‘It’s ready. I’ll send it down as soon as it gets good and dark. In the meantime, how about Brother Rat? Have you anyone watching him?’
‘No, I didn’t think it was necessary. But it might be, at that. From up there, would you say?’
‘Definitely. And Shiro and Lotus haven’t much to do at the moment. I’ll make arrangements.’
‘Do that, guy, and so long till dark.’
‘Just a sec, Dick,’ Dorothy said then. ‘I’m not done with you yet. You remembered the no-neighbors bit, I think?’
‘I sure did, Honey-Chile. No neighbors within half a mile. So, any dark of the moon, slip down here in one of the fifteen-footers and all will be well.’
‘You big, nice man,’ Dorothy purred. ‘Comes dark, comes me! An’ you can lay to that.’
Countless parsecs away, DuQuesne made proper entry into the solar system, putting his Capital D into a parking orbit around Earth, and began to pick up his tremendous order of machine tools and supplies. It went well; Brookings had done his job. There was, however, one job DuQuesne had to do for himself. During the loading, accordingly, he went in person to Washington, D.C., to the Rare Metals Laboratory, and to Room 1631.
That room’s door was open. He tapped lightly on it as he entered the room. He closed the door gently behind him.
‘Park it,’ a well-remembered contralto voice said. ‘Be with you in a moment.’
‘No rush.’ DuQuesne sat down, crossed his legs, lighted a cigarette, and gazed at the woman seated at her electronics panel. Both her eyes were buried in the light-shield of a binocular eyepiece; both her hands were manipulating vernier knobs in tiny arcs.
‘Oh! Hi, Blackie! Be with you in half a moment.’
‘No sweat, Hunkie. Finish your obs.’
‘Natch.’ Her attention had not wavered for an instant from her instruments; it did not waver then.
In a minute or so she pressed a button, her panel went dark, and she rose to her feet. ‘It’s been a long time, Blackie,’ she said, stepping toward him and extending her hand.
‘It has indeed.’ He took her hand and began an encircling action with his left – a maneuver which she countered, neatly but still smilingly, by grasping his left hand and holding it firmly.
‘Tsk, tsk,’ she tsked. ‘The merchandise is on display, Blackie, but it is not to be handled. Remember?’
‘I remember. Still untouchable,’ he said.
‘That’s right. You’re a hard-nosed, possessive brute, Blackie – any man to interest me very much would have to be, I suppose – but no man born is ever going to tell me what I can or can’t do. Selah. But let’s skip that.’ She released his hands, waved him to a chair, sat down, crossed her legs, accepted the lighted cigarette he handed her, and went on, ‘Thanks. The gossip was that you were all washed up and had, as Ferdy put it, “taken it on the lam.” I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. I’ve been wanting to tell you; you’re a good enough man so that whatever you’re really after, you’ll get.’
This woman could reach DuQuesne as no other woman ever had. ‘Thanks, Hunkie,’ he said; and, reaching out, he pressed her right hand hard then dropped it. ‘What I came up here for – have you a date for Thursday evening that you can’t or won’t break?’
Her smile widened; her two lovely dimples deepened. ‘Don’t tell me; let me guess. Louisa Vinciughi in Lucia.’
‘Nothing else but. You like?’
‘I love. With the usual stipulation – we “Dutch” it.’
‘Listen, Hunkie!’ he protested. ‘Aren’t you ever going to get off of that “Dutch” thing? Don’t you think a man can take a girl out without having monkey-business primarily in mind?’
She considered the question thoughtfully, then nodded. ‘As stated, yes. Eliding the one word “primarily”, no. I’ve heard you called a lot of things, my friend, but “stupid” was never one of them. Not even once.’
‘I know.’ DuQuesne smiled, a trifle wryly. ‘You are not going to be obligated by any jot or iota or tittle to any man living or yet to be born.’
Her head went up a little and her smile became a little less warm. ‘That’s precisely right, Marc. But I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I enjoy your company a lot. So, on that basis, okay and thanks.’
‘On that basis, then, if that’s the way it has to be, and thanks to you, too,’ DuQuesne said, and took his leave.
And Thursday evening came; and all during that long and thoroughly pleasant evening the man was, to the girl’s highly sensitive perception … well, different, although very subtly so. He was not quite, by some very small fraction, his usual completely poised and urbane self. Even Vinciughi’s wonderful soprano voice did not bring him entirely back from wherever it was he was. Wherefore, just before saying goodnight at the door of her apartment, she said:
‘You have something big on your mind, Blackie. Tremendously big. Would it help to come in and talk a while?’ This was the first time in all their long acquaintance that she had ever invited him into her apartment. ‘Or wouldn’t it?’
He thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘There are so many maybes and ifs and buts in the way that talking would be even more futile than thinking. But I’d like to ask you this: how much longer will you be here in Washington, do you think?’
She caught her breath. ‘The Observer says it’ll take me a year and a half to get what I should have.’
‘That’s fine,’ DuQuesne said. His thoughts were racing, but none of them showed. What were those Observers doing? And why? He knew the kind of mind Stephanie de Marigny had – they were feeding with a teaspoon a mind fully capable of gulping it down by the truckload … why? Why? So as not to play favorites, probably – that was the only reason he could think of. DuQuesne was playing for very high stakes; he could not afford to overlook any possibility, however remote. Had his interest in Hunkie de Marigny been deduced by the Norlaminians? Was it, in fact, possible – even likely – that he was under observation even now? Was their strange slowdown in her training meaningful? He could not answer; but he decided on caution. He went on with scarcely a noticeable pause, ‘I’ll see you well before that – if I may?’
‘Why, of course you may! I’d get an acute attack of the high dudgeons if you ever came to Washington without seeing me!’
He took his leave then, and she went into her apartment and closed the door … and stood there, motionless, listening to his receding footsteps with a far-away, brooding look in her deep brown eyes.
19
The Coup
As the days had passed, more and more of the Skylarkers had come to ground in Seaton’s temporary home on the planet Ray-See-Nee; until many of them, especially Dorothy, were spending most of their nights there. On this particular evening they were all there.
Since the personal gravity-controls had been perfected long since, Dunark and Sitar were comfortable enough as far as gravity was concerned. The engineers, however, had not yet succeeded in incorporating really good ambient-atmosphere temperature-controllers into them; wherefore he was swathed in wool and she wore her fabulous mink coat. They each wore two Osnomian machine pistols instead of one, and they sat a couple of feet apart – in instant readiness for any action that might become necessary.
Lotus and Shiro, a little closer together than the two Osnomians but not enough so to get into each other’s way, sat cross-legged on the floor. He was listening intently, while she wasn’t. Almost everything that was being said was going completely over her head.
Dorothy, Margaret, and Crane sat around a small table, fingering tall glasses in which ice-cubes tinkled faintly.
Seaton paced the floor, with his right hand in his breeches pocket and his left holding his pipe, which he brandished occasionally in the air to emphasize a point.
‘Considering that we can’t do anything at all on unmuffled high-order stuff except when an ore-scow is here, masking our emanations,’ Seaton was saying, ‘we haven’t done too bad. Howev
er, I wouldn’t wonder if we’d just about run out of time and we’re right between the devil and the deep blue sea. Mart, what’s your synthesis?’
Crane sipped his drink and cleared his throat. ‘You’re probably right in one respect, Dick. They apparently make a spectacle of these destructions of cities; not for the Chlorans’ amusement – I doubt very much if they enjoy or abhor anything, as we understand the term – but to keep the rest of the population of this world in line. Whether or not the quisling dictator of this world arranged for this city to be the next sacrifice, it is certain that we have interfered with the expected course of events to such an extent that the powers-that-be will at least investigate. But I can’t quite see the dilemma.’
‘I can,’ Dorothy said. They have to have a grisly example, once every so often; and since this one didn’t develop on schedule maybe they’ll go crying to mama instead of trying to handle us themselves. You see, they may know more about us than we think they do.’
‘That’s true, of course—’ Crane began, but Seaton broke in.
‘So I say it’s time to let Ree-Toe Prenk in on the whole deal and add him to our Council of War,’ he declared, and talk went on.
They were still discussing the situation twenty minutes later, when someone tapped gently on the front door.
The Osnomians leaped to their feet, pistols in all four hands. The two Japanese leaped to their feet and stood poised, knees and elbows slightly flexed, ready for action. Forty-five-caliber automatics appeared in the hands of the three at the table, and Crane flipped his remote control helmet onto his head. Seaton, magnum in hand, snapped on the outside lights and peered out through the recently installed one-way glass of the door.
‘Speak of the devil,’ he said in relief. ‘It’s Hizzoner.’ He opened the door wide and went on, ‘Come in, Your Honor. We were just talking about you.’
Prenk came in, his eyes bulging slightly at the sight of the arsenal of armaments now being put back into holsters. They bulged still more as he looked at the Japanese, and he gulped as he stared fascinatedly at the green-skinned Osnomians.
‘I knew, of course, within a couple of days,’ Prenk said then, quietly, ‘that you who call yourself Ky-El Mokak were not confining your statements to the exact truth. No wilder could possibly have done what you were doing; but by that time I knew that you, whoever you were, were really on our side. I had no suspicion until this moment, however, that you were actually from another world. I thought that your speech to the miners was what you said it was going to be, “a shot in the arm of hope”. It now seems more than slightly possible that you were talking about the very matters I came here tonight to see you about. Certain supplies, you will remember.’
‘I remember. I lied to you, yes. Wholesale and retail. But how else could I have made the approach, the mood you were in, without blowing everything higher than up?’
Your technique was probably the best possible, I admit.’
‘Okay. Yes, we’re from a galaxy so far away from here that you could barely find it with the biggest telescope this world ever had. Our business at the moment is to wipe out every Chloran in this region of space, but we can’t do it without – among other things – a lot more data than we now have. And we’ll need weeks of time, mostly elsewhere, for preparation.
‘But before we go too deeply into that you must meet my associates. People, this is His Honor Ree-Toe Prenk; what you might call the Mayor of the City of Ty-Ko-Ma of the Planet Ray-See-Nee. You know all about him. Ree-Toe, this is Hi-Fi Mokak, my wife – Lo-Test and Hi-Test Crane, husband and wife’ – and he went on with two more pairs of coined names.
‘Hi-Fi indeed!’ Dorothy snorted, under her breath, in English. ‘Just you wait ’til I get you alone tonight, you egregious clown!’
‘Wha’d’ya mean “clown”?’ he retorted. ‘Try your hand sometime at inventing seven names on the spur of the moment!’
Seaton then put on a headset, slipped one over Prenk’s head, and said in thought: ‘This is what is left – the residue you might say – of our mobile base the Skylark of Valeron,’ and went on to show him and to describe to him the great Brain, the immense tank-chart of the entire First Universe, the tremendous driving engines and even more tremendous engines of offense and of defense.
Prenk was held spellbound and speechless, for this ‘residue’, hundreds of kilometers in diameter and hundreds of millions of tons in weight, was so utterly beyond any artificial structure Prenk had ever imagined that he simply could not grasp its magnitude at all. And when Seaton went on to show him a full mental picture of what that base had been before the battle with the Chlorans and what it would have to be before they could begin to move against the Chlorans – the one-thousand kilometer control-circles, the thousands of cubic kilometers of solidly packed offensive and defensive gear, the scores of fantastically braced and buttressed layers of inoson that composed the worldlet’s outer skin – he was so strongly affected as to be speechless in fact.
‘I … I see. That is … a little, maybe …’ he stammered, then subsided into silence.
‘Yes, it is a bit big to get used to all at once,’ Seaton agreed. ‘It needs a lot of work. Some we’re doing; some of it can’t be done anywhere near here; but we don’t want to leave without being reasonably sure that you and your people will be alive when we get back. So we want a lot of information from you.’
‘I’ll be glad to tell you everything I know or can find out.’
‘Thanks. Ideas, first. How much do you think the quisling Big Shots actually know? What do you think they’ll do about it? What do you think His Magnificence the Director will do? And what should we do about what he thinks he’s going to do? In a few days we’ll want all the information you can get – facts, names, dates, places, times, and personnel. Also one sample copy of each and every item of equipment desired; with numbers wanted and times and places of delivery. Brother Prenk, you have the floor.’
‘One advantage of a small town and a group like ours,’ Prenk said, slowly, ‘is that everybody knows everybody else’s business. Thus, we all knew who the spies were, but the people were all so low in their minds that they simply did not care whether they lived or died. We had done our best and had failed; most of us had given up hope completely. Now, however, the few remaining spies have been locked up and are under control. They and the overseers are still reporting, but’ – he smiled wolfishly – ‘they are saying precisely and only what I tell them to say. This condition can’t last very long; but, after what you just showed me, I’m pretty sure I can make it last long enough. We have organized a really efficient force of guerrilla fighters and our plans for the capital are …’
A couple of weeks later, then, three hundred fifty-eight highly trained men and one highly trained woman set out.
A woman? Yes. Dorothy had protested vigorously.
‘But Sitar! You aren’t going, surely? Surely you’re staying home?’
‘Staying home!’ the green girl had blazed. ‘The First Wife of a prince of Osnome goes with her prince wherever he goes. She fights beside him, at need she dies beside him. Would you have him die fighting and me live an hour? I’d blow myself to hits!’
‘My God!’ Dorothy had gasped, and had stared, appalled.
‘That’s right,’ Seaton had told her. ‘Their ethics, mores and customs differ more than somewhat from ours, you know.’ And nothing more had been said about Sitar being a member of the Expeditionary Force.
Prenk’s guerrillas had infiltrated the capital city by ones and twos; no group ever larger than two. Each one wore the costume of an easily recognizable class of citizen. They were apparently artisans and workmen, soldiers, sailors, clerks, businessmen, tycoons of industry. Nor were the watches they all wore on their wrists any more alike than were their costumes – except in one respect. They all told the same time, to the tenth of a split second, and they all were kept in sync by pulses from a tiny power-pack that had been hidden in a tree in the outskirts of the city.
>
At time zero minus thirty minutes, three hundred fifty-nine persons began to enter into and to distribute themselves throughout an immense building that resembled a palace or a cathedral much more than the capitol building even of a world.
At time zero minus four seconds all those persons, who had in the meantime been doing inconspicuous this and innocuous that, changed direction toward or began to walk toward or kept on walking toward their objectives.
At time zero on the tick, three hundred fifty-nine knives came out of concealment and that exact number of persons fell.
Some of the guerrillas remained on guard where their victims lay. Others went into various offices on various businesses. On the top-most floor four innocent-looking visitors blasted open the steel door of Communications and shot the four operators then on duty. The leader of the four invaders stepped up to the master-control desk, shoved a body aside, flipped three or four switches, and said:
‘Your attention, please! These programs have been interrupted to announce that former Premier Da-Bay Saien and his sycophants have been executed for high treason. Premier Ree-Toe Prenk and his loyalists are now the government. Business is to go on as usual; no new orders will be issued except as they become necessary. That is all. Scheduled programs will now be resumed.’
It was not as easy everywhere, however, as that announcement indicated. By the very nature of things, the information secured by the counterspies was incomplete and sometimes, especially in fine detail, was wrong. Thus, when Seaton took his post on the fifteenth floor, standing before and admiring a heroic-size bronze statue of a woman strangling a boa constrictor whose coils enveloped half her height, he saw that there were four guards, instead of the two he had expected to find, at the door of the office that was his objective. But he couldn’t – wouldn’t – call for help. They hadn’t had man-power enough to carry spares. He’d trip the SOS if necessary, but not until it became absolutely necessary – but that office had to be put out of business by time zero plus fifteen seconds. He’d just have to act twice as fast, was all.
E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne Page 88