Skylark DuQuesne s-4

by Edward E Smith

  There should have been no probes out here!

  The probe had been cut off almost instantaneously; but “almost” instantaneously is not quite zero time, and sixth-order forces operate at the speed of thought. Hence, in that not-quite-zero instant of time during which the intruding mind had been in contact with his own, DuQuesne learned a little. The creature was undoubtedly highly intelligent and, as undoubtedly, unhuman to the point of monstrosity… and DuQuesne had no doubt whatever in his own mind that the alien would think the same of any Tellurian.

  DuQuesne studied his board and saw, much to his surprise, that only one instrument showed any drain at all above maintenance level, and that one was a milliammeter — the needle of which was steady on the scale at a reading of one point three seven mils! He was not being attacked at all — merely being observed — and by an observation system that was using practically no power at all!

  Donning a helmet, so as to be able himself to operate at the speed of thought, DuQuesne began — very skittishly and very gingerly indeed — to soften down his spheres and zones and shells and solid fields of defensive force. He softened and softened them down; down to the point at which a working projection could come through and work.

  And a working projection came through.

  No one of Marc C. DuQuesne’s acquaintances, friend or enemy, had ever said that he was any part of either a weakling or a coward. The consensus was that he was harder than the ultra-refractory hubs of hell itself. Nevertheless, when the simulacrum of Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth of the Realm of the Llurdi came up to within three feet of him and waggled one gnarled forefinger at the helmets of a mechanical educator, even DuQuesne’s burly spirit began to quail a little — but he was strong enough and hard enough not let any sign show.

  With every mind-block he owned set hard, DuQuesne donned a headset and handed its mate to his visitor. He engaged that monstrous alien mind to mind. Then, releasing his blocks, he sent the Llurdi a hard, cold, sharp, diamond-clear — and lying! — thought:

  “Yes? Who are you, pray, and what, to obtrude your uninvited presence upon me, Foalang Kassi a’ Doompf, the Highest Imperial of the Drailsen Quadrant?”

  This approach was, of course, the natural one for DuQuesne to make; he did not believe in giving away truth when lies might be so much cheaper — and less dangerous. It was equally of course the worst possible approach to Klazmon: reenforcing as it did every unfavorable idea the Llurd had already formed from his lightning-fast preliminary once-over-lightly of the man and of the man’s tremendous spaceship.

  Klazmon did not think back at DuQuesne directly. Instead, he thought to himself and, as DuQuesne knew, for the record; thoughts that the Earthman could read like print.

  To the Llurd, DuQuesne was a peculiarly and repulsively obnoxious monstrosity.

  Physically a Jelm, he belonged to a race of Jelmi that had never been subjected to any kind of logical, sensible, or even intelligent control.

  Klazmon then thought at DuQuesne; comparing him with Mergon and Luloy on the one hand and with Sleemet of the Fenachrone on the other — and deciding that all three races were basically the same. The Llurd showed neither hatred nor detestation; he was merely contemptuous, intolerant, and utterly logical. “Like the few remaining Fenachrone and the rebel faction of our own Jelmi and the people you think of as the Chlorans, your race is, definitely, surplus population; a nuisance that must be and shall be abated. Where—” Klazmon suddenly drove a thought “is the Drailsen Quadrant?”

  DuQuesne, however, was not to be caught napping. His blocks held. “You’ll never know,” he sneered. “Any taskforce of yours that ever comes anywhere near us will not last long enough to energize a sixth-order communicator.”

  “That’s an idle boast,” Klazmon stated thoughtfully. “It is true that you and your vessel are far out of range of any possible Llurdiaxian attacking beam. Even this projection of me is being relayed through four mergons. Nevertheless we can and we will find you easily when this becomes desirable. This point will be reached as soon as we have computed the most logical course to take in exterminating all such surplus races as yours.”

  And Klazmon’s projection vanished; and the helmet he had been wearing fell toward the floor.

  DuQuesne was shocked as he had never been shocked before; and when he learned from his analsynths just what the range of one of those incredible “mergons” was, he was starkly appalled.

  One thing was crystal-clear: He was up against some truly first-class opposition here.

  And it had just stated, calmly and definitely, that its intention was to exterminate him, Blackie DuQuesne.

  The master of lies had learned to assess the value of a truth very precisely. He knew this one to be 22-karat, crystal-clear, pure quill. Whereupon Blackie DuQuesne turned to some very intensive thought indeed, compared with which his previous efforts might have been no more than a summer afternoon’s reverie.

  We know now, of coarse, that Blackie DuQuesne lacked major elements of information, and that his constructions could not therefore be complete. They lacked Norlaminian rigor, or the total visualization of his late companions, the disembodied intellectuals.

  And they lacked information.

  DuQuesne knew nothing of Mergon and Luloy, now inward bound on Earth in a hideout orbit. He could not guess how his late visitor had ever heard of the Fenachrone. Nor knew he anything of that strange band of the sixth order to which Seaton referred, with more than half a worried frown, as “magic.” In short, DuQuesne was attempting to reach the greatest conclusion of his life through less than perfect means, with only fragmentary facts to go on.

  Nevertheless, Blackie C. DuQuesne, as Seaton was wont to declare, was no slouch at figuring; and so he did in time come to a plan which was perhaps the most brilliant — and also was perhaps the most witless! — of his career.

  Lips curled into something much more sneer than grin, DuQuesne sat down at his construction board. He had come to the conclusion that what he needed was help, and he knew exactly where to go to get it. His ship wasn’t big enough by far to hold a sixth-order projection across any important distance… but he could build, in less than an hour, a sixth-order broadcaster. It wouldn’t be selective. It would be enormously wasteful of power. But it would carry a signal across half a universe.

  Whereupon, in less than an hour, a signal began to pour out, into and through space:

  “DuQuesne calling Seaton! Reply on tight beam of the sixth. DuQuesne calling Seaton! Reply on tight beam of the sixth. DuQuesne calling Seaton…”

  8. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

  WHEN Seaton and Crane had begun to supply the Earth with ridiculously cheap power, they had expected an economic boom and a significant improvement in the standard of living. Neither of them had any idea, however, of the effect upon the world’s economy that their space-flights would have; but many tycoons of industry did.

  They were shrewd operators, those tycoons. As one man they licked their chops at the idea of interstellar passages made in days. They gloated over thoughts of the multifold increase in productive capacity that would have to be made so soon; as soon as commerce was opened up with dozens and then with hundreds of Tellus-type worlds, inhabited by human beings as human as those of Earth. And when they envisioned hundreds and hundreds of uninhabited Tellus-type worlds, each begging to be grabbed and exploited by whoever got to it first with enough stuff to hold it and to develop it… they positively drooled.

  These men did not think of money as money, but as their most effective and most important tool: a tool to be used as knowledgeably as the old-time lumberjack used his axe.

  Thus, Earth was going through convulsions of change more revolutionary by far than any it had experienced throughout all previous history. All those pressures building up at once had blown the lid completely off. Seaton and Crane and their associates had been working fifteen hours a day for months training people in previously unimagined skills; trying to keep the literally exploding econom
y from degenerating into complete chaos.

  They could not have done it alone, of course. In fact, it was all that a thousand Norlaminian “Observers” could do to keep the situation even approximately in hand.

  And even the Congress — mirabile dictu! — welcomed those aliens with open arms; for it was so hopelessly deadlocked in trying to work out any workable or enforceable laws that it was accomplishing nothing at all.

  All steel mills were working at one hundred ten per cent of capacity. So were almost all other kinds of plants. Machine tools were in such demand that no estimated time of delivery could be obtained. Arenak, dagal, and inoson, those wonder-materials of the construction industry, would be in general supply some day; but that day would not be allowed to come until the changeover could be made without disrupting the entire economy. Inoson especially was confined to the spaceship builders; and, while every pretense was being made that production was being increased as fast as possible, the demand for spaceships was so insatiable that every hulk that could leave atmosphere was out in deep space.

  Multi-billion-dollar corporations were springing up all over Earth. Each sought out and began to develop a Tellus-type planet of its own, to bring up as a civilized planet or merely to exploit as it saw fit. Each was clamoring for and using every possible artifice of persuasion, lobbying, horse-trading, and out-and-out bribery and corruption to obtain — spaceships, personnel, machinery light and heavy, office equipment, and supplies. All the employables of Earth, and many theretofore considered unemployable, were at work.

  Earth was a celestial madhouse…

  It is no wonder, then, that Seaton and Crane were haggard and worn when they had to turn their jobs over to two upper-bracket Norlaminians and leave Earth.

  Their situation thereafter was not much better.

  The first steps were easy — anyway, the decisions involved were easy; the actual work involved was roughly equivalent to the energy budget of several Sol-type suns. It is an enormous project to set up a line of defense hundreds of thousands of miles long; especially when the setters-up do not know exactly what to expect in the way of attack.

  They knew, in fact, only one thing: that the Norlaminians had made a probabilistic statement that Marc C. DuQuesne was likely to be present among them before long.

  That was excuse, reason and compulsion enough to demand the largest and most protracted effort they could make. The mere preliminaries involved laying out axes of action that embraced many solar systems, locating and developing sources of materials and energies that were enough to smother a hundred suns. As that work began to shape up, Seaton and Crane came face to face with the secondary line of problems… and at that point Seaton suddenly smote himself on the forehead and cried: “Dunark!”

  Crane looked up. “Dunark? Why, yes, Dick. Quite right. Not only is he probably the universe’s greatest strategist, but he knows the enemy almost as well as you and I do.”

  “And besides,” Seaton added, “he doesn’t think like us. Not at all. And that’s what we want; so I’ll call him now and we’ll compute a rendezvous.”

  Wherefore, a few days later, Dunark’s Osnomian cruiser matched velocities with the hurtling worldlet and began to negotiate its locks. Seaton shoved up the Valeron’s air-pressure, cut down its gravity, and reached for the master thermostat.

  “Not too hot, Dick,” Dorothy said. “Light gravity is all right, but make them wear some clothes any time they’re outside their special quarters. I simply won’t run around naked in my own house. And I won’t have them doing it, either.”

  Seaton laughed. “The usual eighty-three degrees and twenty-five per cent humidity. They’ll wear clothes, all right. She’ll be tickled to death to wear that fur coat you gave her — she doesn’t get a chance to, very often — and we can stand it easily enough,” and the four Tellurians went out to the dock to greet their green-skinned friends of old: Crown Prince Dunark and Crown Princess Sitar of Osnome, one of the planets of the enormous central sun of the Central System.

  Warlike, bloodthirsty, supremely able Dunark; and Sitar, his lovely, vivacious — and equally warlike — wife. He was wearing ski-pants (Osnome’s temperature, at every point on its surface and during every minute of every day of the year, is one hundred degrees Fahrenheit), a heavy sweater, wool socks, and fur-lined moccasins. She wore a sweater and slacks under her usual fantastic array of Osnomian jewelry; and over it, as Seaton had predicted, the full-length mink coat. Each was wearing only one Osnomian machine pistol instead of the arsenal that had been their customary garb such a short time before.

  The three men greeted each other warmly and executed a six-hand handshake; the while the two white women and the green one went into an arms-wrapped group; each talking two hundred words to the minute.

  A couple of days later, the Norlaminian task-force arrived and a council of war was held that lasted for one full working day. Then, the defense planned in length and in depth, construction began. Seaton and Crane sat in the two master-control helmets of the Brain. Rovol worked with the brain of the Norlaminian spaceship. Dozens of other operators, men and women, worked at and with other, less powerful devices.

  On the surface of a nearby planet, ten thousand square miles of land were leveled and paved to form the Area of Work. Stacks and piles and rows and assortments of hundreds of kinds of structural members appeared as though by magic. Gigantic beams of force, made visible by a thin and dusty pseudo-mist, flashed here and there; seizing this member and that and these and them and those and joining them together with fantastic speed to form enormous towers and platforms and telescope-like things and dirigible tubes and projectors.

  Some of these projectors took containers of pure force out to white dwarf stars after neutronium. Others took faidons — those indestructible jewels that are the sine qua non of higher-order operation — out to the cores of stars to be worked into lenses of various shapes and sizes. Out into the environment of scores of millions of degrees of temperature and of scores of millions of tons per square inch of pressure that is the only environment in which the faidon can be worked by any force known to the science of man.

  The base-line, which was to be built of enormous, absolutely rigid beams of force, could not be of planetary, or even of orbital dimensions. It had to extend, a precisely measured length, from the core of a star to that of another, having as nearly as possible the same proper motion, over a hundred parsecs away. Thus it took over a week to build and to calibrate that base-line; but, once that was done, the work went fast.

  The most probable lines of approach were blocked by fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order installations of tremendous range and of planetary power; less probable ones by defenses of somewhat lesser might; supersensitive detector webs fanned out everywhere. And this work, which would have required years a short time before, was only a matter of a couple of weeks for the gigantic constructor-projectors now filling the entire Area of Work.

  When everything that anyone could think of doing had been done, Seaton lit his pipe, jammed both hands into his pockets, and turned to his wife. “Well, we’ve got it made, now what are we going to do with it? Sit on our hands until Blackie DuQuesne trips a trigger or some Good Samaritan answers our call? I’d give three nickels to know whether he’s loose yet or not, and if he is loose, just where he is at this moment.”

  “I’d raise you a dime,” she said; and then, since Dorothy Seaton concealed an extremely useful brain under her red curls, she added slowly, “And maybe… you know what the Norlaminians deduced: that, upon liberation, he’d be rematerialized? That he’d have a very good spaceship. That, before attacking us, he would recruit personnel, both men and women, both from need of their help and from loneliness… wait up — loneliness! Whoa girl, probably would he get loneliest for?”

  Seaton snapped his fingers. “I can make an awfully good guess. Hunkie de Marigny.”

  “Hunkie de Who? Oh, I remember. That big moose with the black hair and the shape.”

  Seaton la
ughed. “Funny, isn’t it, that such an accurate description can be so misleading? But my guess is, if he’s back she knows it… I think it’d be smart to flip myself over to the Bureau and see what I can find out. Want to come along?”

  “Uh-uh; she isn’t my dish of tea.”

  Seaton projected his solid-seeming simulacrum of pure force to distant Tellus, to Washington, and to the sidewalk in front of the Bureau. He mounted the steps, entered the building, said “Hi, Gorgeous” to the shapely blonde receptionist, and took an elevator to the sixteenth floor; where he paused briefly in thought.

  He hadn’t better see Hunkie first, or only; Ferdinand Scott, the world’s worst gossip, would talk about it, and Hunkie would draw her own conclusions. He’d pull Scotty’s teeth first.

  Wherefore he turned into the laboratory beside the one that once had been his own.

  “Hi, Scotty,” he said, holding out his hand, “Don’t tell me they’ve actually got you working for a change.”

  Scott, a chunky youth with straw-colored hair that needed cutting, jumped off of his stool and shook hands vigorously. “Hi, Dickie, old top! Alla time work. ‘Slavey’ Scott; that’s me. But boy oh boy, did I goof on that ‘Nobody Holme’ bit! You and that bottle of waste solution, that you stirred the whole world up with like goulash! Why can’t anything like that ever happen, to me? But I’s’pose I’d’ve blown the whole world to hellangone up instead of just putting it into the God-awful shape it’s in now, like you and Blackie DuQuesne did. Wow, what a mess!”

  “Yeah. Speaking of DuQuesne — seen him lately?”

  “Not since the big bust. The Norlaminians, probably know all about him.”

  “They don’t. I asked. They lost him.”

  “Well, you might ask Hunkie de Marigny. She’ll know if anybody does.”

  “Oh — she still here?”