E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (102 page)

She was wondering, however, and quite intensely, about the guy. He’d been following her around for a couple of weeks. Or had he? She’d seen him somewhere every day – but he couldn’t
possibly
have followed her here. Not only hadn’t she known she was coming here until just before she started, but she had come by speedboat and had found him on the beach when she arrived!

And the man was wondering, too. He knew that he hadn’t been following her. Without hiring an eye, he wouldn’t know how to. And the idea that Madlyn Mannis would be following
him
around was ridiculous – it
really
stunk. But how many times in a row could heads turn up by pure chance alone?

He didn’t dare move any closer, but he kept on looking and he kept on wondering. Would she slug him or just slap him or maybe even accept it, he wondered, if he should offer to buy
the
Miss Mannis a drink …

Miss Mannis was also being studied, much more
intensively and from much closer viewpoints, by two Jelmi in an immense new spaceship, the
Mallidaxian
, on the moon; and the more they studied the Mannis costume the more baffled they became.

As had been said, the Jelmi had had to build this immense new spaceship because the comparatively tiny
Mallidax
, in which they had escaped from the Realm of the Llurdi, had proved too small by far to house the outsized gear necessary for accurately controlled intergalactic work of any kind. The
Mallidaxian
, however – built as she was of inoson and sister-ship as she was to the largest, heaviest, and most powerful space-sluggers of the Realm – was not only big enough to carry any instrumentation known to the science of the age, but also powerful enough to cope with any foreseeable development or contingency.

The Jelman sub-lunar base had been dismantled and collapsed. Its every distinguishing feature had been reduced to moon-dust. The
Mallidaxian’s
slimly powerful length now extended for a distance of two and one half miles from the mountain’s foot out into the level-floored crater: in less than an hour she would take off for Mallidax, the home world of Tammon, Mergon, Luloy, and several other top-bracket Jelmi of the fugitive eight hundred.

The vessel’s officers and crew were giving their instruments and mechanisms one last pre-flight check. Tammon was still studying the offensive and defensive capabilities of Cape Kennedy; Mergon and Luloy – among others – had been studying the human beings of this hitherto unknown world. Everyone aboard, of course, had long since mastered the principal languages of Earth.

That Madlyn Mannis should have been selected for observation was not very astonishing. Some thousands of Earthmen – and Earthwomen, Earthchildren, even Earthdogs and cats – had been. There was that about Madlyn Mannis, however, and to a lesser degree about the male with whom she seemed in some way associated, that seemed to deserve special study. For one thing, the Jelmi had been totally unable to deduce any shred of evidence that might indicate her profession – not so surprising, since the work of a stripper must seem pure fantasy to a world which habitually wears no clothes at all! Madlyn, although used to being talked about, would have been quite astonished to learn how interestedly she was being discussed on the far side of the moon.

‘Oh, let’s bring her up here, Merg,’ Luloy said in disgust. ‘I want to talk to her – find out what this idiocy
means
. We’d better bring that fellow along, too: she’d probably be scared out of her wits – if any – alone.’

‘Check,’ Mergon said, and the two Tellurians appeared, standing close together, in the middle of the room.

The girl screamed once; then, her eyes caught by the awesome moonscape so starkly visible through the transparent wall, she froze and stared in terror. Then, finding that she was not being hurt, she
fought her terror down. She took one fleeting glance at Mergon, blushed to the waist, and concentrated on Luloy. ‘Why, you must … you do go naked!’ she gasped. ‘All the time! How utterly,
utterly
shameless!’

‘Shameless?’ Luloy wrinkled her nose in perplexity. ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about, this “shame” concept. I can’t understand it and its dictionary definition is senseless to the point of unsanity. I never heard of a concept before that so utterly lacked sense, reason, and logic. What significant difference can there
possibly
be between nakedness and one ribbon and two bits of gauze? And why in the name of All-Seeing Llenderllon wear any clothing at all when you don’t have to? Against cold or thorns or whatever? And especially when you swim? And you take
off
your clothes too …’

‘I do no such thing!’ The dancer threw herself up haughtily. ‘I am an artiste. An exotic dancer’s disrobing is a fine art, and I am Madlyn Mannis,
the
exotic dancer.’

‘Be that as it may, just answer one question and we’ll put you back where you were, on the beach. What
possible
logical, reasonable, or even comprehensible relationship can there be between clothing and sex?’

While the girl was groping for an answer, the main took one step forward and said, ‘She can’t answer that question. Neither can I, fully, but I can state as a fact that such a relationship is a fact of our lives; of the lives of all the people – even the least civilized peoples – of our world. It’s an inbred, ages-old, worldwide sexual taboo. Based, possibly or even probably, upon the idea “out of sight, out of mind”.’

‘A
sexual
taboo?’ Luloy shook her head in complete bafflement. ‘Why, I never heard of anything so completely idiotic in my whole life! Will you wear these thought-caps with me for a moment, please, so that we may explore this weird concept in depth?’

The girl flinched away from the helmet at first, but the man reached out for his, saying, ‘I’ve always claimed to have an open mind, but
this
I’ve got to see.’

Since complete non-comprehension of motivation on one side met fundamental ignorance on the other, however, thoughts were no more illuminating than words had been.

‘Neither she nor I know enough about the basics of that branch of anthropology,’ the man said, handing the helmet back to Luloy. ‘You’d better get a book.
Mores and Customs of Tellus,
by David Lisser, in five volumes, is the most complete work I know of. You can find it in any big bookstore. It’s expensive, though – it costs seventy-five dollars.’

‘Oh? And we haven’t any American money and we don’t steal … but I’ve noticed that highly refractive bits of crystalline carbon of certain shades of color are of value here.’

Turning her back on the two Tellurians, Luloy went to the laboratory bench, opened a drawer, glanced into it, and
shook her head. She picked up a helmet, thought into it, and there appeared upon the palm of her hand a perfectly cut, perfectly polished, blue-white diamond half the size of an egg.

She turned back toward the two and held out her hand so that the man could inspect the gem, saying, ‘I have not given any attention at all to your monetary system, but this should be worth enough, I think, to leave in the place of the book of five volumes. Or should it be bigger?’

Close up, the man goggled at blue-white fire. ‘
Bigger!
Than
that rock? Lady!
Are you
kidding?
If that thing will stand inspection it’ll buy you a
library,
buildings and all!’

‘That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you.’ Luloy turned to Mergon. ‘They don’t know any more than—’

‘Just a minute, please,’ the man broke in. ‘If diamonds don’t mean any more than that to you, why wouldn’t it be a good idea for you to make her some? To alleviate the shock she has just had? Not as big, of course; none bigger than the end of my thumb.’

Luloy nodded. ‘I know. Various sizes, for full-formal array. She’s just about my size, so eleven of your quarts will do it.’

‘My God, no …’ Madlyn began, but the man took smoothly over.

‘Not quite, Miss Luloy. Our ladies don’t decorate their formals as lavishly as you apparently do. One quart, or maybe a quart and a half, will do very nicely.’

‘Very well,’ Luloy looked directly at the man. ‘But you won’t want to be lugging them around with you all the rest of the day – they’re heavy – so I’ll put them in the right-hand top drawer of the bureau in your bedroom. Goodbye,’ and Mergon’s hands began to move toward his controls.

‘Wait a minute!’ the man exclaimed. ‘You
can’t
just dump us back where we were without a word of explanation! While spaceships aren’t my specialty – I’m a petrochemical engineer T-8 – I’ve never imagined anything as big as this vessel actually flying, and I’m just about as much interested in that as I am in the way we got here – which
has
to be fourth-dimensional translation; it
can’t
be anything else. So if everything isn’t top secret, how about showing us around a little?’

‘The fourth-dimension device is top secret; so much so that only three or four of us know anything about it. You may study anything else you please. Bearing in mind that we have only a few seconds over three of your minutes left, where would you like to begin?’

‘The engines first, please, and the drives.’

‘And you, Miss Mannis? Arts? Crafts? Sciences? There is no dancing going on at the moment.’

The dancer’s right hand flashed out, seized her fellow Earthman’s forearm and clung to it. ‘Wherever
he
goes I go along!’ she said, very positively.

Since neither of the two Earthpeople had even been projected before, they were both very much surprised at how much can be learned via
projection, and in how short a time. They saw tremendous receptors and generators and propulsors; they saw the massed and banked and tiered keyboards and instrumentation of the control stations; they saw how the incredibly huge vessel’s inoson structural members were trussed and latticed and braced and buttressed to make it possible for such a titanic structure to fly.

Since everything aboard the original Jelman vessel had been moved aboard this vastly larger one before the original had been reduced to moon-dust, the dancer and her companion also saw beautiful, splendid, and magnificent – if peculiarly unearthly – paintings and statues and tapestries and rugs. They heard music, ranging from vast orchestral recordings down to the squeakings and tootlings of beginners learning to play musical instruments unknown to the humanity of Earth.

And above all they saw people. Hundreds and hundreds of people; each one completely naked and each one of a physical perfection almost never to be found on Earth.

At time zero twenty seconds Mergon cut off the projectors and the Earthman looked at Luloy.

She not only had swapped the diamond for the five-volume set of books; she had already read over a hundred pages of Volume One. She was flipping pages almost as fast as her thumb and forefinger could move, and she was absorbing the full content of the work at the rate of one glance per page.

‘You people seem to be as human as we are,’ Madlyn said, worriedly, ‘but outside of that you’re nothing like us at all in any way.
Where
did you come from anyway?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ Mergon said, flatly. ‘Not that I don’t want to, I can’t. We’re what you call human, yes; but our world Mallidax is a myriad of galaxies away from here – so far away that the distance is completely incomprehensible to the mind. Goodbye.’

And Madlyn Mannis found herself – with no lapse of time and with no sensation whatever of motion – standing in her former tracks under the big umbrella on the beach. The only difference was that she was now standing still instead of digging her toes into the sand.

She looked at her fellow moon-traveler. He, too, was standing in the same place as before, but he now looked as though he had been struck by lightning. She swallowed twice, then said, ‘Well, I’m awfully glad I wasn’t alone when
that
hap—’ She broke off abruptly, licked her lips, and went on in a strangely altered tone, ‘Or am I nuttier than a fruit-cake?
Vas
you dere, Sharlee?’

‘I vas dere, Madlyn.’ He walked toward her. He was trying to grin, but was not having much success with it. ‘And my name
is
Charley – Charles K. van der Gleiss.’

‘My God! That makes it even worse – or does it?’

‘I don’t see how anything could; very well or very much
… but I need a drink. How about you?’

‘
Brother!
Do I! But we’ll have to dress. You can’t get anything on the beach here that’s strong enough to cope with anything like
that!
’

‘I know. City owned. Teetotal. I’ll see you out in front in a couple of minutes. In a taxi.’

‘Make it five minutes, or maybe a bit more. And if you run out on me, Charles K. van der Gleiss, I’ll … I’ll hunt you up and kill you absolutely dead, so help me!’

‘Okay, I’ll wait, but make it snappy. I need that drink.’

She had snatched up her robe and had taken off across the sand like a startled doe; her reply came back over one shoulder. ‘
You
need a drink? Oh,
brother!
’

The world had come a long way from the insular, mud-bound globe of rock and sea of the 1950s and 1970s; Seaton and Crane had seen to that. Norlaminian Observers were a familiar sight to most humans – if not in person, then surely through the medium of TV or tapefax. A thousand worlds had been photographed by Tellurian cameramen and reporters; the stories of the Osnomians, the Fenachrone, the Valeronians, even the Chlorans and other weirdly non-human races of the outer void were a matter of public record.

Nevertheless, it is a far different thing from knowing that other races exist to find yourself a guest of one of them, a quarter of a million miles from home; wherefore Madlyn and Charley’s expressed intentions took immediate and tangible form.

Madlyn Mannis and Charles K. van der Gleiss were facing each other across a small table in a curtained booth; a table upon which a waiter was placing a pint of bonded hundred-proof bourbon and the various items properly accessory thereto. As soon as the curtain fell into place behind the departing waiter the girl seized the bottle, raised it to her mouth, and belted down a good two fingers – as much as she could force down before her coughing, choking, and strangling made her stop.