Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
The man who stared back at him out of it was tall and powerfully built; with thick, slightly wavy hair of an intense, glossy black. The eyes, only a trifle lighter in shade, were surmounted by heavy black eyebrows growing together above his finely-chiseled aquiline beak of a nose. His saturnine face, while actually tanned, looked almost pale because of the blackness of the heavy beard always showing through, even after the closest possible shave.
‘He
could
rematerialize me perfectly – and did,’ he said aloud to himself, ‘and the whole ship – exactly!’
Scowling in concentration, he went into his bathroom and stepped upon the platform of his weight-and-height Fairbanks. Six feet and seven-eighths of an inch. Precisely right. Two hundred two and three-quarters pounds. Ditto.
He examined the various items of equipment and of every-day use. There was his cutthroat razor, Osnomian-made of arenak – vastly sharper than any Earthly razor could possibly be honed and so incredibly hard that it could shave generation after generation of men with no loss whatever of edge.
Comb, brush, toothbrush, lotion – inside the drawers and out – every item was exactly as he had left it … clear down to the correctly printed, peculiarly distorted tubes of toothpaste and of shaving cream; each of which, when he picked it up, fitted perfectly into the grip of his left hand.
‘I’ll … be … totally … damned,’ DuQuesne said then, aloud.
The
Skylark of Valeron
swung in orbit around the sun of Earth.
She was much more of worldlet than a spaceship, being a perfect sphere over a thousand kilometers in diameter. She
had
to be big. She had to house, among other things, the one-thousand-kilometers-diameter graduated circles of declination and of right ascension required to chart the thousands of millions of galaxies making up any given universe of the Cosmic All.
She was for the most part cold and dark. Even the master-control helmets, sprouting masses and mazes of thigh-thick bundles of hair-thin silver wire, hung inactivated in the neutral gray, featureless master control room. The giant computer, however – the cubic mile of ultra-miniaturization that everyone called the ‘Brain’ – was still in operation; and in the worldlet’s miles-wide chart-room, called the ‘tanks’, there still glowed the enormous lenticular aggregation of points of light that was the chart of the First Universe – each tiny pool of light representing a galaxy composed of thousands of millions of solar systems.
A precisely coded thought impinged upon a receptor.
A relay clicked, whereupon a neighboring instrument, noting the passage of current through its vitals, went busily but silently to work, and an entire panel of instrumentation came to life.
Switch after switch snapped home. Field after field of time-stasis collapsed. The planetoid’s artificial sun resumed its shining; breezes began again to stir the leaves of trees and of shrubbery; insects resumed their flitting from bloom to once-more-scented bloom. Worms resumed their gnawings and borings beneath the green velvet carpets that were the lawns. Brooks began again to flow; gurglingly. Birds took up their caroling and chirping and twittering precisely where they had left off so long before; and three houses – there was a house now for Shiro and his bride of a month – became comfortably warm and softly, invitingly livable.
All that activity meant, of course, that the Seaton-Crane party would soon be coming aboard.
They were in fact already on the way, in
Skylark Two
; the forty-foot globe which, made originally of Osnomian arenak and the only spaceship they owned, had been ‘flashed over’ into ultra-refractory inoson and now served as captain’s gig, pinnace, dinghy, lifeboat, landing craft, and so forth – whatever any of the party wanted her to do. There were many other craft aboard the
Skylark of Valeron
, of course, of various shapes and
sizes; but
Two
had always been the Seatons’ favorite ‘small boat’.
As
Two
approached the
Valeron
, directly in line with one of her huge main ports, Seaton slowed down to a dawdling crawl – a mere handful of miles per second – and thought into a helmet already on his head; and the massive gates of locks – of a miles-long succession of locks through the immensely thick skin of the planetoid – opened in front of flying
Two
and closed behind her. Clearing the last gate, Seaton put on a gee and a half of deceleration and brought the little flying sphere down to a soft and easy landing in her berth in the back yard of the Seatons’ house.
Eight people disembarked; five of whom were the three Seatons and Martin and Margaret Crane. (Infant Lucile Crane rode joyously on her mother’s left hip.) Seventh was short, chunky, lightning-fast Shiro, whose place in these
Skylark
annals has not been small. Originally Crane’s ‘man,’ he had long since become Crane’s firm friend; and he was now as much of a Skylarker as was any of the others.
Eighth was Lotus Blossom, Shiro’s small, finely wrought, San Francisco-born and western-dressed bride, whom the others had met only that morning, just before leaving Earth. She looked like a living doll – but appearances can be
so
deceiving! She was in fact one of the most proficient female experts in unarmed combat then alive.
‘Our house first, please, all of you,’ Dorothy said. ‘We’ll eat before we do one single solitary thing else. I could eat that fabled missionary from the plains of Timbuctoo.’
Margaret laughed. ‘Hat and gown and hymnbook too,’ she finished. ‘Me, too, Dick.’
‘Okay by me; I could toy with a couple of morsels myself,’ Seaton said, and pencils of force wafted the eight into the roomy kitchen of the house that was in almost every detail an exact duplicate of the Seatons’ home on Earth. ‘You’re the chief kitchen mechanic, Red-Top; strut your stuff.’
Dorothy looked at and thought into the controller – she no longer had to wear any of the limited-control headsets to operate them – and a damask-clothed table, set for six, laden with a wide variety of food and equipped with six carved oak chairs and two high-chairs, came instantly into being in the middle of the room.
The Nisei girl jumped violently; then smiled apologetically. ‘Shiro
told
me about such things, but … well, maybe I’ll get used to them sometimes, I hope.’
‘Sure you will, Lotus,’ Seaton assured her. ‘It’s pretty weird at first, but you get used to it fast.’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ Lotus said, and eyed the six dinner places dubiously. She had thought that she was thoroughly American, but she wasn’t quite. Traditions are strong. With an IQ that a Heidelberg student
might envy, part of the crew of the most powerful vehicle man had ever seen, fully educated and trained … it was evident that Shiro’s dainty little bride was more than a little doubtful about sitting at that table.
Until Dorothy took her by the hand and sat her down. ‘This is where I like my friends to sit,’ she announced. ‘Where I can see them.’
A flush dyed the porcelain-like perfection of Lotus’s skin.
‘I thank you, Mrs—’
‘Friends, remember?’ Seaton broke in. ‘Call her Dot. Now let’s eat!’
Whereafter, they worked.
It may be wondered, among those historians not familiar with the saga of the Skylarks, why so much consternation and trouble should come from so small an event as the probabilistic speculation of a single Norlaminian sage that one mere human body, lately cast into the energy forms of the disembodied intelligences, might soon return into the universe in a viable form.
Such historians do not, of course, know Blackie DuQuesne.
While Seaton, Crane and the others were eating their meal, across distances to be measured in gigaparsecs, countless millions of persons were in one way or another busy at work on projects central to their own central concern. Seaton and Crane were not idle. They were waiting for further information … and at the same time, refurbishing the inner man with food, with rest and with pleasant company; but an hour later, after dinner, after the table and its appurtenances had vanished and the three couples were seated in the living room, more or less facing the fire, Seaton stoked up his battered black briar and Crane lighted one of his specially made cigarettes.
‘Well?’ Seaton demanded then. ‘Have you thunk up anything you think is worth two tinker’s whoops in Hades?’
Crane smiled ruefully. ‘Not more than one, I’d say – if that many. Let’s consider that thought or message that Carfon is sending out. It will be received, he says, only by persons or entities who not only know more than we do about one or more specific things, but also are friendly enough to be willing to share their knowledge with us. And to make the matter murkier, we have no idea either of what it is that we lack or what it, whatever it is, is supposed to be able to do. Therefore Point One would be: how are they going to get in touch with us? By what you called magic?’
Seaton did not answer at first, then only nodded. ‘Magic’ was still a much less than real concept to him. He said. ‘If you say so – but remember the Peruvian Indian medicinemen and the cinchona bark that just happened to be full of quinine. So, whatever you want to call it – magic or extra-sensory perception or an unknown band of the sixth or what-have-you – I’ll bet my last shirt it’ll be
bio
. And whoever pitches it at us will be good enough at it to
know
that they can hit us with it, so all we have to do about that is wait for it to happen. However, what I’m mostly interested in right now is nothing
that far out, but what we
know
that a reincarnated Blackie DuQuesne could and probably would do.’
‘Such as?’
‘The first thing he’ll do, for all the tea in China, will be to design and set up some gadget or gizmo or technique to kill me with. Certainly me, and probably you, and quite possibly all of us.’
Dorothy and Margaret both gasped; but Crane nodded and said, ‘Check. I check you to your proverbial nineteen decimals. Also, and quite possibly along with that operation, an all-out attempt to reconquer Earth. He wouldn’t set out to destroy Earth, at this time, at least … would he, do you think?’
Seaton thought for seconds, then said, ‘My best guess would be no. He wants to boss it, not wipe it out. However, there are a few other things that might come …’
‘Wait up, presh!’ Dorothy snapped. ‘Those two will hold us for a while; especially the first one. I wish to go on record at this point to the effect that I want my husband
alive
, not dead.’
Seaton grinned. ‘You and me both, pet,’ he said. ‘I’m in favor of it. Definitely. However, as long as I stay inside the
Valeron
here he doesn’t stand the chance of a snowflake in you-know-where of getting at me …’
How
wrong Seaton was!
‘… so the second point is the one that’s really of over-riding importance. The rub is that we can’t make even a wild guess at when he’s going to get loose … He
could
be building his ship right now … so, Engineer Martin Crane, what’s your thought as to defending Earth; as adequately as possible but in the shortest possible time?’
Crane inhaled – slowly – a deep lungful of smoke, exhaled it even more slowly, and stubbed out the butt. ‘That’s a tall order, Dick,’ he said, finally, ‘but I don’t think it’s hopeless. Since we know DuQuesne’s exact line of departure, we know at least approximately the line of his return. As a first-approximation idea we should, I think, cover that line thoroughly with hair-triggered automation. We should occupy the fourth and the fifth completely; thus taking care of everything we
know
that he knows … but as for the sixth …’ Crane paused in thought.
‘Yeah,’ Seaton agreed. ‘That sixth order’s an entirely different breed of cats. It’s a pistol – a question with a capital Q. About all we can do on it, I’d say, is cover everything we know of it and then set up supersensitive analsynths coupled to all the automatic constructors and such-like gizmos we can dream up – with as big a gaggle of ground-and-lofty dreamers as we can round up. The Norlaminians, certainly; and Sacner Carfon for sure. If what he and Drasnik pulled off wasn’t magic it certainly was a remarkably reasonable facsimile thereof. All six of us, of course, and—’
‘But what can you possibly want
of us?’ Shiro asked, and Dorothy said, ‘That goes double for Peggy and me, Dick. Of what good could we two possibly be, thinking about such stuff as that?’
Seaton flushed. ‘’Scuse, please; my error. I switched thinking without announcing the switch. I do know, though, that our minds all work differently – especially Shiro’s and double-especially Lotus’s – and that when you don’t have the faintest glimmering of what you’re getting into you don’t know what you’re going to have to have to cope with it.’ He grinned.
‘If you can untangle that, I mean,’ he said.
‘I think so,’ said Crane, unruffled; he had had long practice in following Seaton’s lightning leaps past syntax. ‘And you think that this will enable us to deal with DuQuesne?’
‘It’ll have to,’ Seaton said positively. ‘One thing we know,
something
has to. He’s not going to send us a polite message asking to be friends – he’s going to hit with all he’s got. So,’ he finished, ‘let’s hop to it. The Norlaminian Observers’ reports are piling up on the tapes right now. And we’d all better keep our eyes peeled – as well as all the rest of our senses and instruments! – for Dr Marc C. Blackie DuQuesne!’
And DuQuesne so immensely far out in intergalactic space, at control board and computer, explored for ten solid hours the vastnesses of his new knowledge.
Then he donned a thought-helmet and thought himself up a snack; after eating which – scarcely tasting any part of it – he put in another ten solid hours of work. Then, leaning back in his form-fitting seat, he immersed himself in thought – and, being corporeal, no longer a pattern of pure force, went sound asleep.
He woke up a couple of hours later; stiff, groggy, and ravenous. He thought himself up a supper of steak and mushrooms, hashed browns, spinach, coffee, and apple pie a la mode. He ate it – with zest, this time – then sought his long-overdue bed.