Self-contained as DuQuesne was, this statement almost took his breath away, squaring almost perfectly as it did with the tale he had so carefully prepared. He did not show his amazed gratification, however, but spoke as gravely and as courteously as the other had done:
‘We are very glad indeed to see you, sir; particularly since we know neither the name nor the location of the planet for which we are searching. Your assumptions are correct in every particular save one …’
‘You do not know even the name of Norlamin?’ the Green scientist interrupted. ‘How can that be? Did not Dr Seaton send the projections of all his party to you upon Earth, and did he not discuss matters with you?’
‘I was about to explain that.’ DuQuesne lied instantly, boldly, and convincingly. ‘We heard that he had sent a talking, three-dimensional picture of his group to Earth, but after it had vanished all the real information that any one seemed to have obtained was that they were here in the Green System somewhere, but not upon Osnome, and that they had been taught much of science. Mrs Seaton did most of the talking, I gather, which may account for the dearth of pertinent details.
‘Neither my friend Loring, here nor I – I am Stewart Donovan, by the way – saw the picture, or rather, projection. You assumed that we are Seaton’s close friends. We are engineers in his company, but we have not the honor of his personal acquaintance. His scientific knowledge was needed so urgently that it was decided that we should come out here after him, since the chief of construction had heard nothing from him for so long.’
‘I see.’ A shadow passed over the seamed green face. ‘I am very sorry indeed at what I have to tell you. We did not report anything of it to Earth because of the panic that would have ensued. We shall of course send the whole story as soon as we can learn what actually did take place and can deduce therefrom the probable sequence of events yet to occur.’
‘What’s that – an accident? Something happened to Seaton?’ DuQuesne snapped. His heart leaped in joy and relief, but his face showed only strained anxiety and deep concern. ‘He isn’t here now? Surely nothing serious could have happened to him.’
‘Alas, young friend, none of us knows yet what really occurred. It is highly probable, however, that their vessel was destroyed in intergalactic space by forces about which we have as yet been able to learn nothing; forces directed by some intelligence as yet to us unknown. There is a possibility that Seaton and his companions escaped in the vessel you knew as Skylark Two, but so far we have not been able to find them.
‘But enough of talking; you are strained and weary and you must rest. As soon as your vessel was detected the beam was transferred to me – the student Rovol, perhaps the closest to Seaton of any of my race – so that I could give you this assurance. With your permission I shall direct upon your controls certain forces which shall so govern your flight that you shall alight safely upon the grounds of my laboratory in a few minutes more than twelve hours of your time, without any further attention or effort upon your part.
‘Further explanations can wait until we meet in the flesh. Until that time, my friends, do nothing save rest. Eat and sleep without care or fear, for your flight and your landing shall be controlled with precision. Farewell!’
The projection vanished instantaneously, and Loring expelled his pent-up breath in an explosive sigh.
‘Whew! But what a break, chief, what a—’
He was interrupted by DuQuesne, who spoke calmly and quietly, yet insistently: ‘Yes, it is a singularly fortunate circumstance that the Norlaminians detected us and recognized us; it probably would have required weeks for us to have found their planet unaided.’ DuQuesne’s lightning mind found a way of covering up his companion’s betraying exclamation and sought some way of warning him that could not be overheard. ‘Our visitor was right in saying that we need food and rest badly, but before we eat let us put on the headsets and bring the record of our flight up to date – it will take only a minute or two.’
‘What’s biting you, chief?’ thought Loring as soon as the power was on. ‘We didn’t have any—’
‘Plenty!’ DuQuesne interrupted him viciously. ‘Don’t you realize that they can probably hear every word we say, and that they can see every move we make, even in the dark? In fact, they may be able to read thoughts, for all I know; so think straight from now on, if you never did before! Now let’s finish up this record.’
He then impressed upon a tape the record of everything that had just happened. They ate. Then they slept soundly – the first really untroubled sleep they had enjoyed for weeks. And at last, exactly as the projection had foretold, the Violet landed without a jar upon the spacious grounds beside the laboratory of Rovol, the foremost physicist of Norlamin.
When the door of the spaceship opened, Rovol in person was standing before it, waiting to welcome the voyagers and to escort them to his dwelling. But DuQuesne, pretending a vast impatience, would not be dissuaded from the object of his search merely to satisfy the Norlaminian amenities of hospitality and courtesy. He poured forth his prepared story in a breath, concluding with a flat demand that Rovol tell him everything he knew about Seaton, and that he tell it at once.
‘It would take far too long to tell you anything in words,’ the ancient scientist replied placidly. ‘In the laboratory, however, I can and will inform you fully in a few minutes concerning everything that has happened.’
Utter stranger himself to deception in any form, as was his whole race, Rovol was easily and completely deceived by the consummate acting, both physical and mental, of DuQuesne and Loring. Therefore, as soon as the three had donned the headsets of the wonderfully efficient Norlaminian educator, Rovol gave to the Terrestrial adventurers without reserve his every mental image and his every stored fact concerning Seaton and his supposedly ill-fated last voyage.
Even more clearly than as if he himself had seen them all happen, DuQuesne beheld and understood Seaton’s visit to Norlamin, the story of the Fenachrone peril, the building of the fifth-order projector, the demolition of Fenor’s space fleet, the revenge-purposed flight of Ravindau the scientist, and the complete volatilization of the Fenachrone planet.
He saw Seaton’s gigantic space cruiser Skylark Three come into being and, uranium-driven, speed out into the awesome void of intergalactic space in pursuit of the last survivors of the Fenachrone race. He watched the mighty Three overtake the fleeing vessel, and understood every detail of the epic engagement that ensued, clear to its cataclysmic end. He watched the victorious battleship speed on and on, deeper and deeper into the intergalactic void, until she began to approach the limiting range of even the stupendous fifth-order projector by means of which he knew the watching had been done.
Then, at the tantalizing limit of visibility, something began to happen; something at the very incomprehensibility of which DuQuesne strained both mind and eye, exactly as had Rovol when it had taken place so long before. The immense bulk of the Skylark disappeared behind zone after impenetrable zone of force, and it became increasingly evident that from behind those supposedly impervious and impregnable shields Seaton was waging a terrific battle against some unknown opponent, some foe invisible even to fifth-order vision.
For nothing was visible – nothing, that is, save the released energies which, leaping through level after level reached at last even to the visible spectrum. Yet forces of such unthinkable magnitude were warring there that space itself was being deformed visibly, moment by moment. For a long time the space strains grew more and more intense, then they disappeared instantly. Simultaneously the Skylark’s screens of force went down and she was for an instant starkly visible before she exploded into a vast ball of appallingly radiant, flaming vapor.
In that instant of clear visibility, however, Rovol’s stupendous mind had photographed every salient visible feature of the great cruiser of the void. Being almost at the limit of range of the projector, details were of course none too plain; but certain things were evident. The human beings were no longe
r aboard; the little lifeboat that was Skylark Two was no longer in her spherical berth; and there were unmistakable signs of a purposeful and deliberate departure.
‘And,’ Rovol spoke aloud as he removed the headset, ‘although we searched minutely and most carefully all the surrounding space we could find nothing tangible. From these observations it is all too plain that Seaton was attacked by some intelligence wielding dirigible forces of the sixth order; that he was able to set up a defensive pattern; that his supply of power uranium was insufficient to cope with the attacking forces; and that he took the last desperate means of escaping from his foes by rotating Skylark Two into the unknown region of the fourth dimension.’
DuQuesne’s stunned mind groped for a moment in an amazement akin to stupefaction, but he recovered quickly and decided upon his course.
‘Well, what are you doing about it?’
‘We have done and are doing everything possible for us, in our present state of knowledge and advancement, to do,’ Rovol replied placidly. ‘We sent out forces, as I told you, which obtained and recorded all the phenomena to which they were sensitive. It is true that a great deal of data escaped them, because the primary impulses originated in a level beyond our present knowledge, but the fact that we cannot understand it has only intensified our interest in the problem. It shall be solved. After its solution we shall know what steps to take and those steps shall then be taken.’
‘Have you any idea how long it will take to solve the problem?’
‘Not the slightest. Perhaps one lifetime, perhaps many – who knows? However, rest assured that it shall be solved, and that the condition shall be dealt with in the manner which shall best serve the interest of humanity as a whole.’
‘But good God!’ exclaimed DuQuesne. ‘In the meantime, what of Seaton and Crane?’ He was now speaking his true thoughts. Upon this, his first encounter, he could in nowise understand the deep, calm, timeless trend of mind of the Norlaminians; not even dimly could he grasp or appreciate the seemingly slow but inexorably certain method in which they pursued relentlessly any given line of research to its ultimate conclusion.
‘If it should be graven upon the Sphere that they shall pass they may – and will – pass in all tranquility, for they know full well that it was not in idle gesture that the massed intellect of Norlamin assured them that their passing should not be in vain. You, however, youths of an unusually youthful and turbulent race, could not be expected to view the passing of such a one as Seaton from our own mature viewpoint.’
‘I’ll tell the universe that I don’t look at things the way you do!’ barked DuQuesne scathingly. When I go back to Earth – if I go – I shall at least have tried. I’ve got a life-sized picture of myself standing idly by while someone else tries for seven hundred years to decipher the indecipherable!’
‘There speaks the impetuousness of youth,’ the old man chided. ‘I have told you that we have proved that at present we can do nothing whatever for the occupants of Skylark Two. Be warned, my rash young friend; do not tamper with powers entirely beyond your comprehension.’
‘Warning be damned!’ DuQuesne snorted. We’re shoving off. Come on, Loring – the quicker we get started the better our chance of getting something done. You’ll be willing to give me the exact bearing and the distance, won’t you Rovol?’
‘We shall do more than that, son,’ the patriarch replied, while a shadow came over his wrinkled visage. ‘Your life is your own, to do with as you see fit. You have chosen to go in search of your friends, scorning the odds against you. But before I tell you what I have in mind, I must try once more to make you see that the courage which dictates the useless sacrifice of a life ceases to be courage at all, but becomes sheerest folly.
‘Since we have had sufficient power several of our youths have been studying the fourth dimension. They rotated many inanimate objects into that region, but could recover none of them. Instead of waiting until they had derived the fundamental equations governing such phenomena they rashly visited that region in person, in a vain attempt to achieve a short cut to knowledge. Not one of them has come back.
‘Now I declare to you in all solemnity that the quest you wish to undertake, involving as it does not only that entirely unknown region but also the equally unknown sixth order of vibrations, is to you at present utterly impossible. Do you still insist upon going?’
‘We certainly do. You may as well save your breath.’
‘Very well; so be it. Frankly, I had but little hope of swerving you from your purpose by reason. But before you go we shall supply you with every resource at our command which may in any way operate to increase your infinitesimal chance of success. We shall build for you a duplicate of Seaton’s own Skylark Three, equipped with every device known to our science, and we shall instruct you fully in the use of those devices before you set out.’
‘But the time … DuQuesne began to object.
‘A matter of hours only,’ Rovol silenced him. ‘True, it took us some little time to build Skylark Three, but that was because it had not been done before. Every force employed in her construction was of course recorded, and to reproduce her in every detail, without attention or supervision, it is necessary only to thread this tape, thus, into the integrator of my master keyboard. The actual construction will of course take place in the area of experiment, but you may watch it, if you wish, in this visiplate. I must take a short series of observations at this time. I will return in ample time to instruct you in the operation of the vessel and of everything in it.’
In stunned amazement the two men stared into the visiplate, so engrossed in what they saw there that they scarcely noticed the departure of the aged scientist. For before their eyes there had already sprung into being an enormous structure of laced and latticed members of purple metal, stretching over two miles of level plain. While it was very narrow for its length, yet its fifteen hundred feet of diameter dwarfed into insignificance the many outlandish structures nearby, and under their staring eyes the vessel continued to take form with unbelievable rapidity. Gigantic girders appeared in place as though by magic; skin after skin of thick, purple inoson was welded on; all without the touch of a hand, without the thought of a brain, without the application of any visible force.
‘Now you can say it, Doll; there’s no spy ray on us here. What a break – what a break!’ exulted DuQuesne. ‘The old fossil swallowed it bodily, hook, line, and sinker!’
‘It may not be so good, though, at that, chief, in one way. He’s going to watch us, to help us out if we get into a jam, and with that infernal telescope, or whatever it is, the Earth is right under his nose.’
‘Simpler than taking milk away from a blind kitten,’ the saturnine chemist gloated. ‘We’ll go out to where Seaton went, only farther – out beyond the reach of his projector. There, completely out of touch with him, we’ll circle around the galaxy back to Earth and do our stuff. Easier than dynamiting fish in a bucket – the old sap’s handing me everything I want, right on a silver platter!’
8
Into the Fourth Dimension
Six mighty rotating currents of electricity impinged simultaneously upon the spherical hull of Skylark Two and she disappeared utterly. No exit had been opened and the walls remained solid, but where the forty-foot globe of arenak had rested in her cradle an instant before there was nothing. Pushed against by six balancing and gigantic forces, twisted cruelly by six couples of angular force of unthinkable magnitude, the immensely strong arenak shell of the vessel had held and, following the path of least resistance – the only path in which she could escape from those irresistible forces – she had shot out of space as we know it and into the impossible reality of that hyperspace which Seaton’s vast mathematical knowledge had enabled him so dimly to perceive.
As those forces smote his vessel, Seaton felt himself compressed. He was being driven together irresistibly in all three dimensions, and in those dimensions at the same time he was as irresistibly being twisted – was b
eing corkscrewed in a monstrously obscure fashion which permitted him neither to move from his place nor to remain in it. He hung poised there for interminable hours, even though he knew that the time required for that current to build up to its inconceivable value was to be measured only in fractional millionths of a single second.
Yet he waited strainingly while that force increased at an all but imperceptible rate, until at last the vessel and all its contents were squeezed out of space, in a manner somewhat comparable to that in which an orange pip is forced out from between pressing thumb and resisting finger.
At the same time Seaton felt a painless, but unutterably horrible, transformation of his entire body – a rearrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion; a hideously revolting and incomprehensibly impossible extrusion of his bodily substance as every molecule, every atom, every ultimate particle of his physical structure was compelled to extend itself into that unknown new dimension.
He could not move his eyes, yet he saw every detail of the grotesquely altered spaceship. His Earthly mentality could not understand anything he saw, yet to his transformed brain everything was as usual and quite in order. Thus the four-dimensional physique that was Richard Seaton perceived, recognized, and admired as of yore his beloved Dorothy, in spite of the fact that her normally solid body was now quite plainly nothing but a three-dimensional surface, solid only in that logically impossible new dimension which his now four-dimensional brain accepted as a matter of course, but which his thinking mentality could neither really perceive nor even dimly comprehend.
He could not move a muscle, yet in some obscure and impossible way he leaped toward his wife. Immobile though tongue and jaws were, yet he spoke to her reassuringly, remonstratingly, as he gathered up her trembling form and silenced her hysterical outbursts.
E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne Page 53