Skylark DuQuesne

26. THE TALENT

Seaton had thought that the visit to the Jelmi would be a short one, just long enough to get the “gizmo,” but his own breakthrough put an end to such thinking. It took days to reduce the theory to practice and weeks to build into the Skylark of Valeron the gigantic installations Seaton wanted.

The very enormity of the breakthrough changed all plans, dislocated all schedules. To the Jelmi the fourth dimensional translator had been a phenomenon — a weapon — in itself.

It had extremely valuable applications, and each of them offered a long career of study.

That was enough for them. But to Seaton and Crane and the Norlaminians it was something more than that; it was an effect, a new and unexplored area of knowledge, to be fitted somehow into the known and computed structure of sixth-order perhaps of other-order-effects; and to be used and considered in conjunction with them. It was a theorist’s dream — and an engineer’s nightmare.

Meanwhile, as the male Skylarkers, their Jelm colleagues and the Norlaminians were busily getting done the impossible task of exploring a whole new field of knowledge and transmuting it into actual structures and gigantic machines, the women of the party were exploring the life of an alien race… and having the time of their respective lives doing it. Sitar, of course, was in her element. Bare skin and jewelry she liked. She liked to look at and to feel her mink coat, she said, but she hated to have to wear it; and as for that horrible, scratchy underwear — augh! Hence, now that the personal gravity controls were personal heaters as well, she was really enjoying herself.

Dorothy and Margaret, of course, took to it as though to the manner born. In three days neither of them was any more conscious of nudity than was Sennlloy herself. Even Lotus got used to it. While she could never become an enthusiastic nudist, she said, she did stop blushing. In fact, she almost stopped feeling like blushing.

“Dick,” Dorothy said one evening, “I’ve finally made contact with them on music.”

“Music!” he snorted. “Huh! It sounds to me like a gaggle of tomcats yowling on a back fence.”

She laughed. “It’s unworldly, of course, but a lot of it is beautiful, in a weird sort of way, and they have some magnificent techniques. I’ve been trying everything on them, you know, and they’ve just been sitting on their hands. I’ll give you three guesses as to what I finally hit them with.”

“Strauss waltzes? Jazz? Don’t tell me it was rock-’n’-roll.” She laughed. “Old-fashioned ragtime. Not what they call rag these days, but real syncopation. And polkas. Specifically, three old, old recordings — with improved sound, of course. Pee Wee Hunt’s Twelfth Street Rag, Plehal Brothers’ Beer Barrel Polka, and — of all things! — Glahe Musette’s Hot Pretzels. They simply grabbed the ball and ran all over the place with it. What they came up with is neither rag nor polka — in fact, it’s like nothing ever heard before on any world — but it’s really toe-tingling stuff. Comes the dance tomorrow evening I’ll show you some steps and leaps and bounds that will knock your eyes right out of their sockets.”

“I believe that, if what the gals have been teaching me is any criterion. You have to be a mind-reader, an adagio dancer and a ground-and-lofty tumbler, and have an eidetic memory. But I hope I won’t smash any of the girls’ arches down or kick any of their faces in.”

“Don’t fish, darling. I know how good you are. Ain’t I been practicing with you for lo, these many periods?”

At the dance it became clear that Seaton’s statement was (as, it must be admitted, some of his statements were!) somewhat exaggerated. There was a great deal of acrobatics — Seaton and Sennlloy took advantage of every clear space to perform handspring-and-flip routines in unison. But everything was strictly according to what each person could do and wished to do. Thus, men and women alike danced with the Osnomians as though they were afraid of breaking them in two — which they were. And thus Lotus was, as Margaret had foretold that she would be, the belle of the ball.

Hard-trained gymnast and acrobat that she was, her feet were off the floor most of the time; and before the dance was an hour old she was being tossed delightedly by her partner of the moment over the heads of half a dozen couples to some other man who was signaling for a free catch.

Three days before the Skylark’s departure, Mergon announced that there would be a full-formal farewell party on the evening before the takeoff.

“What are you going to wear, Dick?” Crane asked. Seaton grinned. “Urvan of Urvania’s royal regalia. All of it. You?”

“I’m going as Tarnan, the Karbix of Osnome; with guns, knives, bracelets and legbands complete. And a pair of forty-fives besides.”

“Nice! And I’ll wear my three-fifty-sevens, then, too. If I can find a place to hang them on anywhere.”

And Dorothy and Margaret each wore about eleven quarts of gems.

As the eight guests entered the dining hall — last, as protocol dictated — and the eight hundred Jelmi rose to their feet as one, the spectacle was something that not one of the six Tellurians would ever forget. DuQuesne had seen a few Jelmi in full formal panoply; but here were eight hundred of them!

After the sumptuous meal the tables vanished; music — a spine-tingling, not-too-fast march — swelled into being; and dancing began.

Dancing, if dancing it could be called, that bore no relationship whatever to the boisterous sport of which there had been so much. Each step and motion and genuflection and posture was stately, graceful, poised and studied. The whole was very evidently the finished product of centuries of refinement and perfection of technique.

And at its close each of the eight honored guests was amazed to find that their movements had been so artfully yet inconspicuously guided that each of them had grasped hands once with every Jelm on the floor.

And on the way to their quarters Dorothy, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, pressed Seaton’s arm against her side. “Oh, Dick, wasn’t that simply wonderful? I could cry. Only once in my life before has anything ever hit me as hard as that did.”

Well on the way back to Galaxy DW-427-LU, Seaton was humming happily to himself.

He had gone through everything for the umpteenth time and for the umpteenth time had found everything good.

“Mart,” he said. “We have now got exactly what it takes to make big medicine on those Chloran apes. The only question is, do we wipe ’em completely out now or do we let ’em suffer a while longer? Suffer in durance vile?”

If he had waited a few hours longer to speak so, he would have kept his mouth shut; for that same afternoon the Skylark’s screens again went instantaneously into full powered incandescent defense. The Brain took evasive action at once; but it was five long hours before they got far enough away from the source of that incredible flood of energy so that it became ineffective and was cut off. During that five hours Seaton and Crane observed and computed and analyzed and thought. When it was over, Seaton scanned the Skylark’s reserve supply of power uranium; and his face was grim and hard when he called the others into conference.

“I wouldn’t have believed it possible,” he said flatly. “I can hardly believe it now, after watching it happen. Either they’ve been building stuff twenty-four hours a day ever since we left…” He paused.

“Or they’ve got myriads of myria-watts,” Dunark said into that pause, “that they couldn’t sync in then, but can now.”

“Could be,” Seaton agreed. “Let’s see if we can find anything out. We’re too far away to hold anything, even a planet. But with all of us looking we should be able to see something — and the gizmo can handle eight projections as easily as one. Has anybody got any better ideas?”

Since no one had, they tried it. “Riding the beam” is a weird sensation; a sense of duality of personality that must be experienced to be either appreciated or understood.

The physical body is here; its duplicate in patterns of pure force is there: the two separate entities see and hear and smell and taste and feel two entirely different environments at the same time. It is a thing that takes some getting used to; but all the Skylarkers except Lotus were used to it. And she, as has been intimated, was a quick study.

Seaton could not hold the projections anywhere near any planet; could not hold them even inside a solar system. Even with the vernier controls locked and Seaton’s hands resolutely off, the point of view jumped erratically about in fantastic leaps of hundreds of billions of miles. Not even the huge-and reinforced-mass of the Skylark of Valeron could hold them steady. They swept dizzily into the chromospheres of suns, out into the cold dark of interstellar vacuum, through tenuous gas clouds and past orbiting planets. In theory — if theory meant anything in this unexplored area — the fourth-dimensional “gizmo” should have been able to lock steadily on a target. In practice, they could hardly find a target to lock onto. All eight of the Skylarkers were synced in at once to the master controls, but their best efforts could not keep them even inside a solar system, much less give them the rock-steady fix that would have permitted them to spy on enemy activity.

And the magnitude of error grew. In a minute they were swinging in huge arcs of a parsec or more. In another minute the swings had become so enormous and so random that they could not measure them. Their speed was immense; they swung dizzyingly toward a cepheid variable and it winked at them like a traffic blinker, spun past a flare star and watched its great gouts of flame leap out and fall back.

Five minutes of this insane cavorting made half the party seasick, and they pulled out of projection and returned, gasping and staggering, to the welcome stability of the Skylark.

Seaton stuck it out for half an hour. Then he pushed the “cancel” button.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he growled. “Every time we wiggle a finger or a fly lights on a table it changes the shape of the whole ship. Oh, for something really rigid to build with!” (The eternal complaint of the precise worker in any field!) “But we each saw something. We’ll report in turn.”

Seaton gave a brief description of his own observations. He had seen something, no more than a flicker, but clearly big and Chloran-made. Dunark had spotted what sounded like the same planet-sized mass, but in the system of a G-3 star, as nearly as he could tell; Seaton’s had been an F. The others had seen nothing. Seaton nodded.

“Okay. There are at least two solar systems having fortified Chloran planets, with one more probable. Ideas, anybody?” Crane broke the ensuing silence. “I can’t come up with anything constructive. Just the opposite. There’s something basically wrong here, Dick. As I understand the TammonSeaton Theory, the operators involved here are all in the no-space-no-time field, so that distance does not enter. Hence it is possible in theory, and should be in practice, to place a bomb anywhere in all total space as accurately and as easily as you can touch the end of your nose with the tip of your finger.”

Dorothy whistled, Dunark looked shocked, and the others looked blank. Seaton scowled and said, “Yeah… But with all points in total space coexistent — Gunther’s Universe — how are you going to pick any given one out? What kind of an operator would it take? There’s a hole, Mart, in either the theory or in the reduction…” He paused, frowning in thought.

“Or both,” Crane said.

“Or both,” Seaton agreed. “Okay, let’s skip down and find it.”

They went down and worked with the Brain all the rest of the day; but they did not find the hole. Nor did they find it the next day, or the next. Then Seaton began to pace the floor.

“So, in all probability, another breakthrough is required,” Crane said. “And I can’t help you on that; I’m not the genius type.”

“Neither am I!” Seaton snorted. “In my book one flash-in-the-pan hunch does not make a genius… But here’s another angle, fella. If this thing can be worked out it’ll be so much better than that synchronization idea that it isn’t funny. Also, it might not take the years to work out. Don’t you think it’ll be worth while, Mart, to spend a few days seeing if we can set it up as a problem? See if we can take it out of the pure brainstorm category before we spring it on Rovol?”

“I do indeed,” and Seaton and Crane both went down to the control room and got into their master controllers. However; before that task was finished there was a surprise for Richard Seaton.