E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (59 page)

Seaton, grimly watching his instruments, glanced at Crane, who, calm but alert at his console, was repairing the damage as fast as it was done.

‘They’re sending more stuff, Mart, and it’s getting hotter. That means they’re building more projectors. We can play that game, too. They’re using up their fuel reserves fast; but we’re bigger than they are, carry more metal, and it’s more efficient metal. Only one way out of it, I guess – what say we put in enough new generators to smother them down by brute
force, no matter how much power it takes?’

‘Why don’t you use some of those awful copper shells? Or aren’t we close enough yet?’ Dorothy’s low voice came clearly, so utterly silent was that frightful combat.

‘Close! We’re still better than two hundred thousand light-years apart! There may have been longer-range battles than this somewhere in the universe, but I doubt it. And as for copper, even if we could get it to ’em it’d be just like so many candy kisses compared to the stuff we’re both using. Dear girl, there are fields of force extending for thousands of miles from each of these vessels beside which the exact center of the biggest lightning flash you ever saw would be a dead area!’

He set up a series of integrals and, machine after machine, in a space left vacant by the rapidly-vanishing store of uranium, there appeared inside the fourth skin of the
Skylark
a row of gigantic generators, each one adding its terrific output to the already inconceivable stream of energy being directed at the foe. As that frightful flow increased, the intensity of the Fenachrone attack diminished, and finally it ceased altogether as the enemy’s whole power became necessary for the maintenance of his defenses. Still greater grew the stream of force from the
Skylark,
and, now that the attack had ceased, Seaton opened the slit wider and stopped its shifting, in order still further to increase the efficiency of his terrible weapon. Face set and eyes hard, deeper and deeper he drove his now irresistible forces. His flying fingers were upon the keys of his console; his keen and merciless eyes were in a secondary projector near the now doomed ship of the Fenachrone, directing masterfully his terrible attack. As the output of his generators still increased Seaton began to compress a hollow sphere of searing, seething energy upon the furiously-straining defensive screens of the Fenachrone. Course after course of the heaviest possible screen was sent out, driven by massed batteries of copper now disintegrating at the rate of tons in every second, only to flare through the ultraviolet and to go down before that dreadful, that irresistible onslaught. Finally, as the inexorable sphere still contracted, the utmost efforts of the defenders could not keep their screens away from their own vessel, and simultaneously the prow and the stern of the Fenachrone battleship were bared to that awful field of force, in which no possible substance could endure for even the most infinitesimal instant of time.

There was a sudden cessation of all resistance, and those titanic forces, all directed inward, converged upon a point with a power behind which there was the inconceivable energy of four hundred thousand tons of uranium being disintegrated at the highest possible rate short of instant disruption. In that same instant of collapse the enormous mass of power-copper in the Fenachrone cruiser and the vessel’s every atom, alike of structure and of contents, also exploded into pure energy at the touch
of that unimaginable field of force.

In that awful moment
before Seaton could shut off his power it seemed to him that space itself must be obliterated by the very concentration of the
unknowable and incalculable forces there unleashed – must be swallowed up and lost in the utterly indescribable brilliance
of the field of radiance driven to a distance of millions upon incandescent millions of miles from the place where the last representatives of the monstrous civilization of the Fenachrone had made their last stand against the forces of Universal Peace.

Day after day a spherical spaceship of arenak tore through the
illimitable reaches of the interstellar void. She had once been a war vessel of Osnome; now, rechristened the
Violet
, she was bearing two Tellurians and a Fenachrone – Dr Marc C. DuQuesne of World Steel, ‘Baby Doll’ Loring, his versatile and accomplished assistant, and the squat and monstrous engineer of the flagship Y427W – from the Green System toward the solar system of the Fenachrone. The mid-point of the stupendous flight had long since been passed; the
Violet
had long been braking down with a negative acceleration of five times the velocity of light.

Much to the surprise of both DuQuesne and Loring, their prisoner had not made the slightest move against them. He had thrown all the strength of his supernaturally powerful body and all the resources of his gigantic brain into the task of converting the atomic motors of the
Violet
into the space-annihilating drive of his own race. This drive, affecting alike as it does every atom of substance within the radius of action of the power bar, entirely nullifies the effect of acceleration, so that the passengers feel no motion whatever, even when the craft is accelerating at maximum.

The engineer had not shirked a single task, however arduous. And, once under way, he had nursed those motors along with every artifice known to his knowing clan; he had performed such prodigies of adjustment and tuning as to raise by a full two per cent their already inconceivable maximum acceleration. Nor was this all. After the first moment of rebellion, he did not even once attempt to bring to bear the almost irresistible hypnotic power of his eyes; the immense, cold, ruby-lighted projectors of mental energy which, both men knew, were awful weapons indeed. Nor did he even once protest against the attractors which were set upon his giant limbs.

Immaterial bands, these, whose slight force could not be felt unless the captor so willed. But let the prisoner make one false move, and those tiny beams of force would instantly become copper-driven rods of pure energy, hurling the luckless weight against the wall of the control room and holding him motionless there, in spite of the most terrific exertions of his mighty body.

DuQuesne lay at ease in his seat; or rather, scarcely touching the seat, he floated at ease in the air above it. His black brows were drawn together, his black eyes were hard as he studied frowningly the Fenachrone engineer. As usual, that worthy was half inside the power
plant, coaxing those mighty engines to do even better than their prodigious best.

Feeling his companion’s eyes upon him, the doctor turned his inscrutable stare upon Loring, who had been studying his chief even as DuQuesne had been studying the outlander. Loring’s cherubic countenance was as pinkly innocent as ever, his guileless blue eyes as calm and untroubled; but DuQuesne, knowing the man as he did, perceived an almost imperceptible tension and knew that the killer also was worried.

‘What’s the matter, Doll?’ The saturnine scientist smiled mirthlessly. ‘Afraid I’m going to let that ape slip one over on us?’

‘Not exactly.’ Loring’s slight tenseness, however, disappeared. ‘It’s your party, and anything that’s all right with you tickles me half to death. I have known all along you knew that that bird there isn’t working under compulsion. You know as well as I do that nobody works that way because they’re made to. He’s working for himself, not for us, and I had just begun to wonder if you weren’t getting a little late in clamping down on him.’

‘Not at all – there are good and sufficient reasons for this apparent delay. I am going to clamp down on him in exactly’ – DuQuesne glanced at his wrist watch – ‘fourteen minutes. But you’re keen – you’ve got a brain that really works – maybe I’d better give you the whole picture.’

DuQuesne, approving thoroughly of his iron-nerved, cold-blooded assistant, voiced again the thought he had expressed once before, a few hours out from Earth; and Loring answered as he had then, in almost the same words – words which revealed truly the nature of the man:

‘Just as you like. Usually I don’t want to know anything about anything, because what a man doesn’t know he can’t be accused of spilling. Out here, though, maybe I should know enough about things to act intelligently in case of a jam. But you’re the doctor – if you’d rather keep it under your hat, that’s all right with me, too. As I’ve said before, it’s your party.’

‘Yes; he certainly is working for himself.’ DuQuesne scowled blackly. ‘Or, rather, he thinks he is. You know I read his mind back there, while he was unconscious. I didn’t get all I wanted to, by any means – he woke up too soon – but I got a lot more than he thinks I did.

‘They have detector zones, way out in space, all around their world, that nothing can get past without being spotted; and patrolling those zones there are scout ships, carrying armament to stagger the imagination. I intend to take over one of those patrol ships and by means of it to capture one of their first-class battleships. As a first step I’m going to hypnotize that ape and find out absolutely everything he knows. When I get done with him, he’ll do exactly what I tell him to, and nothing else.’

‘Hypnotize him?’ Curiosity was awakened in even Loring’s incurious mind at this unexpected development. ‘I didn’t know that was one of your specialties.’

‘It wasn’t until recently, but the Fenachrone are all past
masters, and I learned about it from his brain. Hypnosis is a wonderful science. The only drawback is that his mind is a lot stronger than mine. However, I have in my kit, among other things, a tube of something that will cut him down to my size.’

‘Oh, I see – pentabarb.’ With this hint, Loring’s agile mind grasped instantly the essentials of DuQuesne’s plan. ‘That’s why you had to wait so long, then, to take steps. Pentabarb kills in twenty-four hours, and he can’t help us steal the ship after he’s dead.’

‘Right! One milligram, you know, will make a gibbering idiot out of any human being; but I imagine that it will take three or four times that much to soften
him
down to the point where I can work on him the way I want to. As I don’t know the effects of such heavy dosages, since he’s not really human, and since he must be alive when we go through their screens, I decided to give him the works exactly six hours before we are due to hit their outermost detector. That’s about all I can tell you right now; I’ll have to work out the details of seizing the ship after I have studied his brain more thoroughly.’

Precisely at the expiration of the fourteen allotted minutes, DuQuesne tightened the attractor beams, which had never been entirely released from their prisoner; thus pinning him helplessly, immovably, against the wall of the control room. He then filled a hypodermic syringe and moved the mechanical educator nearer the motionless, although violently struggling, creature. Then, avoiding carefully the baleful out-pourings of those flame-shot volcanoes of hatred that were the eyes of the Fenachrone, he set the dials of the educator, placed the headsets, and drove home the needle’s hollow point. One milligram of the diabolical compound was absorbed without appreciable lessening of the blazing defiance being hurled along the educator’s wires. One and one-half – two milligrams – three – four – five –

That inhumanly powerful mind at last began to weaken, but it became entirely quiescent only after the administration of the seventh milligram of that direly potent drug.

‘Just as well that I allowed only six hours,’ DuQuesne sighed in relief as he began to explore the labyrinthine intricacies of the frightful brain now open to his gaze. ‘I don’t see how any possible form of life can hold together long under seven milligrams of that stuff.’

He fell silent and for more than an hour he studied the brain of the engineer, concentrating upon the several small portions which contained knowledge of most immediate concern. Finally he removed the headsets.

‘His plans were all made,’ he informed Loring coldly, ‘and so are mine, now. Bring out two full outfits of clothing – one of yours and one of mine. Two guns, belts, and so on. Break out a bale of waste, the emergency candles, and all that sort of stuff you can find.’

DuQuesne turned to the Fenachrone, who stood utterly
lax, and stared deep into those dull and expressionless eyes.

‘You,’ he directed crisply, ‘will build at once, as quickly as you can, two dummies which will look exactly like Loring and myself. They must be lifelike in every particular, with faces capable of expressing the emotions of surprise and of anger, and with right arms able to draw weapons upon a signal –
my
signal. Also upon signal their heads and bodies will turn, they will leap toward the center of the room, and they will make certain noises and utter certain words, the records of which I shall prepare. Go to it!’

‘Don’t you need to control him through the headsets?’ asked Loring curiously.

‘I may have to control him in detail when we come to the really fine work, later on,’ DuQuesne replied absently. ‘This is more or less in the nature of an experiment, to find out whether I have him thoroughly under control. During the last act he’ll have to do exactly what I shall have told him to do, without supervision, and I want to be absolutely certain that he will do it without a slip.’

‘What’s the plan – or maybe it’s something that is none of my business?’

‘No; you ought to know it, and I’ve got time to tell you about it now. Nothing material can possibly approach the planet of the Fenachrone without being seen, as it is completely surrounded by never less than two full-sphere detector screens; and to make assurance doubly sure our engineer there has installed a mechanism which, at the first touch of the outer screen, will shoot a warning along a tight communicator beam directly into the receiver of the nearest Fenachrone scout ship. As you already know, the smallest of those scouts can burn this ship out of the ether in less than a second.’

‘That’s a cheerful picture. You still think we can get away?’

‘I’m coming to that. We can’t possibly get through the detectors without being challenged, even if I tear out all his apparatus, so we’re going to use his whole plan, but for our benefit instead of his. Therefore his present hypnotic state and the dummies. When we touch that screen you and I are going to be hidden. The dummies will be in sole charge, and our prisoner will be playing the part I’ve laid out for him.