Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon Read Free Book Online Page A

watched the flames. A spear of red-orange there; the tree stood firm. A lick of a fiery tongue here, and the tree moved.
    So he found it, in the middle of a basalt outcropping. He turned over a rock with fingers which sizzled when they touched it, and under it he found a muddy crystal. He thrust it under his armpit and staggered, tottered, back to his trees, which were now in a small island built of earth and sweat and fire by his own demonaic energy, and he collapsed between the oak saplings while the fire roared past him.
    Just before dawn he staggered through a nightmare, a spitting, dying inferno, to his house, and hid the crystal. He dragged himself a quarter of a mile further toward the town before he collapsed. He regained consciousness in the hospital and immediately began demanding to be released. First they refused, next they tied him to his bed, and finally he left, at night, through the window, to be with his jewel.
    Perhaps it was because he was at the ragged edge of insanity, or because the fusion between his conscious and unconscious minds was almost complete. More likely it was because he was peculiarly equipped, with that driving, searching mind of his. Certainly few, if any, men had ever done it before, but he did it. He established a contact with the jewel.
    He did it with the bludgeon of his hatred. The jewel winked passively at him through all his tests—all that he dared give it. He had to be careful, once he found out that it was alive. His microscope told him that; it was not a crystal, but a supercooled liquid. It was a single cell, with a faceted wall. The solidified fluid inside was a colloid, with an index of refraction like that of polystyrene, and there was a complex nucleus which he did not understand.
    His eagerness quarreled with his caution; he dared not run excessive heat, corrosion, and bombardment tests on it. Wildly frustrated, he sent to it a blast of the refined hatred which he had developed over the years, and the thing—screamed.
    There was no sound. It was a pressure in his mind. There was no word, but the pressure was an agonized negation, a “no”-flavored impulse.
    Pierre Monetre sat stunned at his battered table, staring out of the dark of his room at the jewel, which he had placed in the pool of light under a gooseneck lamp. He leaned forward and narrowed his eyes, and with complete honesty—for he had a ravening dislike of anything which bid to defy his understanding—he sent out the impulse again.
    “No!”
    The thing reacted, by that soundless cry, as if he had prodded it with a hot pin.
    He was, of course, quite familiar with the phenomena of piezoelectricity, wherein a crystal of quartz or Rochelle salts would yield a small potential when squeezed, or would slightly change its dimensions when voltage was applied across it. Here was something analagous, for all the jewel was not a true crystal. His thought-impulse apparently brought a reaction from the jewel in thought “frequencies.”
    He pondered.
    There was an unnatural tree, and it had been connected, in some way, with this buried jewel, fifty feet away; for when flame came near the jewel, the tree trembled. When he flicked the jewel with the flame of his hatred, it reacted.
    Could the jewel have built that tree, with the other as a model? But how? How?
    “Never mind how,” he muttered. He’d find that out in good time. He could hurt the thing. Laws and punishment hurt; oppression hurts; power is the ability to inflict pain. This fantastic object would do what he wanted it to do or he would flog it to death.
    He caught up a knife and ran outside. By the light of a waning moon he dug up a sprig of basil which grew near the old stable and planted it in a coffee can. In a similar can he put earth. Bringing them inside, he planted the jewel in the second can.
    He composed himself at the table, gathering a particular strength. He had known that he had an extraordinary power over his own mind; in a way he was like a