Skylark DuQuesne

12. DUQUESNE AND THE JELMI

DUQUESNE, who had not seen enough of the Skylark of Valeron to realize that it was an intergalactic spacecraft, had supposed that Seaton and his party were still aboard Skylark Three, which was of the same size and power as DuQuesne’s own ship, the Capital D. Therefore, when it became clear just what it was with which the Capital D was making rendezvous, to say that DuQuesne was surprised is putting it very mildly indeed.

He had supposed that his vessel was one of the three most powerful superdreadnoughts of space ever built — but this! This thing was not a spaceship at all! In every important respect it was a world. It was big enough to mount and to power offensive and defensive armament of full planetary capability… and if he knew Seaton and Crane half as well as he thought he did, that monstrosity could volatilize a world as easily as it could light a firecracker.

He was second. Again. And such an insignificantly poor second as to he completely out of the competition.

Something would have to be done about this intolerable situation… and finding out what could be done about it would take precedence over everything else until he did find out.

He scowled in thought. That worldlet of a spaceship changed everything — radically. He’d been going to let eager-beaver Seaton grab the ball and run with it while he, DuQuesne, went on about his own business. But now could he take the risk? Ten to one — or a hundred to one? — he couldn’t touch that planetoid’s safety screens with anything he had. But it was worth his while to try…

Energizing the lightest possible fifth- and sixth-order webs, he reached out with his utmost delicacy of touch to feel out the huge globe’s equipment; to find out exactly what it had.

He found out exactly nothing; and in zero time. At the first, almost imperceptible touch of DuQuesne’s web the mighty planetoid’s every defense flared instantaneously into being.

DuQuesne cut his webbing, the defenses vanished, and Seaton said, “No peeking, DuQuesne. Come inside and you can look around all you please, but from outside it can’t be done.”

“I see it can’t. How do I get inside?”

“One of your shuttles or small boats. Go neutral as soon as you clear your outer skin and I’ll bring you in.”

“I’ll do that,” — and as DuQuesne in one of his vessel’s lifeboats traversed the long series of locks through the worldlet’s tremendously thick shell he kept on wrestling with his problem.

No, the idea of letting Seaton be the Big Solo Hero was out like the well-known light.

Seaton and his whole party would have to die. And the sooner the better.

He’d known it all along, really; his thinking had slipped, back there, for sure. With that fireball of a ship — flying base, rather — by the time Seaton got the job done he would be so big that nothing could ever cut him down to size. For that matter, was there anything that could be done about Seaton and his planetoid, even at the size they already were?

There was no vulnerability apparent… on the outside, at least. But there had to be something; some chink or opening; all he had to do was think of it — like the time he and “Baby Doll” Loring had taken over a fully-manned superdreadnought of the Fenachrone.

The smart thing to do, the best thing for Marc C. DuQuesne, would be to join Seaton and work hand in glove with him — for a while. Until he had a bigger, more powerful worldlet than Seaton did and knew more than all the Skylarkers put together. Then blow the Skylark of Valeron and everyone and everything in it into impalpable dust and go on about his own business; letting Civilization worry about itself.

To get away with that, he might have to give his word to act as one of the party, as before.

He never had broken his word… so he wouldn’t give it, this time, unless he had to… but if he had to? If it came to a choice — breaking his word or being Emperor Marc the First of a galaxy, founder of a dynasty the like of which no civilization had ever seen before?

Whatever happened, come hell or high water, Seaton and his crew must and would die.

He, DuQuesne, must and would come out on top!

As soon as DuQuesne’s lifeboat was inside the enormous hollow globe that was the Skylark of Valeron, Seaton brought it to a gentle landing in a dock behind his own home and walked out to the dock with a thought-helmet on his head and its mate in his hand.

DuQuesne opened his lifeboat’s locks and Seaton joined him in the tiny craft’s main compartment.

Face to face, neither man spoke in greeting or offered to shake hands; both knew that there was nothing of friendship between them or ever would be. Nor did DuQuesne wonder why Seaton was meeting him thus: outside and alone. He knew exactly what the women, especially Margaret, thought of him; but such trifles had no effect whatever upon the essence of Marc C. DuQuesne.

Seaton handed DuQuesne the spare headset. DuQuesne put it on and Seaton said in thought, “This, you’ll notice, is no ordinary mechanical educator; not by seven thousand rows of Christmas trees. I suppose you know you’re in the Skylark of Valeron. Study it, and take your time. I’ll give you her prints before you go — if we’re going to have to be allies again you ought to have something better than your Capital D to work with.”

Seaton thought that this surprise might make DuQuesne’s guard slip for an instant, but it didn’t. DuQuesne studied the worldlet intensively for over an hour, then took off his headset and said:

“Nice job, Seaton. Beautiful; especially that tank-chart of the First Universe and that super-computer brain — some parts of which, I see, this headset enables me to operate.

The rest of it, I suppose, is keyed to and in sync with your own mind? No others need apply?”

“That’s right. So, with the prints, you’ll have everything you need, I think. But before you go into detail, I may know a thing that you don’t and that many have a lot of bearing, one place or another. Have you ever heard of any way of getting into or through the fourth dimension except by rotation?”

“No. Not even in theory. How sure are you that there is or can be any other way of doing it?”

“Positive. One that not even the Norlaminians know anything about,” and Seaton gave DuQuesne the full picture and the full story and all the side-bands of thought of everything that had happened to Madlyn Mannis and Charles van der Gleiss.

At the sight of Mergon and Luloy — two of the three Jelmi whom the monstrous alien Klazmon had been comparing with the Fenachrone and with the chlorine-breathing amoeboid Chlorans and with DuQuesne himself — it took every iota of DuQuesne’s iron control to make no sign of the astounding burst of interest he felt; for in one blinding flash of revealment his entire course of action became pellucidly clear. He knew exactly where and what Galaxy DW-427-LU was. He knew how to get Seaton headed toward that galaxy. He knew how to kill Seaton and all his crew and take over the Skylark of Valeron. And, best of all, he knew how to cover his tracks!

Completely unsuspicious of any of these thoughts, Seaton went on, “Now we’re ready, I think, for the fine details of what you found out.”

After giving a precisely detailed report that lasted for twenty minutes, DuQuesne said, “Now as to location. I have a cylindrical chart — a plug-chart, you might call it, of all the galaxies lying close to the line between the point in space where your stasis-capsule whiffed out and the First Galaxy. Those four reels there.” He pointed. “But I have no idea whatever as to where that plug lies in the universe — its universal coordinates. But since you know where you are and I know how I got here, it can be computed — in time.”

“In practically nothing flat,” Seaton said. “As fast as you can run your tapes through your scanner there.” Seaton put his headset back on; DuQuesne followed suit. “They don’t even have to be in order. When the end of the last tape clears the scanner your plug will be in our tank.”

And it was: a long, narrow cylinder of yellowish-green haze.

“Nice; very nice indeed.” DuQuesne paid tribute to performance. “I started my trip right there.” He marked the spot with a tiny purple light. It was a weird sensation, this; working, with that gigantic brain, in that super-gigantic tank-chart, with only a headset and at a distance of miles!

“With my artificial gravity set to exact universal north as straight up,” DuQuesne went on, “I moved along a course as close as possible to the axis of that cylinder to this point here.” The purple point extended itself into a long line of purple light and stopped.

“Klazmon’s tight beam hit me at that point there, coming in from eighty-seven point four one eight degrees starboard and three point nine two six degrees universal south.”

DuQuesne’s mind, terrifically hard held for that particular statement, revealed not the faintest side-band or other indication of what a monstrous lie that was. The figures themselves were very nearly right; but the fact that the beam had actually come in from the port and the north made a tremendous difference. The purple line darted off at almost a right angle to itself and DuQuesne went on without a break:

“You’ll note that there are two galaxies on that line; one about half way out to the rim of the universe—” this galaxy actually was, in Klazmon’s nomenclature, Galaxy DW-427-LU — “the other one clear out; right on the rim itself. Under those conditions no reliable estimate of distance was possible, but if we assume that Klazmon’s power is of the same order of magnitude as ours it would have to be the first one. However, I’m making no attempt to defend that assumption.”

“Sure not; but it’s safe enough, I’d say, for a first approximation. So, making that assumption, that galaxy is where the Realm of the Llurdi is — where the Llurdi and the Jelmi are. Where the folks that built that big battlewagon on the moon came from.”

“While the data do not prove it, by any means, that would be my best-educated guess. But my next one — that that’s where they’re going back to — isn’t based on anything anywhere near that solid. Side-bands only. and not too many or too strong.”

“Yeah, I got some, too. But you’re having first cut at this; go ahead,” Seaton said.

“Okay. First, you have to dig up some kind of an answer to the question of why those Jelmi came such an ungodly long distance away from home to do what was, after all, a small job of work. We know that they didn’t do it just for fun. We know that the whole race of Jelmi is oppressed; we know that those eight hundred rebelled. We’re fairly sure that Earth alone is, right now, putting out more sixth-order emanation than all the rest of the First Universe put together.

“Okay. There were some indications that Tammon worked out the theory of that fourth-dimensional gizmo quite a while back; but they had to come this tremendous distance to find enough high-order emanation to mask their research and development work from His Nibs Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth.

“Now. My argument gets pretty tenuous at this point, but isn’t it a fairly safe bet that, having reduced the theory of said gizmo to practice and having built a ship big enough to handle it like toothpicks, they’d beat it right back home as fast as they could leg it, knock the living hell out of the Llurdi — they could, you know, like shooting fish in a well — and issue a star-spangled Declaration of Independence? It does to me.”

“Check. While I didn’t get there by exactly the same route you did, I arrived at the same destination. So it’s not only got to be investigated; it’s got to be Number One on the agenda. Question; who operates? Your baby or mine?”

“You know the answer to that. I’ll have other fish to fry; quite possibly until after you have the Jelman angle solved.”

“My thought exactly.” Seaton assumed that DuQuesne’s first, most urgent job would be to build a worldlet of his own; DuQuesne did not correct this thought. Seaton went on,

“The other question, then, is do we join forces again, or work independently… or maybe table the question temporarily, until you get yourself organized and we will have made at least a stab at evaluating what this Llurdan menace actually amounts to?”

“The last… I think.” DuQuesne scowled in thought, then his face cleared but at no time was there the slightest seepage of side-bands to the effect that he, DuQuesne, would see to it that Seaton would be dead long before that. Or that he, DuQuesne, did not give a tinker’s damn whether anything was ever done about the Llurdan menace or not.

The two men discussed less important details for perhaps ten minutes longer; then DuQuesne took his leave. And, out in deep space again, with his mighty Capital D again boring a hole through the protesting ether, DuQuesne allowed himself a contemptuous and highly satisfactory sneer.

Back in their own living room, Seaton asked his wife, “Dottie, did you smell anything the least bit fishy about that?”

“Not a thing, Dick. I gave it everything I had, and everything about it rang as true as a silver bell. Did you detect anything?”

“Not a thing — curse it! Even helmet to helmet — as deep as I could go without putting the screws on and blowing everything higher than up — it was flawless. But you’ve got to remember the guy’s case-hardened and diamond finished… But you’ve also got to remember that I came to exactly the same conclusions he did — and completely independently.”

“So every indication is that he is acting decently. He’s been known to, you know.”

“Yeah. It’s possible.” Seaton did not sound at all sold on the possibility. “But I wouldn’t trust that big black ape as far as I could drop-kick him… I’d like awfully well to know whether he’s pitching us a curve or not… and if he is, what the barb-tailed devil it can possibly be… so what we’ll have to do, pet, is keep our eyes peeled and look a little bit out all the time.”

And, still scowling and still scanning and re-scanning every tiniest bit of data for flaws, Seaton set course for Galaxy DW-427-LU, having every reason to believe it the galaxy in which the Realm of the Llurdi lay. Also, although he did not mention this fact even to Dorothy, that course “felt right” to some deeply buried, unknown, and impossible sense in which he did not, could not, and would not believe.

For Seaton did not know that Galaxy DW-427-LU was in fact going to be highly important to him in a way that he could not foresee; if he had known, would not have believed; if he had believed, would not have understood.

For at that moment in time, not even Richard Ballinger Seaton knew what forces he had unleashed with his “cosmic beacon.”