The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (3 page)

“So there’s nothing you can do?”

She spoke with a sympathy and understanding for his plight that made him more concerned with hers.

“There’s something I can do. It’s called ‘passing the buck.’ I can take you to my leader in the National Park Service and let him figure out what to do. Have you any written authorization from your planet’s government to make the request?”

“My planet no longer exists,” she reminded him.

“That’s only a technicality,” he told her. “The government needs documents. I’m not officially alive unless I produce a birth certificate and not dead until I have a death certificate.”

He thought for a moment and said hopefully, “There may be another way. In my capacity as a civil servant I could act as an official witness to authenticate your arrival on earth, but to make the deposition I’d have to see the space vehicle you arrived in and officially attest to your need of radioactive uranium.”

“I would take you inside the vehicle, Breedlove, because I trust you, but first I must ask you: How long will this take?”

“I’d hope to get it done within the next three weeks because, after that, this meadow will be swarming with campers and fishermen.”

Her question had been voiced with concern, and his answer seemed to relieve her.

“It must not be much longer, or we may never leave.”

“Would this environment be fatal?”

“No. Already my people love your planet, so beautiful and so like our own. It has given us hope. But we are people of light, Breedlove, and the day will soon come when the light from your sun will bid us to stay. This must not be.”

The gravity of her manner disturbed him. Trying to cheer her, he said, “If you don’t get away, there’s an earth ritual I’d like to be the first to introduce to you. It’s called ‘courting.’ Young men call on young women in their parlors with the intention of proposing marriage or a reasonable facsimile.”

“Then I must show you my parlor.” She smiled.

“First let me call my office. I’m expected back by noon.”

“Can you spend another night on the mound and join my people in our twilight ceremony? It will teach you much about us.”

“I’d be delighted. Was it your people who cropped the grass?”

“We ate it.”

He had grown so accustomed to her oddities he only glanced around and commented, “I hope the wire grass didn’t upset your stomachs, and you should leave enough for me to clean my pans.”

He radioed Peterson and requested permission to stay overnight to conduct a survey of the trout population in Jones Creek. Peterson agreed and wished him luck.

“Thank you for being discreet, Breedlove.”

“I want to keep you secret until we’ve made plans. If it became known you had landed here, there’d be claim jumpers all over the place, and I want to keep you for myself. You’re my chance to go down in history. Now, take me to your leader.”

“We have no leader, Breedlove. We are all as one.”

“What do you know about the qualities of light, Breedlove?”

Her question came as they neared the aspen grove on the far side of the creek.

“Not much,” he admitted. “I’m no scientist. But I read a lot. I just finished an article about lasers. A laser beams light amplified by the stimulated emission of radiation, but don’t ask me what that means.”

“Then maybe you can best understand when I tell you that what you don’t see before you is an optical illusion.”

Forty feet in diameter and over three hundred feet high, the Kanabian space vehicle rested on its base in the aspens barely four hundred yards from the hillock in the meadow. It was invisible and unrecordable on human instruments.

It had destroyed three or four trees on landing, but even its self-made landing pad was invisible. Kyra continued to explain the ship’s properties in terms intelligible to a nonscientist.

“Light corpuscles travel halfway around the circumference of the craft and continue onward as rays so you can see behind it from any angle. Its invisibility protects us and keeps it from frightening animals. In nonmountainous areas it would be a hazard to low-flying aircraft, but birds sense it and fly around it because it alters the magnetic lines of a planet in its near vicinity.”

Leading him into the grove, she whistled three notes on an ascending scale. Before them in the shadowy forest he saw a swash of pale light grow visible, lengthen downward, and become a door opening to form a stepless ramp, resembling translucent ivory, leading into the spaceship. It was a gateway through nothingness leading into something. For a moment the sight disoriented his sense of reality, and he faltered in his stride. She reached over and took his hand lightly and said, “Be careful going up. The ramp’s slippery.”

Her touch and conversational tone steadied him. He followed her up the ramp, feeling massive and gross, a mortal invading a fairy dimension, but he was not alarmed, no more, he thought, than Aeneas following the Sibyl into Hades. When he stepped into the rotunda of the ship, he had lost his feeling of unreality completely to his sense of awe, but he remained alertly observant.

Centering the rotunda they stood within was a shallow concavity about four feet in diameter surrounding a manhole cover with an inset handle. A narrow ramp without a guardrail spiraled upward from the rotunda until it was lost in a pink haze of sunlight filtering through the skin of the ship. Anchored to the deck at the base of the ramp stood a padded couch, designed, he assumed, to absorb the G forces on its occupant at takeoff, but it was like none constructed for earth astronauts.

The gravity lounge had straps he assumed were safety belts, but the headrest and shoulder straps were at the foot of the couch, which was tilted at an acute angle. Three separate lines of tubes, red, yellow, and green, wound down from the bulkhead above to cluster at a terminal box above the couch. From the box itself, a single tube with the dimensions of a garden hose dangled from the terminal box, its knobbed head almost reaching the couch.

His observation of the peculiar gravity lounge took only seconds, and as his eyes traced the varicolored tubes upward he saw a woman descending the ramp.

This female, too, was nude and green-haired, but there her resemblance to Kyra ended. Barrel-torsoed, with a massive uplift of pectorals in the travesty of a bust, her gross-featured head was sunk into a wrestler’s sloping shoulders. Advancing on him, she scowled, and began to hiss as she drew nearer.

She was the Gorgon of this fairyland. He cowered as she descended, fighting an impulse to flee even as he felt the beginnings of paralysis from the irrational, primordial terror the sight and sound of this creature aroused in him. Kyra fluted in the direction of the brute in a purring, lilting language, and the she-thing halted, her scowl relaxed, the hissing ceased; but the female remained standing above them, crouched in baleful alertness.

His terror subsided, but Breedlove felt inwardly weak and shaken as he struggled for lightness in a comment, “That must be Medusa.”

“She’s Myra. Her function is to guard the door, but you’re safe. Just ignore her.”

Above Myra he discerned a vanishing line of hatchlike doors opening onto the ramp. Trying to ignore the guardian, he said, “Why, you have only ten people in a ship that could carry hundreds.”

“It’s designed to be our first city when we find a planet to inhabit.”

“Why so many tubes leading to the couch?”

“They lead from the couch,” she said. “They’re designed to relieve internal pressures on the occupant of the couch. The box is sort of a… medical device.”

“Where are your other people?”

“In their compartments. They come out only for the twilight ceremony.”

“Your constant traveling must get boring,” he said with strained amiability, still conscious of the woman on the ramp.

“Oh, no. Below a certain temperature we fall asleep.”

“Then you hibernate, your faculties grow dormant.”

“Our faculties cease altogether,” she said. “We die. At the speed of light, we become light. The ship flies itself from star to star, and whenever a star swings near, the ship slows, the star’s light awakens us, and we scan its solar system for habitable planets. After liftoff the ship powers itself with free hydrogen from space, but even so our fuel decays, and we need its energy for landings and liftoffs.”

She stepped into the concavity around the manhole cover and he followed, getting his back to Myra.

“We’re standing above the engine room,” Kyra said.

“The ramp elevated us only a few feet above the base,” he commented. “It doesn’t seem possible for such a small engine to lift such a mass.”

“There’s much volume here, Breedlove, but little weight. The ship’s walls are thin so as to admit the light that feeds us. The walls are thin and very strong. Here’s the power plant.”

Bending, she twisted the inset handle in the manhole cover, lifted the cover, and handed it to him. “Feel how light it is.”

He hefted the cover in his hand, saying, “On earth we could use this for a toy called a Frisbee.”

“It pleases me that you can think of such things, Breedlove, for it shows you have presence of mind. But this may surprise you. Here is our entire power plant.”

She squatted on the rim of the hole, and he stooped beside her. Inside he saw a four-spoked wheel with a plastic ball in the center. Between the spokes were four flasks with tubes leading to the ball and coiling around the tube in which the ball rested. Below the entire assemblage, but considerably deeper than ten feet, he saw the roots of trees. The ship had dug down and was resting in its own excavation.

“It’s magic,” he said.

“Actually it’s simple. Any technology is magic to a nontechnician. The wheel spins to stabilize the ship, superheated steam is vented against the ground to give the initial liftoff, and the heat comes from the fuel in the ball. Of course, the power of the steam is amplified by the forcer tubes there, which are pulsed by concentrated radioactive emissions.”

“Steam? Just steam?”

“It’s not just steam. You might call this a staser. You know what force a laser gives to light quanta. Imagine the force this gives to heavy atoms of oxygen and hydrogen. It’s quite adequate for liftoff, and the force is not needed in a free fall.”

She bent to unscrew the top hemisphere of the central ball, while continuing a casual lecture that was exploding new concepts into his untutored mind.

“Once we’re under way, the hydrogen scoops bring fuel to the ball, which is ionized into a constant thrust that impels the ship into the speed of light. At that point, for us, time stands still, and that’s why I’m younger than you are, Breedlove, although I was born thousands of years ago.”

Inside the ball she unscrewed, in a maze of silvery pipes, nested a smaller ball, its dimensions between those of a tennis ball and a grapefruit. She lifted it aloft and said, “This is the core shield. With it, you could carry drops of liquid sun in your pocket.”

She unscrewed the two halves of the ball and showed him a residue of grayish ash. “Once, if you had looked at this without protection, the results would have been more devastating than looking at Myra. Now, it’s harmless and useless.”

She spilled the ash through the spokes to the ground below and screwed the halves back together, holding aloft the small pink ball. “This is all the shield I’ll need for my uranium.”

She handed it to him to hold while she reinserted the manhole cover.

Tossing the ball in his palm, Breedlove said, “You’d better make yourself a woman’s shoulder bag to carry this in or the first child who sees it might make off with your pretty pink ball. And we have another problem. I can attest to what you’ve shown and told me, but I’ll not be able to explain anything when the technical people start asking questions. They’ll never believe us.”

Straightening, she said, “You believe me.”

“Yes, but I trust you.”

“And why do you trust me?”

She spoke in the manner of a schoolteacher probing the knowledge of her star pupil, and he groped for an answer to a suddenly difficult question. Finding none, he seized on a playful ambiguity. “Because you’re so cute.”

She had watched him seek an answer and she laughed at his evasion, but before he spoke he saw a premonitory play of mirth in her eyes. Again he had the impression that she interpreted his words before he voiced them. If she could read his mind, he thought, she had advanced beyond any conceivable level of mere technology.

“Breedlove, you are ‘they.’ If you believe me, they will also. I’ll reveal enough to your technicians to persuade them I speak the truth, but no more. Knowledge acquired too soon can be dangerous. What I say is no reflection on you as a person. Your native intelligence is as great as mine. It is simply that I am more informed on methods. I can tell from your sun that your race is newly born, and adults have to protect children from their own folly. Now, what is a shoulder bag?”

He explained with gestures. Listening, she nodded, and asked, “Is pink a fashionable color?”

“I suppose so.”

“I must make me a shoulder bag while you survey the trout population of Jones Creek.”

“Will you join me for lunch at midday?”

“No, the sunlight feeds me, but we will all join you at twilight. Now begone, or I’ll set Myra on you.”

She was laughing as she spoke, ushering him toward the door, but even her playful mention of the sentry made him emerge from the spaceship with a feeling of relief.

Later, as he fished along the creek, Breedlove’s mind entertained the implications of Kyra’s arrival. In the past winter he had read the works of Father Teilhard de Chardin, and it occurred to him that this visitor to earth supported the Jesuit’s hypothesis that mankind was evolving toward the Godhead. Her similarity to the human species indicated that the logic of evolution for higher species was cosmic, and it was benign, that her race had survived the ultimate holocaust, the death of its planet, testified that her fellow mortals of earth held within themselves the key to practical immortality. Kyra synthesized religion and science.

Gradually he forced himself to grapple with the practical problems her appearance and her request for uranium would create. He foresaw no mass hysteria arising from the visit of such an appealing space pilgrim, but if her presence became publicly known, her progress would become as dignified as a traveling freak show, and he wanted his fellow human beings to be on their best behavior for this girl—he could not think of her as other than a girl—who combined regality with such airy grace.