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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  For many days the Norlaminian vessel had been speeding through the void at her frightful maximum of power toward the Skylark of Valeron, which in turn was driving toward our galaxy at the same mad pace. Braking down now, since only a few thousand light-years of distance separated the hurtling flyers, Seaton materialized his image at the Brain control of the smaller cruiser and thought into it for minutes.

  ‘There, we’re all set!’ In the control room of the Skylark Seaton laid aside his helmet and wiped the perspiration from his forehead in sheer relief. ‘The trap is baited and ready to spring – I’ve been scared to death for a week that they’d tackle us before we were ready for them.’

  ‘What difference would it have made?’ asked Margaret curiously. ‘Since we have our sixth-order screens out they couldn’t hurt us, could they?’

  ‘No, Peg; but keeping them from hurting us isn’t enough – we’ve got to capture them. And they’ll have to be almost directly between Rovol’s ship and ours to make that capture possible. You see, we’ll have to send out from each vessel a hollow hemisphere of force and to surround them. If we had only one ship, or if they don’t come between our two ships, we can’t bottle them up, because they have exactly the same velocity of propagation that our forces have.

  ‘Also, you can see that our projector can’t work direct on more than a hemisphere without cutting its own beams, and that we can’t work through relay stations because, fast as relays are, the intellectuals would get away while the relays were cutting in. Any more questions?’

  ‘Yes; I have one,’ put in Dorothy. ‘You told us that this artificial Brain of yours could do anything that your own brain could think of, and here you’ve got it stuck already and have to have two of them. How come?’

  ‘Well, this is a highly exceptional case,’ Seaton replied. What I said would be true ordinarily, but now, as I explained to Peg, it’s working against something that can think and act just as quickly as I can.’

  ‘I know, dear, I was just putting you on the spot a little. What are you using for bait?’

  ‘Thoughts. We’re broadcasting them from a point midway between the two vessels. They’re keen on investigating any sixth-order impulses they feel, you know – that’s why we’ve kept all our stuff on tight beams heretofore, so that they probably couldn’t detect it – so we’re sending out a highly peculiar type of thought, that we are pretty sure will bring them in from wherever they are.’

  ‘Let me listen to it, just for a minute?’ she pleaded.

  ‘W-e-l-l … I don’t know.’ He eyed her dubiously. ‘Not for a minute – no. I haven’t even tried to listen to the finished product, myself. Being of a type that not even a pure intellectual can resist, they’d burn out any human brain in mighty short order. Maybe you might for about a tenth of a second, though.’

  He lowered a helmet over her expectant head and snatched it off again, but that moment had been enough for Dorothy. Her violet eyes widened terribly in an expression commingled of amazedly poignant horror and of dreadfully ecstatic fascination; her whole body trembled uncontrollably.

  ‘Dick – Dick!’ she shrieked; then, recovering slowly: ‘How horrible – how ghastly – how perfectly, exquisitely damnable! What is it? Why, I actually heard babies begging to be born! And there were men who had died and gone to heaven and to hell; there were minds that had lost their bodies and didn’t know what to do – were simply shrieking out their agony, despair, and utter, unreasoning terror for the whole universe to hear! And there were joys, pleasures, raptures, so condensed as to be almost as unbearable as the tortures. And there were other things – awful, terrible, utterly indescribable and unimaginable things! Oh, Dick, I was sure that I had gone stark, raving crazy!’

  ‘Easy, dear,’ Seaton reassured his overwrought wife. ‘All those things are really there, and more. I told you it was bad medicine – that it would tear any human mind to pieces.’

  Seaton paused, weighing in his mind how best to describe the utterly indescribable signal that was being broadcast, then went on, choosing his words with care:

  ‘All the pangs and all the ecstasies, all the thoughts and all the emotions of all evolution of all things, animate and inanimate, are there; of all things that ever have existed from the unknowable beginning of infinite time and of all things that ever shall exist until time’s unknowable end. It covers all animate life, from the first stirring of that which was to vitalize the first unicell in the slime of the first world ever to come into being in the cosmos, to the last cognition of the ultimately last intelligent entity ever to be.

  ‘Our present humanity was of course included, from before conception through birth, through all of life, through death, and through the life beyond. It covers inanimate evolution from the ultimate particle and wave, through the birth, life, death, and rebirth of any possible manifestation of energy and of matter, up to and through the universe.

  ‘Neither Mart nor I could do it all. We carried everything as far as we could, then the Brain went through with it to its logical conclusion, which of course we could not reach. Then the Brain systematized all the data and reduced it to a concentrated essence of pure thought. It is that essence which is being broadcast and which will certainly attract the intellectuals. In the brief flash you got of it you probably could understand only the human part – but maybe it’s just as well.’

  ‘I’ll say it’s just as well!’ Dorothy emphatically agreed. ‘I wouldn’t listen to that again, even for a millionth of a second, for a million dollars – but I wouldn’t have missed it for another million, either. I don’t know whether to beg you to listen to it, Peggy, or to implore you not to.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Margaret replied positively. ‘Anything that could throw you into such a hysterical tantrum as that did, I don’t want any of at all. None at all, in fact, would be altogether too much for—’

  ‘Got them, folks – all done!’ Seaton exclaimed ‘You can put on your headsets now.’

  A signal lamp had flashed brightly and he knew that those two gigantic Brains, working in perfect synchronism, had done instantaneously all that they had been set to do.

  ‘Are you dead sure that they got them all, Dick?’

  ‘Absolutely, and they got them in less time than it took the filament of the lamp to heat up. You can bank on it that all seven of them are in the can. I go off halfcocked and make mistakes; but those Brains don’t – they can’t.’

  Seaton was right. Though far away, even as universal distances go, the Intellectuals had felt that broadcast thought and had shot toward its source at their highest possible speed. For in all their long lives and throughout all their cosmic wanderings they had never encountered thoughts of such wide scope, such clear cogency, such tremendous power.

  The discarnate entities approached the amazing pattern of mental force which was radiating so prodigally and addressed it; and in that instant there shot out curvingly from each of the mechano-electrical Brains a gigantic, hemispherical screen.

  Developing outwardly from the two vessels as poles with the unimaginable velocity possible only to sixth-order forces, the two cups were barriers impenetrable to any sixth-order force, yet neither affected nor were affected by the gross manifestations which human senses can perceive. Thus solar systems, even the neutronium cores of stars, did not hinder their instantaneous development.

  Hundreds of light-years in diameter though they were, the open edges of those semi-globes of force met in perfect alignment and fused smoothly, effortlessly, instantaneously together to form a perfect, thought-tight sphere. The violently radiating thought-pattern which had so interested the intellectuals disappeared, and at the same instant the ultra-sensitive organisms of the entities were assailed by the, to them, deafening and blinding crash and flash of the welding together along its equator of the far-flung hollow globe.

  These simultaneous occurrences were the first intimations that everything was not what it appeared, and the disembodied intelligences flashed instantly into fu
rious activity, too late by the smallest possible instant of time. The trap was sprung, the sphere was impervious at its every point, and, unless they could break through that wall, the intellectuals were incarcerated until Seaton should release his screens.

  Within the confines of the globe there were not a few suns and thousands of cubic parsecs of space upon whose stores of energy the intellectuals could draw. Wherefore they launched a concerted attack upon the wall, hurling against it all the force they could direct. But they were not now contending against the power of any human, organic finite brain. For Seaton’s mind, powerfully composite though it was of the mightiest intellects of the First Galaxy, was only the primary impulse which was being impressed upon the grids of, and was being amplified to any desirable extent by, the almost infinite power of those two cubic miles of coldly emotionless, perfectly efficient, mechano-electrical artificial Brains.

  Thus against every frantic effort of the intellectuals within it the sphere was contracted inexorably, and as it shrank, reducing the volume of space from which the prisoners could draw energy, their struggles became weaker and weaker. When the ball of force was only a few hundred miles in diameter and the two vessels were relatively at rest, Seaton erected auxiliary stations around it and assumed full control.

  Rapidly then the prisoning sphere, little larger now than a toy balloon, was brought through the inoson wall of the Skylark and held motionless in the air above the Brain room. A complex structure of force was built around it, about which in turn there appeared a framework of inoson, supporting sixteen massive bars of uranium.

  Seaton took off his helmet and sighed. ‘There, that’ll hold them for a while, I guess.’

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘Darned if I know, Peg,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘That’s been worrying me ever since we figured out how to catch them. We can’t kill them and I’m afraid to let them go, because they’re entirely too hot to handle. So in the meantime, pending the hatching out of a feasible method of getting rid of them permanently, I have put them in jail.’

  ‘Why, Dick, how positively brutal!’ Dorothy exclaimed.

  ‘Yeah? There goes your soft heart again, Red-Top, instead of your hard head. I suppose it would be positively O.K. to let them loose, so that they can dematerialize all four of us? But it isn’t as bad as it sounds, because I’ve got a stasis of time around them. We can leave them in there for seventeen thousand million years and even their intellects won’t know it, because for them no time at all shall have lapsed.’

  ‘No-o-o – of course we can’t let them go scot-free,’ Dorothy admitted, ‘but we – I should – well, maybe couldn’t you make a bargain with them to give them their liberty if they will go away and let us alone? They’re such free spirits, surely they’d rather do that than stay bottled up forever.’

  ‘Since they are purely intellectual and hence immortal, I doubt very much if they’ll dicker with us at all,’ Seaton replied. ‘Time doesn’t mean a thing to them, you know; but since you insist I’ll check the stasis and talk it over with them.’

  A tenuous projection, heterodyned upon waves far below the band upon which the captives had their being, crept through the barrier screen and Seaton addressed his thoughts to the entity known as ‘One.’

  ‘Being highly intelligent, you have already perceived that we are vastly more powerful than you are. Living in the flesh possesses many advantages over an immaterial existence. One of these is that it permitted us to pass through the fourth dimension, which you cannot do because your patterns are purely three-dimensional and inextensible. While in hyperspace we learned many things. Particularly we learned much of the really fundamental natures and relationship of time, space, and matter, gaining thereby a basic knowledge of all nature which is greater, we believe, than any that has ever before been possessed by any three-dimensional being.

  ‘Not only can we interchange matter and energy as you do in your materializations and dematerializations, but we can go much farther than you can, working in levels which you cannot reach. For instance, I am projecting myself through this screen, which you cannot do because the carrier wave is far below your lowest attainable level.

  ‘With all my knowledge, however, I admit that I cannot destroy you, since you can shrink as nearly to a mathematical point as I can compress this zone, and its complete coalescence would of course liberate you. Upon the other hand, you realize your helplessness inside that sphere. You can do nothing since it cuts off your sources of power.

  ‘I can keep you imprisoned therein as long as I choose. I can set upon it forces which will keep you imprisoned until this two-hundred-kilogram ingot of uranium has dwindled down to a mass of less than one milligram. Knowing that the half-life period of that element is approximately five times ten to the ninth years, you can calculate for yourself how long you shall remain incarcerated.

  ‘My wife, however, has a purely sentimental objection to confining you thus, and wishes to make an agreement with you whereby we may set you at liberty without endangering our own present existences. We are willing to let you go if you will agree to leave this universe forever. I realize, of course, that you are beyond either sentiment or passion and are possessed of no emotions whatever. Realizing this, I give you a choice, upon purely logical grounds, thus:

  ‘Will you leave us and our universe alone, to work out our own salvation or our own damnation, as the case may be, or shall I leave you inside that sphere of force until its monitor bars are exhausted? Think well before you reply; for, know you, we all prefer to exist for a short time as flesh and blood rather than for all eternity as fleshless and immaterial intelligences. Not only that – we intend so to exist and we shall so exist!’

  ‘We shall make no agreements, no promises,’ One replied. ‘Yours is the most powerful mind I have encountered – almost the equal of one of ours – and I shall take it.’

  ‘You just think you will!’ Seaton blazed. ‘You don’t seem to get the idea at all. I am going to surround you with an absolute stasis of time, so that you will not even be conscious of imprisonment, to say nothing of being able to figure a way out of it, until certain more pressing matters have been taken care of. I shall then work out a method of removing you from this universe in such a fashion and to such a distance that if you should desire to come back here the time required would be, as far as humanity is concerned, infinite. Therefore it must be clear to you that you will not be able to get any of our minds, in any circumstances.’

  ‘I had not supposed that a mind of such power as yours could think so muddily,’ One reproved him. ‘In fact, you do not so think. You know as well as I do that the time with which you threaten me is but a moment. Your galaxy is insignificant, your universe is but an ultramicroscopic mote in the cosmic all. We are not interested in them and would have left them before this had I not encountered your brain, the best I have seen in substance. That mind is highly important and that mind I shall have.’

  ‘But I have already explained that you can’t get it, ever,’ protested Seaton, exasperated. ‘I shall be dead long before you get out of that cage.’

  ‘More of your purposely but uselessly confused thinking,’ retorted One. ‘You know well that your mind shall never perish, nor shall it diminish in vigor throughout all time to come. You have the key to knowledge, which you will hand down through all your generations. Planets, solar systems, galaxies, will come and go, as they have since time first was; but your descendants will be eternal, abandoning planets as they age to take up their abodes upon younger, pleasanter worlds, in other systems and in other galaxies – even in other universes.

  ‘And I do not believe that I shall lose as much time as you think. You are bold indeed in assuming that your mind, able as it is, can imprison mine for even the brief period we have been discussing. At any rate, do as you please – we will make neither promises nor agreements.’

  23

  The Long, Long Ride

  Immense as th
e Norlaminian vessel was, getting her inside the planetoid was a simple matter to the Brain. Inside the Skylark a dome bulged up, driving back the air, a circular section of the multilayered wall disappeared; Rovol’s space-torpedo floated in; the wall was again intact; the dome vanished; the visitor settled lightly into the embrace of a mighty landing cradle which fitted exactly her slenderly stupendous bulk.

  The Osnomian prince was the first to disembark, appearing unarmed; for the first time in his warlike life he had of his own volition laid aside his every weapon.

  ‘Glad to see you, Dick,’ he said simply, but seizing Seaton’s hand in both his own, with a pressure that said far more than his words. ‘We thought they got you, but you’re bigger and better than ever – the worse jams you get into, the stronger you come out.’

  Seaton shook the hands enthusiastically. ‘Yeah, “lucky” is my middle name – I could fall into a cesspool and climb out covered with talcum powder and smelling like a bouquet of violets. But you’ve advanced more than I have,’ glancing significantly at the other’s waist, bare now of its wonted assortment of lethal weapons. ‘You’re going good, old son – we’re all behind you!’

  He turned and greeted the other newcomers in cordial and appropriate fashion, then all went into the control room.

  During the long flight from Valeron to the First Galaxy no one paid any attention to course or velocity – a handful of cells in the Brain piloted the Skylark better than any human intelligence could have done it. Each Norlaminian scientist studied rapturously new vistas of his specialty: Orlon the charted galaxies of the First Universe, Rovol the minutely small particles and waves of the sixth order, Astron the illimitable energies of cosmic radiation, and so on.