mind I have encountered-almost the equal of one of ours-and I shall take it.”
“You just think you will!” Seaton blazed. “You don’t seem to get the idea at all. I am
going to surround you with an absolute stasis of time, so that you will not even be
conscious of imprisonment, to say nothing of being able to figure a way out of it, until
certain more pressing matters have been taken care of. I shall then work out a method of
removing you from this universe in such a fashion and to such a distance that if you
should desire to come back here the time required would be, as far as humanity is
concerned, infinite. Therefore it must be clear to you that you will not be able to get any
of our minds, in any circumstances.”
“I had not supposed that a mind of such power as yours could think so muddily,” One
reproved him. “In fact, you do not so think. You know as well as I do that the time with
which you threaten me is but a moment. Your galaxy is insignificant, your universe is but
an ultramicroscopic mote in the cosmic all. We are not interested in them and would have
left them before this had I not encountered your brain, the best I have seen in substance.
That mind is highly important and that mind I shall have.”
“But I have already explained that you can’t get it, ever,” protested Seaton, exasperated.
“I shall be dead long before you get out of that cage.”
“More of your purposely but uselessly confused thinking,” retorted One. “You know well
that your mind shall never perish, nor shall it diminish in vigor throughout all time to come.
You have the key to knowledge, which you will hand down through all your generations.
Planets, solar systems, galaxies, will come and go, as they have since time first was; but
your descendants will be eternal, abandoning planets as they age to take up their
abodes upon younger, pleasanter worlds, in other systems and in other galaxies-even in
other universes.
“And I do not believe that I shall lose as much time as you think. You are bold indeed in
assuming that your mind, able as it is, can imprison mine for even the brief period we
have been discussing. At any rate, do as you please we will make neither promises nor
agreements.”
23 THE LONG, LONG RIDE
Immense as the Norlaminian vessel was, getting her inside the Planetoid was a simple
matter to the Brain. Inside the Skylark a dome bulged up, driving back the air, a circular
section of the multilayered wall disappeared; Rovol’s space-torpedo floated in; the wall
was again intact; the dome vanished; the visitor settled lightly into the embrace of a
mighty landing cradle which fitted exactly her slenderly stupendous bulk.
The Osnomian prince was the first to disembark, appearing unarmed; for the first time in
his warlike life he had of his own volition laid aside his every weapon.
“Glad to see you, Dick,” he said simply, but seizing Seaton’s hand in both his own, with a
pressure that said far more than his words. “We thought they got you, but you’re bigger
and better than ever-the worse jams you get into, the stronger you come out.”
Seaton shook the hands enthusiastically. “Yeah, `lucky’ is my middle, name-I could fall
into a cesspool and climb out covered with talcum powder and smelling like a bouquet of
violets. But you’ve advanced more than I have,” glancing significantly at the other’s waist,
bare now of its wonted assortment of lethal weapons. “You’re going good, old son -we’re
all behind you!”
He turned and greeted the other newcomers in cordial and appropriate fashion, then all
went into the control room.
During the long flight from Valeron to the First Galaxy no one paid any attention to course
or velocity-a handful of cells in the Brain piloted the Skylark better than any human
intelligence could have done it. Each Norlaminian scientist studied rapturously new vistas
of his specialty: Orlon the charted galaxies of the First Universe, Rovol the minutely small
particles and waves of the sixth order, Astron the illimitable energies of cosmic radiation,
and so on.
Seaton spent day after day with the Brain, computing, calculating, thinking with a clarity
and a cogency hitherto impossible, all to one end. What should he do, what could he do,
with those confounded Intellectuals? Crane, Fodan, and Drasnik spent their time in
planning the perfect government-planetary, systemic, galactic, universal-for all intelligent
races, wherever situated.
Sacner Carfon studied quietly but profoundly with Caslor of Mechanism, adapting many
of the new concepts to the needs of his aqueous planet. Dunark and Urvan, their fiery
spirits now subdued and strangely awed, devoted themselves as sedulously to the arts
and industries of peace as they formerly had to those of war.
Time thus passed quickly, so quickly that, almost before the travelers were aware, the
vast planetoid slowed down abruptly to feel her cautious way among the crowded stars
of our galaxy. Though a mere crawl in comparison with her inconceivable intergalactic
speed, her present pace was such that the stars sped past in flaming lines of light. Past
the double sun, one luminary of which had been the planet of the Fenachrone, she flew;
past the Central System; past the Dark Mass, whose awful attraction scarcely affected
her cosmic-energy drive-hurtling toward Earth and toward Earth’s now hated master,
DuQuesne.
DuQuesne had perceived the planetoid long since, and his robot-manned ships rushed
out into space to do battle with Seaton’s new and peculiar craft. But of battle there was
none; Seaton was in no mood to trifle. Far below the level of DuQuesne’s screens, the
cosmic energies directed by the Brain drove unopposed upon the power bars of the
space fleet of Steel and that entire fleet exploded in one space filling flash of blinding
brilliance. Then the Skylark, approaching the defensive screens, halted.
“I know that you’re watching me, DuQuesne, and I know what you’re thinking about, but
you can’t do it.” Seaton, at the Brain’s control, spoke aloud. “You realize, don’t you, that
if you clamp on a zone of force it’ll throw the Earth out of its orbit?”
“Yes; but I’ll do it if I have to,” came back DuQuesne’s cold accents. “I can put it back
after I get done with you.”
“You don’t know it yet, half-shot, but you are going to do exactly nothing at all!” Seaton
snapped. “You see, I’ve got a lot of stuff here that you don’t know anything about
because you haven’t had a chance to steal it yet, and I’ve got you stopped cold. I’m just
two jumps ahead of you, all the time. I could hypnotize you right now and make you do
anything I say, but I’m not going to-I want you to be wide awake and aware of everything
that goes on. Snap on your zone if you want to-I’ll see to it that the Earth stays in its
orbit. Well, start something, you big, black ape!”
The screens of the Skylark glowed redly as a beam carrying the full power of
DuQuesne’s installations was hurled against them-a beam behind which there was the
entire massed output of Steel’s world-girdling network of superpower stations. But
Seaton’s screens merely glowed; they did not radiate even under that Titanic thrust. For,
as has been said, this new Skylark was powered, not by intra-atomic energy, but by
cosmic energy. Therefore her screens did not radiate; in fact, the furious blasts of
DuQuesne’s projectors only increased the stream of power being fed to her receptors
and converters.
The mighty shields of the planetoid took every force that DuQuesne could send, then
Seaton began to compress his zones, leaving open only the narrow band in the fourth
order through which the force of gravitation makes itself manifest. Not only did he leave
that band open, he so blocked it open that not even DuQuesne’s zones of force, full-
driven though they were, could close it.
In their closing those zones brought down over all Earth a pall of darkness of an intensity
theretofore unknown. It was not the darkness of any possible night, but the appalling,
absolute blackness of the utter absence of every visible wave from every heavenly body.
As that unrelieved and unheralded blackness descended, millions of Earth’s humanity
went mad in unspeakable orgies of fright, of violence, and of crime.
But that brief hour of terror, horrible as it was, can be passed over lightly, for it ended
forever any hope of world domination by any self-interested man or group, paving the
way as it did for the heartiest possible reception of the government of right instead of by
might so soon to be given to Earth’s peoples by the sages of Norlamin.
Through the barriers both of mighty space ship and of embattled planet Seaton drove his
sixth-order projection. Although built to be effective at universal distances the installation