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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  ‘They’re probably on guard anyway, without having to be put there – but it’s a sound idea, nevertheless. Along the same line I’ll release the fifth-order screens, with the fastest possible detector on guard. We’re just about within reach of a light copper-driven beam right now, but they can’t send anything heavy this far, and if they think we’re overconfident so much the better.

  ‘There,’ he continued, after a few minutes at the keyboard.

  ‘All set. If they put a detector on us I’ve got a force set to make a noise like a fire siren. If pressed, I will very reluctantly admit that we’re carrying caution to a point ten thousand degrees below the absolute zero of sanity. I’ll bet my shirt that we won’t hear a yip out of them before we touch them off. Furthermore—’

  The rest of his sentence was lost in a crescendo bellow of sound. Seaton, still at the controls, shut off the noise, studied his meters carefully, and turned to Crane with a grin.

  ‘You win the shirt, Mart. I’ll give it to you next Wednesday, when my other one comes back from the laundry. It’s a fifth-order detector, coming in beautifully on band forty-seven fifty.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to put something on ’em?’ asked Dorothy in surprise.

  ‘No – what’s the use? I can read theirs as well as I could one of my own. Maybe they know that, too – if they don’t we’ll let ’em think we’re coming along, as innocent as Mary’s little lamb. That beam is much too thin to carry anything, and if they thicken it up I’ve got an axe set to chop it off.’ Seaton whistled a merry, lilting refrain as his fingers played over the stops and keys.

  ‘Why, Dick, you seem actually pleased about it.’ Margaret was plainly ill at ease.

  ‘Sure I am. I never did like to drown baby kittens, and it goes against the grain to stab a guy in the back, even if he is a Fenachrone. In a battle, though, I could blow them out of space without a qualm or a quiver.’

  ‘But suppose they fight back too hard?’

  ‘They can’t – the worst that can possibly happen is that we can’t lick them. They certainly can’t lick us, because we can outrun ’em. If we can’t take ’em alone, we’ll go back to Norlamin and bring up reinforcements.’

  ‘I am not so sure,’ Crane spoke slowly. ‘There is, I believe, a theoretical possibility that sixth-order forces exist. Would an extension of the methods of detection of fifth-order rays reveal them?’

  ‘Sixth? Sweet spirits of niter! Nobody knows anything about them. However, I’ve had one surprise already, so maybe your suggestion isn’t as crazy as it sounds. We’ve got three or four days yet before either side can send anything except on the sixth, so I’ll find out what I can do.’

  He flew at the task, and for the next three days could hardly be torn from it for rest; but:

  ‘O.K. Mart,’ he finally announced. ‘They exist, all right, and I can detect ’em. Look here,’ and he pointed to a tiny receiver, upon which a small lamp flared in brilliant scarlet light.

  ‘Are they sending them?’

  ‘No, fortunately. They’re coming from our bar. See, it shines blue when I shield it from the bar, and stays blue when I attach it to their detector ray.’

  ‘Can you direct them?’

  ‘Not a chance in the world. That means a lifetime, probably many lifetimes, of research unless somebody uses a fairly complete pattern of them close enough so that I can analyze it. It’s a good deal like calculus in that respect. It took thousands of years to get it in the first place, but it’s easy when somebody that already knows it shows you how it goes.’

  ‘The Fenachrone learned to handle fifth-order rays so quickly, then, by an analysis of our fifth-order projector there?’

  ‘Our secondary projector, yes. They must have had some neutronium in stock, too – but it would have been funny if they hadn’t, at that – they’ve had atomic power for ages.’

  Silent and grim, he seated himself at the console, and for an hour he wrote an intricate pattern of forces upon the inexhaustible supply of keys afforded by the ultra-projector before he once touched a plunger.

  ‘What are you doing? I followed you for a few hundred steps, but could go no farther.’

  ‘Merely a little safety-first stuff. In case they should send any real pattern of sixth-order stuff this set-up will analyze it, record the complete analysis, throw out a screen against every frequency of the pattern; throw on the molecular drive, and pull us back toward the galaxy at full acceleration, while switching the frequency of our carrier wave a thousand times a second, to keep them from shooting a hot one through our open band. It’ll do it all in about a millionth of a second, too … Hm-m-m … They’ve shut off their ray – they know we’ve tapped it. Well, war’s declared now – we’ll see what we can see.’

  Transferring the assembled beam to a plunger, he sent out a secondary projector toward the Fenachrone vessel, as fast as it could be driven, close behind a widespread detector net. He soon found the enemy cruiser, but so immense was the distance that it was impossible to hold the projection anywhere in its neighborhood. They flashed beyond it and through it and upon all sides of it, but the utmost delicacy of the controls would not permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as the power-bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship they saw piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men of her crew, each man at battle stations at the controls of some frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen closed behind them – the Earthmen felt an instant of unreasoning terror as it seemed that one-half of their peculiar dual personalities vanished utterly. Seaton laughed.

  ‘That was a funny sensation, wasn’t it? It just means that they’ve climbed a tree and pulled the tree up after them.’

  ‘I do not like the odds, Dick.’ Crane’s face was grave. ‘They have many hundreds of men, all trained; and we are only two. Yes, only one, for I count for nothing at those controls.’

  ‘All the better, Mart. This board more than makes up the difference. They’ve got a lot of stuff, of course, but they haven’t got anything like this control system. Their captain’s got to issue orders, whereas I’ve got everything right under my hands. Not so uneven as they think!’

  Within battle range at last, Seaton hurled his utmost concentration of direct forces, under the impact of which three courses of Fenachrone defensive screen flared through the ultraviolet and went black. There the massed direct attack was stopped – at what cost the enemy alone knew – and the Fenachrone countered instantly and in a manner totally unexpected. Through the narrow slit in the fifth-order screen through which Seaton was operating, in the bare one-thousandth of a second that it was open, so exactly synchronized and timed that the screens did not even glow as it went through the narrow opening, a gigantic beam of heterodyned force struck full upon the bow of the Skylark, near the sharply-pointed prow, and the stubborn metal instantly flared blinding white and exploded outward in puffs of incandescent gas under the awful power of that titanic thrust. Through four successive skins of inoson, the theoretical ultimate of possible strength, toughness, and resistance, that frightful beam drove before the automatically-reacting detector closed the slit, and the impregnable defensive screens, driven by their mighty uranium bars, flared into incandescent defense. Driven as they were, they held, and the Fenachrone, finding that particular attack useless, shut off their power.

  ‘Wow! They really have got something!’ Seaton exclaimed in unfeigned admiration. ‘What a wallop that was! We will now take time out for repairs. Also, I’m going to cut our slit down to a width of one kilocycle, if I can possibly figure out a way of working on that narrow band, and I’m going to step up our shifting speed to a hundred thousand. It’s a good thing they built this ship in a lot of layers – if that’d got through to the interior it would have raised hell. You might weld up those holes, Mart, while I see what I can do here.’

  Then Seaton noticed the women, white a
nd trembling, upon a seat.

  ‘’Smatter? Cheer up, kids, you ain’t seen nothing yet. That was just a couple of little preliminary love-taps, like two boxers feeling each other out in the first ten seconds of the first round.’

  ‘Preliminary love-taps!’ repeated Dorothy, looking into Seaton’s eyes and being reassured by the serene confidence she read there. ‘But they hit us, and hurt us badly – why, there’s a hole in our Skylark as big as a house, and it goes through four or five layers!’

  ‘Yeah, but we ain’t hurt a bit. They’re easily fixed, and we’ve lost nothing but a few tons of inoson and uranium. We’ve got lots of spare metal. I don’t know what I did to him, any more than he knows what he did to us, but I’ll bet my other shirt that he knows he’s been nudged!’

  Repairs completed and the changes made in the method of projection, Seaton actuated the rapidly-shifting slit and peered through it at the enemy vessel. Finding their screens still up he directed a complete-coverage attack upon them with four bars while, with the entire massed power of the remaining generators concentrated into one frequency, he shifted that frequency up and down the spectrum – probing, probing, ever probing with that gigantic beam of intolerable energy – feeling for some crack, however slight, into which he could insert that searing sheet of concentrated destruction. Although much of the available power of the Fenachrone was perforce devoted to repelling the continuous attack of the Skylark, they maintained an equally continuous offensive and in spite of the narrowness of the open slit and the rapidity with which that slit was changing from frequency to frequency, enough of the frightful forces came through to keep the ultra-powered defensive screens radiating far into the violet – and, the utmost power of the refrigerating system proving absolutely useless against the concentrated beams being employed, mass after mass of inoson was literally blown from the outer and secondary skins of the Skylark by the comparatively tiny jets of force that leaked through the momentarily open slit.

  Seaton, grimly watching his instruments, glanced at Crane, who, calm but alert at his console, was repairing the damage as fast as it was done.

  ‘They’re sending more stuff, Mart, and it’s getting hotter. That means they’re building more projectors. We can play that game, too. They’re using up their fuel reserves fast; but we’re bigger than they are, carry more metal, and it’s more efficient metal. Only one way out of it, I guess – what say we put in enough new generators to smother them down by brute force, no matter how much power it takes?’

  ‘Why don’t you use some of those awful copper shells? Or aren’t we close enough yet?’ Dorothy’s low voice came clearly, so utterly silent was that frightful combat.

  ‘Close! We’re still better than two hundred thousand light-years apart! There may have been longer-range battles than this somewhere in the universe, but I doubt it. And as for copper, even if we could get it to ’em it’d be just like so many candy kisses compared to the stuff we’re both using. Dear girl, there are fields of force extending for thousands of miles from each of these vessels beside which the exact center of the biggest lightning flash you ever saw would be a dead area!’

  He set up a series of integrals and, machine after machine, in a space left vacant by the rapidly-vanishing store of uranium, there appeared inside the fourth skin of the Skylark a row of gigantic generators, each one adding its terrific output to the already inconceivable stream of energy being directed at the foe. As that frightful flow increased, the intensity of the Fenachrone attack diminished, and finally it ceased altogether as the enemy’s whole power became necessary for the maintenance of his defenses. Still greater grew the stream of force from the Skylark, and, now that the attack had ceased, Seaton opened the slit wider and stopped its shifting, in order still further to increase the efficiency of his terrible weapon. Face set and eyes hard, deeper and deeper he drove his now irresistible forces. His flying fingers were upon the keys of his console; his keen and merciless eyes were in a secondary projector near the now doomed ship of the Fenachrone, directing masterfully his terrible attack. As the output of his generators still increased Seaton began to compress a hollow sphere of searing, seething energy upon the furiously-straining defensive screens of the Fenachrone. Course after course of the heaviest possible screen was sent out, driven by massed batteries of copper now disintegrating at the rate of tons in every second, only to flare through the ultraviolet and to go down before that dreadful, that irresistible onslaught. Finally, as the inexorable sphere still contracted, the utmost efforts of the defenders could not keep their screens away from their own vessel, and simultaneously the prow and the stern of the Fenachrone battleship were bared to that awful field of force, in which no possible substance could endure for even the most infinitesimal instant of time.

  There was a sudden cessation of all resistance, and those titanic forces, all directed inward, converged upon a point with a power behind which there was the inconceivable energy of four hundred thousand tons of uranium being disintegrated at the highest possible rate short of instant disruption. In that same instant of collapse the enormous mass of power-copper in the Fenachrone cruiser and the vessel’s every atom, alike of structure and of contents, also exploded into pure energy at the touch of that unimaginable field of force.

  In that awful moment before Seaton could shut off his power it seemed to him that space itself must be obliterated by the very concentration of the unknowable and incalculable forces there unleashed – must be swallowed up and lost in the utterly indescribable brilliance of the field of radiance driven to a distance of millions upon incandescent millions of miles from the place where the last representatives of the monstrous civilization of the Fenachrone had made their last stand against the forces of Universal Peace.

  SKYLARK OF VALERON

  1

  Dr DuQuesne’s Ruse

  Day after day a spherical spaceship of arenak tore through the illimitable reaches of the interstellar void. She had once been a war vessel of Osnome; now, rechristened the Violet, she was bearing two Tellurians and a Fenachrone – Dr Marc C. DuQuesne of World Steel, ‘Baby Doll’ Loring, his versatile and accomplished assistant, and the squat and monstrous engineer of the flagship Y427W – from the Green System toward the solar system of the Fenachrone. The mid-point of the stupendous flight had long since been passed; the Violet had long been braking down with a negative acceleration of five times the velocity of light.

  Much to the surprise of both DuQuesne and Loring, their prisoner had not made the slightest move against them. He had thrown all the strength of his supernaturally powerful body and all the resources of his gigantic brain into the task of converting the atomic motors of the Violet into the space-annihilating drive of his own race. This drive, affecting alike as it does every atom of substance within the radius of action of the power bar, entirely nullifies the effect of acceleration, so that the passengers feel no motion whatever, even when the craft is accelerating at maximum.

  The engineer had not shirked a single task, however arduous. And, once under way, he had nursed those motors along with every artifice known to his knowing clan; he had performed such prodigies of adjustment and tuning as to raise by a full two per cent their already inconceivable maximum acceleration. Nor was this all. After the first moment of rebellion, he did not even once attempt to bring to bear the almost irresistible hypnotic power of his eyes; the immense, cold, ruby-lighted projectors of mental energy which, both men knew, were awful weapons indeed. Nor did he even once protest against the attractors which were set upon his giant limbs.

  Immaterial bands, these, whose slight force could not be felt unless the captor so willed. But let the prisoner make one false move, and those tiny beams of force would instantly become copper-driven rods of pure energy, hurling the luckless weight against the wall of the control room and holding him motionless there, in spite of the most terrific exertions of his mighty body.

  DuQuesne lay at ease in his seat; or rather, scarcely touching the seat, he float
ed at ease in the air above it. His black brows were drawn together, his black eyes were hard as he studied frowningly the Fenachrone engineer. As usual, that worthy was half inside the power plant, coaxing those mighty engines to do even better than their prodigious best.

  Feeling his companion’s eyes upon him, the doctor turned his inscrutable stare upon Loring, who had been studying his chief even as DuQuesne had been studying the outlander. Loring’s cherubic countenance was as pinkly innocent as ever, his guileless blue eyes as calm and untroubled; but DuQuesne, knowing the man as he did, perceived an almost imperceptible tension and knew that the killer also was worried.

  ‘What’s the matter, Doll?’ The saturnine scientist smiled mirthlessly. ‘Afraid I’m going to let that ape slip one over on us?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Loring’s slight tenseness, however, disappeared. ‘It’s your party, and anything that’s all right with you tickles me half to death. I have known all along you knew that that bird there isn’t working under compulsion. You know as well as I do that nobody works that way because they’re made to. He’s working for himself, not for us, and I had just begun to wonder if you weren’t getting a little late in clamping down on him.’

  ‘Not at all – there are good and sufficient reasons for this apparent delay. I am going to clamp down on him in exactly’ – DuQuesne glanced at his wrist watch – ‘fourteen minutes. But you’re keen – you’ve got a brain that really works – maybe I’d better give you the whole picture.’

  DuQuesne, approving thoroughly of his iron-nerved, cold-blooded assistant, voiced again the thought he had expressed once before, a few hours out from Earth; and Loring answered as he had then, in almost the same words – words which revealed truly the nature of the man: