The green girl

by Jack Williamson

I fell through the rosy clouds. The green and purple rim of the abyss grew vague, and the blue cliffs in the north assumed a misty indistinctness. The red mist shone until it seemed that I was swimming in a fog of crimson fire.

And all the while the bright beautiful face of Xenora was before me. The light of her clear violet eyes drove the strangeness and the fear from my mind, leaving only my pain at leaving her. I drove the machine mechanically, lost in a daze of grief.

For ages, it seemed, I shot forward through the haze. At last I made out a bare floor of sand and rocks, pitted with circular craters. It was a good thousand feet below, and still dim in the haze. I opened the bow tubes, and the force of my fall was checked. In three minutes more, the machine struck the earth, bow first. It tore a vast hole in the sand, and rolled over twice, coming to rest on its side. Fortunately it had been built to withstand such knocks; fortunately, too, I was strapped in my cushioned seat.

I got the motors started and worked the machine to an upright position. The crater floor was visible for half a mile about in all directions. It was a dead, desolate waste of hard sand and twisted black volcanic rocks. Further vision was cut off by the rosy mist that hung above the floor.

Then I saw, far before me, a bright violet gleam through the crimson mist! Indistinctly I saw a broad green shaft of pulsing fire rise from it, to lose itself in the crimson sky! That intense violet light, from which the flickering reflections came, and from which the green beam reached up, I knew, must be the seat of the Lord of Flame!

I started the engines once more, and the machine rolled mightily forward over the bare rocks, with a great clangor of metal upon stone, forging ahead at last to meet the alien menace. It roared over bare sandy flats, rounded great boulders, crashed into pits, crawled through craters! Then, suddenly, that terrible green flame flared out toward me! I knew that I had been discovered! Like a lance of green flame it flashed through the red gloom above! Its motion was alert, surprised, terrible!

I set the loading mechanism of the little gun to fire high explosive, and put it in action, hurling shells in the direction of that violet light. And still I drove swiftly on. The flashes of the explosions were visible through the mist ahead, but the deep violet light still glowed.

I turned on the reserve power units, and the machine vibrated from their throbbing drone. I threw another switch, and the deep purr of the giant transformers filled the ship. The mighty white tongue of the electric arc reached out ahead of me!

And the Omnimobile plunged on!

Two of the silver spheres—the ships of Mutron—appeared before me, with the green vortexes of the atomic disintegration springing up about them. The great arc brought them down in incandescent wreckage almost as soon as they came in view!