
A daring solo venture takes a young, athletic explorer deep into the outer reaches of the solar system, where a massive, leaden disc looms against the stars. He’s not there for scientific discovery but for a covert task: to retrieve a rare, luminous substance known as Xarite, the very material that once captivated his late father’s imagination. As his craft breaches the alien atmosphere, the strange purple glow of the planetoid’s surface reveals a night‑lit landscape of spindly, towering vines and floating pods, a forest unlike any on Earth.
The descent is a tense, breath‑holding moment, with anti‑gravity plates fighting the pull of an unfamiliar world while the explorer scans the luminous terrain for the coveted mineral. The eerie beauty of the glowing flora and the shimmering river below hint at a planet that is both wondrous and foreboding, setting the stage for a high‑stakes scramble to secure the prize before the unknown dangers of this alien realm awaken.
Language
en
Duration
~53 minutes (51K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2020-05-09
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1887–1957
A prolific early science-fiction writer, he helped shape the pulp era with fast-moving adventures and imaginative ideas about time, space, and strange new worlds. He is especially remembered for stories like The Girl in the Golden Atom, which brought big cosmic wonder to magazine readers.
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