Skylark DuQuesne

16. THE CHLORANS

While much work had been done on a personal gravity control, to provide for the comfort of such visitors as Dunark and Sitar, it was still in the design stage when the Skylark of Valeron neared Galaxy DW-427-LU. Wherefore, when the Skylarkers sat down to dinner that evening in the Seatons’ dining room that room was almost forty per cent undergrav. And wherefore, when DuQuesne’s six hired killers fired practically as one, all six bullets went harmlessly high.

For, at low gravity, two facts of marksmanship — unknown to or not considered by either DuQuesne or any of his men — became dominant. First, a pistol expert compensates automatically for the weight of his weapon. Second, the more expert the marksman, the more automatic this compensation is.

And one shot each was all those would-be killers had. Dunark and Sitar as has been said, went armed even to bed; and Osnomian reflexes were and are the fastest possessed by any known race of man. Each of their machine pistols clicked twice and four American hoodlums died, liquescent brains and comminuted skulls spattering abroad, before they could do anything more than begin to bring their guns back down into line for their second shots.

The other two gangsters also died; if not as quickly or as messily, just as dead. For Shiro and his bride were, for Earthmen, very fast indeed. Their chairs, too, flew away from the table the merest instant after the invaders appeared and both took off in low, flat dives.

Lotus struck her man with her left shoulder; and, using flawlessly the momentum of her mass and speed, swung him around and put her small but very hard knee exactly where it would do the most good. Then, as he doubled over in agony, she put her left arm around his head, seized her left wrist with her right hand, and twisted with all the strength of arms, shoulders, torso and legs — and the man’s neck broke with a snap audible throughout the room.

And Shiro took care of his man with equal dexterity, precision, and speed; and of the invaders, then there were none.

Seaton was a microsecond slower than either the Osnomians or the two Japanese; but he was fast enough to see what was happening, take in the fact that the forces already engaged were enough to handle the six hoodlums and, in mid-flight, divert his leap toward the remote-control headset. He was blindingly certain of one thing: It was Marc DuQuesne who had unleashed these killers on them. And he was equally certain of that fact’s consequence: The truce was off. DuQuesne was to be destroyed.

Wherefore what happened next astonished him even more than if it had occurred at another time.

A strident roar of klaxons filled the room. It was the loudest sound any human had ever heard — without permanent damage; it was calculated to come right up to the threshold of destruction. There was to be no chance that anyone would fail to hear this particular signal.

His hand on the headset, Seaton paused. The bodies of the six gunmen had not yet all reached the floor, but the other Skylarkers were staring too. They had never expected to hear that sound except in test.

It was the dire warning that they were under attack massive attack — attack on a scale and of a persistence that they had never expected to encounter in real combat, with whatever forces.

For that klaxon warning meant that under the fierce impact of the enemy weapons now so suddenly and mercilessly beating down on them the life of the Valeron’s defensive screens was to be measured only in seconds — and very few of them!

“Yipe!” he yelled then. “Control-room fast!” His voice of course went unheard in the clamor of the horns; but his yelling had been purely reflexive, anyway. While uttering the first syllable he was energizing beams of force that hurtled all eight of the party through ultra-high-speed locks that snapped open in front of them and crashed shut behind them — down into the neutral-gray chamber at the base of the giant Brain.

Seaton rammed his head into his master controller and began furiously but accurately to think… and as he sat there, face harsh and white and strained, a vast structure of inoson, interlaced with the heaviest fields of force generable by the Valeron’s mighty engines, came into being around the Brain and the other absolutely vital components of the worldlet’s core.

After a few minutes of fantastic effort Seaton sighed gustily and tried to grin. “We’re holding ’em and we’re getting away,” he said. “But I had to let ’em whittle us down to just about a nub before I could spare power enough to grab a lunch off of them while they were getting a square meal off of us.”

He spoke the exact truth. The attack had been so incredibly violent that in order to counter it he had had to apply the full power of the Valeron, designed to protect a surface of over three million square kilometers, to an area of less than thirty thousand.

“But what was it, Dick?” Dorothy shrieked. “What could it have been possibly?”

“I don’t know. But you realize, don’t you, that it was two separate, unrelated attacks? Not one?”

“Why, I… I don’t think I realize anything yet.”

“Those guns were Colts,” Seaton said, flatly. “Forty-fives. Made in the U.S.A. So that part of it was DuQuesne’s doing. He wanted — still wants — the Valeron. Bad. But those super-energy super-weapons were definitely something else — as sure as God made apples. No possible ship could put that much stuff out, let alone DuQuesne’s Capital D. So the question rises and asks itself—”

“Just a minute, Dick!” Crane broke in. “Even granting so extraordinary a coincidence as two separate attacks—”

“Coincidence, hell!” Seaton snarled. “There is no such thing. And why postulate an impossibility when you’ve got Blackie DuQuesne? He sucked me in, as sure as hell’s a mantrap — you can bet your case buck on that. And he outfoxed himself doing it, for all the tea in China!”

“What do you mean, Dick?” Dorothy demanded. “How could he have?”

“Plain as the nose on… plainer! He got it from somewhere, the son of a—” Seaton bit the noun savagely off — “probably from Klazmon, that Galaxy DW-427-LU up ahead there that we were heading for is full of bad Indians. So he honeyed up to the Jelmi, got that fourth-dimensional gadget off of them and tried to kill us with it. And he would have succeeded, except for the pure luck of our having lowered our gravity so drastically on account of Dunark and Sitar.”

“I see,” Crane said. “And the Indians jumped us when he pulled the trigger — perhaps attracted by his use of the ‘gadget’.”

“That’s my guess, anyway,” Seaton admitted. “DuQuesne thought he was allowing plenty of leeway in both time and space for his operation. But he wasn’t. He had no more idea than we did, Mart, that any such forces as those could possibly be delivered at such extreme range. And one simple, easy lie — the coordinates of the Llurdan galaxy — was all he had to tell me and defend against my probe.”

DuQuesne’s attention was wrenched from his timer by a glare of light from a visiplate.

He glanced at it, his jaw dropping in surprise; then his hands flashed to the controls of his fourth-dimensional transmitter and his six men appeared — four of them gruesomely headless. For a moment all six stood stiffly upright; then, as the supporting forces vanished, all six bodies slumped bonelessly to the floor.

DuQuesne, after making quickly sure that the two were in fact as dead as were the four, shrugged his shoulders and flipped the bodies out into deep space. Then, donning practically opaque goggles, he studied the incandescently glaring plate — to see that the Skylark of Valeron now looked like a minor sun.

Involuntarily he caught his breath. The Valeron’s screens were failing — failing fast.

Course after course, including her mighty zones of force, her every defensive layer was flaring into and through the violet and going black.

DuQuesne clenched his fists; set his teeth so hard that his jaw-muscles stood out in bands and lumps. Anything to put out that much of that kind of stuff would have to be vast indeed. Incredibly vast. Nothing could be that big — nothing even pertaining, as far as DuQuesne knew, to any civilization or culture of the known universe.

Relaxing a little, he assembled a working projection, but before sending it out he paused in thought.

Seaton hadn’t attacked; he wasn’t the type to. He wouldn’t have, even if he could have done so at that range. So the strangers, whoever or whatever they might be, were the aggressors, with a capital “A.” Guilty of unprovoked and reasonless aggression; aggression in the first degree. So what Tammon had told him about that galaxy being dominated by “inimical life-forms” was the understatement of the year. And he, DuQuesne himself, had triggered the attack; the fact that it had followed his own attack so nearly instantly made that a certainty. How had he triggered it? Almost certainly by the use of the fourth-dimensional transmitter…

But how? He didn’t know and he couldn’t guess… and at the moment it didn’t make a lick of difference. He hadn’t used any sixth-order stuff since then and he sure wouldn’t use any now for a good while. If he did anything at all, he’d pussyfoot it, but good. He didn’t want any part of anything that could manhandle the Skylark of Valeron like that.

His Capital D was small enough and far enough back — he hoped! — to avoid detection. No he wouldn’t do a single damn thing except look on.

Fascinated, DuQuesne stared into the brilliance of his plate. All the Valeron’s screens were down now. Even the ultra-powerful innermost zone — the wall shield itself, the last line of defense of the bare synthetic of the worldlet’s outer skin — was going fast. Huge black areas appeared, but they were black only momentarily. Such was the power of that incredible assault that thousands of tons of inoson flared in an instant into ragingly incandescent vapor; literally exploding; exploding with such inconceivable violence as to blast huge masses of solid inoson out of the Valeron’s thick skin and hurl them at frightful speed out into space.

And the Valeron was not fighting back. She couldn’t.

This fact, more than anything else, rocked DuQuesne to the core and gave him the measure of the power at the disposal of the “inimical” entities of that galaxy. For he, knowing the Valeron’s strength, now knew starkly that she was being attacked by forces of a magnitude never even approximated by the wildest imaginings of man.

Scowling in concentration, he kept on watching the disaster. Watched while those utterly unbelievable forces peeled the Valeron down like an onion, layer after kilometer-thick layer. Watched until that for which he had almost ceased to hope finally took place. The Valeron, down now to the merest fraction of her original size burned and blasted down to the veriest core — struck back. And that counterstroke was no love-tap.

The ether and all the subethers seethed and roiled under the vehemence of that devastating bolt of energy.

The Skylark of Valeron vanished from DuQuesne’s plate; that plate went black; and DuQuesne stood up and stretched the kinks out of his muscles. Seaton could of course flit away on the sixth; but he, DuQuesne, couldn’t. Not without being detected and getting burned to a crisp. Against the forces that he had just seen in action against the Skylark of Valeron, DuQuesne’s own Capital D didn’t stand the proverbial chance of the nitrocellulose dog chasing the asbestos cat in hell.

If the Skylark of Valeron had been hurt, half-demolished and reduced to an irreducible core of fighting muscle before it could mount one successful counter-blow against this new and unexpected enemy, then the Capital D would be reduced to its primitive gases.

DuQuesne rapidly, soberly and accurately came to the conclusion that he simply did not own ship enough to play in this league. Not yet…

Wherefore he pussyfooted it away from there at an acceleration of only a few lights; and he put many parsecs of distance between himself and the scene of recent hostilities before he cut in his space-annihilating sixth-order drive and began really to travel. He did not know whether Seaton and his party were surviving; he did not care.

He did not know the identity of the race which had hurt them so badly, so fast.

What DuQuesne knew was that, as a bare minimum, he needed something as big as the Valeron, plus the fourth dimensional tricks he had learned from the Jelmi, plus a highly developed element of caution based on the scene he had just witnessed. And he knew what to do about it, and where to go to do it; wherefore his course was laid for the First Galaxy and Earth.

Hundreds of thousands of parsecs away from the scene of disaster, Seaton cut his drive and began gingerly to relax the terrific power of his defensive screens.

No young turtle, tentatively poking his head out of his shell to see if the marauding gulls had left, was more careful than Seaton. He had been caught off base twice. He did not propose to let it happen again.

Another man might have raged and sworn at DuQuesne for his treachery; or panicked at the fear inspired by the fourth-dimensional transmitter DuQuesne had come up with, or the massive blow that had fallen from nowhere. Seaton did not. The possibility — no, the virtual certainty of treachery from DuQuesne he had accepted and discounted in the first second of receiving DuQuesne’s distress call. He had accepted the risks, and grimly calculated that in any encounter, however treacherous, DuQuesne would fail; and he had been right. The sudden attack from out of nowhere, however, was something else again. What made it worse was not that Seaton had no idea of its source or reason. The thing that caused his eyes to narrow, his face to wear a hard, thoughtful scowl was that he in fact had a very good idea indeed — and he didn’t like it.

But for the moment they were free. Seaton checked and double-checked every gauge and warning device and nodded at last.

“Good,” he said then, “I was more than half expecting a kick in the pants, even way out here. The next item on our agenda is a council of war; so cluster ’round, everybody, and get comfortable.” He turned control over to the Brain, sat down beside Dorothy, stoked his pipe, and went on:

“Point one; DuQuesne. He got stuff somewhere — virtually certainly from the Jelmi — at least the fourth-dimensional transmitter and we don’t know what else, that he didn’t put out anything about. Naturally. And he sucked me in like Mary’s little lamb. Also naturally. At hindsight I’m a blinding flash and a deafening report. I’ve got a few glimmerings, but you’re the brain, Mart; so give out with analysis and synthesis.”

Crane did so; covering the essential points and concluding: “Since the plug-chart was accurate, the course was accurate. Therefore, besides holding back vital information, DuQuesne lied about one or both of two things: the point at which the signal was received and the direction from which it came.”

“Well, you can find out about that easily enough,” Dorothy said. “You know, that dingus you catch light-waves with, so as to see exactly what went on years and years ago. Or wouldn’t it work, this far away?”

Seaton nodded. “Worth a try. Dunark?”

“I say go after DuQuesne!” the Osnomian said viciously. “Catch him and blow him and his Captial D to hellangone up!”

Seaton shook his head. “I can’t buy that — at the moment. Now that he’s flopped again at murder, I don’t think he’s of first importance any more. You see, I haven’t mentioned Point Two yet, which is a datum I didn’t put into the pot because I wanted to thrash Point One out first. It’s about who the enemy really are. When I finally got organized to slug them a good one back, I followed the shot. They knew they’d been nudged, believe me. So much so that in the confusion I got quite a lot of information. They’re Chlorans. Or, if not exactly like the Chlorans of Chlora, that we had all the trouble with, as nearly identical as makes no difference.”

“Chlorans!” Dorothy and Margaret shrieked as one, and five minds dwelt briefly upon that hideous and ultimately terrible race of amoeboid monstrosities who, living in an atmosphere of gaseous chlorine, made it a point to enslave or to destroy all the humanity of all the planets they could reach.

All five remembered, very vividly, the starkly unalloyed ferocity with which one race of Chlorans had attacked the planet Valeron; near which the Skylark of Valeron had been built and after which she had been named. They remembered the horrifyingly narrow margin by which those Chlorans had been defeated. They also remembered that the Chlorans had not even then been slaughtered. The Skylarkers had merely enclosed the planet Chlora in a stasis of time and sent it back — on a trip that would last, for everyone and everything outside that stasis, some four hundred years — to its own native solar system, from which it had been torn by a near-collision of suns in the long-gone past.

The Skylarkers should have blown Chlora into impalpable and invisible debris, and the men of the party had wanted to do just that, but Dorothy and Margaret and the essentially gentle Valeronians had been dead set against genocide.

Dorothy broke the short silence. “But how could they be, Dick?” she asked. “’Way out here? But of course, if we human beings could do it — ?” She paused.

“But of course,” Seaton agreed sourly. “Why not? Why shouldn’t they be as widespread as humanity is? Or even more so, if they have killed enough of us off? And why shouldn’t they be smarter than those others were? Look at how much we’ve learned in just months, not millennia, of time.”

Another and longer silence fell; which was broken by Seaton. “Well, two things are certain. They’re rabidly antisocial and they’ve got — at the moment — a lot more stuff than we have. They’ve got it to sell, like farmers have hay. It’s also a dead-sure cinch that we can’t do a thing — not anything — without a lot more data than we have now. It’ll take all the science of Norlamin and maybe a nickel’s worth besides to design and build what we’ll have to have. And they can’t go it blind. Nobody can. And we all know enough about Chlorans to know that we won’t get one iota or one of Peg’s smidgeons of information out of them by remote control. At the first touch of any kind of a high-order feeler they’ll bat our ears down… to a fare-thee-well. However, other means are available.”

And he glanced at a monitor where for some minutes a display had shown a planet of the galaxy from which their recent attacker had come.

During this fairly long — for Seaton — speech, and during the silence that had preceded it, two things had been happening.

First the controlling Brain of the ship had been carrying out a program of Seaton’s. Star by star, system by system, it had been scanning the components of the nearest galaxy to the scene of their encounter. It had in fact verified Seaton’s conclusions: the galaxy was dominated by Chlorans. Their works were everywhere. But it had also supported a — not a conclusion; a hope, more accurately — that Seaton had hardly dared put in words.

Although the Chlorans ruled this galaxy, there were oxygen-breathing, warm-blooded races in it too — serfs of the Chlorans of course, but nevertheless occupying their own planets — and it was one such planet that the Brain had finally selected and was now displaying on its monitor.

The other thing was that the auburn-haired beauty who was Mrs. Richard Ballinger Seaton had been eyeing her husband steadily. At first she had merely looked at him thoughtfully. Then look and mien had become heavily tinged, first with surprise and then with doubt and then with wonder; a wonder that turned into an incredulity that became more and more incredulous. Until finally, unable to hold herself in any longer, she broke in on him.

“Dick!” she cried. “You wouldn’t! You know you wouldn’t!”

“I wouldn’t? If not, who… ?” Changing his mind between two words, Seaton cut the rest of the sentence sharply off; shrugged his shoulders; and grinned, somewhat shamefacedly, back at her.

At this point Crane, who had been looking first at one of them and then at the other, put in: “I realize, Dorothy, that you and Dick don’t need either language or headsets to communicate with each other, but how about the rest of us? What, exactly, is it that you’re not as sure as you’d like to be that he wouldn’t do?”

Dorothy opened her mouth to reply, but Seaton beat her to it. “What I would do — and will because I’ll have to; because it’s my oyster and nobody else’s — is, after we sneak up as close as we can without touching off any alarms, take a landing craft and go get the data we absolutely have to have in absolutely the only way it can be gotten.”

“And that’s what I most emphatically do not like!” Dorothy blazed. “Dick Seaton, you are not going to land on an enslaved planet, alone and unarmed and afoot, as an investigating Committee of One! For one thing, we simply don’t have the time! Do we? I mean, poor old Valeron is simply a wreck! We’ve got to go somewhere and—”

But Seaton was shaking his head. “The Brain can handle that by itself,” he said. “All it needs is time. As a matter of fact, you’ve put your finger on a first-rate reason for my going in, alone. There’s simply not much else we can do until the Valeron is back in shape again.”

“Not your going in.” Dorothy blazed. “Flatly, positively no.”

Again Seaton shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t say I’m madly in love with the idea myself, but who’s any better qualified? Or as well? Because I know that you, Dottie, aren’t the type to advocate us sitting on our hands and letting them have all the races of humanity, wherever situate. So who?”

“Me,” Shiro said, promptly if ungrammatically. “Not as good, but good enough. You can tell me what data you want and I can and will get it, just as well as… ”

“Bounce back, both of you, you’ve struck a rubber fence!” Dunark snapped. “That job’s for Sitar and me.” The green-skinned princess waved her pistol in the air and nodded her head enthusiastically and her warlord went on, “You and I being brain-brothers, Dick, I’d know exactly what you want. And she and I would blast—”

“Yeah, that’s what I know damn well you’d do.” Seaton broke in, only to be interrupted in turn by Crane — who was not in the habit of interrupting anyone even once, to say nothing of twice.

“Excuse me, everyone,” he said, “but you’re all wrong, I think. My thought at the moment, Dick, is that your life is altogether too important to the project as a whole to be risked as you propose risking it. As to you others, with all due respect for your abilities, I do not believe that either of you is as well qualified for this kind of an investigation as I am—”

Margaret leaped to her feet in protest, but Crane went quietly on: ” — in either experience or training. However, we should not decide that point yet — or at all, for that matter. We are all too biased. I therefore suggest, Dick, that we feed the Brain everything, we have and keep on feeding it everything pertinent we can get hold of, until it has enough data to make that decision for us.”

“That makes sense,” Seaton said, and both Dorothy and Margaret nodded — but both with very evident reservations. “The first time anything has made sense today!”