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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  Out past the Green System the message sped, and past the dust and the incandescent gas that had once been the noisome planet of the Fenachrone. Past worlds where amphibians roared and bellowed; past planets of methane ice where crystalline life brooded sluggishly on its destiny.

  In the same infinitesimal instant it reached and passed the Rim Worlds of our galaxy; touching many minds but really affecting none. Farther and farther out, with no decrease whatever in speed, it flew; past the inconceivably tiny, inconceivably fast-moving point that housed the seven greatest, most fearsome minds that the Macrocosmic All had ever spawned – minds that, knowing all about that thought already, ignored it completely.

  Immensely farther out, it flashed through the galaxy in which was the solar system of Ray-See-Nee – where, for the first time, it made solid contact with a mind in a body human to the limit of classification. Kay-Lee Barlo, confidential secretary of Department Head Bay-Lay Boyn, stiffened so suddenly that she stuttered into her microphone and had to erase three words from a tape – and in that same instant her mother at home went into deep trance.

  And still farther out, in a galaxy lying on the universe’s Arbitrary Rim, in the Realm of the Llurdi, the message found a much larger group of receivers. While none of the practically enslaved Jelmi could do much of anything about that weirdly peculiar and inexplicably guarded thought, many of them were very much interested in it; particularly Valkyrie-like Sennlloy, a native of the planet Allondax and the master biologist of all known space; ancient Tammon, the greatest genius of the entire Jelman race; and newlyweds Mergon and Luloy, the Mallidaxian savants.

  None of the monstrous Llurdi – not even their most monstrous ‘director’, Klazmon the Fifteenth – being monstrous – could receive the message in any part. And how well that was! For if those tremendously able aliens could have received that message, could have understood it and acted upon it, how vastly different the history of all humanity would have been!

  2

  Llurdi and Jelmi

  The distance from Earth to the Realm of the Llurdi is such that it is worthwhile to take a moment to locate it in space.

  It has been known for a long time that solar systems occur in lenticular aggregations called galaxies; each galaxy consisting of one or more thousands of millions of solar systems. And for almost as long a time, since no definite or systematic arrangement of the galaxies could be demonstrated, the terms ‘Universe’ and ‘Cosmic All’ were interchangeable; each meaning the absolute totality of all matter and all space in existence anywhere and everywhere.

  There had been speculations, of course, that galaxies were arranged in lentictilar universes incomprehensibly vast in size, so that the term ‘Cosmic All’ should be reserved for a plurality of universes and a hyper-space of more than three spatial dimensions.

  Seaton and Crane in the Skylark of Valeron proved that our galaxy, the Milky Way, lies in a lenticular universe by charting every galaxy in that universe. And they suggested to the various learned societies that the two celestial aggregates should be named, respectively, the First Galaxy and the First Universe.

  Many millions of parsecs distant from Tellus and its First Galaxy, then, out near the Arbitrary Rim of the First Universe, there lay the Realm of the Llurdi. This Realm, which had existed for over seventy thousand Tellurian years, was made up of four hundred eighty-two planets in exactly half that many solar systems.

  Two planets in each populated system were necessary because the population of the Realm was composed of two entirely different forms of highly intelligent life. Of these two races the Jelmi – the subject race, living practically in vassalage – were strictly human beings and lived on strictly Tellus-type worlds.

  The master race, the Llurdi, had originated upon the harsh and hostile planet Llurdiax – Llurdiaxorb Five – with its distant, wan, almost-never-seen sun and its incessant gales of frigid, ice-laden, ammonia – and methane-impregnated, forty-pounds-to-the-square-inch air. Like mankind, they wore clothing against the rigors of their environment. Unlike mankind, however, they wore clothes only for protection, and only when protection was actually necessary. Nor was Llurdiax harsh or forbidding – to them.

  It was the best of all possible worlds. They would not colonize any planet that was not as nearly as possible like the mother world of their race.

  Llurdi, although they are erect, bifurcate, bi-laterally symmetrical, bi-sexual, mammalian, and have a large crania and six-digited hands each having two opposed thumbs, are not humanoids. Nor, despite their tremendous, insensitive, un-freezable wings, are they either birds or bats. Nor flying cats, although they have huge, vertically slitted eyes and needle-sharp canine teeth that protrude well below and above their upper and lower lips. Also, they have immensely strong and highly versatile tails; but there is nothing simian about them or in their ancestry.

  The Realm was not exactly an empire. Nor was Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth exactly an emperor. The title ‘Llanzlan’ translates, as nearly as possible, into ‘Director’; and that was what Klazmon regarded himself as being.

  It is true that what he said, went; and that if he didn’t like any existing law he expunged it from all existence. But that was exactly the way things should be. How else could optimum conditions be achieved and maintained in an ever-expanding, ever-changing, ever-rising economy? He ruled, he said and thoroughly believed, with complete reason and perfect fairness and strictly in accordance with the findings of the universe’s largest and most competent computers as to what was for the best good of all.

  Wherefore everyone who did not agree with him was – automatically, obviously, and unquestionably – wrong.

  Llurdias, the capital city of the world Llurdiax and of the Realm, had a population of just over ten million and covered more than nine hundred square miles of ground. At its geometrical center towered the mile-square, half-mile-high office-residence-palace (the Llurdan word ‘Uanzlanate’ has no Tellurian equivalent) of Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth of the Realm of the Llurdi. And in that building’s fifth sub-basement, in Hall Prime of Computation, Klazmon and his Board of Advisors were hard at work.

  That vast room, the first receptor of all the reports of the Realm, was three-quarters full of receivers, recorders, analyzers – bewilderingly complex instrumentation of all kinds. From most of these devices tapes were issuing – tapes that, en route to semi-permanent storage, were being monitored by specialists in the hundreds of different fields of the Llurdan-Jelmi economy.

  Klazmon the Fifteenth and his Board, seated at a long conference table in hard-upholstered ‘chairs’ shaped to fit the Llurdan anatomy, were paying no attention to routine affairs.

  ‘I have called this meeting,’ the ruler said, ‘to decide what can be done to alleviate an intolerable situation. As you all know, we live in what could be called symbiosis with the Jelmi; who are so unstable, so illogical, so bird-brained generally that they would destroy themselves in a century were it not for our gentle but firm insistence that they conduct themselves in all matters for their own best good. This very instability of their illogical minds, however, enables them to arrive occasionally at valid conclusions from insufficient data; a thing that no logical mind can do. These conclusions – they are intuitions, really – account for practically all the advancement we Llurdi have made and explain why we have put up with the Jelmi – yes, cherished them – so long.’

  He paused, contemplating the justice of the arrangement he had just described. It did not occur to him that it could in any way be described as ‘wrong’.

  He went on: ‘What most of you do not know is that intuitions of any large worth have become less and less frequent, decade by decade, over the last few centuries. It was twelve years ago that the Jelm Jarxon elucidated the “Jarxon” band of the sixth order, and no worthwhile intuition has been achieved since that time. Beeloy, has your more rigorous analysis revealed any new fact of interest?’

  A young female stood up, preened the short fur back of her left
ear with the tip of her tail, and said, ‘No, sir. Logic can not be applied to illogic. Statistical analysis is still the only possible tool and it cannot be made to apply to the point in question, since it is incapable of certainty and since the genius-type mind occurs in only one out of thousands of millions of Jelmi. I found a very high probability, however – point nine nine nine plus – that the techniques set up by our ancestors are wrong. In breeding for contentment by destroying the discontented we are very probably breeding out the very characteristics we wish to encourage.’

  ‘Thank you, Beeloy. That finding was not unanticipated. Kalton, your report on Project University, please.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ An old male, so old that his fur was almost white, stood up. ‘Four hundred males and the same number of females, the most intelligent and most capable Jelmi alive, were selected and were brought here to the Llanzlanate. They were put into quarters that were Jelm-type in every respect, even to gravity. They were given every inducement and every facility to work-study and to breed.

  ‘First, as to work-study. They have done practically nothing except waste time. They seem to devote their every effort to what they call “escape” by means of already-well-known constructions of the fifth and sixth orders – all of which are of course promptly negated. See for yourselves what these insanely illogical malcontents are doing and know for yourselves that, in its present form, Project University is a failure as far as producing intuitions is concerned.’

  Kalton picked up a fist-sized instrument between the thumbs of his left hand and a tri-di ‘tank’ appeared on the table’s top, in plain sight of every member of the Board. Then, as he began to finger controls, a three-dimensional scene in true color appeared in the tank; a smoothly flowing, ever-shifting scene that moved from room to room and from place to place as the point of view traversed the vast volume of the prison.

  It did not look like a prison. The apartments, of which there were as many as the Jelmi wanted, were furnished as luxuriously as the various occupants desired; with furniture and equipment every item of which had been selected by each occupant himself or herself. There were wonderful rugs and hangings; masterpieces of painting and of sculpture; triumphs of design in fireplaces and tables and chairs and couches. Each room or suite could be set up for individual control of gravity, temperature, pressure, and humidity. Any imaginable item of food or drink was available on fifteen seconds’ notice at any hour of the day or night.

  In the magnificent laboratories every known or conceivable piece of apparatus could be had for the asking; the memory banks of the library would furnish in seconds any item of information that had been stored in any one of them during all seventy thousand years of the Realm’s existence.

  And there were fully equipped game and exercise rooms, ranging in size from tiny card-rooms up to a full-sized football field, to suit every Jelman need or desire for play or for exercise.

  But not one of the hundreds of Jelmi observed – each one a perfect specimen physically, as was plainly revealed by the complete absence of clothing – appreciated any one of these advantages! Most of the laboratories were vacant and dark. The few scientists who were apparently at work were not doing anything that made sense. The library was not in use at all; the Jelmi who were reading anything were reading works of purely Jelman authorship – mostly love stories, murder mysteries, and science fiction. Many Jelmi seemed to be busy but their activities were as pointless as cutting out paper dolls.

  ‘The pale, frail, practically hairless, repulsive, incomplete, illogical, and insane animals refuse steadfastly to cooperate with us on my level.’

  Any Earthman so frustrated would have snarled the sentence, but the Llurd merely stated it as a fact. ‘You can all see for yourselves that as far as productive work is … but hold!’

  The viewpoint stopped moving and focused sharply on a young man and a young woman who, bending over a table, were working on two lengths of smooth yellow material that looked something like varnished cambric. ‘Mergon and Luloy of planet Mallidax,’ Kalton said into the microphone. ‘What are you doing? Why are you so far away from your own laboratories?’

  Mergon straightened up and glared at what he thought was the point of origin of the voice. ‘If it’s any of your business, funnyface, which it isn’t,’ he said savagely, ‘I’m building a short-long whatsit, and Luloy has nothing to do with it. When I get it done I’m personally going to tear your left leg off and beat you to death with the bloody end of it.’

  ‘You see?’ Kalton dispassionately addressed the other members of the Board. ‘That reaction is typical.’

  He manipulated controls and both Jelmi leaped to their feet, with all four hands pressed to their buttocks. The fact that Luloy was a woman – scarcely more than a girl, in fact – was of no consequence at all to Kalton. Even Llurdan sex meant very little to the Llurdi. Jelman sex meant nothing whatever.

  ‘Nerve-whip,’ Kalton explained to his fellows. He dropped his controller into his lap and the tri-di tank vanished. ‘Nothing serious – only slightly painful and producing only a little ecchymosis and extravasation. Neither of those two beasts, however, will be at all comfortable until they get back where they belong. Now, to continue my report:

  ‘So much for failure to work-study. Failure-refusal to breed, while not possible of such simple and easy demonstration, is no less actual, effective, and determined. A purely emotional, non-logical, and ridiculous factor they call “love” seems to be involved, as does their incomprehensibly exaggerated, inexplicable craving for “liberty” or “freedom”. ’

  The Llanzlan said thoughtfully. ‘But surely, unwillingness to breed cannot possibly affect the results of artificial insemination?’

  ‘It seems to, sir. Definitely. There is some non-physical and non-logical, but nevertheless powerful, operator involved. My assistants and I have not been able to develop any techniques that result in any except the most ephemeral pregnancies.’

  ‘You apparently wish to comment, Velloy?’ Klazmon asked.

  ‘I certainly do!’ a middle-aged female snapped, giving one tautly outstretched wing a resounding whack with her tail. ‘Of course they haven’t! As Prime Sociologist I said five years ago and I repeat now that no mind of the quality of those of the Jelmi here in the Uanzlanate can be coerced by any such gross physical means. Kalton talks of them and thinks of them as animals – meaning lower animals. I said five years ago and still say that they are not. Their minds, while unstable and completely illogical and in many instances unsane to the point of insanity, are nevertheless minds of tremendous power. I told this Board five years ago that the only way to make that project work – to cause selected Jelmi to produce either ideas or young or both – was to give the selectees a perfect illusion of complete freedom, and I recommended that course of action. Since I could not prove my statement mathematically, my recommendation was rejected. While I still cannot prove that statement, it is still my considered opinion that it is true; and I now repeat both statement and recommendation. I will keep on repeating them at every opportunity as long as this Board wastes time by not accepting them. I remind you that you have already wasted – lost – over five years.’

  ‘Your statement becomes more probable year by year,’ the Llanzlan admitted. ‘Kalton, have you anything more to say?’

  ‘Very little. Only that, since Project University has admittedly failed, we should of course adopt—’

  Kalton was silenced in mid-sentence by a terrific explosion, which was followed by a rumbling crash as half of one wall of the hall collapsed inward.

  A volume of Jelman air rushed in, enveloping a purposeful company of Jelmi in yellow coveralls and wearing gasmasks. Some of these invaders were shooting pistols; some were using or throwing knives; but all were covering and protecting eight Jelmi who were launching bombs at one great installation of sixth-order gear – the computer complex that was the very nerve center of the entire Realm.

  For the Jelmi – who, as has been said, were human
to the last decimal of classification – had been working on fifth- and sixth-order devices purely as a blind; their real effort had been on first-order effects so old that their use had been all but forgotten.

  The Jelman plan was simple: Thirty men and thirty women would destroy the central complex of the computer system of the entire Realm. Then, if possible, the survivors of the sixty would join their fellows in taking over an already-selected Llurdan scout cruiser and taking off at max.

  It was quite probable that many or even most of the attacking sixty would die. It was distinctly possible that they all would. All sixty, however, were perfectly willing to trade their lives for that particular bank of sixth-order apparatus, in order that seven hundred forty other Jelmi could escape from Llurdiax and, before control could be re-established, be beyond their masters’ reach.

  Theoretically, the first phase of the operation should have been successful; the Realm’s nerve center should have been blown to unrecognizable bits. The Jelmi knew exactly what they were going to do, exactly how they were going to do it, and exactly how long it would take. They knew that they would have the advantage of complete surprise. There would be, they were sure, half a second or so of the paralysis of shock, followed by at least one second of utter confusion; which would give them plenty of time.

  They were sure it would be as though, during a full-formal session of the Supreme Court, a gang of hoodlums should blast down a wall and come leaping into the courtroom with Tommy-guns ablaze and with long knives flying and stabbing and slashing. Grave, stately, and thoughtful, the justices could not possibly react fast enough to save their lives or their records or whatever else it was that the gangsters were after.