Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘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 spaceship 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 him.’
‘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 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 I 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 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 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 him, 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.’
Martin Crane reclined in a massive chair, the fingers
of his right hand lightly touching those of his 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 halfway 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-m-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 O.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 out 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 Two
. 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 which 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.’