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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  Seaton manipulated controls until two electrodes of force were clamped in place, one at either end of the huge power-bar of the enemy vessel; adjusted rheostats and forces to send a disintegrating current through that massive copper cylinder, and gave the word. Dunark threw in the switch viciously, as though it were an actual sword which he was thrusting through the vitals of one of the hideous crew, and the very universe exploded around them – exploded into one mad, searing coruscation of blinding, dazzling light as the gigantic cylinder of copper resolved itself instantaneously into the pure energy from which its metal originally had come into being.

  Seaton and Dunark staggered back from the visiplates, blinded by the intolerable glare of light, and even Crane, working at his model of the galaxy, blinked at the intensity of the radiation. Many minutes passed before the two men could see through their tortured eyes.

  ‘Zowie! That was fierce!’ exclaimed Seaton, when a slowly-returning perception of things other than dizzy spirals and balls of flame assured him that his eyesight was not permanently gone. ‘It’s nothing but my own fool carelessness, too. I should’ve known that with the visible spectrum in heterodyne, for visibility, enough of that stuff would leak through to raise hell on our plates – that bar weighed a hundred tons and would liberate energy enough to blow a planet from here to Arcturus. How’re you coming, Dunark? See anything yet?’

  ‘Coming along O.K. now, I guess – but for a couple of minutes it had me guessing.’

  ‘I’ll do better next time. I’ll cut out the visible before the flash, and convert and reconvert the infra-red. That’ll let us see what happens, without any direct effect. What’s my force number on the next nearest one, Mart?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  Seaton fastened a detector ray upon stop twenty-nine of the tracer-beam panel and followed its pencil of force out to the torpedo hastening upon its way toward the next doomed cruiser. Flashing ahead in its line as he had done before, he located the vessel and clamped the electrodes of force upon the prodigious driving bar. Again, as Dunark drove home the detonating switch, there was a frightful explosion and a wild glare of frenzied incandescence far out in that desolate region of interstellar space; but this time the eyes behind the visiplates were not torn by the high frequencies and everything that happened was plainly visible. One instant, there was an immense space-cruiser boring on through the void upon its horrid mission, with its full complement of the hellish Fenachrone performing their routine tasks. The next instant there was a flash of light extending for thousands upon untold thousands of miles in every direction. That flare of light vanished as rapidly as it had appeared – instantaneously – and throughout the entire neighborhood of the place where the Fenachrone cruiser had been, there was nothing. Not a plate nor a girder, not a fragment, not the most minute particle nor droplet of disrupted metal nor of condensed vapor. So terrific, so incredibly and incomprehensibly vast were the forces liberated by that mass of copper in its instantaneous decomposition that every atom of substance in that great vessel had gone with the power-bar – had been resolved into radiations which would at some distant time and in some far-off solitude unite with other radiations, again to form matter and thus obey Nature’s immutable cyclic law.

  Vessel after vessel was destroyed of that haughty fleet which until now had never suffered a reverse, and a little green light in the galactic model winked out and flashed back in rosy pink as each menace was removed. In a few hours the space surrounding the system of the Fenachrone was clear; then progress slackened as it became harder and harder to locate each vessel as the distance between it and its torpedo increased. Time after time Seaton would stab forward with his detector screen extended to its utmost possible spread, upon the most carefully plotted prolongation of the line of the torpedo’s flight, only to have the projection flash far beyond the vessel’s farthest possible position without a reaction from the far-flung screen. Then he would go back to the torpedo, make a minute alteration in his line, and again flash forward, only to miss it again. Finally, after thirty fruitless attempts to bring his detector screen into contact with the nearest Fenachrone ship, he gave up the attempt, rammed his battered, reeking briar full of the rank blend that was his favorite smoke, and strode up and down the floor of the projector base – his eyes unseeing, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, his jaw thrust forward, clamped upon the stem of his pipe, emitting dense, blue clouds of strangling vapor.

  ‘The young maestro is thinking, I perceive,’ remarked Dorothy sweetly, entering the projector from an airboat. ‘You must all be blind, I guess – you no hear the bell blow, what? I’ve come after you – it’s time to eat!’

  ‘’At-a-girl, Dot – never miss the eats! Thanks,’ and Seaton with a visible effort, put his problem away.

  ‘This is going to be a job, Mart,’ he went back to it as soon as they were seated in the airboat, flying toward ‘home’. ‘I can nail them, with an increasing shift in azimuth, up to about thirty thousand light-years, but after that it gets awfully hard to get the right shift, and up around a hundred thousand it seems to be impossible – gets to be pure guesswork. It can’t be the controls, because they can hold a point rigidly at five hundred thousand. Of course, we’ve got a pretty short back-line to sight on, but the shift is more than a hundred times as great as the possible error in my back-sight could account for, and there’s apparently nothing either regular or systematic about it that I can figure out. But … I don’t know … Space is curved in the fourth dimension, of course … I wonder if … hm … m … m.’ He fell silent and Crane made a rapid signal to Dorothy, who was opening her mouth to say something. She shut it, feeling ridiculous, and nothing was said until they had disembarked at their destination.

  ‘Did you solve the puzzle, Dickie?’

  ‘Don’t think so – got myself in deeper than ever, I’m afraid,’ he answered, then went on, thinking aloud rather than addressing anyone in particular.

  ‘Space is curved in the fourth dimension, and fifth-order tracers, with their velocity, may not follow the same path in that dimension that light does – in fact, they do not. If that path is to be plotted it requires the solution of five simultaneous equations, each complete and general, and each of the fifth degree, and also an exponential series with the unknown in the final exponent, before the fourth-dimensional concept can be derived … hm … m … m. No use – we’ve struck something not even Norlaminian theory can handle.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ Crane said. ‘I supposed that they had everything worked out.’

  ‘Not on fifth-order stuff. It begins to look as though we’d have to stick around until every one of those torpedoes gets somewhere near its mother-ship. Hate to do it, too – it’ll take a long time to reach the vessels clear across the galaxy. I’ll put it up to the gang at dinner – guess they’ll let me talk business a couple of minutes overtime, especially after they find out what I’ve got to say.’

  He explained the phenomenon to an interested group of white-haired scientists as they ate. Rovol, to Seaton’s surprise, was elated and enthusiastic.

  ‘Wonderful, my boy!’ he breathed. ‘Marvelous! A perfect subject for year after year of deepest study and the most profound thought. Perfect!’

  ‘But what can we do about it?’ Seaton demanded. ‘We don’t want to hang around here twiddling our thumbs for a year waiting for those torpedoes to get to wherever they’re going!’

  ‘We can do nothing but wait and study. That problem is one of splendid difficulty, as you yourself realize. Its solution may well be a matter of lifetimes instead of years. But what is a year more or less? You can destroy the Fenachrone eventually, so be content.’

  ‘But content is just exactly what I ain’t!’ declared Seaton, emphatically. ‘I want to do it, and do it now!’

  ‘Perhaps I might volunteer a suggestion,’ said Caslor, diffidently; and as both Rovol and Seaton looked at him in surprise he went on: ‘Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean concerning the mathematical pr
oblem in discussion, about which I am entirely ignorant. But has it occurred to you that those torpedoes are not intelligent entities, acting upon their own volition and steering themselves as a result of their own ordered mental processes? No, they are mechanisms, in my own province, and I venture to say with the utmost confidence that they are guided to their destinations by streamers of force of some nature, emanating from the vessels upon whose tracks they are.’

  ‘“Nobody Holme” is right!’ exclaimed Seaton, tapping his temple with an admonitory forefinger. ‘’Sright, ace – I thought maybe I’d quit using my head for nothing but a hat rack now, but I guess that’s all it’s good for, yet. Thanks a lot for the idea – that gives me something I can get my teeth into, and now that Rovol’s got a problem to work on for the next century or so, everybody’s happy.’

  ‘How does that help matters?’ asked Crane. ‘Of course it is not surprising that no lines of force were visible, but I thought that your detector screens would have found them if any such guiding beams had been present.’

  ‘The ordinary bands, if of sufficient power, yes. But there are many possible tracer rays not reactive to a screen such as I was using. It was very light and weak, designed for terrific velocity and for instantaneous automatic arrest when in contact with the enormous forces of a power-bar. It wouldn’t react at all to the minute energy of the kind of beams they’d be most likely to use for that work. Caslor’s certainly right. They’re steering their torpedoes with tracer beams of almost infinitesimal power, amplified in the torpedoes themselves – that’s the way I’d do it myself. It may take a little while to rig up the apparatus, but we’ll get it and then we’ll run those birds ragged. We won’t need the fourth-dimensional correction after all.’

  When the bell announced the beginning of the following period of labor, Seaton and his co-workers were in the Area of Experiment waiting, and the work was soon under way.

  ‘How are you going about this, Dick?’ Crane asked.

  ‘Going to examine the nose of one of those torpedoes first, and see what it actually works on. Then build a tracer detector that’ll pick it up at high velocity. Beats the band, don’t it, that neither Rovol nor I, who should have thought of it first, never did see anything as plain as that? That those things are following a lead?’

  ‘That is easily explained. Both of you were not only devoting all your thoughts to the curvature of space, but were also too close to the problem – like the man in the woods, who cannot see the forest because of the trees.’

  ‘Probably. It was plain enough, though, when Caslor showed it to us.’

  While he was talking Seaton had projected himself into the torpedo he had lined up so many times the previous day. With the automatic motions set to hold him stationary in the tiny instrument compartment of the craft, now traveling at a velocity many thousands of times that of light, he set to work. A glance located the detector mechanism, a set of short-wave coils and amplifiers, and a brief study made plain to him the principles underlying the directional loop finders and the controls which guided the flying shell along the path of the tracer. He then built a detector structure of pure force immediately in front of the torpedo, and varied the frequency of his own apparatus until a meter upon one of the panels before his eyes informed him that his detector was in perfect resonance with the frequency of the tracer. He then moved ahead of the torpedo, along the guiding pencil of force.

  ‘Getting it, eh?’ Dunark congratulated him.

  ‘After a fashion. My directors out there ain’t so hot, though. I’m shy on control somewhere, so much so that if I put on anywhere near full velocity I lose the track. Think I can clear that up with a little experimenting, though.’

  He fingered controls lightly, depressing a few more keys, and set one vernier, already at a ratio of a million to one, down to ten million. He then stepped up his velocity, and found that the guides worked well up to a speed much greater than any ever reached by the Fenachrone vessels or torpedoes, but failed utterly to hold at anything approaching the full velocity possible to his fifth-order projector. After hours and days of work and study – in the course of which hundreds of the Fenachrone vessels were destroyed – after employing all the resources of his mind, now stored with the knowledge accumulated by hundreds of generations of highly-trained research specialists in vibrations, he became convinced that it was an inherent impossibility to trace any ether wave with the velocity he desired.

  ‘Can’t be done, I guess, Mart,’ he confessed, ruefully. ‘You see, it works fine up to a certain point; but beyond that, nothing doing. I’ve just found out why – and in so doing, I think I’ve made a contribution to science. At velocities well below that of light, light-waves are shifted a minute amount, you know. At the velocity of light, and up to a velocity not even approached by the Fenachrone vessels on their longest trips, the distortion is still not serious – no matter how fast we want to travel in the Skylark I can guarantee that we will still be able to see things. That is to be expected from the generally-accepted idea that the apparent velocity of any ether vibration is independent of the velocity of either source or receiver. However, that relationship fails at velocities far below that of fifth-order propagation. At only a very small fraction of that speed the tracers I am following are so badly distorted that they disappear altogether, and I have to distort them backwards. That wouldn’t be too bad, but when I get up to about one percent of the velocity I want to use I can’t calculate a force that will operate to distort them back into recognizable wave-forms. That’s another problem for Rovol to chew on, for another hundred years.’

  ‘That will, of course, slow up the work of clearing the galaxy of the Fenachrone, but at the same time I see nothing about which to be alarmed,’ Crane replied. ‘You are working very much faster than you could have done by waiting for the torpedoes to arrive. The present condition is very satisfactory, I should say,’ and he waved his hand at the galactic model, in nearly three-fourths of whose volume the green lights had been replaced by pink ones.

  ‘Yeah, pretty fair as far as that goes – we’ll clean up in ten days or so – but I hate to be licked. However, I might as well quit sobbing and get to work.’

  In due time the nine hundred and sixth Fenachrone vessel was checked off on the model, and the two Tellurians went in search of Drasnik, whom they found in his study, summing up and analyzing a mass of data, facts, and ideas which were being projected in the air around him.

  ‘Well, our first job’s done,’ Seaton stated. ‘Did you find out anything that you feel like passing around?’

  ‘My investigation is practically complete,’ replied the First of Psychology, gravely. ‘I have explored many Fenachrone minds, and without exception I have found them chambers of horror of a kind unimaginable to one of us. However, you are not interested in their psychology, but in facts bearing upon your problem. While such facts were scarce, I did discover a few interesting items. I spied upon them in public and in their most private haunts. I analyzed them individually and collectively, and from the few known facts and from the great deal of guesswork and conjecture there available to me I have formulated a theory. I shall first give you the known facts. Their scientists cannot direct nor control any ray not propagated through the ether, but they can detect one such frequency or band of frequencies which they call “infra-rays” and which are probably the fifth-order rays, since they lie in the first level below the ether. The detector proper is a type of lamp, which gives a blue light at the ordinary intensity of such rays as received from space or an ordinary power plant, but gives a red light under stronger excitation.’

  ‘Uh-huh, I get that O.K. Rovol’s great-great-great grandfather had ’em – I know all about them,’ Seaton encouraged Drasnik, who had paused, with a questioning glance. ‘I know exactly how and why such a detector works. We gave ’em an alarm, all right. Even though we were working on a tight beam from here to there, our secondary projector there was radiating enough to affect every such detector with
in a million miles.’

  ‘Another significant fact is that a great many persons – I learned of some five hundred, and there were probably many more – have disappeared without explanation and without leaving a trace; and it seems that they disappeared very shortly after our communication was delivered. One of these was Fenor, the Emperor. His family remain, however, and his son is not only ruling in his stead, but is carrying out his father’s policies. The other disappearances are all alike and are peculiar in certain respects. First, every man who vanished belonged to the Party of Postponement – the minority party of the Fenachrone, who believe that the time for the Conquest has not yet come. Second, every one of them was a leader of thought in some field of usefulness, and every such field is represented by at least one disappearance – even the army, as General Fenimol, the Commander-in-Chief, and his whole family, are among the absentees. Third, and most remarkable, each such disappearance included an entire family, clear down to children and grandchildren, however young. Another fact is that the Fenachrone Department of Navigation keeps a very close check upon all vessels, particularly vessels capable of navigating outer space. Every vessel built must be registered, and its location is always known from its individual tracer. No Fenachrone vessel is missing.

  ‘I also sifted a mass of gossip and conjecture, some of which may bear upon the subject. One belief is that all the persons were put to death by Fenor’s secret service, and that the Emperor was assassinated in revenge. The most widespread belief, however, is that they have fled. Some hold that they are in hiding in some remote shelter in the jungle, arguing that the rigid registration of all vessels renders a journey of any great length impossible and that the detector screens would have given warning of any vessel leaving the planet. Others think that persons as powerful as Fenimol and Ravindau could have built any vessel they chose with neither the knowledge nor consent of the Department of Navigation; or that they could have stolen a Navy vessel, destroying its records; and that Ravindau certainly could have so neutralized the screens that they would have given no alarm. These believe that the absent ones have migrated to some other solar system or to some other planet of the same sun. One old general loudly gave it as his opinion that the cowardly traitors had probably fled clear out of the galaxy, and that it would be a good thing to send the rest of the Party of Postponement after them. There, in brief, are the salient points of my investigation insofar as it concerns your immediate problem.’