Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘A younger planet than ours,’ DuQuesne said. ‘In the Carboniferous, or about. Aren’t those fern-trees like those in the coal measures, Seaton?’
‘Check – I was just trying to think what they reminded me of. But it’s this ledge that interests me no end. Who ever heard of a chunk of noble metal this big?’
‘How do you know it’s noble?’ Dorothy asked.
‘No corrosion, and it’s probably been sitting here for
a million years.’ Seaton, who had walked over to one of the loose lumps, kicked it with his heavy shoe. It did not move.
He bent over to pick it up, with one hand. It still did not move. With both hands and all the strength of his back he could lift it, but that was all.
‘What do you make of this, DuQuesne?’
DuQuesne lifted the mass, then took out his knife and scraped. He studied the freshly-exposed metal and the scrapings, then scraped and studied again.
‘Hmm. Platinum group, almost certainly … and the only known member of that group with that peculiar bluish sheen is your X.’
‘But didn’t we agree that free X and copper couldn’t exist on the same planet, and that planets of copper-bearing suns carry copper?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t make it true. If this stuff is X, it’ll give the cosmologists something to fight about for the next twenty years. I’ll take these scrapings and run a couple of quickies.’
‘Do that, and I’ll gather in these loose nuggets. If it’s X – and I’m pretty sure it mostly is – that’ll be enough to run all the power-plants of Earth for ten thousand years.’
Crane and Seaton, accompanied by the two girls, rolled the nearer pieces of metal up to the ship. Then, as the quest led them farther and farther afield, Crane protested.
‘This is none too safe, Dick.’
‘It looks perfectly safe to me. Quiet as a—’
Margaret screamed. Her head was turned, looking backward at the
Skylark;
her face was a mask of horror.
Seaton drew his pistol as he whirled, only to check his finger on the trigger and lower his hand. ‘Nothing but X-plosive bullets,’ he said, and the four watched a thing come out slowly from behind their ship.
Its four huge, squat legs supported a body at least a hundred feet long, pursy and ungainly; at the end of a long, sinuous neck a small head seemed composed entirely of cavernous mouth armed with row upon row of carnivorous teeth. Dorothy gasped with terror; both girls shrank closer to the two men, who maintained a baffled silence as the huge beast slid its hideous neck along the hull of the vessel.
‘I can’t shoot, Mart – it’d wreck the boat – and if I had any solids they wouldn’t be any good.’
‘No. We had better hide until it goes away. You two take that ledge, we’ll take this one.’
‘Or gets far enough away from the
Skylark
so we can blow him apart,’ Seaton added as, with Dorothy close beside him, he dropped behind the low bulwark.
Margaret, her staring eyes fixed upon the monster, remained
motionless until Crane touched her gently and drew her down to his side. ‘Don’t be frightened, Peggy. It will go away soon.’
‘I’m not now – much.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘If you weren’t here, though, Martin, I’d be dead of pure fright.’
His arm tightened around her; then he forced it to relax. This was neither the time nor the place …
A roll of gunfire came from the
Skylark.
The creature roared in pain and rage, but was quickly silenced by the stream of .50-caliber machine-gun bullets.
‘DuQuesne’s on the job – let’s go! Seaton cried, and the four rushed up the slope. Making a detour to avoid the writhing body, they plunged through the opening door. DuQuesne closed the lock. They huddled together in overwhelming relief as an apparent tumult arose outside.
The scene, so quiet a few moments before, was horribly changed. The air seemed filled with hideous monsters. Winged lizards of prodigious size hurtled through the air to crash against the
Skylark
’s armored hull. Flying monstrosities, with the fangs of tigers, attacked viciously. Dorothy screamed and started back as a scorpion-like thing ten feet in length leaped at the window in front of her, its terrible sting spraying the quartz with venom. As it fell to the ground a spider – if an eight-legged creature with spines instead of hair, faceted eyes, and a bloated, globular body weighing hundreds of pounds may be called a spider – leaped upon it; and, mighty mandibles against terrible sting, a furious battle raged. Twelve-foot cockroaches climbed nimbly across the fallen timber of the morass and began feeding voraciously on the carcass of the creature DuQuesne had killed. They were promptly driven away by another animal, a living nightmare of that reptilian age which apparently combined the nature and disposition of
Tyrannosaurus rex
with a physical shape approximating that of the saber-tooth tiger. This newcomer towered fifteen feet high at the shoulders and had a mouth disproportionate even to his great size; a mouth armed with sharp fangs three feet in length. He had barely begun his meal, however, when he was challenged by another nightmare, a thing shaped more or less like a crocodile.
The crocodile charged. The tiger met him head on, fangs front and rending claws outstretched. Clawing, striking, tearing savagely, an avalanche of bloodthirsty rage, the combatants stormed up and down the little island.
Suddenly the great tree bent over and lashed out against both animals. It transfixed them with its thorns, which the watchers now saw were both needle-pointed and barbed. It ripped at them with its long branches, which were in fact highly lethal spears. The broad leaves, equipped with sucking disks, wrapped themselves around the hopelessly impaled victims. The long, slender twigs or tendrils, each of which now had an eye at its extremity, waved about at a safe distance.
After absorbing all of the two gladiators that was absorbable,
the tree resumed its former position, motionless in all its strange, outlandish beauty.
Dorothy licked her lips, which were almost as white as her face. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she remarked, conversationally.
‘No you aren’t.’ Seaton tightened his arm. ‘Chin up, ace.’
‘O.K., chief. Maybe not – this time.’ Color began to reappear on her cheeks. ‘But Dick, will you please blow up that horrible tree? It wouldn’t be so bad if it were ugly, like the rest of the things, but it’s
so
beautiful!’
‘I sure will. I think we’d better get out of here. This is
no
place to start a copper mine, even if there’s any copper here, which there probably isn’t … It is X, DuQuesne, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Ninety-nine plus per cent, at least.’
‘That reminds me.’ Seaton turned to DuQuesne, hand outstretched. ‘You squared it, Blackie. Say the word and the war’s all off.’
DuQuesne ignored the hand. ‘Not on my side,’ he said, evenly. ‘I act as one of the party as long as I’m with you. When we get back, however, I still intend to take both of you out of circulation.’ He went to his room.
‘Well, I’ll be a …’ Seaton bit off
a
word. ‘He ain’t a man – he’s a cold-blooded fish!’
‘He’s a machine – a robot.’ Margaret declared. ‘I always thought so, and now I know it!’
‘We’ll pull his cork when we get back,’ Seaton said. ‘He asked for it – we’ll give him both barrels!’
Crane went to the board, and soon they were approaching another planet, which was surrounded by a dense fog. Descending slowly, they found it to be a mass of boiling-hot steam and rank vapor, under enormous pressure.
The next planet looked barren and dead. Its atmosphere was clear, but of a peculiar yellowish-green color. Analysis showed over ninety per cent chlorine. No life of any Earthly type could exist naturally upon such a world and a search for copper, even in space-suits, would be extremely difficult if not impossible.
‘Well,’ Seaton said, as they were once more in space, ‘we’ve got copper enough to visit quite a few more solar systems if we have to. But there’s a nice, hopeful-looking planet right over there. It may be the one we’re looking for.’
Arriving in the belt of atmosphere, they tested it as before and found it satisfactory.
They descended rapidly, over a large city set in the middle
of a vast, level, beautifully planted plain. As they watched, the city vanished, and became a mountain summit, with valleys fading away on all sides as far as the eye could reach.
‘Huh! I never saw a mirage like
that
before!’ Seaton exclaimed. ‘But we’ll land, if we finally have to swim!’
The ship landed gently upon the summit, its occupants more than half expecting the mountain to disappear beneath them. Nothing happened, however, and the five clustered in the lock, wondering whether or not to disembark. They could see no sign of life; but each felt the pressure of a vast, invisible something.
Suddenly a man materialized in the air before them; a man identical with Seaton in every detail, down to the smudge of grease under one eye and the exact design of his Hawaiian sport shirt.
‘Hello, folks,’ he said, in Seaton’s tone and style. ‘S’prised that I know your language – huh, you would be. Don’t even understand telepathy, or the ether, or the relationship between time and space. Not even the fourth dimension.’
Changing instantaneously from Seaton’s form to Dorothy’s, the stranger went on without a break. ‘Electrons and neutrons and things – nothing here, either.’
The form became DuQuesne’s. ‘Ah, a freer type, but blind, dull, stupid; another nothing. As Martin Crane; the same. As Peggy, still the same, as was of course to be expected. Since you are all nothings in essence, of a race so low in the scale that it will be millions of years before it will rise even above death and death’s clumsy attendant necessity, sex, it is of course necessary for me to make of you nothings in fact: to dematerialize you.’
In Seaton’s form the being stared at Seaton, who felt his senses reel under the impact of an awful, if unsubstantial, blow. Seaton fought back with all his mind and remained standing.
‘What’s this?’ the stranger exclaimed in surprise. ‘This is the first time in millions of cycles that mere matter, which is only a manifestation of mind, has refused to obey a mind of power.
There’s something screwy somewhere.’ He switched to Crane’s shape.
‘Ah, I am not a perfect reproduction – there is some subtle difference. The external form is the same; the internal structure likewise. The molecules of substance are arranged properly, as are the atoms in the molecules. The electrons, neutrons, protons, positrons, neutrinos, mesons … nothing amiss on that level. On the third level …’
‘Let’s go!’ Seaton exclaimed, drawing Dorothy backward and
reaching for the airlock switch. ‘This dematerialization stuff may be pie for him, but believe me, it’s
none
of my dish.’
‘No, no!’ the stranger remonstrated, ‘You really
must
stay and be dematerialized – alive or dead.’
He drew his pistol. Being in Crane’s form, he drew slowly, as Crane did; and Seaton’s Mark I shell struck him before the pistol cleared his pocket. The pseudo-body was volatilized; but, just to make sure, Crane fired a Mark V into the ground through the last open chink of the closing lock.
Seaton leaped to the board. As he did so, a creature materialized in the air in front of him – and crashed to the floor as he threw on the power. It was a frightful thing – outrageous teeth, long claws, and an automatic pistol held in a human hand. Forced flat by the fierce acceleration, it was unable to lift either itself or the weapon.
‘We take one trick!’ Seaton blazed. ‘Stick to matter and I’ll run along with you ’til my ankles catch fire!’
‘That is a childish defiance. It speaks well for your courage, but not for your intelligence,’ the animal said, and vanished.
A moment later Seaton’s hair stood on end as a pistol appeared upon his board, clamped to it by bands of steel. The slide jerked; the trigger moved; the hammer came down. However, there was no explosion, but merely a click. Seaton paralyzed by the rapid succession of stunning events, was surprised to find himself still alive.
‘Oh, I was almost sure it wouldn’t explode,’ the gun-barrel said, chattily, in a harsh, metallic voice. ‘You see, I haven’t derived the formula of your sub-nuclear structure yet, hence I could not make an actual explosive. By the use of crude force I could kill you in any one of many different ways …
‘Name one!’ Seaton snapped.
‘Two, if you like. I could materialize as five masses of metal directly over your heads, and fall. I could, by a sufficient concentration of effort, materialize a sun in your immediate path. Either method would succeed, would it not?’
‘I … I guess it would!’ Seaton admitted, grudgingly.
‘But such crude work is distasteful in the extreme, and is never, under any conditions, mandatory. Furthermore, you are not quite the complete nothings that my first rough analysis seemed to indicate. In particular, the DuQuesne of you has the rudiments of a quality which, while it cannot be called mental ability, may in time develop into a quality which may just possibly make him assimilable into the purely intellectual stratum.
‘Furthermore, you have given me a notable and entirely unexpected amount of exercise and enjoyment and can be made to give me more – much more – as follows: I will spend the next sixty of your minutes at work upon that formula – your sub-nuclear structure. Its derivation is comparatively
simple, requiring only the solution of ninety-seven simultaneous differential equations and an integration in ninety-seven dimensions. If you can interfere with my computations sufficiently to prevent me from deriving that formula within the stipulated period of time you may return to your fellow nothings exactly as you now are. The first minute begins when the sweep-hand of your chronometer touches zero; that is … now.’
Seaton cut the power to one gravity and sat up, eyes closed tight and frowning in the intensity of his mental effort.
‘You can’t do it, you immaterial lug!’ he thought, savagely. ‘There are too many variables. No mind, however inhuman, can handle more than ninety-one differentials at once … you’re wrong; that’s theta, not epsilon … It’s X, not Y or Z. Alpha! Beta! Ha, there’s a slip; a bad one – got to go back and start all over … Nobody can integrate above ninety-six brackets … no body and no thing or mind in this whole, entire, cock-eyed universe! …’