E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  ‘I simply can’t eat with these things!’ Dorothy exclaimed.

  ‘That’s where my lumberjack training comes in handy,’ Seaton grinned. ‘I can eat with a spatula four times as fast as you can with a fork. But we’ll fix that.’

  Reaching out, apparently into the girl’s hair, he brought out forks and spoons, much to the surprise of the natives.

  DuQuesne and Seaton waved away most of the proffered foods without discussion. Then, tasting cautiously and discussing fully, they approved a few of the others. The approval, however, was very strictly limited.

  ‘These probably won’t poison us too much,’ DuQuesne said, pointing out the selected few. ‘That is, if we don’t eat much now and don’t eat any of it again too soon. I don’t like this one little bit, Seaton.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Seaton agreed. ‘I don’t think there’ll be any next time.’

  Nalboon took a bowl full of blue crystals, sprinkled his food liberally with the substance, and passed the bowl to Seaton.

  ‘Copper sulphate,’ Seaton said. ‘Good thing they put it on at the table instead of the kitchen, or we couldn’t eat a bit of anything.’

  Seaton, returning the bowl, reached behind him and came up with a pair of salt- and pepper-shakers which, after seasoning his own food with them, he passed to his host. Nalboon tasted the pepper cautiously, then smiled in delight and half-emptied the shaker onto his plate. He then sprinkled a few grains of salt into his palm, studied them closely with growing amazement, and after a few rapid sentences poured them into a dish held by an officer who had sprung to his side. The officer also studied the few small crystals, then carefully washed Nalboon’s hand. Nalboon turned to Seaton, plainly asking for the salt-cellar.

  ‘Sure, my ripe and old.’ In the same mysterious way he produced another set, which he handed to Crane.

  The meal progressed merrily, with much sign-language conversation between the two parties, a little of which was understood. It was evident that Nalboon, usually stern and reticent, was in an unusually pleasant and jovial mood.

  After the meal Nalboon bade them a courteous farewell; and they were escorted to a suite of five connecting rooms by the royal usher and a company of soldiers, who mounted guard outside the suite.

  Gathered in one room, they discussed sleeping arrangements. The girls insisted that they would sleep together, and that the men should occupy the rooms on either side. As the girls turned away, four slaves followed.

  ‘I don’t want these people and I can’t make them go away,’ she protested again. ‘Can’t you do something, Dick?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think we’re stuck with ’em as long as we’re here. Don’t you think so, Mart?’

  ‘Yes. And from what I have seen of this culture, I infer that they will be executed if we discard them.’

  ‘Huh? How do … could be. We keep ’em, then, Dot.’

  ‘Of course, in that case. You keep the men and we’ll take the women.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ He turned to Crane, saying under his breath, ‘They don’t want us sleeping in the same room with any of these gorgeous gals, huh? I wonder why?’

  Seaton waved all the women into the girls’ room; but they hung back. One of them ran up to the man wearing the belt and spoke rapidly as she threw her arms around his neck in a perfectly human gesture. He shook his head, pointing toward Seaton several times as he reassured her. He then led her tenderly into the girls’ room and the other women followed. Crane and DuQuesne having gone to their rooms with their attendants, the man with the belt started to help Seaton take off his clothes.

  Stripped, Seaton stretched vigorously, the muscles writhing and rippling under the skin of mighty arms and broad shoulders as he twisted about, working off the stiffness of comparative confinement. The slaves stared in amazement at the display of musculature and talked rapidly among themselves as they gathered up Seaton’s discarded clothing. Their chief picked up a salt-shaker, a silver fork, and a few other items that had fallen from the garments, apparently asking permission to do something with them. Seaton nodded and turned to his bed. He heard a slight clank of arms in the hall and began to wonder. Going to the window, he saw that there were guards outside as well. Were they honored guests or prisoners?

  Three of the slaves, at a word from their leader, threw themselves on the floor and slept; but he himself did not rest. Opening the apparently solid metal belt he took out a great number of small tools, many tiny instruments, and several spools of insulated wire. He then took the articles Seaton had given him, taking extreme pains not to spill a single crystal of salt, and set to work. As he worked, hour after hour, a strange, exceedingly complex device took form under his flying fingers.

  XVII

  Seaton did not sleep well. It was too hot. He was glad after eight hours to get up. No sooner had he started to shave, however, than one of the slaves touched his arm, motioning him into a reclining chair and showing him a keen blade, long and slightly curved. Seaton lay down and the slave shaved him with a rapidity and smoothness he had never before experienced, so wonderfully sharp was the peculiar razor. Then the barber began to shave his superior, with no preliminary treatment save rubbing his face with a perfumed oil.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ said Seaton. ‘Here’s something that helps a lot. Soap.’ He lathered the face with his brush, and the man with the belt looked up in surprised pleasure as his stiff beard was swept away with no pulling at all.

  Seaton called to the others and soon the party was assembled in his room. All were dressed very lightly because of the unrelieved and unvarying heat, which was constant at one hundred degrees. A gong sounded and one of the slaves opened the door, ushering in servants bearing a table, ready set. The Earthlings did not eat anything, deciding that they would rather wait an hour or so and then eat in the Skylark. Hence the slaves had a much better meal than they otherwise would have had.

  During that meal, Seaton was very much surprised at hearing Dorothy carrying on a labored conversation with one of the women.

  ‘I knew you were a language shark, Dottie, but I didn’t s’pose you could pick one up in a day.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t. Just a few words. I can understand very little of what they’re trying to tell me.’

  The woman spoke rapidly to the man with the belt, who immediately asked Seaton’s permission to speak to Dorothy. Running across to her, he bowed and poured out such a stream of words that she held up her hand to silence him.

  ‘Go slower, please,’ she said, and added a couple of words in his own language.

  There ensued a very strange conversation between the slave couple and Dorothy, with much talking between the man and the woman, both talking at once to Dorothy, and much use of signs and sketches. Dorothy finally turned to Seaton with a frown.

  ‘I can’t make out half of what he tried to tell me, and I’m guessing at part of that. He wants you to take him somewhere, another room of the palace here, I think. He wants to get something. I can’t quite make out what it is, or whether it was his and they took it away from him, or whether it’s something of theirs that he wants to steal. He can’t go alone. Martin was right, any of them will be shot if they stir without us. And he says – I’m pretty sure of this part – when you get there don’t let any guards come inside.’

  ‘What do you think, Mart? I’m inclined to string along with this bunch, at least part way. I don’t like Nalboon’s “honor guard” set-up a bit – it smells. Like over-ripe fish.’

  Crane concurred. Seaton and his slave started for the door. Dorothy went along.

  ‘Better stay back, Dottie. We won’t be gone long.’

  ‘I will not go back,’ she said, for his ears alone. ‘On this damn world I’m not going to be away from you one minute more than I absolutely have to.’

  ‘Hokay, ace,’ he replied, in the same tone. ‘You’d be amazed to find out how little there is in that idea for me to squawk about.’

  Preceded by the man with the belt and followed by half
a dozen other slaves, they went out into the hall. No opposition was made to their going; but half a company of armed guards fell in with them as an escort, most of them looking at Seaton with a mixture of reverence and fear. The slave led the way to a room in a distant wing of the palace and opened the door. As Seaton stepped into it he saw that it was an audience chamber or courtroom and that it was now empty.

  The guards approached the door. Seaton waved them back. All retreated across the hall except the officer in charge, who refused to move. Seaton, the personification of offended dignity, stared haughtily at the offender, who returned the stare with interest and stepped forward, fully intending to be the first to enter the room. Seaton, with the flat of his right hand on the officer’s chest, pushed him back roughly, forgetting that his strength, great upon Earth, would be gigantic upon this smaller world. The officer spun across the corridor, knocking down three of his men in his flight. Picking himself up, he drew his sword and rushed, while his men fled in panic to the extreme end of the corridor.

  Seaton did not wait for him, but leaped to meet him. With his vastly superior agility he dodged the falling broadsword and drove his right fist into the fellow’s throat, with all the strength of arm and shoulder and all the momentum of his body behind the blow. Bones broke audibly as the officer’s head snapped back. The body went high in the air, turned two complete somersaults, crashed against the far wall and dropped to the floor.

  At this outrage, some of the guards started to lift their peculiar guns. Dorothy screamed a warning. Seaton drew and fired in one incredibly fast motion, the Mark One load obliterating the clustered soldiers and demolishing that end of the palace.

  In the meantime the slave had taken several pieces of apparatus from a cabinet and had placed them in his belt. Stopping only to observe for a few moments a small instrument which he clamped to the head of the dead man, he led the party back to the room they had left and set to work upon the device he had built during the sleeping period. He connected it, in an extremely intricate network of wiring, with the pieces of apparatus he had just obtained.

  ‘Whatever that is, it’s a nice job,’ DuQuesne said, admiringly. ‘I’ve built complex stuff myself, but he’s got me completely lost. It’d take a week to find out where some of the stuff is going and what it’s going to do when it gets there.’

  Straightening up, the slave clamped several electrodes to his head and motioned to Seaton and the others, speaking to Dorothy as he did so.

  ‘He wants to put those things on our heads,’ she translated, ‘but I can’t make out what they’re for. Shall we let him?’

  ‘Yes,’ he decided instantly. ‘There’s going to be hell to pay any minute now, and no pitch hot. I got us in too deep to back out now. Besides, I’ve got a hunch. But of course I’m not trying to decide for any of you. In fact, Dot, it might be smart if you …

  ‘I’m not smart, Dick. Where you go, I go,’ Dorothy said quietly, and bent her auburn head to be fitted.

  ‘I do not relish the idea,’ Crane said. ‘In fact, I do not like it at all. But, under present circumstances, it seems the thing to do.’

  Margaret followed Crane’s lead, but DuQuesne said, with a sneer, ‘Go ahead; let him make zombies of you. Nobody wires me up to a machine I can’t understand.’

  The slave closed a switch, and – instantly– the four visitors acquired a completely detailed knowledge of the languages and customs of both Mardonale, the nation in which they now were, and of Kondal, the nation to which the slaves belonged, the only two civilized nations upon Osnome.

  While amazement at this method of instruction was still upon the Earthmen’s faces the slave – or, as they now knew him, Dunark, the kofedix or crown prince of Kondal – began to remove the helmets. He took off the girls’, and Crane’s. He was reaching for Seaton’s when there was a flash, a crackle, and a puff of smoke from the machine. Dunark and Seaton both fell flat.

  Before Crane could reach them, however, they both recovered and Dunark said, ‘This is a mechanical educator, something entirely new. We’ve been working on it several years, but it is still very crude. I didn’t like to use it, but I had to, to warn you of what Nalboon is going to do and to convince you that saving your own lives would save ours as well. But something went wrong, probably because of my hasty work in assembly. Instead of stopping at teaching you our languages it shorted me and Dick together – completely.’

  ‘What would such a short do?’ Crane asked.

  ‘I’ll answer that, Dunark.’ Seaton had not recovered quite as fast as the Kondalian, but was now back to normal. ‘All it did was to print in the brain of each of us, down to the finest detail, everything that the other had ever learned. It was the completeness of the transfer that put us both out for a minute.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Seaton, believe me …’

  ‘Why?’ Seaton grinned. ‘It’s taken each of us all our lives to learn what we know, and now it’s doubled. We’re both way ahead, aren’t we?’

  ‘I certainly am, and I’m very glad that you take it that way. But time presses …’

  ‘Let me tell ’em,’ Seaton said. ‘You aren’t exactly sure which English to use yet, the one I talk or the one I write, and neither you nor we can think very fast, yet, in the other’s language. I’ll boil it down.

  ‘This is Crown Prince Dunark of Kondal. The other thirteen are relatives of his, princes and princesses. Nalboon’s raiders got them while they were out hunting – used a new kind of nerve-gas so they couldn’t kill themselves, which is good technique in these parts.

  ‘Kondal and Mardonale have been at war for over six thousand years, a war with no holds barred. No prisoners, except to find out what they know; no niceties. Having found out what these Kondalians knew, Nalboon threw a party – a Roman circus, really – and was going to feed them to some pet devil-fish of his when those armored flying animals – karlono, they call them – smelled them and came into the picture.

  ‘You know what happened then. These people were aboard Nalboon’s plane, the one we eased down to the ground. You’d think Nalboon would think he owed us something, but …’

  ‘Let me finish,’ Dunark cut in. ‘You simply will not do yourself justice. Having saved his life, you should have been guests of the most honored kind. You would have been, anywhere else in the universe. But no Mardonalian has, or even has had, either honor or conscience. At first, Nalboon was afraid of you, as were we all. We thought you were from the fifteenth sun, now at its closest possible distance, and after seeing your power we expected annihilation.

  ‘However, after seeing the Skylark as a machine, learning that you are short of power, and finding you gentle – weak, he thinks that is; how wrong he is! – instead bloodthirsty Nalboon decided to kill you and take your ship, with its wonderful new power. For, while we Osnomians are ignorant of chemistry, we know machines and we know electricity. No Osnomian has ever had any inkling that such a thing as atomic energy exists. Nevertheless, after his study of your engines, Nalboon knows how to liberate it and how to control it. With the Skylark he could obliterate Kondal; and to do that, he would do anything.

  ‘Also, he or any other Osnomian scientist, including myself, would go to any length, would challenge First Cause itself, to secure even one of those small containers of the chemical you call salt. It is the scarcest, most precious substance in our world. You actually had more of it at the table than the total previously known to exist upon all Osnome. Its immense value is due, not to its rarity, but to the fact that it is the only known catalyst for our hardest metals.

  ‘You know now why Nalboon intends to kill you; and nothing you can do or not do will alter that intent. His plan is this: during the next sleeping period – I simply can’t use your word “night,” since there is no such thing on Osnome – he will cut into the Skylark and take all the salt you have in it. The interrupted circus will be resumed, with you Tellurians as principal guests. We Kondalians will be given to the karlono. Then you five will be killed and
your bodies smelted to recover the salt that is in them.

  ‘This is the warning I had to give you. Its urgency explains why I used my crude educator. In self-defense, I must add this – the lives of you five Tellurians are not of paramount importance, the lives of us fourteen Kondalians much less so. We are all expendable. The Skylark, however, is not. If Nalboon gets her, every living Kondalian will die within a year. That fact, and that fact alone, explains why you saw me, the kofedix of Kondal, prostrate myself before Nalboon of Mardonale, and heard me order my kinsmen to do the same.’

  ‘How do you, a prince of another nation, know all these things?’ Crane asked.

  ‘Some are common knowledge. I heard much while aboard Nalboon’s plane. I read Nalboon’s plan from the brain of the officer Dick killed. He was a … a colonel of the guard, and high in Nalboon’s favor. He was to have been in charge of cutting into the Skylark and of killing and smelting you five.’

  ‘That clears things up,’ Seaton said. ‘Thanks, Dunark. The big question now is, what do we do about it?’

  ‘I suggest that you take us into the Skylark and get away from here – as soon as you can. I’ll pilot you to Kondalek, our capital city. There, I can assure you, you will be welcomed as you deserve. My father will treat you as a visiting karfedix should be treated. As far as I am concerned, if you can succeed in getting us back to Kondal – or in getting the Skylark there without any of us – nothing I can ever do will lighten the burden of my indebtedness; but I promise you all the copper you want, and anything else you may desire that is within the power of all Kondal to give.’

  Seaton scowled in thought.

  ‘Our best chance is with you,’ he said, finally. ‘But if we give you atomic power, which we would be doing if we take you back home, Kondal will obliterate Mardonale – if you can.’