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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  ‘How do you like being a heroine, Dot?’ Seaton asked one evening as the two women returned from an unusually demonstrative reception in another city.

  ‘We just revel in it, since we didn’t do any of the real work – it’s just too perfectly gorgeous for words,’ Dorothy replied shamelessly. ‘Especially Peggy.’ She eyed staid Margaret mischievously and winked furtively at Seaton. ‘Why, you ought to see her – she could just simply roll it up on a fork and eat it, as though it were that much soft fudge!’

  Since the scientific and mechanical details of the construction of a fifth-order projector have been given in full elsewhere there is no need to repeat them here. Seaton built his neutronium lens in the core of the nearby white dwarf star, precisely as Rovol had done it from distant Norlamin. He brought it to Valeron and around it there began to come into being a duplicate of the immense projector which the Terrestrials had been obliged to leave behind when they abandoned gigantic Skylark Three to plunge through the fourth dimension in tiny Two.

  ‘Maybe it’s none of my business, Radnor,’ Seaton turned to the Valeronian curiously during a lull in their work, ‘but how come you’re still simply shooing away those Chloran vessels by making them put out their zones of force? Why didn’t you hop over there on your projector and blow their whole planet over into the next solar system? I would have done that long ago if it had been me, I think.’

  ‘We did visit Chlora once, with something like that in mind, but our attempt failed lamentably,’ Radnor admitted sheepishly. ‘You remember that peculiar special sense, that mental force that Siblin tried to describe to you? Well, it was altogether too strong for us. My father, possessing one of the strongest minds of Valeron, was in the chair, but they mastered him so completely that we had to recall the projection by cutting off the power to prevent them from taking from his mind by force the methods of transmission which you taught us and which we were then using.’

  ‘Hmmm! So that’s it, huh?’ Seaton was greatly interested. ‘As soon as I get this fifth-order outfit done I’ll have to see what it can do about them.’

  True to his word, Seaton’s first use of the new mechanism was to assume the offensive. He first sought out and destroyed the Chloran structure then in space – now an easy task, since zones of force, while impenetrable to any ether-borne phenomena, offer no resistance whatever to forces of the fifth order, propagated as they are in that inner medium, the subether. Then, with the Quedrins standing by, to cut off the power in case he should be overcome, he invaded the sanctum sanctorum of all Chlora – the private office of the Supreme Great One himself – and stared unabashed and unaffected into the enormous ‘eye’ of the monstrous ruler of the planet.

  There ensued a battle royal. Had mental forces been visible, it would have been a spectacular meeting indeed! Larger and larger grew the ‘eye’ until it was transmitting all the terrific power generated by that frightful, visibly palpitating brain. But Seaton was not of Valeron, nor was he handicapped by the limitations of a fourth-order projector. He was now being projected upon a full beam of the fifth, by a mechanism able to do full justice to his stupendously composite brain.

  The part of that brain he was now employing was largely the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of ancient Norlamin; and from it he was hurling along that beam the irresistible sum total of mental power accumulated by ten thousand generations of the most profound students of the mind that our galaxy has ever known.

  The creature, realizing that at long last it had met its mental master, must have emitted radiations of distress, for into the room came crowding hordes of the monstrosities, each of whom sought to add his own mind to those already opposing the intruder. In vain – all their power could not turn Seaton’s penetrating glare aside, nor could it wrest from that glare’s unbreakable grip the mind of the tortured Great One.

  And now, mental means failing, they resorted to the purely physical. Hand rays of highest power blasted at that figure uselessly; fiercely driven bars, spears, axes, and all other weapons rebounded from it without leaving a mark upon it, rebounded bent, broken, and twisted. For that figure was in no sense matter as we understand the term. It was pure force – force made palpable and coherent by the incomprehensible power of disintegrating matter; force against which any possible application of mechanical power would be precisely as effective as would wafted thistledown against Gibraltar.

  Thus the struggle was brief. Paying no attention to anything, mental or physical, that the other monstrosities could bring to bear, Seaton compelled his victim to assume the shape of the heretofore-despised human being. Then, staring straight into that quivering brain through those hate-filled, flaming eyes, he spoke aloud, the better to drive home his thought:

  ‘Learn, so-called Great One, once and for all, that when you attack any race of humanity anywhere, you attack not only that one race, but all the massed humanity of all the planets of all the galaxies! As you have already observed, I am not of the planet Valeron, nor of this solar system, nor even of this galaxy; but I and my fellows have come to the aid of this race of humanity whom you were bold enough to attack.

  ‘I have proved that we are your masters, mentally as well as scientifically and mechanically. Those of you who have been attacking Valeron have been destroyed, ships and crews alike. Those en route there have been destroyed in space. So also shall be destroyed any and all expeditions you may launch beyond the limits of your own foul atmosphere.

  ‘Since even such a repellent civilization as yours must have its place in the great Scheme of Things, we do not intend to destroy your planet nor such of your people as remain upon it or near it, unless such destruction shall become necessary for the welfare of the human race. While we are considering what we shall do about you, I advise you to heed well this warning!’

  20

  The First Universe is Mapped

  The four Tellurians had discussed at some length the subject of Chlora and her outlandish population.

  ‘It looks as though you were perched upon the horns of a first-class dilemma,’ Dorothy remarked at last. ‘If you let them alone there is no telling what harm they will do to these people here, and yet it would be a perfect shame to kill them all – they can’t help being what they are. Do you suppose you can figure a way out of it, Dick?’

  ‘Maybe – I’ve got a kind of hunch, but it hasn’t jelled into a workable idea yet. It’s tied in with the sixth-order projector that we’ll have to have, anyway, to find our way back home. Until we get that working I guess we’ll just let the amoebuses stew in their own juice.’

  ‘Well, and then what?’ Dorothy prompted.

  ‘I told you it’s nebulous yet, with a lot of essential details yet to be filled in …’ Seaton paused, then went on, doubtfully: ‘It’s pretty wild – I don’t know whether …’

  ‘Now you must tell us about it, Dick,’ Margaret urged.

  ‘I’ll say you’ve got to,’ Dorothy agreed. ‘You’ve had a lot of ideas wild enough to make any sane creature’s head spin around in circles, but not one of them was so hair-raising that you were backward in talking about it. This one must be the prize brainstorm of the universe – spill it to Red-Top!’

  ‘All right, but remember that it’s only half-baked and that you asked for it. I’m doping out a way to send them back to their own solar system, planet and all.’

  ‘What!’ exclaimed Margaret.

  Dorothy simply whistled – a long, low whistle highly eloquent of incredulity.

  ‘Maintenance of temperature? Time? Power? Control?’ Crane, the imperturbable, picked out unerringly the four key factors of the stupendous feat.

  ‘Your first three objections can be taken care of easily enough,’ Seaton replied positively. ‘No loss of temperature is possible through a zone of force – our own discovery. We can stop time with a stasis – we learned that from watching those four-dimensional folks work. The power of cosmic radiation is practically infinite and eternal – we learned how to use tha
t from pure intellectuals. Control is the sticker, since it calls for computations and calculations at present impossible; but I believe that when we get our mechanical brain done, it will be able to work out even such a problem as that.’

  ‘What d’you mean, mechanical brain?’ demanded Dorothy.

  ‘The thing that is going to run our sixth-order projector,’ Seaton explained. ‘You see, it’ll be altogether too big and too complicated to be controlled manually, and thought – human thought, at least – is on one band of the sixth order. Therefore the logical thing to do is to build an artificial brain capable of thinking on all bands of the order instead of only one, to handle the whole projector. See?’

  ‘No,’ declared Dorothy promptly, ‘but maybe I will, though, when I see it work. What’s next on the program?’

  ‘Well, it’s going to be quite a job to build that brain and we’d better be getting at it, since without it there’ll be no Skylark Four …’

  ‘Dick, I object!’ Dorothy protested vigorously. ‘The Skylark of Space was a nice name …’

  ‘Sure, you’d think so, since you named her yourself,’ interrupted Seaton in turn, with his disarming grin.

  ‘Keep still a minute, Dickie, and let me finish. Skylark Two was pretty bad, but I stood it; and by gritting my teeth all out of shape, I did manage to keep from squawking about Skylark Three, but I certainly am not going to stand for Skylark Four. Why, just think of giving a name like that to such a wonderful thing as she is going to be – as different as can be from anything that has ever been dreamed of before – just as though she were going to be simply one more of a long series of cup-challenging motor boats or something! Why, it’s – it’s just too perfectly idiotic for words!’

  ‘But she’s got to be some kind of a Skylark. Dot – you know that.’

  ‘Yes, but give her a name that means something – that sounds like something. Name her after this planet, say – Skylark of Valeron – how’s that?’

  ‘O.K. by me. How about it, Peg? Mart?’

  The Cranes agreed to the suggestion with enthusiasm and Seaton went on:

  ‘Well, an onion by any other name would smell as sweet, you know, and it’s going to be just as much of a job to build the Skylark of Valeron as it would have been to build Skylark Four. Therefore, as I have said before and am about to say again, we’d better get at it.’

  The fifth-order projector was moved to the edge of the city, since nowhere within its limits was there room for the structure to be built, and the two men seated themselves at its twin consoles and their hands flew over its massed banks of keyboards. For a few minutes nothing happened; then on the vast, level plain before them – a plain which had been a lake of fluid lava a few weeks before – there sprang into being an immense foundation structure of trussed and latticed girder frames of inoson, the hardest, strongest, and toughest form of matter possible to molecular structure. One square mile of ground it covered and it was strong enough, apparently, to support a world.

  When the foundation was finished, Seaton left the framework to Crane, while he devoted himself to filling the interstices and compartments as fast as they were formed. He first built one tiny structure of coils, fields, and lenses of force – one cell of the gigantic mechanical brain which was to be. He then made others, slightly different in tune, and others, and others.

  He then set forces to duplicating these cells, forces which automatically increased in number until they were making and setting five hundred thousand cells per second, all that his connecting forces could handle. And everywhere, it seemed, there were projectors, fields of force, receptors and converters of cosmic energy, zones of force, and many various-shaped lenses and geometric figures of neutronium incased in sheaths of faidon.

  From each cell led tiny insulated wires, so fine as to be almost invisible, to the ‘nerve centers’ and to one of the millions of projectors. From these in turn ran other wires, joining together to form larger and larger strands until finally several hundred enormous cables, each larger than a man’s body, reached and merged into an enormous, glittering, hemispherical, mechano-electrical inner brain.

  For forty long Valeronian days – more than a thousand of our Earthly hours – the work went on ceaselessly, day and night. Then it ceased of itself and there dangled from the center of the glowing, gleaming hemisphere a something which is only very vaguely described by calling it either a heavily wired helmet or an incredibly complex headset. It was to be placed over Seaton’s head, it is true – it was a headset, but one raised to the millionth power.

  It was the energizer and controller of the inner brain, which was in turn the activating agency of that entire cubic mile of as yet inert substance, that assemblage of thousands of billions of cells, so soon to become the most stupendous force ever to be conceived by the mind of man.

  When that headset appeared Seaton donned it and sat motionless. For hour after hour he sat there, his eyes closed, his face white and strained, his entire body eloquent of a concentration so intense as to be a veritable trance. At the end of four hours Dorothy came up resolutely, but Crane waved her back.

  ‘This is far and away the most crucial point of the work, Dorothy,’ he cautioned her gravely. ‘While I do not think that anything short of physical violence could distract his attention now, it is best not to run any risk of disturbing him. An interruption now would mean that everything would have to be done over again from the beginning.’

  Something over an hour later Seaton opened his eyes, stretched prodigiously, and got up. He was white and trembling, but tremendously relieved and triumphant.

  ‘Why, Dick, what have you been doing? You look like a ghost!’ Dorothy was now an all-solicitous wife.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Rufus, and if you don’t believe that it’s hard work you’d better try it some time! I won’t have to do it any more though – got a machine to do my thinking for me now.’

  ‘Oh, is it all done?’

  ‘Nowhere near, but it’s far enough along so that it can finish itself. I’ve just been telling it what to do.’

  ‘Telling it! Why, you talk as though it were human!’

  ‘Human? It’s a lot more than that. It can outthink and outperform even those pure intellectuals – “and that,” as the poet feelingly remarked, “is going some”! And if you think that riding in that fifth-order projector was a thrill, wait until you see what this one can do. Think of it’ – even the mind that had conceived the thing was awed – ‘it is an extension of my own brain, using waves that traverse even intergalactic distances practically instantaneously. With it I can see anything I want to look at, anywhere; can hear anything I want to hear. It can build, make, do, or perform anything that my brain can think of.’

  ‘That is all true, of course,’ Crane said slowly, his sober mien dampening Dorothy’s ardor instantly, ‘but still – I can not help wondering …’ He gazed at Seaton thoughtfully.

  ‘I know it, Mart, and I’m working up my speed as fast as I possibly can,’ Seaton answered the unspoken thought, rather than the words. ‘But let them come – we’ll take ’em. I’ll have everything on the trips, ready to spring.’

  ‘What are you two talking about?’ Dorothy demanded.

  ‘Mart pointed out to me the regrettable fact that my mental processes are in the same class as the proverbial molasses in January, or as a troop of old and decrepit snails racing across a lawn. I agreed with him, but added that I would have my thoughts all thunk up ahead of time when the pure intellectuals tackle us – which they certainly will.’

  ‘Slow!’ she exclaimed. ‘When you planned the whole Skylark of Valeron and nobody knows what else, in five hours?’

  ‘Yes, dear heart, slow. Remember when we first met our dear departed friend Eight, back in the original Skylark? You saw him materialize exact duplicates of each of our bodies, clear down to the molecular structures of our chemistry, in less than one second, from a cold standing start. Compared to that job, the one I have just done is elemen
tary. It took me over five hours – he could have done it in nothing flat.

  ‘However, don’t let it bother you too much. I’ll never be able to equal their speed, since I’ll not live enough millions of years to get the required practice, but our being material gives us big advantages in other respects that Mart isn’t mentioning because, as usual, he is primarily concerned with our weaknesses – yes? No?’

  ‘Yes; I will concede that being material does yield advantages which may perhaps make up for our slower rate of thinking,’ Crane conceded.

  ‘Hear that? If he admits that much, you know that we’re as good as in, right now,’ Seaton declared. ‘Well, while our new brain is finishing itself up, we might as well go back to the hall and chase the Chlorans back where they belong – the Brain worked out the equations for me this morning.’

  From the ancient records of Valeron, Radnor and the Bardyle had secured complete observational data of the cataclysm, which had made the task of finding the present whereabouts of the Chlorans’ original sun a simple task. The calculations and computations involved in the application of forces of precisely the required quantities to insure the correct final orbit were complex in the extreme; but, as Seaton had foretold, they had presented no insurmountable difficulties to the vast resources of the Brain.

  Therefore, everything in readiness, the two Terrestrial scientists surrounded the inimical planet with a zone of force and with a stasis of time. They then erected force-control stations around it, adjusted with such delicacy and precision that they would direct the planet into the exact orbit it had formerly occupied around its parent sun. Then, at the instant of correct velocity and position, the control stations would go out of existence and the forces would disappear.

  As the immense ball of dazzlingly opaque mirror which now hid the unwanted world swung away with ever-increasing velocity, the Bardyle, who had watched the proceedings in incredulous wonder, heaved a profound sigh of relaxation.