reach the eyes of the Terrestrial wanderers.
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 intergalactic 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 the
private sitting room of the Cranes. “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 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 teethwhen 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.”
The trio then strolled back into the control room.
But Seaton finished his computations without interruption. Some time after midnight he
transferred his integrated and assembled forces to an anchoring plunger, arose from his
irksome chair, stretched mightily, and turned to the others, tired but triumphant.
“Folks, I think I’ve got something!” he cried. “Kinda late, but it’ll take only a couple of
minutes to test it out. I’ll put these nets over your heads, and then you all look into that
viewing cabinet over there.”
Over his own head and shoulders Seaton draped a finely woven screen of silvery metal,
connected by a stranded cable to a plug in his board; and after he had similarly invested
his companions he began to manipulate dials and knobs.
As he did so the dark space of the cabinet became filled with a soft glow of light-a glow
which resolved itself into color and form, a three-dimensional picture. In the background
towered a snow-capped, beautifully symmetrical volcanic mountain; in the foreground
were to be seen cherry trees in full bloom surrounding a small structure of unmistakable
architecture; and through their minds swept fleeting flashes of poignant longing,
amounting almost to nostalgia.
“Good heavens, Dick, what have you done now?” Dorothy broke out. “I feel so homesick
that I want to cry-and I don’t care a bit whether I ever see Japan again or not!”
“These nets aren’t perfect insulators, of course, even though I’ve got them grounded.
There’s some leakage. They’d have to be solid to stop all radiation. Leaks both ways, of
course, so we’re interfering with the picture a little too; but there’s some outside
interference that I can’t discover yet.” Seaton thought aloud, rather than explained, as he
shut off the power. “Folks, we have got something! That’s the sixthorder pattern, and
thought is in that level! Those were thoughts-Shiro’s thoughts.”
“But he’s asleep, surely, by this time,” Dorothy protested.
“Sure he is, or he wouldn’t be thinking that kind of thoughts. Must be dreaming-he’s
contented enough when he is awake.”
“How did you work it out?” asked Crane. “You said, yourself, that it might well take
lifetimes of research.”
“It would, ordinarilv. Partly a hunch, partly dumb luck, but mostly a combination of two
brains that upon Norlamin would ordinarily never touch the same subject anywhere.
Rovol, who knows everything there is to be known about rays, and Drasnik, probably the
greatest authority upon the mind that ever lived, both gave me a good share of their
knowledge; and the combination turned out to be hot stuff, particularly in connection with
this fifth-order keyboard. Now we can really do something!”
“But you had a sixth-order detector before,” Margaret put in. “Why didn’t we touch it off
by thinking?”
“Too coarse-I see that, now. It wouldn’t react to the extremely slight power of a thought-
wave; only to the powerful impulses from a bar or from cosmic radiation. But I can build
one now that will react to thought, and I’m going to; particularly since there was a little
interference on that picture that I couldn’t quite account for.” He turned back to the
projector.
“You’re coming to bed,” declared Dorothy with finality. “You’ve done enough for one
day.”
She had her way, but early the next morning Seaton was again at the keyboard, wearing
a complex headset and driving a tenuous fabric of force far out into the void. After an
hour or so he tensed suddenly, every sense concentrated upon something vaguely
perceptible; something which became less and less nebulous as his steady fingers
rotated micrometric dials in infinitesimal arcs.
“Come get a load of this!” he called at last. “Mart, what would a planet-an inhabited
planet, at that-be doing ‘way out here, Heaven only knows how many light-centuries
away from the nearest galaxy?”
The three donned headsets and seated themselves in their chairs in the base of the great
projector. Instantly they felt projections of themselves hurled an incomprehensible
distance out into empty space. But that weird sensation was not new; each was
thoroughly accustomed to the feeling of duality incident to being in the Skylark in body,
yet with a duplicate mentality carried by the projection to a point many light-years distant
from his corporeal substance. Their mentalities, thus projected, felt a fleeting instant of
unthinkable velocity, then hung poised above the surface of a small but dense planet, a
planet utterly alone in that dreadful void.
But it was like no other planet with which the Terrestrial wanderers were familiar. It
possessed neither air nor water, and it was entirely devoid of topographical features. It
was merely a bare, mountainless, depthless sphere of rock and metal. Though sunless, it
was not dark; it glowed with a strong, white light which emanated from the rocky soil it-
self. Nothing animate was visible, nor was there a sign that any form of life, animal or
vegetable, had ever existed there.
“You can talk if you want to,” Seaton observed, noticing that Dorothy was holding back
by main strength a torrent of words. “They can’t hear us-there’s no audio in the circuit.”