Under the Green Star
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Green Star Rises #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Under the Green Star». Краткое содержание книги:
The good woman was accustomed to this sort of behavior. My quarters were equipped with a kitchenette and pantry, and many times in the past I had secluded myself for days on end behind locked doors while busied in my researches. I impressed upon her that she was not to interrupt me for any reason.
Emptying my mind of all trivial thoughts, I stretched out on a soft, comfortable sofa and composed myself as if for slumber. Closing my eyes, I visualized a black sphere. It hovered before my mind’s eye exact in every detail, almost as if it were a material object. My concentration was focused upon that orb of darkness with such intensity that, ere long, I was unaware of outside sounds. Then I began to will myself into the deepest trance. I began to lose all awareness of my own body; all outer sensation faded; no longer could I feel the faint brush of moving air against my face, or hear the beating of my own pulse, or feel the pressure of my crippled body against the soft fabric of my couch. All of my attention was turned inward now.
Next I visualized the black sphere as not a globular object, but an illusion—I saw it as the black, circular mouth of a tunnel, and down that endless tunnel I imagined myself traveling, until I was swallowed up in unrelieved darkness.
Deeper and deeper I descended until at length I perceived the faintest spark of light ahead, like a star against the breast of the night, like the far, dim opening at the end of the tunnel. I drifted toward it at ever-increasing speeds, until I seemed to hurtle through the black hollow darkness at an inconceivable velocity.
I emerged from darkness into dim ruby light.
For a moment I could make nothing of my surroundings. I seemed to be enclosed in a rectangular box of considerable depth, whose floor was drowned in deep gloom: and whose upper levels were awash in faint red luminosity.
Then, with a strange, tingling shock of surprise, I recognized my surroundings. I was in the very room wherein I had immersed myself in the sleep-like trance … but floating near the ceiling!
Many hours had passed, for early afternoon had given way to the hour of sunset, and the last level beams shone redly through the windows of the western wall.
Gazing down from my height I saw … myself.
I lay stretched out on a couch, my arms folded upon my chest, my face waxen-pale and curiously unfamiliar to me. It came to me then that I had never before actually seen my own face as others saw it, but always in a mirror or through the medium of some other reflective surface. Always before I had seen my face reversed, in reflection: but now I saw myself as the rest of the world saw me. It seemed a trivial difference; but it was oddly stranger than it should have been. My face was … empty; blank and expressionless.
Was this because I lay in trance-like sleep, and all of my facial muscles—which in my waking moments were in tension, giving my features what we call “expression” were now completely relaxed? Or was the strange blankness of my features due to the fact that my body was now—untenanted?
I cannot answer now, nor could I then.
Curiously, I turned my gaze upon my own being, and found that to the eyes of my immaterial self I was an invisible spirit. Indeed, now that I began to accustom myself to this peculiar state, I felt oddly unaware of myself in every way. A man in the flesh may strip himself naked and yet be aware of his bodily envelope in a thousand small ways—the roughness of a carpet against his bare soles—the chill wind blowing against naked flanks—the thousand little internal sensations of the body, tongue resting against teeth, dryness of throat, an itching finger. None of these I felt in my new spirit-state: it was as if I did not possess a body at all.
And, of course, that was the truth of the matter.
I had liberated myself from my body.
I was—free!
Chapter 2
BEYOND THE MOON
To the windows I drifted. I know of no other term whereby to describe the mode of locomotion I employed. I did not stride or even swim through the air: I … moved. In my bodiless state, the whim was father to the deed. I but thought of going over to look out of the window, and found myself there without any sensation of having propelled myself thither.
I gazed out. The sun was all but gone now, mere guttering embers burning amid the distant pines. Suddenly, I wanted to be out in the open air … and again found that I had traversed an interval of space with no sensation of having physically moved. I hovered far above the lawn, which lay drowned in darkness below. Had I been here in the body, I should have experienced the giddiness of vertigo; now I felt nothing. I hung in the air thirty feet above the wet grass, but it was like a dream of flight, rather than the physical experience.
A sudden intoxication seized me: I could go anywhere—do anything! I rose to a great height with the swiftness of thought. The hilly Connecticut countryside lay spread out beneath me, fields and forests and the checkered farms with their sown fields. The rooftops of the nearest community, Harritton, were visible from my height; I could see the white steeple of the Congregational church, the yellow marquee lights of the cinema, the red neon sign of the Cozy Oak Bar and Grill, the luminous funnels of moving headlights along the highway leading to New Haven.
At this height—in the flesh!—I would have felt intense cold, the pressure of great winds—but I felt nothing. Nor could I hear a sound, not even the beating of my own heart or the faint hollow roaring of blood moving through the arteries of the inner ear, that seashell sound that is the closest to absolute silence man ever knows.
Why should I be able to see and not to hear? True, I was as immaterial as thought itself, and sound waves passed through me without the slightest obstacle—but was not this true of light waves as well? And it was truly light by which I saw, not the ghostly luminance of some astral sun, but the light of the ordinary world. Why was I opaque to light, but transparent to sound or matter? The ancient pages of the Kan Chan Ga said nothing of this. And to this day I have no explanation to offer; I can but set down exactly what I experienced, and leave it to others wiser than myself to explain.
I looked down. The woods bordering my property lay below, all but invisible in the darkness. Within those woods was a narrow stream by whose banks I had played as a child before polio struck me down. A whim bore me there without the slightest sensation of motion. The darkness under the overhanging pine boughs was inky, but the moon was beginning to rise and a dim silver radiance pervaded the place. The stream was wider than I remembered, and the banks more deeply cut—but that should be the case, considering the years that had passed.
A fat raccoon was washing its food in the gliding waters. I watched it with delight. Had I been present in the body, the wary little fellow would have vanished in the bushes on the instant: now, although it paused, to rear up and peer around with bright eyes gleaming in its comic, black-masked face, it showed no sign of being aware of my presence.
Like this fat, furry little inhabitant of the woods, I, too, was free! I could go where I would, and no walls or barrier of steel could hinder my passage.
Behind me, in the great house, my body lay in deep sleep. My heartbeat had slowed by this time, my body temperature had dropped, and my breathing was shallow. To leave my body far behind would not cause it harm in any way, so the Kan Chan Ga assured me. Were I to spend hours, or even days in this insubstantial state, I could return to my body in confidence that it had suffered in no way from the departure of its tenant. In the deep trance state in which it now lay, the fires of life burned very low. There were minimal demands on that store of vitality in this state; to remain away for days or even weeks would not mean that I would return to find a gaunt, starved corpse.