The Skylark of Valeron

by E. E. Smith

VII.

DuQuesne did not find Seaton, nor did he quite comb the Galaxy star by star, as he had declared that he would do in that event. He did, however, try; he prolonged the vain search to distances of so many light-years and through so many weeks of time that even the usually complacent Loring was moved to protest.

"Pretty much like hunting the proverbial needle in the haystack, isn't it, chief?" that worthy asked at last. "They could be clear back home by this time, whoever they are. It looks as though maybe we could do ourselves more good by doing something else."

"Yes; I probably am wasting time now, but I hate to give it up," the scientist replied. "We have pretty well covered this section of the Galaxy. I wonder if it really was Seaton, after all? If he could blow up that planet through those screens he must have a lot more stuff than I have ever thought possible—certainly a lot more than I have, even now—and I would like very much to know how he did it. I couldn't have done it, nor could the Fenachrone, and if he did it without coming closer to it than a thousand light-years—"

"He may have been a lot closer than that," Loring interrupted. "He has had lots of time to make his get-away, you know."

"Not so much as you think, unless he has an acceleration of the same order of magnitude as ours, which I doubt," DuQuesne countered. "Although it is of course possible, in the light of what we know must have happened, that he may have an acceleration as large as ours, or even larger. But the most vital question now is, where did he get his dope? We'll have to consider the probabilities and make our own plans accordingly."

"All right! That's your dish—you're the doctor."

"We shall have to assume that it was Seaton who did it, because if it was any one else, we have nothing whatever to work on. Assuming Seaton, we have four very definite leads. Our first lead is that it must have been Seaton in the Skylark and Dunark in the Kondal that destroyed the Fenachrone ship from the wreck of which he rescued the engineer. I couldn't learn anything about the actual battle from his brains, since he didn't know much except that it was a zone of force that did the real damage, and that the two strange ships were small and spherical.

"The Skylark and the Kondal answer that description and, while the evidence is far from conclusive, we shall assume as a working hypothesis that the Skylark and the Kondal did in fact attack and cut up a Fenachrone battleship fully as powerful as the one we are now in. That, as I do not have to tell you, is a disquieting thought.

"If it is true, however, Seaton must have left the Earth shortly after we did. That idea squares up, because he could very well have had an object-compass on me—whose tracer, by the way, would have been cut by the Fenachrone screens, so we needn't worry about it, even if he did have it once.