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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  Seaton spent day after day with the Brain, computing, calculating, thinking with a clarity and a cogency hitherto impossible, all to one end. What should he do, what could he do, with those confounded intellectuals? Crane, Fodan, and Drasnik spent their time in planning the perfect government – planetary, systemic, galactic, universal – for all intelligent races, wherever situated.

  Sacner Carfon studied quietly but profoundly with Caslor of Mechanism, adapting many of the new concepts to the needs of his aqueous planet. Dunark and Urvan, their fiery spirits now subdued and strangely awed, devoted themselves as sedulously to the arts and industries of peace as they formerly had to those of war.

  Time thus passed quickly, so quickly that, almost before the travelers were aware, the vast planetoid slowed down abruptly to feel her cautious way among the crowded stars of our galaxy. Though a mere crawl in comparison with her inconceivable intergalactic speed, her present pace was such that the stars sped past in flaming lines of light. Past the double sun, one luminary of which had been the planet of the Fenachrone, she flew; past the Central System; past the Dark Mass, whose awful attraction scarcely affected her cosmic-energy drive – hurtling toward Earth and toward Earth’s now hated master, DuQuesne.

  DuQuesne had perceived the planetoid long since, and his robot-manned ships rushed out into space to do battle with Seaton’s new and peculiar craft. But of battle there was none; Seaton was in no mood to trifle. Far below the level of DuQuesne’s screens, the cosmic energies directed by the Brain drove unopposed upon the power-bars of the space fleet of Steel and that entire fleet exploded in one space-filling flash of blinding brilliance. Then the Skylark, approaching the defensive screens, halted.

  ‘I know that you’re watching me, DuQuesne, and I know what you’re thinking about, but you can’t do it.’ Seaton, at the Brain’s control, spoke aloud. ‘You realize, don’t you, that if you clamp on a zone of force it’ll throw the Earth out of its orbit?’

  ‘Yes; but I’ll do it if I have to,’ came back DuQuesne’s cold accents. ‘I can put it back after I get done with you.’

  ‘You don’t know it yet, half-shot, but you are going to do exactly nothing at all!’ Seaton snapped. ‘You see, I’ve got a lot of stuff here that you don’t know anything about because you haven’t had a chance to steal it yet, and I’ve got you stopped cold. I’m just two jumps ahead of you, all the time. I could hypnotize you right now and make you do anything I say, but I’m not going to – I want you to be wide awake and aware of everything that goes on. Snap on your zone if you want to – I’ll see to it that the Earth stays in its orbit. Well, start something, you big, black ape!’

  The screens of the Skylark glowed redly as a beam carrying the full power of DuQuesne’s installations was hurled against them – a beam behind which there was the entire massed output of Steel’s world-girdling network of super-power stations. But Seaton’s screens merely glowed; they did not radiate even under that titanic thrust. For, as has been said, this new Skylark was powered, not by intra-atomic energy, but by cosmic energy. Therefore her screens did not radiate; in fact, the furious blasts of DuQuesne’s projectors only increased the stream of power being fed to her receptors and converters.

  The mighty shields of the planetoid took every force that DuQuesne could send, then Seaton began to compress his zones, leaving open only the narrow band in the fourth order through which the force of gravitation makes itself manifest. Not only did he leave that band open, he so blocked it open that not even DuQuesne’s zones of force, full-driven though they were, could close it.

  In their closing those zones brought down over all Earth a pall of darkness of an intensity theretofore unknown. It was not the darkness of any possible night, but the appalling, absolute blackness of the utter absence of every visible wave from every heavenly body. As that unrelieved and unheralded blackness descended, millions of Earth’s humanity went mad in unspeakable orgies of fright, of violence, and of crime.

  But that brief hour of terror, horrible as it was, can be passed over lightly, for it ended forever any hope of world domination by any self-interested man or group, paving the way as it did for the heartiest possible reception of the government of right instead of by might so soon to be given to Earth’s peoples by the sages of Norlamin.

  Through the barriers both of mighty spaceship and of embattled planet Seaton drove his sixth-order projection. Although built to be effective at universal distances the installation was equally efficient at only miles, since its control was purely mental. Therefore Seaton’s image, solid and visible, materialized in DuQuesne’s inner sanctum – to see DuQuesne standing behind Dorothy’s father and mother, a heavy automatic pistol pressed into Mrs Vaneman’s back.

  ‘That’ll be all from you, I think,’ DuQuesne sneered. ‘You can’t touch me without hurting your beloved parents-in-law and you’re too tender-hearted to do that. If you make the slightest move toward me all I’ve got to do is to touch the trigger. And I shall do that, anyway, right now, if you don’t get out of this system and stay out. I am still master of the situation, you see.’

  ‘You are master of nothing, you murderous baboon!’

  Even before Seaton spoke the first word his projection had acted. DuQuesne was fast, as has been said, but how fast are the fastest human nervous and muscular reactions when compared with the speed of thought? DuQuesne’s retina had not yet registered the fact that Seaton’s image had moved when his pistol was hurled aside and he was pinioned by forces as irresistible as the cosmic might from which they sprang.

  DuQuesne was snatched into the air of the room – was surrounded by a globe of energy – was jerked out of the building through a welter of crushed and broken masonry and concrete and of flailing, flying structural steel – was whipped through atmosphere, stratosphere, and empty space into the control room of the Skylark of Valeron. The enclosing shell of force disappeared and Seaton hurled aside his controlling helmet, for he knew that wave upon wave of passion, of sheer hate, was rising, battering at the very gates of his mind; knew that if he wore that headset one second longer the Brain, actuated by his own uncontrollable thoughts, would passionately but mercilessly exert its awful power and blast his foe into nothingness before his eyes.

  Thus at long last the two men, physically so like, so unlike mentally, stood face to face; hard gray eyes staring relentlessly into unyielding eyes of midnight black. Seaton was in a towering rage; DuQuesne, cold and self-contained as ever, was calmly alert to seize any possible chance of escape from his present predicament.

  ‘DuQuesne, I’m telling you something,’ Seaton gritted through clenched teeth. ‘Prop back your ears and listen. You and I are going out in that projector. You are going to issue “cease firing” orders to all your stations and tell them that you’re all washed up – that a humane government is taking things over.’

  ‘Or else?’

  ‘Or else I’ll do, here and now, what I’ve been wanting to do to you ever since you shot up Crane’s place that night – I will scatter your component atoms all the way from here to Valeron.’

  ‘But, Dick—’ Dorothy began.

  ‘Don’t butt in, Dot!’ Stern and cold, Seaton’s voice was one his wife had never before heard. Never had she seen his face so hard, so bitterly implacable. ‘Sympathy is all right in its place, but this is the show-down. The time for dealing tenderly with this piece of mechanism in human form is past. He has needed killing for a long time, and unless he toes the mark quick and careful he’ll get it, right here and right now.

  ‘And as for you, DuQuesne,’ turning again to the prisoner, ‘for your own good I’d advise you to believe that I’m not talking just to make a noise. This isn’t a threat, it’s a promise – get me?’

  ‘You couldn’t do it, Seaton, you’re too …’ Their eyes were still locked, but into DuQuesne’s there had crept a doubt. ‘Why, I believe you would!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘A damned good way to find out is to say no. Yes or no?’

 
‘Yes.’ DuQuesne knew when to back down. ‘You win – temporarily at least,’ he could not help adding.

  The projection went out and the required orders were given. Sunlight, moonlight, and starlight again bathed the world in wonted fashion. DuQuesne sat at ease in a cushioned chair, smoking Crane’s cigarettes; Seaton stood scowling blackly, hands jammed deep into pockets, addressing the jury of Norlaminians.

  ‘You see what a jam I’m in?’ he complained. ‘I could be arrested for what I think of that bird. He ought to be killed, but I can’t do it unless he gives me about half an excuse, and he’s darn careful not to do that. So what?’

  ‘The man has a really excellent brain, but it is slightly warped,’ Drasnik offered. ‘I do not believe, however, that it is beyond repair. It may well be that a series of mental operations might make of him a worthwhile member of society.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Seaton still scowled. ‘He’d never be satisfied unless he was all three rings of the circus. Being a big shot isn’t enough – he’s got to be Poo-Bah. He’s naturally antisocial – he would always be making trouble and would never fit into a really civilized world. He has got a wonderful brain; but he isn’t human … Say, that gives me an idea!’ His corrugated brow smoothed magically, his boiling rage was forgotten.

  ‘Blackie, how would you like to become a pure intellect? A bodiless intelligence, immaterial and immortal, pursuing pure knowledge and pure power throughout all cosmos and all time, in company with seven other such entities?’

  ‘What are you trying to do, kid me?’ DuQuesne sneered. ‘I don’t need any sugar coating on my pills. You are going to take me on a one-way ride – all right, go to it, but don’t lie about it.’

  ‘No; I mean it. Remember the one we met in the first Skylark? Well, we captured him and six others, and it’s a very simple matter to dematerialize you so that you can join them. I’ll bring them in, so that you can talk to them yourself.’

  The intellectuals were brought into the control room, the stasis of time was released, and DuQuesne – via projection – had a long conversation with One.

  ‘That’s the life!’ he exulted. ‘Better a million times over than any possible life in the flesh – the ideal existence! Think you can do it without killing me, Seaton?’

  ‘Sure can – I know both the words and the music.’

  DuQuesne and the caged intellectuals poised in the air, Seaton threw a zone around cage and man, the inner zone of course disappearing as the outer one went on. DuQuesne’s body disappeared – but not so his intellect.

  ‘That was the first really bad mistake you ever made, Seaton,’ the same sneering, domineering, icily cold DuQuesne informed Seaton’s projection in level thought. ‘It was bad because you can’t ever remedy it – you can’t kill me now! And now I will get you – what’s to hinder me from doing anything I please?’

  ‘I am, bucko,’ Seaton informed him cheerfully. ‘I told you quite a while ago that you’d be surprised at what I could do, and that still goes as it lays. But I’m surprised at your rancor and at the survival of your naughty little passions. What d’you make of it, Drasnik? Is it simply a hangover, or may it be permanent in his case?’

  ‘Not permanent, no,’ Drasnik decided. ‘It is only that he has not yet become accustomed to his changed state of being. Such emotions are definitely incompatible with pure mentality and will disappear in a short time.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to let him think, even for a minute, that I slipped up on his case,’ Seaton declared. ‘Listen, you! If I hadn’t been dead sure of being able to handle you I would have killed you instead of dematerializing you. And don’t get too cocky about my not being able to kill you yet, either, if it comes to that. It shouldn’t be impossible to calculate a zone in which there would be no free energy whatever, so that you would starve to death. But don’t worry – I’m not going to do it unless I have to.’

  ‘Just what do you think you are going to do?’

  ‘See that miniature spaceship there? I am going to compress you and your new playmates into this spherical capsule and surround you with a stasis of time. Then I am going to send you on a trip. As soon as you are out of the galaxy this bar here will throw in a cosmic-energy drive – not using the power of the bar itself, you understand, but only employing its normal radiation of energy to direct and to control the energy of space – and you will depart for scenes unknown with an acceleration of approximately three times ten to the twelfth centimeters per second. You will travel at that acceleration until this small bar is gone. It will last something more than one hundred thousand million years; which, as One will assure you, is but a moment.

  ‘Then these large bars, which will still be big enough to do the work, will rotate your capsule into the fourth dimension. This is desirable, not only to give you additional distance, but also to destroy any orientation you may have remaining, in spite of the stasis of time and not inconsiderable distance already covered. When and if your capsule gets back into three-dimensional space you will be so far away from here that you will certainly need most of what is left of eternity to find your way back here.’ Then, turning to the ancient physicist of Norlamin: ‘O.K., Rovol?’

  ‘An exceedingly scholarly bit of work,’ Rovol applauded.

  ‘It is well done, son,’ majestic Fodan gravely added. ‘Not only is it a terrible thing indeed to take away a life, but it is certain that the unknowable force is directing these disembodied mentalities in the engraving upon the Sphere of a pattern which must forever remain hidden from our more limited senses.’

  Seaton thought into the headset for a few seconds, then again projected his mind into the capsule.

  ‘All set to go, folks?’ he asked. ‘Don’t take it too hard – no matter how many millions of years the trip lasts, you won’t know anything about it. Happy landings!’

  The tiny spaceship prison shot away, to transport its contained bodiless intelligences into the indescribable immensities of the superuniverse; of the cosmic all; of that ultimately infinite space which can be knowable, if at all, only to such immortal and immaterial, to such incomprehensibly gigantic mentalities as were theirs.

  The erstwhile Overlord and his wife sat upon an ordinary davenport in their own home, facing a fireplace built by human labor, within which nature-grown logs burned crackingly. Dorothy wriggled luxuriously, fitting her gorgeous auburn head even more snugly into the curve of Seaton’s shoulder, her supple body even more closely into the embrace of his arm.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, lover, the way things turn out? Spaceships and ordinary projectors and forces and things are all right, but I’m awfully glad that you turned that horrible Brain over to the Galactic Council in Norlamin and said you’d never build another. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it’s ever so much nicer to have you just a man again, instead of a – well, a kind of a god or something.’

  ‘I’m glad of it, too, Dot – I couldn’t hold the pose. When I got so mad at DuQuesne that I had to throw away the headset I realized that I never could get good enough to be trusted with that much dynamite.’

  ‘We’re both really human, and I’m glad of it. It’s funny, too,’ she went on dreamily, ‘the way we jumped around and how much we missed. From here across thousands of solar systems to Osnome, and from Norlamin across thousands of galaxies to Valeron. And that we haven’t seen either Mars or Venus, our next-door neighbors, and there are lots of places on Earth, right in our own back yard, that we haven’t seen yet, either.’

  ‘Well, since we’re going to stick around here for a while, maybe we can catch up on our local visitings.’

  ‘I’m glad that you are getting reconciled to the idea; because where you go I go, and if I can’t go you can’t, either, so you’ve got to stay on Earth for a while, because Richard Ballinger Seaton Junior is going to be born right here, and not off in space somewhere!’

  ‘Sure he is, sweetheart. I’m with you, all the way – you’re a blinding flash and a deafening report; and, as I may have
intimated previously, I love you.’

  ‘Yes … and I love you … it’s wonderful, how happy you and I are … I wish more people could be like us … more of them will be, too, don’t you think, when they have learned what cooperation can do?’

  ‘They’re bound to. It’ll take time, of course – racial hates and fears cannot be overcome in a day – but the people of good old Earth are not too dumb to learn.’

  Auburn head close to brown, they stared into the flickering flames in silence; a peculiarly and wonderfully satisfying silence.

  For these two the problems of life were few and small.

  SKYLARK DUQUESNE

  1

  S.O.S.

  Appearances are deceiving. A polished chunk of metal that shines like a Christmas-tree ornament may hold – and release – energy to destroy a city. A seed is quite another order of being to the murderous majesty of a toppling tree. A match flame can become a holocaust.

  And the chain of events that can unseat the rulers of galaxies can begin in a cozy living room, before a hearth …

  Outwardly, the comfortable (if somewhat splendidly furnished) living room of the home of the Richard Ballinger Seatons of Earth presented a peaceful scene. Peaceful? It was sheerly pastoral! Seaton and Dorothy, his spectacularly auburn-haired wife, sat on a davenport, holding hands. A fire of pine logs burned slowly, crackling occasionally and sending sparks against the fine bronze screen of the fireplace. Richard Ballinger Seaton Junior lay on the rug, trying doggedly, silently, and manfully, if unsuccessfully, to wriggle toward those entrancing flames.

  Inwardly, however, it was very much otherwise. Dorothy’s normally pleasant – as well as beautiful – face wore a veritable scowl.

  The dinner they had just eaten had been over two hours late; wherefore not one single item of it had been fit to feed to a pig. Furthermore, and worse, Dick was not relaxed and was not paying any attention to her at all. He was still wound up tight; was still concentrating on the multitude of messages driving into his brain through the button in his left ear – messages of such urgency of drive that she herself could actually read them, even though she was wearing no apparatus whatever.