Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
Tersely but vividly he recounted the tale of the first interstellar cruise, the voyage of the
Skylark of Space
. When he had finished, Loring smoked for a few minutes in silence.
‘There’s a lot of stuff there that’s hard to understand all at once. Do you mind if I ask a few foolish questions, to get things straightened out in my mind?’
‘Go ahead – ask as many as you want to. It is hard to understand a lot of that Osnomian stuff – a man can’t get it all at once.’
‘Osnome is so far away – how are you going to find it?’
‘With one of the object-compasses I mentioned. I had planned
on navigating from notes I took on the trip back to the Earth, but it wasn’t necessary. They tried to keep me from finding out anything, but I learned all about the compasses, built a few of them in their own shop, and set one on Osnome. I had it, among other things, in my pocket when I landed. In fact, the control of that explosive copper bullet is the only thing they had that I wasn’t able to get – and I’ll get that on this trip.’
‘What is that arenak armor they’re wearing?’
‘Arenak is a synthetic metal, almost perfectly transparent. It has practically the same refractive index as air, therefore it is, to all intents and purposes, invisible. It’s about five hundred times as strong as chrome-vanadium steel, and even when you’ve got it to the yield-point it doesn’t break, but stretches out and snaps back, like rubber, with the strength unimpaired. It’s the most wonderful thing I saw on the whole trip. They make complete suits of it. Of course they aren’t very comfortable, but since they are only a tenth of an inch thick they can be worn.’
‘And a tenth of an inch of that stuff will stop a steel-nosed machine-gun bullet?’
‘Stop it! A tenth of an inch of arenak is harder to pierce than fifty inches of our hardest, toughest armor steel. A sixteen-inch armor-piercing projectile couldn’t get through it. It’s hard to believe, but nevertheless it’s a fact. The only way to kill Seaton with a gun would be to use one heavy enough so that the shock of the impact would kill him – and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he had his armor anchored with an attractor against that very contingency. Even if he hasn’t, you can imagine the chance of getting action against him with a gun of that size.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard that he is fast.’
‘That doesn’t tell half of it. You know that I’m handy with a gun myself?’
‘You’re faster than I am, and that’s saying something. You’re chain lightning.’
‘Well, Seaton is at least that much faster than I am. You’ve never seen him work – I have. On that Osnomian dock he shot once before I started, and shot four times to my three from then on. I must have been shooting a full second after he had his side all cleaned up. To make it worse I missed once with my left hand – he didn’t. There’s absolutely no use tackling Richard Seaton without something at least as good as full Osnomian equipment; but, as you know, Brookings always has been and always will be a complete damned fool. He won’t believe anything new until after he has actually been shown. Well, I imagine he will be shown plenty by this evening.’
‘Well, I’ll never tackle Seaton with a rod. How does he get that way?’
‘He’s naturally fast, and has practiced sleight-of-hand work ever since he was a kid. He’s one of the best amateur magicians in the country, and I will say that his ability along that line has come in handy for him more than once.’
‘I see where you’re right in wanting to get something, since we have only ordinary weapons and they have all that stuff. This trip is to get
a little something for ourselves, I take it?’
‘Exactly, and you know enough now to understand what we are after. You have guessed that we are headed for Osnome?’
‘I suspected it. However, if you were going only to Osnome you would have gone alone; so I also suspect that that’s only half of it. I have no idea what it is, but you’ve got something else on your mind.’
‘You’re right – I knew you were keen. When I was on Osnome I found out something that only four other men – all dead – ever knew. There is a race of men far ahead of the Osnomians in science, particularly in warfare. They live a long way beyond Osnome. It is my plan to steal an Osnomian airship and mount all its screens, generators, guns, and everything else, upon this ship, or else convert their vessel into a spaceship. Instead of using their ordinary power, however, we will do as Seaton did, and use atomic power, which is practically infinite. Then we’ll have everything Seaton’s got, but that isn’t enough. I want enough more than he’s got to wipe him out. Therefore, after we get a ship armed to suit us, we’ll visit this strange planet and either come to terms with them or else steal a ship from them. Then we’ll have their stuff and that of the Osnomians, as well as our own. Seaton won’t last long after that.’
‘Do you mind if I ask how you got that dope?’
‘Not at all. Except when right with Seaton I could do pretty much as I pleased, and I used to take long walks for exercise. The Osnomians tired very easily, being so weak, and because of the light gravity of the planet I had to do a lot of work or walking to keep in any kind of condition at all. I learned Kondalian quickly, and got so friendly with the guards that pretty quick they quit trying to keep me in sight, but waited at the edge of the palace grounds until I came back and joined them. Well, on one trip I was fifteen miles or so from the city when an airship crashed down in a woods about half a mile from me. It was in an uninhabited district and nobody else saw it. I went over to investigate, on the chance that I could find out something useful. It had the whole front end cut or broken off, and that made me curious, because no imaginable fall will break an arenak hull. I walked in through the hole and saw that it was one of their fighting tenders – a combination warship and repair shop, with all of the stuff in it that I’ve been telling you about. The generators were mostly burned out and the propelling and lifting motors were out of commission. I prowled around, getting acquainted with it, and found a lot of useful instruments and, best of all, one of Dunark’s new mechanical educators, with complete instructions for its use. Also, I found three bodies, and thought I’d try it out …’
‘Just a minute. Only three bodies on a warship? And what good could a mechanical educator do you if the men were all dead?’
‘Three is all I found then, but there was another
one. Three men and a captain compose an Osnomian crew for any ordinary vessel. Everything is automatic, you know. As for the men being dead, that doesn’t make any difference – you can read their brains just the same, if they haven’t been dead too long. However, when I tried to read theirs, I found only blanks – their brains had been destroyed so that nobody could read them. That did look funny, so I ransacked the ship from truck to keelson, and finally found another body, wearing an air-helmet, in a sort of closet off the control room. I put the educator on it …’
‘This is getting good. It sounds like a page out of the old “Arabian Nights” that I used to read when I was a boy. You know, it really isn’t surprising that Brookings didn’t believe a lot of this stuff.’
‘As I’ve said, a lot of it is hard to take; but I’m going to show it to you – all that, and a lot more.’
‘Oh, I believe it, all right. After riding in this boat and looking out of the windows I’ll believe anything. Reading a dead man’s brain is steep, though.’
‘I’ll let you do it after we get there. I don’t understand exactly how it works, myself, but I know how to operate one. Well, I found out that this man’s brain was in good shape, and I got a shock when I read it. Here’s what he had been through. They had been flying very high on their way to the front when their ship was seized by an invisible force and thrown or pulled upward. He must have thought faster than the others, because he put on an air-helmet and dived into this locker where he hid under a pile of gear, fixing things so that he could see out through the transparent arenak of the wall. No sooner was he hidden than the front end of the ship went up in a blaze of light, in spite of their ray screens going full blast. They were up so high by that time that when the bow was burned off the other three fainted from lack of air. Then their generators went out, and pretty soon two peculiar-looking strangers entered. They were wearing vacuum suits and were very short and stocky, giving the impression of enormous strength. They brought an educator of their own with them and read the brains of the three men. They then dropped the ship a few thousand feet and revived the three with a drink of something out of a flask.’
‘Potent, eh? Find out what it was? The stuff we’ve been getting lately would make a man more unconscious than ever.’
‘Some powerful drug, probably, but the Osnomian didn’t know anything about it. After the men revived, the strangers, apparently from sheer cruelty and love of torturing their victims, informed them in the Osnomian language that they were from another world, near the edge of the galaxy. They even told them, knowing that the Osnomians knew nothing of astronomy, exactly where they were from. Then they went on to say that they wanted the entire green system for themselves, and that in something like two years of our time they were going to wipe out all the present inhabitants
of the system and take it over, as a base for further operations. After that they amused themselves by describing exactly the kinds of death and destruction they were going to use. They described most of it in great detail. It’s too involved to tell you about now, but they’ve got rays, force-weapons, generators, and screens that even the Osnomians never heard of. And of course they’ve got atomic energy, the same as we have. After telling them all this and watching them suffer they put a machine up to their heads and they dropped dead. That’s probably what disintegrated their brains. Then they looked the ship over rather casually, as though they didn’t see anything they were interested in; crippled the motors; and went away. The vessel was then released, and crashed. This man, of course, was killed by the fall. I buried the men – I didn’t want anybody else reading that brain – hid some of the stuff I wanted most, and camouflaged the ship so that I’m fairly sure that it’s there yet. I decided then to make this trip.’
‘I see.’ Loring’s mind was grappling with these new and strange facts. ‘That news is staggering, doctor. Think of it! Everybody thinks our own world is everything there is!’
‘Our world is simply a grain of dust in the universe. Most people know it, academically, but very few ever give the fact any actual consideration. But now that you’ve had a little time to get used to the idea of there being other worlds, and some of them as far ahead of us in science as we are ahead of the monkeys, what do you think of it?’
‘I agree with you that we’ve got to get their stuff. However, it occurs to me as a possibility that they may have so much stuff that we won’t be able to make the approach. However, if the Osnomian fittings we’re going to get are as good as you say they are, I think that two such men as you and I can get at least a lunch while any other crew, no matter who they are, are getting a square meal.’
‘I like your style, Loring. You and I will have the world eating out of our hands shortly after we get back. As far as actual procedure over there is concerned, of course I haven’t made any definite plans. We’ll have to size up the situation after we get there before we can know exactly what we’ll have to do. However, we are not coming back empty-handed.’
‘You said something, Chief!’ and the two men, so startlingly unlike physically but so alike inwardly, shook hands in token of their mutual dedication to a single purpose.
Loring was then instructed in the simple navigation of the ship of space, and thereafter the two men took their regular shifts at the controls. In due time they approached Osnome, and DuQuesne studied the planet carefully through a telescope before he ventured down into the atmosphere.
‘This half of it used to be Mardonale. I suppose it’s all Kondal now. No, there’s a war on down there yet – at least, there’s a disturbance of some kind, and on this planet that means a war.’
‘What are you looking for, exactly?’ asked Loring, who was also examining
the terrain with a telescope.
‘They’ve got some spherical space-ships, like Seaton’s. I know they had one, and they’ve probably built more of them since that time. Their airships can’t touch us, but those ball-shaped fighters would be pure poison for us, the way we are fixed now. Can you see any of them?’
‘Not yet. Too far away to make out details. They’re certainly having a hot time down there, though, in that one spot.’
They dropped lower, toward the stronghold which was being so stubbornly defended by the inhabitants of the third planet of the fourteenth sun, and so savagely attacked by the Kondalian forces.
‘There, we can see what they’re doing now,’ and DuQuesne anchored the vessel with an attractor. ‘I want to see if they’ve got many of those spaceships in action, and you will want to see what war is like when it is fought by people who have been making war steadily for ten thousand years.’
Poised at the limit of clear visibility the two men studied the incessant battle being waged beneath them. They saw not one, but fully a thousand of the globular craft, high in the air and grouped in a great circle around an immense fortification upon the ground below. They saw no airships in the line of battle, but noticed that many such vessels were flying to and from the front, apparently carrying supplies. The fortress was an immense dome of some glassy, transparent material, partially covered with slag, through which they saw that the central space was occupied by orderly groups of barracks, and that around the circumference were arranged gigantic generators, projectors, and other machinery at whose purposes they could not even guess. From the base of the dome, a twenty-mile-wide apron of the same glassy substance spread over the ground, and above this apron and around the dome were thrown the mighty defensive screens, visible now and then in scintillating violet splendor as one of the copper-driven Kondalian projectors sought in vain for an opening. But the Earthmen saw with surprise that the main attack was not being directed at the dome; that only an occasional beam was thrown against it in order to make the defenders keep their screens up continuously. The edge of the apron was bearing the brunt of that vicious and never-ceasing attack, and most concerned the desperate defense.