"Mother-r-r!" A sturdy, auburn-haired urchin of twelve--Richard
Ballinger Seaton the fourteen hundred and seventy-first--turned to the
queenly young matron who was his mother as the viewing area before them
went blank. "You said that as soon as I was old enough you would let
me see the rest of the 'Exploits of Seaton One.' Now grandfather's the
chief of the Galactic Council, and I'm twelve, and I'm old enough."
"Perhaps you are, son." Into the beautiful eyes of the young woman
came that indefinable, indescribable something; the knowledge that her
oldest was no longer a baby. "Tell me the story as it is run for the
holiday, and I shall see."
"Richard Ballinger Seaton the First was a Ph. D. in chemistry," the boy
began. "He lived in the city of Washington, in what was then the United
States of America. He was born--"
"Never mind dates and such things, sonny. It would take too long
to give all the details. I just want to make sure that you really
understand the story--conditions were _so_ different then from what
they are now."
"Well, Seaton One discovered Rovolon, which he called 'X' metal at
first. He found out that it would turn copper into energy, and he and
Martin Reynolds Crane One built the very first space ship that was ever
known. But the World Steel Corporation wanted all the Rovolon that
Seaton had found; so Dr. DuQuesne, a chemist of theirs, and a kind of a
spy named Perkins, tried to steal it away from him. They got a little
of it, but it exploded some copper and killed a lot of people.
"When Seaton heard about the explosion he found out that some of his
Rovolon was gone, and they hired some detectives and had an awful
time. A lot more people were killed, and a Japanese assistant of
Crane's, named Shiro, was almost killed, too. Then they went to work
and invented a lot of new instruments, such as a compass that pointed
at any one thing forever; and attractors and repellers and rays and
screens and explosives and lots of things that are good yet.
"This DuQuesne tried for a long time to get the Rovolon and couldn't,
so they built a space ship from Seaton's plans that they stole, and
he carried off Dorothy Vaneman and Margaret Spencer, the girls that
Seaton One and Crane One were going to marry--and they did marry them,
afterward, too. Well, Dorothy kicked Perkins in the stomach, and the
space ship ran away and kept on going until it got caught by the
attraction of the Dark Mass that the First of Energy has always had so
much trouble with, and while they were falling toward it that Perkins
went crazy and tried to kill Margaret, but DuQuesne killed him instead,
and then Seaton One caught up with them and rescued them and--"
"Just a minute, son; there is no great hurry. How did Seaton One get
way out there?"
"Well, they had their big new space ship, the _Skylark of Space_, all
built by then, and Seaton One had an object-compass set on DuQuesne,
because he'd been watching him a long time since he'd been making
lots of trouble for him. So Seaton One and Crane One followed the
object-compass and found them and rescued them all but Perkins, because
he was dead already.
"They had an awful time getting away from the Dark Mass, but they
did it, but they were about out of copper, so they had to hunt up a
planet that had some. They landed on one that dinosaurs and things
like that lived on, and got a lot more Rovolon, but didn't find any
copper, so they hunted up more planets. One had poison gas instead of
air, and another had people that were pure intellectuals, so that they
had bodies whenever they wanted to, but not all the time. They pretty
nearly dematerialized Seaton One and all the rest of them, and we're
awfully glad they didn't.
"Well, anyway, they got away, but they had an awful time, and after a
while they saw the green suns of the Central System. There's lots of
copper there, you know; so much that Grandfather Seaton wouldn't let me
swim in the ocean last year when we were there because it was copper
solution and it would have made me sick. They went to Osnome first, one
of the inside worlds, and landed in a country named Mardonale.
"They were bad people and wanted to kill Seaton One and steal his
ship, and they had already captured Dunark, the Kofedix or crown prince
of the other nation, Kondal. Then Dunark helped Seaton One get away,
and they all went home with Dunark. But the _Skylark_ was pretty nearly
ruined in the battle they had getting away from Mardonale, so Seaton
One and Dunark built it over out of arenak, which was much better than
the funny, soft steel they used to use in the old days. Of course,
arenak doesn't amount to much beside the inoson we have now, but even
Seaton One didn't know anything about inoson then.
"Then they got married. Seaton married Dorothy, and they're our
great-great--fourteen hundred and seventy times--grandparents. Crane
married Margaret, and they're awfully famous, too. And Shiro is, too,
especially in Asiatica. Well, anyway, after they got married they had a
fight with a monster Karlon, and were just going to start back here for
Tellus when the whole Mardonalian fleet attacked Kondal. The _Skylark
Two_ beat them all, and DuQuesne helped, too, and then of course
Dunark's father was Karfedix or emperor of the whole planet of Osnome,
and he made Seaton One the overlord. Then they came back home. Seaton
One and Crane One didn't know just what to do with DuQuesne, but he
jumped out of _Skylark Two_ in a parachute and got away.
* * * * *
"They hadn't been back on Tellus very long when Dunark came to visit
them, from Osnome, after some salt which they needed to make arenak,
and some more Rovolon. He was going to blow up another planet of the
Central Sun because they were having a war. But Seaton One didn't
have enough Rovolon, so both _Skylark Two_ and the _Kondal_ started
out to go to the 'X' planet after some, and on the way there they
were attacked by a space ship of the Fenachrone, who were a race
of terrible men who were going to conquer the whole universe. The
Fenachrone blew up the _Kondal_, and pretty nearly destroyed the
_Skylark_, too, but Seaton One could use zones of force as well as
they could--I don't know much about zones of force because they're in
advanced physics, but they're barriers in the ether and space ships
use them yet because nothing above the fifth level can get through
them--and finally Seaton One cut the Fenachrone ship all up into little
pieces. Then he rescued Dunark, and one of his wives named Sitar, but
one of the bad men got away without being killed and DuQuesne picked
him up--"
"But you haven't said anything about DuQuesne being out there, sonny."
"Well, he was. He kept on trying to get the Rovolon away from Seaton
One, but couldn't, so he took his own space ship and went to Osnome.
You see, while he was there he had found out something about the
Fenachrone and was going to join them. Well, he got to Osnome and stole
a better space ship than the one he had and started out to go to the
Fenachrone System, but on the way he passed close to where _Skylark
Two_ was fighting the big Fenachrone ship, which was the flagship
_Y427W_. The chief engineer of the ship got away, and DuQuesne rescued
him, and he showed DuQuesne how to get to the Fenachrone world, and
he installed his own super-drive on the _Violet_, which was the name
of DuQuesne's ship. But when they got there something funny happened.
A Fenachrone patrol ship apparently captured the _Violet_, and they
burned up what they thought were DuQuesne and Loring--this Loring was
DuQuesne's helper--and the engineer reported over the visirecorder
everything that had happened to the flagship, and Seaton and Crane were
listening in on their projector. Now's the funny part. Some of the
visirecorder report was right, but some of it didn't really happen that
way at all, because Dr. DuQuesne knew all the time what was going--"
"You are getting ahead of the story, sonny. You have heard that part,
of course, but you haven't actually seen the record of it yet."
"Well, anyway, Seaton One found out the Fenachrone's plans by reading
their brains with a mechanical educator, and he made Dunark's people
make peace with the other planet, the one that they were going to
blow up. He knew from some old legends that there was a race of green
men somewhere in the Central System that knew everything, so he went
hunting for them. They went to Dasor first, where those funny porpoise
men live, and a Dasorian named Sacner Carfon was councilor then. A
Sacner Carfon is councilor there yet, too, and I beat his boy shooting
a ray, but he beat me all hollow swimming, because he's got web feet
and hands. The Dasorians told Seaton One where to go, and that's how
they found Norlamin, where the oldest and wisest men in the whole
Galaxy live. Rovol, the First of Rays, and Drasnik, the First of
Psychology, and Caslor, the First of Mechanism, and lots of the other
Firsts of Norlamin helped them build things.
"Oh, yes; I almost forgot about the way the Norlaminian scientists
learn things. When one of them gets old he makes a record of his brain
on a tape, and when his son takes his place he just transfers all his
knowledge to the son's brain with a mechanical educator, and then
he--the son, I mean--knows everything that every specialist in that
line ever did find out, and he goes on from there. Rovol and Drasnik
and some of the others gave Seaton One and Crane One copies of their
own brains that way, and that's why they knew so much. And then they
built a projector that would take images of themselves clear across
the Galaxy in a couple of seconds on fifth-order rays, and into the
middle of suns and anywhere else they wanted to be or work, and then
they built _Skylark Three_, a space ship about five kilometers long.
Not so much these days, of course, but she was the biggest thing in the
ether then.
"But by that time the Fenachrone fleet had started out to conquer the
Galaxy, and Seaton One and Crane One and all the other Ones and the
Firsts of Norlamin hunted them up with the projector and blew them
up by exploding their power bars, which were made of copper instead
of uranium, like _Three_ used. And then Dunark blew up the whole
Fenachrone planet, so that they'd never make any more trouble, but one
Fenachrone ship got away and started out for another Galaxy, 'way out
of range of the projector. So Seaton One chased it and caught it out
in space, halfway to the other Galaxy. They had a terrible battle, but
Seaton One blew it up and the picture stopped, and I want to see some
more of the 'Exploits,' mother, please!"
"Very well told, son--I believe that you are old enough to follow
One and his friends of ancient times. You will have them next year,
anyway, in your history classes, and you might as well see them now;
particularly since it is our own family history as well as that of
civilization." The young woman pressed a contact in the arm of her
chair and spoke:
"Central Library of History, please.... Mrs. R. B. Seaton fourteen
seventy. Please put on reel three of the 'Exploits.' Wave point one
nine four six.... Thank you."