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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  ‘What a relief – what a relief!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘How long will it take?’ asked Dorothy curiously.

  ‘Quite a while – something over four hundred years of our time. But don’t let it bother you – they won’t know a thing about it. When the forces let go they’ll simply go right on, from exactly where they left off, without realizing that any time at all has lapsed – in fact, for them, no time at all shall have lapsed. All of a sudden they will find themselves circling around a different sun, that’s all.

  ‘If their old records are clear enough they may be able to recognize it as their original sun and they’ll probably do a lot of wondering as to how they got back there. One instant they were in a certain orbit around this sun here, the next instant they will be in another orbit around an entirely different sun! They’ll know, of course, that we did it, but they’ll have a sweet job figuring out how and what we did – some of it is really deep stuff. Also, they will be a few hundred years off in their time, but since nobody in the world will know it, it won’t make any difference.’

  ‘How perfectly weird!’ Dorothy exclaimed. ‘Just think of losing a four-hundred-year chunk right out of the middle of your life and not even knowing it!’

  ‘I would rather think of the arrest of development,’ meditated Crane. ‘Of the opportunity of comparing the evolution of the planets already there with that of the returned wanderer.’

  ‘Yeah, it would be interesting – it’s a shame we won’t be alive then,’ Seaton responded, ‘but in the meantime we’ve got a lot of work to do for ourselves. Now that we’ve got this mess straightened out I think we had better tell these folks goodbye, get into Two, and hop out to where Dot’s Skylark of Valeron is going to materialize.’

  The farewell to the people of Valeron was brief, but sincere.

  ‘This is in no sense goodbye,’ Crane concluded. ‘By the aid of these newly discovered forces of the sixth order there shall soon be worked out a system of communication by means of which all the inhabited planets of the galaxies shall be linked as closely as are now the cities of any one world.’

  Skylark Two shot upward and outward, to settle into an orbit well outside that of Valeron. Seaton then sent his projection back to the capital city, fitted over his imaged head the controller of the inner brain, and turned to Crane with a grin.

  ‘That’s timing it, old son – she finished herself up less than an hour ago. Better cluster around and watch this, folks, it’s going to be good.’

  At Seaton’s signal the structure which was to be the nucleus of the new space traveler lifted effortlessly into the air its millions of tons of dead weight and soared, as lightly as little Two had done, out into the airless void. Taking up a position a few hundred miles away from the Terrestrial cruiser, it shot out a spherical screen of force to clear the ether of chance bits of debris. Then inside that screen there came into being a structure of gleaming inoson, so vast in size that to the startled onlookers it appeared almost of planetary dimensions.

  ‘Good heavens – it’s stupendous!’ Dorothy exclaimed. ‘What did you boys make it so big for – just to show us you could, or what?’

  ‘Hardly! She’s just as small as she can be and still do the work. You see, to find our own galaxy we will have to project a beam to a distance greater than any heretofore assigned diameter of the universe, and to control it really accurately its working base and the diameter of its hour and declination circles would each have to be something like four light-years long. Since a ship of that size is of course impracticable, Mart and I did some figuring and decided that with circles one thousand kilometers in diameter we could chart galaxies accurately enough to find the one we’re looking for – if you think of it, you’ll realize that there are a lot of hundredth-millimeter marks around the circumference of circles of that size – and that they would probably be big enough to hold a broadcasting projection somewhere near a volume of space as large as that occupied by the Green System. Therefore we built the Skylark of Valeron just large enough to contain those thousand-kilometer circles.’

  As Skylark Two approached the looming planetoid the doors of vast airlocks opened. Fifty of those massive gates swung aside before her and closed behind her before she swam free in the cool, sweet air and bright artificial sunlight of the interior. She then floated along above an immense grassy park toward two well-remembered and beloved buildings.

  ‘Oh, Dick!’ Dorothy squealed. ‘There’s our house – and Martin’s! It’s funny, though, to see them side by side. Are they the same inside, too – and what’s that funny little low building between them?’

  ‘They duplicate the originals exactly, except for some items of equipment which would be useless here. The building between them is the control room, in which are the master headsets of the Brain and its lookouts. The Brain itself is what you would think of as underground – inside the shell of the planetoid.’

  The small vessel came lightly to a landing and the wanderers disembarked upon the close-clipped, springy turf of a perfect lawn. Dorothy flexed her knees in surprise.

  ‘How come we aren’t weightless, Dick?’ she demanded. This gravity isn’t – can’t be – natural. I’ll bet you did that too!’

  ‘Mart and I together did, sure. We learned a lot from the intellectuals and a lot more in hyperspace, but we could neither derive the fundamental equations nor apply what knowledge we already had until we finished this sixth-order outfit. Now, though, we can give you all the gravity you want – or as little – whenever and wherever you want it.’

  ‘Oh marvelous – this is glorious, boys!’ Dorothy breathed. ‘I have always just simply despised weightlessness. Now, with these houses and everything, we can have a perfectly wonderful time!’

  ‘Here’s the dining room,’ Seaton said briskly. ‘And here’s the headset you put on to order dinner or whatever is appropriate to the culinary department. You will observe that the kitchen of this house is purely ornamental – never to be used unless you want to.’

  ‘Just a minute, Dick.’ Dorothy’s voice was tensely serious. ‘I have been really scared ever since you told me about the power of that Brain, and the more you tell me of it the worse scared I get. Think of the awful damage a wild, chance thought would do – and the more an ordinary mortal tries to avoid any thought the surer he is to think it, you know that. Really, I’m not ready for that yet, dear – I’d much rather not go near the headset.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart.’ His arm tightened around her. ‘But you didn’t let me finish. These sets around the house control forces which are capable of nothing except duties pertaining to the part of the house in which they are. This dining-room outfit, for instance, is exactly the same as the Norlaminian one you used so much, except that it is much simpler.

  ‘Instead of using a lot of keyboards and force-tubes, you simply think into that helmet what you want for dinner and it appears. Think that you want the table cleared and it is cleared – dishes and all simply vanish. Think of anything else you want done around this room and it’s done – that’s all there is to it.

  ‘To relieve your mind I’ll explain some more. Mart and I both realized that that Brain could very easily become the most terrible, the most frightfully destructive thing that the universe has ever seen. Therefore, with two exceptions, every controller on this planetoid is of a strictly limited type. Of the two master controls, which are unlimited and very highly reactive, one responds only to Crane’s thoughts, the other only to mine. As soon as we get some loose time we are going to build a couple of auxiliaries, with automatic stops against stray thoughts, to break you girls in on – we know as well as you do, Red-Top, that you haven’t had enough practice yet to take an unlimited control.’

  ‘I’ll say I haven’t!’ she agreed feelingly. ‘I feel a lot better now – I’m sure I can handle the rest of these things very nicely.’

  ‘Sure you can, Well, let’s call the Cranes and go into the control room,’ Seaton suggested. ‘The quicker w
e get started the quicker we’ll get done.’

  Accustomed as she was to the banks and tiers of keyboards, switches, dials, meters, and other operating paraphernalia of the control rooms of the previous Skylarks, Dorothy was taken aback when she passed through the thick, heavily insulated door into that of the Skylark of Valeron. For there were four gray walls, a gray ceiling, and a thick gray rug. There were low, broad double chairs and headsets. There was nothing else.

  ‘This is your seat, Dottie, here beside me, and this is your headset – it’s just a visiset, so you can see what is going on, not a controller,’ he hastened to reassure her. ‘You have a better illusion of seeing if your eyes are open, that’s why everything is neutral in color. But better still for you girls, we’ll turn off the lights.’

  The illumination, which had seemed to pervade the entire room instead of emanating from any definite sources, faded out; but in spite of the fact that the room was in absolute darkness Dorothy saw with a clarity and a depth of vision impossible to any Earthly eyes. She saw at one and the same time, with infinite precision of detail, the houses and their contents; the whole immense sphere of the planetoid, inside and out; Valeron and her sister planets circling their sun; and the stupendous full sphere of the vaulted heavens.

  She knew that her husband was motionless at her side, yet she saw him materialize in the control room of Skylark Two. There he seized the cabinet which contained the space chart of the Fenachrone – that library of films portraying all the galaxies visible to the wonderfully powerful telescopes and projectors of that horrible but highly scientific race.

  That cabinet became instantly a manifold scanner, all its reels flashing through as one. Simultaneously there appeared in the air above the machine a three-dimensional model of all the galaxies there listed. A model upon such a scale that the First Galaxy was but a tiny lenticular pellet, although it was still disproportionately large; upon such a scale that the whole vast sphere of space covered by the hundreds of Fenachrone scrolls was compressed into a volume but little larger than a basketball. And yet each tiny galactic pellet bore its own peculiarly individual identifying marks.

  Then Dorothy felt as though she herself had been hurled out into the unthinkable reaches of space. In a fleeting instant of time she passed through thousands of star clusters, and not only knew the declination, right ascension, and distance of each galaxy, but saw it duplicated in miniature in its exact place in an immense, three-dimensional model in the hollow interior of the space-flyer in which she actually was.

  The mapping went on. To human brains and hands the task would have been one of countless years. Now, however, it was to prove only a matter of hours, for this was no human brain. Not only was it reactive and effective at distances to be expressed intelligibly in light-years or parsecs; because of the immeasurable sixth-order velocity of its carrier wave it was equally effective across reaches of space so incomprehensibly vast that the rays of visible light emitted at the birth of a sun so far away would reach the point of observation only after that sun had lived through its entire cycle of life and had disappeared.

  ‘Well, that’s about enough of that for you, for a while,’ Seaton remarked in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘A little of that stuff goes a long ways at first – you have to get used to it.’

  ‘I’ll say you do I Why … I … it …’ Dorothy paused, even her ready tongue at a loss for words.

  ‘You can’t describe it in words – don’t try,’ Seaton advised. ‘Let’s go outdoors and watch the model grow.’

  To the awe, if not to the amazement of the observers, the model had already begun to assume a lenticular pattern. Galaxies, then, really were arranged in general as were the stars composing them; there really were universes, and they really were lenticular – the vague speculations of the hardiest and most exploratory cosmic thinkers were being confirmed.

  For hour after hour the model continued to grow and Seaton’s face began to take on a look of grave concern. At last, however, when the chart was three fourths done or more, a deep-toned bell clanged out the signal for which he had been waiting – the news that there was now being plotted a configuration of galaxies identical with that portrayed by the space chart of the Fenachrone.

  ‘Gosh!’ Seaton sighed hugely. ‘I was beginning to be afraid that we had escaped clear out of our own universe, and that would have been bad – very, very bad, believe me! The rest of the mapping can wait – let’s go!’

  Followed by the others he dashed into the control room, threw on his helmet, and hurled a projection into the now easily recognizable First Galaxy. He found the Green System without difficulty, but he could not hold it. It was so far away that the utmost delicacy of control of which the gigantic sixth-order installation was capable could not keep the viewpiont from leaping erratically, in fantastic bounds of hundreds of millions of miles, all through and around its objective.

  But Seaton had half expected this development and was prepared for it. He had already sent out a broadcasting projection; and now, upon a band of frequencies wide enough to affect every receiving instrument in use throughout the Green System and using power sufficient to overwhelm any transmitter, however strong, that might be in operation, he sent out in a mighty voice his urgent message to the scientists of Norlamin.

  21

  Dunark takes a Hand

  In the throne room of Kondal, with its gorgeously resplendent jeweled ceiling and jeweled metallic-tapestry walls, there were seated in earnest consultation the three most powerful men of the planet Osnome – Roban, the Emperor; Dunark, the Crown Prince; and Tarnan, the Commander-in-Chief. Their ‘clothing’ was the ordinary Osnomian regalia of straps, chains, and metallic bands, all thickly bestudded with blazing gems and for the most part supporting the full assortment of devastatingly powerful hand weapons without which any man of that race would have felt stark naked. Their fierce green faces were keenly hawk-like; the hard, clean lines of their bare green bodies bespoke the rigid physical training that every Osnomian undergoes from birth until death.

  ‘Father, Tarnan may be right,’ Dunark was saying soberly. ‘We are too savage, too inherently bloodthirsty, too deeply interested in killing, not as a means to some really worthwhile end, but as an end in itself. Seaton the Overlord thinks so, the Norlaminians think so, the Dasorians think so, and I am beginning to think so myself. All really enlightened races look upon us as little better than barbarians, and in part I agree with them. I believe, however, that if we were really to devote ourselves to study and to productive effort we could soon equal or surpass any race in the system, except of course the Norlaminians.’

  ‘There may be something in what you say,’ the emperor admitted dubiously, ‘but it is against all our racial teachings. What, then, of an outlet for the energies of all manhood?’

  ‘Constructive effort instead of destructive,’ argued the karbix. ‘Let them build – study – learn – advance. It is all too true that we are far behind other races of the system in all really important things.’

  ‘But what of Urvan and his people?’ Roban brought up his last and strongest argument. ‘They are as savage as we are, if not more so. As you say, the necessity for continuous warfare ceased with the destruction of Mardonale, but are we to leave our whole planet defenseless against an interplanetary attack from Urvania?’

  ‘They dare not attack us,’ declared Tarnan, ‘any more than we dare attack them. Seaton the Overlord decreed that the people of us two first to attack the other dies root and branch, and we all know that the word of the Overlord is no idle, passing breath.’

  ‘But he has not been seen for long. He may be far away and the Urvanians may decide at any time to launch their fleets against us. However, before we decide this momentous question I suggest that you two pay a visit of state to the court of Urvan. Talk to Urvan and his karbix as you have talked to me, of cooperation and of mutual advancement. If they will cooperate, we will.’

  During the long voyage to Urvania, the third planet of
the fourteenth sun, however, their new ardor cooled perceptibly – particularly that of the younger man – and in Urvan’s palace it became clear that the love of peaceful culture inculcated upon those fierce minds by contact with more humane peoples could not supplant immediately the spirit of strife bred into bone and fiber during thousands of generations of incessant warfare.

  For when the two Osomians sat down with the two Urvanians the very air seemed charged with animosity. Like strange dogs meeting with bared fangs and bristling manes, Osnomian and Urvanian alike fairly radiated hostility. Therefore Tarnan’s suggestions as to cooperation and understanding were decidedly unconvincing, and were received with open scorn.

  ‘Your race may well wish to cooperate with ours,’ sneered the Emperor of Urvania, ‘since but for the threats of that self-styled Overlord, you would have ceased to exist long since. And how do we know where that one is, what he is doing, whether he is paying any attention to us? Probably you have learned that he has left this system entirely and have already planned an attack upon us. In self-defense we shall probably have to wipe out your race to keep you from destroying ours. At any rate your plea is very evidently some underhanded trick of your weak and cowardly race …’

  ‘Weak! Cowardly! Us? You conceited bloated toad!’ stormed Dunark, who had kept himself in check thus far only by sheer power of will. He sprang to his feet, his stool flying backward. ‘Here and now I demand a meeting of honor, if you know the meaning of the word honor.’

  The four enraged men, all drawing weapons, were suddenly swept apart, then clutched and held immovably as a figure of force materialized among them – the form of an aged, white-bearded Norlaminian.

  ‘Peace, children, and silence!’ the image commanded sternly. ‘Rest assured that there shall be no more warfare in this system and that the decrees of the Overlord shall be enforced to the letter. Calm yourselves and listen. I know well, mind you, that none of you really meant what has just been said. You of Osnome were so impressed by the benefits of mutual helpfulness that you made this journey to further its cause; you of Urvania are at heart also strongly in favor of it, but neither of you has strength enough to admit it.