E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (86 page)

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 – it
was
a 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 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 been
thinking
, Rufus, and if you don’t believe that it’s hard work you’d better try it some time! I won’t have to do it any more though – 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.’

‘
Telling
it! 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.’

‘What
are
you 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 whole
Skylark of Valeron
and nobody knows what else, in five hours?’

‘Yes, dear heart,
slow
. Remember when we first met our dear departed friend Eight, back in the original
Skylark
? 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 gives 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 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 and with a stasis of time. 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 bother 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 – it’s a 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 goodbye, get into
Two
, and hop out to where Dot’s
Skylark of Valeron
is going to materialize.’

The farewell to the people of Valeron was brief, but sincere.

‘This is in no sense goodbye,’ 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 Two
shot 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 little
Two
had 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 debris. 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 the
Skylark of Valeron
just large enough to contain those thousand-kilometer circles.’

As
Skylark Two
approached 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.

‘Oh, Dick!’ Dorothy squealed. ‘There’s our house – and Martin’s! 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’t
be – 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 the 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.