E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (76 page)

The guard holding his tridents in Crane and Shiro had not much more warning. He saw his fellow obliterated, true; but that was all he lived to see, and he had time to do exactly nothing. One more quick flip of Seaton’s singularly efficient weapon and the remains of that officer also disappeared into hyperspace. More of the chain went along, this time, but that did not matter. Dropping to the floor the remaining links of his hyperflail, Seaton sprang to Dorothy, reaching her side just as the punishing
trident, released by the slain guard, fell away from her.

She recovered her senses instantly and turned a surprised face to the man, who, incoherent in his relief that she was alive and apparently unharmed, was taking her into his arms.

‘Why, surely, Dick, I’m all right – how could I be any other way?’ she answered his first agonized question in amazement. She studied his worn face in puzzled wonder and went on: ‘But you certainly are not. What has happened, dear, anyway; and how could it have, possibly?’

‘I hated like sin to be gone so long, Dimples, but it couldn’t be helped,’ Seaton, in his eagerness to explain his long absence, did not even notice the peculiar implications in his wife’s speech and manner. ‘You see, it was a long trip, and we didn’t get a chance to break away from those meat hooks of theirs until after they got us into their city and examined us. Then, when we finally did break away, we found that we couldn’t travel at night. Their days are bad enough, with this thick blue light, but during the nights there’s absolutely no light at all, of any kind. No moon, no stars, no nothing …’

‘Nights! What are you talking about, Dick, anyway?’ Dorothy had been trying, to interrupt since his first question and had managed at last to break in. ‘Why, you haven’t been gone at all, not even a second. We’ve all been right here, all the time!’

‘Huh?’ ejaculated Seaton. ‘Are you completely nuts, Red-Top, or what …?’

‘Dick and I were gone at least a week, Dottie,’ Margaret, who had been embracing Crane, interrupted in turn, ‘and it was awful!’

‘Just a minute, folks!’ Seaton listened intently and stared upward. ‘We’ll have to let the explanations ride a while longer. I thought they wouldn’t give up that easy – here they come! I don’t know how long we were gone – it seemed like a darn long time – but it was long enough so that I learned how to mop up on these folks, believe me! You take that sword and buckler of Peg’s, Mart. They don’t look so hot, but they’re big medicine in these parts. All we’ve got to do is swing them fast enough to keep those stingaroos of theirs out of our gizzards and we’re all set. Be careful not to hit too hard, though, or you’ll bust that grating into forty pieces – it’s hyperstuff, nowhere near as solid as anything we’re used to. All it’ll stand is about normal fly-swatting stroke, but that’s enough to knock any of these fantailed humming birds into an outside loop. Ah, they’ve got guns or something! Duck down, girls, so we can cover you with these shields; and, Shiro, you might pull that piece of chain apart and throw the links at them – that’ll be good for what ails them!’

The hypermen appeared in the control room, and battle again was joined. This time, however, the natives did not rush to the attack with their tridents; nor did they employ their futile rays of death. They had guns, shooting pellets of metal; they had improvised, crossbow-like slings and catapults; they had spears and javelins made of their densest
materials, which their strongest men threw with all their power. But pellets and spears alike thudded harmlessly against four-dimensional shields – shields once the impenetrable, unbreakable doors of their mightiest prison – and the masses of metal and stone vomited forth by the catapults were caught by Seaton and Crane and hurled back through the ranks of the attackers with devastating effect. Shiro also was doing untold damage with his bits of chain and with such other items of four-dimensional matter as came to hand.

Still the hypermen came pressing in, closer and closer. Soon the three men were standing in a triangle, in the center of which were the women, their flying weapons defining a volume of space to enter which meant hideous dismemberment and death to any hypercreature. But on they came, willing, it seemed, to spend any number of lives to regain their lost control over the Terrestrials; realizing, it seemed, that even those supernaturally powerful beings must in time weaken.

While the conflict was at its height, however, it seemed to Seaton that the already tenuous hypermen were growing even more wraithlike; and at the same time he found himself fighting with greater and greater difficulty. The lethal grating, which he had been driving with such speed that it had been visible only as a solid barrier, moved more and ever more slowly, to come finally to a halt in spite of his every effort.

He could not move a muscle, and despairingly he watched a now almost-invisible warden who was approaching him, controlling trident outthrust. But to his relieved surprise the hyperforceps did not touch him, but slithered
past him
without making contact; and hyperman and hyperweapon disappeared altogether, fading out slowly into nothingness.

Then Seaton found himself moving in space. Without volition he was floating across the control room, toward the switch whose closing had ushered the Terrestrials out of their familiar space of three dimensions and into this weirdly impossible region of horror. Nor was he alone in his movement. Dorothy, the Cranes, and Shiro were all in motion, returning slowly to the identical positions they had occupied at the instant when Seaton had closed his master switch.

And as they moved, they
changed
. The
Skylark
herself changed, as did every molecule, every atom of substance, in or of the spherical cruiser of the void.

Seaton’s hand reached out and grasped the ebonite handle of the switch. Then, as his entire body came to rest, he was swept by wave upon wave of almost-unbearable relief as the artificial and unnatural extension into the fourth dimension began to collapse. Slowly, as had progressed the extrusion into that dimension, so progressed the de-extrusion from it. Each ultimate particle of matter underwent an indescribable and incomprehensible foreshortening; a compression; a shrinking together; a writhing
and twisting reverse rearrangement, each slow increment of which was poignantly welcome to every outraged unit of human flesh.

Suddenly seeming, and yet seemingly only after untold hours, the return to three-dimensional space was finished. Seaton’s hand drove through the remaining fraction of an inch of its travel with the handle of the switch; his ears heard the click and snap of the plungers driving home against their stop blocks – the closing of the relay switches had just been completed. The familiar fittings of the control room stood out in their normal three dimensions, sharp and clear.

Dorothy sat exactly as she had sat before the transition. She was leaning slightly forward in her seat – her gorgeous red-bronze hair in perfect order, her sweetly curved lips half parted, her violet eyes widened in somewhat fearful anticipation of what the dimensional translation was to bring. She was unchanged – but Seaton!

He also sat exactly as he had sat an instant – or was it a month? – before; but his face was thin and heavily lined, his normally powerful body was now gauntly eloquent of utter fatigue. Nor was Margaret in better case. She was haggard, almost emaciated. Her clothing, like that of Seaton, had been forced to return to a semblance of order by the exigencies of interdimensional and inter-time translation, and for a moment appeared sound and whole.

The translation accomplished, however, that clothing literally fell apart. The dirt and grime of their long, hard journey and the sticky sap of the hyperplants through which they had fought their way had of course disappeared – being four-dimensional material, all such had perforce remained behind in four-dimensional space – but the thorns and sucking disks of the hypervegetation had taken toll. Now each rent and tear reappeared, to give mute but eloquent testimony to the fact that the sojourn of those two human beings in hyperland had been neither peaceful nor uneventful.

Dorothy’s glance flashed in amazement from Seaton to Margaret, and she repressed a scream as she saw the ravages wrought by whatever it was that they had gone through. She could not understand it, could not reconcile it with what she herself had experienced while in the hyperspace–hypertime continuum, but moved by the ages-old instinct of all true women, she reached out to take her abused husband into the shelter of her arms. But Seaton’s first thought was for the bodiless foes whom they might not have left behind.

‘Did we get away, Mart?’ he demanded, hand still upon the switch. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went on: ‘We must’ve made it, though, or we’d’ve been dematerialized before this. Three rousing cheers! We made it – we made it!’

For several minutes all four gave way to their mixed but profound emotions, in which relief and joy predominated.
They had escaped from the intellectuals; they had come alive through hyperspace!

‘But Dick!’ Dorothy held Seaton off at arm’s length and studied his gaunt, lined face. ‘Lover, you look actually thin.’

‘I
am
thin,’ he replied. ‘We were gone a week, we told you. I’m just about starved to death, and I’m thirstier even than that. Not being able to eat is bad; but going without water is worse, believe me! My whole insides feel like a mess of desiccated blotters. Come on, Peg; let’s empty us a couple of water tanks.’

They drank; lightly and intermittently at first, then deeply.

At last Seaton put down the pitcher. ‘That isn’t enough, by any means; but we’re damp enough inside so that we can swallow food, I guess. While you’re finding out where we are, Mart, Peg and I’ll eat six or eight meals apiece.’

While Seaton and Margaret ate – ate as they had drunk, carefully, but with every evidence of an insatiable bodily demand for food – Dorothy’s puzzled gaze went from the worn faces of the diners to a mirror which reflected her own vivid, unchanged self.

‘But I don’t understand it at all, Dick!’ she burst out at last. ‘
I’m
not thirsty, nor hungry, and I haven’t changed a bit. Neither has Martin; and yet you two have lost pounds and pounds and look as though you had been pulled through a knot hole. It didn’t seem to us as though you were away from us at all. You were going to tell me about that back there, when we were interrupted. Now go ahead and explain things, before I explode. What happened, anyway?’

Seaton, hunger temporarily assuaged, gave a full but concise summary of everything that had happened while he and Margaret were away from the
Skylark
. He then launched into a scientific dissertation, only to be interrupted by Dorothy.

‘But, Dick, it doesn’t sound reasonable that all that could
possibly
have happened to you and Peggy without our even knowing that any time at all had passed!’ she expostulated. ‘We weren’t unconscious or anything, were we, Martin? We knew what was going on all the time, didn’t we?’

‘We were at no time unconscious, and we knew at all times what was taking place around us,’ Crane made surprising but positive answer. He was seated at a visiplate, but had been listening to the story instead of studying the almost-sheer emptiness that was space. ‘And since it is a truism of Norlaminian psychology that any lapse of consciousness, of however short duration, is impressed upon the conscious of a mind of even moderate power, I feel safe in saying that for Dorothy and me, at least, no lapse of time did occur or could have occurred.’

‘There!’ Dorothy exulted. ‘You’ve got to admit that Martin knows his stuff. How are you going to get around that?’

‘Search me – wish I knew.’ Seaton frowned in thought.
‘But Mart chirped it, I think, when he said “for Dorothy and me, at least,” because for us two the time certainly lapsed, and lapsed plenty. However, Mart certainly
does
know his stuff; the old think tank is full of bubbles all the time. He doesn’t make positive statements very often, and when he does you can sink the bank roll on ’em. Therefore, since you were both conscious and time did not lapse – for you – it must have been time itself that was cuckoo instead of you. It must have stretched, or must have been stretched, like the very dickens – for you.

‘Where does that idea get us? I might think that their time was intrinsically variable, as well as being different from ours, if it was not for the regular alternation of night and day – of light and darkness, at least – that Peg and I saw, and which affected the whole country, as far as we could see. So that’s out.

‘Maybe they treated you two to a dose of suspended animation or something of the kind, since you weren’t going anywhere … Nope, that idea doesn’t carry the right earmarks, and besides it would have registered as such on Martin’s Norlaminianly psychological brain. So that’s out, too. In fact, the only thing that could deliver the goods would be a sta— but that’d be a trifle strong, even for a hyperman, I’m afraid.’

‘What would?’ demanded Margaret. ‘Anything that you would call strong ought to be worth listening to.’

‘A stasis of time. Sounds a trifle far-fetched, of course, but …’

‘But phooey!’ Dorothy exclaimed. ‘Now you
are
raving, Dick!’

‘I’m not so sure of that, at all,’ Seaton argued stubbornly. ‘They really understand time, I think, and I picked up a couple of pointers. It would take a sixth-order field … That’s it, I’m pretty sure, and that gives me an idea. If they can do it in hypertime, why can’t we do it in ours?’

‘I fail to see how such a stasis could be established,’ argued Crane. ‘It seems to me that as long as matter exists time must continue, since it is quite firmly established that time depends upon matter – or rather upon the motion in space of that which we call matter.’

‘Sure – that’s what I’m going on. Time and motion are both relative. Stop all motion – relative, not absolute motion – and what have you? You have duration without sequence or succession, which is what?’

‘That would be a stasis of time, as you say,’ Crane conceded, after due deliberation. ‘How can you do it?’