Skylark DuQuesne s-4

by Edward E Smith

  How right Sleemet was!

  He knew that he was right after hearing the first few words of Sacner Carfon’s ultimatum to Emperor Fenor; that was why he had pushed the panic button for the eighty-five-thousand-odd members of his faction to flee the planet right then.

  He knew it still better when, after Fenor’s foolhardly defiance of Sacner Carfon, of the Overlord, and of the Forces of Universal Peace, his native planet became a minor sun behind his flying fleet.

  Even then, however, Sleemet had not learned very much — at least, nowhere nearly enough.

  At first glance it might seem incredible that, after such an experience, Sleemet could have so lightly destroyed two such highly industrialized worlds about which he knew so little. It might seem as though it must have been impressed upon his mind that the Fenachrone were not the ablest, strongest, wisest, smartest, most highly advanced and most powerful form of life ever created. Deeper study will show, however, that with his heredity and conditioning he could not possibly have done anything else.

  Sleemet probably did not begin really to realize the truth until the Llurd Klazmon so effortlessly — apparently — wiped out sixteen of his seventeen superdreadnoughts, then crippled his flagship beyond resistance or repair and sent it hurtling through space toward some completely unknown destination.

  His first impulse, like that of all his fellows, was to storm and to rage and to hurl things and to fight. But there was no one to fight; and storming and raging and hurling and smashing things did not do any good. In fact, nothing they could do elicited any attention at all from their captors.

  Wherefore, as days stretched out endlessly and monotonously into endless and monotonous weeks, all those five thousand-odd Fenachrone — males and females, adults and teen-agers and children and babies — were forced inexorably into a deep and very un-Fenachronian apathy.

  And when the hulk of the flagship arrived at the Llanzlanate on far Llurdiax, things went immediately from bad to worse. The volume of space into which the Fenachrone were moved had a climate exactly like that of their native city on their native world. All its artifacts — its buildings, and its offices and its shops and its foods and its drinks and its everything else — were precisely what they should have been.

  Ostensibly, they were encouraged to live lives even more normal than ever before (if such an expression is allowable); to breed and to develop and to evolve; and especially to perform breakthroughs in science.

  Actually, however, it was practically impossible for them to do anything of their own volition; because they were being studied and analyzed and tested every minute of every day. Studied coldly and logically and minutely; with an utterly callous ferocity unknown to even such a ferocious race as the Fenachrone themselves were.

  Hundreds upon hundreds of the completely helpless captives died — died without affecting in any smallest respect the treatment received by the survivors — and as their utter helplessness struck in deeper and deeper, the Fenachrone grew steadily weaker, both physically and mentally.

  This was no surprise to their captors, the Llurdi. Nor was it in any sense a disappointment. To them the Fenachrone were tools; and they were being tempered and shaped to their task…

  On Earth, leaving Stephanie de Marigny’s apartment, DuQuesne went back to the Capital D and took off on course one hundred seventy-five Universal — that is, five degrees east of Universal South. He went that way because in that direction lay the most completely unexplored sector of the First Universe and he did not want company.

  Earth and the First Galaxy lay on the edge of the First Quadrant. Llurdiax and its Realm lay in the Second. So did the Empire of the Chlorans and his own imaginary planet Xylmny. The second galaxy along that false line, which might also attract Seaton, lay in the Third. He didn’t want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton and this course was mathematically the best one to take to get out of and keep out of Seaton’s way.

  Therefore he would follow it clear out to the Fourth Quadrant rim of the First Universe.

  As the Capital D bored a hole through the protesting ether DuQuesne took time out from his thinkings to consider women. First, he considered Stephanie de Marigny; with a new and not at all unpleasant thrill as he did so. He considered Sennlloy and Luloy and some unattached women of the Jelmi. They all left him completely cold; and he was intellectually honest enough to know why and to state that “why” to himself. The Jelmi were so much older than the humanity of Earth that they were out of his class. He could stand equality — definitely; in fact, that was what he wanted — but he could not live with and would not try to live with any woman so demonstrably his superior.

  But Hunkie — ah, there was a man’s woman! His equal; his perfect equal in every respect; with a brain to match one of the finest bodies ever built. She didn’t play hard to get, she was hard to get; but once got she’d stay got. She’d stand at a man’s back ’till his belly caved in.

  Slowed to a crawl, as Universal speed goes, the Capital D entered the outermost galaxy of the Rim of the Universe and DuQuesne energized his highest-powered projector. He studied the Tellus-type planets of hundreds of solar systems. Many of these planets were inhabited, but he did not reveal himself to the humanity of any of them.

  He landed on an uninhabited planet and went methodically to work. He bulldozed out an Area of Work. He set up his batteries of machine tools; coupling an automatic operator of pure force to each tool as it was set up. Then he started work on the Brain; which took longer than all the rest of the construction put together. It was an exact duplicate of that of the Skylark of Valeron; one cubic mile of tightly packed ultra-miniaturized components; the most tremendous and most tremendously capable super-computer known to man.

  While the structure of the two brains was identical, their fillings were not. As has been said, there were certain volumes — blocks of cells — in the Valeron’s brain that DuQuesne had not been able to understand. These blocks he left inoperative — for the time being.

  Conversely, DuQuesne either had or wanted powers and qualities and abilities that Seaton neither had nor wanted; hence certain blocks that were as yet inoperative in Seaton’s vast fabrication were fully operative in DuQuesne’s.

  It is a well-known fact that white-collar men, who sit at desks and whose fellowship with machines is limited to week-end drives in automobiles, scoff heartily at the idea that any two machines of the same make and model do or can act differently from each other except by reason of wear. With increasing knowledge of an acquaintance with machines, however — especially with mechanisms of the more complex and sophisticated sorts — this attitude changes markedly. The men and women who operate such machines swear unanimously that those machines do unquestionably have personalities; each its unique and peculiar own.

  Thus, while the fact can not be explained in logical or “common” sense terms, those two giants brains were as different in personality as were the two men who built them.

  Nor was DuQuesne’s worldlet, which he named the DQ, very much like the Skylark of Valeron except in shape. It was bigger. Its skin was much thicker and much denser and much more heavily armed. The individual mechanisms were no larger — the Valeron’s were the biggest and most powerful that DuQuesne knew how to build — but there were so many of them that he was pretty sure of being safe from anyone. Even from whoever it was that had mauled the Valeron so unmercifully — whom he, DuQuesne, did not intend to approach. Ever.

  It was, in fact, his prayerful hope that both mauler and maulee — Seaton himself — would ultimately emerge from that scufe whittled down to a size where he would not have to consider them again.

  He did not in fact, consider them; nor did he consider the captive Fenachrone in the pens of Llurdiax; nor the Jelmi; nor — and this, perhaps, was his greatest mistake did he consider, because he did not know about, a mother and daughter of whose existence neither he nor any other Tellus-type human being had yet heard.

  He simply built himself the most power space ve
ssel he could imagine, armed it, launched it… and set out to recapture the Universe Seaton had once taken away from him.

  The revolution on the planet Ray-See-Nee was over and Richard Seaton, disguised under the identity of Ky-El Mokak, was ready to take the one tactical move for which all the effort and struggle on the planet had been only the preliminaries. But first he needed to know what had happened to his shipmates and friends; he had been busy enough fighting his own fights and taking his own prisoners to have temporarily lost sight of them.

  Wherefore, in Ray-See-Nee’s palatial Capitol Building, in the Room of State — which, except for the absence of an actual throne, was in effect a throne-room — Seaton turned his prisoner over to a guard and rounded up his own crew, so that they could look each other over and compare notes.

  Sitar, limping badly but with fur coat still glossily immaculate, proudly displayed a left leg bandaged from the knee all the way up. “A slash from here, clear down to there.” The Osnomian princess ran a fore-finger along a line six or seven inches long. “And a bullet right through there. That was the gaudiest fight I was ever in in my whole life!”

  Dunark, whose right arm was in a sling, spoke up. “She got that slash saving my life. I’d just taken this one through the shoulder—” he pointed — “and was paralyzed for a second. So she kicked her leg up in the way — while she was flipping a gun around to blow this guy apart, you know so his knife went into her leg instead of my neck.”

  “Yes, but go on and tell them about how many times you—” Sitar began.

  “Sh-h-h-h,” Dunark said, and she subsided. “Maybe some day we’ll write a book. How about you, Mart? I notice you’ve been standing up all the time.”

  “I’ll be standing up or lying on my face for a while, I guess.” But that wouldn’t account for the cane,” Seaton objected. “Come clean, guy.”

  “One through the hip — thigh, rather, low down — no bones broken.”

  Shiro, who had a broken arm, would not talk at first, but they finally got the story out of him. His last opponent had been just too big and too strong and too well trained to be easy meat, but Shiro had finally got him with a leg-lock around the neck. “But how about you, Dick?” Shiro asked. “Whoever wrapped you up must get hospital supplies at wholesale.”

  Seaton grinned. “She had only one patient.” He told his own story, then went on, “Since we can all walk, let’s go over and see what they’re finding out.”

  Ree-Toe Prenk had said that he wanted all thirty-one of the department heads taken alive if possible; but he had known that it would not be possible. He was surprised and highly pleased, in fact, that only six of the High Exalteds had been killed or had taken their own lives.

  There is no need to go into the details of that questioning. Seaton took no part in any of it; nor did any of his group. He did not offer to help and Prenk did not ask him.

  Nor is it necessary to describe the operation outside the palace. The rebels had learned much from their previous failure, and they now had all the arms, ammunition and supplies they needed. Thus, before sunset that day every known quisling had been shot and every suspect was under surveillance. Premier Ree-Toe Prenk sat firmly in the Capitol City’s saddle; and whoever controlled that city always controlled the world.

  Hours before control was assured, however, Prenk called Seaton. “About the daily report to Chloran headquarters that is due in half an hour,” the new Premier said. “I am wondering if you have any ideas. Our ordinary reports are not dangerous to make, since they are made to underlings whose only interest in the human race is to encode and file our reports properly. But, since their automatic instruments have recorded much of this change of government, it will have to be reported in detail. And a Great One, or even a Greater Great One, may become interested, in which case the reporter’s mind may be searched.” Prenk looked thoughtful, then shook his head.

  “There’s no use trying to gloss it over. In an event like this the Greatest Great One himself will very probably become interested and the reporter will die on the spot. In any case, even with an ordinary Great One, his mind will be shattered for life.”

  “I see,” Seaton said. “I didn’t think of it, but I’m not surprised. We’ve tangled with Chlorans before. But cheer up. I locked eyes with their Supreme Great One…”

  “You didn’t!” Prenk broke in, in amazement. “You actually did?”

  “I actually did, and I knocked him — it? — loose from his teeth.” Regretfully Seaton added, “But we can’t make a battle out of this.” He scowled in concentration for a minute, then went on, “Okay, there’s more than one way to stuff a goose. I’ll make the report. Let’s go.”

  Wherefore, twenty-five minutes later, Seaton sat at an ultra-communicator panel in Communications, ready to flip a switch.

  The reporter whose shift it was stood off to one side, out of the cone of vision of the screen. Crane sat — gingerly, sidewise, and on a soft pillow — well within the cone of visibility of the screen, at what looked like an ordinary communications panel, but was in fact a battery of all the analytical instruments known to the science of Norlamin.

  “But, Your Exalted,” said the highly nervous reporter. “I’m very glad indeed that you’re doing this instead of me, but won’t they notice that it isn’t me? And probably do something about it?”

  “I’m sure they won’t.” Seaton had already considered the point. “I doubt very much, in view of their contempt for other races, if they ever bother to differentiate between any one human being and any other one. Like us and beetles.”

  The reporter breathed relief. “They probably don’t, sir, at that. They don’t seem to pay any attention to us as individuals.”

  Seaton braced himself and, exactly on the tick of time, flipped the switch. Knowing that the amoeboids could assume any physical form they pleased and as a matter of course assumed the form most suitable for the job, he was not surprised to see that the filing clerk looked like an overgrown centipede with a hundred or so long, flexible tentacles ending in three-fingered “hands” — a dozen or so of which were manipulating the gadgetry of a weirdly complex instrument-panel. He was somewhat surprised, however, in spite of what he had been told, that the thing did not develop an eye and look at him; did not even direct a thought at him. Instead:

  “I am ready, slave,” a deep bass voice rolled from the speaker, in the language of Prenk’s planet Ray-See-Nee. “Start the tape.”

  Seaton pressed a button; the tape began to travel through the sender. For perhaps five minutes nothing happened. Then the sender stopped and a deeper, heavier voice came from the speaker: a voice directed at the filing clerk, but using Rayseenese…

  Why? Seaton wondered to himself. Oh, I see. Soften ’em up. Scare the pants off of ’em, then put on the screws.

  “Yield, clerk,” the new voice said.

  “I yield with pleasure O Great One,” the clerk replied, and went rigidly motionless; not moving a finger or a foot.

  “It pleases me to study this matter myself,” the giant voice went on as though the clerk had not spoken. “While slight, the possibility does exist that some of these verminous creatures have dared to plot against the Race Supreme. If this is merely another squabble among themselves for place it is of no interest; but if there is any trace of nonsubmission, vermin and city will cease to exist. I shall learn the deepest truth. They can make lying tapes, but no entity of this or of any other galaxy can lie to a Great One mind to mind.”

  While the Great One talked, the picture on the screen began to change. The clerk began to fade out and something else began to thicken in. And Seaton, knowing what was coming, set himself in earnest and brought into play that part of his multi-compartmented mind that was the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of Norlamin.

  This coming interview, he knew, must be vastly different from his meeting with the Supreme Great One of Chlora One. That had been a wide-open, hammer-and-tongs battle; a battle of sheer power of mind. Here
it would have to be a matter of delicacy of control; of precision and of nicety and of skill as well as of power. He would have to play his mind as exactly and as subtly as Dorothy played her Stradivarius, for if the monster came to suspect any iota of the truth all hell would be out for noon with no pitch hot.

  The screen cleared and Seaton saw what he had known he would see; a large, flatly ellipsoidal mass of something that was not quite a jelly not quite a solid; a monstrosity through whose transparent outer membrane there was visible a large, intricately convoluted brain. As Seaton looked at the thing it developed an immense eye, from which there poured directly into Seaton’s brain a beam of mental energy so incredibly powerful as to be almost tangible physically.

  Braced as he was, every element of the man’s mind quivered under the impact of that callously hard-driven probe; but by exerting all his tremendous mental might he took it.

  More, he was able to hold his Drasnik-taught defenses so tightly as to reveal only and precisely what the Great One expected to find — utter helplessness and abject submission.

  That probe was not designed to kill. Or rather, the Great One did not care in the least whether it killed or not. It was intended to elicit the complete truth; and from any ordinary human mind it did.

  “Can you lie to me, slave?” That tremendous voice resounded throughout every chamber of Seaton’s mind. “Or withhold from me any iota of the truth?”

  “I cannot lie to you, O Great One; nor withhold from you any iota, however small, of the truth.” This took everything of camouflage and of defensive screen Seaton had; but he managed to reveal no sign at all of any of it.