E. E. Doc Smith - Skylark 2 - Skylark Three

SKYLARK THREE

By Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.

Copyright, 1930, by Experimenter Publications, Inc.

Copyright, 1948, by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.

CHAPTER 1

DuQuesne Goes Traveling

In the innermost private office of steel, Brookings and DuQuesne stared

at each other

across the massive desk. DuQuesne's voice was cold, his black brows were drawn

together.

"Get this, Brookings, and get it straight. I'm shoving off at twelve

o'clock tonight. My

advice to you is to lay off Richard Seaton, absolutely. Don't do a thing.

NOTHING, understand?

Just engrave these two words upon your brain— HOLD EVERYTHING. Keep on holding

it

until I get back, no matter how long that may be."

"I am very much surprised at your change of front, Doctor. You are the

last man I would

have expected to be scared off after one engagement."

"Don't be any more of a fool than you have to, Brookings. There's a lot

of difference

between being scared and knowing when you are simply wasting effort. As you

remember, I

tried to abduct Mrs. Seaton by picking her off with an attractor from a space-

ship. I would have

bet that nothing could have stopped me. Well, when they located me—probably

with an

automatic Osnomian emission detector—and heated me red-hot while I was still

better than two

hundred miles up, I knew then and there that they had us stopped: that there

was nothing we

could do except go back to my plan, abandon the abduction idea, and kill them

all. Since my

plan would take time, you objected to it, and sent an airplane to drop a five-

hundred-pound bomb

on them. Airplane, bomb and all, simply vanished. It didn't explode, you

remember, just flashed

into light and disappeared. Then you pulled several more of your fool ideas,

such as long-range

bombardment, and so on. None of them worked. Still you've got the nerve to

think that you can

get them with ordinary gunmen! I've drawn you diagrams and shown you figures—

I've told you

in great detail and in one-syllable words exactly what we're up against. Now I

tell you again that

they've GOT SOMETHING. If you had the brains of a louse you would know that

anything I

can't do with a space-ship can't be done by a mob of ordinary gangsters. I'm

telling you,

Brookings, that you can't do it. My way is absolutely the only way that will

work."

"But five years, Doctor!"

"I may be back in six months. But on a trip of this kind anything can

happen, so I am

planning on being gone five years. Even that may not be enough—I am carrying

supplies for ten

years, and that box of mine in the vault is not to be opened until ten years

from today."

"But surely we shall be able to remove the obstructions ourselves in a

few weeks. We

always have."

"Oh, quit kidding yourself, Brookings! This is no time for idiocy! You

stand just as much

chance of killing Sea-ton. . . ."

"Please, Doctor, please don't talk like that!"

"Still squeamish, eh? Your pussyfooting always did give me an acute pain.

I'm for direct

action, word and deed, first, last, and all the time. I repeat, you have

exactly as much chance of

killing Richard Seaton as a blind kitten has."

"How do you arrive at that conclusion, Doctor? You seem very fond of

belittling our

abilities. Personally, I think that we shall be able to attain our objectives

within a few

weeks—certainly long before you can possibly return from such an extended trip

as you have in

mind. And since you are so fond of frankness, I will say that I think Seaton

has you buffaloed, as

you call it. Nine-tenths of these wonderful Osnomian things I am assured by

competent

authorities are scientifically impossible, and I think that the other one-

tenth exists only in your

own imagination. Seaton was lucky in that the airplane bomb was defective and

exploded

prematurely; and your space-ship got hot because of your injudicious speed

through the

atmosphere. We shall have everything settled by the time you get back."

"If you have I'll make you a present of the controlling interest in Steel

and buy myself a

chair in some home for feeble-minded old women. Your ignorance and

unwillingness to believe

any new idea do not change the facts in any particular. Even before they went

to Osnome, Seaton

was hard to get, as you found out. On that trip he learned so much new stuff

that it is now

impossible to kill him by any ordinary means. You should realize that fact

when he kills every

gangster you send against him. At all events be very, very careful not to

kill—nor even hurt—his

wife in any of your attacks, even by accident, until after you have killed.

"Such an event would be regrettable, certainly, in that it would remove

all possibility of

the abduction."

"It would remove more than that. Remember the explosion in our

laboratory, that blew an

entire mountain into I impalpable dust? Draw in your mind a nice, vivid

picture of one ten times

the size in each of our plants and in this building. I know that you are fool

enough to go ahead

with your own ideas, in spite of everything I've said; and, since !l do not

yet actually control

Steel, I can't forbid you to, officially. But you should know that I know what

I'm talking about,

and I say again that you're going to make an utter fool of yourself; just

because you won't believe

anything possible that hasn't been done every day for a hundred years. I wish

that I could make

you understand that Seaton and Crane have got something that we haven't—but

for the good of

our plants, and incidentally for your own, you must 'remember one thing,

anyway; for if you

forget it we won't have a plant left and you personally will be blown into

atoms. Whatever you

start, kill Seaton first, and be absolutely certain that he is definitely,

completely, finally, and

totally dead before you touch one of Dorothy Seaton's red hairs. As long as

you only attack him

personally he won't do anything 'but kill every man you send against him. If

you touch her |while

he's still alive, though—Blooie!" and the saturnine I scientist waved both

hands in an expressive

pantomime of ! wholesale destruction.

"Probably you are right in that," Brookings paled slightly. ] "Yes,

Seaton would do just

that. We shall be very careful, | until after we succeed in removing him."

"Don't worry—you won't succeed. I shall attend to that detail myself, as

soon as I get

back. Seaton and Crane and I their families, the directors and employees of

their plants, the

banks that by any possibility may harbor their notes or solutions—in short,

every person and

every thing standing between me and a monopoly of 'x'—all shall disappear."

"That is a terrible program, Doctor. Wouldn't the late Perkins' plan of

an abduction, such

as I have in mind, be better, safer, and quicker?"

"Yes—except for the fact that it will not work. I've talked until I'm

blue in the face—I've

proved to you over and over that you can't abduct her now without first

killing aim, and that you

can't even touch him. My plan is the only one that will work. Seaton isn't the

only one who

learned anything—I learned a lot myself. I learned one thing in particular.

Only four other

inhabitants of either Earth or Osnome ever had even an inkling of it, and they

died, with their

brains disintegrated beyond reading. That thing is my ace in the hole. I'm

going after it. When I

get it, and not until then, I'll be ready to take the offensive."

"You intend starting open war upon your return?"

"The war started when I tried to pick off the women with my attractor.

That is why I am

leaving at midnight. He always goes to bed at eleven-thirty, and I will be out

of range of his

object-compass before he wakes up. Seaton and I understand each other

perfectly. We both know

that the next time we meet one of us is going to be resolved into his

component ultra-

microscopic constituents. He doesn't know that he's going to be the one, but I

do. My final word

to you is to lay off—if you don't, you and your 'competent authorities' are

going to learn a lot."

"You do not care to inform me more fully as to your destination or your

plans?"

"I do not. Goodbye."

_CHAPTER 2

Dunark Visits Earth

Martin Crane reclined in a massive chair, the fingers of his right hand

lightly touching

those of Ms left, listening attentively. Richard Seaton strode up and down the

room before his

friend, his unruly brown hair on end, speaking savagely between teeth clenched

upon the stem of

his reeking, battered briar; brandishing a sheaf of papers.

"Mart, we're stuck—stopped dead. If my head wasn't made of solid blue

mush I'd've had

a way figured out of this thing before now, but I can't. With that zone of

force the Skylark would

have everything imaginable—without it, we're exactly where we were before.

That zone is

immense, man—terrific—its possibilities are unthinkable—and I'm so damned dumb

that I can't

find out how to use it intelligently —can't use it at all, for that matter. By

its very nature it is

impenetrable to any form of matter, however applied; and this calc here,"

shaking the sheaf of

papers viciously, "shows that it must also be opaque to any wave whatever,

propagated through

air or through ether, clear down to cosmic rays. Behind it we would be blind

and helpless, so we

can't use it at all. It drives me frantic! Think of a barrier of pure force,

impalpable, immaterial,

and exerted along a geometrical surface of no thickness whatever—and yet

actual enough to stop

a radiation that travels a hundred million light-years and then goes through

twenty-seven feet of

solid lead just like it was so much vacuum! That's what we're up against!

However, I'm going to

try out that model, Mart, right now. Let's go!"

"You are getting idiotic again, Dick," Crane rejoined calmly, without

moving. "You

know, even better than I do, that you are playing with the most concentrated

essence of energy

that the world has ever seen. That zone of force probably can be generated . .

."

"Probably, nothing!" barked Seaton. "It's just as evident a fact as that

stool," kicking the

unoffending bit of furniture half-way across the room as he spoke. "If

you'd've let me I'd've

shown it to you yesterday."

"Undoubtedly, then. Grant that it is impenetrable to all matter and to

all known wave-

lengths. Suppose that it should prove impenetrable also to gravitation and to

magnetism? Those

phenomena probably depend upon the ether, but we know nothing fundamental of

their nature,

nor of that of the ether. Therefore your calculations, comprehensive though

they are, cannot

predict the effect upon them of your zone of force. Suppose that that zone

actually does set up a

barrier in the ether, so that it nullifies gravitation, magnetism, and all

allied phenomena; so that

the power bars, the attractors and repellors, cannot work through it? Then

what? As well as

showing me the zone of force, you might well have shown me yourself flying off

into space,

unable to use your power and helpless if you released the zone. No, we must

know more of the

fundamentals before you try even a small-scale experiment."

"Oh, bugs! You're carrying caution to extremes, Mart. What can happen?

Even if

gravitation should be nullified, I would rise only slowly, heading south the

angle of our

latitude—that's thirty-nine degrees—away from the perpendicular. I couldn't

shoot off on a

tangent, as some of these hop-heads have been claiming. Inertia would make me

keep pace,

approximately, with the earth in its rotation. I would rise slowly—only as

fast as the tangent

departs from the curvature of the earth's surface. I haven't figured out how

fast that is, but it must

be pretty slow."

"Pretty slow?" Crane smiled. "Figure it out."

"All right—but I'll bet it's slower than the rise of a toy balloon."

Seaton threw down the

papers and picked up his slide rule, a twenty-inch deci-trig duplex. "You'll

concede that it is

allowable to neglect the radial component of the orbital velocity of the

earth, for a first

approximation, won't you—or shall I figure that in too?"

"You may neglect that factor."

"All right—let's see. Radius of rotation here in Washington would be

cosine latitude

times equatorial radius, approximately—call it thirty-two hundred miles.

Angular velocity,

fifteen degrees an hour. I want secant fifteen less one times thirty-two

hundred. Right? Secant

equals one over cosine—um-——m—one point oh three five. Then point oh three

five times

thirty-two hundred. Hundred and twelve miles first hour. Velocity constant

with respect to sun,

accelerated respecting point of departure. Ouch! You win, Mart—I'd step out!

Well, how about

this, then? I'll put on a suit and carry rations. Harness outside, with the

same equipment I used in

the test flights before we built Skylark One—plus the new stuff. Then throw on

the zone, and see

what happens. There can't be any jar in taking off, and with that outfit I can

get back U.K. if I go

clear to Jupiter!"

Crane sat in silence, his keen mind considering every aspect of the

motions possible, of

velocity, of acceleration, of inertia. He already knew well Seaton's

resourcefulness in crises and

his physical and mental strength.

"As far as I can see, that might be safe," he admitted finally, "and we

really should know

something about it besides the theory."

"Fine! I'll get at it—be ready in five minutes. Yell at the girls, will

you? They'd break us

off at the ankles if we pull anything new without letting them in on it."

A few minutes later the "girls" strolled out into Crane Field, arms

around each

other—Dorothy Seaton, her gorgeous auburn hair framing violet eyes and vivid

coloring; black-

haired, dark-eyed Margaret Crane.

"Br-r-r, it's cold!" Dorothy shivered, wrapping her coat more closely

about her. "This

must be the coldest day Washington has seen for years!"

"It is cold," Margaret agreed. "I wonder what they are going to do our

here, this kind of

weather?"

As she spoke, the two men stepped out of the "testing shed"—the huge

structure that

housed their Osnomian-built space-cruiser, Skylark II. Seaton waddled

clumsily, wearing as he

did a Crane space-suit which, built of fur, canvas, metal, and transparent

silica, braced by steel

netting and equipped with air-tanks and heaters, rendered its wearer

independent of outside

conditions of temperature and pressure. Outside this suit he wore a heavy

harness of leather,

buckled about his body, shoulders, and legs, attached to which were numerous

knobs, switches,

dials, bakelite cases, and other pieces of apparatus. Carried by a strong

aluminum framework

\vhich was in turn supported by the harness, the universal bearing of a small

power-bar rose

directly above his grotesque-looking helmet.

"What do you think you're going to do in that thing, Dickie?" Dorothy

called. Then,

thinking that he could not hear her voice, she turned to Crane. "What are you

letting that

precious husband of mine do now, Martin? He looks like he's up to something."

While she was speaking, Seaton had snapped the release of his face-plate.

"Nothing much, Dottie. Just going to show you-all the zone of force.

Martin wouldn't let

me turn it on unless I got all cocked and primed for a year's journey into

space."

"Dot, what is that zone of force, anyway?" asked Margaret.

"Oh, it's something Dick got into his head during that awful fight they

had on Osnome.

He hasn't thought of anything else since we got back. You know how the

attractors and repellors

work? Well, he found out something funny about the way everything acted while

the

Mardonalians were bombarding them with a certain kind of a wave-length. He

finally figured out

the exact vibration that did it, and found out that if it is made strong

enough, it acts as if a

repellor and attractor were working together—only so much stronger that

nothing can get

through the boundary, either way— in fact, it's so strong that it cuts

anything in two that's in the

way. And the funny thing is that there's nothing there at all, really; but

Dick says that the forces

meeting there, or something, make it act as though something really important

were there. See?"

"Uh-huh," assented Margaret, doubtfully, just as Crane finished the final

adjustments and

moved toward them. A safe distance away from Seaton, he turned and waved his

hand.

Instantly Seaton disappeared from view, and around the place where he had

stood there

appeared a shimmering globe some twenty feet in diameter—a globe apparently a

perfect

spherical mirror, which darted upward and toward the south. After a moment the

globe

disappeared and Seaton was again seen. He was now standing upon a

hemispherical mass of

earth. He darted back toward the group upon the ground, while the mass of

earth fell with a crash

a quarter of a mile away. High above their heads the mirror again encompassed

Seaton, and

again shot upward and southward. Five times this maneuver was repeated before

Seaton came

down, landing easily in front of them and opening his helmet.

"It's just what we thought it was, only worse," he reported tersely.

"Can't do a thing with

it. Gravitation won't work through it—bars won't—nothing will. And dark? DARK!

Folks, you

never saw real darkness, nor heard real silence. It scared me stiff!"

"Poor little boy—afraid of the dark!" exclaimed Dorothy. "We saw absolute

blackness in

space." "Not like this, you didn't. I just saw absolute darkness and heard

absolute silence for the

first time in my life. I never imagined anything like it—come on up with me

and I'll show it to

you."

"No you won't!" his wife shrieked as she retreated toward Crane. "Some

other time,

perhaps."

Seaton removed the harness and glanced at the spot from which he had

taken off, where

now appeared a hemispherical hole in the ground.

"Let's see what kind of tracks I left, Mart," and the two men bent over

the depression.

They saw with astonishment that the cut surface was perfectly smooth, with not

even the

slightest roughness or irregularity visible. Even the smallest grains of sand

had been sheared in

two along a mathematically exact hemispherical surface by the inconceivable

force of the

disintegrating copper bar. "Well, that sure wins the . . ."

An alarm bell sounded. Without a glance around, Sea-ton seized Dorothy

and leaped into

the testing shed. Dropping her unceremoniously to the floor he stared through

the telescope sight

of an enormous projector which had automatically aligned itself upon the

distant point of

liberation of atomic energy which had caused the alarm to sound. One hand upon

the switch, his

face was hard and merciless as he waited to make sure of the identity of the

approaching space-

ship before he released the frightful power of his generators upon it.

"I've been expecting DuQuesne to try it again," he gritted, striving to

make out the

visitor, yet more than two hundred miles distant "He's out to get you, Dot—and

this time I'm not

just going to warm him up and scare him away, like I did last time. I'm going

to give him the

works . . . I can't locate him with this small telescope, Mart. Line him up in

the big one and give

me the word, will you?"

"I see him, Dick, but it is not DuQuesne's ship. It is built of

transparent arenak, like the

Kondal. Even though it seems impossible, "I believe it is the Kondal "

"Maybe so, and again maybe DuQuesne built it—or stole it. On second

thought, though, I

don't believe that DuQuesne would be fool enough to tackle us again in the

same way— but I'm

taking no chances . . . O.K., it is the Kondal, I can see Dunark and Sitar

myself, now."

The transparent vessel soon neared the field and the four Terrestrials

walked out to greet

their Osnomian friends. Through the arenak walls they recognized Dunark,

Kofedix of Kondal,

at the controls, and saw Sitar, his beautiful young queen, lying in one of the

seats near the wall.

She attempted a friendly greeting, but her face was strained as though she

were laboring under a

tremendous burden.

As they watched, Dunark slipped a helmet over his head and one over

Sitar's, pressed a

button to open one of the doors, and supported her toward the opening.

"They mustn't come out, Dick!" exclaimed Dorothy in dismay. "They'll

freeze to death in

five minutes without any clothes on!"

"Yes, and Sitar can't stand up under our gravitation, either—I doubt if

Dunark can, for

long," and Seaton dashed toward the vessel, motioning the visitors back.

But misunderstanding the signal, Dunark came on. As he clambered heavily

through the

door he staggered, and Sitar collapsed upon the frozen ground. Trying to help

her, half-kneeling

over her, Dunark struggled, his green skin paling to a yellowish tinge at the

touch of the bitter

and unexpected cold. Seaton leaped forward and gathered Sitar up as though she

were a child.

"Help Dunark back in, Mart," he directed crisply. "Hop in, girls—we've

got to take these

folks back up where they can live."

Seaton shut the door, and as everyone lay flat in the seats Crane, who

had taken the

controls, applied one notch of power and the huge vessel leaped upward. Many

hundreds of

miles of altitude were gained before he brought the cruiser to a stop and

locked her in place with

an anchoring attractor.

"There," he remarked calmly. "Gravitation here is approximately the same

as upon

Osnome."

"Yeah," put in Seaton, standing up and shedding clothes in all

directions, "and I rise to

remark that we'd better undress as far as the law allows—perhaps farther. I

never did like

Osnomian ideas of comfortable warmth, but we can endure it by peeling down to

bedrock—they

can't stand our temperatures at all."

Sitar jumped up happily, completely restored, and the three women threw

their arms

around each other.

"What a horrible, terrible, frightful world!" exclaimed Sitar, her eyes

widening as she

thought of her first experience with our Earth. "Much as I love you, I shall

never dare to try to

visit you again. I have never been able to understand why you Terrestrials

wear what you call

'clothes', nor why you are so terribly, brutally strong. Now I really know—I

will feel the utterly

cold and savage embrace of this awful world of yours as long as I live!"

"Oh, it ain't so bad, Sitar." Seaton, who was shaking both of Dunark's

hands vigorously,

assured her over his shoulder. "All depends on where you were raised. We like

it that way, and

Osnome gives us the pip. But you poor fish," turning again to Dunark, "with

all my brains inside

your skull you should've known what you were letting yourself in for."

"That's true, after a fashion," Dunark admitted, "but your brain told me

that Washington

was hot. If I'd've thought to recalculate your actual Fahrenheit degrees into

our loro . . . but that

figures only forty-seven and, while very cold, we could have endured it—wait a

minute, I'm

getting it. You have what you call 'seasons'. This, then, must be your

'winter'. Right?""Right the

first time. That's the way your brain works in my skull, too. I could figure

anything out all right

after it happened, but hardly ever beforehand—so I guess I can't blame you

much, at that. But

what I want to know is, how'd you get here? It'd take more than my brains—you

can't see our

sun from anywhere near Osnome, even if you knew exactly where to look for it."

"Easy. Remember those wrecked instruments you threw out of the Skylark

when we built

Skylark Two?" Having every minute detail of the configuration of Seaton's

brain engraved upon

his own, Dunark spoke English in Seaton's own characteristic careless fashion.

Only when

thinking deeply or discussing abstruse matters did Seaton employ the

carefully-selected and

precise phrasing which he knew so well how to use. "Well, none of them were

beyond repair and

the juice was still on most of them. One was an object-compass bearing on the

Earth. We simply

fixed the bearings, put On Some minor improvements, and here we are."

"Let us all sit down and be comfortable," he continued, changing into the

Kondalian

tongue without a break, "and I will explain why we have come. We are in most

desperate need of

two things which you alone can supply—salt, and that strange metal, V. Salt I

know you have in

great abundance, but I know that you have very little of the metal. You have

only the one

compass upon that planet?"

"That's all—one is all we set on it. However, we've got close to half a

ton of it on

hand—you can have all you want."

"Even if I took it all, which I would not like to do, that would be less

than half enough.

We must have at least one of your tons, and two tons would be better."

"Two tons! Holy cat! Are you going to plate a fleet of battle cruisers?"

"More than that. We must plate an area of copper of some ten thousand

square miles—in

fact, the very life of our entire race depends upon it.

"It's this way," he continued, as the four human beings stared at him in

wonder. "Shortly

after you left Osnome we were invaded by the inhabitants of the third planet

of our fourteenth

sun. Luckily for us they landed upon Mardonale, and in less than two days

there was not a single

Osnomian left alive upon that half of the planet. They wiped out our grand

fleet in one brief

engagement, and it was only the Kondal and a few more like her that enabled us

to keep them

from crossing the ocean. Even with our full force of these vessels, we cannot

defeat them. Our

regular Kondalian weapons were useless. We shot explosive copper charges

against them of such

size as to cause earthquakes all over Osnome, without seriously crippling

their defenses. Their

offensive weapons are almost irresistible—they have generators that burn

arenak as though it

were so much paper, and a series of deadly frequencies against which only a

copper-driven

screen is effective, and even that does not stand up long."

"How come you lasted till now, then?" asked Seaton. "They have nothing

like the

Skylark, and no knowledge of atomic energy. Therefore their space-ships are of

the rocket type,

and for that reason they can cross only at the exact time of conjunction, or

whatever you call

E. E. Doc Smith - Skylark 2 - Skylark Three

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: