V.
Skylark Three, the mightiest space ship that had ever lifted her stupendous mass from any planet known to the humanity of this, the First Galaxy, was hurtling onward through the absolute vacuum of intergalactic space. Around her there was nothing—no stars, no suns, no meteorites, no smallest particle of cosmic dust. The First Galaxy lay so far behind her that even its vast lens showed only as a dimly perceptible point of light in the visiplates.
The Fenachrone space chart placed other Galaxies to right of and to left of, above and below, the flying cruiser; but they were so infinitely distant that their light could scarcely reach the eyes of the Terrestrial wanderers. Equally far from them, or farther, but in their line of flight, lay the distant Galaxy which was their goal.
So prodigious had been the velocity of the Skylark, when the last vessel of the Fenachrone had been destroyed, that she could not possibly have been halted until she had covered more than half the distance separating that Galaxy from our own; and Seaton and Crane had agreed that this chance to visit it was altogether too good to be missed. Therefore the velocity of their vessel had been augmented rather than lessened, and for uneventful days and weeks she had bored her terrific way through the incomprehensible nothingness of the interuniversal void.
After a few days of impatient waiting and of eager anticipation, Seaton had settled down into the friendly and companionable routine of the flight. But inaction palled upon his vigorous nature and, physical outlet denied, he began to delve deeper and deeper into the almost-unknown, scarcely plumbed recesses of his new mind—a mind stored with the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations of the Rovol and of the Drasnik; generations of specialists in research in two widely separated fields of knowledge.
Thus it was that one morning Seaton prowled about aimlessly in brown abstraction, hands jammed deep into pockets, the while there rolled from his villainously reeking pipe blue clouds of fumes that might have taxed sorely a less efficient air-purifier than that boasted by the Skylark; prowled, suddenly to dash across the control room to the immense keyboards of his fifth-order projector.
There he sat, hour after hour; hands setting up incredibly complex integrals upon its inexhaustible supply of keys and stops; gray eyes staring unseeingly into infinity; he sat there, deaf, dumb, and blind to everything except the fascinatingly fathomless problem upon which he was so diligently at work.
Dinner time came and went, then supper time, then bedtime; and Dorothy strode purposefully toward the console, only to be led away, silently and quietly, by the watchful Crane.
"But he hasn't come up for air once to-day, Martin!" she protested, when they were in Crane's private sitting room. "And didn't you tell me yourself, that time back in Washington, to make him snap out of it whenever he started to pull off one of his wild marathon splurges of overwork?"
"Yes; I did," Crane replied thoughtfully; "but circumstances here and now are somewhat different from what they were there and then. I have no idea of what he is working out, but it is a problem of such complexity that in one process he used more than seven hundred factors, and it may well be that if he were to be interrupted now he could never recover that particular line of thought. Then, too, you must remember that he is now in such excellent physical condition that he is in no present danger. I would say to let him alone, for a while longer, at least."
"All right, Martin, that's fine! I hated to disturb him, really—I would hate most awfully to derail an important train of thought."
"Yes; let him concentrate a while," urged Margaret. "He hasn't indulged in one of those fits for weeks—Rovol wouldn't let him. I think it's a shame, too, because when he dives in like that after something he comes up with it in his teeth—when he really thinks, he does things. I don't see how those Norlaminians ever got anything done, when they always did their thinking by the clock and quit promptly at quitting time, even if it was right in the middle of an idea."
"Dick can do more in an hour, the way he is working now, than Rovol of Rays could ever do in ten years!" Dorothy exclaimed with conviction. "I'm going in to keep him company—he's more apt to be disturbed by my being gone than by having me there. Better come along, too, you two, just as though nothing was going on. We'll give him an hour or so yet, anyway."
The trio then strolled back into the control room.
But Seaton finished his computations without interruption. Some time after midnight he transferred his integrated and assembled forces to an anchoring plunger, arose from his irksome chair, stretched mightily, and turned to the others, tired but triumphant.
"Folks, I think I've got something!" he cried. "Kinda late, but it'll take only a couple of minutes to test it out. I'll put these nets over your heads, and then you all look into that viewing cabinet over there."
Over his own head and shoulders Seaton draped a finely woven screen of silvery metal, connected by a stranded cable to a plug in his board; and after he had similarly invested his companions he began to manipulate dials and knobs.
As he did so the dark space of the cabinet became filled with a soft glow of light—a glow which resolved itself into color and form, a three-dimensional picture. In the background towered a snow-capped, beautifully symmetrical volcanic mountain; in the foreground were to be seen cherry trees in full bloom surrounding a small structure of unmistakable architecture; and through their minds swept fleeting flashes of poignant longing, amounting almost to nostalgia.
"Good heavens, Dick, what have you done now?" Dorothy broke out. "I feel so homesick that I want to cry—and I don't care a bit whether I ever see Japan again or not!"
"These nets aren't perfect insulators, of course, even though I've got them grounded. There's some leakage. They'd have to be solid to stop all radiation. Leaks both ways, of course, so we're interfering with the picture a little, too; but there's some outside interference that I can't discover yet."
Seaton thought aloud, rather than explained, as he shut off the power.
"Folks, we have got something! That's the sixth-order pattern, and thought is in that level! Those were thoughts—Shiro's thoughts."
"But he's asleep, surely, by this time," Dorothy protested.
"Sure he is, or he wouldn't be thinking that kind of thoughts. It's his subconscious—he's contented enough when he's awake."
"How did you work it out?" asked Crane. "You said, yourself, that it might well take lifetimes of research."
"It would, ordinarily. Partly a hunch, partly dumb luck, but mostly a combination of two brains that upon Norlamin would ordinarily never touch the same subject anywhere. Rovol, who knows everything there is to be known about rays, and Drasnik, probably the greatest authority upon the mind that ever lived, both gave me a good share of their knowledge; and the combination turned out to be hot stuff, particularly in connection with this fifth-order keyboard. Now we can really do something!"
"But you had a sixth-order detector before," Margaret put in. "Why didn't we touch it off by thinking?"
"Too coarse—I see that, now. It wouldn't react to the extremely slight power of a thought-wave; only to the powerful impulses from a bar or from cosmic radiation. But I can build one now that will react to thought, and I'm going to; particularly since there was a little interference on that picture that I couldn't quite account for." He turned back to the projector.
"You're coming to bed," declared Dorothy with finality. "You've done enough for one day."
She had her way, but early the next morning Seaton was again at the keyboard, wearing a complex headset and driving a tenuous fabric of force far out into the void. After an hour or so he tensed suddenly, every sense concentrated upon something vaguely perceptible; something which became less and less nebulous as his steady fingers rotated micrometric dials in infinitesimal arcs.
"Come get a load of this, folks!" he called at last. "Mart, what would a planet—an inhabited planet, at that—be doing 'way out here, Heaven only knows how many light-centuries away from the nearest Galaxy?"
The three donned headsets and seated themselves in their chairs in the base of the great projector. Instantly they felt projections of themselves hurled an incomprehensible distance out into empty space. But that weird sensation was not new; each was thoroughly accustomed to the feeling of duality incident to being in the Skylark in body, yet with a duplicate mentality carried by the projection to a point many light-years distant from his corporeal substance. Their mentalities, thus projected, felt a fleeting instant of unthinkable velocity, then hung poised above the surface of a small but dense planet, a planet utterly alone in that dreadful void.
Dorothy, Margaret and Crane donned headsets and seated themselves in the base of the great projector.
But it was like no other planet with which the Terrestrial wanderers were familiar. It possessed neither air nor water, and it was entirely devoid of topographical features. It was merely a bare, mountainless, depthless sphere of rock and metal. Though sunless, it was not dark; it glowed with a strong, white light which emanated from the rocky soil itself. Nothing animate was visible, nor was there a sign that any form of life, animal or vegetable, had ever existed there.
"You can talk if you want to," Seaton observed, noticing that Dorothy was holding back by main strength a torrent of words. "They can't hear us—there's no audio in the circuit."
"What do you mean by 'they,' Dick?" she demanded. "You said it was an inhabited planet. That one isn't inhabited. It never was, and it can't possibly be, ever!"
"When I spoke I thought that it was inhabited, in the ordinary sense of the word, but I see now that it isn't," he replied, quietly and thoughtfully. "But they were there a minute ago, and they'll probably be back. Don't kid yourself, Dimples. It's inhabited, all right, and by somebody we don't know much—or rather, by something that we knew once—altogether too well."
"The pure intellectuals," Crane stated, rather than asked.
"Yes; and that accounts for the impossible location of the planet, too. They probably materialized it out there, just for the exercise. There, they're coming back. Feel 'em?"
Vivid thoughts, for the most part incomprehensible, flashed from the headsets into their minds; and instantly the surroundings of their projections changed. With the speed of thought a building materialized upon that barren ground, and they found themselves looking into a brilliantly lighted and spacious hall. Walls of alabaster, giving forth a living, almost a fluid light. Tapestries, whose fantastically intricate designs changed from moment to moment into ever new and ever more amazingly complex delineations. Gem-studded fountains, whose plumes and gorgeous sprays of dancing liquid obeyed no Earthly laws of mechanics. Chairs and benches, writhing, changing in form constantly and with no understandable rhythm. And in that hall were the intellectuals—the entities who had materialized those objects from the ultimately elemental radiant energy of intergalactic space.
Their number could not even be guessed. Sometimes only one was visible, sometimes it seemed that the great hall was crowded with them—ever-changing shapes varying in texture from the tenuousness of a wraith to a density greater than that of any Earthly metal.
So bewilderingly rapid were the changes in form that no one appearance could be intelligently grasped. Before one outlandish and unearthly shape could really be perceived it had vanished—had melted and flowed into one entirely different in form and in sense, but one equally monstrous to Terrestrial eyes. Even if grasped mentally, no one of those grotesque shapes could have been described in language, so utterly foreign were they to all human knowledge, history, and experience.
And now, the sixth-order projections in perfect synchronism, the thoughts of the Outlanders came clearly into the minds of the four watchers—thoughts cold, hard, and clear, diamondlike in polish and in definition; thoughts with the perfection of finish and detail possible only to the fleshless mentalities who for countless millions of years had done little save perfect themselves in the technique of pure and absolute thinking.
The four sat tense and strained as the awful import of those thoughts struck home; then, at another thought of horribly unmistakable meaning, Seaton snapped off his power and drove lightning fingers over his keyboard, while the two women slumped back, white-faced and trembling, into their seats.
"I thought it was funny, back there that time, that that fellow couldn't integrate in the ninety-seven dimensions necessary to dematerialize us, and I didn't know anything then." Seaton, his preparations complete, leaned back in his operator's seat at the console. "He was just kidding us—playing with us, just to see what we'd do, and as for not being able to think his way back—phooie! He can think his way through ninety-seven universes if he wants to. They're certainly extragalactic, and very probably extrauniversal, and the one that played with us could have dematerialized us instantly if he had felt like it."
"That is apparent, now," Crane conceded. "They are quite evidently patterns of sixth-order forces, and as such have a velocity of anything they want to use. They absorb force from the radiations in free space, and are capable of diverting and of utilizing those forces in any fashion they may choose. They would of course be eternal, and, so far as I can see, they would be indestructible. What are we going to do about it, Dick? What can we do about it?"
"We'll do something!" Seaton gritted. "We're not as helpless as they think we are. I've got out five courses of six-ply screen, with full interliners of zones of force. I've got everything blocked, clear down to the sixth order. If they can think their way through those screens they're better than I think they are, and if they try anything else we'll do our darnedest to block that, too—and with this Norlaminian keyboard and all the uranium we've got that'll be a mighty lot, believe me! After that last crack of theirs they'll hunt for us, of course, and I'm pretty sure they'll find us. I thought so—here they are! Materialization, huh? I told him once that if he'd stick to matter that I could understand, I'd give him a run for his money, and I wasn't kidding him, either.”