Smith, E E 'Doc' - Skylark 1 - Skylark of Space
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THE SKYLARK OF SPACE
By Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.
Copyright p 1928 by Experimenter Publishing Co;
1946, 1947, 1950, 1958, by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.
Chapter One
Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon
which, a moment before, he had been electrolyzing his solution of `X,' the unknown
metal. As soon as he had removed the beaker with its precious contents the heavy bath
had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific
speed over the table, smashing a dozen Reagent-bottles on its way, raid straight o:, out
through the open window. Hastily setting the beaker down, he seized his binoculars and
focused them upon the flying bath, which now, to the unaided vision, was merely a speck
in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did not fall to the ground, but continued
on in a straight line, its rapidly diminishing size alone showing the enormous velocity at
which it was moving. It grew smaller and smaller. In a few seconds it disappeared.
Slowly lowering the binoculars to his side, Seaton turned like a man in a trance. He
stared dazedly, first at the litter of broken bottles covering the table, and then at the
empty space under the hood whore the bath had stood for so many years.
Aroused by the entrance of his laboratory helper, he silently motioned him to clean up the
wreckage.
`What happened, doctor?'
`Search me, Dan ... wish I knew, myself,' Seaton replied, absently, lost in wonder at
what he had just seen.
Ferdinand Scott, a chemist from an adjoining laboratory, entered breezily.
'Hello, Dicky, thought I heard a rack - Good Lord! What you been celebrating? Had an
explosion?'
`Uh-uh.' Seaton shook his head. `Something funny - darned funny. I can tell you what
happened, but that's all.'
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He did so, and while he talked he prowled about the big room, examining minutely every
instrument, dial, meter, gauge, and indicator in the place.
Scott's face showed in turn interest, surprise, and pitying alarm. `Dick, boy, I don't know
why you wrecked the joint, and I don't know whether that yarn came out of a bottle or a
needle, but believe me, it stinks. It's an honest-to-God, bottled-in-bond stinkeroo if I ever
heard one. You'd better lay off the stuff, whatever it is.'
Seeing that Seaton was paying no attention to him, Scott left the room, shaking his head.
Seaton walked slowly to his desk, picked up his blackened and battered briar pipe, and
sat down. What could possibly have happened to result in such shattering of all the
natural laws he knew? An inert mass of metal couldn't fly off into space without the
application of a force - in this case an enormous, a really tremendous force - a force
probably of the order of magnitude of atomic energy. But it hadn't been atomic energy.
That was out. Definitely. No hard radiation ... His instruments would have indicated and
recorded a hundredth of a millimicrocurie, and every one of them had sat placidly on
deadcenter zero through the whole show. What was that force?
And where? In the cell? The solution? The bath? Those three places were . . . all the
places there were.
Concentrating all the power of his mind - deaf, dumb, and blind to every external thing -
he sat motionless, with his forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth.
He sat there while most of his fellow chemists finished the day's work and went home;
sat there while the room slowly darkened with the coming of night.
Finally he stood up and turned on the lights. Tapping the stem of his pipe against his
palm, he spoke aloud. `Absolutely the only unusual incidents in this whole job were a
slight slopping over of the solution onto the copper and the short-circuiting of the wires
when I grabbed the beaker ... wonder if it will repeat ....'
He took a piece of copper wire and dipped it into the solution of the mysterious metal.
Upon withdrawing it he saw that the wire had changed its appearance, the X having
apparently replaced a layer of the original metal. Standing well clear of the table, he
touched the wire with the conductors. There was a slight spark, a snap, and it
disappeared. Simultaneously there was a sharp sound, like that made by the impact of a
rifle bullet, and Seaton saw with amazement a small round hole where the wire had gone
completely through the heavy brick wall. There was power - and how! - but whatever it
was, it was a fact. A demonstrable fact.
Suddenly he realized that he was hungry; and, glancing at his watch, saw that it was ten
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o'clock. And he had had a date for dinner at seven with his fiancee at her home, their first
dinner since their engagement! Cursing himself for an idiot, he hastily left the laboratory.
Going down the corridor, he saw that Marc DuQuesne, a fellow research man, was also
working late. He left the building, mounted his motorcycle, and was soon tearing up
Connecticut Avenue toward his sweetheart's home.
On the way, an idea struck him like a blow of a fist. He forgot even his motorcycle, and
only the instinct of the trained rider saved him from disaster during the next few blocks.
As he drew near his destination, however, he made a determined effort to pull himself
together.
`What a stunt!' he muttered ruefully to himself as he considered what he had done. `What
a stupid jerk! If she doesn't give me the bum's rush for this I'll never do it again if I live to
be a million years old.’
-4-
Chapter Two
As evening came on and the fireflies began flashing over the grounds of her luxurious
Chevy Chase home, Dorothy Vaneman went upstairs to dress. Mrs. Vaneman's eyes
followed her daughter's tall, trim figure more than a little apprehensively. She was
wondering about this engagement. True, Richard was a fine chap and might make a
name for himself, but at present he was a nobody and, socially, he would always be a
nobody . . . and men of wealth, of distinction, of impeccable social status, had paid court
... but Dorothy - no, `stubborn' was not too strong a term - when Dorothy made up her
mind . . .
Unaware of her mother's look, Dorothy went happily up the stairs. She glanced at the
clock, saw that it was only a little after six, and sat down at her dressing table, upon
which there stood a picture of Richard. A strong, not unhandsome face, with keen, wide-
set gray eyes; the wide brow of the thinker, surmounted by thick, unruly, dark hair; the
firm, square jaw of the born fighter - such was the man whose vivid personality, fierce
impetuosity, and indomitable perseverance had set him apart from all other men ever
since their first meeting, and who had rapidly cleared the field of all other aspirants for
her favor. Her breath came faster and her cheeks showed a lovelier color as she sat
there, the lights playing in her heavy auburn hair and a tender smile upon her lips.
Dorothy dressed with unusual care and, the last touches deftly made, went downstairs
and out upon the porch to wait for her guest.
Half an hour passed. Mrs. Vaneman came to the door and said anxiously, `I wonder if
anything could have happened to him? 9
`Of course there hasn't' Dorothy tried to keep all concern out of her voice. `Traffic jams -
or perhaps he has been picked up again for speeding. Can Alice keep dinner a little
longer?'
`To be sure,' her mother answered, and disappeared.
But when another half hour had passed Dorothy went in, holding her head somewhat
higher than usual and wearing a say-something-if-you-dare expression.
The meal was eaten in polite disregard of the unused plate. The family left the table. For
Dorothy the evening was endless; but at the usual time it was ten o'clock, and then ten-
thirty, and then Seaton appeared.
Dorothy opened the door, but Seaton did not come in. He stood close to her, but did not
touch her. His eyes searched her face anxiously. Upon his face was a look of indecision,
almost of fright - a look so foreign to his usual expression that the girl smiled in spite of
herself.
`I'm awfully sorry, sweetheart, but I couldn't help it. You've got a right to be sore and I
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ought to be kicked from here to there, but are you too sore to let me talk to you for a
couple of minutes?'
`I was never so mad at anybody in my life, until I started getting scared witless. I simply
couldn't and can't believe you'd do anything like that on purpose. Come in.'
He came. She closed the door. He half-extended his arms, then paused, irresolute, like a
puppy hoping for a pat but expecting a kick. She grinned then, and came into his arms.
`But what happened, Dick?' she asked later. `Something terrible, to make you act like
this. I've never seen you act so - so funny.'
`Not terrible, Dotty, just extraordinary. So outrageously extraordinary that before I begin I
wish you'd look me in the eye and tell me if you have any doubts about my sanity'
She led him into the living room, held his face up to the light, and made a pretense of
studying his eyes.
`Richard Ballinger Seaton, I certify that you are entirely sane - quite the sanest man I
ever knew. Now tell me the worst. Did you blow up the Bureau with a C-bomb?'
`Nothing like that,' he laughed. `Just a thing I can't understand. You know I've been
reworking the platinum wastes that have been accumulating for the last ten or fifteen
years.!
'Yes, you told me you'd recovered a small fortune in platinum and some of those other
metals. You thought you'd found a brand-new one. Did you?'
`I sure did. After I'd separated out everything I could identify, there was quite a lot of
something left - something that didn't respond to any tests I knew or could find in the
literature.
`That brings us up to today. As a last resort, because there wasn't anything else left, I
started testing for trans-uranics, and there it was. A stable - almost stable, I mean -
isotope; up where no almost-stable isotopes are supposed to exist. Up where I would've
bet my last shirt no such isotope could possibly exist.
`Well, I was trying to electrolyze it out when the fireworks started. The solution started to
fizz over, so I grabbed the beaker - fast. The wires dropped onto the steam-bath and the
whole outfit, except the beaker, took off out of the window at six or eight times the speed
of sound and in a straight line, without dropping a foot in as far as I could keep it in sight
with a pair of good binoculars. And my hunch is that it's still going. That's what happened.
It's enough to knock any physicist into an outside loop, and with my one-cylinder brain I
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got to thinking about it and simply didn't come to until after ten o'clock. All I can say is,
I'm sorry and I love you. As much as I ever did or could. More, if possible. And I always
will. Can you let it go -this time?'
`Dick . . . oh, Dick !'
There was more - much more - but eventually Seaton mounted his motorcycle and
Dorothy walked beside him down to the street. A final kiss and the man drove away.
After the last faint glimmer of red tail-light had disappeared in the darkness Dorothy
made her way to her room, breathing a long and slightly tremulous, but supremely happy
sigh.
-7-
Chapter Three
Seaton's childhood had been spent in the mountains of northern Idaho, a region not much
out of the pioneer stage and offering few inducements to intellectual effort. He could only
dimly remember his mother, a sweet, gentle woman with a great love for books; but his
father, `Big Fred' Seaton, a man of but one love, almost filled the vacant place. Fred
owned a quarter-section of virgin white-pine timber, and in that splendid grove he estab-
lished a home for himself and his motherless boy.
In front of the cabin lay a level strip of meadow, beyond which rose a magnificent, snow-
crowned peak that caught the earliest rays of the sun.
This mountain, dominating the entire countryside, was to the boy a challenge, a question,
and a secret. He accepted the challenge, scaling its steep sides, hunting its forests, and
fishing its streams. He toughened his sturdy young body by days and nights upon its
slopes. He puzzled over the question of its origin as he lay upon the needles under some
monster pine. He put staggering questions to his father; and when in books he found
some partial answers his joy was complete. He discovered some of the mountain's
secrets then - some of the laws that govern the world of matter, some of the beginnings
man's mind has made toward understanding the hidden mechanism of Nature's great
simplicity.
Each taste of knowledge whetted his appetite for more. Books! Books! More and more
he devoured them; finding in them meat for the hunger that filled him, answers to the
questions that haunted him.
After Big Fred lost his life in the forest fire that destroyed his property, Seaton turned his
back upon the woods forever. He worked his way through high school and won a
scholarship at college. Study was a pleasure to his keen mind; and he had ample time for
athletics, for which his backwoods life had fitted him outstandingly. He went out for
everything, and excelled in football and tennis.
In spite of the fact that he had to work his way he was popular with his college mates,
and his popularity was not lessened by an almost professional knowledge of sleight-of-
hand. His long, strong fingers could move faster than the eye could follow, and many a
lively college party watched in vain to see how he did what he did.
After graduating with the highest honors as a physical chemist, he was appointed
research fellow in a great university, where he won his Ph.D. by brilliant research upon
rare metals - his dissertation having the lively title of `Some Observations upon Certain
Properties of Certain Metals, Including Certain TransUranic Elements' Soon afterward he
had his own room in the Rare Metals Laboratory, in Washington, D.C.
He was a striking figure - well over six feet in height, broadshouldered, narrow-waisted, a
man of tremendous physical strength. He did not let himself grow soft in his laboratory
job, but kept in hard, fine condition. He spent most of his spare time playing tennis,
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swimming, and motorcycling.
As a tennis-player he quickly became well known in Washington sporting and social
circles. During the District Tournament he met M. Reynolds Crane - known to only a very
few intimates as `Martin' -the multi-millionaire explorer-archaeologist-sportsman who was
then District singles champion. Seaton had cleared the lower half of the list and played
Crane in the final round. Crane succeeded in retaining his title, but only after five of the
most grueling, most bitterly contested sets ever seen in Washington.
Impressed by Seaton's powerful, slashing game, Crane suggested that they train
together as a doubles team. Seaton accepted instantly, and the combination was highly
effective.
Practicing together almost daily, each came to know the other as a man of his own kind,
and a real friendship grew up between them. When the Crane-Seaton team had won the
District Championship and had gone to the semi-finals of the National before losing, the
two were upon a footing which most brothers could have envied. Their friendship was
such that neither Crane's immense wealth and high social standing nor Seaton's
comparative poverty and lack of standing offered any obstacle whatever. Their
comradeship was the same, whether they were in Seaton's modest room or in Crane's
palatial yacht.
Crane had never known the lack of anything that money could buy. He had inherited his
fortune and had little or nothing to do with its management, preferring to delegate that job
to financial specialists. However, he was in no sense an idle rich man with no purpose in
life. As well as being an explorer and an archaeologist and a sportsman, he was also an
engineer - a good one - and a rocket-instrument man second to none in the world. The
old Crane estate in Chevy Chase was now, of course, Martin's, and he had left it pretty
much as it was. He had, however, altered one room, the library, and it was now pecu-
liarly typical of the man. It was a large room, very long, with many windows. At one end
was a huge fireplace, before which Crane often sat with his long legs outstretched,
studying one or several books from the cases close at hand. The essential furnishings
were of a rigid simplicity, but the treasures he had gathered transformed the room into a
veritable museum.
He played no instrument, but in a corner stood a magnificent piano, bare of any
ornament; and a Stradivarius reposed in a special cabinet. Few people were asked to
play either of those instruments; but to those few Crane listened in silence, and his brief
words of thanks showed his real appreciation of music.
He made few friends, not because he hoarded his friendship, but because, even more
than most rich men, he had been forced to erect around his real self an almost
impenetrable screen.
As for women, Crane frankly avoided them, partly because his greatest interests in life
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were things in which woman had neither interest nor place, but mostly because he had
for years been the prime target of the man-hunting debutantes and the matchmaking
mothers of three continents.
Dorothy Vaneman with whom he had become acquainted through his friendship with
Seaton, had been admitted to his friendship. Her frank comradeship was a continuing
revelation, and it was she who had last played for him.
She and Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower and had dashed in
for shelter. While the rain beat outside, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by
playing his `fiddle'. Dorothy, a Doctor of Music and an accomplished violinist, realized
with the first sweep of the bow that she was playing an instrument such as she had
known only in her dreams, and promptly forgot everything else. She forgot the rain, the
listeners, the time, and the place; she simply poured into that wonderful violin everything
she had of beauty, of tenderness, of artistry.
Sure, true, and full the tones filled the big room, and in Crane's vision there rose a home
filled with happy work, with laughter and companionship. Sensing the girl's dreams as the
music filled his ears, he realized as never before in his busy and purposeful life what a
home with the right woman could be like.
No thought of love for Dorothy entered his mind - he knew that the love existing between
her and Dick was of the sort that only death could alter - but he knew that she had
unwittingly given him a great gift. Often thereafter in his lonely hours he saw that dream
home, and knew that nothing less than its realization would ever satisfy him.
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-1-THESKYLARKOFSPACEByEdwardE.Smith,Ph.D.Copyrightp1928byExperimenterPublishingCo;1946,1947,1950,1958,byEdwardE.Smith,Ph.D.ChapterOnePetrifiedwithastonishment,RichardSeatonstaredafterthecoppersteam-bathuponwhich,amomentbefore,hehadbeenelectrolyzinghissolutionof`X,'theunknownmetal.Assoonashehadremove...
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