Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
As Seaton came back to the girls from shutting off the refrigerators,
Roban came up and gave the Earthmen thanks in the name of his nation for what they had done.
‘Has it yet occurred to you, Karfedix Roban,’ Margaret said, diffidently, ‘that, had it not been for your rigid adherence to your Code, none of us Tellurians would have been on Osnome or near it when the Mardonalians attacked you?’
‘No, my daughter … by no means … I still fail to see the connection. Will you explain, please?’
‘Dick’s idea was to have Dunark take the first eight bars of copper and sail for Mardonale. Then we would take the next forty bars – which would take about half an hour to make – and leave immediately for Earth. Then, when Dunark arrived over Mardonale he would have been shot down out of control wouldn’t he?’
‘Undoubtedly … I understand now, but go ahead.’
‘How long did it take the Mardonalian fleet to get here, about?’
‘About forty of your hours.’
‘Then assuming that Dunark didn’t take any time at all in getting over there, we would have been gone about thirty-nine and a half hours when they struck … but there wasn’t that much time! They must have been well on the way while we were getting the copper!’
‘Very true, daughter Margaret, but the end result would have been precisely the same. You would have been gone at least one hour – which, for us, would have been as bad as one thousand.’
The Karfedix Roban stood facing the party from Earth. Back of him stood his family, the officers and nobility, and a multitude of people.
‘Is it permitted, karfedo, that I award your captive some small recognition of the service he has done my nation?’ Roban asked.
‘It is permitted,’ Seaton and Crane replied, in unison; whereupon Roban stepped forward and, after handing DuQuesne a heavy bag, fastened about his left wrist the emblem of the Order of Kondal.
‘I welcome you, Karfedelix DuQuesne, to the highest nobility of Kondal.’
He then clasped around Crane’s wrist a bracelet of ruby-red metal bearing a peculiarly-wrought, heavily-jeweled disk, at the sight of which the nobles saluted and Seaton barely concealed a start of surprise.
‘Karfedix Crane, I bestow upon you this symbol; which proclaims that, throughout all Kondalian Osnome, you have authority as my personal representative in all things, great and small.’
Approaching Seaton, Roban held up a bracelet of seven disks so that everyone could see it. The nobles knelt; the people prostrated themselves.
‘Karfedix Seaton, no language spoken by man possesses words able to express our indebtedness to you. In small and partial recognition of that indebtedness I bestow upon you these symbols, which
declare you to be our overlord, the ultimate authority upon all Osnome.’
Lifting both arms above his head he continued.
‘May the great First Cause smile upon you in all your endeavors until you solve the Prime Mystery; may your descendants soon reach the Ultimate Goal. Goodbye.’
Seaton spoke a few heart-felt words in response and the five Earthpeople stepped backward toward their ship. As they reached it the standing emperor and the ranks of nobles snapped into the double salute – truly a rare gesture. ‘What’ll we do now?’ Seaton whispered. ‘I’m fresh out of Ideas.’
‘Bow, of course,’ Dorothy said.
They bowed, deeply and slowly, and entered their vessel and as the
Skylark
shot into the air the grand fleet of Kondalian warships fired a royal salute.
DuQuesne’s first act upon gaining the privacy of his own cabin was to open the bag presented to him by the emperor. He expected to find it filled with rare metals, with perhaps some jewels, instead of which the only metal present was in a heavily-insulated tube – a full half pound of metallic radium!
The least valuable items of his prize were hundreds of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds of very large size and of flawless perfection. Merely ornamental glass to Roban, he had known their Earthly value. To this wealth of known gems Roban had added a rich and varied assortment of the strange jewels peculiar to his own world, the faidon alone being absent from the collection. DuQuesne’s calmness almost deserted him as he sorted out and listed the contents of the bag.
The radium alone was worth millions of dollars; and the scientist in him exulted at the uses to which it would be put, even while he was also exulting at the price he would get for it. He counted the familiar jewels, estimating their value as he did so – a staggering total. That left the strange gems, enough to fill the bag half full – shining and glowing and scintillating in multi-colored splendor. He sorted them out and counted them, but made no effort to appraise them. He knew that he could get any price he pleased to set.
‘Now,’ he breathed to himself, ‘I can go my own way!’
The return voyage through space was uneventful. Several times, as the days wore on, the
Skylark
came within the gravity range of gigantic suns; but her pilots had learned the most important fundamental safeguard of interstellar navigation. Automatic indicating and recording goniometers
were now on watch continuously, set to give alarm at a deviation of two seconds of arc; and their dead reckoning of acceleration and velocity was checked, twice each eight-hour shift, by triangulation and the application of Schuyler’s Method.
When half the distance had been covered the bar was reversed, the travelers holding an impromptu ceremony as the
Skylark
spun through an angle of one hundred eighty degrees.
A few days later Seaton, who was on watch, thought he recognized Orion. It was by no means the constellation he had known, but it seemed to be shifting, ever so slowly, toward the old, familiar configuration. It
was
Orion.
‘C’mere, everybody!’ he shouted, and they came.
‘That, my friends, is the most gladsome sight these feeble old eyes have rested on for many a long and weary moon. Wassail!’
They ‘wassailed’ with glee, and from that moment on the pilot was never alone at his board. Everyone who could be there was there, looking over his shoulders to watch the firmament while it assumed a more and more familiar aspect.
They identified Sol; and, some time later, they could see Sol’s planets.
Crane put on all the magnification he had, and the girls peered excitedly at the familiar outlines of continents and oceans upon the lighted half of the visible disk.
It was not long until these outlines were plainly visible to the unaided vision, the Earth appearing as a softly shining, greenish half-moon, with parts of its surface obscured by fleecy wisps of cloud, with its ice-caps making of its poles two brilliant areas of white. The wanderers stared at their world with hearts in throats as Crane made certain that they would not be going too fast to land.
The girls went to prepare a meal and DuQuesne sat down beside Seaton.
‘Have you gentlemen decided what you intend to do with me?’
‘No. We haven’t discussed it yet, and I can’t make up my own mind – except that I’d like to have you in a square ring with four-ounce gloves. You’ve been of altogether too much real help on this trip for either of us to enjoy seeing you hanged. At the same time, you’re altogether too much of a scoundrel for us to let you go free … I, personally, don’t like anything we can do, or not do, with you. That’s the fix I’m in. What would you suggest?’
‘Nothing,’ DuQuesne replied, calmly. ‘Since I am in no danger whatever of either hanging or prison, nothing you can say or do along those lines bothers me at all. Hold me on free me, as you please. I will add that, while I have made a fortune on this trip and do not have to associate any longer with Steel unless it is to my interest to do so, I may find it desirable at some future time to obtain a monopoly of X. If so, you and Crane, and possibly a few others, would die. No matter what happens or does not happen, however,
this whole thing is over as far as I’m concerned. Done with.
Fini
.’
‘You kill us? You talk like a man with a paper nose. Peel off, Buster, any time you like. We can out-run you, out-jump you, throw you down, or lick you – hit harder, run faster, dive deeper and come up dryer – for fun, money, chalk on marbles …’
A thought struck him and every trace of levity disappeared. Face hard and eyes cold, he stared at DuQuesne, who stared unmovedly back at him.
‘But listen, DuQuesne,’ Seaton said slowly, every word sharp, clear and glacially cold. ‘That goes for Crane and me personally. Nobody else. I could be arrested for what I think of you as a man; and if anything you ever do touches either Dorothy or Margaret in any way I’ll kill you like I would a snake – or rather, I’ll take you apart like I would any other piece of scientific apparatus. And don’t think this is a threat. It’s a promise. Is that clear?’
‘Perfectly. Goodnight.’
For many hours Earth had been obscured by clouds, so that the pilot had no idea of what part it was beneath them. To orient himself, Seaton dropped downward into the twilight zone until he could see the surface, finding that they were almost directly over the western end of the Panama Canal. Dropping still lower, to about ten thousand feet, he stopped and waited while Crane took bearings and calculated the course to Washington.
DuQuesne had retired, cold and reticent as usual. After making sure that he had overlooked nothing, he put on the leather suit he had worn when he left Earth. He unlocked a cubby, taking therefrom a Kondalian parachute. Then, making sure every foot of the way that he was not observed, he made his way to the airlock and entered it.
Thus, when the
Skylark
paused over the Isthmus, he was ready. Smiling sardonically, he opened the outer valve and stepped out into ten thousand feet of air. The neutral color of his parachute was lost in the twilight a few seconds after he left the vessel.
The course computed. Seaton set the bar and the
Skylark
core through the air. When about half the ground had been covered Seaton spoke suddenly.
‘Forgot about DuQuesne, Mart. We’d better lock him in, don’t you think? Then we’ll have to decide whether we want to put him in the jail-house or turn him loose.’
‘I’ll see to it,’ Crane said.
He returned immediately with the news.
‘Hmmm. He must have picked up a Kondalian parachute. You can’t quite put one in your pocket, but pretty near. But I can’t say I’m sorry he got away … Anyway, we can still get him any time we want him, because that compass is still looking right at him.’
‘I think he earned his liberty,’ Dorothy declared.
‘He deserves to be shot,’ Margaret said, ‘but I’m glad he’s gone. He gives me the cold, creeping shivers.’
At the end of the calculated time they saw the lights of a large city
beneath them; and Crane’s fingers tightened upon Seaton’s arm as he pointed downward. There were the landing-lights of Crane Field – seven searchlights throwing their mighty beams upward into the night.
‘Nine weeks, Dick,’ he said unsteadily, ‘and Shiro would have kept them burning for nine years if necessary.’
The
Skylark
dropped easily to the ground and the wanderers leaped out, to be greeted by the half-hysterical Japanese. Shiro’s ready vocabulary of peculiar but sonorous words failed him completely and he bent himself double in a bow, his face one beaming smile. Crane, with one arm around his wife, seized Shiro’s hand and wrung it in silence.
Seaton swept Dorothy off
her feet and their arms tightened around each other.
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 spaceship. 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 spaceship 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 Seaton …’