THE SKYLARK OF SPACE

E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

I

Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which, a moment before, he had been electrolyzing his solution of ‘X,’ the unknown metal. As soon as he had removed the beaker with its precious contents the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing a dozen reagent-bottles on its way, and straight on out through the open window. Hastily setting the beaker down, he seized his binoculars and focused them upon the flying bath, which now, to the unaided vision, was merely a speck in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did not fall to the ground, but continued on in a straight line, its rapidly diminishing size alone showing the enormous velocity at which it was moving. It grew smaller and smaller. In a few seconds it disappeared.

Slowly lowering the binoculars to his side, Seaton turned like a man in a trance. He stared dazedly, first at the litter of broken bottles covering the table, and then at the empty space under the hood where the bath had stood for so many years.

Aroused by the entrance of his laboratory helper, he silently motioned him to clean up the wreckage.

‘What happened, doctor?’

‘Search me, Dan … wish I knew, myself,’ Seaton replied, absently, lost in wonder at what he had just seen.

Ferdinand Scott, a chemist from an adjoining laboratory, entered breezily.

‘Hello, Dicky, thought I heard a rack— Good Lord! What you been celebrating? Had an explosion?’

‘Uh-uh.’ Seaton shook his head. ‘Something funny – darned funny. I can tell you what happened, but that’s all.’

He did so, and while he talked he prowled about the big room, examining minutely every instrument, dial, meter, gauge, and indicator in the place.

Scott’s face showed in turn interest, surprise, and pitying alarm. ‘Dick, boy, I don’t know why you wrecked the joint, and I don’t know whether that yarn came out of a bottle or a needle, but believe me, it stinks. It’s an honest-to-God, bottled-in-bond stinkeroo if I ever heard one. You’d better lay off the stuff, whatever it is.’

Seeing that Seaton was paying no attention to him, Scott left the room, shaking his head.

Seaton walked slowly to his desk, picked up his blackened and battered briar pipe, and sat down. What could possibly have happened, to result in such shattering of all the natural laws he knew? An inert mass of metal couldn’t fly off into space without the application of a force – in this case an enormous, a really tremendous force – a force probably of the order of magnitude of atomic energy. But it hadn’t been atomic energy. That was out. Definitely. No hard radiation … His instruments would have indicated and recorded a hundredth of a millimicrocurie, and every one of them had sat placidly on dead-center zero through the whole show. What was that force?

And where? In the cell? The solution? The bath? Those three places were … all the places there were.

Concentrating all the power of his mind – deaf, dumb, and blind to every external thing – he sat motionless, with his forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth.

He sat there while most of his fellow chemists finished the day’s work and went home; sat there while the room slowly darkened with the coming of night.

Finally he stood up and turned on the lights. Tapping the stem of his pipe against his palm, he spoke aloud. ‘Absolutely the only unusual incidents in this whole job were a slight slopping over of the solution onto the copper and the short-circuiting of the wires when I grabbed the beaker … wonder if it will repeat …’

He took a piece of copper wire and dipped it into the solution of the mysterious metal. Upon withdrawing it he saw that the wire had changed its appearance, the X having apparently replaced a layer of the original metal. Standing well clear of the table, he touched the wire with the conductors. There was a slight spark, a snap, and it disappeared. Simultaneously there was a sharp sound, like that made by the impact of a rifle bullet, and Seaton saw with amazement a small round hole where the wire had gone completely through the heavy brick wall. There was power – and how! – but whatever it was, it was a fact. A demonstrable fact.

Suddenly he realized that he was hungry; and, glancing at his watch, saw that it was ten o’clock. And he had had a date for dinner at seven with his fiancée at her home, their first dinner since their engagement! Cursing himself for an idiot, he hastily left the laboratory. Going down the corridor, he saw that Marc DuQuesne, a fellow research man, was also working late. He left the building, mounted his motor-cycle, and was soon tearing up Connecticut Avenue toward his sweetheart’s home.

On the way, an idea struck him like a blow of a fist. He forgot even his motorcycle, and only the instinct of the trained rider saved him from disaster during the next few blocks. As he drew near his destination, however, he made a determined effort to pull himself together. ‘What a stunt!’ he muttered ruefully to himself as he considered what he had done.

‘What a stupid jerk! If she doesn’t give me the bum’s rush for this I’ll never do it again if I live to be a million years old!’

II

As evening came on and the fireflies began flashing over the grounds of her luxurious Chevy Chase home, Dorothy Vaneman went upstairs to dress. Mrs Vaneman’s eyes followed her daughter’s tall, trim figure more than a little apprehensively. She was wondering about this engagement. True, Richard was a fine chap and might make a name for himself, but at present he was a nobody and, socially, he would always be a nobody … and men of wealth, of distinction, of impeccable social status, had paid court … but Dorothy – no, ‘stubborn’ was not too strong a term – when Dorothy made up her mind …

Unaware of her mother’s look, Dorothy went happily up the stairs. She glanced at the clock, saw that it was only a little after six, and sat down at her dressing table, upon which there stood a picture of Richard. A strong, not unhandsome face, with keen, wide-set gray eyes; the wide brow of the thinker, surmounted by thick, unruly, dark hair; the firm, square jaw of the born fighter – such was the man whose vivid personality, fierce impetuosity, and indomitable perseverance had set him apart from all other men ever since their first meeting, and who had rapidly cleared the field of all other aspirants for her favor. Her breath came faster and her cheeks showed a lovelier color as she sat there, the lights playing in her heavy auburn hair and a tender smile upon her lips.

Dorothy dressed with unusual care, the last touches deftly made, went downstairs and out upon the porch to wait for her guest.

Half an hour passed. Mrs Vaneman came to the door and said anxiously, ‘I wonder if anything could have happened to him?’

‘Of course there hasn’t,’ Dorothy tried to keep all concern out of her voice. ‘Traffic jams – or perhaps he has been picked up again for speeding. Can Alice keep dinner a little longer?’

‘To be sure,’ her mother answered, and disappeared.

But when another half hour had passed Dorothy went in, holding her head somewhat higher than usual and wearing a say-something-if-you-dare expression.

The meal was eaten in polite disregard of the unused plate. The family left the table. For Dorothy the evening was endless; but at the usual time it was ten o’clock, and then ten-thirty, and then Seaton appeared.

Dorothy opened the door, but Seaton did not come in. He stood close to her, but did not touch her. His eyes searched her face anxiously. Upon his face was a look of indecision, almost of fright – a look so foreign to his usual expression that the girl smiled in spite of herself.

‘I’m awfully sorry, sweetheart, but I couldn’t help it. You’ve got a right to be sore and I ought to be kicked from here to there, but are you too sore to let me talk to you for a couple of minutes?’

‘I was never so mad at anybody in my life, until I started getting scared witless. I simply couldn’t and can’t believe you’d do anything like that on purpose. Come in.’

He came. She closed the door. He half-extended his arms, then paused, irresolute, like a puppy hoping for a pat but expecting a kick. She grinned then, and came into his arms.

‘But what happened, Dick?’ she asked later. ‘Something terrible, to make you act like this. I’ve never seen you act so – so funny.’

‘Not terrible, Dotty, just extraordinary. So outrageously extraordinary that before I begin I wish you’d look me in the eye and tell me if you have any doubts about my sanity.’ She led him into the living room, held his face up to the light, and made a pretense of studying his eyes.

‘Richard Ballinger Seaton, I certify that you are entirely sane – quite the sanest man I ever knew. Now tell me the worst. Did you blow up the Bureau with a C-bomb?’

‘Nothing like that,’ he laughed. ‘Just a thing I can’t understand. You know I’ve been reworking the platinum wastes that have been accumulating for the last ten or fifteen years.’

‘Yes, you told me you’d recovered a small fortune in platinum and some of those other metals. You thought you’d found a brand-new one. Did you?’

‘I sure did. After I’d separated out everything I could identify, there was quite a lot of something left – something that didn’t respond to any tests I knew or could find in the literature.

‘That brings us up to today. As a last resort, because there wasn’t anything else left, I started testing for trans-uranics, and there it was. A stable – almost stable, I mean – isotope; up where no almost-stable isotopes are supposed to exist. Up where I would’ve bet my last shirt no such isotope could possibly exist.

‘Well, I was trying to electrolyze it out when the fireworks started. The solution started to fizz over, so I grabbed the beaker – fast. The wires dropped onto the steam-bath and the whole outfit, except the beaker, took off out of the window at six or eight times the speed of sound and in a straight line, without dropping a foot in as far as I could keep it in sight with a pair of good binoculars. And my hunch is that it’s still going. That’s what happened. It’s enough to knock any physicist into an outside loop, and with my one-cylinder brain I got to thinking about it and simply didn’t come to until after ten o’clock. All I can say is, I’m sorry and I love you. As much as I ever did or could. More, if possible. And I always will. Can you let it go – this time?’

‘Dick … oh, Dick!’

There was more – much more – but eventually Seaton mounted his motorcycle and Dorothy walked beside him down to the street. A final kiss and the man drove away.

After the last faint glimmer of red tail-light had disappeared in the darkness Dorothy made her way to her room, breathing a long and slightly tremulous, but supremely happy sigh.

III

Seaton’s childhood had been spent in the mountains of northern Idaho, a region not much out of the pioneer stage and offering few inducements to intellectual effort. He could only dimly remember his mother, a sweet, gentle woman with a great love for books; but his father, ‘Big Fred’ Seaton, a man of but one love, almost filled the vacant place. Fred owned a quarter-section of virgin white-pine timber, and in that splendid grove he established a home for himself and his motherless boy.

In front of the cabin lay a level strip of meadow, beyond which rose a magnificent, snow-covered peak that caught the earliest rays of the sun.

This mountain, dominating the entire countryside, was to the boy a challenge, a question, and a secret. He accepted the challenge, scaling its steep sides, hunting its forests, and fishing its streams. He toughened his sturdy young body by days and nights upon its slopes. He puzzled over the question of its origin as he lay upon the needles under some monster pine. He put staggering questions to his father; and when in books he found some partial answers his joy was complete. He discovered some of the mountain’s secrets then – some of the laws that govern the world of matter, some of the beginnings man’s mind has made toward understanding the hidden mechanism of Nature’s great simplicity.

Each taste of knowledge whetted his appetite for more. Books! Books! More and more he devoured them; finding in them meat for the hunger that filled him, answers to the questions that haunted him.

After Big Fred lost his life in the forest fire that destroyed his property, Seaton turned his back upon the woods forever. He worked his way through high school and won a scholarship at college. Study was a pleasure to his keen mind; and he had ample time for athletics, for which his backwoods life had fitted him outstandingly. He went out for everything, and excelled in football and tennis.

In spite of the fact that he had to work his way he was popular with his college mates, and his popularity was not lessened by an almost professional knowledge of sleight-of-hand.

His long, strong fingers could move faster than the eye could follow, and many a lively college party watched in vain to see how he did what he did.

After graduating with highest honors as a physical chemist, he was appointed research fellow in a great university, where he won his Ph.D. by brilliant research upon rare metals – his dissertation having the lively title of ‘Some Observations upon Certain Properties of Certain Metals, Including Certain Trans-Uranic Elements.’ Soon afterward he had his own room in the Rare Metals Laboratory, in Washington, D.C.

He was a striking figure – well over six feet in height, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, a man of tremendous physical strength. He did not let himself grow soft in his laboratory job, but kept in hard, fine condition. He spent most of his spare time playing tennis, swimming and motor-cycling.

As a tennis-player he quickly became well known in Washington sporting and social circles. During the District Tournament he met M. Reynolds Crane – known to only a very few intimates as ‘Martin’ – the multi-millionaire explorer-archaeologist-sportsman who was then District singles champion. Seaton had cleared the lower half of the list and played Crane in the final round. Crane succeeded in retaining his title, but only after five of the most grueling, most bitterly contested sets ever seen in Washington.

Impressed by Seaton’s powerful, slashing game, Crane suggested that they train together as a doubles team. Seaton accepted instantly, and the combination was highly effective.

Practicing together almost daily, each came to know the other as a man of his own kind, and a real friendship grew up between them. When the Crane–Seaton team had won the District Championship and had gone to the semi-finals of the National before losing, the two were upon a footing which most brothers could have envied. Their friendship was such that neither Crane’s immense wealth and high social standing nor Seaton’s comparative poverty and lack of standing offered any obstacle whatever. Their comradeship was the same, whether they were in Seaton’s modest room or in Crane’s palatial yacht.

Crane had never known the lack of anything that money could buy. He had inherited his fortune and had little or nothing to do with its management, preferring to delegate that job to financial specialists. However, he was in no sense an idle rich man with no purpose in life. As well as being an explorer and an archaeologist and a sportsman, he was also an engineer – a good one – and a rocket-instrument man second to none in the world.

The old Crane estate in Chevy Chase was now, of course, Martin’s, and he had left it pretty much as it was. He had, however, altered one room, the library, and it was now peculiarly typical of the man. It was a large room, very long, with many windows. At one end was a huge fireplace, before which Crane often sat with his long legs outstretched, studying one or several books from the cases close at hand. The essential furnishings were of a rigid simplicity, but the treasures he had gathered transformed the room into a veritable museum.

He played no instrument, but in a corner stood a magnificent piano, bare of any ornament; and a Stradivarius reposed in a special cabinet. Few people were asked to play either of those instruments; but to those few Crane listened in silence, and his brief words of thanks showed his real appreciation of music.

He made few friends, not because he hoarded his friendship, but because, even more than most rich men, he had been forced to erect around his real self an almost impenetrable screen.

As for women, Crane frankly avoided them, partly because his greatest interests in life were things in which women had neither interest nor place, but mostly because he had for years been the prime target of the man-hunting debutantes and the matchmaking mothers of three continents.

Dorothy Vaneman, with whom he had become acquainted through his friendship with Seaton, had been admitted to his friendship. Her frank comradeship was a continuing revelation, and it was she who had last played for him.

She and Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his ‘fiddle.’ Dorothy, a doctor of music and an accomplished violinist, realized with the first sweep of the bow that she was playing an instrument such as she had known only in her dreams, and promptly forgot everything else. She forgot the rain, the listeners, the time and the place; she simply poured into that wonderful violin everything she had of beauty, of tenderness, of artistry.

Sure, true, and full, the tones filled the big room, and in Crane’s vision there rose a home filled with happy work, with laughter and comradeship. Sensing the girl’s dreams as the music filled his ears, he realized as never before in his busy and purposeful life what a home with the right woman could be like. No thought of love for Dorothy entered his mind – he knew that the love existing between her and Dick was of the sort that only death could alter – but he knew that she had unwittingly given him a great gift. Often thereafter in his lonely hours he saw that dream home, and knew that nothing less than its realization would ever satisfy him.