PROLOGUE
"Mother-r-r!" A sturdy, auburn-haired urchin of twelve—Richard Ballinger Seaton the fourteen hundred and seventy-first—turned to the queenly young matron who was his mother as the viewing area before them went blank. "You said that as soon as I was old enough you would let me see the rest of the 'Exploits of Seaton One.' Now grandfather's the chief of the Galactic Council, and I'm twelve, and I'm old enough."
"Perhaps you are, son." Into the beautiful eyes of the young woman came that indefinable, indescribable something; the knowledge that her oldest was no longer a baby. "Tell me the story as it is run for the holiday, and I shall see."
"Richard Ballinger Seaton the First was a Ph. D. in chemistry," the boy began. "He lived in the city of Washington, in what was then the United States of America. He was born—"
"Never mind dates and such things, sonny. It would take too long to give all the details. I just want to make sure that you really understand the story—conditions were so different then from what they are now."
"Well, Seaton One discovered Rovolon, which he called 'X' metal at first. He found out that it would turn copper into energy, and he and Martin Reynolds Crane One built the very first space ship that was ever known. But the World Steel Corporation wanted all the Rovolon that Seaton had found; so Dr. DuQuesne, a chemist of theirs, and a kind of a spy named Perkins, tried to steal it away from him. They got a little of it, but it exploded some copper and killed a lot of people.
"When Seaton heard about the explosion he found out that some of his Rovolon was gone, and they hired some detectives and had an awful time. A lot more people were killed, and a Japanese assistant of Crane's, named Shiro, was almost killed, too. Then they went to work and invented a lot of new instruments, such as a compass that pointed at any one thing forever; and attractors and repellers and rays and screens and explosives and lots of things that are good yet.
"This DuQuesne tried for a long time to get the Rovolon and couldn't, so they built a space ship from Seaton's plans that they stole, and he carried off Dorothy Vaneman and Margaret Spencer, the girls that Seaton One and Crane One were going to marry—and they did marry them, afterward, too. Well, Dorothy kicked Perkins in the stomach, and the space ship ran away and kept on going until it got caught by the attraction of the Dark Mass that the First of Energy has always had so much trouble with, and while they were falling toward it that Perkins went crazy and tried to kill Margaret, but DuQuesne killed him instead, and then Seaton One caught up with them and rescued them and—"
"Just a minute, son; there is no great hurry. How did Seaton One get way out there?"
"Well, they had their big new space ship, the Skylark of Space, all built by then, and Seaton One had an object-compass set on DuQuesne, because he'd been watching him a long time since he'd been making lots of trouble for him. So Seaton One and Crane One followed the object-compass and found them and rescued them all but Perkins, because he was dead already.
"They had an awful time getting away from the Dark Mass, but they did it, but they were about out of copper, so they had to hunt up a planet that had some. They landed on one that dinosaurs and things like that lived on, and got a lot more Rovolon, but didn't find any copper, so they hunted up more planets. One had poison gas instead of air, and another had people that were pure intellectuals, so that they had bodies whenever they wanted to, but not all the time. They pretty nearly dematerialized Seaton One and all the rest of them, and we're awfully glad they didn't.
"Well, anyway, they got away, but they had an awful time, and after a while they saw the green suns of the Central System. There's lots of copper there, you know; so much that Grandfather Seaton wouldn't let me swim in the ocean last year when we were there because it was copper solution and it would have made me sick. They went to Osnome first, one of the inside worlds, and landed in a country named Mardonale.
"They were bad people and wanted to kill Seaton One and steal his ship, and they had already captured Dunark, the Kofedix or crown prince of the other nation, Kondal. Then Dunark helped Seaton One get away, and they all went home with Dunark. But the Skylark was pretty nearly ruined in the battle they had getting away from Mardonale, so Seaton One and Dunark built it over out of arenak, which was much better than the funny, soft steel they used to use in the old days. Of course, arenak doesn't amount to much beside the inoson we have now, but even Seaton One didn't know anything about inoson then.
"Then they got married. Seaton married Dorothy, and they're our great-great—fourteen hundred and seventy times—grandparents. Crane married Margaret, and they're awfully famous, too. And Shiro is, too, especially in Asiatica. Well, anyway, after they got married they had a fight with a monster Karlon, and were just going to start back here for Tellus when the whole Mardonalian fleet attacked Kondal. The Skylark Two beat them all, and DuQuesne helped, too, and then of course Dunark's father was Karfedix or emperor of the whole planet of Osnome, and he made Seaton One the overlord. Then they came back home. Seaton One and Crane One didn't know just what to do with DuQuesne, but he jumped out of Skylark Two in a parachute and got away.
"They hadn't been back on Tellus very long when Dunark came to visit them, from Osnome, after some salt which they needed to make arenak, and some more Rovolon. He was going to blow up another planet of the Central Sun because they were having a war. But Seaton One didn't have enough Rovolon, so both Skylark Two and the Kondal started out to go to the 'X' planet after some, and on the way there they were attacked by a space ship of the Fenachrone, who were a race of terrible men who were going to conquer the whole universe. The Fenachrone blew up the Kondal, and pretty nearly destroyed the Skylark, too, but Seaton One could use zones of force as well as they could—I don't know much about zones of force because they're in advanced physics, but they're barriers in the ether and space ships use them yet because nothing above the fifth level can get through them—and finally Seaton One cut the Fenachrone ship all up into little pieces. Then he rescued Dunark, and one of his wives named Sitar, but one of the bad men got away without being killed and DuQuesne picked him up—"
"But you haven't said anything about DuQuesne being out there, sonny."
"Well, he was. He kept on trying to get the Rovolon away from Seaton One, but couldn't, so he took his own space ship and went to Osnome. You see, while he was there he had found out something about the Fenachrone and was going to join them. Well, he got to Osnome and stole a better space ship than the one he had and started out to go to the Fenachrone System, but on the way he passed close to where Skylark Two was fighting the big Fenachrone ship, which was the flagship Y427W. The chief engineer of the ship got away, and DuQuesne rescued him, and he showed DuQuesne how to get to the Fenachrone world, and he installed his own super-drive on the Violet, which was the name of DuQuesne's ship. But when they got there something funny happened. A Fenachrone patrol ship apparently captured the Violet, and they burned up what they thought were DuQuesne and Loring—this Loring was DuQuesne's helper—and the engineer reported over the visirecorder everything that had happened to the flagship, and Seaton and Crane were listening in on their projector. Now's the funny part. Some of the visirecorder report was right, but some of it didn't really happen that way at all, because Dr. DuQuesne knew all the time what was going—"
"You are getting ahead of the story, sonny. You have heard that part, of course, but you haven't actually seen the record of it yet."
"Well, anyway, Seaton One found out the Fenachrone's plans by reading their brains with a mechanical educator, and he made Dunark's people make peace with the other planet, the one that they were going to blow up. He knew from some old legends that there was a race of green men somewhere in the Central System that knew everything, so he went hunting for them. They went to Dasor first, where those funny porpoise men live, and a Dasorian named Sacner Carfon was councilor then. A Sacner Carfon is councilor there yet, too, and I beat his boy shooting a ray, but he beat me all hollow swimming, because he's got web feet and hands. The Dasorians told Seaton One where to go, and that's how they found Norlamin, where the oldest and wisest men in the whole Galaxy live. Rovol, the First of Rays, and Drasnik, the First of Psychology, and Caslor, the First of Mechanism, and lots of the other Firsts of Norlamin helped them build things.
"Oh, yes; I almost forgot about the way the Norlaminian scientists learn things. When one of them gets old he makes a record of his brain on a tape, and when his son takes his place he just transfers all his knowledge to the son's brain with a mechanical educator, and then he—the son, I mean—knows everything that every specialist in that line ever did find out, and he goes on from there. Rovol and Drasnik and some of the others gave Seaton One and Crane One copies of their own brains that way, and that's why they knew so much. And then they built a projector that would take images of themselves clear across the Galaxy in a couple of seconds on fifth-order rays, and into the middle of suns and anywhere else they wanted to be or work, and then they built Skylark Three, a space ship about five kilometers long. Not so much these days, of course, but she was the biggest thing in the ether then.
"But by that time the Fenachrone fleet had started out to conquer the Galaxy, and Seaton One and Crane One and all the other Ones and the Firsts of Norlamin hunted them up with the projector and blew them up by exploding their power bars, which were made of copper instead of uranium, like Three used. And then Dunark blew up the whole Fenachrone planet, so that they'd never make any more trouble, but one Fenachrone ship got away and started out for another Galaxy, 'way out of range of the projector. So Seaton One chased it and caught it out in space, halfway to the other Galaxy. They had a terrible battle, but Seaton One blew it up and the picture stopped, and I want to see some more of the 'Exploits,' mother, please!"
"Very well told, son—I believe that you are old enough to follow One and his friends of ancient times. You will have them next year, anyway, in your history classes, and you might as well see them now; particularly since it is our own family history as well as that of civilization." The young woman pressed a contact in the arm of her chair and spoke:
"Central Library of History, please.... Mrs. R. B. Seaton fourteen seventy. Please put on reel three of the 'Exploits.' Wave point one nine four six.... Thank you.”