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

by E. E. 'Doc' Smith

  Except for the heat, the collision might have lasted for a long time. But heat was the all-important factor – the starkly incomprehensible heat of hundreds of millions of Centigrade degrees.

  Each of those suns was already an atomic furnace in precise equilibrium; generating and radiating the energy of some five million tons per second of matter being converted completely into energy. Thus there was no place for the added energy of billions of tons of matter to go. It could not be absorbed and it could not be radiated. Therefore the whole enormous mass of super-hot, super-dense material began to go into the long series of ultra-atomic explosions that is the formation of a super-super-nova – the most utterly, the most fantastically violent display of pure, raw energy known to or possible in the universe of man.

  Flares and prominences of this insanely detonating material were hurled upward and outward for millions upon millions of miles. Shock-wave after shock-wave, so hellishly hot as to be invisible for days, raged and raved spherically outward; converting instantaneously all the flotsam in their paths into their own unknown composition or atomic and subatomic debris. Planets lasted a little longer. Oceans and mountain ranges boiled briefly; after which each world evaporated comparatively slowly, as does a drop of water riding a cushion of its own steam on a hot steel plate.

  And the sphere of annihilation, ravening outward with unabated ferocity, reached and passed the outermost limits of the Chloran solar system and kept on going …

  On and on …

  And on …

  Until there came to pass an event which not even Seaton, not even Madame Barlo herself had foreseen … and an event which nearly canceled all their efforts and their lives as well; for the Chlorans were not left without resources even in the destruction of their galaxy …

  29

  DuQuesne to the Rescue

  As has been said, the Chlorans of Galaxy DW-427-LU as a race were more conversant with the Talent than were any of the human or near-human races of the First Galaxy: that is, with the phases or facets of it that had to do with the remarkable hypnotic qualities of their minds. Thus their mathematicians were more or less familiar with no-space-no-time theory, and some of the Greater Great Ones had played with it a little more or less for fun, in practice. Since they had never had any real use for it as a weapon, however, it had never been fully developed.

  Thus there were no detectors or feeling for that type of attack. ‘It was not sixth-order, but no-space-no-time, which is no-order.’ Thus millions upon millions of Chloran planets were destroyed without any intelligent entity either giving or receiving warning that an attack was being made.

  And that was the way Richard Seaton wanted it. This was not a game; not a chivalric tournament. This was a matter of life and death, in which the forces of human civilization, outnumbered untold billions to one, needed all the advantage they could get.

  Unfortunately for Seaton’s desires and expectations, the Chlorans had a Galactic Institute for Advanced Study.

  In common with all such institutions everywhere, its halls harbored at least one devotee of any nameable subject, however recondite or arcane that subject might be. So there was one old professor of advanced optical hypnosis who, as a hobby, had been delving into no-space-no-time for a couple of hundred years. He did not feel the light preliminary surveying tendrils of the human witches; but when the big Gunther beams began to come in he became interested fast and got busy fast.

  He called his first assistant and his most advanced student – the latter a Greater Great One who was also interested in and a possessor of the Talent and thus familiar with the mysterious power of the number three – and, synchronizing their three minds, they traced those beams to the Skylark of Valeron and the DQ, and to Seaton and to Crane and to DuQuesne.

  ‘First,’ the professor told his two weaker fellows, ‘we will attune our Union of Three to theirs and break it apart with blasts of psionic force. Then, each of us having tuned to one of the separated strands, we will kill the three murderers forthwith.’

  And the Chlorans proceeded to do their best to bring this event about – and their best was very potent indeed.

  If things did not quite work out the way they had planned it, it was no fault of the individual Chlorans. Their minds were fully capable of killing three ‘murderers’ at a distance. The first enormous surge of mental energy they thrust into the Tellurian union of minds destroyed its fabric. The coupling of ‘poles of power’ was wrenched asunder. The individual minds of the operators were left alone against the Chloran thrust … and each of the three Chlorans selected one of the three mightiest intellects of their enemies and commanded it to die.

  In that moment, Seaton, Crane and DuQuesne were seized and pinned. The minds that thundered destruction at them were not merely of great intrinsic power, carefully trained: they were backed up by all the million-year evolution of Chloran science, aided by the impact of total surprise.

  The three helpless Tellurians were helpless before they knew what hit them.

  But they did not die. What saved them was DuQuesne’s bargain with the Fenachrone. Sleemet had had a few microseconds’ warning by that Fenachrone ferocity, and the backing of every last member of his feral race.

  His primary purpose was, of course, the defense of DuQuesne’s life – not for the sake of DuQuesne, to be sure, but for the protection of the Fenachrone. He succeeded. DuQuesne’s rigidity melted and he was back in control of himself, his own great intellect reinforcing Sleemet’s counterblows. The two of them had enough psionic power left over to help Seaton and Crane … but not enough. The blow had been too powerful and too sudden.

  Both Seaton and Crane slumped bonelessly to the floor of the control room, leaving their controllers empty and idle.

  In that moment the one great pole of strength left to humankind was – Dr Marc C. DuQuesne.

  To Dorothy Seaton, that moment was pure horror. It was every terrible fear she had ever thought of, all come to pass at once: Seaton disabled, perhaps dying; DuQuesne in control of all the mighty resources of the Skylark. Dorothy shrieked and leaped from her chair –

  And was stopped in her tracks by DuQuesne’s shout, crackling out of a speaker to emphasize his hard-driven thoughts:

  ‘Dorothy! Margaret! Quit it! Pick up your loads and carry ’em. Pole to me!’

  And Dorothy hesitated, irresolute, torn between her love for Seaton and her urgent duty to help against the Chlorans, while the whole vast net of human mental energies wavered and hung in the balance.

  ‘Now!’ snarled DuQuesne, the thought like a lash. ‘Move! To hell with the dead’ – Dorothy screamed again – ‘you’re still alive! But you won’t be long if you goof off!’ Rapidly he scanned the quavering net. ‘You Barlo women and your poles! Drop what you’re doing and locate this interference for me – fast! All of you – find it for me so I can slug it! Hunkie? Yeah – good girl! Stay with it just as you are!’

  ‘But DuQuesne,’ Dorothy protested, ‘I’ve got to—’

  ‘Oh, hell!’ DuQuesne wrenched out, every nuance of his tone showing the tremendous strain under which he was laboring. ‘Savant Sennlloy! You can’t be spared from there, but have you got a couple of girls who can tune themselves to me?’

  ‘Yes, Dr DuQuesne.’ Neither she nor any other Jelm aboard understood why Seeker Sevance of Xylmny had been masquerading as Dr Marc C. DuQuesne of Tellus when he received his Call. They knew, however, that it had to do with his Seeking; hence none of them did anything to interfere with it. ‘We have many very good mentalists in our party.’

  ‘Fine! Have two of ’em relieve these two weak sisters here – and fast!’

  ‘Here we are, sir,’ two thoughts came in, in unison. And two powerful female Jelman minds – the minds of two girls with whom he was already very well acquainted – fitted themselves snugglingly to his and picked up the loads that the two Earthwomen had been unable to carry.

  It was not that either of those Earthwomen was weak. Both were tremendously stro
ng; mentally and psychically. Both disliked DuQuesne so intensely, however, that it was psychologically impossible for either of them to work with him. Of course, he regarded that fact itself as an extreme weakness. Sentiment was as bad as sentimentality, he held, and both bored him to tears.

  ‘Ah, that’s better.’ DuQuesne’s thought was a sigh of relief. ‘That makes it at least possible.’

  And it did. DuQuesne and his two new assistants did not do much to keep the wave of destruction sweeping through Galaxy DW-427-LU, but he and they, with a lot of very high-powered Fenachrone help, did hold the Chloran attackers at bay until the three witches and the three warlocks found the planet upon which the Chloran Galactic Institute of Advanced Study was located. Then, with locked teeth and hard-set muscles and sweating face, he made the superhuman effort required to drive that three-man beam single-handed and keep those rabid Chloran attackers at bay besides.

  By a miracle of coordination and timing he did it – and practically collapsed when all attack and all necessity of resistance ceased. The Chloran Institute simply ceased to be. Its members died. DuQuesne recovered so quickly that no one else except the two Jelman girls knew that he had been affected at all.

  ‘Dorothy! Margaret! Break it up!’ he snapped. Doctors had been working on Seaton and Crane for minutes. Both were beginning to recover consciousness. Neither, apparently, had been permanently damaged; and both their wives were making enthusiastically joyful noises. ‘Come on, come on, take them home to do your slobbering over them. The rest of us have work to do – or do you expect us to hold this demolition job up until they organize another threesome to go to the mat with us?’

  Stretchermen carried Seaton and Crane away; Dorothy and Margaret went along. The Chloran blow at the lives of the two Skylarkers had been deadly and fast, but it had not succeeded – quite.

  And the ‘demolition job’ went on.

  In the great light-years-thick ‘tank’ that was the psiontists’ working model of the three galaxies they were manipulating, lights were winking out and reappearing as stars and planets were hurled through four-dimensional curves to new orbits and positions. Already Galaxy A – the ‘raw-material’ source that was being used for a supply of suns – was visibly dimmer, visibly poorer in stars. Tens of millions of them had already been stolen away and tossed through four-space into Chloran suns in Galaxy DW-427-LU. And when they reappeared, in a head-on collision course with those Chloran suns, and struck, and destroyed themselves in the titanic outflow of energies that produced super-nova blasts, the model of Galaxy DW-427-LU showed another tiny but blindingly bright flare – and another – and another –

  There were more than fifty thousand million suns to move, in all. As the first targets had been the strongest and most dangerous Chloran systems, resistance soon ceased to matter; the task became monotonous, exhausting and mind-deadening.

  To the Chlorans, of course, it was something else again. They died in uncounted trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous flesh was charred, baked and desiccated in the split-second of the passing of the wave front from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves began to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Some died in terrible, frantic efforts to escape …

  But they all died.

  And for each sun that DuQuesne’s remorseless net located and flung into the Chloran galaxy, an oxygen-bearing, human-populated planet was snatched out of the teeth of the resulting explosion and carried through four-space into the safety of Galaxy B, there to slip quietly into orbit around a pre-selected, hospitable sun. No human world was destroyed in all of Galaxy DW-427-LU.

  It went on and on …

  And then it was over.

  Marc DuQuesne rose, stretched and yawned. ‘That’s all. Everybody dismissed,’ he said, and at once the vast psionic net ceased to be. He was alone for the first time in many hours.

  His face was lined, his eyes deeper and darker than ever. Apart from that there was no sign of the great extermination he had just conducted. He was simply Marc DuQuesne. The man who slew a galaxy looked no different after the deed than he had before.

  He allowed his sense of perception to roam for a moment about the ‘working model’. In Galaxy A, where billions of suns had gone through the stellar cycle of evolution for billions of years, there was scarcely a corporal’s guard of primaries left. It was a strange, almost a frightening sight. For with the loss of the suns the composition of the galaxy had changed to something never before seen in all the plenum of universes. Nearly every sun had had planets; nearly every planet remained behind when its sun was stolen. Now they roamed at random – uncontrolled, barren, uninhabited – lacking not only the light and heat of their primaries, but freed from their gravitational reins as well.

  Galaxy B, on the other hand, looked quite normal – in ‘working model’. The planets it had acquired, both from the exploded Chloran suns and from the looted solar systems of Galaxy A, were not even visible. Galactically speaking, it was essentially unchanged; the additional mass of a few billion planets did not matter, and each of the new planets was already in orbit around a friendly sun. There would be readjustments, of course. It would be necessary to keep a watch on the developments of each affected solar system, over a period of years. But that was no problem of Marc DuQuesne’s.

  But the Chloran galaxy! What was it?

  In the ‘working model’ it was rapidly becoming a single, light-years-thick concentration of living flame. In the reality it was even huger, even more deadly. A name would be invented for it some day – quasi-stellar? Or something greater still?

  But that, too, was no longer a concern for Marc DuQuesne. He dropped from his mind, without a qualm, the memory of the trillions of lives he had taken, the billions of worlds he had dislocated. He ignored the question of Richard Ballinger Seaton, now stirring back to consciousness, to worry – and ultimately, to reassurance – somewhere on the Valeron. He had more pressing business to take care of. Personal business. And to DuQuesne that was the most pressing of all.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he sent Stephanie de Marigny a tight-beamed thought:

  ‘Hunkie – some time before you go back to Washington, can I flip you over to the DQ for a private conference that we know will be private?’

  Her beautifully dimpled smile flashed on. ‘I should say not! You know I’m not that kind of a …’ she began; then, as she perceived how much in earnest he was, she changed tone instantly and went on, ‘Of course, Blackie. Any time. Just give me time to pack a toothbrush and my pajamas. Top Secret, or can you give me a hint to allay my ’satiable curiosity?’

  ‘Hint; large economy size. Every time I think of what those damned observers are doing to you – feeding a mind like yours with an eye-dropper instead of a seventy-two-inch pipeline – it makes me madder and madder. I can give you everything that Seaton, I, Crane and half the Norlaminians know, and give it to you in five hours.’

  ‘You can what?’ The thought was a mental scream. She licked her lips, gulped twice, and said, ‘In that case we needn’t wait for either toothbrush or pajamas. Do it now.’

  He laughed deeply. ‘I wasn’t sure that would be your attitude, but I’m glad it is. But I can’t do it this minute. I have to help Sleemet finish building his planetoid, watch him very carefully for a while on course and do a couple of other crash-pri chores. Three or four days, probably. Say Saturday, seventeen hours?’

  ‘That’ll be fine, Blackie, and thanks. I’ll be here with my ears pinned back and my teeth filed down to needle points.’

  30

  Emperor

  The Fenachrone had taken off and DuQuesne had watched them go, taking extreme precautions – none of which, it turned out, had been necessary – that they did not eliminate either him or the rest of the party as soon as it became safe for them to do so. He had taken Stephanie de Marigny and all her belongings aboard, saying that he was going close enough to Tellus so that i
t would be no trouble at all to drop her off there. And lastly, when Seaton and Crane had insisted upon thanking him for what he had done:

  ‘Save it,’ he had sneered. ‘Remember, that time on X-World, what I told you to do with that kind of crap! That still goes,’ and he had taken off at full touring drive on course one seven five Universal. This course, which would give the First Galaxy a near miss, was the most direct route to a galaxy that was distant indeed; the galaxy lying on the extreme southern rim of the First Universe; the galaxy in which the DQ had been built; the galaxy that DuQuesne had surveyed so thoroughly and which he intended to rule.

  DuQuesne and Stephanie were in the DQ’s control room, which was an exact duplicate of the Skylark of Valeron’s. He placed her in the seat that on the Valeron was Crane’s, showed her how to elevate herself into his own station.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re going to give me the whole gigantic Brain?’

  ‘That’s the best and easiest way to do it. I boiled down about ten thousand lifetimes of knowledge and experience into ten half-hour sessions. The ten tapes on that player there are coded instructions for the Brain – what to give you and how. There are minds who could take the whole jolt in seconds, but yours and mine aren’t that type – yet. But you’ll get it all in five hours. Every detail. It’ll shock you all hell’s worth and it’ll scare you right out of your panties, but it won’t hurt you and it won’t damage your brain. Yours is one of the very few human brains that can take it. I’ll start it and in five hours I’ll be back. Ready?’

  ‘As much so as I ever will be, I guess. Go.’

  He started the player; and, after waiting a few minutes to be sure that everything was going as programmed, he left the room …

  He came back in just as the machine clicked off, lowered her ‘chair,’ and lifted her to her feet.

  ‘Good – God – in Heaven!’ she gasped. Her skin, normally so dark, was a yellowish white; so pale that her scattered freckles stood out sharply, each one in bold relief. ‘I don’t. I can’t … I simply can’t grasp it! I know it, but …’ She paused.