XXI.
The four Terrestrials had discussed at some length the subject of Chlora and her outlandish population.
"It looks as though you were perched upon the horns of a first-class dilemma," Dorothy remarked at last. "If you let them alone there is no telling what harm they will do to these people here, and yet it would be a perfect shame to kill them all—they can't help being what they are. Do you suppose you can figure a way out of it, Dick?"
"Maybe—I've got a kind of a hunch, but it hasn't jelled into a workable idea yet. It's tied in with the sixth-order projection that we'll have to have, anyway, to find our way back home with. Until we get that working I guess we'll just let the amœbuses stew in their own juice."
"Well, and then what?" Dorothy prompted.
"I told you it's nebulous yet, with a lot of essential details yet to be filled in—" Seaton paused, then went on, doubtfully: "It's pretty wild—I don't know whether—"
"Now you must tell us about it, Dick," Margaret urged.
"I'll say you've got to," Dorothy agreed. "You've had a lot of ideas wild enough to make any sane creature's head spin around in circles before this, but not one of them was so hair raising that you were backward in talking about it. This one must be the prize brain storm of the universe—spill it to us!"
"All right, but remember that it's only half baked and that you asked for it. I'm doping out a way of sending them back to their own Solar System, planet and all."
"What!" exclaimed Margaret.
Dorothy simply whistled—a long, low whistle highly eloquent of incredulity.
"Maintenance of temperature? Time? Power? Control?" Crane, the imperturbable, picked out unerringly the four key factors of the stupendous feat.
"Your first three objections can be taken care of easily enough," Seaton replied positively. "No loss of temperature is possible through a zone of force—our own discovery. We can stop time with a stasis—we learned that from watching those four-dimensional folks work. The power of cosmic radiation is practically infinite and eternal—we learned how to use that from the pure intellectuals. Control is the sticker, since it calls for computations and calculations at present impossible; but I believe that when we get our mechanical brain done, it will be able to work out even such a problem as that."
"What d'you mean, mechanical brain?" demanded Dorothy.
"The thing that is going to run our sixth-order projector," Seaton explained. "You see, it'll be altogether too big and too complicated to be controlled manually, and thought—human thought, at least—is on one band of the sixth order. Therefore the logical thing to do is to build an artificial brain capable of thinking on all bands of the order instead of only one, to handle the whole projector. See?"
"No," declared Dorothy promptly, "but maybe I will, though, when I see it work. What's next on the program?"
"Well, it's going to be quite a job to build that brain and we'd better be getting at it, since without it there'll be no Skylark Four—"
"Dick, I object!" Dorothy protested vigorously. "The Skylark of Space was a nice name—"
"Sure, you'd think so, since you named her yourself," interrupted Seaton in turn, with his disarming grin.
"Keep still a minute, Dickie, and let me finish. Skylark Two was pretty bad, but I stood it; and by gritting my teeth all out of shape I did manage to keep from squawking about Skylark Three, but I certainly am not going to stand for Skylark Four. Why, just think of giving a name like that to such a wonderful thing as she is going to be—as different as can be from anything that has ever been dreamed of before—just as though she were going to be simply one more of a long series of cup-challenging motor boats or something! Why, it's—it's just too perfectly idiotic for words!"
"But she's got to be some kind of a Skylark, Dot—you know that."
"Yes, but give her a name that means something—that sounds like something. Name her after this planet, say—Skylark of Valeron—how's that?"
"O.K. by me. How about it, Peg? Mart?"
The Cranes agreed to the suggestion with enthusiasm and Seaton went on:
"Well, an onion by any other name would smell as sweet, you know, and it's going to be just as much of a job to build the Skylark of Valeron as it would have been to build Skylark Four. Therefore, as I have said before and am about to say again, we'd better get at it."
The fifth-order projector was moved to the edge of the city, since nowhere within its limits was there room for the structure to be built, and the two men seated themselves at its twin consoles and their hands flew over its massed banks of keyboards. For a few minutes nothing happened; then on the vast, level plain before them—a plain which had been a lake of fluid lava a few weeks before—there sprang into being an immense foundation-structure of trussed and latticed girder frames of inoson, the hardest, strongest, and toughest form of matter possible to molecular structure. One square mile of ground it covered and it was strong enough, apparently, to support a world.
When the foundation was finished, Seaton left the framework to Crane, while he devoted himself to filling the interstices and compartments as fast as they were formed. He first built one tiny structure of coils, fields, and lenses of force—one cell of the gigantic mechanical brain which was to be. He then made others, slightly different in tune, and others, and others.
He then set forces to duplicating these cells, forces which automatically increased in number until they were making and setting five hundred thousand cells per second, all that his connecting forces could handle. And everywhere, it seemed, there were projectors, fields of force, receptors and converters of cosmic energy, zones of force, and many various shaped lenses and geometric figures of neutronium incased in sheaths of faidon.
From each cell led tiny insulated wires, so fine as to be almost invisible, to the "nerve centers" and to one of the millions of projectors. From these in turn ran other wires, joining together to form larger and larger strands until finally several hundred enormous cables, each larger than a man's body, reached and merged into an enormous, glittering, hemispherical, mechano-electrical inner brain.
For forty long Valeronian days—more than a thousand of our Earthly hours—the work went on ceaselessly, day and night. Then it ceased of itself and there dangled from the center of the glowing, gleaming hemisphere a something which is only very vaguely described by calling it either a heavily wired helmet or an incredibly complex headset. It was to be placed over Seaton's head, it is true—it was a headset, but one raised to the millionth power.
It was the energizer and controller of the inner brain, which was in turn the activating agency of that entire cubic mile of as yet inert substance, that assemblage of thousands of billions of cells, so soon to become the most stupendous force for good ever to be conceived by the mind of man.
When that headset appeared Seaton donned it and sat motionless. For hour after hour he sat there, his eyes closed, his face white and strained, his entire body eloquent of a concentration so intense as to be a veritable trance. At the end of four hours Dorothy came up resolutely, but Crane waved her back.
"This is far and away the most crucial point of the work, Dorothy," he cautioned her gravely. "While I do not think that anything short of physical violence could distract his attention now, it is best not to run any risk of disturbing him. An interruption now would mean that everything would have to be done over again from the beginning."
Something over an hour later Seaton opened his eyes, stretched prodigiously, and got up. He was white and trembling, but tremendously relieved and triumphant.
"Why, Dick, what have you been doing? You look like a ghost!" Dorothy was now an all solicitous wife.
"I've been thinking, and if you don't believe that it's hard work you'd better try it some time! 'Sall right, though, I won't have to do it any more—got a machine to do my thinking for me now."
"Oh, is it all done?"
"Nowhere near, but it's far enough along so that it can finish itself. I've just been telling it what to do."
"Telling it! Why, you talk as though it were human!"
"Human? It's a lot more than that. It can outthink and outperform even those pure intellectuals—'and that,' as the poet feelingly remarked, 'is going some'! And if you think that riding in that fifth-order projector was a thrill, wait until you see what this one can do. Think of it"—even the mind that had conceived the thing was awed—"it is an extension of my own brain, using waves that traverse even intergalactic distances practically instantaneously. With it I can see anything I want to look at, anywhere; can hear anything I want to hear. It can build, make, do, or perform anything that my brain can think of."
"That is all true, of course," Crane said slowly, his sober mien dampening Dorothy's ardor instantly, "but still—I can not help wondering—" He gazed at Seaton thoughtfully.
"I know it, Mart, and I'm working up my speed as fast as I possibly can," Seaton answered the unspoken thought, rather than the words. "But let them come—we'll take 'em. I'll have everything on the trips, ready to spring."
"What are you two talking about?" Dorothy demanded.
"Mart pointed out to me the regrettable fact that my mental processes are in the same class as the proverbial molasses in January, or as a troop of old and decrepit snails racing across a lawn. I agreed with him, but added that I would have my thoughts all thunk up ahead of time when the pure intellectuals tackle us—which they certainly will."
"Slow!" she exclaimed. "When you planned the whole Skylark of Valeron and nobody knows what else, in five hours?"
"Yes, dear, slow. Remember when we first met our dear departed friend Eight, back in the original Skylark? You saw him materialize exact duplicates of each of our bodies, clear down to the molecular structures of our chemistry, in less than one second, from a cold, standing start. Compared to that job, the one I have just done is elementary. It took me over five hours—he could have done it in nothing flat.
"However, don't let it bother you too much. I'll never be able to equal their speed, since I'll not live enough millions of years to get the required practice, but our being material gave us big advantages in other respects that Mart isn't mentioning because, as usual, he is primarily concerned with our weaknesses—yes? No?"
"Yes; I will concede that being material does yield advantages which may perhaps make up for our slower rate of thinking," Crane at last conceded.
"Hear that? If he admits that much, you know that we're as good as in, right now," Seaton declared. "Well, while our new brain is finishing itself up, we might as well go back to the hall and chase the Chlorans back where they belong—the Brain worked out the equations for me this morning."
From the ancient records of Valeron, Radnor and the Bardyle had secured complete observational data of the cataclysm, which had made the task of finding the present whereabouts of the Chlorans' original sun a simple task. The calculations and computations involved in the application of forces of precisely the required quantities to insure the correct final orbit were complex in the extreme; but, as Seaton had foretold, they had presented no insurmountable difficulties to the vast resources of the Brain.
Therefore, everything in readiness, the two Terrestrial scientists surrounded the inimical planet with a zone of force, so that it would lose none of its heat during the long journey; and with a stasis of time, so that its people would not know of anything that was happening to them. They then erected force-control stations around it, adjusted with such delicacy and precision that they would direct the planet into the exact orbit it had formerly occupied around its parent sun. Then, at the instant of correct velocity and position, the control stations would go out of existence and the forces would disappear.
As the immense ball of dazzlingly opaque mirror which now hid the unwanted world swung away with ever-increasing velocity, the Bardyle, who had watched the proceedings in incredulous wonder, heaved a profound sigh of relaxation.
"What a relief—what a relief!" he exclaimed.
"How long will it take?" asked Dorothy curiously.
"Quite a while—something over four hundred years of our time. But don't let it gnaw on you—they won't know a thing about it. When the forces let go they'll simply go right on, from exactly where they left off, without realizing that any time at all has lapsed—in fact, for them, no time at all shall have lapsed. All of a sudden they will find themselves circling around a different sun, that's all.
"If their old records are clear enough they may be able to recognize it as their original sun and they'll probably do a lot of wondering as to how they got back there. One instant they were in a certain orbit around this sun here, the next instant they will be in another orbit around an entirely different sun! They'll know, of course, that we did it, but they'll have a sweet job figuring out how and what we did—some of it is really deep stuff. Also, they will be a few hundred years off in their time, but since nobody in the world will know it, it won't make any difference."
"How perfectly weird!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Just think of losing a four-hundred-year chunk right out of the middle of your life and not even knowing it!"
"I would rather think of the arrest of development," meditated Crane. "Of the opportunity of comparing the evolution of the planets already there with that of the returned wanderer."
"Yeah, it would be interesting—'sa shame we won't be alive then," Seaton responded, "but in the meantime we've got a lot of work to do for ourselves. Now that we've got this mess straightened out I think we had better tell these folks good-by, get into Two, and hop out to where Dot's Skylark of Valeron is going to materialize."
The farewell to the people of Valeron was brief, but sincere.
"This is in no sense good-by," Crane concluded. "By the aid of these newly discovered forces of the sixth order there shall soon be worked out a system of communication by means of which all the inhabited planets of the Galaxies shall be linked as closely as are now the cities of any one world."
Skylark Two shot upward and outward, to settle into an orbit well outside that of Valeron. Seaton then sent his projection back to the capital city, fitted over his imaged head the controller of the inner brain, and turned to Crane with a grin.
"That's timing it, old son—she finished herself up less than an hour ago. Better cluster around and watch this, folks, it's going to be good."
At Seaton's signal the structure which was to be the nucleus of the new space traveler lifted effortlessly into the air its millions of tons of dead weight and soared, as lightly as little Two had done, out into the airless void. Taking up a position a few hundred miles away from the Terrestrial cruiser, it shot out a spherical screen of force to clear the ether of chance bits of débris. Then inside that screen there came into being a structure of gleaming inoson, so vast in size that to the startled onlookers it appeared almost of planetary dimensions.
"Good heavens—it's stupendous!" Dorothy exclaimed. "What did you boys make it so big for—just to show us you could, or what?"
"Hardly! She's just as small as she can be and still do the work. You see, to find our own Galaxy we will have to project a beam to a distance greater than any heretofore assigned diameter of the universe, and to control it really accurately its working base and the diameter of its hour and declination-circles would each have to be something like four light-years long. Since a ship of that size is of course impracticable, Mart and I did some figuring and decided that with circles one thousand kilometers in diameter we could chart Galaxies accurately enough to find the one we're looking for—if you think of it, you'll realize that there are a lot of hundredth-millimeter marks around the circumference of circles of that size—and that they would probably be big enough to hold a broadcasting projection somewhere near a volume of space as large as that occupied by the Green System. Therefore we built the Skylark of Valeron just large enough to contain those thousand-kilometer circles."
As Skylark Two approached the looming planetoid the doors of vast airlocks opened. Fifty of those massive gates swung aside before her and closed behind her before she swam free in the cool, sweet air and bright artificial sunlight of the interior. She then floated along above an immense, grassy park toward two well-remembered and beloved buildings.
As the tiny ship approached, the doors of vast airlocks opened.
"Oh, Dick!" Dorothy squealed. "There's our house—and Cranes! It's funny though to see them side by side. Are they the same inside, too—and what's that funny little low building between them?"
"They duplicate the originals exactly, except for some items of equipment which would be useless here. The building between them is the control room, in which are the master headsets of the Brain and its lookouts. The Brain itself is what you would think of as underground—inside the shell of the planetoid."
The small vessel came lightly to a landing and the wanderers disembarked upon the close-clipped, springy turf of a perfect lawn. Dorothy flexed her knees in surprise.
"How come we aren't weightless, Dick?" she demanded. "This gravity isn't—can't be—natural. I'll bet you did that, too!"
"Mart and I together did, sure. We learned a lot from the intellectuals and a lot more in hyperspace, but we could neither derive the fundamental equations nor apply what knowledge we already had until we finished this sixth-order outfit. Now, though, we can give you all the gravity you want—or as little—whenever and wherever you want it."
"Oh, marvelous—this is glorious, boys!" Dorothy breathed. "I have always just simply despised weightlessness. Now, with these houses and everything, we can have a perfectly wonderful time!"
"Here's the dining room," Seaton said briskly. "And here's the headset you put on to order dinner or whatever is appropriate to the culinary department. You will observe that the kitchen of this house is purely ornamental—never to be used unless you want to."
"Just a minute, Dick," Dorothy's voice was tensely serious. "I have been really scared ever since you told me about the power of that Brain, and the more you tell me of it the worse scared I get. Think of the awful damage a wild, chance thought would do—and the more an ordinary mortal tries to avoid any thought the surer he is to think it, you know that. Really, I'm not ready for that yet, dear—I'd much rather not go near that headset."
"I know, sweetheart," his arm tightened around her. "But you didn't let me finish. These sets around the house control forces which are capable of nothing except duties pertaining to the part of the house in which they are. This dining-room outfit, for instance, is exactly the same as the Norlaminian one you used so much, except that it is much simpler.
"Instead of using a lot of keyboards and force-tubes, you simply think into that helmet what you want for dinner and it appears. Think that you want the table cleared and it is cleared—dishes and all simply vanish. Think of anything else you want done around this room and it's done—that's all there is to it.
"To relieve your mind I'll explain some more. Mart and I both realized that that Brain could very easily become the most terrible, the most frightfully destructive thing that the universe has ever seen. Therefore, with two exceptions, every controller on this planetoid is of a strictly limited type. Of the two master controls, which are unlimited and very highly reactive, one responds only to Crane's thoughts, the other only to mine. As soon as we get some loose time we are going to build a couple of auxiliaries, with automatic stops against stray thoughts, to break you girls in on—we know as well as you do, Red-Top, that you haven't had enough practice yet to take an unlimited control."
"I'll say I haven't!" she agreed feelingly. "I feel lots better now—I'm sure I can handle the rest of these things very nicely."
"Sure you can. Well, let's call the Cranes and go into the control room," Seaton suggested. "The quicker we get started the quicker we'll get done."
Accustomed as she was to the banks and tiers of keyboards, switches, dials, meters, and other operating paraphernalia of the control rooms of the previous Skylark, Dorothy was taken aback when she passed through the thick, heavily insulated door into that of the Skylark of Valeron. For there were four gray walls, a gray ceiling, and a rugged gray floor. There were low, broad double chairs and headsets. There was nothing else.
"This is your seat, Dottie, here beside me, and this is your headset—it's just a visiset, so you can see what is going on, not a controller," he hastened to reassure her. "You have a better illusion of seeing if your eyes are open, that's why everything is neutral in color. But better still for you girls, we'll turn off the lights."
The illumination, which had seemed to pervade the entire room instead of emanating from any definite sources, faded out; but in spite of the fact that the room was in absolute darkness Dorothy saw with a clarity and a depth of vision impossible to any Earthly eyes. She saw at one and the same time, with infinite precision of detail, the houses and their contents; the whole immense sphere of the planetoid, inside and out; Valeron and her sister planets encircling their sun; and the stupendous full sphere of the vaulted heavens.
She knew that her husband was motionless at her side, yet she saw him materialize in the control room of Skylark Two. There he seized the cabinet which contained the space chart of the Fenachrone—that library of films portraying all the Galaxies visible to the wonderfully powerful telescopes and projectors of that horrible race.
That cabinet became instantly a manifold scanner, all its reels flashing through as one. Simultaneously there appeared in the air above the machine a three-dimensional model of all the Galaxies there listed. A model upon such a scale that the First Galaxy was but a tiny lenticular pellet, although it was still disproportionately large; upon such a scale that the whole vast sphere of space covered by the hundreds of Fenachrone scrolls was compressed into a volume but little larger than a basketball. And yet each tiny Galactic pellet bore its own peculiarly individual identifying marks.
Then Dorothy felt as though she herself had been hurled out into the unthinkable reaches of space. In a fleeting instant of time she passed through thousands of star clusters, and not only knew the declination, right ascension, and distance of each Galaxy, but saw it duplicated in miniature in its exact place in an immense, three-dimensional model in the hollow interior of the space-flyer in which she actually was.
The mapping went on. To human brains and hands the task would have been one of countless years. Now, however, it was to prove only a matter of hours, for this was no human brain. Not only was it reactive and effective at distances to be expressed in light-years or parsecs: because of the immeasurable sixth-order velocity of its carrier wave it was equally effective at distances of thousands upon thousands of light—millionia—reaches of space so incomprehensibly vast that the rays of visible light emitted at the birth of a sun so far away would reach the point of observation only after that sun had lived through its entire cycle of life and had disappeared.
"Well, that's about enough of that for you, for a while," Seaton remarked in a matter-of-fact voice. "A little of that stuff goes a long ways at first—you have to get used to it."
"I'll say you do! Why—I—it—" Dorothy paused, even her ready tongue at a loss for words.
"You can't describe it in words—don't try," Seaton advised. "Let's go outdoors and watch the model grow."
To the awe, if not to the amazement of the observers, the model had already begun to assume a lenticular pattern. Galaxies, then, really were arranged in general as were the stars composing them; there really were universes, and they really were lenticular—the vague speculations of the hardiest and most exploratory cosmic thinkers were being confirmed.
For hour after hour the model continued to grow and Seaton's face began to take on a look of grave concern. At last, however, when the chart was three fourths done or more, a deep-toned bell clanged out the signal for which he had been waiting—the news that there was now being plotted a configuration of Galaxies identical with that portrayed by the space chart of the Fenachrone.
"Gosh!" Seaton sighed hugely. "I was beginning to be afraid that we had escaped clear out of our own universe, and that would have been bad—very, very bad, believe me! The rest of the mapping can wait—let's go!"
Followed by the others he dashed into the control room, threw on his helmet, and hurled a projection into the now easily recognizable First Galaxy. He found the Green System without difficulty, but he could not hold it. So far away it was that even the highest amplification and the greatest power of which the gigantic sixth-order installation was capable could not keep the viewpoint from leaping erratically, in fantastic bounds of hundreds of millions of miles, all through and around its objective.
But Seaton had half expected this development and was prepared for it. He had already sent out a broadcasting projection; and now, upon a band of frequencies wide enough to affect every receiving instrument in use throughout the Green System and using power sufficient to overwhelm any transmitter, however strong, that might be in operation, he sent out in a mighty voice his urgent message to the scientists of Norlamin.
