Adventure stories; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
"I am forgetting. There _is_ danger if you are not protected from--from
certain vibration that you might see here. This is a different
universe, and your Martian physical laws do not hold good between our
worlds. Vibration ... light ... other things might harm you. There
should be armor in Sanfel's laboratory. Find it."
Dantan glanced around. There was a cabinet in one corner. He went over
to it slowly, his eyes wary. He had no intention of relaxing vigilance
here simply because that voice sounded familiar....
Inside the cabinet hung a suit of something like space armor, more
flexible and skin tight than any he had ever seen, and with a
transparent helmet through which vision seemed oddly distorted. He got
into the suit carefully, pulling up the rich shining folds over his
body, thinking strangely how long time had stood still in this small
room since the last time a man had worn it. The whole room looked
slightly different when he set the helmet into place. It must be
polarized, he decided, though that alone could not account for the
strange dimming and warping of vision that was evident.
"All ready," he said after a moment.
"Then throw the switch."
With his hand upon it Dantan hesitated for one last instant of
wariness. He was stepping into unknown territory now, and to him the
unknown meant the perilous. His mind went back briefly to the Redhelms
scouring the canyons above for him. He quieted his uneasy mind with the
thought that there might be some weapon in the world of the voice which
he could turn against them later. Certainly, without a weapon, he had
little to lose. But he knew that weapon or no weapon, danger or not, he
must see the face behind that sweet, familiar, imperious voice.
He pressed the lever forward. It hesitated, the weight of milleniums
behind its inertia. Then, groaning a little in its socket, it moved.
Across the screen above it a blaze of color raged like a sudden shining
deluge. Blinded by the glare, Dantan leaped back and swung an arm
across his eyes.
When he looked again the colors had cleared. Blinking, he stared--and
forgot to look away. For the screen was a window now, with the world of
Zha behind it.... And in the center of that window--a girl. He looked
once at her, and then closed his eyes. He had felt his heart move, and
a nerve jumped in his lean cheek.
He whispered a name.
Impassively the girl looked down at him from the screen. There was no
change, no light of recognition upon that familiar, beloved face. The
face of the girl who had died at the Redhelm hands, long ago, in the
fortress of Klanvahr.... For her sake he had hunted the Redhelms all
these dangerous years. For her sake he had taken to the spaceways and
the outlaw life. In a way, for her sake the Redhelms hunted him now
through the canyons overhead. But here in the screen, she did not know
him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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