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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  Though the weirdly peculiar trees, creepers, and bamboo-like shoots comprising the jungle’s vegetation were not strong enough to bar the progress of the dense, hard, human bodies, yet they impeded that progress so terribly that the trail-breaker soon halted.

  ‘Not so good this way, Peg,’ he reflected. ‘These creepers will soon pull you down, I’m afraid; and, besides, we’ll be losing our line pretty quickly. What to do? Better I knock out a path with this magic wand of mine, I guess – none of this stuff seems to be very heavy.’

  Again they set out; Seaton’s grating, so bent and battered now that it could not be recognized as once having been the door of a prison cell, methodically sweeping from side to side; a fiercely driven scythe against which no hyperthing could stand. Vines and creepers still wrapped around and clung to the struggling pair; shattered masses drifted down upon them from above, exuding in floods a viscous, gluey sap; and both masses of broken vegetation and floods of adhesive juices reinforced and rendered even more impassable the already high-piled wilderness of debris which had been accumulating there during time unthinkable. All hypernature seemed to be in league against them; feebly but clingingly attempting to hold them back and devour them.

  Thus hampered, but driven to highest effort by the fear of imminent darkness and consequent helplessness, they struggled indomitably on. On and on; while behind them stretched an ever-lengthening, straight, sharply cut streak of blackness in the livid hyperlight of the jungle. On and on; Seaton flailing a path through the standing jungle, Margaret plowing along in his wake, fighting, struggling through and over the matted tangle of underbrush and the grasping, clinging tentacles of its parasitic inhabitants.

  Seaton’s great mass and prodigious strength enabled him to force his way through that fantastically inimical undergrowth, but the unremitting pull and drag of the attacking vines wore down the woman’s slighter physique.

  ‘Just a minute, Dick!’ She stopped, strength almost spent. ‘I hate to admit that I can’t stand the pace, especially since you are doing all the work, as well as wading through the same mess that I am, but I don’t believe that I can go on much longer without a rest.’

  ‘All right …’ Seaton began, but broke off, staring ahead. ‘No; keep on coming one minute more, Peg – three more jumps and we’re through.’

  ‘I can go that much farther, of course. Lead on, MacDuff!’ and they struggled on.

  In a few more steps they broke out of the thick growth of the jungle and into the almost-palpable darkness of a great, roughly circular area which had been cleared of the prolific growth. In the center of this circle could be seen the bluely illuminated works of the engineers who were raising Skylark Two. The edge of the great well was surrounded by four-dimensional machinery; and that well’s wide apron and its towering derricks were swarming with hypermen.

  ‘Stay behind me, Peg, but as close as you can without getting hit,’ the man instructed his companion after a hasty but comprehensive study of the scene. ‘Keep your shield up and have your grating in good swinging order. I’ll be able to take care of most of them, I think, but you want to be ready to squash any of them that may get around me or who may rush us from behind. Those stickers of theirs are bad medicine, girl, and we don’t want to take any chances at all of getting stuck again.’

  ‘I’ll say we don’t!’ she agreed feelingly, and Seaton started off over the now unencumbered ground. ‘Wait a minute, Dick – where are you, anyway? I can’t see you at all!’

  ‘That’s right, too. Never thought of it, but there’s no light. The glimmer of those plants is pretty faint at best, and doesn’t reach out here at all. We’d better hold hands, I guess, until we get close enough to the works out there so that we can see what we’re doing and what’s going on.’

  ‘But I’ve got only two hands – I’m not a hippocampus – and they’re both full of doors and clubs and things. But maybe I can carry this shield under my arm – it isn’t heavy – there, where are you, anyway?’

  Seeking hands found each other, and, hand in hand, the two set out boldly toward the scene of activity so starkly revealed in the center of that vast circle of darkness. So appalling was the darkness that it was a thing tangible – palpable. Seaton could not see his companion, could not see the weapons and the shield he bore, could not even faintly discern the very ground upon which he walked. Yet he plunged forward, almost dragging the girl along bodily, eyes fixed upon the bluely gleaming circle of structures which was his goal.

  ‘But Dick!’ Margaret panted. ‘Let’s not go so fast; I can’t see a thing – not even my hand right in front of my eyes – and I’m afraid we’ll bump into something – anything!’

  ‘We’ve got to snap it up, Peg,’ the man replied, not slackening his pace in the slightest, ‘and there’s nothing very big between us and the Skylark, or we could see it against those lights. We may stumble over something, of course, but it’ll be soft enough so that it won’t hurt us any. But suppose that another night clamps down on us before we get out there?’

  ‘Oh, that’s right; it did come awfully suddenly,’ and Margaret leaped ahead; dread of the abysmally horrible hypernight so far outweighing her natural fear of unseen obstacles in her path that the man was hard put to it to keep up with her. ‘Suppose they’ll know we’re coming?’

  ‘Maybe – probably – I don’t know. I don’t imagine they can see us, but since we cannot understand anything about them, it’s quite possible that they may have other senses that we know nothing about. They’ll have to spot us mighty quick, though, if they expect to do themselves any good.’

  The hypermen could not see them, but it was soon made evident that the weird beings had indeed, in some unknown fashion, been warned of their coming. Mighty searchlights projected great beams of livid blue light, beams which sought eagerly the human beings – probing, questing, searching.

  As he perceived the beams Seaton knew that the hypermen could not see without lights any better than he could; and knowing what to expect, he grinned savagely into the darkness as he threw an arm around Margaret and spoke – or thought – to her.

  ‘One of those beams’ll find us pretty quick, and they may send something along it. If so, and if I yell jump, do it quick. Straight up; high, wide, and handsome – jump!’

  For even as he spoke, one of the stabbing beams of light found them and had stopped full upon them. And almost instantly had come flashing along that beam a horde of hypermen, armed with peculiar weapons at whose use the Terrestrials could not even guess.

  But also almost instantly had Seaton and Margaret jumped – jumped with the full power of Earthly muscles which, opposed by only the feeble gravity of hyperland, had given their bodies such a velocity that to the eyes of the hypermen their intended captives had simply and instantly disappeared.

  ‘They knew we were there, all right, some way or other – maybe our mass jarred the ground – but they apparently can’t see us without lights, and that gives us a break,’ Seaton remarked conversationally, as they soared interminably upward. ‘We ought to come down just about where that tallest derrick is – right where we can go to work on them.’

  But the scientist was mistaken in thinking that the hypermen had discovered them through tremors of the ground. For the searching cones of light were baffled only for seconds; then, guided by some sense or by some mechanism unknown and unknowable to any three-dimensional intelligence, they darted aloft and were once more outlining the fleeing Terrestrials in the bluish glare of their livid radiance. And upward, along those illuminated ways, darted those living airplanes, the hypermen; and this time the man and the woman, with all their incredible physical strength could not leap aside.

  ‘Not so good,’ said Seaton, ‘better we’d stayed on the ground, maybe. They could trace us, after all; and of course this air is their natural element. But now that we’re up here, we’ll just have to fight them off; back to back, until we land.’

  ‘But how can we stay back to back?’ asked Margar
et sharply. ‘We’ll drift apart at our first effort. Then they’ll be able to get behind us and they’ll have us again!’

  ‘That’s so, too – never thought of that angle, Peg. You’ve got a belt on, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fine! Loosen it up and I’ll run mine through it. The belts and an ankle-and-knee lock’ll hold us together and in position to play tunes on those sea-horses’ ribs. Keep your shield up and keep that grating swinging and we’ll lay them like a carpet.’

  Seaton had not been idle while he was talking, and when the attackers drew near, vicious tridents outthrust, they encountered an irresistibly driven wall of crushing, tearing dismembering, and all-destroying metal. Back to back the two unknown monstrosities floated through the air; interlaced belts holding their vulnerable backs together, gripped legs holding their indestructibly dense and hard bodies in alignment.

  For a time the four-dimensional creatures threw themselves upon the Terrestrials, only to be hurled away upon all sides, chopped literally to bits. For Margaret protected Seaton’s back, and he himself took care of the space in front of him, to right and to left of them, above and below them; driving the closely spaced latticework of his metal grating throughout all that space so viciously and so furiously that it seemed to be omnipresent as well as omnipotent. For a time the hypermen tried, as has been said; only to be sliced by that fearsomely irresistible weapon into such grisly fragments that the appalled survivors of the hyper-horde soon abandoned the futile and suicidal attack.

  Then, giving up hope of recapturing the specimens alive, the hyperbeings turned upon them their lethal beams. Soft, pinkly glowing beams which turned to a deep red and then flamed through the spectrum and into the violet as they were found to have no effect upon the human bodies. But the death rays of the hypermen, whatever the frequency, were futile – the massed battalions at the pit’s mouth were as impotent as had been the armed forces of the great hypercity, whose denizens had also failed either to hold or to kill the supernatural Terrestrials.

  During the hand-to-hand encounter the two had passed the apex of their flight; and now, bathed in the varicolored beams, they floated gently downward, directly toward the great derrick which Seaton had pointed out as marking their probable landing place. In fact, they grazed one of the massive corner members of the structure; but Seaton interposed his four-dimensional shield and, although the derrick trembled noticeably under the impact, neither he nor Margaret was hurt as they drifted lightly to the ground.

  ‘Just like jumping off of and back into a feather bed!’ Seaton exulted, as he straightened up, disconnected the hampering belts, and guided Margaret toward the vast hole in the ground, unopposed now save for the still-flaring beams. ‘Wonder if any more of them want to argue the right of way with us? Guess not.’

  ‘But how are we going to get down there?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘Fall down – or, better yet, we’ll slide down those chains they’ve already got installed. You’d better carry all this junk, and I’ll kind of carry you. That way you won’t have to do anything – just take a ride.’

  Scarcely encumbered by the girl’s weight, Seaton stepped outward to the great chain cables, and hand under hand he went down, down past the huge lifting cradles which had been placed around the massive globe of arenak.

  ‘But we’ll go right through it – there’s nothing to stop us in this dimension!’ protested Margaret.

  ‘No, we won’t; and yes, there is,’ Seaton replied. ‘We swing past it and down, around onto level footing, on this loose end of chain – like this, see?’ and they were once more in the control room of Skylark Two.

  There stood Dorothy, Crane, and Shiro, exactly as they had left them so long before. Still held in the grip of the tridents, they were silent, immobile; their eyes were vacant and expressionless. Neither Dorothy nor Crane gave any sign of recognition, neither seemed even to realize that their loved ones, gone so long, had at last returned.

  13

  The Return to Space

  Seaton’s glance leaped to his beloved Dorothy. Drooping yet rigid she stood there, unmoving, corpselike. Accustomed now to seeing four-dimensional things by consciously examining only their three-dimensional surfaces, he perceived instantly the waxen, utterly inhuman vacuity of her normally piquant and vivacious face – perceived it, and at that perception went mad.

  Clutching convulsively the length of hyperchain by which he had swung into the control room he leaped, furious and elementally savage; forgetting weapons and armor, heedless of risk and of odds, mastered completely by a seething, searing urge to wreak vengeance upon the creature who had so terribly outraged his Dorothy, the woman in whom centered his universe.

  So furious was his action that the chain snapped apart at the wall of the control room; so rapid was it that the hyperguard had no time to move, nor even to think.

  That guard had been peacefully controlling with his trident the paralyzed prisoner. All had been quiet and calm. Suddenly – in an instant – had appeared the two monstrosities who had been taken to the capital. And in that same fleeting instant one of the monsters was leaping at him. And ahead of that monster there came lashing out an enormous anchor chain, one of whose links of solid steel no ordinary mortal could lift; an anchor chain hurtling toward him with a velocity and a momentum upon that tenuous hyperworld unthinkable.

  The almost-immaterial flesh of the hyperman could no more withstand that fiercely driven mass of metal than can a human body ward off an armor-piercing projectile in full flight. Through his body the great chain tore; cutting, battering, rending it into ghastly, pulpily indescribable fragments unrecognizable as ever having been anything animate. Indeed, so fiercely had the chain been urged that the metal itself could not stand the strain. Five links broke off at the climax of the chain’s blacksnake-like stroke, and, accompanying the bleeding scraps of flesh that had been the guard, tore on past the walls of the space ship and out into the hypervoid.

  The guard holding his tridents in Crane and Shiro had not much more warning. He saw his fellow obliterated, true; but that was all he lived to see, and he had time to do exactly nothing. One more quick flip of Seaton’s singularly efficient weapon and the remains of that officer also disappeared into hyperspace. More of the chain went along, this time, but that did not matter. Dropping to the floor the remaining links of his hyperflail, Seaton sprang to Dorothy, reaching her side just as the punishing trident, released by the slain guard, fell away from her.

  She recovered her senses instantly and turned a surprised face to the man, who, incoherent in his relief that she was alive and apparently unharmed, was taking her into his arms.

  ‘Why, surely, Dick, I’m all right – how could I be any other way?’ she answered his first agonized question in amazement. She studied his worn face in puzzled wonder and went on: ‘But you certainly are not. What has happened, dear, anyway; and how could it have, possibly?’

  ‘I hated like sin to be gone so long, Dimples, but it couldn’t be helped,’ Seaton, in his eagerness to explain his long absence, did not even notice the peculiar implications in his wife’s speech and manner. ‘You see, it was a long trip, and we didn’t get a chance to break away from those meat hooks of theirs until after they got us into their city and examined us. Then, when we finally did break away, we found that we couldn’t travel at night. Their days are bad enough, with this thick blue light, but during the nights there’s absolutely no light at all, of any kind. No moon, no stars, no nothing …’

  ‘Nights! What are you talking about, Dick, anyway?’ Dorothy had been trying, to interrupt since his first question and had managed at last to break in. ‘Why, you haven’t been gone at all, not even a second. We’ve all been right here, all the time!’

  ‘Huh?’ ejaculated Seaton. ‘Are you completely nuts, Red-Top, or what …?’

  ‘Dick and I were gone at least a week, Dottie,’ Margaret, who had been embracing Crane, interrupted in turn, ‘and it was awful!’

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nbsp; ‘Just a minute, folks!’ Seaton listened intently and stared upward. ‘We’ll have to let the explanations ride a while longer. I thought they wouldn’t give up that easy – here they come! I don’t know how long we were gone – it seemed like a darn long time – but it was long enough so that I learned how to mop up on these folks, believe me! You take that sword and buckler of Peg’s, Mart. They don’t look so hot, but they’re big medicine in these parts. All we’ve got to do is swing them fast enough to keep those stingaroos of theirs out of our gizzards and we’re all set. Be careful not to hit too hard, though, or you’ll bust that grating into forty pieces – it’s hyperstuff, nowhere near as solid as anything we’re used to. All it’ll stand is about normal fly-swatting stroke, but that’s enough to knock any of these fantailed humming birds into an outside loop. Ah, they’ve got guns or something! Duck down, girls, so we can cover you with these shields; and, Shiro, you might pull that piece of chain apart and throw the links at them – that’ll be good for what ails them!’

  The hypermen appeared in the control room, and battle again was joined. This time, however, the natives did not rush to the attack with their tridents; nor did they employ their futile rays of death. They had guns, shooting pellets of metal; they had improvised, crossbow-like slings and catapults; they had spears and javelins made of their densest materials, which their strongest men threw with all their power. But pellets and spears alike thudded harmlessly against four-dimensional shields – shields once the impenetrable, unbreakable doors of their mightiest prison – and the masses of metal and stone vomited forth by the catapults were caught by Seaton and Crane and hurled back through the ranks of the attackers with devastating effect. Shiro also was doing untold damage with his bits of chain and with such other items of four-dimensional matter as came to hand.