As he prepared the clean sparkling fluid, Sarchimus spoke to me in a casual tone of voice. He addressed me in an offhand manner whose calm tones belied the inner excitement visible in his face.
“For very long have I sought to perfect this chemical, which is termed the Elixir of Light,” he said. “The precise formulation of the recipe has eluded my researches, although I have discovered the principal ingredients. Variation upon variation have I tested, and each has proven a dismal failure. But today, at long last, the being whose mind contains the perfect formula has divulged it to me, and undying life is within my reach.”
A prickling of terror went through me. My nakedness tingled with superstitious fear—yet I could not move. There was naught that I could do but lay there helpless and listen to his serene, gloating voice as he prepared the mixture.
“I don’t know why I bother to tell you all this,” he said, with an unsteady laugh. “I can hardly expect an untutored savage from the wild to understand the secrets of transcendent chemistry! But I am no such fool as to trust my captive; first I will try the mixture on you, and if you derive no ill effects from it, then and then only will I down the Elixir myself…”
He approached me, a beaker of lambent fluid clenched in one slender hand.
Kneeling beside me, he lifted my head and forced the fluid down my throat.
The voluntary muscle-centers of my body were hopelessly paralyzed, but the involuntary centers were unaffected by the drug he had slipped into my brandy. If it had not been so, I would have died, my heartbeat stilling, my lungs failing to expand, permitting me to draw breath. And swallowing, too, is an involuntary action.
The Elixir was tasteless but deathly cold. A numbness spread through me as the fluid was poured down my throat.
I waited for death. Or for the creeping death of petrification.
Sarchimus hung over me, his features pale and taut, glistening with a sheen of perspiration. The agony in his eyes was terrible to see.
Then the numbness that had spread through the center of my being was replaced by a glowing warmth. Vigor surged up within me and the fires of life burned high. A glorious surge of fresh new energy blazed within me—a wondrous new strength went flaming through every fiber of my being!
The expression of agonized suspense in the quicksilver eyes that observed me turned eagerly to a wild joy.
My young chest rose and fell. My thews swelled with the surge of new power. I could feel the strength grow within me; almost I could have thrown off the effects of the narcotic. My sinews trembled and, in the next moment, I was free of the numbness of the drug and fighting the bonds with furious strength. Had they not been fashioned of the incredibly durable transparent metal which was as common on the World of the Green Star as iron is on Earth, I have no doubt I could have burst my chains, for my strength was as the strength of three men in those glorious moments. But they were of the lucent metal I privately thought of as glassteel, and all my strength was helpless against them.
Unholy joy transformed the normally impassive visage of the savant to a mask of ecstacy. He snatched up the beaker from its stand with trembling hands and poured the sparkling fluid down his own throat—
Part 3
THE BOOK OF ZARQA THE KALOOD
Chapter 11
THE ELIXIR OF LIGHT
Panting, I lay helpless in my bonds. Iffy brown, muscular limbs gleamed with perspiration under the fiery rays of the lamp. I stared through my tousled gold mane at the savant, knowing him victorious. Hoom had spoken wisely; nor had Zarqa overestimated the hazards of the situations Unknowingly, I had aided in the birth of a tyrant superman whose career, unchecked, would lead him to the dominance of my adopted planet.
The secret of immortality lent him a terrible weapon; in its way, the weapon was more disastrous even than the army of metal automatons now vivified and ranked in wait for his commands. Armed with the superior technology of the Kaloodha, he could whelm and conquer the cities of the Laonese. Armed with the promise of immortality, he could conquer the hearts of the kings and princes of the Green Star, who would sell their sovereignty—and their very souls—for eternal youth.
A grim, ironic smile twisted my lips. I had come a second time to this world, hoping to undo the wrongs I had committed on my first visit. Then, my accidental reincarnation in the person of the heroic Chong had hardened the people of Phaolon in their determination to resist their enemies, the Ardhanese. Then, the princess I loved had fallen into the hands of her deadliest foes, and I had perished in the attempt to set her free—leaving her alone and friendless in the land of her enemies.
Hoping to correct these grievous wrongs, I had flown again in astral form to the World of the Green Star. And now, in this second incarnation as the boy warrior, Karn, I had unwittingly aided the tyrant Sarchimus in vitalizing a mechanical horde of killer machines and in attaining the long-sought secret of personal immortality. Far from improving the situation on this world, I had irreparably worsened it!
I glared through my tousled mane at the exulant face of Sarchimus, to see the effects of the Elixir blaze up within him, transforming him, as it had transformed me, into a superman of tripled vigor.
Instead… I saw his features crumble into a mask of horror!
Pale and working, his features fell into sagging folds and he staggered, one bare hand going out to a stone column to steady himself.
And there came, loud in the ringing silence, a most peculiar sound.
The grating of stone against stone.
His eyes fell with unbelieving horror to his own right hand. For it had been the touch of his bare flesh against the column that had produced that stony rasp.
I looked at his hand and saw that horror which had transfixed him. For, even as I watched, the mellow ivory tone of his hand paled—whitened—to the dead, lusterless white of pure chalk.
Within the space of a single heartbeat his hand was a dead thing of white stone, lifeless as a lump of cold rock.
He staggered about the laboratorium, lurching against the lecterns, overturning the porcelain benches, shrieking in a mindless blasphemy of mad imprecation against the merciless and mocking fates.
Now the petrification attacked his left leg. It became a dead weight which he was forced to drag over the stone pave with a grating sound.
Babbling hoarsely, he staggered and could no longer support the growing weight of his own body. He fell to his knees sobbing, then sprawled face forward on the pave, writhing and foaming at the mouth. His struggles grew fainter as the creeping tide of petrification spread through his limbs; his moaning became fainter.
At last only his mad, despairing eyes lived in a face of dead, carved stone…
The lamps guttered and died, leaving me alone in utter darkness. Throughout the Scarlet Pylon there was only darkness and silence. Naked and helpless, I lay in my chains awaiting death.
But death did not come to me. Some innate factor in my physical body prevented the sparkling fluid from working its spell of petrification upon my flesh. Could it perhaps be that the lingering traces of phuol-venom in my blood resisted or neutralized the Elixir?
I did not know; I only knew I must live on. Until I died in the slow agony of thirst and starvation, helpless to free myself from the chains.
For hours I lay alone in the darkness, listening to the beating of my own heart in my naked breast. The silence about me was deafening.
Here I would lie helpless until I starved to death… or would I?
For I thought of the horrible saloogs that infested the lowermost tiers of the Scarlet Pylon… the monstrous and unkillable plant-animal hybrids that writhed and squirmed like monstrous worms through the jungle darkness of the fungi groves… the hybrid predators held at bay only by the forces employed by Sarchimus the Wise…