E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (114 page)

For the first time, the girl’s taut self-control was broken. ‘Do you mean I can actually clean this pig-sty up?’ she demanded, tears welling into her eyes. ‘That you actually
want
me to clean it up?’

‘Just that. You’ll be briefed at a meeting of the new department heads late this afternoon. In the meantime start your house-cleaning as soon as you like after your people get back from lunch; and I don’t have to tell you now to act. Have you got or can you get a good hand-gun?’

‘Yes,
sir
, there’s a very good one – his – in his desk. I was trying to get up nerve enough to ask for it.’

‘It’s yours as of now. Can you use it? That’s probably a foolish question.’

‘I’ll say I can use it! I made Pistol Expert One when I was eleven and I’ve been improving ever since.’

‘Fine!’ He glanced again at his watch. ‘Go get it, be sure it’s loaded, buckle it on and wear it. Show your badge, play the recording and lay down the law. If there’s any argument, shoot to kill. We aren’t fooling.’ He glanced at the prisoner. ‘He’ll be out of your way. I’m taking him downstairs pretty soon to answer some questions.’

‘I – I thank you, sir. I can’t tell you how much. But you – I mean … well, I –’ The girl was a study in mixed emotions. Her nostrils flared and her whole body was tense with the beyond-imagining thrill of what had just occurred; but at the same time she was so acutely embarrassed that she could scarcely talk. ‘I want to tell you, sir, that I
wasn’t
trying to curry …’ She broke off in confusion and gulped twice.

‘Curry? I know you weren’t. You aren’t the toadying type. That’s one reason you got it – but just a second.’

He looked again at his watch and did not put it down; but in a few seconds raised the ring to his lips and asked, ‘Are you there, Ree-Toe?’

‘Here, Ky-El,’ the tiny ring-voice said.

‘Mission accomplished, including selection and installation
of department head.’

‘Splendid! Are you hurt?’

‘Not badly. Scratch across my back. How’re we doing?’

‘Better even than expected. The Premier is dead, I don’t know yet exactly how. All your people are all right except for some not-too-serious wounds. Ours, only ten dead reported so far. The army came over to a man. You have earned a world’s thanks this day, Ky-El, and its eternal gratitude.’

Seaton blushed. ‘Skip it, chief. Any change in schedule?’

‘None.’

‘Okay. Off.’ Seaton, lowering his hand to his side, turned to Kay-Lee.

She, who had not quite been able to believe all along that all this was actually happening to
her
, was staring at him in wide-eyed awe. ‘You
are a
biggie!’ she gasped. ‘A great
big
biggie, Your Exalted, to talk to the Premier himself like that! So this unbelievable appointment will stick!’

‘It will stick. Definitely. So chin high and don’t spare the horses, Your Exalted; and I’ll see you at the meeting. Until then, so-long.’

Seaton cut his prisoner loose and half-led, half-dragged him, gibbering and begging, out of the room. Almost Seaton regretted it was over; the work on Ray-See-Nee had been pleasurable, as well as useful.

But – now he had his base of operations, unknown to the Chlorans, on a planet they thought safely their own. Now he could go on with his campaign against them. Seaton was well aware that the universe held other enemies than the Chlorans, but his motto was one thing at a time.

However, it is instructive now to see just what two of those inimical forces were up to at this one – one which knew it was in trouble … and one which did not!

Before the world of the Fenachrone was destroyed by Civilization’s superatomic bombs it was a larger world than Earth, and a denser, and with a surface gravity very much higher. It was a world of steaming jungle; of warm and reeking fog; of tepid, sullenly steaming water; of fantastically lush vegetation unknown to Earthly botany. Wind there was none, nor sunshine. Very seldom was the sun of that reeking world visible at all through the omnipresent fog, and then only as a pale, wan disk; and what of its atmosphere
was not fog was hot and humid and sulphurously stinking air.

And as varied the world, so varied the people. The Fenachrone, while basically humanoid, were repulsively and monstrously short, wide and thick. They were immensely strong physically, and their mentalities were as monstrous as their civilization was many thousands of years older than that of Earth; their science was equal to ours in most respects and ahead of it in some.

Most monstrous of all the facets of Fenachrone existence, however, was their basic philosophy of life. Might was right. Power was not only the greatest good; it was the only good. The Fenachrone were the MASTER RACE, whose unquestionable destiny it was to be the unquestionable masters of the entire space-time continuum – of the summated totality of the Cosmic All.

For many thousands of years nothing had happened to shake any Fenachrone’s rock-solid conviction of the destiny of their race. Progress along the Master-Race line had been uninterrupted. In fact, it had never been successfully opposed. The Fenachrone had already wiped out, without really extending themselves, all the other civilizations within a hundred parsecs or so of their solar system. But up to the time of Emperor Fenor no ruler of the Fenachrone had become convinced that the time had come to set the Day of Conquest – the day upon which the Big Push was to begin.

But rash, headstrong, egomaniacal Fenor insisted upon setting the Day in his own reign – which was why First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet had set up his underground so long before. He was just as patriotic as any other member of his race; just as thoroughly sold on the idea of the inevitable ultimate supremacy over all created things wherever situated; but his computations did not indicate that success was as yet quite certain.

How right Sleemet was!

He knew that he was right after hearing the first few words of Sacner Carfon’s ultimatum to Emperor Fenor: that was why he had pushed the panic button for the eighty-five-thousand-odd members of his faction to flee the planet right then.

He knew it still better when, after Fenor’s foolhardy defiance of Sacner Carfon, of the Overlord, and of the Forces of Universal Peace, his native planet became a minor sun behind his flying fleet.

Even then, however, Sleemet had not learned very much – at least, nowhere nearly enough.

At first glance it might seem incredible that, after such an experience, Sleemet could have so lightly destroyed two such highly industrialized worlds about which he knew so little. It might seem as though it must have been impressed upon his mind that the Fenachrone were not the ablest, strongest, wisest, smartest, most highly advanced and most powerful form of life ever created. Deeper study will show, however, that
with his heredity and conditioning he could not possibly have done anything else.

Sleemet probably did not begin to realize the truth until the Llurd Klazmon so effortlessly – apparently – wiped out sixteen of his seventeen superdreadnoughts, then crippled his flagship beyond resistance or repair and sent it hurtling through space toward some completely unknown destination.

His first impulse, like that of all his fellows, was to storm and to rage and to hurl things and to fight. But there was no one to fight; and storming and raging and hurling and smashing things did not do any good. In fact, nothing they could do elicited any attention at all from their captors.

Wherefore, as days stretched out endlessly and monotonously into endless and monotonous weeks, all those five-thousand-odd Fenachrone – males and females, adults and teenagers and children and babies – were forced inexorably into a deep and very un-Fenachronian apathy.

And when the hulk of the flagship arrived at the Llanzlanate on far Llurdiax, things went immediately from bad to worse. The volume of space into which the Fenachrone were moved had a climate exactly like that of their native city on their native world. All its artifacts – its buildings, and its offices and its shops and its foods and its drinks and its everything else – were precisely what they should have been.

Ostensibly, they were encouraged to live lives even more normal than ever before (if such an expression is allowable); to breed and to develop and to evolve; and especially to perform breakthroughs in science.

Actually, however, it was practically impossible for them to do anything of their own volition; because they were being studied and analyzed and tested every minute of every day. Studied coldly and logically and minutely; with an utterly callous ferocity unknown to even such a ferocious race as the Fenachrone themselves were.

Hundreds upon hundreds of the completely helpless captives died – died without affecting in any smallest respect the treatment received by the survivors – and as their utter helplessness struck in deeper and deeper, the Fenachrone grew steadily weaker, both physically and mentally.

This was no surprise to their captors, the Llurdi. Nor was it in any sense a disappointment. To them the Fenachrone were tools; and they were being tempered and shaped to their task …

On Earth, leaving Stephanie de Marigny’s apartment, DuQuesne went back to the
Capital D
and took off on course one hundred seventy-five Universal – that is, five degrees east of Universal South. He went that way because in that direction lay the most completely unexplored sector of the First Universe and he did not want company. Earth and the First Galaxy lay on the edge of the First Quadrant. Llurdiax and its Realm lay in the Second. So did the Empire of the Chlorans and his own imaginary planet Xylmny. The second
galaxy along that false line, which might also attract Seaton, lay in the Third. He didn’t want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton – yet – and this course was mathematically the best one to take to get out of and keep out of Seaton’s way. Therefore he would follow it clear out to the Fourth Quadrant rim of the First Universe.

As the
Capital D
bored a hole through the protesting ether DuQuesne took time out from his thinkings to consider women. First, he considered Stephanie de Marigny; with a new and not at all unpleasant thrill as he did so. He considered Sennlloy and Luloy and some unattached women of the Jelmi. They all left him completely cold; and he was intellectually honest enough to know why and to state that ‘why’ to himself. The Jelmi were so much older than the humanity of Earth that they were out of his class. He could stand equality – definitely; in fact, that was what he wanted – but he could not live with and would not try to live with any woman so demonstrably his superior.

But Hunkie – ah,
there
was a man’s woman! His equal; his perfect equal in every respect; with a brain to match one of the finest bodies ever built. She didn’t
play
hard to get, she
was
hard to get; but once got she’d stay got. She’d stand at a man’s back till his belly caved in.

Slowed to a crawl, as Universal speed goes, the
Capital D
entered the outermost galaxy of the Rim of the Universe and DuQuesne energized his highest-powered projector. He studied the Tellus-type planets of hundreds of solar systems. Many of these planets were inhabited, but he did not reveal himself to the humanity of any of them.

He landed on an uninhabited planet and went methodically to work. He bulldozed out an Area of Work. He set up his batteries of machine tools; coupling an automatic operator of pure force to each tool as it was set up. Then he started to work on the Brain; which took longer than all the rest of the construction put together. It was an exact duplicate of that of the
Skylark of Valeron
; one cubic mile of tightly packed ultra-miniaturized components; the most tremendous and most tremendously capable super-computer known to man.

While the structure of the two brains was identical, their fillings were not. As has been said, there were certain volumes – blocks of cells – in the
Valeron’s
brain that DuQuesne had not been able to understand. These blocks he left inoperative – for the time being. Conversely, DuQuesne either had or wanted powers and qualities and abilities that Seaton neither had nor wanted; hence certain blocks that were as yet inoperative in Seaton’s vast, fabrication were fully operative in DuQuesne’s.

It is a well-known fact that white-collar men, who sit at desks and whose fellowship with machines is limited to weekend drives in automobiles, scoff heartily at the idea that any two machines of the same make and model do or can act differently from each other except by reason of wear. With increasing knowledge of an acquaintance with machines, however
– especially with mechanisms of the more complex and sophisticated sorts – this attitude changes markedly. The men and women who operate such machines swear unanimously that those machines do unquestionably have personalities; each its unique and peculiar own.

Thus, while the fact can not be explained in logical or ‘common’ sense terms, those two giants’ brains were as different in personality as were the two men who built them.

Nor was DuQuesne’s worldlet, which he named the
DQ
, very much like the
Skylark of Valeron
except in shape. It was bigger. Its skin was much thicker and much denser and much more heavily armed. The individual mechanisms were no larger – the
Valeron’s
were the biggest and most powerful that DuQuesne knew how to build – but there were so many of them that he was pretty sure of being safe from anyone. Even from whoever it was that had mauled the
Valeron
so unmercifully – whom he, DuQuesne, did not intend to approach. Ever.

It was, in fact, his prayerful hope that both mauler and maulee – Seaton himself – would ultimately emerge from the scuffle whittled down to a size where he would not have to consider them again.

He did not, in fact, consider them; nor did he consider the captive Fenachrone in the pens of Llurdiax; nor the Jelmi; nor – and this, perhaps, was his greatest mistake – did he consider, because he did not know about, a mother and daughter of whose existence neither he nor any other Tellus-type human being had yet heard.