SKYLARK OF VALERON
By Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.
1 DOCTOR DUQUESNE’S RUSE
Day after day a spherical space-ship of Arenak tore through the illimitable reaches of the
interstellar void. She had once been a war vessel of Osnome; now, rechristened the
Violet, she was bearing two Tellurians and a Fenachrone-Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne of
World Steel, “Baby Doll” Loring, his versatile and accomplished assistant, and the squat
and monstrous engineer of the flagship Y427W — from the Green system toward the
solar system of the Fenachrone. The mid-point of the stupendous flight had long since
been passed; the Violet had long been braking down with a negative acceleration of five
times the velocity of light.
Much to the surprise of both DuQuesne and Loring, their prisoner had not made the
slightest move against them. He had thrown all the strength of his supernaturally powerful
body and all the resources of his gigantic brain into the task of converting the atomic
motors of the Violet into the space-annihilating drive of his own race. This drive, affecting
alike as it does every atom of substance within the radius of action of the power bar,
entirely nullifies the effect of acceleration, so that the passengers feel no motion
whatever, even when the craft is accelerating at maximum.
The engineer had not shirked a single task, however arduous. And, once under way, he
had nursed those motors along with every artifice known to his knowing clan; he had
performed such prodigies of adjustment and tuning as to raise by a full two per cent their
already inconceivable maximum acceleration. Nor was this all. After the first moment of
rebellion, he did not even once attempt to bring to bear the almost irresistible hypnotic
power of his eyes; the immense, cold, ruby-lighted projectors of mental energy which,
both men knew, were awful weapons indeed. Nor did he even once protest against the
attractors which were set upon his giant limbs.
Immaterial bands, these, whose slight force could not be felt unless the captor so willed.
But let the prisoner make one false move, and those tiny beams of force would instantly
become copper-driven rods of pure energy, hurling the luckless wight against the wall of
the control room and holding him motionless there, in spite of the most terrific exertions
of his mighty body.
DuQuesne lay at ease in his seat; or rather, scarcely touching the seat, he floated at
ease in the air above it. His black brows were drawn together, his black eyes were hard
as he studied frowningly the Fenachrone engineer. As usual, that worthy was half inside
the power plant, coaxing those mighty engines to do even better than their prodigious
best.
Feeling his companion’s eyes upon him, the doctor turned his inscrutable stare upon
Loring, who had been studying his chief even as DuQuesne had been studying the
outlander. Loring’s cherubic countenance was as pinkly innocent as ever, his guileless
blue eyes as calm and untroubled; but DuQuesne, knowing the man as he did, perceived
an almost imperceptible tension and knew that the killer also was worried.
“What’s the matter, Doll?” The saturnine scientist smiled mirthlessly. “Afraid I’m going to
let that ape slip one over on us?”
“Not exactly.” Loring’s slight tenseness, however, disappeared. “It’s your party, and
anything that’s all right with you tickles me half to death. I have known all along you knew
that that bird there isn’t working under compulsion. You know as well as I do that nobody
works that way because they’re made to. He’s working for himself, not for us, and I had
just begun to wonder if you weren’t getting a little late in clamping down on him.”
“Not at all-there are good and sufficient reasons for this apparent delay. I am going to
clamp down on him in exactly”-DuQuesne glanced at his wrist watch-“fourteen minutes.
But you’re keen-you’ve got a brain that really works-maybe I’d better give you the whole
picture.”
DuQuesne, approving thoroughly of his iron-nerved, cold-blooded assistant, voiced again
the thought he had expressed once before, a few hours out from Earth; and Loring
answered as he had then, in almost the same words-words which revealed truly the
nature of the man:
“Just as you like. Usually I don’t want to know anything about anything, because what a
man doesn’t know he can’t be accused of spilling. Out here, though, maybe I should
know enough about things to act intelligently in case of a jam. But you’re the doctor-if
you’d rather keep it under your hat, that’s all right with me, too. As I’ve said before, it’s
your party.”
“Yes; he certainly is working for himself.” DuQuesne scowled blackly. “Or, rather, he
thinks he is. You know I read his mind back there, while he was unconscious. I didn’t get
all I wanted to, by any means-he woke up too soon but I got a lot more than he thinks I
did.
“They have detector zones, ‘way out in space, all around their world, that nothing can get
past without being spotted; and patrolling those zones there are scout ships, carrying
armament to stagger the imagination. I intend to take over one of those patrol ships and
by means of it to capture one of their first-class battleships. As a first step I’m going to
hypnotize that ape and find out absolutely everything be knows. When I get done with
him, he’ll do exactly what I tell him to, and nothing else.”
“Hypnotize him?” Curiosity was awakened in even Loring’s incurious mind at this
unexpected development. “I didn’t know that was one of your specialties.”
“It wasn’t until recently, but the Fenachrone are all past masters, and I learned about it
from his brain. Hypnosis is a wonderful science. The only drawback is that his mind is a
lot stronger than mine. However, I have in my kit, among other things, a tube of
something that will cut him down to my size.”
“Oh, I see-pentabarb” With this hint, Loring’s agile mind grasped instantly the essentials
of DuQuesne’s plan. “That’s why you had to wait so long, then, to take steps. Pentabarb
kills in twenty-four hours, and he can’t help us steal the ship after he’s dead.”
“Right! One milligram, you know, will make a gibbering idiot out of any human being; but I
imagine that it will take three or four times that much to soften him down to the point
where I can work on him the way I want to. As I don’t know the effects of such heavy
dosages, since he’s not really human, and since he must be alive when we go through
their screens, I decided to give him the works exactly six hours before we are due to hit
their outermost detector. That’s about all I can tell you right now; I’ll have to work out the
details of seizing the ship after I have studied his brain more thoroughly.”
Precisely at the expiration of the fourteen allotted minutes, DuQuesne tightened the
attractor beams, which had never been entirely released from their prisoner; thus pinning
him helplessly, immovably, against the wall of the control room. He then filled a
hypodermic syringe and moved the mechanical educator nearer the motionless, although
violently struggling, creature. Then, avoiding carefully the baleful outpourings of those
name-shot volcanoes of hatred that were the eyes of the Fenachrone, he set the dials of
the educator, placed the headsets, and drove home the needle’s hollow point. One-
milligram of the diabolical compound was absorbed, without appreciable lessening of the
blazing defiance being hurled along the educator’s wires. One and one-half -two
milligrams-three-four-five
That inhumanly powerful mind at last began to weaken, but it became entirely quiescent
only after the administration of the seventh milligram of that direly potent drug.
“Just as well that I allowed only six hours.” DuQuesne sighed in relief as he began to
explore the labyrinthine intricacies of the frightful brain now open to his gaze. “I don’t see
how any possible form of life can hold together long under seven milligrams of that stuff.”
He fell silent and for more than an hour he studied the brain of the engineer,
concentrating upon the several small portions which contained knowledge of most
immediate concern. Finally he removed the headsets.
“His plans were all made,” he informed Loring coldly, “and so are mine, now. Bring out
two full outfits of clothing -one of yours and one of mine. Two guns, belts, and so on.
Break out a bale of waste, the emergency candles, and all that sort of stuff you can
find.”
DuQuesne turned to the Fenachrone, who stood utterly lax, and stared deep into those
dull and expressionless eyes.
“You,” he directed crisply, “will build at once, as, quickly as you can, two dummies which
will look exactly like Loring and myself. They must be lifelike in every particular, with
faces capable of expressing the emotions of surprise and of anger, and with -right arms