Radnor and his scientists devoted themselves exclusively to the development of new and ever more powerful weapons of offense; the Chlorans ceased their fruitless attacks upon the central dome and concentrated all their offensive power into two semicircular arcs, which they directed vertically downward upon the outer ring of the Valeronian works in an incessant and methodical flood of energy.
They could not pierce the defensive shields against Valeron's massed power, but they could and did bring into being a vast annular lake of furiously boiling lava, into which the outer ring of fortresses began slowly to crumble and to dissolve. This method of destruction, while slow, was certain; and grimly, pertinaciously, implacably, the Chlorans went about the business of reducing Valeron's only citadel.
The Bardyle wondered audibly how the enemy could possibly maintain indefinitely an attack so profligate of energy, but he soon learned that there were at least four of the floating fortresses engaged in the undertaking. Occasionally the two creations then attacking were replaced by two precisely similar structures, presumably to return to Chlora in order to renew their supplies of the substance, whatever it was, from the atomic disintegration of which they derived their incomprehensible power.
And slowly, contesting stubbornly and bitterly every foot of ground lost, the forces of Valeron were beaten back under the relentless, never-ceasing attack of the Chloran monstrosities—back and ever back toward their central dome as ring after ring of the outlying fortifications slagged down into that turbulently seething, that incandescently flaming lake of boiling lava.
XX.
Valeron was making her last stand. Her back was against the wall. The steadily contracting ring of Chloran force had been driven inward until only one thin line of fortified works lay between it and the great dome covering the city itself. Within a week at most, perhaps within days, that voracious flood of lava would lick into and would dissolve that last line of defense. Then what of Valeron?
All the scientists of the planet had toiled and had studied, day and night, but to no avail. Each new device developed to halt the march of the encroaching constricting band of destruction had been nullified in the instant of its first trial.
"They must know every move we make, to block us so promptly," Quedrin Radnor had mused one day. "Since they certainly have no visiray viewpoints of material substance within our dome, they must be able to operate a spy ray using only the narrow gravity band, a thing we have never been able to accomplish. If they can project such viewpoints of pure force through such a narrow band, may they not be able to project a full materialization and thus destroy us? But, no, that band is—mustbe—altogether too narrow for that."
Stirred by these thoughts he had built detectors to announce the appearance of any nongravitational forces in the gravity band and had learned that his fears were only too well founded. While the enemy could not project through the open band any forces sufficiently powerful to do any material damage, they were thus in position to forestall any move which the men of Valeron made to ward off their inexorably approaching doom.
Far beneath the surface of the ground, in a room which was not only sealed but was surrounded with every possible safeguard, nine men sat at a long table, the Bardyle at its head.
"—and nothing can be done?" the coördinator was asking. "There is no possible way of protecting the edges of the screens?"
"None." Radnor's voice was flat, his face and body alike were eloquent of utter fatigue. He had driven himself to the point of collapse, and all his labor had proved useless. "Without solid anchorages we cannot hold them—as the ground is fused they give way. When the fused area reaches the dome the end will come. The outlets of our absorbers will also be fused, and with no possible method of dissipating the energy being continuously radiated into the dome we shall all die, practically instantaneously."
"But I judge you are trying something new, from the sudden cutting off of nearly all our weight," stated another.
"Yes. I have closed the gravity band until only enough force can get through to keep us in place on the planet, in a last attempt to block their spy rays so that we can try one last resort—" He broke off as an intense red light suddenly flared into being upon a panel. "No; even that is useless. See that red light? That is the pilot light of a detector upon the gravity band. The Chlorans are still watching us. We can do nothing more, for if we close that band any tighter we shall leave Valeron entirely and shall float away, to die in space."
As that bleak announcement was uttered the councilors sat back limply in their seats. Nothing was said—what was there to say? After all, the now seemingly unavoidable end was not unexpected. Not a man at that table had really in his heart thought it possible for peaceful Valeron to triumph against the superior war craftiness of Chlora.
They sat there, staring unseeing into empty air, when suddenly in that air there materialized Seaton's projection. Since its reception has already been related, nothing need be said of it except that it was the Bardyle himself who was the recipient of that terrific wave of mental force. As soon as the Terrestrial had made clear his intentions and his desires, Radnor leaped to his feet, a man transformed.
"A laboratory of radiation!" he exclaimed, his really profound exhaustion forgotten in a blaze of new hope. "Not only shall I lead him to such a laboratory, but my associates and I shall be only too glad to do his bidding in every possible way."
Followed closely by the visitor, Radnor hurried buoyantly along a narrow hall and into a large room in which, stacked upon shelves, lying upon benches and tables, and even piled indiscriminately upon the floor, there was every conceivable type and kind of apparatus for the generation and projection of etheric forces.
Seaton's flashing glance swept once around the room, cataloguing and classifying the heterogeneous collection. Then, while Radnor looked on in a daze of incredulous astonishment, that quasi-solid figure of force made tangible wrought what was to the Valeronian a scientific miracle. It darted here and there with a speed almost impossible for the eye to follow, seizing tubes, transformers, coils, condensers, and other items of equipment, connecting them together with unbelievable rapidity into a mechanism at whose use the bewildered Radnor, able physicist though he was, could not even guess.
The mechanical educator finished, Seaton's image donned one of its sets of multiple headphones and placed another upon the unresisting head of his host. Then into Radnor's already reeling mind there surged an insistent demand for his language, and almost immediately the headsets were tossed aside.
"There, that's better!" Seaton—for the image was, to all intents and purposes, Seaton himself—exclaimed. "Now that we can talk to each other we'll make those jelly brains hard to catch. They'll think they've got hold of a wild cat by the tail pretty quick now, and they'll be yelling for help to let go."
"But the Chlorans are watching everything you do," protested Radnor, "and we cannot block them out without cutting off our gravity entirely. They will therefore be familiar with any mechanism we may construct and will be able to protect themselves against it."
"They just think they will," was the grim response. "I can't close the gravity band without disaster, any more than you could, but I can find any spy ray they can use and send back along it a jolt that'll burn their eyes out. You see, there's a lot of stuff down on the edge of the fourth order that neither you folks nor the Chlorans know anything about yet, because you haven't had enough thousands of years to study it."
While he was talking, Seaton had been furiously at work upon a small generator, and now he turned it on.
"If they can see throughthat," he said, "they're a lot smarter than I think they are. Even if they're bright enough to have figured out what I was doing while I was doing it, it won't do them any good, because this outfit will scramble any beam they can send through that band."
"I must bow to your superior knowledge, of course," Radnor said gravely, "but I should like to ask one question. You are working a full materialization through less than a quarter of the gravity band—something that has always been considered impossible. Is there no danger that the Chlorans may analyze your patterns and thus duplicate your feat?"
"Not a chance," Seaton assured him positively. "This stuff I am using is on a tight beam, so tight that it is absolute proof against analysis or interference. It took the Norlaminians—and they're a race of real thinkers—over eight thousand years to go from the beams you and the Chlorans are using down to what I'm showing you. Therefore I'm not afraid that the opposition will pick it up in the next week or two. But we'd better get busy in a big way. Your most urgent need, I take it, is for something—anything—that will stop that surface of force before it reaches the skirt of your defensive dome and blocks your dissipators?"
"Exactly!"
"All right. We'll build you a four-way fourth-order projector to handle full materializations—four way to handle four attackers in case they get desperate and double their program. With it you will send working images of yourselves into the power rooms of the Chloran ships and clamp a short circuiting field across the secondaries of their converters. Of course they can bar you out with a zone of force if they detect you before you can kill the generators of their zones, but that will be just as good, as far as we're concerned—they can't do a thing as long as they're on, you know. Now put on the headset again and I'll give you the dope on the projector. Better get a recorder, too, as there'll be some stuff that you won't be able to carry in your head."
The recorder was brought in and from Seaton's brain there flowed into it and into the mind of Radnor the fundamental concepts and complete equations and working details of the new instrument. Upon the Valeronian's face was first blank amazement, then dawning comprehension, and lastly sheer, wondering awe as, the plan completed, he removed the headset. He began a confused panegyric of thanks, but Seaton interrupted him briskly.
"'Sall right, Radnor, you'd do the same thing for us if things were reversed. Humanity has got to stick together against all the vermin of all the universes. But, say, I'm getting a yen to see this mess all cleaned up, myself—think I'll stick around and help you build it. You're all in, clear to the neck, but you won't rest until the Chlorans are whipped—I can't blame you for that, I wouldn't either—and I'm fresh as a daisy. Let's go!"
In a few hours the complex machine was done. Radnor and Siblin were seated at two of the sets of controls, associate physicists at the others.
"Since I don't know any more about their system of conversion than you do, I can't tell you in detail what to do," Seaton was issuing final instructions. "But whatever you do, don't monkey with their primaries—shortening them would overload their liberators and blow this whole Solar System over into the next Galaxy. Take time to be dead sure that you've got the secondaries of their main converters, and slap a short circuit on as many of them as you can before they cut you off with a zone. You'll probably find a lot of liberator-converter sets on vessels of that size, but if you can kill the ones that feed the zone generators they're our meat."
"You are much more familiar with such things than we are," Radnor remarked. "Would you not like to come along?"
"I'll say I would, but I can't," Seaton replied instantly. "This isn't me at all, you know. But let's see—"
"Oh, of course," Radnor apologized. "In working with you so long and so cordially I forgot for the moment that you are not here in person."
"Nope, can't be done." Seaton frowned, still immersed in the hitherto unstudied problem of the reprojection of a projected image. "Need over two hundred thousand relays and—um—synchronization—neuro-muscular—not on this outfit. Wonder if it can be done at all? Have to look into it sometime—but excuse me, Radnor, I was thinking and got lost. Ready to go? I'll watch you on the plate here and be ready to offer advice—not that you'll need it. Shoot!"
Radnor snapped on the power and he and his aid shot their projections into one of the opposing fortresses, Siblin and his associate going into the other. Through compartment after compartment of the immense structures the as yet invisible projections went, searching for the power rooms. They were not hard to find, extending as they did nearly the full length of the stupendous structures; vaulted caverns filled with linked pairs of mastodonic fabrications, the liberator-converters.
Springing in graceful arcs from heavily insulated posts in the ends of one machine of each pair were five great bus-bars, which Radnor and Siblin recognized instantly as secondary leads from the converters—the gigantic mechanisms which, taking the raw intra-atomic energy from the liberators, converted it into a form in which it could be controlled and utilized.
Neither Radnor nor Siblin had ever heard of five-phase energy of any kind, but those secondaries were unmistakable. Therefore all four images drove against the fivefold bars their perfectly conducting fields of force. Four converters shrieked wildly, trying to wrench themselves from their foundations; insulation smoked and burst wildly into yellow flame; the stubs of the bars grew white-hot and began to fuse; and in a matter of seconds a full half of each prodigious machine subsided to the floor, a semimolten, utterly useless mass.
They drove their fields of force against the fivefold bars.
They drove their fields of force against the fivefold bars.
They drove their fields of force against the fivefold bars.
Similarly went the next two in each fortress, and the next—then Radnor's two projections were cut off sharply as the Chloran's impenetrable zone of force went on, and that fortress, all its beams and forces inoperative, floated off into space.
Siblin and his partner were more fortunate. When the amœbus commanding their prey threw in his zone switch nothing happened. Its source of power had already been destroyed, and the two Valeronian images went steadily down the line of converters, in spite of everything the ragingly frantic monstrosities could do to hinder their progress.
The terrible beam of destruction held steadily upon that fortress by the beamers in Valeron's mighty dome had never slackened its herculean efforts to pierce the Chloran screens. Now, as more and more of the converters of that floating citadel were burned out those screens began to radiate higher and higher into the ultra-violet. Soon they went down, exposing defenseless metal to the blasting, annihilating fury of the beam, to which any conceivable substance is but little more resistant than so much vacuum.
There was one gigantic, exploding flash, whose unbearable brilliance darkened even the incandescent radiance of the failing screen, and Valeron's mighty beam bored on, unimpeded. And where that mastodonic creation had floated an instant before there were only a few curling wisps of vapor.
"Nice job of clean-up, boys—fine!" Seaton clapped a friendly hand upon Radnor's shoulder. "Anybody can handle them now. Better you take a week off and catch up on sleep. I could do with a little shut-eye myself, and you've been on the job a lot longer than I have."
"But hold on—don't go yet!" Radnor exclaimed in consternation. "Why, our whole race owes its very existence to you—wait at least until our Bardyle can have a word with you!"
"That isn't necessary, Radnor. Thanks just the same, but I don't go in for that sort of thing, any more than you would. Besides, we'll be here in the flesh in a few days and I'll talk to him then. So long!" and the projection disappeared.
In due timeSkylark Twocame lightly to a landing in a parkway near the council hall, to be examined curiously by an excited group of Valeronians who wondered audibly that such a tiny space ship should have borne their salvation. The four Terrestrials, sure of their welcome, stepped out and were greeted by Siblin, Radnor, and the Bardyle.
"I must apologize, sir, for my cavalier treatment of you at our previous meeting." Seaton's first words to the coördinator were in sincere apology. "I trust that you will pardon it, realizing that something of the kind was necessary in order to establish communication."
"Speak not of it, Richard Seaton. I suffered only a temporary inconvenience, a small thing indeed compared to the experience of encountering a mind of such stupendous power as yours. Neither words nor deeds can express to you the profound gratitude of our entire race for what you have done for Valeron.
"I am informed that you personally do not care for extravagant praise, but please believe me to be voicing the single thought of a world's people when I say that no words coined by brain of man could be just, to say nothing of being extravagant, when applied to you. I do not suppose that we can do anything, however slight, for you in return, in token that these are not entirely empty words?"
"You certainly can, sir," Seaton made surprising answer. "We are so completely lost in space that without a great deal of material and of mechanical aid we shall never be able to return to, nor even to locate in space, our native Galaxy, to say nothing of our native planet."
A concerted gasp of astonishment was his reply, then he was assured in no uncertain terms that the resources of Valeron were at his disposal.
A certain amount of public attention had of course to be endured; but Seaton and Crane, pleading a press of work upon their new projectors, buried themselves in Radnor's laboratory, leaving it to their wives to bear the brunt of Valeronian adulation.
"How do you like being a heroine, Dot?" Seaton asked one evening, as the two women returned from an unusually demonstrative reception in another city.
"We just revel in it, since we didn't do any of the real work—it's just too perfectly gorgeous for words," Dorothy replied shamelessly. "Especially Peggy." She eyed Margaret mischievously and winked furtively at Seaton. "Why, you ought to see her—she could just simply roll that stuff up on a fork and eat it, as though it were that much soft fudge!"
Since the scientific and mechanical details of the construction of a fifth-order projector have been given in full elsewhere there is no need to repeat them here. Seaton built his neutronium lens in the core of the near-by white dwarf star, precisely as Rovol had done it from distant Norlamin. He brought it to Valeron and around it there began to come into being a duplicate of the immense projector which the Terrestrials had been obliged to leave behind them when they abandoned giganticSkylark Threeto plunge through the fourth dimension in tinyTwo.
"Maybe it's none of my business, Radnor," Seaton turned to the Valeronian curiously during a lull in their work, "but how come you're still simply shooting away those Chloran vessels by making them put out their zones of force? Why didn't you hop over there on your projector and blow their whole planet over into the next Solar System? I would have done that long ago if it had been me, I think."
"We did visit Chlora once, with something like that in mind, but our attempt failed lamentably," Radnor admitted sheepishly. "You remember that peculiar special sense, that mental force that Siblin tried to describe to you? Well, it was altogether too strong for us. My father, possessing one of the strongest minds of Valeron, was in the chair, but they mastered him so completely that we had to recall the projection by cutting off the power to prevent them from taking from his mind by force the methods of transmission which you taught us and which we were then using."
"Hmm! So that's it, huh?" Seaton was greatly interested. "Maybe I'll take one on the chin, but I'm going to lock horns with that bunch of squidges myself, one of these days. When this projector gets itself done I'll skip over there and try them a whirl—with this fifth-order outfit I think maybe I'll be able to make big medicine on them."
True to his word, Seaton's first use of the new mechanism was to assume the offensive. He first sought out and destroyed the Chloran structure then in space—now an easy task, since zones of force, while impenetrable to any ether-borne phenomena, offer no resistance whatever to forces of the fifth order, propagated as they are in that inner medium, the sub-ether. Then, with the Quedrins standing by, to cut off the power in case he should be overpowered, he invaded the sanctum sanctorum of all Chlora—the private office of the Supreme Great One himself—and stared unabashed and unaffected into the enormous "eye" of the monstrous ruler of the planet.
There ensued a battle royal. Had mental forces been visible, it would have been a spectacular meeting indeed! Larger and larger grew the "eye" until it was transmitting all the terrific power generated by that frightful, visibly palpitating brain. But Seaton was not of Valeron, nor was he handicapped by the limitations of a fourth-order projector. He was now being projected upon a full beam of the fifth, by a mechanism able to do full justice to his stupendously composite brain.
The part of that brain he was now employing was largely the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of ancient Norlamin; and from it he was hurling along that beam the irresistible sum total of mental power accumulated by ten thousand generations of the most profound students of the mind that our Galaxy has ever known.
The creature, realizing that at long last it had met its mental master, must have emitted radiations of distress, for into the room came crowding hordes of the monstrosities, each of whom sought to add his own mind to those already opposing the intruder. In vain—all their power could not turn Seaton's penetrating glare aside, nor could it wrest from that glare's unbreakable grip the mind of the tortured Great One.
And now, mental waves failing, they resorted to the purely physical. Hand rays of highest power blasted at that figure uselessly; fiercely driven bars, spears, axes, and all other weapons rebounded from it without leaving a mark upon it, rebounded bent, broken, and twisted. For that figure was in no sense matter as we understand the term. It was pure force—force made palpable and coherent by the incomprehensible power of disintegrating matter; force against which any possible application of mechanical power would be precisely as effective as would wafted thistledown against Gibraltar.
Thus the struggle was brief. Paying no attention to anything, mental or physical, that the other monstrosities could bring to bear, Seaton compelled his victim to assume the shape of the heretofore-despised human being. Then, staring straight into that quivering brain through those hate-filled, flaming eyes, he spoke aloud, the better to drive home his thought:
"Learn, so-called Great One, once and for all, that when you attack any race of humanity anywhere, you attack not only that one race, but all the massed humanity of all the planets of all the Galaxies! As you have already observed, I am not of the planet Valeron, nor of this Solar System, nor even of this Galaxy; but I and my fellows have come to the aid of this race of humanity whom you were bold enough to attack.
"I have proved that we are your masters, mentally as well as scientifically and mechanically. Those of you who have been attacking Valeron have been destroyed, ships and crews alike. Those en route there have been destroyed in space. So also shall be destroyed any and all expeditions you may launch beyond the limits of your own foul atmosphere.
"Since even such a repellent civilization as yours must have its place in the great scheme of things, we do not intend to destroy your planet nor such of your people as remain upon it or near it, unless such destruction shall become necessary for the welfare of the human race. While we are considering what we shall do about you, I advise you to heed well this warning!"
XXI.
The four Terrestrials had discussed at some length the subject of Chlora and her outlandish population.
"It looks as though you were perched upon the horns of a first-class dilemma," Dorothy remarked at last. "If you let them alone there is no telling what harm they will do to these people here, and yet it would be a perfect shame to kill them all—they can't help being what they are. Do you suppose you can figure a way out of it, Dick?"
"Maybe—I've got a kind of a hunch, but it hasn't jelled into a workable idea yet. It's tied in with the sixth-order projection that we'll have to have, anyway, to find our way back home with. Until we get that working I guess we'll just let the amœbuses stew in their own juice."
"Well, and then what?" Dorothy prompted.
"I told you it's nebulous yet, with a lot of essential details yet to be filled in—" Seaton paused, then went on, doubtfully: "It's pretty wild—I don't know whether—"
"Now youmusttell us about it, Dick," Margaret urged.
"I'll say you've got to," Dorothy agreed. "You've had a lot of ideas wild enough to make any sane creature's head spin around in circles before this, but not one of them was so hair raising that you were backward in talking about it. This one must be the prize brain storm of the universe—spill it to us!"
"All right, but remember that it's only half baked and that you asked for it. I'm doping out a way of sending them back to their own Solar System, planet and all."
"What!" exclaimed Margaret.
Dorothy simply whistled—a long, low whistle highly eloquent of incredulity.
"Maintenance of temperature? Time? Power? Control?" Crane, the imperturbable, picked out unerringly the four key factors of the stupendous feat.
"Your first three objections can be taken care of easily enough," Seaton replied positively. "No loss of temperature is possible through a zone of force—our own discovery. We can stop time with a stasis—we learned that from watching those four-dimensional folks work. The power of cosmic radiation is practically infinite and eternal—we learned how to use that from the pure intellectuals. Control is the sticker, since it calls for computations and calculations at present impossible; but I believe that when we get our mechanical brain done, it will be able to work out even such a problem as that."
"What d'you mean, mechanical brain?" demanded Dorothy.
"The thing that is going to run our sixth-order projector," Seaton explained. "You see, it'll be altogether too big and too complicated to be controlled manually, and thought—human thought, at least—is on one band of the sixth order. Therefore the logical thing to do is to build an artificial brain capable of thinking onallbands of the order instead of only one, to handle the whole projector. See?"
"No," declared Dorothy promptly, "but maybe I will, though, when I see it work. What's next on the program?"
"Well, it's going to be quite a job to build that brain and we'd better be getting at it, since without it there'll be noSkylark Four—"
"Dick, I object!" Dorothy protested vigorously. "The Skylark of Spacewas a nice name—"
"Sure, you'd think so, since you named her yourself," interrupted Seaton in turn, with his disarming grin.
"Keep still a minute, Dickie, and let me finish.Skylark Twowas pretty bad, but I stood it; and by gritting my teeth all out of shape I did manage to keep from squawking aboutSkylark Three, but I certainly am not going to stand forSkylark Four. Why, just think of giving a name like that to such a wonderful thing as she is going to be—as different as can be from anything that has ever been dreamed of before—just as though she were going to be simply one more of a long series of cup-challenging motor boats or something! Why, it's—it's just too perfectly idiotic for words!"
"But she'sgotto be some kind of aSkylark, Dot—you know that."
"Yes, but give her a name that means something—that sounds like something. Name her after this planet, say—Skylark of Valeron—how's that?"
"O.K. by me. How about it, Peg? Mart?"
The Cranes agreed to the suggestion with enthusiasm and Seaton went on:
"Well, an onion by any other name would smell as sweet, you know, and it's going to be just as much of a job to build theSkylark of Valeronas it would have been to buildSkylark Four. Therefore, as I have said before and am about to say again, we'd better get at it."
The fifth-order projector was moved to the edge of the city, since nowhere within its limits was there room for the structure to be built, and the two men seated themselves at its twin consoles and their hands flew over its massed banks of keyboards. For a few minutes nothing happened; then on the vast, level plain before them—a plain which had been a lake of fluid lava a few weeks before—there sprang into being an immense foundation-structure of trussed and latticed girder frames of inoson, the hardest, strongest, and toughest form of matter possible to molecular structure. One square mile of ground it covered and it was strong enough, apparently, to support a world.
When the foundation was finished, Seaton left the framework to Crane, while he devoted himself to filling the interstices and compartments as fast as they were formed. He first built one tiny structure of coils, fields, and lenses of force—one cell of the gigantic mechanical brain which was to be. He then made others, slightly different in tune, and others, and others.
He then set forces to duplicating these cells, forces which automatically increased in number until they were making and setting five hundred thousand cells per second, all that his connecting forces could handle. And everywhere, it seemed, there were projectors, fields of force, receptors and converters of cosmic energy, zones of force, and many various shaped lenses and geometric figures of neutronium incased in sheaths of faidon.
From each cell led tiny insulated wires, so fine as to be almost invisible, to the "nerve centers" and to one of the millions of projectors. From these in turn ran other wires, joining together to form larger and larger strands until finally several hundred enormous cables, each larger than a man's body, reached and merged into an enormous, glittering, hemispherical, mechano-electrical inner brain.
For forty long Valeronian days—more than a thousand of our Earthly hours—the work went on ceaselessly, day and night. Then it ceased of itself and there dangled from the center of the glowing, gleaming hemisphere a something which is only very vaguely described by calling it either a heavily wired helmet or an incredibly complex headset. It was to be placed over Seaton's head, it is true—itwasa headset, but one raised to the millionth power.
It was the energizer and controller of the inner brain, which was in turn the activating agency of that entire cubic mile of as yet inert substance, that assemblage of thousands of billions of cells, so soon to become the most stupendous force for good ever to be conceived by the mind of man.
When that headset appeared Seaton donned it and sat motionless. For hour after hour he sat there, his eyes closed, his face white and strained, his entire body eloquent of a concentration so intense as to be a veritable trance. At the end of four hours Dorothy came up resolutely, but Crane waved her back.
"This is far and away the most crucial point of the work, Dorothy," he cautioned her gravely. "While I do not think that anything short of physical violence could distract his attention now, it is best not to run any risk of disturbing him. An interruption now would mean that everything would have to be done over again from the beginning."
Something over an hour later Seaton opened his eyes, stretched prodigiously, and got up. He was white and trembling, but tremendously relieved and triumphant.
"Why, Dick, what have you been doing? You look like a ghost!" Dorothy was now an all solicitous wife.
"I've beenthinking, and if you don't believe that it's hard work you'd better try it some time! 'Sall right, though, I won't have to do it any more—got a machine to do my thinking for me now."
"Oh, is it all done?"
"Nowhere near, but it's far enough along so that it can finish itself. I've just been telling it what to do."
"Tellingit! Why, you talk as though it were human!"
"Human? It's a lot more than that. It can outthink and outperform even those pure intellectuals—'and that,' as the poet feelingly remarked, 'is going some'! And if you think that riding in that fifth-order projector was a thrill, wait until you see what this one can do. Think of it"—even the mind that had conceived the thing was awed—"it is an extension of my own brain, using waves that traverse even intergalactic distances practically instantaneously. With it I can see anything I want to look at, anywhere; can hear anything I want to hear. It can build, make, do, or perform anything that my brain can think of."
"That is all true, of course," Crane said slowly, his sober mien dampening Dorothy's ardor instantly, "but still—I can not help wondering—" He gazed at Seaton thoughtfully.
"I know it, Mart, and I'm working up my speed as fast as I possibly can," Seaton answered the unspoken thought, rather than the words. "But let them come—we'll take 'em. I'll have everything on the trips, ready to spring."
"Whatareyou two talking about?" Dorothy demanded.
"Mart pointed out to me the regrettable fact that my mental processes are in the same class as the proverbial molasses in January, or as a troop of old and decrepit snails racing across a lawn. I agreed with him, but added that I would have my thoughts all thunk up ahead of time when the pure intellectuals tackle us—which they certainly will."
"Slow!" she exclaimed. "When you planned the wholeSkylark of Valeronand nobody knows what else, in five hours?"
"Yes, dear,slow. Remember when we first met our dear departed friend Eight, back in the originalSkylark? You saw him materialize exact duplicates of each of our bodies, clear down to the molecular structures of our chemistry, in less than one second, from a cold, standing start. Compared to that job, the one I have just done is elementary. It took me over five hours—he could have done it in nothing flat.
"However, don't let it bother you too much. I'll never be able to equal their speed, since I'll not live enough millions of years to get the required practice, but our being material gave us big advantages in other respects that Mart isn't mentioning because, as usual, he is primarily concerned with our weaknesses—yes? No?"
"Yes; I will concede that being material does yield advantages which may perhaps make up for our slower rate of thinking," Crane at last conceded.
"Hear that? If he admits that much, you know that we're as good as in, right now," Seaton declared. "Well, while our new brain is finishing itself up, we might as well go back to the hall and chase the Chlorans back where they belong—the Brain worked out the equations for me this morning."
From the ancient records of Valeron, Radnor and the Bardyle had secured complete observational data of the cataclysm, which had made the task of finding the present whereabouts of the Chlorans' original sun a simple task. The calculations and computations involved in the application of forces of precisely the required quantities to insure the correct final orbit were complex in the extreme; but, as Seaton had foretold, they had presented no insurmountable difficulties to the vast resources of the Brain.
Therefore, everything in readiness, the two Terrestrial scientists surrounded the inimical planet with a zone of force, so that it would lose none of its heat during the long journey; and with a stasis of time, so that its people would not know of anything that was happening to them. They then erected force-control stations around it, adjusted with such delicacy and precision that they would direct the planet into the exact orbit it had formerly occupied around its parent sun. Then, at the instant of correct velocity and position, the control stations would go out of existence and the forces would disappear.
As the immense ball of dazzlingly opaque mirror which now hid the unwanted world swung away with ever-increasing velocity, the Bardyle, who had watched the proceedings in incredulous wonder, heaved a profound sigh of relaxation.
"What a relief—what a relief!" he exclaimed.
"How long will it take?" asked Dorothy curiously.
"Quite a while—something over four hundred years of our time. But don't let it gnaw on you—they won't know a thing about it. When the forces let go they'll simply go right on, from exactly where they left off, without realizing that any time at all has lapsed—in fact, for them, no time at all shall have lapsed. All of a sudden they will find themselves circling around a different sun, that's all.
"If their old records are clear enough they may be able to recognize it as their original sun and they'll probably do a lot of wondering as to how they got back there. One instant they were in a certain orbit around this sun here, the next instant they will be in another orbit around an entirely different sun! They'll know, of course, that we did it, but they'll have a sweet job figuring out how and what we did—some of it is really deep stuff. Also, they will be a few hundred years off in their time, but since nobody in the world will know it, it won't make any difference."
"How perfectly weird!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Just think of losing a four-hundred-year chunk right out of the middle of your life and not even knowing it!"
"I would rather think of the arrest of development," meditated Crane. "Of the opportunity of comparing the evolution of the planets already there with that of the returned wanderer."
"Yeah, it would be interesting—'sa shame we won't be alive then," Seaton responded, "but in the meantime we've got a lot of work to do for ourselves. Now that we've got this mess straightened out I think we had better tell these folks good-by, get intoTwo, and hop out to where Dot'sSkylark of Valeronis going to materialize."
The farewell to the people of Valeron was brief, but sincere.
"This is in no sense good-by," Crane concluded. "By the aid of these newly discovered forces of the sixth order there shall soon be worked out a system of communication by means of which all the inhabited planets of the Galaxies shall be linked as closely as are now the cities of any one world."
Skylark Twoshot upward and outward, to settle into an orbit well outside that of Valeron. Seaton then sent his projection back to the capital city, fitted over his imaged head the controller of the inner brain, and turned to Crane with a grin.
"That's timing it, old son—she finished herself up less than an hour ago. Better cluster around and watch this, folks, it's going to be good."
At Seaton's signal the structure which was to be the nucleus of the new space traveler lifted effortlessly into the air its millions of tons of dead weight and soared, as lightly as littleTwohad done, out into the airless void. Taking up a position a few hundred miles away from the Terrestrial cruiser, it shot out a spherical screen of force to clear the ether of chance bits of débris. Then inside that screen there came into being a structure of gleaming inoson, so vast in size that to the startled onlookers it appeared almost of planetary dimensions.
"Good heavens—it's stupendous!" Dorothy exclaimed. "What did you boys make it so big for—just to show us you could, or what?"
"Hardly! She's just as small as she can be and still do the work. You see, to find our own Galaxy we will have to project a beam to a distance greater than any heretofore assigned diameter of the universe, and to control it really accurately its working base and the diameter of its hour and declination-circles would each have to be something like four light-years long. Since a ship of that size is of course impracticable, Mart and I did some figuring and decided that with circles one thousand kilometers in diameter we could chart Galaxies accurately enough to find the one we're looking for—if you think of it, you'll realize that there are a lot of hundredth-millimeter marks around the circumference of circles of that size—and that they would probably be big enough to hold a broadcasting projection somewhere near a volume of space as large as that occupied by the Green System. Therefore we built theSkylark of Valeronjust large enough to contain those thousand-kilometer circles."
AsSkylark Twoapproached the looming planetoid the doors of vast airlocks opened. Fifty of those massive gates swung aside before her and closed behind her before she swam free in the cool, sweet air and bright artificial sunlight of the interior. She then floated along above an immense, grassy park toward two well-remembered and beloved buildings.
As the tiny ship approached, the doors of vast airlocks opened.
As the tiny ship approached, the doors of vast airlocks opened.
As the tiny ship approached, the doors of vast airlocks opened.
"Oh, Dick!" Dorothy squealed. "There's our house—and Cranes! It's funny though to see them side by side. Are they the same inside, too—and what's that funny little low building between them?"
"They duplicate the originals exactly, except for some items of equipment which would be useless here. The building between them is the control room, in which are the master headsets of the Brain and its lookouts. The Brain itself is what you would think of as underground—inside the shell of the planetoid."
The small vessel came lightly to a landing and the wanderers disembarked upon the close-clipped, springy turf of a perfect lawn. Dorothy flexed her knees in surprise.
"How come we aren't weightless, Dick?" she demanded. "This gravity isn't—can'tbe—natural. I'll bet you did that, too!"
"Mart and I together did, sure. We learned a lot from the intellectuals and a lot more in hyperspace, but we could neither derive the fundamental equations nor apply what knowledge we already had until we finished this sixth-order outfit. Now, though, we can give you all the gravity you want—or as little—whenever and wherever you want it."
"Oh, marvelous—this is glorious, boys!" Dorothy breathed. "I have always just simply despised weightlessness. Now, with these houses and everything, we can have a perfectly wonderful time!"
"Here's the dining room," Seaton said briskly. "And here's the headset you put on to order dinner or whatever is appropriate to the culinary department. You will observe that the kitchen of this house is purely ornamental—never to be used unless you want to."
"Just a minute, Dick," Dorothy's voice was tensely serious. "I have been really scared ever since you told me about the power of that Brain, and the more you tell me of it the worse scared I get. Think of the awful damage a wild, chance thought would do—and the more an ordinary mortal tries to avoid any thought the surer he is to think it, you know that. Really, I'm not ready for that yet, dear—I'd much rather not go near that headset."
"I know, sweetheart," his arm tightened around her. "But you didn't let me finish. These sets around the house control forces which are capable of nothing except duties pertaining to the part of the house in which they are. This dining-room outfit, for instance, is exactly the same as the Norlaminian one you used so much, except that it is much simpler.
"Instead of using a lot of keyboards and force-tubes, you simply think into that helmet what you want for dinner and it appears. Think that you want the table cleared and it is cleared—dishes and all simply vanish. Think of anything else you want done around this room and it's done—that's all there is to it.
"To relieve your mind I'll explain some more. Mart and I both realized that that Brain could very easily become the most terrible, the most frightfully destructive thing that the universe has ever seen. Therefore, with two exceptions, every controller on this planetoid is of a strictly limited type. Of the two master controls, which are unlimited and very highly reactive, one responds only to Crane's thoughts, the other only to mine. As soon as we get some loose time we are going to build a couple of auxiliaries, with automatic stops against stray thoughts, to break you girls in on—we know as well as you do, Red-Top, that you haven't had enough practice yet to take an unlimited control."
"I'll sayIhaven't!" she agreed feelingly. "I feel lots better now—I'm sure I can handle the rest of these things very nicely."
"Sure you can. Well, let's call the Cranes and go into the control room," Seaton suggested. "The quicker we get started the quicker we'll get done."
Accustomed as she was to the banks and tiers of keyboards, switches, dials, meters, and other operating paraphernalia of the control rooms of the previousSkylark, Dorothy was taken aback when she passed through the thick, heavily insulated door into that of theSkylark of Valeron. For there were four gray walls, a gray ceiling, and a rugged gray floor. There were low, broad double chairs and headsets. There was nothing else.
"This is your seat, Dottie, here beside me, and this is your headset—it's just a visiset, so you can see what is going on, not a controller," he hastened to reassure her. "You have a better illusion of seeing if your eyes are open, that's why everything is neutral in color. But better still for you girls, we'll turn off the lights."
The illumination, which had seemed to pervade the entire room instead of emanating from any definite sources, faded out; but in spite of the fact that the room was in absolute darkness Dorothy saw with a clarity and a depth of vision impossible to any Earthly eyes. She saw at one and the same time, with infinite precision of detail, the houses and their contents; the whole immense sphere of the planetoid, inside and out; Valeron and her sister planets encircling their sun; and the stupendous full sphere of the vaulted heavens.
She knew that her husband was motionless at her side, yet she saw him materialize in the control room ofSkylark Two. There he seized the cabinet which contained the space chart of the Fenachrone—that library of films portraying all the Galaxies visible to the wonderfully powerful telescopes and projectors of that horrible race.
That cabinet became instantly a manifold scanner, all its reels flashing through as one. Simultaneously there appeared in the air above the machine a three-dimensional model of all the Galaxies there listed. A model upon such a scale that the First Galaxy was but a tiny lenticular pellet, although it was still disproportionately large; upon such a scale that the whole vast sphere of space covered by the hundreds of Fenachrone scrolls was compressed into a volume but little larger than a basketball. And yet each tiny Galactic pellet bore its own peculiarly individual identifying marks.
Then Dorothy felt as though she herself had been hurled out into the unthinkable reaches of space. In a fleeting instant of time she passed through thousands of star clusters, and not only knew the declination, right ascension, and distance of each Galaxy, but saw it duplicated in miniature in its exact place in an immense, three-dimensional model in the hollow interior of the space-flyer in which she actually was.
The mapping went on. To human brains and hands the task would have been one of countless years. Now, however, it was to prove only a matter of hours, for this was no human brain. Not only was it reactive and effective at distances to be expressed in light-years or parsecs: because of the immeasurable sixth-order velocity of its carrier wave it was equally effective at distances of thousands upon thousands of light—millionia—reaches of space so incomprehensibly vast that the rays of visible light emitted at the birth of a sun so far away would reach the point of observation only after that sun had lived through its entire cycle of life and had disappeared.
"Well, that's about enough of that for you, for a while," Seaton remarked in a matter-of-fact voice. "A little of that stuff goes a long ways at first—you have to get used to it."
"I'll say you do! Why—I—it—" Dorothy paused, even her ready tongue at a loss for words.
"You can't describe it in words—don't try," Seaton advised. "Let's go outdoors and watch the model grow."
To the awe, if not to the amazement of the observers, the model had already begun to assume a lenticular pattern. Galaxies, then, reallywerearranged in general as were the stars composing them; there reallywereuniverses, and they reallywerelenticular—the vague speculations of the hardiest and most exploratory cosmic thinkers were being confirmed.
For hour after hour the model continued to grow and Seaton's face began to take on a look of grave concern. At last, however, when the chart was three fourths done or more, a deep-toned bell clanged out the signal for which he had been waiting—the news that there was now being plotted a configuration of Galaxies identical with that portrayed by the space chart of the Fenachrone.
"Gosh!" Seaton sighed hugely. "I was beginning to be afraid that we had escaped clear out of our own universe, and that would have been bad—very, very bad, believe me! The rest of the mapping can wait—let's go!"
Followed by the others he dashed into the control room, threw on his helmet, and hurled a projection into the now easily recognizable First Galaxy. He found the Green System without difficulty, but he could not hold it. So far away it was that even the highest amplification and the greatest power of which the gigantic sixth-order installation was capable could not keep the viewpoint from leaping erratically, in fantastic bounds of hundreds of millions of miles, all through and around its objective.
But Seaton had half expected this development and was prepared for it. He had already sent out a broadcasting projection; and now, upon a band of frequencies wide enough to affect every receiving instrument in use throughout the Green System and using power sufficient to overwhelm any transmitter, however strong, that might be in operation, he sent out in a mighty voice his urgent message to the scientists of Norlamin.