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.