My body began to tingle pleasantly. That was all at first. It is difficult to describe the weird sensation I experienced as soon as the transmitter began to work. It was literally true that every atom of my body was being torn apart-and it felt like it. I began to get light-headed; then came the sensation of frightful pressures building up inside me, followed by the feeling that I was exploding outwards.
Everything went green and I felt as though I was spreading gently in all directions. Then came a riot of colors blossoming around me-reds, yellows, purples, blues.
There was an increasing sense of weightlessness-masslessness even. I felt I was streaming through blackness and my mind began to blank out altogether. I felt I was hurtling over vast distances, beyond time and space-covering an incredible area of the universe in every direction in a few seconds.
Then I knew nothing more!
I came to my senses-if senses they were-under a lemon-colored sun blazing down on me from out of a deep blue, near-purple sky. It was a color more intense than any I had ever seen before. Had my experience enabled me to see color with greater sharpness?
But when I looked around I realized that it was more than intensity which had changed. I was lying in a field of gently swaying, sweet-smelling ferns. But they were ferns unlike any I had ever seen!
These ferns were an impossible shade of crimson!
I rubbed my eyes. Had the transmitter-or rather the receiver-gone wrong and put me together slightly mixed up, with my color sense in a muddle?
I got up and looked across the sea of crimson ferns.
I gasped.
My whole sight must somehow have been altered!
Cropping at the ferns, with a line of yellowish, hills in the background, was a beast as large as an elephant and of roughly the same proportions as a horse. Yet here the similarly to any beast I knew ended. This creature was a mottled shade of mauve and light green. It had three long, white horns curling from its flat, almost catlike head. It had twin, somewhat reptilian, tails spreading to the ground behind it, and it had one huge eye covering at least half the area of its face. This was a faceted eye that shone and glinted in the sunlight. The beast looked rather curiously at me and lifted its head, then began to move towards me.
With, I suspect, a wild yell, I ran. I felt convinced I was experiencing some sort of nightmare or paranoiac delusion as a result of a fault in the transmitter or receiver.
I heard the beast thundering on behind me, giving out a strange mooing sound, and increased my pace as best I could. I found I could run very easily indeed and seemed to be lighter than normal.
Then to one side of me I heard musical laughter, at once merry and sympathetic. A lilting voice called something in what was to me a strange, unearthly language, trilling and melodic. In fact, the sound of the language was so beautiful that it did not seem to need words.
"Kahsaaa manherra vosu!"
I slowed my pace and looked towards the source of the voice.
It was a girl-the most wonderful girl I have ever seen in my life.
Her hair was long, free and golden. Her face was oval, her white skin clear and fresh. She was naked, apart from a wispy cloak which curled round her shoulders and a broad, leather belt around her waist. The belt held a short sword and a holster from which jutted the butt of a pistol of some kind. She was tall and her figure was exquisite. Somehow her nakedness was not obvious and I accepted it at once. She, too, was totally unselfconscious about it. I stopped still, not caring about the beast behind me so long as I could have a few seconds' glimpse of her.
Again she threw back her head and laughed that merry laugh.
Suddenly I felt something wet tickling my neck.
Thinking it must be an insect of some sort, I put up my hand. But it was too large for an insect. I turned.
That strange mauve and green beast, that monster with the fly-like, Cyclops eye, two tails and three horns, was gently licking me!
Was it tasting me? I wondered vaguely, still concentrating on the girl. Judging by the way she was laughing, I thought not.
Wherever I was-in dream or lost world-I knew that I had fled in panic from a tame, friendly, domestic animal. I blushed and then joined in the girl's laughter.
After a moment I said: "If it's not a rude question, I wonder, ma'am, if you could tell me where I am."
She wrinkled her perfect brow when she heard me and shook her head slowly. "Uhoi merrash?
Civinnee norshasa?"
I tried again in French but without any luck.
Then in German-again no success. Spanish was equally ineffective at producing communication between us. My Latin and Greek were limited, but I tried those, too. I am something of a linguist, picking up foreign tongues quickly. I tried to remember the little Sioux and Apache I had learned during a brief study of the Red Indians at college.
But nothing worked.
She spoke a few more words in her language which seemed to me, when I listened very carefully, to have certain faint similarities to classical Sanskrit.
"We are both, it seems, at a loss," I remarked, standing there with the beast still licking me lovingly.
She stretched out a hand for me to take. My heart pounded and I could hardly make myself move. "Phoresha," she said. She seemed to want me to go somewhere with her, and pointed towards the distant hills.
I shrugged, took her hand and went along with her.
So that was how, hand in hand with its loveliest resident, I came to Varnal, City of the Green Mists-most splendid of the splendid Martian cities.
Oh, how many thousands upon thousands of years ago!
Chapter Two
THE ASTOUNDING TRUTH
VARNAL is more real to me, even in my memories, than ever Chicago or New York can be. It lies in a gentle valley in the hills, which the Martians term the Calling Hills. Green and golden, they are covered with slender trees and, when the wind passes through them, they sound like sweet, distant, calling voices as one walks past.
The valley itself is wide and shallow and contains a fairly large, hot lake. The city is built around the lake, from which rises a greenish steam, a delicate green that sends tendrils curling around the spires of Varnal. Most of Varnal's graceful buildings are tall and white, though some are built of the unique blue marble which is mined close by.
Others have traceries of gold in them, making them glitter in the sunlight. The city is walled by the same blue marble, which also has golden traceries in it. From its towers fly pennants, gay and multicolored, and its terraces are crowded with its handsome inhabitants, the plainest of whom would be a sought-after beau or belle in Wynnsville, Ohio-or, indeed, Chicago or any other great city of our world.
When I first came upon the city of Varnal, led by that wonderful girl, I gasped in awed admiration. She seemed to accept my gasp as the compliment it was and she smiled proudly, saying something in her then incomprehensible language.
I decided that I could not be dreaming, for my own imagination was simply not capable of creating such a vision of splendor and loveliness.
But where was I? I did not know then. How had I got there? That I still cannot answer fully.
I puzzled over the second question. Evidently the matter transmitter had had a fault. Instead of sending me to the receiver on the other side of the lab building it had sent me hurtling through space-perhaps through time, too-to another world. It could not be Earth-not, at least, the Earth of my own age. Somehow I could not believe it was any Earth, of the past or the future.
Yet it could not be the only other obvious planet in our solar system-Mars-for Mars was a dead, arid planet of red dust and lichen. Yet the size of the Sun and the fact that gravity was less here than on Earth seemed to indicate Mars.