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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  Most galling condition of all, the Fenachrone were not treated as enemies; nor as menaces or threats; nor even as intelligent entities whose knowledges and abilities might be worthy of notice. These things were observed and recorded, to be sure, but only as competent parts of a newly discovered class of objects, the Fenachrone; a class of objects that happened to be alive. The Fenachrone were neither more nor less noteworthy than were birds or barnacles.

  Sleemet, no longer young and perhaps the proudest and most intractable and most intransigent of the lot, could not endure that treatment very long; but he did not bend. The old adage ‘Where there’s life there’s hope,’ simply is not true where such as the Llurdi and the Fenachrone are concerned. Sleemet lost all hope and broke; broke almost completely down.

  He stopped eating. That did not bother the Llurdi in any way. Why should it? They were neither squeamish nor humane, any more than they were cruel or vindictive. The fact that certain of these creatures stopped taking nourishment under certain conditions was merely a datum to be observed and recorded.

  But since Sleemet was big and strong, even for a Fenachrone, and had previously eaten very well indeed, it took him a long time to die. And as he weakened – as the bindings between flesh and spirit loosened more and ever more – he regressed more and ever more back into the youth of his race. Back and back. Still farther back; back into its very childhood; back to a time when his remote ancestors ate their meat alive and communicated with each other, sometimes by grunts and gestures, but more often by means of a purely mental faculty that was later to evolve into the power of ocular hypnosis.

  Half conscious or less of his surroundings but knowing well that death was very near, Sleemet half-consciously sent out his race’s ages-old mental message-in-extremity of the dying.

  Marc C. DuQuesne knew vastly more about the Fenachrone than did any other man alive, not excluding Richard Seaton. He and Seaton were, as far as is known, the only two men ever to meet Fenachrone mind to mind and live through the experience; but DuQuesne had been in thought-helmet contact with a Fenachrone much longer and much more intimately and very much more interestedly than Seaton ever had – because of the tremendous intrinsic differences between the personalities of the two men.

  Seaton, after having crippled a war-vessel of the Fenachrone, had pinned its captain against a wall with so many beams of force that he could not move his head and could scarcely move any other part of his monstrous body. Then, by means of a pair of thought-helmets, he had taken what of that captain’s knowledge he wanted. He had, however, handled that horribly unhuman brain very gingerly. He had merely read certain parts of it, as one reads an encyclopedia; at no time had his mind become en rapport with that of the monster. In fact, he had said to Crane:

  ‘I’d hate to have much of that brain in my own skull – afraid I’d bite myself. I’m just going to look … and when I see something I want I’ll grab it and put it into my own brain.’

  DuQuesne, however, in examining a navigating engineer of that monstrous race, had felt no such revulsion, contrariwise – although possibly not quite consciously – he had admired certain traits of Fenachrone; character so much that he had gone en rapport with that engineer’s mind practically cell to cell; with the result that he had emerged from that mental union as nearly a Fenachrone himself as a human being could very well become.

  Wherefore, as DuQuesne in his flying-planetoid-base approached the point of its course nearest to the planet Llurdiax, he began to feel the thinnest possible tendril of thought trying to make contact with one of the deepest chambers of his mind. He stiffened; shutting it off by using automatically an ability that he had not known consciously that he had. He relaxed; and, all interest now, tuned his mind to that feeler of thought, began to pull it in, and stopped – and the contact released a flood of Fenachrone knowledge completely new to him.

  A Fenachrone, dying somewhere, wanted … wanted what? Not help, exactly. Notice? Attention? To give something? DuQuesne was not enough of a Fenachrone to translate that one thought even approximately, and he was not interested enough to waste any time on it. It had something to do with the good of the race; that was close enough.

  DuQuesne, frowning a little, sat back in his bucket seat and thought. He had supposed that the Fenachrone were all dead … but it made sense that Seaton couldn’t have killed all of a space-faring race, at that. But so what? He didn’t care how many Fenachrone died. But a lot of their stuff was really good, and he certainly hadn’t got it all yet, by any means; it might be smart to listen to what the dying monster had to say – especially since he, DuQuesne, was getting pretty close to the home grounds of Klazmon the Llurd.

  Wherefore DuQuesne opened his mental shield: and, since his mind was still tuned precisely to the questing wave and since the DQ was now practically as close to Llurdiax as it would get on course 255U, he received a burst of thought that jarred him to the very teeth.

  It is amazing how much information can be carried by a Fenachrone-compressed burst of thought. It was fortunate for DuQuesne that he had the purely Fenachrone abilities to decompress it, to spread it out and analyze it, and later, to absorb it fully.

  The salient points, however, were pellucidly clear. The dying monster was First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet; and he and more than four thousand other Fenachrone were helpless captives of and were being studied to death by Llurdan scientists under the personal direction of Llanzlan Klazmon.

  Realizing instantly what that meant – Klazmon would be out here in seconds with a probe, if nothing stronger – DuQuesne slammed on full-coverage screens at full power, thus sealing his entire worldlet bottle-tight against any and every spy-ray, beam, probe, band, zone of force and/or order of force that he knew anything about. Since this included everything he had known before this trip began, plus everything he had learned from Freemind One and from the Jelmi and from Klazmon himself, he was grimly certain that he was just as safe as though he were in God’s hip pocket from any possible form of three-dimensional observation or attack.

  Cutting in his fourth-dimensional gizmo – how glad he was that he had studied it so long and so intensively that he knew more about it than its inventors did! – he flipped what he called its ‘eye’ into the Fenachrone Reservation on distant Llurdiax. He seized Sleemet, bed and all, in a wrapping of force and deposited the bundle gently on the floor of the DQ’s control room, practically at his, DuQuesne’s feet. Fenachrone could breathe Earth air for hours without appreciable damage – they had proved that often enough – and if he decided to keep any of them alive he’d make them some air they liked better.

  Second, he brought over a doctor, complete with kit and instruments and supplies; and third, the Fenachrone equivalent of a registered nurse.

  ‘You, doctor!’ DuQuesne snapped, in Fenachronian. ‘I don’t know whether this spineless weakling is too far gone to save or not. Or whether he is worth saving or not. But since he was actually in charge of your expedition-to-preserve-the-race I will listen to what he has to say instead of blasting him out of hand. So give him a shot of the strongest stuff you have – or is he in greater need of food than of stimulant?’

  DuQuesne did not know whether the doctor would cooperate with a human being or not. But he did – whether from lack of spirit of his own or from desire to save his chief, DuQuesne did not care to ask.

  ‘Both,’ the doctor said, ‘but nourishment first, by all means. Intravenous, nurse, please,’ and doctor and nurse went to work with the skill and precision of their highly trained crafts.

  And, somewhat to DuQuesne’s surprise, Sleemet began immediately to rally; and in three-quarters of an hour he had regained full consciousness.

  ‘You spineless worm!’ DuQuesne shot at the erstwhile invalid, in true Fenachrone tone and spirit. ‘You gutless wonder! You pusillanimous weakling, you sniveling coward! Is it the act of a noble of the Fenachrone to give up, to yield supinely, to surrender ignominiously to a fate however malign while a spark of life en
dures?’

  Sleemet was scarcely stirred by this vicious castigation. He raised dull eyes – eyes shockingly lifeless to anyone who had ever seen the ruby-lighted, flame-shot wells of vibrant force that normal Fenachrone eyes were – and said lifelessly, ‘There is a point, the certainty of death, at which struggle becomes negative instead of positive. It merely prolongs the agony. Having passed that point, I died.’

  ‘There is no such point, idiot, while life lasts! Do I look like Klazmon of Llurdiax?’

  ‘No, but death is no less certain at your hands than at his.’

  ‘Why should it be, stupid?’ and DuQuesne’s sneer was extra-high-voltage stuff, even for Dr Marc C. DuQuesne.

  Now was the crucial moment. IF he could take all those Fenachrone over, and IF he could control them after they got back to normal, what a crew they would make! He stared contemptuously at the ex-admiral and went on:

  ‘Whether or not you and your four thousand die in the near future is up to you. While I do not have to have a crew, I can use one efficiently for a few weeks. If you choose to work with me I will, at the end of that time, give you a duplicate of your original spaceship and will see to it that you are allowed to resume your journey wherever you wish.’

  ‘Sir, the Fenachrone do not—’ the doctor began stiffly.

  ‘Shut up, you poor, dumb clown!’ DuQuesne snapped. ‘Haven’t you learned anything? That instead of being the strongest race in space you are one of the weakest? You have one choice merely – cooperate or die. And that is not yours, but Sleemet’s. Sleemet?’

  ‘But how do I know that if—’

  ‘If you have any part of a brain, fool, use it! What matters it to me whether Fenachrone live or die? I’m not asking you anything; I’m telling you under what conditions I will save your lives. If you want to argue the matter I’ll put you three – and the bed – back where you were and be on my way. Which do you prefer?’

  Sleemet had learned something. He had been beaten down flat enough so that he could learn something – and he realized that he had much to learn from any race who could do what his rescuer had just done.

  ‘We will work with you,’ Sleemet said. ‘You will, I trust, instruct us concerning how you liberated us three and propose to liberate the others?’

  ‘I can’t. It was fourth-dimensional translation.’ DuQuesne lied blandly. ‘Did you ever try to explain the color “blue” to a man born blind? No scientist of your race will be able to understand either the theory or the mechanics of fourth-dimensional translation for something like eleven hundred thousand of your years.’

  24

  DuQuesne and Sleemet

  En route to the galaxy in which DuQuesne’s aliens supposedly lived, Dorothy said, ‘Say, Dick. I forgot to ask you something. What did you ever find out about that thought business of Kay-Lee’s?’

  ‘Huh?’ Seaton was surprised. ‘What was there to find out? How are you going to explain the mechanism of thought – by unscrewing the inscrutable? She said, and I quote, “We didn’t feel that we were quite reaching you,” unquote. So it was she and Ree-Toe Prenk. Obviously. Holding hands or something –across a Ouija board or some other focusing device, probably. Staring into each other’s eyes to link minds and direct the thought.’

  ‘But they did hit you with something,’ she insisted, ‘and it bothers me. They can do it and we can’t.’

  ‘No sweat, pet. That isn’t a circumstance to what you do every time you think at a controller to order up a meal or whatever. How do you do that? Different people, different abilities, is all. Anyway, Earth mediums have done that kind of thing for ages. If you’re really interested, you can take some time off and learn it, next time we’re on Ray-See-Nee. But for right now, my red-headed beauty, we’ve got something besides that kind of monkey-business to worry about.’

  ‘That’s right, we have,’ and Dorothy forgot the minor matter in thinking of the major. ‘Those aliens. Have you and Martin figured out a modus operandi?’

  ‘More or less. Go in openly, like tourists, but with everything we’ve got not only on the trips but hyped up to as nearly absolutely instantaneous reactivity as the Brain can possibly get it.’

  Both DuQuesne’s DQ and Seaton’s Skylark of Valeron were within range of Llurdiax. DuQuesne, however, as has been said, was covering up as tightly as he could. Everything that could be muzzled or muffled was muzzled or muffled, and he was traveling comparatively slowly, so as to put out the minimum of detectable high-order emanation. Furthermore, his screens were shoved out to such a tremendous distance, and were being varied so rapidly and so radically in shape, that no real pattern existed to be read. The DQ was not undetectable, of course, but it would have taken a great deal of highly specialized observation and analysis to find her.

  The Skylark of Valeron, on the other hand, was coming in wide open: ‘Like a tourist,’ as Seaton had told Dorothy the plan was to do.

  In the llanzlanate on Llurdiax, therefore, an observer alerted Klazmon, who flew immediately to his master-control panel. He checked the figures the observer had given him, and was as nearly appalled as a Llurd could become. An artificial structure of that size and mass – it was certainly not a natural planetoid – had never even been thought of by any builder of record. He measured its acceleration – the Valeron was still braking down at max – and his eyes bulged. That thing, tremendous as it was, had the power-to-mass ratio of a speedster! In spite of its immense size it was actually an intergalactic flyer!

  He launched a probe, as he had done so many times before – but with entirely unexpected results.

  The stranger’s guardian screens were a hundred times as reactive as any known Llurdan science. He was not allowed time for even the briefest of mental contacts or for any real observation at all. So infinitesimal had been the instant usable time that only one fact was clear. The entities in that mobile monstrosity were – positively – Jelmoids.

  Not true Jelmi, certainly. He knew all about the Jelmi. Those tapes bore unmistakable internal evidence of being true and complete records and there was no hint anywhere in them of anything like this. If not the Jelmi, who? Ah, yes, the Fenachrone, whose fleet … no, Sleemet knew nothing of such a construction … and he was not exactly of the same race … ah, yes, that one much larger ship that had escaped. The probability was high that its one occupant belonged to precisely the same Jelmoid race as did the personnel of this planetoid. The escaped one had reported Klazmon’s cursory investigation as an attack. It was a virtual certainty, therefore, that this was a battleship of that race, heading for Llurdiax to … to what? To investigate merely? No.

  Nor merely to parley. They had made no attempt whatever to communicate. (It did not occur to Klazmon, then or ever, that his own fiercely driven probe could not possibly have been taken for an attempt at communication. He had fully intended to communicate, as soon as he had seized the mind of whoever was in command of the strange spacecraft.) And now, with the stranger’s incredible full-coverage screen in operation, communication was and would remain impossible.

  But he had data sufficient for action. These Jelmoids, like all others he knew, were rabidly anti-social, illogical, unreasoning, unsane and insane. They were – definitely – surplus population.

  So thinking, Llanzlan Klazmon launched his attack.

  As the Skylark entered that enigmatic galaxy, Seaton was not in his home, with only a remote-control helmet with which to work. He was in the control room itself, at the base of the Brain, with the tremendously complex master-control itself surrounding his head. Thus he was attuned to and in instantaneous contact with every activated cell of that gigantic Brain. It was ready to receive and to act upon with the transfinite speed of thought any order that Seaton would think. Nor would any such action interfere in any way with the automatics that Seaton had already set up.

  ‘I’m going to stay here all day,’ Seaton said, ‘and all night tonight, too, if necessary.’

  But he did not have to stay there even all day. In
less than four hours the Llanzlan drove his probe and Seaton probed practically instantaneously back. And since Seaton’s hyped-up screens were a hundred times faster than the Llurd’s, Seaton ‘saw’ a hundred times as much as Klazmon did. He saw the city Llurdias in all its seat-of-empire pride and glory. He perceived its miles-wide girdle of fortresses. He perceived the llanzlanate; understood its functions and purposes. He entered the Hall of Computation and examined minutely the beings and the machines at work there.

  How could all this be? Because the speed of thought, if not absolutely infinite, is at least transfinite; immeasurable to man. And the Valeron’s inorganic brain and Seaton’s organic one were, absolutely and super-intimately, the two component parts of one incredibly able, efficient and proficient whole.

  Thus, when the alien’s attack was launched in all its fury and almost all of the Valeron’s mighty defensive engines went simultaneously into automatic action, the coded chirpings that the Brain employed to summon human help did not sound: that Brain’s builder, fellow, boss, and perfect complement was already on the job.

  And thus, since no warning had been given, the other Skylarkers were surprised when Seaton called them all down into the control room.

  They were even more surprised when they saw how white and strained his face was.

  ‘This may become veree unfunny,’ he said. ‘’Tsa good thing I muscled her up or we’d be losing some skin and some of our defense. As it is, we’re holding ’em and we’ve got a few megas in reserve. Not enough to be really happy about, but some. And we’re building more, of course. However, that ape down there has undoubtedly got a lot of stuff otherwheres on the planet that he can hook in pretty fast, so whatever we’re going to do we’d better do right now.’

  ‘They didn’t try to communicate at all?’ Crane asked. ‘Strange for a race of such obviously high attainments.’

  ‘Not a lick,’ Seaton said, flatly. ‘Just a probe; the hardest and sharpest probe I ever saw. When I blocked it – Whammo!’