Skylark DuQuesne s-4 Read online

  “Yeah. Most of us are, and will be.”

  Seaton chatted for another minute, then, “Take it easy, guy,” he said; and went up the corridor to Room 1631. The door was wide open, so he went in without knocking.

  “Park it. Be with you in a moment,” a smooth contralto voice said, and Seaton sat down on a chair near the door.

  The woman — Doctor Stephanie de Marigny, nuclear physicist and good at her trade — kept both eyes fastened on a four-needle meter about eighteen inches in front of her nose.

  Her well-kept hands and red-nailed fingers, working blind with the sure precision of those of a world-champion typist, opened and closed switches, moved sliders and levers, and manipulated a dozen or so vernier knobs in tiny arcs.

  There was nothing to show any uninformed observer what she was doing. Whatever it was that she was working on could have been behind that instrument-filled panel or down in some sub-basement — or at the Proving Grounds down the Potomac — or a million miles or parsecs out in space. Whatever it was or wherever, as she worked the four needles of the master-meter closer and closer together as each needle approached the center-zero mark of the meter’s scale.

  Until finally the four hair-thin flat needles were exactly in line with each other and with the hair-thin zero mark. Whereupon four heavy plungers drove home and every light on the panel flashed green and went out.

  “On the button,” she said then, aloud. She rose to her feet, stretched as gracefully and luxuriously and unselfconsciously as does a cat, and turned toward her visitor.

  “Hi, Hunkie,” Seaton said. “Can you spare me a minute?”

  “Nice to see you again, Dick.” She, came toward him, hand outstretched. “I could probably be talked into making it two minutes.”

  The word “big,” while true, was both inadequate and misleading. Stephanie de Marigny was tall — five feet ten in her nylons — and looked even taller because of her three-inch heels, her erect posture, and because of the mass of jet-black hair piled high on her head.

  Her breasts jutted; her abdomen was flat and hard; her wide, flat hips flared out from a startlingly narrow waist; and her legs would have made any professional glamour photographer drool. And her face, if not as beautiful as her body, was fully as striking.

  Her unplucked eyebrows, as black as her hair, were too long and too thick and too bushy and grew too nearly together above a nose that was as much of a beak as DuQuesne’s own. The lashes over her deep brown eyes were simply incredible. Her cheekbones were too large and too prominent. Her fire-engine-red mouth was too big.

  Her square chin and her hard, clean line of jaw were too outstanding; demanded too much notice. Her warm, friendly, dimple-displaying smile, however, revealed the charm that was actually hers.

  Seaton said, “As always, you’re really a treat for the optic nerve.”

  She ignored the compliment. “You aren’t; you look like a catastrophe looking for a place to happen. You ought to take better care of yourself, Dick. Get some sleep once in a while.”

  “I’m going to, as soon as I can. But what I came in for — have you heard anything of Blackie lately?”

  “No. Not since he got delusions of grandeur. Why? Should I have?”

  “Not that I know of. I just thought maybe you two had enough of a thing on so you’d keep in touch.”

  “Uh-uh. I ran around with him a little, is all. Nothing serious. Of all the men I know who understand and appreciate good music, he’s the youngest, the best-looking, and the most fun. Also the biggest. I can wear high heels and not tower over him, which I can’t do with most men… ” She paused, nibbling at her lower lip, then went on, “My best guess is that he’s out on one of the new planets some where, making several hundred thousand tax-free dollars per year. That’s what I’m going to be doing as soon as I finish Observers’ School here.”

  “You’re the gal who can do it, too. Luck, Hunkie.”

  “Same to you, Dick. Drop in again, any time you’re around.”

  And aboard the Skylark of Valeron, Seaton turned to Dorothy with a scowl. “Nobody’s seen him or heard anything of him, so he probably isn’t loose yet. I hate this waiting. Confound it, I wish the big black ape would get loose and start something!”

  Although Seaton did not know it, DuQuesne had, and was about to.

  It happened that night, after Seaton had gone to bed.

  The message came in loud and clear on Seaton’s private all-hours receiver, monitored and directed by the unsleeping Brain:

  “… Seaton reply on tight beam of the sixth stop DuQuesne calling Seaton reply on tight beam of the sixth stop DuQuesne calling…”

  Coming instantly awake at the sound of his name, Seaton kicked off the covers, thought a light on, and, setting hands and feet, made a gymnast’s twisting, turning leap over Dorothy without touching her. There was plenty of room on his own side of the bed, but the direct route was quicker. He landed on his feet, took two quick steps, and slapped the remote-control helmet on his head.

  “Trace this call. Hit its source with a tight beam of the sixth,” he thought into the helmet; then took it off and said aloud, “You’re coming in loud and clear. What gives?”

  “Loud and clear here. All hell’s out for noon. I just met the damndest alien any science-fiction fan ever imagined teeth, wings, tail — the works. Klazmon by name; boss of two hundred forty-one planets full of monsters just like him. He’s decided that all humanity everywhere should be liquidated; and it looks as though he may have enough stuff to do just that.”

  Dorothy had sat up in bed, sleepily. She made a gorgeously beautiful picture, Seaton thought; wearing a wisp of practically nothing and her hair a tousled auburn riot. As the sense of DuQuesne’s words struck home, however, a look of horror spread over her face and she started to say something; but Seaton touched his lips with a forefinger and she, wide awake now, nodded.

  “Nice summary, DuQuesne,” Seaton said then. “Now break it down into smaller pieces, huh?” and DuQuesne went on to give a verbatim report of his interview with Llanzlan Klazmon of the Realm of the Llurdi.

  “So much for facts,” DuQuesne said. “Now for inferences and deductions. You know how, when you’re thinking with anyone, other information, more or less relevant and more or less clear, comes along? A sort of side-band effect?”

  “Yeah, always. I can see how you picked up the business about the stranger ships that way. But how sure are you that those seventeen ships were Fenachrone?”

  “Positive. That thought was clear. And for that matter, there must be others running around loose somewhere. How possible is it, do you think, to wipe out completely a race that has had spaceships as long as they have?”

  “Could be,” agreed Seaton. “And this ape Klazmon figured it that we were the same race, basically, both mentally — savage, egocentric, homicidal — and physically. How could he arrive at any such bobbled-up, cockeyed conclusions as that?”

  “For him, easily enough. Klazmon is just about as much like us as we are like those X-planet cockroaches. Imagine a man-sized bat, with a super-able tail, cat’s eyes and teeth, humanoid arms and hands, a breastbone like the prow of a battleship, pectoral muscles the size of forty-pound hams, and—”

  “Wait up a sec — this size thing. His projection?”

  “That’s right. Six feet tall. He wasn’t the type to shrink or expand it.”

  “I’ll buy that. And strictly logical — with their own idea of what logic is.”

  “Check. According to which logic we’re surplus population and are to be done away with. So I decided to warn you as to what the human race is up against and to suggest a meeting with you that we know can’t be listened in on. Check?”

  “Definitely. We’ll lock our sixths on and instruct our computers to compute and effect rendezvous at null relative velocity in minimum time. Can do?”

  “Can do — am doing,” DuQuesne said; and Seaton, donning his helmet, perceived that the only fifth- or sixth-order stuff anyw
here near the Skylark of Valeron — except what she was putting out herself, of course — was the thin, tight beam that was the base-line.

  Seaton thought into his helmet for a few seconds; then, discarding it, he went around the bed, got into it on his own side, and started to kiss Dorothy a second good night.

  “But, Dick,” she protested. “That DuQuesne! Do you think it’s safe to let him come actually aboard?”

  “Yes. Not only safe, but necessary — we don’t want to be blabbing that kind of stuff all over a billion parsecs of space. And safe because I still say we’re better than he is at anything he want to start, for fun, money, chalk, or marbles. So good night again, ace of my bosom.”

  “Hadn’t you better notify somebody else first? Especially the Norlaminians?”

  “You said it, presh; I sure should.” Seaton put on his helmet; and it was a long time before either of the Seatons got back to sleep. Long for Dorothy, heroically keeping eyes closed and breathing regularly so that her husband would not know how shaken and terrified she really was; long for Seaton himself, who lay hour upon endless hour, hands linked behind his head, gray eyes staring fiercely up into the darkness.

  It had been a long time since Richard Ballinger Seaton and Marc C. DuQuesne had locked horns last. This galaxy — this cluster — this whole First Universe was not large enough for the two of them. When they met again one of them would dispose of the other.

  It was as simple as that. Yet Seaton had accepted a call for help. The whole enormous complex of defenses that he had labored so hard and long to erect again DuQuesne would now be diverted to another, perhaps even a greater, threat to the safety of civilization. It was right and proper that this should be so.

  But Seaton knew that whatever the best interests of civilization in this matter, there could and would never be any greater personal threat to himself than was incarnate in the cold, hard, transcendentally logical person of Blackie DuQuesne.

  9. AMONG THE JELMI

  AND half a universe away other events were moving to fruition.

  As has been said, the eight hundred Jelmi aboard the ship that had once been a Llurdan cruiser were the selected pick of the teeming billions of their race inhabiting two hundred forty-one planets. The younger ones had been selected for brains, ability, and physical perfection; the older ones for a hundred years or more of outstanding scientific achievement. And of the older group, Tammon stood out head and shoulders above all the rest. He was the Einstein of his race.

  He looked a vigorous, bushily gray-haired sixty; but was in fact two hundred eleven Mallidaxian years old.

  Tammon was poring over a computed graph, measuring its various characteristics with vernier calipers, a filar microscope, and an integrating planimeter, when Mergon and Luloy came swinging hand in hand into his laboratory. Both were now fully recovered from the wounds they had suffered in that hand-to-hand battle with the Llurdi on now far-distant Llurdiax. Muscles moved smoothly under the unblemished bronze of Mergon’s skin; Luloy’s swirling shoulder-length mop of gleaming chestnut hair was a turbulent glory.

  “Hail, Tamm,” the two said in unison, and Mergon went on: “Have you unscrewed the inscrutability of that anomalous peak yet?”

  Tammon picked up another chart and scowled at a sharp spike going up almost to the top of the scale. “This? I’m not exactly sure yet, but I may have. At least, by recomputing with an entirely new and more-than-somewhat weird set of determinors, I got this,” and he ran his fingertip along the smooth curve on the chart he had been studying.

  Mergon whistled through his teeth and Luloy, after staring for a moment said, “Wonderful! Expound, oh sage, and elucidate.”

  “It had to have at least one component in the sixth, on the level of thought, but no known determinors would affect it. Therefore I applied the mathematics of symbolic logic to a wide variety of hunches, dreams, I’ve-been-here-or-done-this-befores, premonitions, intuitions…”

  “Llenderllon’s eyeballs!” Luloy broke in. “So that was what you ran us all through the wringer for, a while back.”

  “Precisely. Using these new determinors in various configurations — dictated not by mathematical reasoning, but by luck and by hunch and by perseverance — I finally obtained a set of uniquely manipulable determinants that yielded this final smooth curve, the exactly fitting equation of which reduces beautifully to…”

  “Hold it, Tamm,” Mergon said, “you’re losing me,” and Luloy added, “You lost me long ago. What does it mean?”

  “It will take years to explore its ramifications, but one fact is clear: the fourth dimension of space does actually exist. Therefore the conclusion seems inescapable that…”

  “Stop it!” Luloy snapped. “This is terribly dangerous stuff to be talking about. That terrific kind of a breakthrough is just exactly what Klazmon — the beast! — has been after for years. And you know very well that we’re not really free; that he has us under constant surveillance.”

  “But by detector only,” Mergon said. “A full working projection at this distance? Uh-uh. It might be smart, though, to be a little on the careful side, at that.”

  Days lengthened into weeks. The ex-Llurdan cruiser, renamed the Mallidax and converted into a Jelman worldlet, still hurtled along a right-line course toward the center of the First Universe, at a positive-and-negative acceleration that would keep her — just barely! — safe against collision with intergalactic clouds of gas or dust.

  The objective of their flight was a small sun, among whose quite undistinguished family of planets were a moderate-sized oxygen-bearing world and its rather large, but otherwise uninteresting companion moon.

  Tammon, hot on the trail of his breakthrough in science, kept his First Assistant Mergon busy fourteen or sixteen hours per day designing and building — and sometimes inventing — new and extremely special gear; and Mergon in turn drove Luloy, his wife and Girl Friday, as hard as he drove himself.

  Tammon, half the time, wore armor and billion-volt gloves against the terribly lethal forces he was tossing so nonchalantly from point to point. Mergon, only slightly less powerfully insulated, had to keep his variable-density goggles practically opaque against the eye-tearing frequencies of his welding arcs. And even Luloy, much as she detested the feel of clothing against her skin, was as armored and as insulated as was either of the men as she tested and checked and double-checked and operated, with heavily gloved flying fingers, the maze of unguarded controls that was her constructor station.

  And all the other Jelmi were working just as hard; even — or especially? — Master Biologist Sennlloy: who, with her long, thick braids of Norse-goddess hair piled high on her head and held in place by a platinum-filigree net, was delving deeper and ever deeper into the mystery of life.

  Any research man worth his salt must not be the type to give up: he must be able to keep on butting his head against a stone wall indefinitely without hoisting the white flag.

  Thus, Tammon developed theory after theory after theory for, and Mergon and Luloy built model after model after model of, mechanisms to transport material objects from one place to another in normal space by moving them through the fourth dimension — and model after model after model failed to work.

  They failed unfailingly. Unanimously. Wherefore Mergon had run somewhat low on enthusiasm when he and Luloy carried the forty-ninth model of the series into Tammon’s laboratory to be put to the test. While the old savant hooked the device up into a breadboard layout of gadgetry some fifteen feet long, Mergon somewhat boredly picked up an empty steel box, dropped six large ball-bearings into it, closed and hasped its cover, grasped it firmly in his left hand, and placed an empty steel bowl on the bench.

  “Now,” Tammon said, and flipped a switch — and six heavy steel balls clanged into the bowl out of nowhere.

  “Huh?” Mergon’s left hand had jumped upward of its own accord; and, fumbling in his haste, he opened the box in that hand and stared, jaw actually agape, at its empty interior.


  “Llenderllon’s eyeballs!” Luloy shrieked. “This one works!”

  “It does indeed,” a technician agreed, and turned anxiously to Tammon. “But sir, doesn’t that fact put us into a highly dangerous position? Even though Klazmon can’t operate a full working projection at this distance, he undoubtedly has had all his analytical detectors out all this time and this successful demonstration must have tripped at least some of them.”

  “Not a chance,” Mergon said. “He’ll never find these bands — it’d be exactly like trying to analyze a pattern of fifth- or sixth-order force with a visible-light spectroscope.”

  “It probably would be, at that,” the technician agreed, and Luloy said, “But what I’ve been wondering about all along is, what good is it? What’s it for? Except robbing a bank or something, maybe.”

  “It reduces theory to practice,” Tammon told her. “It gives us priceless data, by the application of which to already-known concepts we will be able to build mechanisms and devices to perform operations hitherto deemed impossible. Operations unthought-of, in fact.”

  “Maybe we should be pretty careful about it, though, at that,” Mergon said. “To do very much real development work, we’ll have to be using a lot of fairly unusual sixth order stuff that he can detect and analyze. That will make him wonder what we’re up to and he won’t stop at wondering. He’ll take steps.”

  “Big steps,” Luloy agreed.

  Tammon nodded. “That is true… and we must land somewhere to do any worthwhile development work, since this ship is not large enough to house the projectors we will have to have. Also, we are short of certain necessities for such work, notably neutronium and faidons… and the projectors of these ultra-bands will have to be of tremendous power, range, and scope… you are right. We must find a solar system emanating sixth-order energies. Enough of them, if possible, to mask completely our own unavoidable emanations. We now have enough new data so that we can increase tremendously the range, delicacy, and accuracy of our own detectors. See to it, Mergon, and find a good landing place.”