E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (125 page)

Everyone resumed thinking and Kay-Lee resumed writing. She wrote smoothly and effortlessly, with the precision and with almost the speed of the operating point of a geometric lathe.

She wrote the first column and the second and the third and the fourth – six feet by three feet of tightly packed equations and other mathematical shorthand. Then came twelve feet of exquisitely detailed ‘wiring’ diagram. Then, covering all the rest of the paper, came working drawings of and meticulously detailed specifications for machines that no one there had ever heard of.

Then all three women collapsed. As well they might; they had worked without a let-up for three hours.

Men and women sprang to their aid with restoratives, and they began to recover.

‘Mr Fodan,’ Madlyn Mannis said then, coming up to the Chief of the Five arm-in-arm with Stephanie de Marigny. Her usually vivid face was strangely pale. ‘I can understand Hunkie here having a place in a brawl like this, she’s got half the letters in the alphabet after her name, but what good could I do? Possibly? I only went to school one day in my life and that day it rained and the teacher didn’t come.’

‘Formal education does not matter, child; it is what you intrinsically are that counts. You and your friend Charles are two perfectly matched male and female poles of tremendous power. You felt your paired power at work, I’m sure.’

‘Wel-l-l, I felt
something
.’ Madlyn looked up at her Charley, her eyes full of question marks. ‘My whole brain was full of … well, it was all kind of sizzly like champagne tastes.’ And:

‘That’s it exactly,’ van der Gleiss agreed.

Kay-Lee, fully recovered now, looked in surprise at some of the equations she had written, then turned to Sacner Carfon. ‘Did it come out all right?’ she asked hopefully. ‘Oh, I
hope
it did!’

‘I think so,’ the porpoise-man replied. ‘At least, all of it I can understand makes sense.’

The T-8 engineer stared at Kay-Lee. ‘But didn’t you
know
what you were doing?’

‘Of course she didn’t.’ Again Madame Barlo did the talking. ‘None of us did, consciously. We are not masters of the Power, but Its servants. We are merely Its tools; the agents through which It does Its work.’

And, off to one side, Dorothy was saying,
‘Dick, those women actually
are
witches! I
liked
Kay-Lee, too … but real, live, practicing
witches
! I got goose bumps as big as peas. I don’t
believe
in witchcraft, darn it!’

‘I don’t either. That is, I never did before … but what else are you going to call it now?’

The mathematicians and physical scientists began at once to study the wealth of new data. Drasnik, the First of Psychology, after conferring with Fodan, with Sacner Carfon and with each of the three witches in turn, actually rushed over to the group of Tellurians. It was the first time Seaton had ever seen an excited Norlaminian.

‘Ah, youths of Tellus, I thank you!’ he enthused. ‘I thank you immensely for the inestimable privilege of meeting the ladies Barlo! They possess a talent that is indubitably of the most tremendous—’

‘
Talent
?’ Dorothy snorted. ‘Do you call
witchcraft
a talent? Why, the very idea of it makes me …’ She paused.

‘Uh-huh, me too,’ Madlyn agreed fervently. ‘If I have to believe in practicing witches I’ll go not-so-slowly nuts.’

‘Witchcraft, my children? Bosh and fiddle-faddle! It is a
talent
. Extremely rare and lamentably rudimentary in our part of the universe, yet these women have it in astoundingly full measure. Unfortunately, you have no name for it except “witchcraft”, which term has deplorable connotations. It is the ability to … but the English has no words for that, either. But no matter, you have seen it in fine, full action. Fodan and Sacner and I each have a very little of it …’

‘But those women couldn’t
possibly
have known anything about that kind of stuff!’ Madlyn protested.

‘Of course they didn’t. Richard here and Tammon and Dr DuQuesne were the principal sources of information. But all three of them together lacked a great deal of having full knowledge, and the rest of us had very little indeed. While the comparison is lamentably loose, consider a large, finely cut jigsaw puzzle. Seaton and DuQuesne and Tammon could each assemble an area. But no two of the three areas were contiguous, while none of the rest of us could fit more than a very few pieces together. But the ladies Barlo – particularly Grand Dame Barlo, who is a veritable powerhouse of strength – with some little help from the rest of us, exerted
and directed the Power. The Power that, by tapping the reservoir of infinite knowledge, enabled the scribe Kay-Lee to fill in the missing parts of the puzzle.’

‘But why …’ Seaton began, but changed his mind. ‘I see. You didn’t tell me anything about it because at that time it was both insignificant and inapplicable.’

‘That is correct. As I was saying, our Fodan, who has more of it than any other entity previously known, had perhaps the thousandth of what Kay-Lee, the weakest by far of the three, has. That is why he is Chief of the Five. And they tell me that there are other women of their race who also have this talent. Remarkable!’ At this thought Drasnik, who had quieted down, became excited all over again. ‘When this is all over I shall go at once to Ray-See-Nee and study. Marvelous! They did not know even that it is a talent or that, when they learn, there will be no need to drug themselves into half-unconsciousness to employ it successfully. Thank you again, young friends, for this wonderful opportunity. Marvelous!’ and Drasnik scurried away.

The Seatons and Madlyn and van der Gleiss started after the Norlaminian until he was out of sight. They turned and stared at each other.

‘Well … I’ll … be … a … dirty … name,’ Madlyn said.

Seaton was pacing the floor, talking to Dorothy, emitting a cloud of smoke from his battered and reeking briar. ‘I like to do my thinking with you, ace.’

She chuckled. ‘At me, you mean, don’t you? That stuff is over my head like a beach umbrella.’

‘Don’t fish, sweetie. You not only have a body and some hair, but also a brain. One that fires on all sixteen barrels all the time.’

She laughed delightedly. ‘Thank you so much. You know that isn’t true, but you also know how I lap it up and purr. But to proceed, Dunark wants to smash them all with planets, the way he was going to smash Urvania. Martin and Peggy, after talking the way they did, crawfished and are now talking about enclosing the whole galaxy in a stasis of time …’

‘Huh? That’s news to me. How’s he figuring on doing it – did he say?’

‘Uh-uh. I didn’t talk to him. Peggy says he isn’t going to say anything about it until he can present the package.’

‘He should live so long. But ’scuse, please; go ahead.’

‘Only one more. Fodan, the simple-minded old darling, wants to
work
with them.
Convert
them!’

‘Yeah. Make Christians of ’em. I’ve got a life-sized picture in technicolor of anybody ever accomplishing
that
feat. The trouble is, everybody wants to do something different and none of their ideas are any good at all.’

‘Oh? I noticed that you haven’t been enthusiastic about any of them. Pretty grim, in fact. Why not?’

‘Because none of ’em will come even close to getting ’em all and this has got to be a one hundred point zero zero zero per cent cleanup.
You know how they operate on a cancer. They cut deep enough and wide enough to get it all. Every cell. If they don’t get it all it spreads all over the body and the patient dies. This is a cancer. It’s already eaten just about all of that galaxy by Chlora-typing planets wherever they go – or rather, enslaved humans are doing it for them – and it’s spreading fast. And when that galaxy begins to get crowded they won’t just jump to one other; they’ll go for hundreds or thousands of galaxies and there goes the ball game. So that cancer has got to be operated on before it spreads any farther.’

Dorothy’s face began to pale. ‘By that analogy you mean destroy the whole galaxy! How can such a thing be possible? It can’t
possibly
be possible!’

He told her how the operation could be performed. That apparatus that the Barlo women had dredged up out of nowhere had a lot of capabilities that did not appear on the surface. Blackie DuQuesne had perceived one set of those possibilities, and he and Blackie had been working on the hardware. They were calling it Project Rho.

Her face, already pale, turned white as he talked; and when he had finished:

‘Project … Rho,’ she breathed. ‘How utterly horrible! And yet … I never dreamed … have you talked to Martin yet?’

‘No. You first. I don’t want to even think about pushing that kind of a button without being sure you’re standing at my back.’

‘I’ll do better than that, Dick,’ She looked him steadily in the eye. ‘I’ll take half of it. My finger will be right beside yours on that button.’

‘You are an ace, ace. As maybe I’ve said once before.’

‘Uh-huh, at least once – but we’re one, remember?’

After a moment she went on, ‘But we can’t possibly sell the Norlaminians any such bill of goods as that.’

‘I’ll say we can’t. They’d cry their eyes out all over the place. Or wait. When they find out that they can’t stop it, they’ll help save the human planets, which will be all to the good; the witches can use the help. But basically, the grand slam will be up to DuQuesne and his Fenachrone and the witches and Mart and me. Even Mart will need some persuasion, I’m afraid; and you’ll have to really work on Peg. She’ll simply have a litter of kittens.’

‘Why, Dick;
what
a way to talk!’ She smiled in spite of herself, but sobered quickly. ‘She’ll come around, I’m sure; she’ll have to. But Dick, is it actually physically possible? It’s so
huge
!’

‘Definitely. You see, we’ll be operating in a Gunther universe, so that mass as such won’t enter and power will be no problem. All we have to do is build an apparatus to alter the properties of space around and throughout the object to be moved – altering those properties in such a way as to make its three-dimensional attributes incompatible with those of its—’

She stopped him with an upraised hand.
‘Hold it! Wait up, please. We’ll dispense with the high math, if you don’t mind. It’s the sheer
size
of the thing that scares me witless.’

Seaton did grin then. ‘Well, you’ve always known that making things bigger and better is the fondest thing I am of. But we know exactly how to do it, and I think we can get it done before the Norlaminians finish theirs. But DuQuesne should be about ready to take off. I’ll flip myself over there and see.’

He did so and said, ‘How’re you doing, Blackie?’

‘A few minutes yet to finish final checking. I’ve been thinking. What kind of a celestial object will that galaxy be when we get done with it? Not a quasi-stellar, certainly; that’s only a star with the energy of a hundred thousand million stars. This will be a galaxy with the energy of a hundred thousand million galaxies – the energy of an entire universe.’

‘Yeah. Something new, I’d say. It’ll give some astronomers a thrill, some day. But what I can’t compute is, whether or not it will sterilize the interstellar space of that galaxy,’ Seaton said.

‘Well, if it doesn’t, you might put the Osnomians and Urvanians on it. Keep ’em from thinking about fighting each other.’

‘You know, Blackie, I’d thought of doing exactly that? “Great minds” and so forth. Bye now; be seein’ ya,’ and Seaton flipped himself back home.

En route to his destination – barren planet in a star-cluster on the opposite side of the galaxy from the
Skylark of Valeron
– DuQuesne again went into a huddle with Sleemet.

‘So far, you’ve done a job,’ he began. ‘What I told you to do – what I knew how to do – and done it well. But nothing else. Now I want something more than that. Something you can do, if you will, that I can’t. As you know, I’ve made arrangements so that in case of my death this whole planetoid goes up in an atomic blast. That was to keep you from killing me and making off with it. The same thing will happen, though, if those Chlorans kill me in the fracas that’s coming. It would seem as though that fact would be enough to make you make an honest-to-God effort to be sure that they
don’t
kill me by doing your damnedest to help me kill them. Mentally. Both you and the Chlorans know more about one phase of that than I do – as yet. So, as added inducement to really top effort, if you’ll really tear into it on this Project Rho I’ll teach you everything I know that you can take. And I’ll help you build any kind of spacecraft you want before you leave; one even as big as this one. What do you say?’

Sleemet’s strange eyes glowed. ‘If you will go mind to mind with me on that I can now assure you of such cooperation as no member of my race has ever given to any non-Fenachrone form of life,’ he declared; and DuQuesne handed him a headset.

It wasn’t easy, not even for such an accomplished liar as
Marc C. DuQuesne was, to make the four-dim gizmo very much more incomprehensible than it actually was; but he accomplished the feat – and he actually did give Sleemet practically everything else.

The
DQ
went into a one-day orbit above one point of an immense plain of the barren planet that was its goal. A plain some ten thousand square miles of which became forthwith an Area of Work. Enormous mechanisms sprang into being, by means of which DuQuesne and several hundred top-bracket Fenachrone engineers sent gigantic beams of force hurtling across the galaxy to the
Skylark of Valeron
and to hundreds of thousands of other micrometrically determined points.

But not Sleemet. That wight, knowing now almost everything that DuQuesne knew, was working in his own private laboratory – working with all the power of his tremendous mind on the various mental aspects of the battle of giants to come.

Hour after hour, Crane worked in his master control at the base of the Brain, with Madame Barlo and Drasnik and Margaret, each wearing an extra-complex headset, sitting close to him. They were mapping and modeling three galaxies, on such a large scale that the vast ‘tank’ of the
Skylark of Valeron
was millions of times too small. They were using a discus-shaped volume of open space some ten light-years in diameter and three light-years thick.