The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes Read Online Free Page A

you is an optical illusion.”
    Forty feet in diameter and over three hundred feet high, the Kanabian space vehicle rested on its base in the aspens barely four hundred yards from the hillock in the meadow. It was invisible and unrecordable on human instruments.
    It had destroyed three or four trees on landing, but even its self-made landing pad was invisible. Kyra continued to explain the ship’s properties in terms intelligible to a nonscientist.
    “Light corpuscles travel halfway around the circumference of the craft and continue onward as rays so you can see behind it from any angle. Its invisibility protects us and keeps it from frightening animals. In nonmountainous areas it would be a hazard to low-flying aircraft, but birds sense it and fly around it because it alters the magnetic lines of a planet in its near vicinity.”
    Leading him into the grove, she whistled three notes on an ascending scale. Before them in the shadowy forest he saw a swash of pale light grow visible, lengthen downward, and become a door opening to form a stepless ramp, resembling translucent ivory, leading into the spaceship. It was a gateway through nothingness leading into something. For a moment the sight disoriented his sense of reality, and he faltered in his stride. She reached over and took his hand lightly and said, “Be careful going up. The ramp’s slippery.”
    Her touch and conversational tone steadied him. He followed her up the ramp, feeling massive and gross, a mortal invading a fairy dimension, but he was not alarmed, no more, he thought, than Aeneas following the Sibyl into Hades. When he stepped into the rotunda of the ship, he had lost his feeling of unreality completely to his sense of awe, but he remained alertly observant.
    Centering the rotunda they stood within was a shallow concavity about four feet in diameter surrounding a manhole cover with an inset handle. A narrow ramp without a guardrail spiraled upward from the rotunda until it was lost in a pink haze of sunlight filtering through the skin of the ship. Anchored to the deck at the base of the ramp stood a padded couch, designed, he assumed, to absorb the G forces on its occupant at takeoff, but it was like none constructed for earth astronauts.
    The gravity lounge had straps he assumed were safety belts, but the headrest and shoulder straps were at the foot of the couch, which was tilted at an acute angle. Three separate lines of tubes, red, yellow, and green, wound down from the bulkhead above to cluster at a terminal box above the couch. From the box itself, a single tube with the dimensions of a garden hose dangled from the terminal box, its knobbed head almost reaching the couch.
    His observation of the peculiar gravity lounge took only seconds, and as his eyes traced the varicolored tubes upward he saw a woman descending the ramp.
    This female, too, was nude and green-haired, but there her resemblance to Kyra ended. Barrel-torsoed, with a massive uplift of pectorals in the travesty of a bust, her gross-featured head was sunk into a wrestler’s sloping shoulders. Advancing on him, she scowled, and began to hiss as she drew nearer.
    She was the Gorgon of this fairyland. He cowered as she descended, fighting an impulse to flee even as he felt the beginnings of paralysis from the irrational, primordial terror the sight and sound of this creature aroused in him. Kyra fluted in the direction of the brute in a purring, lilting language, and the she-thing halted, her scowl relaxed, the hissing ceased; but the female remained standing above them, crouched in baleful alertness.
    His terror subsided, but Breedlove felt inwardly weak and shaken as he struggled for lightness in a comment, “That must be Medusa.”
    “She’s Myra. Her function is to guard the door, but you’re safe. Just ignore her.”
    Above Myra he discerned a vanishing line of hatchlike doors opening onto the ramp. Trying to ignore the guardian, he said, “Why, you have only ten people in a