Читать книгу Skylark DuQuesne - Edward Elmer Smith - Страница 9

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The Skylark of Valeron swung in orbit around the sun of Earth. She was much more of worldlet than a spaceship, being a perfect sphere over a thousand kilometers in diameter. She had to be big. She had to house, among other things, the one-thousand-kilometers-diameter graduated circles of declination and of right ascension required to chart the thousands of millions of galaxies making up any given universe of the Cosmic All.

She was for the most part cold and dark. Even the master-control helmets, sprouting masses and mazes of thigh-thick bundles of hair-thin silver wire, hung inactivated in the neutral-gray, featureless master-control room. The giant computer, however—the cubic mile of ultra-miniaturization that everyone called the “Brain”—was still in operation; and in the worldlet’s miles-wide chart-room, called the “tank,” there still glowed the enormous lenticular aggregation of points of light that was the chart of the First Universe—each tiny pool of light representing a galaxy composed of thousands of millions of solar systems.

A precisely coded thought impinged upon a receptor.

A relay clicked, whereupon a neighboring instrument, noting the passage of current through its vitals, went busily but silently to work, and an entire panel of instrumentation came to life.

Switch after switch snapped home. Field after field of time-stasis collapsed. The planetoid’s artificial sun resumed its shining; breezes began again to stir the leaves of trees and of shrubbery; insects resumed their flitting from bloom to once-more-scented bloom. Worms resumed their gnawings and borings beneath the green velvet carpets that were the lawns. Brooks began again to flow; gurglingly. Birds took up their caroling and chirping and twittering precisely where they had left off so long before; and three houses—there was a house now for Shiro and his bride of a month—became comfortably warm and softly, invitingly livable.

All that activity meant, of course, that the Seaton-Crane party would soon be coming aboard.

They were in fact already on the way, in Skylark Two; the forty-foot globe which, made originally of Osnomian arenak and the only spaceship they owned, had been “flashed over” into ultra-refractory inoson and now served as Captain’s gig, pinnace, dinghy, lifeboat, landing-craft, and so forth—whatever any of the party wanted her to do. There were many other craft aboard the Skylark of Valeron, of course, of various shapes and sizes; but Two had always been the Seatons’ favorite “small boat.”

As Two approached the Valeron, directly in line with one of her huge main ports, Seaton slowed down to a dawdling crawl—a mere handful of miles per second—and thought into a helmet already on his head; and the massive gates of locks—of a miles-long succession of locks through the immensely thick skin of the planetoid—opened in front of flying Two and closed behind her. Clearing the last gate, Seaton put on a gee and a half of deceleration and brought the little flying sphere down to a soft and easy landing in her berth in the back yard of the Seatons’ house.

Eight people disembarked; five of whom were the three Seatons and Martin and Margaret Crane. (Infant Lucile Crane rode joyously on her mother’s left hip.) Seventh was short, chunky, lightning-fast Shiro, whose place in these Skylark annals has not been small. Originally Crane’s “man,” he had long since become Crane’s firm friend; and he was now as much of a Skylarker as was any of the others.

Eighth was Lotus Blossom, Shiro’s small, finely wrought, San Francisco-born and western-dressed bride, whom the others had met only that morning, just before leaving Earth. She looked like a living doll—but appearances can be so deceiving! She was in fact one of the most proficient female experts in unarmed combat then alive.

“Our house first, please, all of you,” Dorothy said. “We’ll eat before we do one single solitary thing else. I could eat that fabled missionary from the plains of Timbuctoo.”

Margaret laughed. “Hat and gown and hymnbook too,” she finished. “Me, too, Dick.”

“Okay by me; I could toy with a couple of morsels myself,” Seaton said, and pencils of force wafted the eight into the roomy kitchen of the house that was in almost every detail an exact duplicate of the Seatons’ home on Earth. “You’re the chief kitchen mechanic, Red-Top; strut your stuff.”

Dorothy looked at and thought into the controller—she no longer had to wear any of the limited-control headsets to operate them—and a damask-clothed table, set for six, laden with a wide variety of food and equipped with six carved oak chairs and two high-chairs, came instantly into being in the middle of the room.

The Nisei girl jumped violently; then smiled apologetically. “Shiro told me about such things, but ... well, maybe I’ll get used to them sometimes I hope.”

“Sure you will, Lotus,” Seaton assured her. “It’s pretty weird at first, but you get used to it fast.”

“I sincerely hope so,” Lotus said, and eyed the six dinner places dubiously. She had thought that she was thoroughly American, but she wasn’t quite. Traditions are strong. With an IQ that a Heidelberg student might envy, part of the crew of the most powerful vehicle man had ever seen, fully educated and trained ... it was evident that Shiro’s dainty little bride was more than a little doubtful about sitting at that table.

Until Dorothy took her by the hand and sat her down. “This is where I like my friends to sit,” she announced. “Where I can see them.”

A flush dyed the porcelain-like perfection of Lotus’s skin. “I thank you, Mrs.—”

“Friends, remember?” Seaton broke in. “Call her Dot. Now let’s eat!”

Whereafter, they worked.

It may be wondered, among those historians not familiar with the saga of the Skylarks, why so much consternation and trouble should come from so small an event as the probabilistic speculation of a single Norlaminian sage that one mere human body, lately cast into the energy forms of the disembodied intelligences, might soon return into the universe in a viable form.

Such historians do not, of course, know Blackie DuQuesne.

While Seaton, Crane and the others were eating their meal, across distances to be measured in gigaparsecs, countless millions of persons were in one way or another busy at work on projects central to their own central concern. Seaton and Crane were not idle. They were waiting for further information ... and at the same time, refurbishing the inner man with food, with rest and with pleasant company; but an hour later, after dinner, after the table and its appurtenances had vanished and the three couples were seated in the living room, more or less facing the fire, Seaton stoked up his battered black briar and Crane lighted one of his specially made cigarettes.

“Well?” Seaton demanded then. “Have you thunk up anything you think is worth two tinker’s whoops in Hades?”

Crane smiled ruefully. “Not more than one, I’d say—if that many. Let’s consider that thought or message that Carton is sending out. It will be received, he says, only by persons or entities who not only know more than we do about one or more specific things, but also are friendly enough to be willing to share their knowledge with us. And to make the matter murkier, we have no idea either of what it is that we lack or what it, whatever it is, is supposed to be able to do. Therefore Point One would be: how are they going to get in touch with us? By what you called magic?”

Seaton did not answer at first, then only nodded. “Magic” was still a much less than real concept to him. He said, “If you say so—but remember the Peruvian Indian medicine-men and the cinchona bark that just happened to be full of quinine. So, whatever you want to call it—magic or extra-sensory perception or an unknown band of the sixth or what-have-you—I’ll bet my last shirt it’ll be bio. And whoever pitches it at us will be good enough at it to know that they can hit us with it, so all we have to do about that is wait for it to happen. However, what I’m mostly interested in right now is nothing that far out, but what we know that a reincarnated Blackie DuQuesne could and probably would do.”

“Such as?”

“The first thing he’ll do, for all the tea in China, will be to design and set up some gadget or gizmo or technique to kill me with. Certainly me, and probably you, and quite possibly all of us.”

Dorothy and Margaret both gasped; but Crane nodded and said, “Check. I check you to your proverbial nineteen decimals. Also, and quite possibly along with that operation, an all-out attempt to reconquer Earth. He wouldn’t set out to destroy Earth, at this time, at least ... would he, do you think?”

Seaton thought for seconds, then said, “My best guess would be no. He wants to boss it, not wipe it out. However, there are a few other things that might come ...”

“Wait up, presh!” Dorothy snapped. “Those two will hold us for a while; especially the first one. I wish to go on record at this point to the effect that I want my husband alive, not dead.”

Seaton grinned. “You and me both, pet,” he said. “I’m in favor of it. Definitely. However, as long as I stay inside the Valeron here he doesn’t stand the chance of a snowflake in you-know-where of getting at me ...”

How wrong Seaton was!

“... so the second point is the one that’s really of overriding importance. The rub is that we can’t make even a wild guess at when he’s going to get loose ... He could be building his ship right now ... so, Engineer Martin Crane, what’s your thought as to defending Earth; as adequately as possible but in the shortest possible time?”

Crane inhaled—slowly—a deep lungful of smoke, exhaled it even more slowly, and stubbed out the butt. “That’s a tall order, Dick,” he said, finally, “but I don’t think it’s hopeless. Since we know DuQuesne’s exact line of departure, we know at least approximately the line of his return. As a first-approximation idea we should, I think, cover that line thoroughly with hair-triggered automation. We should occupy the fourth and the fifth completely; thus taking care of everything we know that he knows ... but as for the sixth ...” Crane paused in thought.

“Yeah,” Seaton agreed. “That sixth order’s an entirely different breed of cats. It’s a pistol—a question with a capital Q. About all we can do on it, I’d say, is cover everything we know of it and then set up supersensitive analsynths coupled to all the automatic constructors and such-like gizmos we can dream up—with as big a gaggle of ground-and-lofty dreamers as we can round up. The Norlaminians, certainly; and Sacner Carfon for sure. If what he and Drasnik pulled off wasn’t magic it certainly was a remarkably reasonable facsimile thereof. All six of us, of course, and ...”

“But what can you possibly want of us?” Shiro asked, and Dorothy said, “That goes double for Peggy and me, Dick. Of what good could we two possibly be, thinking about such stuff as that?”

Seaton flushed. “ ’Scuse, please; my error. I switched thinking without announcing the switch. I do know, though, that our minds all work differently—especially Shiro’s and double-especially Lotus’s—and that when you don’t have the faintest glimmering of what you’re getting into you don’t know what you’re going to have to have to cope with it.” He grinned.

“If you can untangle that, I mean,” he said.

“I think so,” said Crane, unruffled; he had had long practice in following Seaton’s lightning leaps past syntax. “And you think that this will enable us to deal with DuQuesne?”

“It’ll have to,” Seaton said positively. “One thing we know, something has to. He’s not going to send us a polite message asking to be friends—he’s going to hit with all he’s got. So,” he finished, “let’s hop to it. The Norlaminian observers’ reports are piling up on the tapes right now. And we’d all better keep our eyes peeled—as well as all the rest of our senses and instruments!—for Doctor Marc C. Blackie DuQuesne!”

And DuQuesne, so immensely far out in intergalactic space, at control board and computer, explored for ten solid hours the vastnesses of his new knowledge.

Then he donned a thought-helmet and thought himself up a snack; after eating which—scarcely tasting any part of it—he put in another ten solid hours of work. Then, leaning back in his form-fitting seat, he immersed himself in thought—and, being corporeal, no longer a pattern of pure force, went sound asleep.

He woke up a couple of hours later; stiff, groggy, and ravenous. He thought himself up a supper of steak and mushrooms, hashed browns, spinach, coffee, and apple pie à la mode. He ate it—with zest, this time—then sought his long-overdue bed.

In the morning, after a shower and a shave and a breakfast of crisp bacon and over-easy eggs, toast and butter and marmalade, and four cups of strong, black coffee, he sat down at his board and again went deep into thought. This time, he thought in words and sentences, the better to nail down his conclusions.

“One said I’d have precisely the same chance as before of living out my normal lifetime. Before what? Before the dematerialization or before Seaton got all that extra stuff? Since he gave me sixth-order drive, offense, defense, and communications, he could have—probably did—put me on a basis of equality with Seaton as of now. Would he have given me any more than that?”

DuQuesne paused and worked for ten busy minutes at computer and control board again. What he learned was in the form of curves and quantities, not words; he did not attempt to speak them aloud, but sat staring into space.

Then, satisfied that the probabilities were adequate to base a plan on, he spoke out loud again: “No. Why should he give me everything that Seaton’s got? He didn’t owe me anything.” To Blackie DuQuesne that was not a rueful complaint but a statement of fact. He went on. “Assume we both now have a relatively small part of the spectrum of the sixth-order forces, if I keep using this drive—Ouch! What the living hell was that?”

DuQuesne leaped to his feet. “That” had been a sixth-order probe, at the touch of which his vessel’s every course of defensive screen had flared into action.

DuQuesne was not shaken, no. But he was surprised, and he didn’t like to be surprised. There should have been no probes out here!

The probe had been cut off almost instantaneously; but “almost” instantaneously is not quite zero time, and sixth-order forces operate at the speed of thought. Hence, in that not-quite-zero instant of time during which the intruding mind had been in contact with his own, DuQuesne learned a little. The creature was undoubtedly highly intelligent—and, as undoubtedly, unhuman to the point of monstrosity ... and DuQuesne had no doubt whatever in his own mind that the alien would think the same of any Tellurian.

DuQuesne studied his board and saw, much to his surprise, that only one instrument showed any drain at all above maintenance level, and that one was a milliammeter—the needle of which was steady on the scale at a reading of one point three seven mils! He was not being attacked at all—merely being observed—and by an observation system that was using practically no power at all!

Donning a helmet, so as to be able himself to operate at the speed of thought, DuQuesne began—very skittishly and very gingerly indeed—to soften down his spheres and zones and shells and solid fields of defensive force. He softened and softened them down; down to the point at which a working projection could come through and work.

And a working projection came through.

No one of Marc C. DuQuesne’s acquaintances, friend or enemy, had ever said that he was any part of either a weakling or a coward. The consensus was that he was harder than the ultra-refractory hubs of hell itself. Nevertheless, when the simulacrum of Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth of the Realm of the Llurdi came up to within three feet of him and waggled one gnarled forefinger at the helmets of a mechanical educator, even DuQuesne’s burly spirit began to quail a little—but he was strong enough and hard enough not let any sign show.

With every mind-block he owned set hard, DuQuesne donned a headset and handed its mate to his visitor. He engaged that monstrous alien mind to mind. Then, releasing his blocks, he sent the Llurdi a hard, cold, sharp, diamond-clear—and lying!—thought:

“Yes? Who are you, pray, and what, to obtrude your uninvited presence upon me, Foalang Kassi a’ Doompf, the Highest Imperial of the Drailsen Quadrant?”

This approach was, of course, the natural one for DuQuesne to make; he did not believe in giving away truth when lies might be so much cheaper—and less dangerous. It was equally of course the worst possible approach to Klazmon: reenforcing as it did every unfavorable idea the Llurd had already formed from his lightning-fast preliminary once-over-lightly of the man and of the man’s tremendous spaceship.

Klazmon did not think back at DuQuesne directly. Instead, he thought to himself and, as DuQuesne knew, for the record; thoughts that the Earthman could read like print.

To the Llurd, DuQuesne was a peculiarly and repulsively obnoxious monstrosity. Physically a Jelm, he belonged to a race of Jelmi that had never been subjected to any kind of logical, sensible, or even intelligent control.

Klazmon then thought at DuQuesne; comparing him with Mergon and Luloy on the one hand and with Sleemet of the Fenachrone on the other—and deciding that all three races were basically the same. The Llurd showed neither hatred nor detestation; he was merely contemptuous, intolerant, and utterly logical. “Like the few remaining Fenachrone and the rebel faction of our own Jelmi and the people you think of as the Chlorans, your race is, definitely, surplus population; a nuisance that must be and shall be abated. Where—” Klazmon suddenly drove a thought—“is the Drailsen Quadrant?”

DuQuesne, however, was not to be caught napping. His blocks held. “You’ll never know,” he sneered. “Any task-force of yours that ever comes anywhere near us will not last long enough to energize a sixth-order communicator.”

“That’s an idle boast,” Klazmon stated thoughtfully. “It is true that you and your vessel are far out of range of any possible Llurdiaxian attacking beam. Even this projection of me is being relayed through four mergons. Nevertheless we can and we will find you easily when this becomes desirable. This point will be reached as soon as we have computed the most logical course to take in exterminating all such surplus races as yours.”

And Klazmon’s projection vanished; and the helmet he had been wearing fell toward the floor.

DuQuesne was shocked as he had never been shocked before; and when he learned from his analsynths just what the range of one of those incredible “mergons” was, he was starkly appalled.

One thing was crystal-clear: He was up against some truly first-class opposition here. And it had just stated, calmly and definitely, that its intention was to exterminate him, Blackie DuQuesne.

The master of lies had learned to assess the value of a truth very precisely. He knew this one to be 22-karat, crystal-clear, pure quill. Whereupon Blackie DuQuesne turned to some very intensive thought indeed, compared with which his previous efforts might have been no more than a summer afternoon’s reverie.

We know now, of course, that Blackie DuQuesne lacked major elements of information, and that his constructions could not therefore be complete. They lacked Norlaminian rigor, or the total visualization of his late companions, the disembodied intellectuals. And they lacked information.

DuQuesne knew nothing of Mergon and Luloy, now inward bound on Earth in a hideout orbit. He could not guess how his late visitor had ever heard of the Fenachrone. Nor knew he anything of that strange band of the sixth order to which Seaton referred, with more than half a worried frown, as “magic.” In short, DuQuesne was attempting to reach the greatest conclusion of his life through less than perfect means, with only fragmentary facts to go on.

Nevertheless, Blackie C. DuQuesne, as Seaton was wont to declare, was no slouch at figuring; and so he did in time come to a plan which was perhaps the most brilliant—and also was perhaps the most witless!—of his career.

Lips curled into something much more sneer than grin, DuQuesne sat down at his construction board. He had come to the conclusion that what he needed was help, and he knew exactly where to go to get it. His ship wasn’t big enough by far to hold a sixth-order projection across any important distance ... but he could build, in less than an hour, a sixth-order broadcaster. It wouldn’t be selective. It would be enormously wasteful of power. But it would carry a signal across half a universe.

Whereupon, in less than an hour, a signal began to pour out, into and through space:

“DuQuesne calling Seaton! Reply on tight beam of the sixth. DuQuesne calling Seaton! Reply on tight beam of the sixth. DuQuesne calling Seaton ...”