The Skylark of Valeron

by E. E. Smith

Followed closely by the visitor, Radnor hurried buoyantly along a narrow hall and into a large room in which, stacked upon shelves, lying upon benches and tables, and even piled indiscriminately upon the floor, there was every conceivable type and kind of apparatus for the generation and projection of etheric forces.

Seaton's flashing glance swept once around the room, cataloguing and classifying the heterogeneous collection. Then, while Radnor looked on in a daze of incredulous astonishment, that quasi-solid figure of force made tangible wrought what was to the Valeronian a scientific miracle. It darted here and there with a speed almost impossible for the eye to follow, seizing tubes, transformers, coils, condensers, and other items of equipment, connecting them together with unbelievable rapidity into a mechanism at whose use the bewildered Radnor, able physicist though he was, could not even guess.

The mechanical educator finished, Seaton's image donned one of its sets of multiple headphones and placed another upon the unresisting head of his host. Then into Radnor's already reeling mind there surged an insistent demand for his language, and almost immediately the headsets were tossed aside.

"There, that's better!" Seaton—for the image was, to all intents and purposes, Seaton himself—exclaimed. "Now that we can talk to each other we'll make those jelly brains hard to catch. They'll think they've got hold of a wild cat by the tail pretty quick now, and they'll be yelling for help to let go."

"But the Chlorans are watching everything you do," protested Radnor, "and we cannot block them out without cutting off our gravity entirely. They will therefore be familiar with any mechanism we may construct and will be able to protect themselves against it."

"They just think they will," was the grim response. "I can't close the gravity band without disaster, any more than you could, but I can find any spy ray they can use and send back along it a jolt that'll burn their eyes out. You see, there's a lot of stuff down on the edge of the fourth order that neither you folks nor the Chlorans know anything about yet, because you haven't had enough thousands of years to study it."

While he was talking, Seaton had been furiously at work upon a small generator, and now he turned it on.

"If they can see through that," he said, "they're a lot smarter than I think they are. Even if they're bright enough to have figured out what I was doing while I was doing it, it won't do them any good, because this outfit will scramble any beam they can send through that band."

"I must bow to your superior knowledge, of course," Radnor said gravely, "but I should like to ask one question. You are working a full materialization through less than a quarter of the gravity band—something that has always been considered impossible. Is there no danger that the Chlorans may analyze your patterns and thus duplicate your feat?"

"Not a chance," Seaton assured him positively. "This stuff I am using is on a tight beam, so tight that it is absolute proof against analysis or interference. It took the Norlaminians—and they're a race of real thinkers—over eight thousand years to go from the beams you and the Chlorans are using down to what I'm showing you. Therefore I'm not afraid that the opposition will pick it up in the next week or two. But we'd better get busy in a big way. Your most urgent need, I take it, is for something—anything—that will stop that surface of force before it reaches the skirt of your defensive dome and blocks your dissipators?"