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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  ‘It might, at that,’ Crane conceded, after minutes of narrow-eyed concentration; then, Crane-wise, began to muster objections. ‘But it would not so affect this vessel. She is altogether too large, is of the wrong shape, and—’

  ‘And you can’t pull yourself up by your own boot straps,’ Seaton interrupted. ‘Right – you’ve got to have something to work from, something to anchor your forces to. We’d make the trip in little old Skylark Two. She’s small, she’s spherical and she has so little mass compared to Three that rotating her out of space would be easy – it wouldn’t even shift Three’s reference planes.’

  ‘It might prove successful,’ Crane admitted at last, ‘and, if so, it could not help but be a very interesting and highly informative experience. However, the chance of success seems to be none too great, as you have said, and we must exhaust every other possibility before we decide to attempt it.’

  For hours then the two scientists went over every detail of their situation, but could evolve no other plan which held out even the slightest gleam of hope for a successful outcome; and Seaton seated himself before the banked and tiered keyboards of his projector.

  There he worked for perhaps half an hour, then called to Crane: ‘I’ve got everything set to spin Two out to where we’re going, Mart. Now if you and Shiro’ – for Crane’s former ‘man’ and the Skylark’s factotum was now quite as thoroughly familiar with Norlaminian forces as he had formerly been with Terrestrial tools – ‘will put some forces onto the job of getting her ready for anything you think we may meet up with, I’ll put in the rest of the time trying to figure out a way of taking a good stiff poke at those jaspers out there.’

  He knew that the zones of force surrounding his vessel were absolutely impenetrable to any wave propagated through the ether, and to any possible form of material substance. He knew also that the subether was blocked, through the fifth and sixth orders. He knew that it was hopeless to attempt to solve the problem of the seventh order in the time at his disposal.

  If he were to open any of his zones, even for an instant, in order to launch a direct attack, he knew that the immense mentalities to which he was opposed would perceive the opening and through it would wreak the Terrestrials’ dematerialization before he could send out a single beam.

  Last and worst, he knew that not even his vast console afforded any combination of forces which could possibly destroy the besieging intellectuals. What could he do?

  For hours he labored with all the power of his wonderful brain, now stored with all the accumulated knowledge of thousands upon thousands of years of Norlaminian research. He stopped occasionally to eat, and once, at his wife’s insistence, he snatched a little troubled and uneasy sleep; but his mind drove him back to his board and at that board he worked. Worked – while the hands of the chronometer approached more and ever more nearly the zero hour. Worked – while the Skylark’s immense stores of uranium dwindled visibly away in the giving up of their inconceivable amounts of intra-atomic energy to brace the screens which were dissipating the inexhaustible flood of cosmic force being directed against them. Worked – in vain. At last he glanced at the chronometer and stood up. ‘Twenty minutes now – time to go,’ he announced. ‘Dot, come here a minute!’

  ‘Sweetheart!’ Tall though Dorothy was, the top of her auburn head came scarcely higher than Seaton’s chin. Tightly but tenderly held in his arms she tipped her head back, and her violet eyes held no trace of fear as they met his. ‘It’s all right, lover. I don’t know whether it’s because I think we’re going to get away, or because we’re together; but I’m not in the least bit afraid.’

  ‘Neither am I, dear. Some way, I simply can’t believe that we’re passing out; I’ve got a hunch that we’re going to come through. We’ve got a lot to live for yet, you and I, together. But I want to tell you what you already know – that, whatever happens, I love you.’

  ‘Hurry it up, Seatons!’

  Margaret’s voice recalled them to reality, and all five were wafted upon beams of force into the spherical launching space of the craft in which they were to venture into the unknown.

  That vessel was Skylark Two, the forty-foot globe of arenak which from Earth to Norlamin had served them so well and which had been carried, lifeboat-like, well inside the two-mile-long torpedo which was Skylark Three. The massive doors were clamped and sealed, and the five human beings strapped themselves into their seats against they knew not what emergency.

  ‘All ready, folks?’ Seaton grasped the ebonite handle of his master switch. ‘I’m not going to tell you Cranes goodbye, Mart – you know my hunch. You got one, too?’

  ‘I cannot say that I have. However, I have always had a great deal of confidence in your ability. Then, too, I have always been something of a fatalist; and, most important of all, like you and Dorothy, Margaret and I are together. You may start any time now, Dick.’

  ‘All right – hang on. On your marks! Get set! Go!’

  As the master switch was thrown, a set of gigantic plungers drove home, actuating the tremendous generators in the holds of the massive cruiser of space above and around them; generators which, bursting into instantaneous and furious activity, directed upon the spherical hull of their vessel three opposed pairs of currents of electricity; madly spinning currents, of a potential and of a density never before brought into being by human devices.

  7

  DuQuesne Visits Norlamin

  DuQuesne did not find Seaton, nor did he quite comb the galaxy star by star, as he had declared that he would do in that event. He did, however, try; he prolonged the vain search to distances of so many light-years and through so many weeks of time that even the usually complacent Loring was moved to protest.

  ‘Pretty much like hunting the proverbial needle in the haystack, isn’t it, chief?’ that worthy asked at last. ‘They could be clear back home by this time, whoever they are. It looks as though maybe we could do ourselves more good by doing something else.’

  ‘Yes; I probably am wasting time now, but I hate to give it up,’ the scientist replied. ‘We have pretty well covered this section of the galaxy. I wonder if it really was Seaton, after all? If he could blow up that planet through those screens he must have a lot more stuff than I have ever thought possible – certainly a lot more than I have, even now – and I would like very much to know how he did it. I couldn’t have done it, nor could the Fenachrone, and if he did it without coming closer to it than a thousand light-years—’

  ‘He may have been a lot closer than that,’ Loring interrupted. ‘He has had lots of time to make his get-away, you know.’

  ‘Not so much as you think, unless he has an acceleration of the same order of magnitude as ours, which I doubt,’ DuQuesne countered. ‘Although it is of course possible, in the light of what we know must have happened, that he may have an acceleration as large as ours, or even larger. But the most vital question now is, where did he get his dope? We’ll have to consider the probabilities and make our own plans accordingly.’

  ‘All right! That’s your dish – you’re the doctor.’

  ‘We shall have to assume that it was Seaton who did it, because if it was anyone else, we have nothing whatever to work on. Assuming Seaton, we have four very definite leads. Our first lead is that it must have been Seaton in the Skylark and Dunark in the Kondal that destroyed the Fenachrone ship from the wreck of which we rescued the engineer. I couldn’t learn anything about the actual battle from his brains, since he didn’t know much except that it was a zone of force that did the real damage, and that the two strange ships were small and spherical.

  ‘The Skylark and the Kondal answer that description and, while the evidence is far from conclusive, we shall assume as a working hypothesis that the Skylark and the Kondal did in fact attack and cut up a Fenachrone battleship fully as powerful as the one we are now in. That, as I do not have to tell you, is a disquieting thought.

  ‘If it is true, however, Seaton must have left the Earth shortly after we
did. That idea squares up, because he could very well have had an object-compass on me – whose tracer, by the way, would have been cut by the Fenachrone screens, so we needn’t worry about it, even if he did have it once.

  ‘Our second lead lies in the fact that he must have got the data on the zone of force sometime between the time when we left the Earth and the time when he cut up the battleship. He either worked it out himself on Earth, got it en route, or else got it on Osnome, or at least somewhere in the Green System. If my theory is correct, he worked it out by himself, before he left the Earth. He certainly did not get it on Osnome, because they did not have it.

  ‘The third lead is the shortness of the period of time that elapsed between his battle with the Fenachrone warship and the destruction of their planet.

  ‘The fourth lead is the great advancement in ability shown; going as he did from the use of a zone of force as an offensive weapon, up to the use of some weapon as yet unknown to us that works through defensive screens fully as powerful as any possible zone of force.

  ‘Now, from the above hypothesis, we are justified in concluding that Seaton succeeded in enlisting the help of some ultra-powerful allies in the Green System, on some planet other than Osnome …’

  ‘Why? I don’t quite follow you there,’ put in Loring.

  ‘He didn’t have this new stuff, whatever it is, when he met the battleship, or he would have used it instead of the dangerous, almost hand-to-hand fighting entailed by the use of a zone of force,’ DuQuesne declared flatly. ‘Therefore, he got it some time after that, but before the big explosion; and you can take it from me that no one man worked out a thing that big in such a short space of time. It can’t be done. He had help, and high-class help at that.

  ‘The time factor is also an argument in favor of the idea that he got it somewhere in the Green System – he didn’t have time to go anywhere else. Also, the logical thing for him to do would be to explore the Green System first, since it has a very large number of planets, many of which undoubtedly are inhabited by highly advanced races. Does that make it clearer?’

  ‘I’ve got it straight so far,’ assented the aide.

  ‘We must plan our course of action in detail before we leave this spot,’ DuQuesne decided. ‘Then we will be ready to start back for the Green System, to find out who Seaton’s friends were and to persuade them to give us all the stuff they gave him. Now listen – carefully.

  ‘We are not nearly as ready nor as well equipped as I thought we were – Seaton is about three laps ahead of us yet. Also, there is a lot more to psychology than I ever thought there was before I read those brains back there. Both of us had better get in training mentally to meet Seaton’s friends, whoever they may be, or else we probably will not be able to get away with a thing.

  ‘Both of us, you especially, want to clear our minds of every thought inimical to Seaton in any way or in even the slightest degree. You and I are, and always have been, two of the best friends Seaton ever had on Earth – or anywhere else, for that matter. And of course I cannot be Marc DuQuesne, for reasons that are self-evident. From now on I am Stewart Vaneman, Dorothy’s brother … No, forget all that – too dangerous. They may know all about Seaton’s friends and Mrs Seaton’s family. Our best line is to be humble cogs in Seaton’s great machine. We worship him from afar as the world’s greatest hero, but we are not of sufficient importance for him to know personally.’

  ‘Isn’t that carrying caution to extremes?’

  ‘It is not. The only thing that we are certain of concerning these postulated beings is that they know immensely more than we do; therefore our story cannot have even the slightest flaw in it – it must be bottle-tight. So I will be Stewart Donovan – fortunately I haven’t my name, initials, or monogram on anything I own – and I am one of the engineers of the Seaton-Crane Co., working on the power-plant installation.

  ‘Seaton may have given them a mental picture of DuQuesne, but I will grow a mustache and beard, and with this story they will never think of connecting Donovan with DuQuesne. You can keep your own name, since neither Seaton nor any of his crowd ever saw or heard of you. You are also an engineer – my technical assistant at the works – and my buddy.

  ‘We struck some highly technical stuff that nobody but Seaton could handle, and nobody had heard anything from him for a long time, so we came out to hunt him up and ask him some questions. You and I came together because we are just like Damon and Pythias. That story will hold water, I believe – do you see any flaws in it?’

  ‘Perhaps not flaws, but one or two things you forgot to mention. How about this ship? I suppose you could call her an improved model, but suppose they are familiar with Fenachrone spaceship construction?’

  ‘We shall not be in this ship. If, as we are assuming, Seaton and his new friends were the star actors in the late drama, those friends certainly have mentalities and apparatus of high caliber and they would equally certainly recognize this vessel. I had that in mind when I shoved the Violet off.’

  ‘Then you will have the Violet to explain – an Osnomian ship. However, the company could have imported a few of them, for runabout work, since Seaton left. It would be quicker than building them, at that, since they already have all the special tools and stuff on Osnome.’

  ‘You’re getting the idea. Anything else?’

  ‘All this is built around the supposition that he will not be there when we arrive. Suppose he is there?’

  ‘The chances are a thousand to one that he will be gone somewhere, exploring – he never did like to stick around in any one place. And even in the remote possibility that he should be on the planet, he certainly will not be at the dock when we land, so the story is still good. If he should be there, we shall simply have to arrange matters so that our meeting him face to face is delayed until after we have got what we want; that’s all.’

  ‘All right; I’ve got it down solid.’

  ‘Be sure that you have. Above all, remember the mental attitude toward Seaton – hero worship. He is not only the greatest man that Earth ever produced; he is the king-pin of the entire galaxy, and we rate him just a hair below God Himself. Think that thought with every cell of your brain. Concentrate on it with all your mind. Feel it – act it – really believe it until I tell you to quit.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Now what?’

  ‘Now we hunt up the Violet, transfer to her, and set this cruiser adrift on a course toward Earth. And while I think of it, we want to be sure not to use any more power than the Skylark could, anywhere near the Green System, and cover up anything that looks peculiar about the power plant. We’re not supposed to know anything about the five-light drive of the Fenachrone, you know.’

  ‘But suppose that you can’t find the Violet, or that she has been destroyed?’

  ‘In that case we’ll go on to Osnome and steal another one just like her. But I’ll find her – I know her exact course and velocity, we have ultrarange detectors, and her automatic instruments and machinery make her destruction-proof.’

  DuQuesne’s chronometers were accurate, his computations were sound, and his detectors were sensitive enough to have revealed the presence of a smaller body than the Violet at a distance vastly greater than the few millions of miles which constituted his unavoidable error. Therefore the Osnomian cruiser was found without trouble and the transfer was effected without untoward incident.

  Then for days the Violet was hurled at full acceleration toward the center of the galaxy. Long before the Green System was reached, however, the globular cruiser was swung off her course and, mad acceleration reversed, was put into a great circle, so that she would approach her destination from the direction of our own solar system. Slower and slower she drove onward, the bright green star about which she was circling resolving itself first into a group of bright-green points and finally into widely spaced, tiny green suns.

  Although facing the completely unknown and about to do battle, with their wits certainly, and with their every weapon
possibly against overwhelming odds, neither man showed or felt either nervousness or disorganization. Loring was a fatalist. It was DuQuesne’s party; he was merely the hired help. He would do his best when the time came to do something; until that time came there was nothing to worry about.

  DuQuesne’s, on the other hand, was the repose of conscious power. He had laid his plans as best he could with the information then at hand. If conditions changed he would change those plans; otherwise he would drive through with them ruthlessly, as was his wont. In the meantime he awaited he knew not what, poised, cool, and confident.

  Since both men were really expecting the unexpected, neither betrayed surprise when something that was apparently a man materialized before them in the air of the control room. His skin was green, as was that of all the inhabitants of the Green System. He was tall and well proportioned, according to Earthly standards, except for his head, which was overlarge and particularly massive above the eyes and backward from the ears. He was evidently of advanced years, for his face was seamed and wrinkled, and both his long, heavy hair and his yard-long, square-cut beard were a snowy white, only faintly tinged with green.

  The Norlaminian projection thickened instantly, with none of the oscillation and ‘hunting’ which had been so noticeable in the one which had visited Skylark Two a few months earlier, for at that comparatively short range the fifth-order keyboard handling it could hold a point, however moving, as accurately as a Terrestrial photographic telescope holds a star. And in the moment of materialization of his projection the aged Norlaminian spoke.

  ‘I welcome you to Norlamin, Terrestrials,’ he greeted the two marauders with the untroubled serenity and calm courtesy of his race. ‘Since you are quite evidently of the same racial stock as our very good friends the doctors Seaton and Crane, and since you are traveling in a ship built by the Osnomians, I assume that you speak and understand the English language which I am employing. I suppose that you are close friends of Seaton and Crane and that you have come to learn why they have not communicated with you of late?’