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.