unexplored territory. Remember how casually that Eight thing out there discussed it? It
isn’t how to get there that’s biting me; it’s only that those intellectuals can stand a lot
more grief than we can, and conditions in the region of the fourth dimension probably
wouldn’t suit us any too well.
“However, we wouldn’t have to be there for more than a hundred thousandth of a second
to dodge this gang, and we could stand almost anything that long, I imagine. As to how
to do it-rotation. Three pairs of rotating, high-amperage currents, at mutual right angles,
converging upon a point. Remembering that any rotating current exerts its force at a right
angle, what would happen?”
“It might, at that,” Crane conceded, after minutes of narrow-eyed concentration; then,
Crane-wise, began to muster objections. “But ft would not so affect this vessel. She is
altogether too large, is of the wrong shape, and-”
“And you can’t pull yourself up by your own boot straps,” Seaton interrupted. “Right-
you’ve got to have something to work from, something to anchor your forces to. We’d
make the trip in little old Skylark Two. She’s small, she’s spherical and she has so little
mass compared to Three that rotating her out of space would be easy-it wouldn’t even
shift Three’s reference planes.”
“It might prove successful,” Crane admitted at last, “and, if so, it could not help but be a
very interesting and highly informative experience. However, .the chance of success
seems to be none too great, as you have said, and we must exhaust every other
possibility before we decide to attempt it.
For hours then the two scientists went over every detail of their situation, but could
evolve no other plan which held out even the slightest gleam of hope for a successful
outcome; and Seaton seated himself before the banked and tiered .,keyboards of his
projector.
There he worked for perhaps half an hour, then called to Crane: “I’ve got everything set
to spin Two out to where we’re going, Mart. Now if you and Shiro”-for Crane’s former
“man” and the Skylark’s factotum was now quite as thoroughly familiar with Norlaminian
forces as he had formerly been with Terrestrial tools-“will put some forces onto the job of
getting her ready for anything you think we may meet up with, I’ll put in the rest of the
time trying to figure out a way of taking a good stiff poke at those jaspers out there.”
He knew that the zones of force surrounding his vessel were absolutely impenetrable to
any wave propagated through the ether, and to any possible form of material substance.
He knew also that the subether was blocked, through the fifth and sixth orders. He knew
that it was hopeless to attempt to solve the problem of the seventh order in the time at
his disposal.
If he were to open any of his zones, even for an instant, in order to launch a direct
attack, he knew that the immense mentalities to which he was opposed would perceive
the opening and through it would wreak the Terrestrials’ dematerialization before he
could send out a single beam.
Last and worst, he knew that not even his vast console afforded any combination of
forces which could possibly destroy the besieging intellectuals. What could he do?
For hours he labored with all the power of his wonderful brain, now stored with all the
accumulated knowledge of thousands upon thousands of years of Norlaminian research.
He stopped occasionally to eat, and once, at his wife’s insistence, he snatched a little
troubled and uneasy sleep; but his mind drove him back to his board and at that board he
worked. Worked-while the hands of the chronometer approached more and ever more
nearly the zero hour. Worked -while the Skylark’s immense stores of uranium dwindled
visibly away in the giving up of their inconceivable amounts of intra-atomic energy to
brace the screens which were dissipating the inexhaustible flood of cosmic force being
directed against them. Worked-in vain. At last he glanced at the chronometer and stood
up. “Twenty minutes now-time to go,” he announced. “Dot, come here a minute!”
“Sweetheart!” Tall though Dorothy was, the top of her auburn head came scarcely higher
than Seaton’s chin. Tightly but tenderly held in his aims she tipped her head back, and
her violet eyes held no trace of fear as they met his. “It’s all right, lover. I don’t know
whether it’s because I think we’re going to get away, or because we’re together; but I’m
not the least bit afraid.”
“Neither am I, dear. Some way, I simply can’t believe that we’re passing out; I’ve got a
hunch that we’re going to come through. We’ve got a lot to live for yet, you and I,
together. But I want to tell you what you already know that, whatever happens, I love
you.”
“Hurry it up, Seatons!”
Margaret’s voice recalled them to reality, and all five were wafted upon beams of force
into the spherical launching space of the craft in which they were to venture into the
unknown.
That vessel was Skylark Two, the forty-foot globe of arenak which from Earth to
Norlamin had served them so well and which had been carried, life-boat-like, well inside
the two-mile-long torpedo which was Skylark Three. The massive doors were clamped
and sealed, and the five human beings strapped themselves into their seats against they
knew not what emergency.
“All ready, folks?” Seaton grasped the ebonite handle of his master switch. “I’m not going
to tell you Cranes goodby, Mart-you know my hunch. You got one, too?”
“I cannot say that I have. However, I have always had a great deal of confidence in your
ability. Then, too, I have always been something of a fatalist; and, most important of all,
like you and Dorothy, Margaret and I are together. You may start any time now, Dick.”
“All right-hang on. On your marks! Get set! Go!”
As the master switch was thrown, a set of gigantic plungers drove home, actuating the
tremendous generators in the holds of the massive cruiser of space above and around
them; generators which, bursting into instantaneous and furious activity, directed upon
the spherical hull of their vessel three opposed pairs of currents of electricity; madly
spinning currents, of a potential and of a density never before brought into being by
human devices.
7 DUQUESNE VISITS NORLAMIN
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 we rescued the en-
gineer. 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