E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (92 page)

‘You err, youth,’ corrected the Norlaminian. ‘You did not allow us time sufficient to consider and to evaluate all the many factors involved. Rigid analysis and extended computation show that the probability approaches unity that the capsule of stasis will, almost certainly within one Tellurian year of its launching and highly probably in much less time, encounter celestial matter of sufficient density to volatilize its uranium power-bars. This event will of course allow the stasis of time to collapse and the imprisoned immaterial entities will be liberated in precisely the same condition as in the instant of their encapsulation.’

Dorothy Seaton gasped. Even her husband showed that he was shaken. DuQuesne and the Immortals free? But –

‘But it
can’t?
he fairly yelled the protest. ‘It’ll dodge – it’s built to dodge anything that dense!’

‘At ordinary – or even extraordinary – velocities, yes,’ the ancient sage agreed, unmoved. ‘Its speed of reaction is great, yes; a rather small fraction of a trillionth of a second. That interval of time, however, while small, is very large indeed relative to zero. Compute for yourself, please, what distance that capsule will in theory traverse during that space of time at the end of only one third of one of your years.’

Seaton strode across the room and uncovered a machine that resembled somewhat a small, unpretentious desk
calculator.
*
He picked up a helmet and thought into it briefly; then stared appalled at the figure that appeared on a tape.

‘My – aunt’s – cat’s – kitten’s – pants – buttons,’ he said, slowly. ‘It’d’ve been smarter, maybe, to’ve put ’em in orbit around a planetless sun … And I don’t suppose there’s a Chinaman’s chance of catching ’em again that same way.’

‘No. Those minds are competent,’ agreed the Norlaminian.

‘Only one point is clear. You must again activate the
Skylark of Valeron
and again wear its sixth-order controller, since we know of no other entity who either can wear it or should. We eight are here to confer and, on the basis of the few data now available, to plan.’

Seaton scowled in concentration for two long minutes.

It was a measure of the strain that had been working on him that it took that long. As he had said, he was no God, and didn’t want to be. He had not gone looking for either conquest or glory. One thing at a time … but that ‘one thing’ had successively led him across a galaxy, into another dimension, through many a hard and desperate fight against some of the most keen-honed killers of a universe.

His gray eyes hardened. Of all those killers, it was Blackie DuQuesne who posed the greatest threat – to civilization, to Seaton himself, and above all to his wife, Dorothy. DuQuesne at large was deadly.

‘All right,’ he snapped at last. ‘If that’s all that’s in the wood, I suppose that’s the way it’ll have to be carved.’

The Norlaminian merely nodded. He, at least, had had no doubts of how Seaton would react to the challenge. Typically, once Seaton had decided speed became of the essence. ‘We’ll start moving now,’ he barked. ‘The parameters give us up to a year –
maybe
– but from this minute we act as though DuQuesne and the intellectuals are back in circulation
right now.
So if one of you – Rovol? – will put beams on Mart and Peg and project them over here, we’ll get right at it.’

And Dorothy, her face turning so white that a line of freckles stood boldly out across the bridge of her nose, picked the baby up and clasped him fiercely, protectively to her breast.

M. Reynolds (‘Martin’ or ‘Mart’) Crane was tall, slender, imperturbable; his black-haired, ivory-skinned wife Margaret was tall and whistle stacked – she and Dorothy were just about of a size and a shape. In a second or two their full working projections appeared, standing in the middle of the room facing the Seatons – projections so exactly true to life and so solid-seeming
as to give no indication whatever that they were not composed of fabric and of flesh and bone and blood.

Seaton stood up and half-bowed to Margaret, but wasted no time in getting down to business. ‘Hi, Peg – Mart. He briefed you?’

‘Up to the moment, yes,’ Crane replied.

‘You know, then, that some time in the indeterminate but not too distant future all hell is going to be out for noon. Any way I scan it, it looks to me as though, more or less shortly, we’re going to be
spurlos versenkt
– sunk without a trace.’

‘You err, youth.’ Drasnik, the First of Psychology of Norlamin, spoke quite sharply, for him. ‘Your thinking is loose, turbid, confused; inexcusably superficial; completely—’

‘But you know what their top man said!’ Seaton snapped. ‘The one they called “One” – and he wasn’t kidding, either, believe me!’

‘I do, youth. I know more than that, since they visited us long since. They were not exactly “kidding” you, perhaps, but your several various interpretations of One’s actual words and actions were inconsistent with any and every aspect of the truth. Those words and actions were in all probability designed to elicit such responses and reaction as would enable him to analyze and classify your race. Having done so, the probability approaches unity that you will not again encounter him or any of his group.’

‘My – God!’ Dorothy, drawing a tremendously deep breath, put Dick the Small back down on the rug and left him to his own devices. ‘That makes sense … I was scared simply witless.’

‘Maybe,’ Seaton admitted, ‘as far as One and the rest of his original gang are concerned. But there’s still DuQuesne. And if Blackie DuQuesne, even as an immaterial pattern of pure sixth-order force, thinks that way about me I’m a Digger Indian.’

‘Ah, yes; DuQuesne. One question, please, to clarify my thinking. Can you, do you think, even with the fullest use of all the resources of your
Skylark of Valeron,
release the intact mind from any body?’

‘Of course I … oh, I see what you mean. Just a minute; I think probably I can find out from here.’ He went over to his calculator-like instrument, put on a helmet, and stood motionless for a couple of minutes while the great Brain of the machine made its computation. Then, wearing a sheepish grin:

‘A flat bust. I not only couldn’t, I didn’t,’ he reported, cheerfully. ‘So One not only did the business, but he was good enough to make me
know
that I was doing it. What an operator!’ He sobered, thought intensely, then went on, ‘So they sucked us in. Played with us.’

‘You are now beginning to think clearly, youth,’ Drasnik said. ‘We come now, then, to lesser probabilities.
DuQuesne’s mind, of itself, is a mind of power.’

‘You can broadcast
that
to the all-attentive universe,’ Seaton said. ‘Question: how much stuff has he got now? We know he’s got the fifth order down solid. Incarnate, he didn’t know any more than that.
However,
mind is a pattern of sixth-order force. Knowing what we went through to get the sixth, and that we haven’t got it all yet by seven thousand rows of Christmas trees, the first sub-question asks itself: can a free mind analyze itself completely enough to work out and to handle the entire order of force in which it lies?

‘We may assume, I think, that One
could
have given DuQuesne full knowledge of the sixth if he felt like it. The second sub-question, then, is; did he? If those questions aren’t enough to start with I can think of plenty more.’

‘They are enough, youth,’ Fodan said. ‘You have pointed out the crux. We will now discuss the matter. Since this first phase lies largely in your province, Drasnik, you will now take over.’

The discussion mounted, and grew, and went on and on. Silently Dorothy slipped away, and the projection of force that was Margaret Crane followed her into the kitchen.

There was no need for Dorothy to prepare coffee and sandwiches for her husband, not by hand; one thought into a controller would have produced any desired amount of any desired comestibles. But she wanted something to do. Both girls knew from experience that a conference of this sort might go on for hours; and Dorothy knew that with food placed before him, Seaton would eat; without it, he would never notice the lack.

She did not, of course, prepare anything for the others.

They were not there. Their bodies were at varying distances – a few miles for Crane and his wife, an unthinkable number of parsecs for the Norlaminians and Sacner Carfon. The distance between Earth and the Green System was so unthinkably vast that there was no point in trying to express it in numbers of miles, or even parsecs. The central green sun of the cluster that held Norlamin, Osnome, and Dasor was visible from Earth, all right – in Earth’s hugest optical telescopes, as a tiny, 20th-magnitude point – but the light that reached Earth had been on its way for tens of thousands of years before Seaton’s ancestors had turned from hunting to agriculture, had taken off their crude skins and begun to build houses, cities, machines, and, ultimately, spaceships.

To all of this Dorothy and Peggy Crane were no strangers; they had been themselves in such projections countless times. If they were more than usually silent, it was not because of the astonishing quality of the meeting that was taking place in the Seatons’ living room, but because of the subject of that meeting. Both Dorothy and Peg knew Marc DuQuesne well. Both of them had experienced his cold, impersonal deadliness.

Neither wanted to come close to it again.

Back in the living room, Seaton
was saying: ‘If One gave DuQuesne all of the sixth-order force patterns, he can be anywhere and can do practically anything. So he probably didn’t. On the other hand if One didn’t give him any of it DuQuesne couldn’t get back here in forty lifetimes. So he probably gave him some of it. The drive and the projector, at least. Maybe as much as we have, to equalize us. Maybe One figured he owed the ape that much. Whatever the truth may be, we’ve got to assume that DuQuesne knows as much as we do about sixth-order forces.’ He paused, then corrected himself. ‘If we’re smart we’ll assume that he knows
more
than we do. So we’ll have to find somebody else who knows more than we do to learn from. Question – how do we go about doing that? Not by just wandering around the galaxy at random, looking; that’s one certain damn sure thing.’

‘It is indeed,’ the moderator agreed. ‘Sacner Carfon, you have, I think, a contribution to make at this point?’

‘I have?’ The Dasorian was surprised at first, but caught on quickly. ‘Oh – perhaps I have, at that. By using Seaton’s power and that of the Brain on the Fodan-Carfon band of the sixth, it will undoubtedly be possible to broadcast a thought that would affect selected mentalities wherever situated in any galaxy of this universe.’

‘But listen!’ protested Seaton. ‘We don’t want to
advertise
how dumb we are all over space!’

‘Of course not. The thought would be very carefully built and highly selective. It would tell who we are, what we have done, and what we intend and hope to do. It would state our abilities and – by inference, and only to those we seek – our lacks; and would invite all qualified persons and entities to get in touch with us.’

Seaton looked abstracted for a moment. He was thinking. The notion of sending out a beacon of thought was probably a good one –
had
to be a good one – after all, the Norlaminians and Sacner Carfon knew what they were doing. Yet he could see complications. The Fodan-Carfon band of the sixth order was still very new and very experimental. ‘Can you make it selective?’ he demanded. ‘I don’t mind telling our prospective friends we need help – I don’t want to holler it to our enemies.’

The Dasorian’s deep voice chuckled. ‘It can not be made selective,’ he said. ‘The message would of necessity be on such a carrier as to be receivable by any intelligent brain. Yet it can be hedged about with such safeguards, limitations, and compulsions that no one could or would pay attention to it except those who possess at least some ability, overt or latent, to handle the Fodan-Carfon band.’

Seaton whistled through his teeth. ‘Wow! And just how are you going to clamp on such controls as
those
? I don’t see how anything but magic – sheer, unadulterated, pure black magic – could swing that load.’

‘Precisely. Or, rather, imprecisely. It is unfortunate that
your term “magic” is so inexcusably loose and carries so many and so deplorable connotations and implications. Shall we design and build the thought we wish to send out?’

The thought was designed and was built; and was launched into space with the inconceivable, the utterly immeasurable velocity of its order of being.

A red-haired stripper called Madlyn Mannis, strutting her stuff in Tampa in Peninsula Florida, felt it and almost got it; but, not being very strongly psychic, shrugged it off and went on about the business of removing the last sequin-bedecked trifle of her costume. And, as close to the dancer as plenteous baksheesh could arrange for, a husky, good-looking young petrochemical engineer named Charles K. van der Gleiss felt a thrill like nothing he had ever felt before – but ascribed it, naturally enough, to the fact that this was the first time he had ever seen Madlyn Mannis dance. And in Washington, D.C., one Doctor Stephanie de Marigny, a nuclear physicist, pricked up her ears, tightened the muscles of her scalp, and tried for two full minutes to think of something she
ought
to think of but couldn’t.

Out past the Green System the message sped, and past the dust and the incandescent gas that had once been the noisome planet of the Fenachrone. Past worlds where amphibians roared and bellowed; past planets of methane ice where crystalline life brooded sluggishly on its destiny.

In the same infinitesimal instant it reached and passed the Rim Worlds of our galaxy; touching many minds but really affecting none. Farther and farther out, with no decrease whatever in speed, it flew; past the inconceivably tiny, inconceivably fast-moving point that housed the seven greatest, most fearsome minds that the Macrocosmic All had ever spawned – minds that, knowing all about that thought already, ignored it completely.

Immensely farther out, it flashed through the galaxy in which was the solar system of Ray-See-Nee – where, for the first time, it made solid contact with a mind in a body human to the limit of classification. Kay-Lee Barlo, confidential secretary of Department Head Bay-Lay Boyn, stiffened so suddenly that she stuttered into her microphone and had to erase three words from a tape – and in that same instant her mother at home went into deep trance.