E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (69 page)

‘In order to enter this region, our vessel and everything in it had to acquire the property of extension in another dimension. Your forces, calculated to rotate us here, in reality forced us to assume that extra extension, which process automatically moved us from the space in which we could no longer exist into the only one in which it is possible for us to exist. When that force is no longer operative, our extension into the fourth dimension will vanish and we shall as automatically return to our customary three-dimensional space, but probably not to our original location in that space. Is that the way you understand it?’

‘That’s a lot better than I understood it, and it’s absolutely right, too. Thanks, old thinker! And I certainly hope we don’t land back there where we took off from – that’s why we left, because we wanted to get away from there. The farther the better,’ Seaton laughed. ‘Just so we don’t get so far away that the whole galaxy is out of range of the object-compasses we’ve got focused on it. We’d be lost for fair, then.’

‘That is a possibility, of course.’ Crane took the light utterance far more seriously than did Seaton. ‘Indeed, if the two time rates are sufficiently different, it becomes a probability. However, there is another matter which I think is of more immediate concern. It occurred to me, when I saw you take that pinch of tobacco without opening the tin, that everywhere we have gone, even in intergalactic space, we have found life, some friendly, some inimical. There is no real reason to suppose that hyperspace is devoid of animate and intelligent life.’

‘Oh, Martin!’ Margaret shuddered. ‘Life! Here? In this horrible, this utterly impossible place?’

‘Certainly, dearest,’ he replied gravely. ‘It all goes back to the conversation we had long ago, during the first trip of the old
Skylark
. Remember? Life need not be comprehensible to us to exist
– compared to what we do not know and what we can never either know or understand, our knowledge is infinitesimal.’

She did not reply and he spoke again to Seaton:

‘It would seem to be almost a certainty that four-dimensional life does in fact exist. Postulating its existence, the possibility of an encounter cannot be denied. Such beings could of course enter this vessel as easily as your fingers entered that tobacco can. The point of these remarks is this – would we not be at a serious disadvantage? Would they not have fourth-dimensional shields or walls about which we three-dimensional intelligences would know nothing?’

‘Sweet spirits of niter!’ Seaton exclaimed. ‘Never thought of that at all, Mart. Don’t see how they could – and yet it does stand to reason that they’d have some way of locking up their horses so they couldn’t run away, or so that nobody else could steal them. We’ll have to do a job of thinking on that, big fellow, and we’d better start right now. Come on – let’s get busy!’

Then for what seemed hours the two scientists devoted the power of their combined intellects to the problem of an adequate fourth-dimensional defense, only and endlessly to find themselves butting helplessly against a blank wall. Their three dimensional brains in their now four-dimensional bodies told them that such extra-dimensional bulwarks and safeguards must, and in fact did, exist; that they were not only possible, but necessary in the humanly incomprehensible actuality in which the Terrestrials now found themselves: but still the immaterial and thus unaltered intelligences of the human beings, utterly unable to cope with any save three-dimensional concepts, failed miserably to envisage anything which promised to be of the slightest service.

Baffled, they drifted on through the unknowable reaches of hyperspace. All they knew of time was that it was hopelessly distorted; of space that it was hideously unrecognizable; of matter that it obeyed no familiar laws. They drifted. And drifted. Futilely.

Timelessly … aimlessly … endlessly …

The take-off of Norlamin’s second immense spaceship was not
at all like that of its first. When
Skylark Three
left Norlamin in pursuit of the fleeing vessel of Ravindau, the Fenachrone scientist, the occasion had been made an event of world-wide interest. From their tasks everywhere had come the mental laborers to that portentous launching. To it had come also, practically en masse, the ‘youngsters’ from the Country of Youth; and even those who, their life work done, had betaken themselves to the placid Nirvana of the Country of Age, returned briefly to the Country of Study to speed upon its epoch-making way that stupendous messenger of civilization.

But in sharp contrast to the throngs of Norlaminians who had witnessed the take-off of
Three
, Rovol alone was present when DuQuesne and Loring wafted themselves into the control room of its gigantic counterpart. DuQuesne had been in a hurry, and in the driving urge of his haste to go to the rescue of his ‘friend’ Seaton he had so completely occupied the mind of Rovol that that aged scientist had had no time to do anything except transfer to the brain of the Terrestrial pirate the knowledge which he would so soon require.

Of the real reason for this overwhelming haste, however, Rovol had not had the slightest inkling. DuQuesne well knew what the ancient physicist did not even suspect – that if any one of several Norlaminians, particularly one Drasnik, First of Psychology, should become informed of the proposed flight, that flight would not take place. For Drasnik, that profound student of the mind, would not be satisfied with DuQuesne’s story without a thorough mental examination – an examination which, DuQuesne well knew, he could not pass. Therefore Rovol alone saw them off, but what he lacked in numbers he made up in sincerity.

‘I am very sorry that the exigencies of the situation did not permit a more seemly leave-taking,’ he said in parting, ‘but I can assure you of the cooperation of every one of us whose brain can be of any use. We shall watch you, and shall aid you in any way we can. May the Unknowable Force direct your minor forces to the successful conclusion of your task. If, however, it is graven upon the Sphere that you are to pass in this venture, you may pass in all tranquility, for I affirm in the name of all Norlamin that this problem shall not be laid aside short of complete solution. For all my race I bid you farewell.’

‘Farewell to you, Rovol, my friend and my benefactor, and to all Norlamin,’ DuQuesne replied solemnly. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you have done for us and for Seaton, and for what
you may yet be called upon to do for all of us.’

He touched a stud and in each of the many skins of the great cruiser a heavy door drove silently shut, establishing a manifold seal.

His hand moved over the controls, and the gigantic vessel tilted slowly upward until her narrow prow pointed almost directly into the zenith. Then, easily as a wafted feather, the unimaginable mass of the immense cruiser of space floated upward with gradually increasing velocity. Faster and faster she flew, out beyond measurable atmospheric pressure, out beyond the outermost limits of the Green System, swinging slowly into a right line toward the point in space where Seaton, his companions, and both their spaceships had disappeared.

On and on she drove, now at high acceleration; the stars, so widely spaced at first, crowding closer and closer together as her speed, long since incomprehensible to any finite mind, mounted to a value almost incalculable. Past the system of the Fenachrone she hurtled; past the last outlying fringe of stars of our galaxy; on and on into the unexplored, awesome depths of open and absolute space.

Behind her the vast assemblage of stars comprising our island universe dwindled to a huge, flaming lens, to a small but bright lenticular nebula, and finally to a mere patch of luminosity.

For days communication with Rovol had been difficult, since as the limit of projection was approached it became impossible for the most powerful forces at Rovol’s command to hold a projection upon the flying vessel. In order to communicate, Rovol had to send out a transmitting and receiving projection.

As the distance grew still greater, DuQuesne had done the same thing. Now it was becoming evident, by the wavering and fading of the signals, that even the two projections, reaching out toward each other though they were, would soon be out of touch, and DuQuesne sent out his last message:

‘There is no use in trying to keep in communication any longer, as our beams are falling apart fast. I am on negative acceleration now, of an amount calculated to bring us down to maneuvering velocity at the point to which the inertia of
Skylark Two
would have carried her, without power, at the time when we shall arrive there. Please keep a listening post established out this way as far as you can, and I will try to reach it if I find out anything. If I fail – goodbye!’

‘The poor, dumb cluck!’ DuQuesne sneered as he shut off his sender and turned to Loring. ‘That was so easy that it was a shame to take it, but we’re certainly set to go now.’

‘I’ll say so!’ Loring agreed enthusiastically. ‘That was a nice touch, chief, telling him to keep a lookout out here. He’ll do it with forces, of course, not in person; but at that it’ll keep him from thinking about the Earth until
you’re all set.’

‘You’ve got the idea, Doll. If they had any suspicion at all that we were heading back for the Earth they could block us yet, easily enough; but if we can get back inside the solar system before they smell a rat it will be too late for them to do anything.’

He rotated his ship through an angle of ninety degrees upon her longitudinal axis and applied enough ‘downward’ acceleration to swing her around in such an immense circle that she would approach the galaxy from the side opposite to that from which she had left it.

Then, during days that lengthened into weeks and months of dull and monotonous flight, the two men occupied themselves, each in his own individual fashion. There was no piloting to do and no need of vigilance, for space to a distance of untold billions of miles was absolutely and utterly empty.

Loring, unemotional and incurious, performed what simple routine house-keeping there was to do, ate, slept, and smoked. During the remainder of the time he simply sat still, stolidly doing nothing whatever until the time should come when DuQuesne would tell him to perform some specific act.

DuQuesne, on the other hand, dynamic and energetic to his ultimate fiber, found not a single idle moment. His newly acquired knowledge was so vast that he needs must explore and catalogue his own brain, to be sure that he would be able instantly to call upon whatever infinitesimal portion of it might be needed in some emergency.

The fifth-order projector, with its almost infinitely complicated keyboard, must needs be studied until its every possible resource of integration, permutation, and combination held from him no more secrets than does his console from a master of the pipe organ. Thus it was that the galaxy loomed ahead, a stupendous lens of flame, before DuQuesne had really realized that the long voyage was almost over.

To his present mentality, working with his newly acquired fifth-order projector, the task of locating our solar system was but the work of a moment; and to the power and speed of his new spaceship the distance from the galaxy’s edge to the Earth was merely a longish jaunt.

When they approached the Earth it appeared as a softly shining greenish half-moon. With fleecy wisps of cloud obscuring its surface here and there, with gleaming ice caps making of its poles two brilliant areas of white, it presented an arrestingly beautiful spectacle indeed; but DuQuesne was not interested in beauty. Driving down from the empty reaches of space north of the ecliptic, he observed that Washington was in the morning zone, and soon his great vessel was poised motionless, invisibly high above the city.

His first act was to throw out an ultra-powered detector screen, with automatic trips and tighteners, around the entire solar system; out far beyond the outermost point of the orbit of Pluto. Its every
part remained unresponsive. No foreign radiation was present in all that vast volume of space, and DuQuesne turned to his henchman with cold satisfaction stamped upon his every hard lineament.

‘No interference at all, Doll. No ships, no projections, no spy rays, nothing,’ he said. ‘I can really get to work now. I won’t be needing you for a while, and I imagine that, after being out in space so long, you would like to circulate around with the boys and girls for a couple of weeks or so. How are you fixed for money?’

‘Well, chief, I could do with a small binge and a few nights out among ’em, if it’s all right with you,’ Loring admitted. ‘As for money, I’ve got only a couple of hundred on me, but I can get some at the office – we’re quite a few pay days behind, you know.’

‘Never mind about going to the office. I don’t know exactly how well Brookings is going to like some of the things I’m going to tell him, and you’re working for
me
, you know, not for the office. I’ve got plenty. Here’s five thousand, and you can have three weeks to spend it in. Three weeks from today I’ll tell you what to do. Until then, do as you please. Where do you want me to set you down? Perhaps the Perkins roof will be clear at this hour.’

‘Good as any. Thanks, chief,’ and without even a glance to assure himself that DuQuesne was at the controls Loring made his way through the manifold airlocks and calmly stepped out into ten thousand feet of empty air.

DuQuesne caught the falling man neatly with an attractor and lowered him gently to the now-deserted roof of the Perkins Cafe – that famous restaurant which had been planned and was maintained by the World Steel Corporation as a blind for its underground activities. He then seated himself at his console and drove his projection down into the innermost private office of Steel. He did not at first thicken the pattern into visibility, but remained invisible, studying Brookings, now president of that industrial octopus.

The magnate was seated as of yore in a comfortably padded chair at his massive and ornate desk, the focus and center of a maze of secret private communication bands and even more secret private wires. For Steel was a growing octopus and its voraciously insatiable maw must be fed.