels. This desire was all but irresistible, and in its rising flood were swept away all of my wise and cautious arguments.

I must venture again to the World of the Green Star, where, in the body of another man, I had lived the most perilous and fantastic adventures in all the annals of human experience.

I must… and there was nothing I left behind me on Earth that I could not do without.

Why did I hesitate—why did I linger? Every fiber of my being yearned to drift through that world encompassing forest of sky-tall trees, where a delicate and ancient people dwelt in precarious balance between implacable foes and ferocious monsters. Where cities of sparkling gems soared from the bowers of branches that sprung miles into a misty sky shot through with sunbeams of mingled jade and gold… a world of unearthly beauty and superhuman, mystery, where my heart had, at last, come home.

I had nothing to lose by going, except my life.

And I placed little enough value on that, God knows…

Chapter 3 INTO THE UNKNOWN

One last glance I cast behind me at the world on which I had been born. I said my silent farewells to her green hills and dim forests and shining seas, to the people I had known and loved, to familiar places and moments that would live in memory. My regrets were few, for most of the memories were bitter. But there were certain things I put behind me now that it would sadden me never to know again… the taste of a fresh spring morning in the woods of Connecticut; the familiar feel of an old, much-read, long-loved book; the portrait of my mother, smiling, lovely, forever youthful with the immortality of the painter’s art, that hung above the mantle in the dining room; the carefully-tended grave of a great, lovable Newfoundland who had been the faithful companion of my childhood…

These things I might never look upon again.

I made them my farewells.

Then I looked beyond the white-flecked azure sphere of the Earth to that place in the eternal blackness of the heavens where the Green Star blazed like a beacon-fire against the dark.

And I left my world behind forever.

Somehow I knew that I would not return again to that strong but crippled body that slept in an unbreakable trance in the dark room of the old house that had been home to my people for a little less than two hundred years. How I could be certain of this I could not say. But the inner conviction was very strong.

Staring into the black sky with the eyes of my spirit-body, I willed myself to the Green Star with all the force of will I had learned from my patient study of the old book from Tibet.

And the dead surface of the moon fell away beneath me—dwindled to a shining mote that hung beside a shrinking sphere of glittering blue—and vanished into the darkness between the stars.

The transition was timeless. That is, I was not aware of any lapse of time. My second flight to the Green Star, like my first, may have taken a moment—or a century. There was no way to measure the interval.

I have come to feel that a sense of the passing of time is an illusion of the flesh, not an absolute universal standard. The wise men of Lhasa teach that both time and space—the sense of distance and of interval—are delusions imposed upon the spirit which is imprisoned in a human body. They teach that to the liberated soul there is only the eternal and the infinite; no bounds, no limits, an endless Now… and an uncircumscribed Everywhere. As to the truth of this, I really cannot say. But I suspect that, in this as in certain other things, the timeless wisdom of the East has attained to an insight denied the little men of the West who huddle in narrow laboratories, probing at the secrets of the universe with narrow minds, minds too small to contain the measureless Truth.

There was no sensation of motion.

I was momentarily aware of an infinite darkness closing about me. The icy breath of a supernal cold touched the center of my being. The stars blurred… and shifted…

And the Green Star blazed up before me in all the glory of her tremendous dawn!

It was a spectacle such as few eyes could ever have seen. The star-strewn vastness of space was filled with a vast sphere of intolerable emerald flame. Thundering gouts of incandescent spume, like a fiery vapor of jade, blazed up from the shimmering surface of the immense orb… floated in arcs of unendurable brilliance against the dark… and sank again into the green furnace of the tremendous sun.

I stared enthralled upon the scene. How it was that I could look upon this cataclysmic vision of wonder and might I cannot explain. Had I been a fleshly visitor, my organs of vision would have been blinded in the first microsecond. As an invisible and bodiless spirit, it seems to me that I employed the eyes of my astral senses, but this is only a guess. However it was that an immaterial form can sense the vibrations of light—I saw. It is but one of the many enigmas of the bodiless state, and the solution of it I must leave to wiser men than I.

Circling this sphere of cold green fire I spied a smaller globe, sheathed in impenetrable silver mists. This was the world whereon I had ventured in the person of Chong the Mighty… and how my heart sprang with joy now that I beheld it again!

I directed the flight of my spirit toward it.

Nacreous, dawn-struck mists swirled up around me; for a long moment I sank through mists of turbulent vapors of spun silver, irradiated with fiery emerald.

Then the mists dispersed about me and whipped away, and I looked upon a landscape such as Earthly eyes have never beheld before my coming.

It was a world of Brobdingnagian trees. In their countless tens of thousands they marched from horizon to mist bound horizon, and most of them were as tall as Everest. Mountain-thick boles sprung from unseen depths beneath to fling their towering spires against the green-and-silver sky. Enormous branches sprouted from the soaring trunks, branches as broad as six-lane highways, bearing up immense clouds of leafage. These leaves were as huge as the sails of ships, and were like gold tissue struck through with sun.

It was an awesome spectacle; once seen it could never be forgotten. Earth affords no mightier, more impressive landscape.

Through the maze of intertwining branches I floated down as lightly as a drifting leaf.

Branches thrust about me now in every direction. Here and there a scarlet reptile clung with sucker-feet to the rough bark surface. An immense dragonfly shot past me, his wings of sheeted opal flashed suddenly with jeweled splendor as he transected a shaft of green-gold sunlight. I could see about half a mile in every direction… beyond that limit, branches and masses of aureate leafage blocked my vision.

I gazed down; the trunks of the colossal trees dwindled away beneath me like the shafts of skyscrapers, their bases lost in the dense gloom that reigned eternal at the forest’s floor.

I did not have even the slightest idea where I was. And it suddenly came to me that in this mysterious world of titan forests, one tree looks very like another. On my earlier trip here, I had been lucky enough to stumble upon the site of Phaolon, Jewel City of Niamh, through pure chance. Now, unless the Gods of Luck were with me, I had not the slightest chance of finding it again. Nor, for that matter, of finding the Secret City of the Outlaws, where I had taken my last look at the princess, and where, in the body of Chong the Mighty, I had been slain.

Phaolon or the Secret City might be on the next branch—or ten thousand miles away! I floated for a time, musing on this problem, realizing it was hopelessly insoluble.

Princess Niamh and I had been in the act of making our escape from the outlaw encampment of Siona the Huntress. The Amazon girl, who had foolishly conceived an unreciprocated passion for me, had been on the point of delivering the princess into the hands of certain envoys from her rival city of Ardha. We had fought our way out of Siona’s fortress to the zaiph pens. In that battle I had received my death wound and had fallen; but my last glimpse of Niamh was as she fled from the outlaw city, mounted on a fleet-winged zaiph.

Had she safely eluded her pursuers, or had the outlaws recaptured her? Had Siona sold her into the bondage of her Ardhanese enemies, or kept her prisoner to wreak upon the helpless princess her own jealous vengeance? Or had she indeed made her escape—in which case she might have found her way back to the Jewel City. Or had she fallen prey to the monstrous predators who roamed the world of the mighty trees? Or did she still wander, lost and alone, searching for the way back to Phaolon?

To have known the answer to any of these questions would have satisfied me. But it gnawed at my heart that I knew nothing of her fate for sure. And, myself completely lost, there seemed no way I could find the answers I so desperately desired.

For an immeasurable time I drifted aimlessly through the giant forest, searching for any sign of intelligent life. It tortured me to think that the girl I sought might be, quite literally, anywhere… on the next branch, or in the next tree, or on the other side of the planet, for all I knew.

And then, quite suddenly, I came upon a tense scene.

By sheerest accident, I had stumbled into the last act of a small, pitiful tragedy.

Four stakes of strange, glassy metal had been driven deep into the broad upper surface of one great tree-branch.

Bound spread-eagled between these stakes, a half-naked boy lay within inches of death. They had bound his wrists and ankles with cruel rawhide thongs to these stakes, stretching out his limbs to their limit, and left him there to die.

And death approached him now on silent, scuttling feet.

At first, the youth did not spy the monster as it stealthily crept near. He was straining every muscle and sinew in a last effort to free one hand from his bonds. Already the cruel thongs had bitten deep into his wrist; his hand was purple and swollen, and red blood dribbled from the tips of his numb fingers. The pain must have been excruciating, but, sinking his teeth into his lower lip, the brave boy struggled on. He would, I somehow knew, continue that struggle to the very last.

He looked to be sixteen, perhaps younger. His lean, bony physique was naked except for battered boots and a scrap of cloth twisted about his loins. Whoever he was, and however he had come to this end, he had been starved and brutally mistreated. The raw weals of a savage whipping gleamed wetly across his chest and shoulders, and his bony ribs thrust through his skin.

His silky hair of raw pale gold was shaggy and unkempt. His face was dirty and sullen, but it was a good face, with clear alert eyes, amber-gold in a tawny-skinned face. He had a strong jaw and finely molded mouth, and his broad, high brow denoted intelligence and breeding.

I could see about him none of the dainty effeminacy I found so offensive in the pampered princelings who dwelt in the jeweled cities. Starved to skin and bones, his limbs were supple and lithe and his muscular development was extraordinary for a boy of his age. He was no painted and perfumed fop from the delicate life of court and city, but a hardy, rangy, long-legged youngster sprung from the savage wilderness itself. I wondered what foes had staked him here to die, and for what reason. And I admired the grim, dogged determination he displayed, as he fought to free his hand from the tight thongs, stoically ignoring the pain he so obviously suffered.

But death was very near him now, in the form of a hideous monster insect. I recognized it as a phuol, a sort of scorpion—but one the size of a full-grown dog. Eyes mounted on protruding stalks glared at the bound youth; pincerlike claws swung from an armored thorax; a horrible barbed tail, poison sac swollen with venom, hovered menacingly above its scuttling body as it inched forward on six jointed legs.

The boy had not seen it yet. His full attention was fixed on the thong he was striving to loosen from his puffed, purple hand.

In a way, the thing was beautiful. Its chitinous exoskeleton glittered like blue enamel. Its huge pincers were like something carved from immense fragments of flashing sapphire crystal by some nightmarish sculptor. Eyes like ruby chips blazed with soulless hunger.

Silent as a moving shadow, the blue death glided nearer—nearer.

There was nothing that I could do. I was as immaterial as a wisp of air; I could not even utter a warning cry.

The boy saw it at last. His face whitened, his eyes stared in horror, his lips parted in a cry inaudible to me.

Then, in a rush, the scuttling horror was upon him, the poison-sting sinking its barb in the flesh of his leg.

Chapter 4 THE DEAD CITY

In fascinated horror I watched the last act of the drama. An invisible spectator, unable to intervene, I looked on as the brave boy fought against death.

His cries must have rung loudly through the leafy silence. He threshed his bare body violently, striving to dislodge the venomous phuol.

Startled, the monster scorpion retreated from his threshing prey and hesitated before launching a second attack.

The brute would not have long to wait. Poison from its sting had already entered the boy’s body and must be infiltrating his blood even now. The lips of the wound blackened almost visibly, and the boy’s calf began to swell as the poison circulated.

I knew something of the nature of the phuol, although on my previous adventure I had been lucky enough not to encounter one. But the foresters of Siona’s band, and the assassins of Ardha, employ the venom of these blue scorpions to render poisonous their dagger-blades and arrowtips. And I understood that the phuol were cowardly killers, who injected their venom into their prey, waited until the poison had paralyzed them, and then fed on the helpless and still-living bodies of their victims.

Already the boy’s extremities must be numbing as the subtle venom worked through his system. His eyes glazed; his breath came in ragged, uneven pants; his blond head lolled on one shoulder.

The phuol crept stealthily near again.

But this time its charge was interrupted.

Without the slightest warning there stepped from behind the cover of immense gold-tissue leaves a tall, lean man curiously armed with a rod of crystal.

His figure was gaunt, his features ascetic. A close-fitting cowl covered his head, leaving only his face bare. It was a cryptic mask, that face; hooded eyes of lambent mercury observed the scene with cool, thoughtful, unhurried appraisal. The face was the mellow ivory hue of old parchment, youthful and unlined, calm and serene. Keen intelligence and weary boredom gleamed in those brilliant quicksilver eyes; the man had about him the look of the scholar, the aesthete.

One hand was strangely gloved in a black metallic fabric. It was the hand which clasped that shaft of sparkling crystal. This scepter-like rod bore caps of black metal at either terminus. Within the transparent substance of the rod, fierce light quivered and writhed like a living thing.

At his entrance upon the scene, the phuol had paused to assess this intruder. Now the blue horror began his creeping advance on the pinioned boy again, evidently assuming the tall man would not intervene.

But the monster was mistaken.

With a swift gesture the cowled man leveled the crystal shaft at the phuol and removed the metal capping one end.

Lightning flared! A crackling bolt of incandescent blue-white fire lanced through the green dimness of the branch. Caught in the electric discharge, the giant scorpion stiffened—convulsed—fell to one side, crisped and blackening. Its hideous sting struck blindly again and again at empty air as the monster writhed in its death-throes.

The magician capped his wand swiftly; prisoned lightnings flickered within the crystal shaft as he sheathed this peculiar weapon in a rubbery black tube which hung at his girdle.

Then, ignoring the dying insect, he knelt swiftly by the boy and severed the thongs which bound him to the stakes. The boy sagged limply, staring up at his enigmatic savior with dimming eyes. The magician laid one hand on his naked breast to test his heartbeat; then from a capacious pouch he withdrew a small flask of sparkling red fluid, uncapped it, and poured the contents in the boy’s mouth.

Again he tested the heartbeat, and took the pulse of the boy’s uninjured wrist. Then, apparently satisfied, he picked up the boy in his arms and strode off into the mass of leafage from which he had emerged.

If any reader ever peruses this narrative of marvels, he will understand how they mystified me at the time. Curious, I sent my spirit floating after the enigmatic rescuer and his limp young burden. I followed them down the slope of a long branch to where a most remarkable vehicle stood parked.

It looked for all the world like a child’s sled, with its curled up-curved prow and long, flat runners. It was nearly ten feet long, and the curled prow was shielded to either side with a curved transparent pane like a windshield. The thing was either fashioned of silvery metal, or enameled in that color.

The cowled man stepped into this peculiar craft and deposited his still living burden in the rear, strapping him in. Then he stretched out in the fore part and did something to a control element under the curved prow. To my astonishment the sled glided off the branch and floated through the air, swiftly vanishing into the distance.

I was filled with amazement. This was the first example of a superior technology I had yet encountered on the World of the Green Star. Most of the Laonese—as the people of this planet term their race—seem to inhabit a cultural level comparable to the High Renaissance. But this remarkable flying vehicle—and, come to think of it, the electrical weapon with which the magician had slain the giant scorpion—suggested that there dwelt upon this world some who had attained to an advanced technology.

Recovering from my amazement, I directed my bodiless flight in the direction the skysled has flown. Soon I caught up with the aerial vehicle and could observe it in motion. There was no discharge of vapor or visible energy from the rear of the miniature craft, nor did I see any evidence of propellers. The motive power was a puzzle to me; much later I learned that the skysled rode the magnetic currents generated by the planetary magnetosphere, but at the time the power that propelled the vehicle was a mystery to me.

So swiftly did the skysled traverse the forest way that within mere minutes it achieved its goal.

And I looked upon an awesome spectacle.

Within the enormous bower of one gigantic tree, was a city built of black crystal.

It rose in successive tiers, the upper works tightly anchored to the bole of the tree itself, the lower levels extending out upon the level upper surface of the branch.

With the exception of the Secret City, the only other Laonese metropolis I had seen had been Phaolon itself, that sparkling capital that was fashioned of glittering gems and crystals.

This city was ebon-black in structure, and, although fashioned like Phaolon from crystals, these were dead and lusterless.

The city itself was dead.

How old it was I have no way of telling. But time had broken down its balustrades and toppled many of its soaring spires. Great cracks ran zigzag through the swelling domes and the narrow, crooked streets were littered with fallen shards.

And so it was that I first looked upon the Dead City of Sotaspra.

Not all life was extinct within the ruined metropolis, however. Life still clung to a few slender spires, guttering low like a windblown candle.

Toward one of these towers, somewhat more remote than the others, the magician directed his uncanny aerial contrivance, floating to a landing on the upmost tier.

Unseen, a drifting ghost from a distant star, I followed.

The tower toward which the cowled magician directed the skysled differed in several ways from the other structures. For one thing, whereas they were dead and blackly lusterless, this spire shimmered with brilliant color. As scarlet as new-shed blood it gleamed—a graceful, tapering shaft of smooth crystalline substance that seemed cast all in one piece, for all that I could see. At least, no segmentation or jointure could be discerned.

Toward this Scarlet Pylon the skysled flew. Hovering like a winged zaiph, it floated to a landing upon the topmost tier. I perceived that the Pylon was apart from the others, built on the utmost verge of the Dead City, where the levels rose from the crotch of the enormous branch, ascending partway up the slope of the giant tree-trunk itself.

One spire that blazed and flashed with color, amid a crumbling metropolis of dead black. The thought crossed my mind that this structure had been somehow revitalized—energized—whereas the black, lusterless, ruined towers had slumped into decay, their stores of energy vitiated. I was, much later, to realize that my first impression was strictly true and accurate.

The magician bore the unconscious boy from his craft into the Scarlet Pylon. Entering a spacious apartment, he deposited his burden on a couch of sumptuous silken stuffs and set about without further ado to lance the boy’s swollen and discolored leg. Draining off the poison, he cleansed and treated the wound with swift, economical motions, smearing the bite with a sparkling salve permeated with flecks of radiance.

Then he momentarily left the suite, returning with a peculiar apparatus like a tall floor lamp. The luminiferous element of this instrument was a coil of milky crystal, shielded in a hooded cone of glistening white metal which shaped and directed the rays.

He affixed this instrument to the floor, adjusted the extensible shaft so that the luminiferous coil was swiveled to bring is rays to bear directly upon the boy’s injured leg. He then switched the lamp on. A dim rosy light bathed the boy’s flesh. I gathered that this roseate light was a form of energy that worked on the cellular structure, accelerating the natural rate of growth.

Leaving the unconscious boy beneath the ruby rays of the healing lamp, the magician strode swiftly from the room. In a few moments he returned with a tray of various instruments and stoppered bottles whose employment obviously pertained to the healing arts. These he utilized over the next two hours in what I observed to be a vain and futile attempt to save the life of the boy.

A sympathetic audience, albeit an invisible one, I lingered in the chamber. Something in the dogged determination with which the boy had battled for life aroused my admiration.

With the aid of an apparatus which consisted of a tangled maze of glass tubes, the cowled man succeeded in draining most of the venom from the boy’s bloodstream. The healing ruby rays enormously accelerated the healing of the wound, and a poultice of glittering crystalline salts reduced the swelling and, I assume, fought infection.

But it would seem the magician’s fight against death was to be a hopeless struggle. Too much time had elapsed between the attack of the scorpion and the time the boy was brought into the Pylon laboratorium. The poison had largely accomplished its deadly purpose; the boy would not live through the night.

Unless an unknown and inscrutable fate intervened.

Night fell over the World of the Green Star. As day waned, the boy’s life waned with it. Paper-white, dripping with perspiration, he lay on the couch surrounded with healing instruments. I gathered from the expression on the cowled man’s face that the boy’s heartbeat grew ever fainter, and I could see that his breathing grew difficult. Toward the middle of night his condition worsened. His breast rose and fell almost imperceptibly now, as his breathing became more shallow.

The magician had done all that lay within the scope of his art. At length, he shrugged, switched off the apparatus, and left the apartment, abandoning the youth to his fate.

I hovered nearby, observing to the last this little drama into which chance had thrust me.

Then, toward morning, I saw an amazing sight.

It was as if a drifting whorl of luminous vapor rose slowly from the boy’s motionless body.

In the dimness of the half-lit chamber, the mysterious vapor glowed with a wan and pearly luminescence.

It seeped slowly from his flesh, floated for a brief time above his body, melting into empty air.

I sensed, with a thrill of uncanny awe, that I was observing the dissipation of his vital energy. How it came that the strange phenomenon was visible to me, I cannot precisely explain. Perhaps it was due to my bodiless state. An invisible spirit myself, perhaps I saw with the eyes of a spirit, to whom another spirit is dimly visible.

Near dawn an intense point of brilliant light seemed to emerge from the boy’s breast. Starlike, a focused point of pure flame, limpidly white, it seemed to float up from his body… hung above the motionless corpse for an instant… then drifted out of the room. And I knew that it had been given to me to observe an immortal soul leave its mansion of clay.

The boy was dead now. Still warm, his flesh would soon cool, the rich red blood congeal in his veins, his limbs stiffen in the grip of rigor mortis.

I think a madness came over me then.

What impelled me to this act I cannot say; it was no conscious act performed of my own volition.

But, swift as thought, I drifted down into the empty, warm, and waiting body!

Chapter 5 I LIVE AGAIN

My flesh was at once numb—and on fire. A sound like surf roared in my ears. My lungs fought for air, struggling against a vast weight that seemed piled upon my chest.

It came to me, then, what a mad thing I had done, entering the vacated body of the forest boy. For the body had been at the very point of death, and I, who had died once before in the flesh of Chong, knew that death was a trauma as shattering to the psyche as birth is said to be.

But I fought, clinging to life. Red mist gathered before my eyes. Excruciating torment flayed through my nerves as pulse and respiration began anew. Had I possessed the strength I would have shrieked aloud with the pain; but I had not breath enough to do so much as whimper.

After an endless time, the torment lessened. The red mist cleared from my vision and the roar of my blood moving through the inner ear faded.

To draw each breath was a struggle against enormous odds. My heart labored violently within my chest, battling for life. My consciousness faded as the powerful life-instinct took over control of the battle against death.

And I swooned or slept.

After an unknown interval, I struggled back to wakefulness again to gaze up into the cool, aloof eyes of the cowled magician who was regarding me with surprise and slight admiration. Above the muffled thunder of my struggling heart I could not make out the words he murmured as he spoke to me. He lifted my head and set a beaker to my parched lips. I drank down a potent, stinging beverage as effervescent as vintage champagne, as bracing as a tonic. The fluid bit my tongue and slid down my throat to form a center of warmth deep within me, from which waves of languid heat expanded through my extremities. The numbness faded almost magically from my flesh, and the agony of the poison ebbed. And I swooned or slept again.

For days thereafter I lingered, half-conscious, clinging to life. Gradually my hold strengthened, and I sensed myself no longer in danger of losing my precarious grip on life or my rash tenancy in this new body.

I slept much, while strange lights beat upon my flesh and curious potions circulated through my veins. Doubtless my mysterious savior kept me drugged much of the time with some narcotic.

Why I lived while the boy himself had died I cannot say for certain. Perhaps it was simply that I am a full-grown man, with a greater store of vigor and life force, while he was a skinny, mistreated, half-starved stripling. At any rate, I recovered in time from the effects of the sting of the phuol. The wound on my leg healed; the poison-rotted flesh reknit. At first I could only hobble; in time I limped; but before very long I could walk or run as good as ever.

That I lived anew in the body of another did not trouble me. The boy died and there had been nothing that I could do in my bodiless state, to help him. When the soul has fled, the empty body is dead matter. Had I not entered it as a wandering spirit and revitalized it, the body would have decayed, its elements returning to the matrix of nature from which it had sprung.

But my tenancy of this body was a strange and unique experience for two reasons. It was not that merely to inhabit a borrowed body was new to me, for I had known the phenomenon before, on my first visit to the World of the Green Star. Then I had dwelt in the body of Kyr Chong, the Lord Chong, whose spirit had been torn from his flesh and driven forth to wander forever among the stars by a hostile enchanter. The memories of Chong had long-since faded from his body’s brain, and other than an extraordinary ease and facility in learning the Laonese language, my tenancy of his flesh had occasioned no peculiarities.

But the body of this boy was very newly dead—if indeed his body can be said to have died at all, since I entered it at the very moment his spirit fled forth. In the case of the boy, his brain was still a living organ and all his memories were still fresh. Thus, for example, I knew his name, which was Karn—or “Karn the Hunter,” as he thought of himself. And I knew that he was an orphan lad, his family long-since slain by the monstrous predators of the wild, who lived alone among the giant trees, subsisting on the game he slew with bow or lance, or trapped in cunningly contrived nets. There were many such as the boy Karn who dwelt apart from the treetop cities amid the wilderness of the giant trees. Sometimes they banded together into tribes of small clans, but as often as not they dwelt alone and apart, living off the forest, eschewing the companionship of their own kind.

Life for such persons is hard, for the World of the Green Star is a savage wilderness—an ocean teeming with enemies, in which there exist only a few islands of civilization and safety.

Thus it had been for Karn the Hunter. And there was still fresh in his memory the moment of his capture by a hostile tribe from which his own parents had fled into exile before his birth.

It was an uncanny thing, to delve into the alien memories of another person and another life. But my curiosity was, I think, natural enough under the circumstances. Thus I searched into the memories of Karn the Hunter, and thus I learned of the circumstances which had led him to that grim scene in which I had first encountered him, bound to the death stakes, set out to die under the venomous sting of the scorpion monster…

His father had been named Athgar, and he had been a hunter of the Red Dragon nation, a tribe of wandering savages who roamed among the giant trees at eternal enmity with all others of their kind. Athgar the Hunter had seen and had fallen in love with the girl Dioma, the daughter of a chieftain. His love had been returned, for she had often looked upon him from afar, admiring his prowess in the hunt, his fearlessness in battle, his stalwart body, and his nobility of features and deportment.

Thus they met and thus they loved. But her father had promised her to another, and refused Athgar when he came to sue for her hand. Athgar’s rival for the affections of Dioma had driven him into exile on the pretext that he had broken taboo, but on the fateful day of the nuptial rites, when Dioma was to have been delivered into the arms of the rival chieftain, Athgar appeared, slew his rival, and carried off into the wilderness the woman he loved, who became the mother of Karn.

As I have already stated, life among the giant trees is hard. It is especially hard for a lone man encumbered by a woman and a newborn child. In time, both Athgar and Dioma succumbed to the countless perils of the wild, leaving the child Karn to live or die on his own.

But Karn the Hunter had not died. The blood of mighty warriors and of many ancient chieftains ran in his veins, and his young body swelled with sleek thews; in time, if he survived, he would grow into a tall and majestic warrior like his father, fit to bear up the standard of the Red Dragon nation in war, and to lead a mighty party in the hunt. And Karn survived—for, although still but a boy, he had inherited much of his father’s fearlessness and dogged determination, as he had his inches and his brave prowess and courage.

But the cruel laws of survival in the wilderness impose the sentence of unending warfare upon those who choose to live apart from their fellow men, or those who are driven into the lonely life. Rogues and outlaws, they are, for the most part, and to be slain whenever they are encountered.

Such had been the doom of Karn the Hunter, the son of Athgar the Hunter; for in time he had been captured by Red Dragon scouts from his father’s own people. They had imprisoned him, starved and beaten him, and staked him out to die a merciless and lingering death under the poisonous sting of the phuol.

It was an irony of fate. For the savage boy had survived in the wild forest where a city-nurtured child would have succumbed to the thousand predators who roamed the wilderness. These perils he had survived—only to fall prey to his father’s foes, to his own people, who had staked him out to die on a branch whereon the venomous phuol make their nest. And from this grim jest of fate the hooded savant had saved him, for some idle whim or perhaps a deeper purpose which as yet remained unknown.

As for Karn’s mysterious savior, he was a cold, aloof, impersonal man who had not as yet divulged his reason for rescuing the wild boy from the scorpion monster. His name was Sarchimus, and in this chronicle I have referred to him as a “magician,” for want of a more fitting term. Sarchimus the Wise was he called, and in this Scarlet Pylon he dwelt alone, insofar as I had learned as yet. There were others like Sarchimus, who lived here and there in various portions of the Dead City, but it was to be some time before I encountered any of them.

Sarchimus was silent and inscrutable; he lived apart and busied himself in curious studies whereof I knew but little, for I seldom saw him. Although he was solicitous to me while my wound knit and my body healed and I recovered my strength and health, he was neither my friend nor my master. The mystery of Sarchimus was one I had yet to solve.

And so this first peculiarity of my new embodied state was that I now possessed the living memories of another; I shared his memories only, and not his being or his sense of identity, for that had fled into the Unknown with his immortal spirit. The other peculiarity of which I have spoken is the strangeness of my new body, which was that of an immature boy. For I had been a full-grown man in my former life on the planet Earth far away, and to find myself a boy again was weird and unsettling, and it took me a considerable time to adjust to my new condition.

My own boyhood on Earth had been cruelly curtailed, for since I was a child of six I had been crippled with polio and had not taken a single step without mechanical aids. So now, to the strangeness of my new immaturity, was added the strangeness of dwelling within a strong and athletic body. A body that yearned to run and climb and play with the reckless abandon of a healthy boy—a body that chafed at restraints and conditions and ill health. It was all rather like a strange dream.

To be a boy again—and a healthy one, at that—was a dream that many men have had. The actuality of the dream was, oddly enough, uncomfortable. For one thing, although my spirit was that of a man, my emotions and my self-control were immature and tentative. On those rare occasions when I saw my keeper, or owner, or whatever he was, I suffered from the awkward, blushing selfconsciousness of a tongue-tied boy. Far from being able to deal with him on a man to man basis, I felt very much in awe of his superior wisdom and mysterious accomplishments, and knew myself to be his junior and not at all his equal. But these emotions and feelings were those of the boy Karn, not those of the man-spirit which now inhabited his body; it was, however, to be quite some time before I became—myself—and accepted my new life as Karn the Hunter.

The Pylon of Sarchimus was large and capacious. The magician or savant, or whatever I should call him, dwelt in his own private apartments into which I was forbidden to enter, and thus I saw very little of him, once my wound was healed and my health restored. He was a cryptic man, my “master,” and left me to my own devices most of the time. He seemed to care nothing for my company and generally ignored my very presence, and certainly demanded nothing from me in the way of service—at first, anyway.

I cared little, and did not bother to puzzle into his mysteries. It was enough to me during this period that he neither abused nor mistreated me in any way, which was a lucky thing. For I had not yet managed to fully master the savage instincts of Karn the Hunter; and Karn was, by ancestry and birth and self-training, a savage warrior and a killer.

Sarchimus, as I say, left me to my own devices, and sometimes I did not even glimpse him from a distance for days on end. His enigma was insoluble. When I had lain weak and helpless, he had tended me with the gentle solicitude of a kindly nurse; once my wound was healed and I was able to be up and around on my own, he left me to myself very largely, never required my presence, and hardly ever talked to me.

We ate apart and lived apart, my master and I. The mysterious people who had built this city had mastered the strange secrets of an alien science. I will have more to say on this subject later, but for the moment let me remark that one of their most remarkable scientific attainments was in the preservation of food. They had known a technique for instantly preserving food and it was upon these supplies of perfectly preserved nutriment that my master and I subsisted. Each apartment in the Scarlet Pylon contained a certain niche in one wall, protected by a panel. When this panel was opened, a switch caused a variety of foods encased in transparent cubes to revolve past the eye of the beholder in a recess. Roast meats and stews and all manner of vegetables and fruits, pastries and deserts, and a considerable variety of unfamiliar beverages, were on display in this manner, all in a condition of perfect preservation. Having chosen the repast you desired, pressure on a certain switch caused the transparent cube containing the food of your choice to be detached from the continuous sequence of stacked cubes. The cubes themselves were easily unsealed and when this was done the food or drink you had chosen was before you—steaming hot or cool and frosted, ready to be devoured. The supplies of these preserved foods set aside by the Ancients, as I soon came to think of them, seemed virtually infinite in variety and number. Thus, although I suffered something from loneliness, I would never go hungry for as long as I remained a guest—or a prisoner—in the Scarlet Pylon of Sarchimus the Wise.