The Skylark of Valeron

by E. E. Smith

Raging but impotent, Seaton stood motionless beside his friend's wife upon the slowly rising lift; while Crane, Dorothy, and Shiro remained in the control room of the Skylark. All were helpless, incapable alike of making a single movement not authorized by their grotesque captors. Feeble the hypermen were, as has been said; but at the first tensing of a human muscle in revolt there shot from the insulated teeth of the grappling hypertrident such a terrific surge of unbearably poignant torture that any thought of resistance was out of the question.

Even Seaton—fighter by instinct though he was, and reckless as he was and desperate at the thought of being separated from his beloved Dorothy—had been able to endure only three such shocks. The unimaginable anguish of the third rebuke, a particularly vicious and long-continued wrenching and wringing of the most delicate nerve centers of his being, had left him limp and quivering. He was still furious, still bitterly humiliated. His spirit was willing, but he was physically unable to drive his fiendishly tortured body to further acts of rebellion.

Thus it was that the improvised elevator of the hypermen carried two docile captives as it went past—not through—the spherical arenak shell of Skylark Two and up the mighty well which the vessel had driven in its downward plunge. The walls of that pit were glassily smooth; or, more accurately, were like slag: as though the peculiarly unsubstantial rock of the hyperplanet had been actually melted by the force of the cruiser's descent, easy and gradual as the fall had seemed to the senses of the Terrestrials.

It was apparent also that the hypermen were having difficulty in lifting the, to them, tremendous weight of the two human bodies. The platform would go up a few feet, then pause. Up and pause, up and pause; again and again. But at last they reached the top of the well, and, wretched as he was, Seaton had to grin when he perceived that they were being lifted by a derrick, whose overdriven engine, attended though it was by a veritable corps of mechanics, could lift them only a few feet at a time. Coughing and snorting, it ran slower and slower until, released from the load, it burst again into free motion to build up sufficient momentum to lift them another foot or so.

And all about the rim of that forty-foot well there were being erected other machines. Trusses were rising into the air, immense chains were being forged, and additional motors were being assembled. It was apparent that the Skylark was to be raised; and it was equally evident that to the hypermen that raising presented an engineering problem of no small magnitude.

"She'll be right here when we get back, Peg, as far as those jaspers are concerned," Seaton informed his companion. "If they have to slip their clutches to lift the weight of just us two, they'll have one sweet job getting the old Skylark back up here. They haven't got the slightest idea of what they're tackling—they can't begin to pile enough of that kind of machinery in this whole part of the country to budge her."

"You speak as though you were quite certain of our returning," Margaret spoke somberly. "I wish that I could feel that way."

"Sure I'm certain of it," Seaton assured her. "I've got it all figured out. Nobody can maintain one hundred per cent vigilance forever, and as soon as I get back into shape from that last twisting they gave me, I'll be fast enough to take advantage of the break when it comes."

"Yes; but suppose it doesn't come?"

"It's bound to come sometime. The only thing that bothers me is that I can't even guess at when we're due to snap back into our own three-dimensional space. Since we couldn't detect any motion in an ether wave, though, I imagine that we'll have lots of time, relatively speaking, to get back here before the Skylark leaves. Ah! I wondered if they were going to make us walk to wherever it is they're taking us, but I see we ride—there comes something that must be an airship. Maybe we can make our break now instead of later."