The Skylark of Valeron

by E. E. Smith

"Done and checked—O.K."

"Good! I am, too. It won't take us long to get to our destination now; our mother ship should be just about at her post by this time."

Now that the vessel was approaching the location assigned to it in the plan, and since DuQuesne had already taken from the brains of the dead Fenachrone all that he wanted of their knowledge, he threw their bodies into space and rayed them out of existence. The other corpse he left lying, a bloated and ghastly mass, in the forward compartment as he prepared to send in what was to be his last flight report to the office of the general in command of the plan of defense.

"His high-mightiness doesn't know it, but that is the last call he is going to get from this unit," DuQuesne remarked, leaving the sender and stepping over to the control board. "Now we can leave our prescribed course and go where we can do ourselves some good. First, we'll find the Violet. I haven't heard of her being spotted and destroyed as a menace to navigation, so we'll look her up and start her off for home."

"Why?" asked the henchman. "Thought we were all done with her."

"We probably are, but if it should turn out that Seaton is back of all this excitement, our having her may save us a trip back to the Earth. Ah, there she is, right on schedule! I'll bring her alongside and set her controls on a distance-squared decrement, so that when she gets out into space she'll have a constant velocity."

"Think she'll get out into free space through those screens?"

"They will detect her, of course, but when they see that she is an abandoned derelict and headed out of their system they'll probably let her go. It will be no great loss, of course, if they do burn her."

Thus it came about that the spherical cruiser of the void shot away from the then feeble gravitation of the vast but distant planet of the Fenachrone at a frightful but constant speed. Through the outer detector screens she tore. Searching beams explored her instantly and thoroughly; but since she was so evidently a deserted hulk and since the Fenachrone cared nothing now for impediments to navigation beyond their screens, she was not pursued.

On and on she sped, her automatic controls reducing her power in exact ratio to the square of the distance attained; on and on, her automatic deflecting detectors swinging her around suns and solar systems and back upon her original right line; on and on toward the Green System, the central system of this the First Galaxy—our own native island universe.