The Skylark of Valeron

by E. E. Smith

"It wouldn't work, hardly," Seaton commented. "Look at our time here—we must be 'way beyond light. I doubt if we could see anything, even if we had a sixth-order projector—which of course we haven't."

"But how about our light inside here, then?" asked Margaret. "The lamps are burning, and we can see things."

"I don't know, Peg," Seaton replied. "All this stuff is 'way past me. Maybe it's because the lights are traveling with us—no, that's out. Probably, as I intimated before, we aren't seeing things at all—just feeling them, some way or other. That must be it, I think—it's sure that the light-waves from those lamps are almost perfectly stationary, as far as we're concerned."

"Oh, there's something!" Dorothy called. She had remained at the visiplate, staring into the impenetrable darkness. "See, it just flashed on! We're falling toward ground of some kind. It doesn't look like any planet I ever saw before, either—it's perfectly endless and it's perfectly flat."

The others rushed to the plates and saw, instead of the utter blackness of a moment before, an infinite expanse of level, uncurving hyperland. Though so distant from it that any planetary curvature should have been evident, they could perceive no such curvature. Flat that land was, and sunless, but apparently self-luminous; glowing with a strong, somewhat hazy, violet light. And now they could also see the craft which had been towing them. It was a lozenge-shaped affair, glowing fiercely with the peculiarly livid "light" of the hyperplanet; and was now apparently exerting its maximum tractive effort in a vain attempt to hold the prodigious mass of Skylark Two against the seemingly slight force of gravitation.

"Must be some kind of hyperlight that we're seeing by," Seaton cogitated. "Must be sixth or seventh-order velocity, at least, or we'd be—"

"Never mind the light or our seeing things!" Dorothy interrupted. "We are falling, and we shall probably hit hard. Can't you do something about it?"

"Afraid not, Kitten." He grinned at her. "But I'll try it—Nope, everything's dead. No power, no control, no nothing, and there won't be until we snap back where we belong. But don't worry about a crash. Even if that ground is solid enough to crash us, and I don't think it is, everything out here, including gravity, seems to be so feeble that it won't hurt us any."

Scarcely had he finished speaking when the Skylark struck—or, rather, floated gently downward into the ground. For, slight as was the force of gravitation, and partially counteracted as well by the pull of the towing vessel, the arenak globe did not even pause as it encountered the apparently solid rock of the planet's surface. That rock billowed away upon all sides as the Skylark sank into it and through it, to come to a halt only after her mass had driven a vertical, smooth-sided well some hundreds of feet in depth.

Even though the Osnomian metal had been rendered much less dense than normal by its extrusion and expansion into the fourth dimension, yet it was still so much denser than the unknown material of the hyperplanet that it sank into that planet's rocky soil as a bullet sinks into thick jelly.