In the Green Star's Glow

During her next few days as a prisoner of the sorcerer Quoron in the Opal Tower, Niamh came very close to madness from fear, frustration, and despair.

The apartment in which the dwarf had confined her was in truth comfortable to the point of being luxurious. A warm bath of scented waters was at her disposal, and the apartment contained sanitary facilities superior even to those afforded by her own palace in distant Phaolon. She had a variety of attractive, fresh clothing to wear, and the apartment contained several books and works of art for her amusement.

But a prison is still a prison, no matter if the bars of the cage are made of beautiful gold.

There was no window to the room and the only door, a massive slab of heavy ceramic, was guarded by the unsleeping giant the sorcerer called Number Nine. It was this immense, obscene brute who served her meals, and no matter how intense her appetite night be, the very approach of the monstrosity made her faint with loathing.

Number Nine, she learned from scraps of information gleaned from listening to the rambling discourse of Quoron, was one of a series of surgical experiments—one that had lived.

In an attempt to master the secrets of life and death, and to discover the arcana of Nature herself, Quoron had taken apart human bodies and put them together into new, ghastly hybrids.

Number Nine, for example, had four arms and three legs.

And two heads.

The arms were positioned two to a side, the one above the other. This reorganization of the human body had required the sorcerer to build into the armpit of the first pair sufficient shoulder muscles to render the lower set of arms usable. In the case of the lower left arm, the grafting of a new musculature had been successful. But the lower right arm dangled limply, pale and wizened, its flaccid open-palmed hand slapping Number Nine’s thigh at every step.

The third leg had been built on to an extension of the rear portion of the pelvis, a new hip-socket having been engineered where the coccyx is found on normal bodies. The leg had to be a trifle shorter than the other two, so Quoron had used the right leg of an immature boy for this hind-member.

The body was a walking obscenity. But it was the matter of the twin heads that nauseated the princess the most.

They jutted out from a thickly wattled common neck at sharp angles, and one was a woman’s head, and the other was a man’s.

Quoron referred to this choice, as one of his “little pleasantries.”

Both heads were slack-jawed and blank-eyed, and the twin brains were little more than idiots. But the lumbering brute was completely under the control of its master and had utterly no will of its own. Quoron demonstrated this fact one evening by commanding Nine to hold its fingers in a candle-flame until the skin shriveled and popped and crackled like the skin of a sausage on a spit.

Nine whimpered and whined, but did not remove its hand from the white-hot flame until Quoron bade it do so.

That night the dreams of Niamh were horrible …

The sorcerer seldom visited the princess, although he very frequently conversed with his lovely young captive from a place concealed in the walls of the apartment.

These conversations were more in the order of rambling monologues than true conversations, although Niamh at times sought to draw the maniacal dwarf out with questions. Her theory here was, obviously, the more you know about your captor, the more potentially useful information you have at your disposal.

Quoron did not mind being questioned. He loved to talk about his plans for the future, and an intelligent audience was better than a drooling head or a witless, shambling giant.

In this manner Niamh found out the purpose of Quoron’s experiments.

They could be summed up in one word; immortality.

The madman could not have enjoyed much of life, confined to a warped and hideous, dwarfed and crippled body. But, it would seem, even life at such a price is more sweetly to be savored than the absence of life.

Quoron had fallen into the same intellectual trap which had already, ages before his time, destroyed the race whose scientific marvels and accomplishments he admired so much-the Kaloodha, the extinct Winged Men who had built the Opal Tower a million years before.

The same madness infected him which had also driven insane the beautiful black supermen of the Flying Cities which drifted high above the treetops amid the eternal cloud-veil that shields this planet from the piercing emerald rays of its primary.

The lust to live—forever.

It was the mad ambition of Quoron to find a way to render a human being perpetually invulnerable to the effects of time and change and age.