E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (115 page)

He simply built himself the most powerful space vessel he could imagine, armed it, launched it … and set out to recapture the universe Seaton had once taken away from him.

The revolution on the planet Ray-See-Nee was over and Richard Seaton, disguised under the identity of Ky-El Mokak, was ready to take the one tactical move for which all the effort and struggle on the planet had been only the preliminaries. But first he needed to know what had happened to his shipmates and friends; he had been busy enough fighting his own fights and taking his own prisoners to have temporarily lost sight of them.

Wherefore, in Ray-See-Nee’s palatial Capitol Building, in the Room of State – which, except for the absence of an actual throne, was in effect a throne-room – Seaton turned his prisoner over to a guard and rounded up his own crew, so that they could look each other over and compare notes.

Sitar, limping badly but with fur coat still glossily immaculate, proudly displayed a left leg bandaged from the knee all the way up. ‘A slash from here, clear down to there.’ The Osnomian princess ran a forefinger along a line six or seven inches long. ‘And a bullet right through there. That was the
gaudiest
fight I was ever in in my whole life!’

Dunark, whose right arm was in a sling, spoke up.
‘She got that slash saving my life. I’d just taken this one through the shoulder’ – he pointed – ‘and was paralyzed for a second. So she kicked her leg up in the way – while she was flipping a gun around to blow this guy apart, you know – so his knife went into her leg instead of my neck.’

‘Yes, but go on and tell them about how many times you—’ Sitar began.

‘Sh-h-h-h,’ Dunark said, and she subsided. ‘Maybe some day we’ll write a book. How about you, Mart? I notice you’ve been standing up all the time.’

‘I’ll be standing up or lying on my face for a while, I guess.’

‘But that wouldn’t account for the cane,’ Seaton objected. ‘Come clean, guy.’

‘One through the hip – thigh, rather, low down – no bones broken.’

Shiro, who had a broken arm, would not talk at first, but they finally got the story out of him. His last opponent had been just too big and too strong and too well trained to be easy meat, but Shiro had finally got him with a leg-lock around the neck. ‘But how about you, Dick?’ Shiro asked. ‘Whoever wrapped you up must get hospital supplies at wholesale.’

Seaton grinned. ‘She had only one patient.’ He told his own story, then went on, ‘Since we can all walk, let’s go over and see what they’re finding out.’

Ree-Toe Prenk had said that he wanted all thirty-one of the department heads taken alive if possible; but he had known that it would not be possible. He was surprised and highly pleased, in fact, that only six of the High Exalteds had been killed or had taken their own lives.

There is no need to go into the details of that questioning. Seaton took no part in any of it; nor did any of his group. He did not offer to help and Prenk did not ask him.

Nor is it necessary to describe the operation outside the palace. The rebels had learned much from their previous failure, and they now had all the arms, ammunition and supplies they needed. Thus, before sunset that day every known quisling had been shot and every suspect was under surveillance. Premier Ree-Toe Prenk sat firmly in the Capitol City’s saddle; and whoever controlled that city always controlled the world.

Hours before control was assured, however, Prenk called Seaton. ‘About the daily report to Chloran headquarters that is due in half an hour,’ the new Premier said. ‘I am wondering if you have any ideas. Our ordinary reports are not dangerous to make, since they are made to underlings whose only interest in the human race it to encode and file our reports properly. But, since their automatic instruments have recorded much of this change of government, it will have to be reported in detail. And a Great One, or even a Greater Great One, may become interested, in which case the reporter’s mind may be searched.’ Prenk looked thoughtful, then shook his head. ‘There’s no use trying to gloss it over. In an event like this the Greatest Great One himself will very probably become interested and the reporter
will die on the spot. In any case, even with an ordinary Great One, his mind will be shattered for life.’

‘I see,’ Seaton said. ‘I didn’t think of it, but I’m not surprised. We’ve tangled with Chlorans before. But cheer up. I locked eyes with their Supreme Great One …’

‘You didn’t!’ Prenk broke in, in amazement. ‘You actually did?’

‘I actually did, and I knocked him – it? – loose from his teeth.’ Regretfully Seaton added, ‘But we can’t make a battle out of this.’ He scowled in concentration for a minute, then went on, ‘Okay, there’s more than one way to stuff a goose. I’ll make the report. Let’s go.’

Wherefore, twenty-five minutes later, Seaton sat at an ultra-communicator panel in Communications, ready to flip a switch.

The reporter whose shift it was stood off to one side, out of the cone of vision of the screen. Crane sat – gingerly, sidewise, and on a soft pillow – well within the cone of visibility of the screen, at what looked like an ordinary communications panel, but was in fact a battery of all the analytical instruments known to the science of Norlamin.

‘But, Your Exalted,’ said the highly nervous reporter. ‘I’m very glad indeed that you’re doing this instead of me, but won’t they notice that it isn’t me? And probably do something about it?’

‘I’m sure they won’t.’ Seaton had already considered the point. ‘I doubt very much, in view of their contempt for other races, if they ever bother to differentiate between any one human being and any other one. Like us and beetles.’

The reporter breathed relief. ‘They probably don’t, sir, at that. They
don’t
seem to pay any attention to us as individuals.’

Seaton braced himself and, exactly on the tick of time, flipped the switch. Knowing that the amoeboids could assume any physical form they pleased and as a matter of course assumed the form most suitable for the job, he was not surprised to see that the filing clerk looked like an overgrown centipede with a hundred or so long, flexible tentacles ending in three-fingered ‘hands’ – a dozen or so of which were manipulating the gadgetry of a weirdly complex instrument-panel. He was somewhat surprised, however, in spite of what he had been told, that the thing did not develop an eye and look at him; did not even direct a thought at him. Instead:

‘I am ready, slave,’ a deep bass voice rolled from the speaker, in the language of Prenk’s planet Ray-See-Nee. ‘Start the tape.’

Seaton pressed a button; the tape began to travel through the sender. For perhaps five minutes nothing happened. Then the sender stopped and a deeper, heavier voice came from the speaker: a voice directed at the filing clerk, but using Rayseenese …

Why
? Seaton wondered to himself.
Oh, I see. Soften ’em up. Scare the pants off ’em, then put on the screws.

‘Yield, clerk,’ the new voice said.

‘I yield with pleasure, O Great One,’ the clerk replied, and went rigidly motionless; not moving a finger or a foot.

‘It pleases me to study this matter myself,’ the giant voice went on as though the clerk had not spoken. ‘While slight, the possibility does exist that some
of these verminous creatures have dared to plot against the Race Supreme. If this is merely another squabble among themselves for place it is of no interest; but if there is any trace of non-submission, vermin and city will cease to exist. I shall learn the deepest truth. They can make lying tapes, but no entity of this or of any other galaxy can lie to a Great One mind to mind.’

While the Great One talked, the picture on the screen began to change. The clerk began to fade out and something else began to thicken in. And Seaton, knowing what was coming, set himself in earnest and brought into play that part of his multi-compartmented mind that was the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of Norlamin.

This coming interview, he knew, must be vastly different from his meeting with the Supreme Great One of Chlora One. That had been a wide-open, hammer-and-tongs battle; a battle of sheer power of mind. Here it would have to be a matter of delicacy of control; of precision and of nicety and of skill as well as of power. He would have to play his mind as exactly and as subtly as Dorothy played her Stradivarius, for if the monster came to suspect any iota of the truth all hell would be out for noon with no pitch hot.

The screen cleared and Seaton saw what he had known he would see; a large, flatly ellipsoidal mass of something that was not quite a jelly not quite a solid; a monstrosity through whose transparent outer membrane there was visible a large, intricately convoluted brain. As Seaton looked at the thing it developed an immense eye, from which there poured directly into Seaton’s brain a beam of mental energy so incredibly powerful as to be almost tangible physically.

Braced as he was, every element of the man’s mind quivered under the impact of that callously hard-driven probe; but by exerting all his tremendous mental might he took it. More, he was able to hold his Drasnik-taught defenses so tightly as to reveal only and precisely what the Great One expected to find – utter helplessness and abject submission.

That probe was not designed to kill. Or rather, the Great One did not care in the least whether it killed or not. It was intended to elicit the complete truth; and from any ordinary human mind it did.

‘Can you lie to me, slave?’ That tremendous voice resounded throughout every chamber of Seaton’s mind. ‘Or withhold from me any iota of the truth?’

‘I cannot lie to you, O Great One; nor withhold from you any iota, however small, of the truth.’ This took everything of camouflage
and of defensive screen Seaton had; but he managed to reveal no sign at all of any of it.

‘How much do you personally know, not of the details of the
coup d’état
itself, but of the motivation underlying it?’

‘Everything, O Great One, since I was Premier Ree-Toe Prenk’s right-hand man,’ and Seaton reported the exact truth of Prenk’s motivation and planning.

The Great One’s probe vanished, the screen went dark, and the sender resumed its sending.

‘Huh!’ Seaton wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. ‘“This dope isn’t of any interest, clerk old boy, so just file it away and forget it,” His Nibs says. It’s a good thing he was after Prenk’s motivation, not mine. If he’s really bored in after mine I don’t know whether I could have kept things all nice and peaceful or not. I knew I’d been nudged, believe you me.’

‘I believed you,’ Crane said, looking into his friend’s eyes. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

The reporter goggled in awe: ‘And you can still talk intelligently, sir?’

‘Yeah.’ Seaton answered both questions at once, but did not elaborate. ‘What did you get, Mart? Anything?’

‘I learned where it is,’ said Crane. Nothing else.

Small reward for weeks of effort and risk of life … and yet it was for that the entire campaign on the planet Ray-See-Nee had been waged! The whole operation had been designed to get that one fact. A people had been given new hope; some hundreds had lost their lives; many thousands had received scars they would bear a long time; a regime had been deposed and a new one put in power.

But these were only by-products, only the small change of a victory which justified all of Seaton’s efforts … and would have its consequences in every part of the universe, for incalculable times to come!

Ray-See-Nee’s new department heads, in their meeting with Premier Ree-Toe Prenk in the Room of State, were in unanimous agreement that everything was under control. Some quislings and recalcitrants had been shot and a few more would probably have to be. That was only to be expected. Yes, since all of the new incumbents had been jumped many grades in status and in authority and in salary, there was and
would continue to be a certain amount of jealousy; but that was not of very much importance. The jealous ones would either accept the facts of life or be shot. Period.

After the meeting was over Kay-Lee Barlo came up to Seaton. She now bore herself as though she had been born an Exalted; her ex-boss’s pistol swung jauntily at one very female hip as she walked. As she came up to him and took both his hands in hers, standing so close to him that her upstanding, outstanding hair-do almost tickled his nose, it became evident that her weapon had been fired quite recently. She wore no perfume, and the faint but unmistakable acrid odor of burned smokeless powder still clung to her hair.

‘O Ky-El!’ she exclaimed, equal to equal now. ‘I’ll simply
never
be able to thank you enough. Nor will all Ray-See-Nee. This world will be an entirely different place to live on hereafter.’

‘I sincerely hope so, Kay-Lee.’ Seaton smiled into the girl’s eager, expressive face. ‘Ray-See-Nee is lucky to have had as strong, able and just a man as Ree-Toe Prenk to take over.’

‘As you said a while back, “You can say
that
again.” He’s all of that. What he’s done already is marvelous. But everyone knows – he does, too, he’s put you up on a pedestal a mile high – that it’s you who put him in the saddle. That’s what I wanted mostly to tell you. Also, I wanted to ask you’ – she paused and flushed slightly – ‘you’ll forget, won’t you please, what I said about that louse’s brains? I didn’t mean that, really; I’m not the type to cherish a grudge like
that
. I was a little … well, I’d been a little put out with him, just before you came in.’ With which masterpiece of understatement she gave his hands another vigorous, friendly squeeze and, swinging around, walked hip-wiggling out of the room.

She thereupon took certain steps and performed certain actions which would have astonished Seaton very much, had he known about them. But he did not – until much later.

Prenk came up to the Skylarkers a few minutes later. He shook hands with each of the off-worlders; thanked them in rounded phrases. ‘I would like very much to have you stay here indefinitely, friends,’ he concluded, ‘but I know of course that is impossible. If all the resources of the world could be devoted to the project and if all our technical men could work on it undetected for a year, we could not build anything able to withstand those Chlorans’ beams.’