_Skylark Three_, the mightiest space ship that had ever lifted her
stupendous mass from any planet known to the humanity of this, the
First Galaxy, was hurtling onward through the absolute vacuum of
intergalactic space. Around her there was nothing--no stars, no suns,
no meteorites, no smallest particle of cosmic dust. The First Galaxy
lay so far behind her that even its vast lens showed only as a dimly
perceptible point of light in the visiplates.
The Fenachrone space chart placed other Galaxies to right of and
to left of, above and below, the flying cruiser; but they were so
infinitely distant that their light could scarcely reach the eyes of
the Terrestrial wanderers. Equally far from them, or farther, but in
their line of flight, lay the distant Galaxy which was their goal.
So prodigious had been the velocity of the _Skylark_, when the last
vessel of the Fenachrone had been destroyed, that she could not
possibly have been halted until she had covered more than half the
distance separating that Galaxy from our own; and Seaton and Crane
had agreed that this chance to visit it was altogether too good to
be missed. Therefore the velocity of their vessel had been augmented
rather than lessened, and for uneventful days and weeks she had bored
her terrific way through the incomprehensible nothingness of the
interuniversal void.
After a few days of impatient waiting and of eager anticipation,
Seaton had settled down into the friendly and companionable routine
of the flight. But inaction palled upon his vigorous nature and,
physical outlet denied, he began to delve deeper and deeper into the
almost-unknown, scarcely plumbed recesses of his new mind--a mind
stored with the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations of
the Rovol and of the Drasnik; generations of specialists in research in
two widely separated fields of knowledge.
Thus it was that one morning Seaton prowled about aimlessly in brown
abstraction, hands jammed deep into pockets, the while there rolled
from his villainously reeking pipe blue clouds of fumes that might have
taxed sorely a less efficient air-purifier than that boasted by the
_Skylark_; prowled, suddenly to dash across the control room to the
immense keyboards of his fifth-order projector.
There he sat, hour after hour; hands setting up incredibly complex
integrals upon its inexhaustible supply of keys and stops; gray eyes
staring unseeingly into infinity; he sat there, deaf, dumb, and blind
to everything except the fascinatingly fathomless problem upon which he
was so diligently at work.
Dinner time came and went, then supper time, then bedtime; and Dorothy
strode purposefully toward the console, only to be led away, silently
and quietly, by the watchful Crane.
"But he hasn't come up for air once to-day, Martin!" she protested,
when they were in Crane's private sitting room. "And didn't you tell
me yourself, that time back in Washington, to make him snap out of it
whenever he started to pull off one of his wild marathon splurges of
overwork?"
"Yes; I did," Crane replied thoughtfully; "but circumstances here
and now are somewhat different from what they were there and then. I
have no idea of what he is working out, but it is a problem of such
complexity that in one process he used more than seven hundred factors,
and it may well be that if he were to be interrupted now he could never
recover that particular line of thought. Then, too, you must remember
that he is now in such excellent physical condition that he is in no
present danger. I would say to let him alone, for a while longer, at
least."
"All right, Martin, that's fine! I hated to disturb him, really--I
would hate most awfully to derail an important train of thought."
"Yes; let him concentrate a while," urged Margaret. "He hasn't indulged
in one of those fits for weeks--Rovol wouldn't let him. I think it's a
shame, too, because when he dives in like that after something he comes
up with it in his teeth--when he really thinks, he does things. I don't
see how those Norlaminians ever got anything done, when they always did
their thinking by the clock and quit promptly at quitting time, even if
it was right in the middle of an idea."
"Dick can do more in an hour, the way he is working now, than Rovol of
Rays could ever do in ten years!" Dorothy exclaimed with conviction.
"I'm going in to keep him company--he's more apt to be disturbed by my
being gone than by having me there. Better come along, too, you two,
just as though nothing was going on. We'll give him an hour or so yet,
anyway."
The trio then strolled back into the control room.
But Seaton finished his computations without interruption. Some time
after midnight he transferred his integrated and assembled forces to an
anchoring plunger, arose from his irksome chair, stretched mightily,
and turned to the others, tired but triumphant.
"Folks, I think I've got something!" he cried. "Kinda late, but it'll
take only a couple of minutes to test it out. I'll put these nets over
your heads, and then you all look into that viewing cabinet over there."
* * * * *
Over his own head and shoulders Seaton draped a finely woven screen
of silvery metal, connected by a stranded cable to a plug in his
board; and after he had similarly invested his companions he began to
manipulate dials and knobs.
As he did so the dark space of the cabinet became filled with a soft
glow of light--a glow which resolved itself into color and form, a
three-dimensional picture. In the background towered a snow-capped,
beautifully symmetrical volcanic mountain; in the foreground were to
be seen cherry trees in full bloom surrounding a small structure of
unmistakable architecture; and through their minds swept fleeting
flashes of poignant longing, amounting almost to nostalgia.
"Good heavens, Dick, what have you done now?" Dorothy broke out. "I
feel so homesick that I want to cry--and I don't care a bit whether I
ever see Japan again or not!"
"These nets aren't perfect insulators, of course, even though I've got
them grounded. There's some leakage. They'd have to be solid to stop
all radiation. Leaks both ways, of course, so we're interfering with
the picture a little, too; but there's some outside interference that I
can't discover yet."
Seaton thought aloud, rather than explained, as he shut off the power.
"Folks, we _have_ got something! That's the sixth-order pattern, and
_thought_ is in that level! Those were _thoughts_--Shiro's thoughts."
"But he's asleep, surely, by this time," Dorothy protested.
"Sure he is, or he wouldn't be thinking that kind of thoughts. It's his
subconscious--he's contented enough when he's awake."
"How did you work it out?" asked Crane. "You said, yourself, that it
might well take lifetimes of research."
"It would, ordinarily. Partly a hunch, partly dumb luck, but mostly a
combination of two brains that upon Norlamin would ordinarily never
touch the same subject anywhere. Rovol, who knows everything there is
to be known about rays, and Drasnik, probably the greatest authority
upon the mind that ever lived, both gave me a good share of their
knowledge; and the combination turned out to be hot stuff, particularly
in connection with this fifth-order keyboard. Now we can really do
something!"
"But you had a sixth-order detector before," Margaret put in. "Why
didn't we touch it off by thinking?"
"Too coarse--I see that, now. It wouldn't react to the extremely
slight power of a thought-wave; only to the powerful impulses from a
bar or from cosmic radiation. But I can build one now that will react
to thought, and I'm going to; particularly since there was a little
interference on that picture that I couldn't quite account for." He
turned back to the projector.
"You're coming to bed," declared Dorothy with finality. "You've done
enough for one day."
She had her way, but early the next morning Seaton was again at the
keyboard, wearing a complex headset and driving a tenuous fabric of
force far out into the void. After an hour or so he tensed suddenly,
every sense concentrated upon something vaguely perceptible; something
which became less and less nebulous as his steady fingers rotated
micrometric dials in infinitesimal arcs.
"Come get a load of this, folks!" he called at last. "Mart, what would
a planet--an inhabited planet, at that--be doing 'way out here, Heaven
only knows how many light-centuries away from the nearest Galaxy?"
* * * * *
The three donned headsets and seated themselves in their chairs in
the base of the great projector. Instantly they felt projections of
themselves hurled an incomprehensible distance out into empty space.
But that weird sensation was not new; each was thoroughly accustomed to
the feeling of duality incident to being in the _Skylark_ in body, yet
with a duplicate mentality carried by the projection to a point many
light-years distant from his corporeal substance. Their mentalities,
thus projected, felt a fleeting instant of unthinkable velocity, then
hung poised above the surface of a small but dense planet, a planet
utterly alone in that dreadful void.
[Illustration: _Dorothy, Margaret and Crane donned headsets and seated
themselves in the base of the great projector._]
But it was like no other planet with which the Terrestrial wanderers
were familiar. It possessed neither air nor water, and it was entirely
devoid of topographical features. It was merely a bare, mountainless,
depthless sphere of rock and metal. Though sunless, it was not dark; it
glowed with a strong, white light which emanated from the rocky soil
itself. Nothing animate was visible, nor was there a sign that any form
of life, animal or vegetable, had ever existed there.
"You can talk if you want to," Seaton observed, noticing that Dorothy
was holding back by main strength a torrent of words. "They can't hear
us--there's no audio in the circuit."
"What do you mean by 'they,' Dick?" she demanded. "You said it was an
inhabited planet. That one isn't inhabited. It never was, and it can't
possibly be, _ever!_"
"When I spoke I thought that it was inhabited, in the ordinary sense
of the word, but I see now that it isn't," he replied, quietly and
thoughtfully. "But they were there a minute ago, and they'll probably
be back. Don't kid yourself, Dimples. It's inhabited, all right, and
by somebody we don't know much--or rather, by something that we knew
once--altogether too well."
"The pure intellectuals," Crane stated, rather than asked.
"Yes; and that accounts for the impossible location of the planet, too.
They probably materialized it out there, just for the exercise. There,
they're coming back. Feel 'em?"
Vivid thoughts, for the most part incomprehensible, flashed from the
headsets into their minds; and instantly the surroundings of their
projections changed. With the speed of thought a building materialized
upon that barren ground, and they found themselves looking into a
brilliantly lighted and spacious hall. Walls of alabaster, giving
forth a living, almost a fluid light. Tapestries, whose fantastically
intricate designs changed from moment to moment into ever new and
ever more amazingly complex delineations. Gem-studded fountains,
whose plumes and gorgeous sprays of dancing liquid obeyed no Earthly
laws of mechanics. Chairs and benches, writhing, changing in form
constantly and with no understandable rhythm. And in that hall were the
intellectuals--the entities who had materialized those objects from the
ultimately elemental radiant energy of intergalactic space.
Their number could not even be guessed. Sometimes only one was
visible, sometimes it seemed that the great hall was crowded with
them--ever-changing shapes varying in texture from the tenuousness of a
wraith to a density greater than that of any Earthly metal.
So bewilderingly rapid were the changes in form that no one appearance
could be intelligently grasped. Before one outlandish and unearthly
shape could really be perceived it had vanished--had melted and
flowed into one entirely different in form and in sense, but one
equally monstrous to Terrestrial eyes. Even if grasped mentally, no
one of those grotesque shapes could have been described in language,
so utterly foreign were they to all human knowledge, history, and
experience.
And now, the sixth-order projections in perfect synchronism, the
thoughts of the Outlanders came clearly into the minds of the four
watchers--thoughts cold, hard, and clear, diamondlike in polish and in
definition; thoughts with the perfection of finish and detail possible
only to the fleshless mentalities who for countless millions of years
had done little save perfect themselves in the technique of pure and
absolute thinking.
The four sat tense and strained as the awful import of those thoughts
struck home; then, at another thought of horribly unmistakable meaning,
Seaton snapped off his power and drove lightning fingers over his
keyboard, while the two women slumped back, white-faced and trembling,
into their seats.
"I thought it was funny, back there that time, that that fellow
couldn't integrate in the ninety-seven dimensions necessary to
dematerialize us, and I didn't know anything then." Seaton, his
preparations complete, leaned back in his operator's seat at the
console. "He was just kidding us--playing with us, just to see what
we'd do, and as for not being able to think his way back--phooie!
He can think his way through ninety-seven universes if he wants to.
They're certainly extragalactic, and very probably extrauniversal, and
the one that played with us could have dematerialized us instantly if
he had felt like it."
"That is apparent, now," Crane conceded. "They are quite evidently
patterns of sixth-order forces, and as such have a velocity of anything
they want to use. They absorb force from the radiations in free space,
and are capable of diverting and of utilizing those forces in any
fashion they may choose. They would of course be eternal, and, so far
as I can see, they would be indestructible. What are we going to do
about it, Dick? What _can_ we do about it?"
"We'll do _something_!" Seaton gritted. "We're not as helpless as they
think we are. I've got out five courses of six-ply screen, with full
interliners of zones of force. I've got everything blocked, clear down
to the sixth order. If they can think their way through those screens
they're better than I think they are, and if they try anything else
we'll do our darnedest to block that, too--and with this Norlaminian
keyboard and all the uranium we've got that'll be a mighty lot, believe
me! After that last crack of theirs they'll hunt for us, of course,
and I'm pretty sure they'll find us. I thought so--here they are!
Materialization, huh? I told him once that if he'd stick to matter that
I could understand, I'd give him a run for his money, and I wasn't
kidding him, either."