Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
Both men were glad to be of assistance; Crane was delighted at the chance to learn how to work that very hard and extremely stubborn metal, iridium, from which all the Kondalian instruments were to be made.
On the way to the instrument shop Seaton said to Crane, ‘But what tickles me most is this arenak; and not only for armor and so forth. I s’pose you’ve noticed your razor?’
‘How could I help it?’
‘I can’t understand how anything can be that hard, Mart. Forty years on an arenak-dust abrasive machine – diamond dust won’t touch it – to hone it, and then it’ll shave ten men every day for a thousand years and still have
exactly
the same edge it started with. That is what I would call a contribution to science.’
Dunark’s extraordinary skill and his even more extraordinary automatic machine tools made the manufacture of his instruments a comparatively short job. While it was going on, the foreman in charge of the scrap-copper drive came in to report. Enough had been found to make two bars, with a few pounds to spare. The bars were in the engines, one in each ship.
‘Well done, Kolanix Melnen,’ Dunark said, warmly. ‘I didn’t expect nearly that much.’
‘We got every last bit of metallic copper in the whole city,’ the foreman said, proudly.
‘Fine!’ Seaton applauded. ‘With one bar apiece, we’re ready. Let ’em come.’
‘We don’t want them to come here; we want to go there,’ Dunark said. ‘One bar apiece isn’t enough for that.’
‘That’s right,’ Seaton agreed. ‘For an invasion in force, no.’
‘I’d let you have ours, but two wouldn’t be any better than one.’
‘No. Four, at least, and I’m going to have eight. There should be
some way of speeding up work on that copper plant, but I haven’t been able to think of any.’
‘Speed it up? It’s going at fantastic speed already. On Earth it takes months, not days, to build smelters and refineries.’
‘I’ve got half a notion to go over there … but …’
‘“But” is right,’ Seaton said. ‘You’d be more apt to throw the boys off stride than anything else.’
‘Could be … but …’
While the Kondalian prince was still standing, undecided, a call for help came in. A freight plane was being pursued by a karlon a few hundred miles away.
‘Now’s your time to study one, Dunark!’ Seaton exclaimed. ‘We’ll drag him in here – get your scientists out here!’
The
Skylark
reached the monster before it reached the freighter. Seaton focused the attractor and threw on power, jerking the beast upward and backward. As it saw the puny size of the
Skylark
it opened its cavernous mouth and rushed to attack. Seaton, not wishing to have his ship stripped of repellors, turned them on. The monster was hurled backward to the point of equilibrium of the two forces, where it hung helpless, struggling frantically.
Seaton towed the captive back to the field. By judicious pushing and pulling, and by using every attractor and repellor the
Skylark
mounted, the three Earthmen finally managed to hold that monstrous body flat on the ground; but not even with the help of Dunark’s vessel could all of the terrible tentacles be pinned down. The scientists studied the creature as well as they could, from battleships and from heavily-armored tanks.
‘I wish we could kill it without blowing it to bits,’ said Dunark, via radio. ‘Do you know of any way of doing it?’
No – except maybe poison. And since we don’t know what would poison it, and couldn’t make it if we did, I don’t see much chance. Maybe we can tire him out, though, and find out where he lives.’
After the scholars had learned all they could, Seaton yanked the animal a few miles into the air and shut off the forces holding it. There was a crash and the karlon, knowing that this apparently insignificant vessel was its master, shot away in headlong flight.
‘What was that noise, Dick?’ Crane asked.
‘I don’t know – a new one on me. Probably we cracked a few of his plates,’ Seaton replied, as he drove the
Skylark
after the monster.
Pitted for the first time in its life against an antagonist who could both outfight and outfly it, the karlon put everything it had into its giant wings. It flew back over the city of Kondalek, over the outlying country,
and out over the ocean. As they neared the Mardonalian border a fleet of warships came up to meet the monster; and Seaton, not wanting to let the enemy see the rejuvenated
Skylark
too closely, jerked the captive high into the air. It headed for the ocean in a perpendicular dive. Seaton focused an object-compass upon it.
‘Go to it, sport,’ he said. ‘We’ll follow you clear to the bottom, if you want to go that far!’
There was a tremendous double splash as pursued and pursuer struck the water. Dorothy gasped, seized a hand-hold, and shut both eyes; but she could scarcely feel the shock, so tremendous was the strength of the
Skylark’s
new hull and so enormous the power that drove her. Seaton turned on his searchlights and closed in. Deeper and deeper the quarry dove; it became clear that the thing was just as much at home in the water as it was in the air.
The lights revealed strange forms of life, among which were staring-eyed fishes, floundering blindly in the unaccustomed glare. As the karlon bored still deeper the living things became scarcer; but the Earthmen still saw from time to time the living nightmares that inhabited the oppressive depths of those strange seas. Continuing downward, the karlon went clear to the bottom and stopped there, stirring up a murk of ooze.
‘How deep are we, Mart?’
‘Something under four miles. No fine figures yet.’
‘Of course not. Strain gauges O.K.?’
‘Scarcely moved off their zeroes.’
‘Ha! Good news, even though I knew – with my mind – that they wouldn’t. With our steel hull they’d’ve been way up in the red. Wonderful stuff, this arenak. Well, it looks as though he wants to sit it out here and we won’t find out anything that way. Come on, sport, let’s go somewhere else!’ Spaceship and karlon went straight up – fast.
On reaching the surface, the monster decided to grab altitude, and went so high that Seaton was amazed.
‘I wouldn’t have believed that such a thing could possibly fly in air so thin!’ he exclaimed.
‘It is thin up here,’ Crane said. ‘Four point one six pounds per square inch.’
‘This is his ceiling, I guess. Wonder what he’ll do next?’
As if in answer the karlon dived towards the lowlands of Kondal, a swampy region lush with poisonous vegetation and inhabited only by venomous reptiles. As it approached the surface Seaton slowed the
Skylark
down, remarking, ‘He’ll have to flatten out pretty quick or he’ll bust something.’
But it did not flatten out. Diving all out, it struck the morass head-first and disappeared.
Astonished at such an un-looked-for development, Seaton brought the
Skylark
to a halt and stabbed downward with the full power of the attractor. The first stab brought up nothing but a pillar of muck; the
second, one wing and one arm; the third, the whole animal – fighting as savagely as ever.
Seaton eased the attractor’s grip. ‘If he digs in here again we’ll follow him.’
‘Will the ship stand it?’ DuQuesne asked.
‘She’ll stand anything. But you’d better all hang on. I don’t know whether there’ll be much of a jar or not.’
There was scarcely any jar at all. After the
Skylark
had been pulling herself downward, quite effortlessly, for something over one minute, Seaton glanced across at Crane; who was sitting still at his board doing nothing at all except smiling quietly to himself.
‘What’re you grinning about, you Cheshire cat?’
‘Just wondering what you came down here for and what you’re going to prove. These instruments are lying, unanimously and enthusiastically. Plastic flow, you know, not fluid.’
‘Oh … uh-huh, check. No lights, radar, or … We could build a sounder, though, or a velocimeter.’
‘There are quite a few things we can do, if you think it worthwhile to take the time.’
‘It isn’t, of course.’
After a few minutes more, Seaton again hauled the monster to the surface and into the air. Again it attacked, with unabated fury.
‘Well, that’s about enough of that, I guess. Apparently he isn’t going home – unless his home was down there in the mud, which I can’t quite believe. We can’t waste much more time, so you might as well put him away.’
The Mark Five struck; the ground rocked and heaved under the concussion.
‘Hey, I just thought of something!’ Seaton exclaimed. ‘We could have taken him out and set him into an orbit around the planet. Without air, water, or food he’ d die
sometime –
I think. Then they’d have a perfect specimen to study.’
‘Why, Dick, what a
horrible idea
!’ Dorothy’s eyes flashed as she turned on him. ‘You wouldn’t want even such a monster as that to die
that
way!’
‘No, I guess I wouldn’t really. He’s a game fighter. So we’ll let Dunark do it sometime, if he wants to.’
The
Skylark
reached the palace dock just before fourth-meal, and while they were all eating Dunark told Seaton that the copper plant would be in production in a few hours, and that the first finished bar would roll at point thirty-four – in other words, immediately after first-meal of the following ‘day.’
‘Fine!’ Seaton exclaimed. ‘You’ll be ready in the
Kondal.
Take the first eight bars and be on your way. F-f-f-f-t! There goes Mardonale!’
‘Impossible, as you already know, if you think a little.’
‘Oh … I see … the code. I wouldn’t want you to break it, of course … but couldn’t it be … say, stretched just enough to cover a situation like this, which has never come up before?’
‘It can not,’ Dunark said, stiffly.
‘But s’pose … Pardon me, Dunark. Ignorance – I never really scanned it before. You’re right. I’ll play ball.’
‘Smatter, Dick?’ Dorothy whispered into his ear. ‘What did you do to him? I thought he was going to blow his top.’
‘I said something I should have known better than
to say,’ he replied, loudly enough so that Dunark, too, could hear. ‘Also, I shouldn’t have told you the schedule I had in mind. It’s been changed. The
Skylark
gets her copper first, then the
Kondal.
And Dunark doesn’t leave until we do. Why, I don’t know, any more than Dunark can figure out, with all he got from my mind, why you and I insist on wearing clothes. A matter of code.’
‘But, just that little extra time wouldn’t make any difference, would it?’
‘One chance in a million, maybe, with the bars rolling off the line so fast – no, after all this time, half an hour more won’t make any difference. I suppose your men are loading the platinum, Dunark?’
‘Yes. They’re filling Number Three Storeroom full.’
‘Good work, Seaton,’ DuQuesne said. ‘I’ve often wished there was some way of getting platinum out of jewelry and into laboratories and production, and your scheme will do it. I don’t think much of your judgment in passing up the chance to make a million bucks or so, but I’ll be glad to see jewelers drop platinum. I wonder how they’ll put it across that platinum isn’t the thing for jewelry any more?’
‘Oh, they can keep on using it, all they want of it,’ Seaton said, innocently, ‘at exactly the same price as stainless steel.’
‘Who do you think you’re kidding?’ DuQuesne’s reply was not a question, but a sneer.
On the following ‘morning,’ immediately after ‘breakfast,’ enough bars were ready to supply both vessels. The
Skylark
was fueled first, then the
Kondal.
Both ships hopped across plain and city and, timed to the split second, landed as one upon the palace dock. Both crews disembarked and stood at half-attention, the three Americans dressed in their whites, the twenty Kondalian high officers wearing their robes of state.
‘This stuff is for the birds.’ Seaton’s lips scarcely moved, only Crane could hear him. ‘We stand here for exactly so many seconds, to give the natives a treat.’ His eyes flicked upward at the aircraft filling the air. ‘Then we come to full attention as the grand moguls and high panjandrums appear, escorting our wives, and the battleships salute, and – blast such flummery!’
‘But think of how the girls are enjoying it.’ Crane said, using Seaton’s own technique. ‘And you are going to do it, so why gripe about it?’
‘I’d like to do more than pop off – I’d like to call Dot and tell her to shake a leg – but I won’t. With Dunark what he is I have to play ball, but I don’t have to like it.’
Suddenly the silence was shattered. Bells rang, sirens shrieked,
whistles screamed, every radio and visiset and communicator in or near the city of Kondalek began to clamor. All were giving the same dire warning, the alarm extraordinary of invasion, of imminent and catastrophic danger from the air. Seaton leaped toward the nearest elevator, but whirled back toward the
Skylark
even before Dunark spoke.
‘Don’t try it, Dick – you can’t possibly make it. Everyone will have time to reach the bomb-proofs. They’ll be safe – if we can keep the Mardonalians from landing.’
‘They won’t land – except in hell.’ The three sprang into the
Skylark;
Seaton going to the board, Crane and DuQuesne to the guns. Crane picked up his microphone.
‘Send in English, and tell the girls not to answer,’ Seaton directed. ‘They can locate calls to a foot. Just tell ’em we’re safe and to sit tight while we wipe out this gang of high-binders that’s coming.’
DuQuesne was breaking out box after box of belts of ammunition. ‘What do you want first, Seaton? There’s not enough of any one load to fight much of a battle.’
‘Start with Mark Fives and go up to Tens. That ought to be enough. If not, follow up with Fours and so on down.’
‘Fives to Tens; Fours and down. Check.’
There was a crescendo whine of enormous propellers, followed by a concussion of sound as one wing of the palace disappeared in a cloud of dust and debris.
The air was full of Mardonalian warships. They were huge vessels, each mounting hundreds of guns; and a rain of high-explosive shells was reducing the entire city to ruins.