E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (31 page)

‘No, an investigation is indicated.’

‘Well, that puts me out of a job. What to do? Don’t want to study, like you. Can’t crochet, like Peg. Darned if I’ll sit cross-legged on a pillow and eat candy, like that Titian blonde over there on the floor. I know what – I’ll build me a mechanical educator and teach Shiro to talk English instead of that mess of language he indulges in. How’d that be, Mart?’

‘Don’t do it,’ put in Dorothy, positively. ‘He’s just too perfect, the way he is. Especially don’t do it if he’d talk the way you do – or could you teach him to talk the way you write?’

‘Ouch! That’s a dirty dig. However, Mrs Seaton, I am able and willing to defend my customary mode of speech. You realize that the spoken word is ephemeral, whereas the thought whose nuances have once been expressed in imperishable print is not subject to revision – its crudities can never be remodeled into more subtle, more gracious shading. It is my contention that, due to these inescapable conditions, the mental effort necessitated by the employment of nice distinctions in sense and meaning of words and a slavish adherence to the dictates of the more precise grammarians should be reserved for the prin—’

He broke off as Dorothy, in one lithe motion, rose and hurled her pillow at his head.

‘Choke him, somebody! Perhaps you had better build it, Dick, after all.’

‘I believe that he would like it, Dick. He is trying hard to learn, and the continuous use of a dictionary is undoubtedly a nuisance to him.’

‘I’ll ask him. Shiro!’

‘You have call, sir?’ Shiro entered the room from his galley, with his unfailing bow.

‘Yes. How’d you like to learn to talk English like Crane there does – without taking lessons?’

Shiro smiled doubtfully, unable to take such a thought seriously.

‘Yes, it can be done,’ Crane assured him. ‘Dr Seaton can build a machine which will teach you all at once, if you like.’

‘I like, sir, enormously, yes, sir. I years study and pore, but honorable English extraordinary difference from Nipponese – no can do. Dictionary useful but …’ he flipped pages dexterously, ‘extremely cumbrous. If honorable Seaton can do, shall be extreme … gratification.’

He bowed again, smiled, and went out.

‘I’ll do just that little thing. So-long, folks. I’m going up to the shop.’

Day after day the
Skylark
plunged through the vast emptiness of the
interstellar reaches. At the end of each second she was traveling exactly twenty-six feet per second faster than she had been at its beginning and as day after day passed, her velocity mounted into figures which became meaningless, even when expressed in thousands of miles per second. Still she seemed stationary to her occupants, and only different from a vessel motionless upon the surface of the Earth in that objects within her hull had lost three-sixteenths of their normal weight. Only the rapidity with which the closer suns and their planets were passed gave any indication of the frightful speed at which they were being hurried along by the inconceivable power of that disintegrating copper bar.

When the vessel was nearly halfway to X, the bar was reversed in order to change the sign of their acceleration, and the hollow sphere spun through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees around the motionless cage which housed the enormous gyroscopes. Still apparently motionless and exactly as she had been before, the
Skylark
was now actually traveling in a direction which seemed ‘down’, and with a velocity which was being constantly decreased by the amount of their acceleration.

A few days after the bar had been reversed Seaton announced that the mechanical educator was complete, and brought it into the control room.

In appearance it was not unlike a large radio set, but it was infinitely more complex. It possessed numerous tubes, kinolamps, and photo-electric cells, as well as many coils of peculiar design – there were dozens of dials and knobs, and a multiple set of head-harnesses.

‘How can a thing like that possibly work as it does?’ asked Crane. ‘I know that it does work, but I could scarcely believe it, even after it had educated me.’

‘That is nothing like the one Dunark used, Dick,’ objected Dorothy. ‘How come?’

‘I’ll answer you first, Dot. This is an improved model – it has quite a few gadgets of my own in it. Now, Mart, as to how it works – it isn’t so funny after you understand it – it’s a lot like radio in that respect. It operates on a band of frequencies lying between the longest light and heat waves and the shortest radio waves. This thing here is the generator of those waves and a very heavy power amplifier. The headsets are stereoscopic transmitters, taking or receiving a three-dimensional view. Nearly all matter is transparent to those waves; for instance bones, hair, and so on. However, cerebrin, a cerebroside peculiar to the thinking structure of the brain, is opaque to them. Dunark, not knowing chemistry, didn’t know why the educator worked or what it worked on – they found out by experiment that it did work; just as we found out about electricity. This three-dimensional model,
or view, or whatever you want to call it, is converted into electricity in the headsets, and the resulting modulated wave goes back to the educator. There it is heterodyned with another wave – this second frequency was found after thousands of trials and is, I believe, the exact frequency existing in the optic nerves themselves – and sent to the receiving headset. Modulated as it is, and producing after rectification in the receiver a three-dimensional picture, it of course reproduces exactly what has been “viewed”, if due allowance has been made for the size and configuration of the different brains involved in the transfer. You remember a sort of flash – a sensation of seeing something – when the educator worked on you? Well, you did see it, just as though it had been transmitted to the brain by the optic nerve, but everything came at once, so the impression of sight was confused. The result in the brain, however, was clear and permanent. The only drawback is that you haven’t the visual memory of what you have learned, and that sometimes makes it hard to use your knowledge. You don’t know whether you know anything about a certain subject or not until after you go digging around in your brain looking for it.’

‘I see,’ said Crane, and Dorothy, the irrepressible, put in: ‘Just as clear as so much mud. What are the improvements you added to the original design?’

‘Well, you see, I had a big advantage in knowing that cerebrin was the substance involved, and with that knowledge I could carry matters considerably farther than Dunark could in his original model. I can transfer the thoughts of somebody else to a third party or onto a record. Dunark’s machine couldn’t work against resistance – if the subject wasn’t willing to give up his thoughts he couldn’t get ’em. This one can take ’em away by force. In fact, by increasing plate and grid voltages in the amplifier, I believe that I can burn out a man’s brain. Yesterday, I was playing with it, transferring a section of my own brain onto a magnetized tape – for a permanent record, you know – and found out that above certain rather low voltages it becomes a form of torture that would make the best efforts of the old Inquisition seem like a petting party.’

‘Did you succeed in the transfer?’ Crane was intensely interested.

‘Sure. Push the button for Shiro, and we’ll start something.’

‘Put your heads against this screen,’ he directed when Shiro had come in, smiling and bowing as usual. ‘I’ve got to caliper your brains to do a good job.’

The calipering done, he adjusted various dials and clamped the electrodes over his own head and over the heads of Crane and Shiro.

‘Want to learn Japanese while we’re at it, Mart? I’m going to.’

‘Yes, please. I tried to learn it while I was in Japan, but it was altogether too difficult to be worthwhile.’

Seaton threw in a switch, opened it, depressed two more, opened them, and threw off the power.

‘All set,’ he reported crisply, and barked a series of explosive
syllables at Shiro, ending upon a rising note.

‘Yes, sir,’ answered the Japanese. ‘You speak Nipponese as though you had never spoken any other tongue. I am very grateful to you, sir, that I may now discard my dictionary.’

‘How about you two girls – anything you want to learn in a hurry?’

‘Not me!’ declared Dorothy emphatically. ‘That machine is too perfectly darned weird to suit me. Besides, if I knew as much about science as you do, we’d probably fight about it.’

‘I do not believe I care to—’ began Margaret.

She was interrupted by the penetrating sound of an alarm bell.

‘That’s a new note!’ exclaimed Seaton. ‘I never heard that tone before.’

He stood in surprise at the board, where a brilliant purple light was flashing slowly. ‘Great Cat! That’s a purely Osnomian war-gadget – kind of a battleship detector – shows that there’s a boatload of bad news around here somewhere. Grab the visiplates, quick, folks,’ as he rang Shiro’s bell. ‘I’ll take visiplate and area one, dead ahead. Mart, take number two; Dot, three; Peg four; Shiro, five. Look sharp! … Nothing in front. See anything, any of you?’

None of them could discover anything amiss, but the purple light continued to flash, and the alarm to sound. Seaton cut off the bell.

‘We’re almost to X,’ he thought aloud. ‘Can’t be more than a million miles or so, and we’re almost stopped. Wonder if somebody’s there ahead of us? Maybe Dunark is doing this, though. I’ll call him and see.’ He threw in a switch and said one word – ‘Dunark!’

‘Here!’ came the voice of the Kofedix from the speaker. ‘Are you generating?’

‘No – just called to see if you were. What do you make of it?’

‘Nothing as yet. Better close up?’

‘Yes, edge over this way and I’ll come over to meet you. Leave your negative as it is or we’ll be stopped directly. Whatever it is, it’s dead ahead. It’s a long ways off yet, but we’d better get organized. Wouldn’t talk much, either – they may intercept our wave, narrow as it is.’

‘Better yet, shut off your radio entirely. When we get close enough together, we’ll use the hand-language. You may not know that you know it, but you do. Turn your heaviest searchlight toward me – I’ll do the same.’

There was a click as Dunark’s power was shut off abruptly, and Seaton grinned as he cut his own.

‘That’s right, too, folks. In Osnomian battles we always used a sign-language when we couldn’t hear anything – and that was most of the time. I know it as well as I know English, now that I am reminded of the fact.’

He shifted his course to intercept that of the Osnomian vessel. After a time the watchers picked out a minute point of light, moving comparatively rapidly against the stars, and knew it to be the searchlight of
the
Kondal
. Soon the two vessels were almost side by side, moving cautiously forward, and Seaton set up a sixty-inch parabolic reflector, focused upon a coil. As they went on the purple light continued to flash more and more rapidly, but still nothing was to be seen.

‘Take number six visiplate, will you, Mart? It’s telescopic, equivalent to a twenty-inch refractor. I’ll tell you where to look in a minute – this reflector increases the power of the regular indicator.’ He studied meters and adjusted dials. ‘Set on nineteen hours forty-three minutes, and two hundred seventy-one degrees. He’s too far away yet to read exactly, but that’ll put him in the field of vision.’

‘Is this radiation harmful?’ asked Margaret.

‘Not yet – it’s too weak. Pretty quick we may be able to feel it; then I’ll throw out a screen against it. When it’s strong enough it’s pretty deadly stuff. See anything, Mart?’

‘I see something, but it is very indistinct. It is moving in sharper now. Yes, it is a spaceship, shaped like a dirigible airship.’

‘See it yet, Dunark?’ Seaton signaled.

‘Just sighted it. Ready to attack?’

‘I am not. I’m going to run. Let’s go, and go fast!’

Dunark signaled violently, and Seaton shook his head time after time, stubbornly.

‘A difficulty?’ asked Crane.

‘Yes, he wants to go jump on it, but I’m not looking for trouble with any such craft as that – it must be a thousand feet long and is certainly neither Terrestrial nor Osnomian. I say beat it while we’re all in one piece. How about it?

‘Absolutely,’ concurred Crane and both women, in a breath.

The bar was reversed and the
Skylark
leaped away. The
Kondal
followed, although the observers could see that Dunark was raging. Seaton swung number six visiplate around, looked once, and switched on his radio transmitter.

‘Well, Dunark,’ he said grimly, ‘you get your wish. That bird is coming out, with at least twice the acceleration we could get with both motors full on. He saw us all the time, and was waiting for us.’

‘Go on – get away if you can. You can stand a higher acceleration that we can. We’ll hold him as long as possible.’

‘I would, if it would do any good, but it won’t. He’s so much faster than we are that he could catch us anyway, if he wanted to, no matter how much of a start we had – and it looks now as though he wanted us. Two of us stand a lot better chance than one of licking him if he’s looking for trouble. Spread out a little farther apart, and pretend this is all the speed we’ve got. What’ll we give him first?’

‘Give him everything at once. Beams six, seven, eight,
nine, and ten …’

Crane, with Seaton, began making contacts, rapidly but with precision. ‘Heat wave two seven. Induction, five eight. Oscillation, everything under point oh six three. All the explosive copper we can get in. Right?’

‘Right – and if worst comes to worst, remember the zone of force. Let him shoot first, because he may be peaceable – but it doesn’t look like olive branches to me.’

‘Got both your screens out?’

‘Yes. Mart, you might take number two visiplate and work the guns – I’ll handle the rest of this stuff. Better strap yourselves in solid, everybody – this may develop into a rough party, by the looks of things right now.’

As he spoke a pyrotechnic display enveloped the entire ship as a radiation from the foreign vessel struck the outer neutralizing screen and dissipated its force harmlessly in the ether. Instantly Seaton threw on the full power of his refrigerating system and shoved in the master switch that actuated the complex offensive armament of his dreadnought of the skies. An intense, livid violet glow hid completely main and auxiliary power bars, and long flashes leaped between metallic objects in all parts of the vessel. The passengers felt each hair striving to stand on end as the very air became more and more highly charged – and this was but the slight corona-loss of the frightful stream of destruction being hurled at the other space-cruiser, now only miles away!