The Skylark of Valeron

by E. E. Smith

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."