Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
Steadily and contentedly they worked on, while at the behest of their nimble and unerring fingers there came into being the forces which were to build into their own vessel a duplicate of the mechano-electrical Brain which actuated and controlled the structure, almost of planetary proportions, in which Seaton was even then hurtling toward them. Hurtling with a velocity rapidly mounting to a value incalculable; driven by the power liberated by the disintegrating matter of all the suns of all the galaxies of all the universes of cosmic space!
With all their might of brain and skill of hand and with all the resources of their fifth-order banks of forces, it was no small task for the Norlaminians to build the sixth-order controlling system which their ship must have if they were to traverse universal space in any time short of millennia. But finally it was done.
A towering mechano-electrical Brain almost filled the midsection of their enormous sky rover, the receptors and converters of the free energy of space itself had been installed, and their intra-atomic space-drive, capable of developing an acceleration of only five light-velocities, had been replaced by Seaton’s newly developed sixth-order cosmic-energy drive which could impart to the ship and its entire contents, without jolt, jar, or strain, any conceivable, almost any calculable acceleration.
For many days the Norlaminian vessel had been speeding through the void at her frightful maximum of power toward the
Skylark of Valeron
, which in turn was driving toward our galaxy at the same mad pace. Braking down now, since only a few thousand light-years of distance separated the hurtling flyers, Seaton materialized his image at the Brain control of the smaller cruiser and thought into it for minutes.
‘There, we’re all set!’ In the control room of the
Skylark
Seaton laid aside his helmet and wiped the perspiration from his forehead in sheer relief. ‘The trap is baited and ready to spring – I’ve been scared to death for a week
that they’d tackle us before we were ready for them.’
‘What difference would it have made?’ asked Margaret curiously. ‘Since we have our sixth-order screens out they couldn’t hurt us, could they?’
‘No, Peg; but keeping them from hurting us isn’t enough – we’ve got to capture them. And they’ll have to be almost directly between Rovol’s ship and ours to make that capture possible. You see, we’ll have to send out from each vessel a hollow hemisphere of force and to surround them. If we had only one ship, or if they don’t come between our two ships, we can’t bottle them up, because they have exactly the same velocity of propagation that our forces have.
‘Also, you can see that our projector can’t work direct on more than a hemisphere without cutting its own beams, and that we can’t work through relay stations because, fast as relays are, the intellectuals would get away while the relays were cutting in. Any more questions?’
‘Yes; I have one,’ put in Dorothy. ‘You told us that this artificial Brain of yours could do anything that your own brain could think of, and here you’ve got it stuck already and have to have two of them. How come?’
‘Well, this is a highly exceptional case,’ Seaton replied. What I said would be true ordinarily, but now, as I explained to Peg, it’s working against something that can think and act just as quickly as I can.’
‘I know, dear, I was just putting you on the spot a little. What are you using for bait?’
‘Thoughts. We’re broadcasting them from a point midway between the two vessels. They’re keen on investigating any sixth-order impulses they feel, you know – that’s why we’ve kept all our stuff on tight beams heretofore, so that they probably couldn’t detect it – so we’re sending out a highly peculiar type of thought, that we are pretty sure will bring them in from wherever they are.’
‘Let me listen to it, just for a minute?’ she pleaded.
‘W-e-l-l … I don’t know.’ He eyed her dubiously. ‘Not for a minute – no. I haven’t even tried to listen to the finished product, myself. Being of a type that not even a pure intellectual can resist, they’d burn out any human brain in mighty short order. Maybe you might for about a tenth of a second, though.’
He lowered a helmet over her expectant head and snatched it off again, but that moment had been enough for Dorothy. Her violet eyes widened terribly in an expression commingled of amazedly poignant horror and of dreadfully ecstatic fascination; her whole body trembled uncontrollably.
‘Dick – Dick!’ she shrieked; then, recovering slowly: ‘How horrible – how ghastly – how perfectly, exquisitely damnable! What is it? Why, I actually heard babies begging to be born! And there were men who had died and gone to heaven and to hell; there were minds that had lost their bodies and didn’t know what to do – were simply shrieking out their agony,
despair, and utter, unreasoning terror for the whole universe to hear! And there were joys, pleasures, raptures, so condensed as to be almost as unbearable as the tortures. And there were other things – awful, terrible, utterly indescribable and unimaginable things! Oh, Dick, I was sure that I had gone stark, raving crazy!’
‘Easy, dear,’ Seaton reassured his overwrought wife. ‘All those things are really there, and more. I told you it was bad medicine – that it would tear any human mind to pieces.’
Seaton paused, weighing in his mind how best to describe the utterly indescribable signal that was being broadcast, then went on, choosing his words with care:
‘All the pangs and all the ecstasies, all the thoughts and all the emotions of all evolution of all things, animate and inanimate, are there; of all things that ever have existed from the unknowable beginning of infinite time and of all things that ever shall exist until time’s unknowable end. It covers all animate life, from the first stirring of that which was to vitalize the first unicell in the slime of the first world ever to come into being in the cosmos, to the last cognition of the ultimately last intelligent entity ever to be.
‘Our present humanity was of course included, from before conception through birth, through all of life, through death, and through the life beyond. It covers inanimate evolution from the ultimate particle and wave, through the birth, life, death, and rebirth of any possible manifestation of energy and of matter, up to and through the universe.
‘Neither Mart nor I could do it all. We carried everything as far as we could, then the Brain went through with it to its logical conclusion, which of course we could not reach. Then the Brain systematized all the data and reduced it to a concentrated essence of pure thought. It is that essence which is being broadcast and which will certainly attract the intellectuals. In the brief flash you got of it you probably could understand only the human part – but maybe it’s just as well.’
‘I’ll say it’s just as well!’ Dorothy emphatically agreed. ‘I wouldn’t listen to that again, even for a millionth of a second, for a million dollars – but I wouldn’t have missed it for another million, either. I don’t know whether to beg you to listen to it, Peggy, or to implore you not to.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Margaret replied positively. ‘Anything that could throw you into such a hysterical tantrum as that did, I don’t want any of at all. None at all, in fact, would be altogether too much for—’
‘Got them, folks – all done!’ Seaton exclaimed ‘You can put on your headsets now.’
A signal lamp had flashed brightly and he knew that those two gigantic Brains, working in perfect synchronism, had done instantaneously all that they had been set to do.
‘Are you dead sure that they got
them all, Dick?’
‘Absolutely, and they got them in less time than it took the filament of the lamp to heat up. You can bank on it that all seven of them are in the can. I go off halfcocked and make mistakes; but those Brains don’t – they can’t.’
Seaton was right. Though far away, even as universal distances go, the Intellectuals had felt that broadcast thought and had shot toward its source at their highest possible speed. For in all their long lives and throughout all their cosmic wanderings they had never encountered thoughts of such wide scope, such clear cogency, such tremendous power.
The discarnate entities approached the amazing pattern of mental force which was radiating so prodigally and addressed it; and in that instant there shot out curvingly from each of the mechano-electrical Brains a gigantic, hemispherical screen.
Developing outwardly from the two vessels as poles with the unimaginable velocity possible only to sixth-order forces, the two cups were barriers impenetrable to any sixth-order force, yet neither affected nor were affected by the gross manifestations which human senses can perceive. Thus solar systems, even the neutronium cores of stars, did not hinder their instantaneous development.
Hundreds of light-years in diameter though they were, the open edges of those semi-globes of force met in perfect alignment and fused smoothly, effortlessly, instantaneously together to form a perfect, thought-tight sphere. The violently radiating thought-pattern which had so interested the intellectuals disappeared, and at the same instant the ultra-sensitive organisms of the entities were assailed by the, to them, deafening and blinding crash and flash of the welding together along its equator of the far-flung hollow globe.
These simultaneous occurrences were the first intimations that everything was not what it appeared, and the disembodied intelligences flashed instantly into furious activity, too late by the smallest possible instant of time. The trap was sprung, the sphere was impervious at its every point, and, unless they could break through that wall, the intellectuals were incarcerated until Seaton should release his screens.
Within the confines of the globe there were not a few suns and thousands of cubic parsecs of space upon whose stores of energy the intellectuals could draw. Wherefore they launched a concerted attack upon the wall, hurling against it all the force they could direct. But they were not now contending against the power of any human, organic finite brain. For Seaton’s mind, powerfully composite though it was of the mightiest intellects of the First Galaxy, was only the primary impulse which was being impressed upon the grids of, and was being amplified to any desirable extent by, the almost infinite power of those two cubic miles of coldly emotionless, perfectly efficient, mechano-electrical artificial Brains.
Thus against every frantic effort of the intellectuals within it
the sphere was contracted inexorably, and as it shrank, reducing the volume of space from which the prisoners could draw energy, their struggles became weaker and weaker. When the ball of force was only a few hundred miles in diameter and the two vessels were relatively at rest, Seaton erected auxiliary stations around it and assumed full control.
Rapidly then the prisoning sphere, little larger now than a toy balloon, was brought through the inoson wall of the
Skylark
and held motionless in the air above the Brain room. A complex structure of force was built around it, about which in turn there appeared a framework of inoson, supporting sixteen massive bars of uranium.
Seaton took off his helmet and sighed. ‘There, that’ll hold them for a while, I guess.’
‘What are you going to do with them?’ asked Margaret.
‘Darned if I know, Peg,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘That’s been worrying me ever since we figured out how to catch them. We can’t kill them and I’m afraid to let them go, because they’re entirely too hot to handle. So in the meantime, pending the hatching out of a feasible method of getting rid of them permanently, I have put them in jail.’
‘Why, Dick, how positively brutal!’ Dorothy exclaimed.
‘Yeah? There goes your soft heart again, Red-Top, instead of your hard head. I suppose it would be positively O.K. to let them loose, so that they can dematerialize all four of us? But it isn’t as bad as it sounds, because I’ve got a stasis of time around them. We can leave them in there for seventeen thousand million years and even their intellects won’t know it, because for them no time at all shall have lapsed.’
‘No-o-o – of course we can’t let them go scot-free,’ Dorothy admitted, ‘but we – I should – well, maybe couldn’t you make a bargain with them to give them their liberty if they will go away and let us alone? They’re such free spirits, surely they’d rather do that than stay bottled up forever.’
‘Since they are purely intellectual and hence immortal, I doubt very much if they’ll dicker with us at all,’ Seaton replied. ‘Time doesn’t mean a thing to them, you know; but since you insist I’ll check the stasis and talk it over with them.’
A tenuous projection, heterodyned upon waves far below the band upon which the captives had their being, crept through the barrier screen and Seaton addressed his thoughts to the entity known as ‘One.’
‘Being highly intelligent, you have already perceived that we are vastly more powerful than you are. Living in the flesh possesses many advantages over an immaterial existence. One of these is that it permitted us to pass through the fourth dimension, which you cannot do because your patterns are purely three-dimensional and inextensible. While in hyperspace we learned many things. Particularly we learned much
of the really fundamental natures and relationship of time, space, and matter, gaining thereby a basic knowledge of all nature which is greater, we believe, than any that has ever before been possessed by any three-dimensional being.
‘Not only can we interchange matter and energy as you do in your materializations and dematerializations, but we can go much farther than you can, working in levels which you cannot reach. For instance, I am projecting myself through this screen, which you cannot do because the carrier wave is far below your lowest attainable level.
‘With all my knowledge, however, I admit that I cannot destroy you, since you can shrink as nearly to a mathematical point as I can compress this zone, and its complete coalescence would of course liberate you. Upon the other hand, you realize your helplessness inside that sphere. You can do nothing since it cuts off your sources of power.
‘I can keep you imprisoned therein as long as I choose. I can set upon it forces which will keep you imprisoned until this two-hundred-kilogram ingot of uranium has dwindled down to a mass of less than one milligram. Knowing that the half-life period of that element is approximately five times ten to the ninth years, you can calculate for yourself how long you shall remain incarcerated.