‘But why?’ the old savant protested. ‘I don’t see any possible reason for any of it.’
Seaton grinned. ‘There isn’t any – any more than there was for your original brainstorm. If there had been the Norlaminian would have worked this whole shebang out a hundred thousand years ago. It’s nothing but a hunch, but it’s strong enough so I want to follow it up – okay? Fine then, integrating that, we get …’
Five hours later, Tammon took his helmet off and stared at Seaton with wonder in his eyes. ‘Do you realize just what you’ve done, young man? You have made a breakthrough at least equal to my own. Opened up a whole vast new field – a field parallel to my own, perhaps, but in no sense the same.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. Merely an enlargement. All I did was follow a hunch.’
‘An intuition,’ Tammon corrected him. ‘What else, pray, makes breakthroughs?’
And Luloy, on the way out of the laboratory hand in hand with Mergon, said, ‘I had no idea that Tellus ever did or ever could produce anybody like him. He is their god’s fair-haired child, for a fact. Sennlloy will have to know about this, Merg.’
‘She will indeed – I was sure you’d think of that.’
And as soon as Dorothy could get Seaton alone that evening she stared at him with a variety of emotions playing over her face. As though she had never seen him before; or as though she were getting acquainted with him all over again. ‘I’ve been talking to Sennlloy,’ she announced. ‘Or, rather, she’s been talking to me. She didn’t lose much time, did she?’
Seaton blushed to the roots of his hair. ‘I’ll say she didn’t. Not any. She knocked me for a block-long row of ash cans.’
‘Uh-huh. Me, too – and how!’ She told me you said I’d blow my red top and I just about did, until she explained. She’s quite a gal, isn’t she? And what a shape! You know, I’m awfully glad I’m not too bad in that shape department myself, or I’d die of mortification looking at them. But Dick – don’t you suppose there are any people in this whole cockeyed universe except us and the Rayseenians who don’t run around naked all the time?’
‘I wouldn’t know; but what has all that got to do with the price of hasheesh c.i.f. Istanbul?’
‘It ties in. She must have thought I was some kind of an idiot child, but she didn’t show it. She couldn’t really understand my taboos, she said, since they were not in her own heredity, but she could accept them as facts in mine and work within their limitations.’ Dorothy blushed, but went on, ‘I’d be the only Prime Operator – and so forth. You know about the “and so forth”. Anyway, before she got done she actually made me feel ashamed of myself! They really need your genes, Dick. You didn’t let on, did you, that DuQuesne’s a Tellurian, too?’
‘I’ll say I didn’t! The less they think that ape and I came from the same world, the better I’ll like it.’
‘You and me both. Well, she didn’t actually say so, but when she found out what kind of genes you have she decided to pour every one of DuQuesne’s right down the drain.’
‘Could be.’ Seaton didn’t agree with that conclusion at all, but he was too smart to argue the point.
At breakfast the following morning Seaton said, ‘You chirped it, birdie, about their thinking us some kind of idiot children. Besides, the First Principle and Prime Tenet of all diplomacy has always been, “When in Rome be a Roman candle.” So I think we’d all better peel to the raw as of now. You and I had better, whether the rest do so or not. Check?’
‘Check – but I think they will. We’re horribly conspicuous, dressed. People look at us as though we were things that had escaped from a zoo. And all the Green System people have always thought we were more than somewhat loco in the coco for covering up so much. We’ll get used to it easily enough – look at the nudists. So lead on, my bold and valiant – I follow thee to the bitter end of all my raiment.’
‘I knew you would, ace. Let’s go spread the gospel.’
When they approached the Cranes and the Japanese on the subject, Margaret threw back her black-thatched head and laughed. ‘We must be psychic – we were going to spring the same thing on you. And after all, actually, how much do our bathing suits hide? Yours or mine either one? And we have it to show, too – so here goes! The last one undressed is Stinker of the Day!’ She began to unzip, then paused and looked at Lotus.
The Nisei girl shrugged. ‘We all should, of course. I won’t like it and I positively know I’ll never get used to it, but if you two do I will too if it kills me.’
‘’At-a-girl, Lambie!’ Margaret put her arm around the beautifully formed little body and squeezed. ‘But you just wait – you’ll have it really made. None of them ever saw anything like you before, you gorgeous little doll, you. With your size and build you’ll be the absolute Queen of the May!’
25
Roman Candles
Countless parsecs away, Marc C. DuQuesne was carrying out his own plans – plans which would have been a most unpleasant surprise for the Skylarkers had they known about them.
DuQuesne moved the surviving Fenachrone into his DQ easily enough and without incident. Housing was no problem. How could it be, with millions upon millions of cubic kilometers of space available and with automatic high-order constructors to do the work? Nor was atmosphere, nor food nor any other necessity or desideratum of Fenachronian life and/or well-being a problem.
Fenachrone engineers did it all – by operating special keyboards and by thinking into carefully limited headsets – but none of them had any idea whatever of what it was that did any given task or how it did it. None of this knowledge, of either practice or theory, was in their science; and DuQuesne took great pains to be sure that none of them got any chance to learn any iota of it. He taught them, and they learned, purely by rote.
Like high-school girls learning to drive automobiles. They can become excellent drivers; but with only that type of instruction none of them will ever become able to design a hypoid gear or to understand in detail the operation of an automatic clutch.
The Fenachrone did not like such treatment. Sleemet in particular, when he began to recover some of the normal pugnaciously prideful spirit of his race, did not like it at all and said so; but DuQuesne did not care a particle whether he liked it or not.
DuQuesne’s snapping black eyes stared, contemptuously unaffected, into the furiously hypnotic, red-lighted black eyes of the Fenachrone. ‘You megalomaniacal cretin,’ he sneered. ‘How can you possibly figure that it makes any difference whatever to me, what you like or don’t like? If you have any fraction of a brain you’d better start using it. If you haven’t or can’t or won’t, I’ll build you a duplicate of your original ship and turn you all loose today.’
‘You will? In that case …’ Sleemet got that far and stopped cold in mid-sentence.
‘Yeah.’ DuQuesne’s tone cut like a knife. ‘Exactly. We’re still within Klazmon’s range; we will be for quite a while yet. Do you want to be turned loose here?’
‘Well, no.’ If the thought occurred to him that DuQuesne was lying, he didn’t show it. That was just as well for Sleemet and for the Fenachrone race. DuQuesne wasn’t.
‘Maybe you have a brain of sorts, at that. But if you don’t forget this Master Race flapdoodle, all of it and fast, you’ll last quick. Remember how easily that self-styled Overlord wiped out your navy and then volatilized your whole stinking world? And how easily Klazmon of Llurdiax smacked your whole fleet down? And what a fool I made and am still making of Klazmon? And I know of one race that is as much ahead of mine as I am ahead of you; and of another race that may be somewhat ahead of us Xylmnians in some ways. As I said, you’re about eleven hundred thousand years behind. Have you got brains enough to realize that instead of being top dog you’re just low man on the totem pole?’
‘If you’re so high and we’re so low,’ Sleemet snarled, ‘why did you take us away from the Llurd? Of what possible use can we be to you?’
‘You have certain mental and physical q
ualities that may perhaps be of use in a project I have in mind. You are not only able and willing to fight, you really like to fight. These qualities should, theoretically, make you better in some respects than automatics in operating the offensive weapons of a base as large as this one is.’ DuQuesne studied the Fenachrone appraisingly. ‘I do not really need you, but I am willing to make the experiment on the terms I have stated. I will allow you two Xylmnian minutes in which to decide whether or not to cooperate with me in such an experiment.’
‘We will cooperate,’ Sleemet said in less than one minute; whereupon DuQuesne told him in broad terms what he had in mind.
And for many days thereafter the two, so unlike physically but so similar in so many respects mentally, devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the finer and ever finer refinement of the placing and tuning of mechanisms and of the training of already hard-trained personnel.
But DuQuesne knew that, given the slightest opportunity, the Fenachrone would take high delight in killing him and taking the DQ. Wherefore he did not at any time trust any one of them as far as he could spit.
Moreover, DuQuesne was not quite as sure of his own victory as he had given the Fenachrone to understand.
DuQuesne was not easy in his mind about Galaxy DW-427-LU. He hadn’t been, not since some superpowered enemy in that galaxy had attacked Seaton’s Skylark of Valeron without warning and had burned her down to a core before she could get out of range. And she hadn’t been able to fight back. That one blast back at them couldn’t have done any damage.
It had been that uneasiness that had been responsible for the DQ’s terrific armament and for DuQuesne’s wanting the Fenachrone for a crew. Wherefore, as soon as the Fenachrone were settled in their new quarters and before they had recovered enough of their normal combativeness to become completely unmanageable, DuQuesne got ‘on the com’ with Sleemet.
‘… I don’t give a damn what happens to Earth or to Norlamin. I’m no longer interested in either,’ he said in part. ‘But I don’t want it to happen to me and you don’t want it to happen to you. You agree with me, I’m sure, that a good strategist does not leave an enemy behind him without knowing, at very least, who that enemy is and what he can do.’
‘That is one of the basics, yes.’
‘All right. Somebody in this galaxy here has more muscle than I like.’ DuQuesne pointed out Galaxy DW-427-LU in his tank and told Sleemet what had happened to the Skylark of Valeron, then went on, ‘On theoretical grounds, the degree of synchronization could make all the difference.’ He had reached by theory the same point that Seaton had arrived at by experience. ‘Hence, the greater the number of operators – of equal skill, of course – the tighter the output. The efficiency will vary directly as the cube of the number of operators.’
‘I see.’ Sleemet did see, and for the first time became really interested. ‘That will be to our advantage as well as yours. You will have to teach us much.’
‘I’ll teach you everything you have to know. Nothing else.’
‘That is assumed … But I see no possibility of assurance that you will keep your bargain … or will you go mind to mind that you will release us and build us a ship after this one expedition as your crew?’
‘Yes. Without reservation.’
‘In that case we will cooperate fully.’
And they did – and so it was that the DQ became the most fantastically armed and powered and defended fortress that had ever moved its own mass through space.
As the DQ approached Galaxy DW-427-LU, with everything she had either wide open or on the trips, DuQuesne braked her down and swung into what he called ‘the curve of fastest getaway’ – and as he did so, in the instant, the mighty vessel’s every defense went blinding-white.
And in that same instant two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven Fenachrone, males and females but superlatively expert technicians all, pressed activating switches and took command, each of a tightly clustered battery of micrometrically synchronized generators.
And one black-browed, hard-eyed Tellurian sat with his head buried in the DQ’s master-control helmet.
While he had not expected to find any significant fraction of what he actually found, he was not too appalled to go viciously and pinpoint-accurately to work. Working through the fourth dimension, with the transfinite speed of thought, he hurled bomb after bomb after multi-billion-kiloton superatomic bomb: and the target world of each one of those bombs became a sun.
And the DQ got away. She was by no means intact; but, since her skin had been very much thicker than the Valeron’s to start with, there was still some of it left when she got out of range.
Thereupon DuQuesne put on the headset of the DQ’s Brain and began to think. He had tried direct attack on the galaxy of Chlorans; it had failed. His next step, obviously, was – to decide what his next step should be.
The flesh-and-blood brain that was thinking into the energy-and-metal Brain of the DQ was no whit less logical, no iota less unsentimental in its judgments than the great computer itself. Man-brain and machine-brain together considered the evidence. Datum: The DQ was not up to handling Galaxy DW-427-LU. Datum: Not even the added muscle conferred by the willing cooperation of the Fenachrone was enough to make it so. Datum: No discoverable increase of its armaments or its crew would give it even a fighting chance against the energies that had just come so close to destroying it.
Wherefore –
Finally, an hour later, DuQuesne raised the microphone of a repeating sixth-order broadcasting transmitter to his lips and said – dispassionately, unemotionally and with no more expression than if he had been ordering up his lunch:
‘DuQuesne calling Seaton reply as before stop.’
26
The Talent
Seaton had thought that the visit to the Jelmi would be a short one, just long enough to get the ‘gizmo,’ but his own breakthrough put an end to such thinking. It took days to reduce the theory to practice and weeks to build into the Skylark of Valeron the gigantic installations Seaton wanted.
The very enormity of the breakthrough changed all plans, dislocated all schedules. To the Jelmi the fourth-dimensional translator had been a phenomenon – a weapon – in itself. It had extremely valuable applications, and each of them offered a long career of study. That was enough for them. But to Seaton and Crane and the Norlaminians it was something more than that; it was an effect, a new and unexplored area of knowledge, to be fitted somehow into the known and computed structure of sixth-order – perhaps of other-order – effects; and to be used and considered in conjunction with them. It was a theorist’s dream – and an engineer’s nightmare.
Meanwhile, the male Skylarkers, their Jelm colleagues and the Norlaminians were busily getting done the impossible task of exploring a whole new field of knowledge and transmuting it into actual structures and gigantic machines, while the women of the party were exploring the life of an alien race … and having the time of their respective lives doing it. Sitar, of course, was in her element. Bare skin and jewelry she liked. She liked to look at and to feel her mink coat, she said, but she hated to have to wear it; and as for that horrible, scratchy underwear – augh! Hence, now that the personal gravity controls were personal heaters as well, she was really enjoying herself.
Dorothy and Margaret, of course, took to it as though to the manner born. In three days neither of them was any more conscious of nudity than was Sennlloy herself. Even Lotus got used to it. While she could never become an enthusiastic nudist, she said, she did stop blushing. In fact, she almost stopped feeling like blushing.
‘Dick,’ Dorothy said one evening, I’ve finally made contact with them on music.’
‘Music!’ he snorted. ‘Huh! It sounds to me like a gaggle of tomcats yowling on a back fence.’
She laughed. ‘It’s unworldly, of course, but a lot of it is beautiful, in a weird sort of way, and they have some magnificent techniques. I’ve been trying everything on them, you know, and they’ve just been sitting
on their hands. I’ll give you three guesses as to what I finally hit them with.’
‘Strauss waltzes? Jazz? Don’t tell me it was rock-’n’-roll.’
She laughed. ‘Old-fashioned ragtime. Not what they call rag these days, but syncopation. And polkas. Specifically, three old, old recordings – with improved sound, of course. Pee Wee Hunt’s Twelfth Street Rag, Plehal Brothers’ Beer Barrel Polka, and – of all things! – Glahe Musette’s Hot Pretzels. They simply grabbed the ball and ran all over the place with it. What they came up with is neither rag nor polka – in fact, it’s like nothing ever heard before on any world – but it’s really toe-tingling stuff. Comes the dance tomorrow evening I’ll show you some steps and leaps and bounds that will knock your eyes right out of their sockets.’
‘I believe that, if what the gals have been teaching me is any criterion. You have to be a mind-reader, an adagio dancer and a ground-and-lofty tumbler, and have an eidetic memory. But I hope I won’t smash any of the girls’ arches down or kick any of their faces in.’
‘Don’t fish, darling. I know how good you are. Ain’t I been practicing with you for lo, these many periods?’
At the dance it became clear that Seaton’s statement was (as, it must be admitted, some of his statements were!) somewhat exaggerated. There was a great deal of acrobatics – Seaton and Sennlloy took advantage of every clear space to perform hand-spring-and-flip routines in unison. But everything was strictly according to what each person could do and wished to do. Thus, men and women alike danced with the Osnomians as though they were afraid of breaking them in two – which they were. And thus Lotus was, as Margaret had foretold that she would be, the belle of the ball. Hard-trained gymnast and acrobat that she was, her feet were off the floor most of the time; and before the dance was an hour old she was being tossed delightedly by her partner of the moment over the heads of half a dozen couples to some other man who was signalling for a free catch.
E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne Page 96