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.

Nor did my exertions while in this astral state cause any drain of energy. I was essentially disembodied thought—free spirit—and I drew upon cosmic sources of energy as yet unstudied by Western science.

The moon was rising now; it glowed like a shield of pure silver through the black branches. A sudden heady intoxication seized me—I could travel wherever I might—to the very moon itself, if the whim pleased me!

But, no—men of my race had walked the desiccated powdery plains of that shining sphere—why should I, in the perfect freedom of my spirit-state, .go where other men could travel?

I gazed beyond the moon to where the ruddy spark of Mars burned like a dim coal—Mars! The goal of the human imagination for untold centuries—I could travel there, if I willed, with the unthinkable swiftness of thought itself! What matter the vast distances of interplanetary space: a million miles or eight millions are naught to the unleashed spirit!

Upon the very thought, my soul lifted with joy. To walk the surface of another planet—to go where no man of my world had yet been in all the ages of infinite time! Vague thoughts of the books I had read with such fascination in my boyhood came back to me—memories of old Edgar Rice Burroughs and his unforgettable Martian adventure classics—now I, too, like John Carter, could stride the dead sea bottoms of mysterious and romantic Barsoom!

Again, the whim was father to the deed. In a twinkling the Earth vanished beneath me and the blackness of space closed about my being. The moon flashed by in a dim dazzle of gray-silver, and the blurred red sphere swam up before me until it filled my vision. I drifted down toward it—like one in a dream, and slowly came to rest on an illimitable dim plain of dry red sand and crumbling porous rock.

About me, stretching to a horizon that seemed strangely closer than Terrestrial horizons, I stared through the dim twilight of the Martian day. The sun was only a fierce, scorching, and intolerably brilliant star at this vast distance, and it shed little light on the red desert and the low ancient hills.

I gazed up, searching for the famous twin moons, and at length I found them. They were very much smaller than I had thought they would be, and very dim, almost invisible. I looked beyond them to the Earth I had left behind, and found it, a dim, remote blue star with a minute silvery companion.

Then I stared down at the dim-litters red sands beneath me. I sought to bend and touch the sands, but I had no bodily awareness at all and do not know if my spirit-self performed the action or not. This is very difficult to describe: I was not aware of having arms wherewith to reach, or a waist wherefrom to bend; and all that chanced was that my “level” sank until “I” was closer to the ground than before.

I next ascended and floated above the endless plain, searching for some feature—either the legendary canals the early astronomers bad seen, or had thought they had seen—-or the immense craters NASA had photographed from Mariner.

I saw neither...instead, I saw—a city!

Excitement flamed up within me, and I sank toward it.

It lay in the shelter of encircling hills, and the red sands lapped up to drift about its squares and to sift slowly into the streets. I stared about me with heart-aching wonder. A city of tall, impossibly slender, incredibly graceful fluted towers with flaring tiers and swelling domes, all fashioned from some unknown and glistening stone, like pale golden marble, faintly veined with green. There were broad avenues and mighty forums and long shadowy arcades of slim columns, and on the slopes of the encircling hills, facing upon what had once been a broad seashore a billion years ago, were the husks of lovely villas.

I drifted like a ghost through the deserted city, wondering what sort of beings had dwelt in these empty palaces and what dreams they had dreamed, gazing up at the cold mockery of the stars. And in a small square I found at last a likeness of the long-gone dwellers of the seaside metropolis, and gazed with wonder upon the slim, graceful statue of palest alabaster, that limned the likeness of a race that bad died before the first Terrestrial mammal had risen from the primordial slime.

It was manlike, slender and impossibly tall, with a featureless oval for a head. Two of its several boneless limbs were lifted to the skies, and the smooth casque of its face was tilted on its long graceful neck, as if it stared up longingly at the stars it could never reach.

At the base of the statue was an inscription, but in no tongue known to me, a lovely, elaborated script full of curlicues and flourishes.

I turned from the slim, mournful, lovely thing restlessly: this city was a necropolis. Here reigned Death and only shadows drifted through these silent streets. I wandered on, floating above the domed villas, and through the column-fronted palaces, and found murals filled with the slender, faceless beings posed against fantastic gardens that had withered to dust aeons ago: Not even a bone had been left untouched by time.

Beyond, on the stone quays where once the blue waves of a forgotten sea broke in sheeted foam beneath the hurtling glory of the moons, I raised my sight to the stars that blazed like strewn diamonds on black velvet, far clearer and more brilliant than those that glitter through the watery atmosphere of my own world.

If I could traverse the abyss between the worlds, the stars themselves were not beyond my reach, and I had no fear of becoming lost in the star-sewn immensities of the universe, no fear of traveling so far I could not find my way back to that shell of flesh that lay slumbering on Earth. For the mere act of wishing my return would cause it, even if I had no conception of distance or direction.

So again 1 lifted up my sight...and a strange green star caught and held my attention.

Green it was, that distant spark, as a flame of emerald, and it blazed down steadily from its height as if beckoning to me...as if calling me from the illimitable vastnesses wherein it hung.

Why this particular star, out of the millions that jeweled the Martian night, seized my attention I cannot say. Perhaps it was only that green is a rare hue for stars and that I could not recall having ever seen a star of this strange color before. Or there may have been some other and far stranger reason for the fascination which now seized upon me—and of this I shall speak at another time and in another place.

Suffice it to say that floating there amid the impossibly slim towers of the Martian city, I was rapt and held by the flame, of emerald green that blazed above me through the night. And I thought to myself—why not?—mere distance is no hurdle to a bodiless spirit—I could circumnavigate the Universe itself, if so I desired.

And I soared up from the barren surface of Mars and left the ghostly city behind me to its shadows and its immemorial memories, and flew out into the greater universe that lay beyond.

By now all conception of time bad left me. In this bodiless spirit-realm, both time and space—distance and duration—were without real meaning, and I discovered that the awareness of passing time is only a habit of the flesh-bound consciousness, no more.

Thus I cannot say whether my flight to the Green Star was as swift as a flashing instant, or occupied some duration. I was not aware of any slightest sensation of motion. The dim red disk of Mars shrank and vanished beneath me; the fierce star-like beacon of the sun dwindled and was lost in the jeweled mists of clustered stars that gemmed the night. I flashed on through darkness in a strange dreamlike flight and it may have been an aeon—or an instant—before the Green Star swung before me like a tremendous globe of vernal flame.

For a long moment I floated there in space before the terrific orb of furious light.

Then a world swam into view out of the darkness—a planet, like the one whereon I had been born, or the one from whose surface I had flown hither, an instant or an aeon ago.

On sudden impulse, I directed my flight toward the dim silvery orb whose surface was wreathed in lacy mists. Down through its atmosphere I flashed...down to the surface of a new and unknown world...and into an adventure more strange and perilous and thrilling than any other man has ever lived!