E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (60 page)

‘The scout ship that he calls will come up to investigate. They will bring apparatus and attractors to bear to liberate the prisoner, and the dummies will try to fight. They will be blown up or burned to cinders almost instantly, and our little playmate will put on his space-suit and be taken across to the capturing vessel. Once there, he will report to the commander.

‘That officer will think the affair sufficiently serious to report it directly to headquarters. If he doesn’t, this ape here will insist upon reporting it to general headquarters himself. As soon as that report is in, we, working through our prisoner here, will proceed to wipe out the crew of the ship and take it over.’

‘And do you think he’ll really do it?’ Loring’s guileless face showed doubt, his tone was faintly skeptical.

‘I
know
he’ll do it!’ The chemist’s voice was hard. ‘He won’t take any active part – I’m not psychologist enough to know whether I could drive
him that far, even drugged, against an unhypnotizable subconscious or not – but he’ll be carrying something along that will enable me to do it, easily and safely. But that’s about enough of this chin music – we’d better start doing something.’

While Loring brought spare clothing and weapons, and rummaged through the vessel in search of material suitable for the dummies’ fabrication, the Fenachrone engineer worked rapidly at his task. And not only did he work rapidly, he worked skillfully and artistically as well. This artistry should not be surprising, for to such a mentality as must necessarily be possessed by the chief engineer of a first-line vessel of the Fenachrone, the faithful reproduction of anything capable of movement was not a question of art – it was merely an elementary matter of line, form, and mechanism.

Cotton waste was molded into shape, reinforced, and wrapped in leather under pressure. To the bodies thus formed were attached the heads, cunningly constructed of masticated fiber, plastic, and wax. Tiny motors and many small pieces of apparatus were installed, and the completed effigies were dressed and armed.

DuQuesne’s keen eyes studied every detail of the startlingly lifelike, almost microscopically perfect, replicas of himself and his traveling companion.

‘A good job,’ he commented briefly.

‘Good?’ exclaimed Loring. ‘It’s perfect! Why, that dummy would fool my own wife, if I had one – it almost fools me!’

‘At least, they’re good enough to pass a more critical test than any they are apt to get during this coming incident.’

Satisfied, DuQuesne turned from his scrutiny of the dummies and went to the closet in which had been stored the space-suit of the captive. To the inside of its front protector flap he attached a small and inconspicuous flat-sided case. He then measured carefully, with a filar micrometer, the apparent diameter of the planet now looming so large beneath them.

‘All right, Doll; our time’s getting short. Break out our suits and test them, will you, while I give the big boy his final instructions?’

Rapidly those commands flowed over the wires of the mechanical educator, from DuQuesne’s hard, keen brain into the now docile mind of the captive. The Earthly scientist explained to the Fenachrone, coldly, precisely, and in minute detail, exactly what he was to do and exactly what he was to say from the moment of encountering the detector screens of his native planet until after he had reported to his superior officers.

Then the two Tellurians donned their own armor and made their way into an adjoining room, a small armory in which were hung several
similar suits and which was a veritable arsenal of weapons.

‘We’ll hang ourselves up on a couple of these hooks, like the rest of the suits,’ DuQuesne explained. ‘This is the only part of the performance that may be even slightly risky, but there is no real danger that they will spot us. That fellow’s message to the scout ship will tell them that there are only two of us, and we’ll be out there with him, right in plain sight.

‘If by any chance they should send a party aboard us they would probably not bother to search the
Violet
at all carefully, since they will already know that we haven’t got a thing worthy of attention; and they would of course suppose us to be empty space-suits. Therefore keep your lens shields down, except perhaps for the merest crack to see through, and, above all, don’t move a millimeter, no matter what happens.’

‘But how can you manipulate your controls without moving your hands?’

‘I can’t; but my hands will not be in the sleeves, but inside the body of the suit – shut up! Hold everything – there’s the flash!’

The flying vessel had gone through the zone of feeble radiations which comprised the outer detector screen of the Fenachrone. But, though tenuous, that screen was highly efficient, and at its touch there burst into frenzied activity the communicator built by the captive to be actuated by that very impulse. It had been built during the long flight through space, and its builder had thought that its presence would be unnoticed and would remain unsuspected by the Tellurians.

Now automatically put into action, it laid a beam to the nearest scout ship of the Fenachrone and into that vessel’s receptors it passed the entire story of the
Violet
and her occupants. But DuQuesne had not been caught napping. Reading the engineer’s brain and absorbing knowledge from it, he had installed a relay which would flash to his eyes an inconspicuous but unmistakable warning of the first touch of the screen of the enemy. The flash had come – they had penetrated the outer lines of the monstrous civilization of the dread and dreaded Fenachrone.

In the armory DuQuesne’s hands moved slightly inside his shielding armor, and out in the control room the dummy, that was also to all outward seeming DuQuesne, moved and spoke. It tightened the controls of the attractors, which had never been entirely released from their prisoner, thus again pinning the Fenachrone helplessly against the wall.

‘Just to be sure you don’t try to start anything,’ it explained coldly, in DuQuesne’s own voice and tone. ‘You have done well so far, but I’ll run things myself from now on, so that you can’t steer us into a trap. Now tell me exactly how to go about getting one of your vessels. After we get it I’ll see about letting you go.’

‘Fools, you are too late!’ the prisoner roared exultantly. ‘You would have been too late, even had you killed me out there in space and had fled at your utmost acceleration. Did you but know it you are as dead, even
now – our patrol is upon you!’

The dummy that was DuQuesne whirled, snarling, and its automatic pistol and that of its fellow dummy were leaping out when an awful acceleration threw them flat upon the floor, a magnetic force snatched away their weapons, and a heat ray of prodigious power reduced the effigies to two small piles of gray ash. Immediately thereafter a beam of force from the patrolling cruiser neutralized the attractors bearing upon the captive and, after donning his space-suit, he was transferred to the Fenachrone vessel.

Motionless inside his cubby, DuQuesne waited until the airlocks of the Fenachrone vessel had closed behind his erstwhile prisoner; waited until that luckless monster had told his story to Fenor, his emperor, and to Fenimol, his general in command; waited until the communicator circuit had been broken and the hypnotized, drugged, and already dying creature had turned as though to engage his fellows in conversation. Then only did the saturnine scientist act. His finger closed a circuit, and in the Fenachrone vessel, inside the front protector flap of the discarded space-suit, the flat case fell apart noiselessly and from it there gushed forth volume upon volume of colorless and odorless, but intensely lethal, vapor.

‘Just like killing goldfish in a bowl.’ Callous, hard, and cold, DuQuesne exhibited no emotion whatever; neither pity for the vanquished foe nor elation at the perfect working out of his plans. ‘Just in case some of them might have been wearing suits for emergencies, I had some explosive copper ready to detonate, but this makes it much better – the explosion might have damaged something we want.’

And aboard the vessel of the Fenachrone, DuQuesne’s deadly gas diffused with extreme rapidity, and as it diffused, the hellish crew to the last man dropped in their tracks. They died not knowing what had happened to them; died with no thought of even attempting to send out an alarm; died not even knowing that they died.

‘Can you open the airlocks of that scout ship from the outside, doctor?’ asked Loring, as the two adventurers came out of the armory into the control room, where DuQuesne, by means of the attractors, began to bring the two vessels together.

‘Yes. I know everything that the engineer of a
first-class battleship knew, To him, one of these little scouts was almost beneath notice, but he did know that much about them – the outside controls of all Fenachrone ships work the same way.’

Under the urge of the attractors the two ships of space were soon door to door. DuQuesne set the mighty beams to lock the craft immovably together and both men stepped into the
Violet
’s airlock. Pumping back the air, DuQuesne opened the outer door, then opened both outer and inner doors of the scout.

As he opened the inner door the poisoned atmosphere of the vessel screamed out into space, and as soon as the frigid gale had subsided the raiders entered the control room of the enemy craft. Hardened and conscienceless killer though Loring was, the four bloated, ghastly objects that had once been men gave him momentary pause.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have let the air out so fast,’ he suggested, tearing his gaze away from the grisly sight.

‘The brains aren’t hurt, and that’s all I care about.’ Unmoved, DuQuesne opened the air valves wide, and not until the roaring blast had scoured every trace of the noxious vapor from the whole ship did he close the airlock doors and allow the atmosphere to come again to normal pressure and temperature.

‘Which ship are you going to use – theirs or our own?’ asked Loring, as he began to remove his cumbersome armor.

‘I don’t know yet. That depends largely upon what I find out from the brain of the lieutenant in charge of this patrol boat. There are two methods by which we can capture a battleship; one requiring the use of the
Violet
, the other the use of this scout. The information which I am about to acquire will enable me to determine which of the two plans entails the lesser amount of risk.

‘There is a third method of procedure, of course; that is, to go back to Earth and duplicate one of their battleships ourselves, from the knowledge I shall have gained from their various brains concerning the apparatus, mechanisms, materials, and weapons of the Fenachrone. But that would take a long time and would be far from certain of success, because there would almost certainly be some essential facts that I would not have secured. Besides, I came out here to get one of their first-line spaceships, and I intend to do it.’

With no sign of distaste DuQuesne coupled his brain to that of the dead lieutenant of the Fenachrone through the mechanical educator, and quite as casually as though he were merely giving Loring another lesson in Fenachrone matters did he begin systematically to explore the intricate convolutions of that fearsome brain. But after only ten minutes’ study he was interrupted by the brazen clang of the emergency alarm. He flipped off the power of the educator, discarded his headset, acknowledged the call,
and watched the recorder as it rapped out its short, insistent message.

‘Something is going on here that was not on my program,’ he announced to the alert but quiescent Loring. ‘One should always be prepared for the unexpected, but this may run into something cataclysmic. The Fenachrone are being attacked from space, and all armed forces have been called into a defensive formation – Invasion Plan XB218, whatever that is. I’ll have to look it up in the code.’

The desk of the commanding officer was a low, heavily built cabinet of metal. DuQuesne strode over to it, operated rapidly the levers and dials of its combination lock and took from one of the compartments the ‘Code’ – a polygonal framework of engraved metal bars and sliders, resembling somewhat an Earthly multiplex squirrel-cage slide rule.

‘X – B – Two – One – Eight.’ Although DuQuesne had never before seen such an instrument, the knowledge taken from the brains of the dead officers rendered him perfectly familiar with it, and his long and powerful fingers set up the indicated defense plan as rapidly and as surely as those of any Fenachrone could have done it. He revolved the mechanism in his hands, studying every plane surface, scowling blackly in concentration.

‘Munitions plants – shall – so-and-so – We don’t care about that. Reserves – zones – ordnance – commissary – defensive screens … Oh, here we are! Scout ships. Instead of patrolling a certain volume of space, each scout ship takes up a fixed post just inside the outer detector zone. Twenty times as many on duty, too – enough so that they will be only about ten thousand miles apart – and each ship is to lock high-power detector screens and visiplate and recorder beams with all its neighbors.

‘Also, there is to be a first-class battleship acting as mother ship, protector, and reserve for each twenty-five scouts. The nearest one is to be … Let’s see, from here that would be only about twenty thousand miles over that way and about a hundred thousand miles down.’

‘Does that change your plans, chief?’

‘Since my plans were not made, I cannot say that it does – it changes the background, however, and introduces an element of danger that did not previously exist. It makes it impossible to go out through the detector zone – but it was practically impossible before, and we have no intention of going out, anyway, until we possess a vessel powerful enough to go through any barrage they can lay down. On the other hand, there is bound to be a certain amount of confusion in placing so many vessels, and that fact will operate to make the capture of our battleship much easier than it would have been otherwise.’

‘What danger exists that wasn’t there before?’ demanded Loring.

‘The danger that the whole planet may be blown up,’ DuQuesne returned bluntly. ‘Any nation or race attacking from space would
of course have atomic power, and any one with that power could volatilize any planet by simply dropping a bomb on it from open space. They might want to colonize it, of course, in which case they wouldn’t destroy it, but it is always safest to plan for the worst possible contingencies.’