E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (73 page)

And, although quiescent enough and submissive enough to all outward seeming, his inner brain was keyed up to its highest pitch, ready and eager to drive his muscles into furious activity at the slightest lapse of the attention of the wielder of the mastering trident.

But there was no such lapse. The intelligence of the hyperman seemed to be concentrated in the glowing tips of the forceps and did not waver for an instant, even when an elevator into which he steered his charges refused to lift the immense weight put upon it.

A silent colloquy ensued, then Seaton and Margaret walked endlessly up a spiral ramp. Climbed, it seemed, for hours, their feet sinking to the ankles into the resilient material of the rock-and-metal floor, while their alert guardian floated effortlessly in the air behind them, propelled and guided by his swiftly revolving tail.

Eventually the ramp leveled off into a corridor. Straight ahead, two aisles – branch half right – branch half left – first turn left – third turn right – second doorway on right. They stopped. The door opened. They stepped into a large, office-like room, thronged with the peculiar, sea-horse-like hypermen of this four-dimensional civilization. Everything was indescribable, incomprehensible, but there seemed to be desks, mechanisms, and tier upon tier of shelf-like receptacles intended for the storage of they knew not what.

Most evident of all, however, were the huge, goggling, staring eyes of the creatures as they pressed in, closer and closer to the helplessly immobile bodies of the man and the woman. Eyes dull, expressionless, and unmoving to Earthly, three-dimensional intelligences; but organs of highly intelligible, flashing language, as well as of keen vision, to their possessors.

Thus it was that the very air of the chamber was full of speech and of signs, but neither Margaret nor Seaton could see or hear them. In turn the Earthman tried, with every resource at his command of voice, thought, and pantomime, to bridge the gap – in vain.

Then strange, many-lensed instruments were trundled into the room and up to the helpless prisoners. Lenses peered; multicolored rays probed; planimeters, pantographs, and plotting points traced and recorded every bodily part; the while the two sets of intelligences, each to the other so foreign, were at last compelled to acknowledge frustration. Seaton of course knew what caused the impasse and, knowing the fundamental incompatibility of the dimensions involved, had no real hope that communication could be established, even though he knew the hypermen to be of high intelligence and attainment.

The natives, however, had no inkling of the possibility
of three-dimensional actualities. Therefore, when it had been made plain to them that they had no point of contact with their visitors – that the massive outlanders were and must remain unresponsive to their every message and signal – they perforce ascribed that lack of response to a complete lack of intelligence.

The chief of the council, who had been conducting the examination, released the forces of his mechanisms and directed his flashing glance upon the eyes of the Terrestrials’ guard, ordering him to put the specimens away.

‘… and see to it that they are watched very carefully,’ the ordering eye concluded. ‘The Fellows of Science will be convened and will study them in greater detail than we have been able to do here.’

‘Yes, sir; as you have said, so shall it be,’ the guard acknowledged, and by means of the trident he guided his captives through a high-arched exit and into another labyrinth of corridors.

Seaton laughed aloud as he tucked Margaret’s hand under his arm and marched along under the urge of the admonishing trident.

‘“Nobody ’ome – they ain’t got no sense,” says his royal nibs. “Tyke ’em awye!”’ he exclaimed.

‘Why so happy all of a sudden, Dick? I can’t see very much change in our status.’

‘You’d be surprised.’ He grinned. ‘There’s been a lot of change. I’ve found out that they can’t read our thoughts at all, as long as we don’t express them in muscular activity. I’ve been guarding my thoughts and haven’t been talking to you much for fear they could get my ideas some way. But now I can tell you that I’m going to start something pretty quick. I’ve got this trident thing pretty well solved. This bird’s taking us to jail now, I think, and when he gets us there his grip will probably slip for an instant. If it does he’ll never get it back, and we’ll be merrily on our way.’

‘To jail!’ Margaret exclaimed. ‘But suppose they put us – I hope they put us in the same cell!’

‘Don’t worry about that. If my hunch is right it won’t make a bit of difference – I’ll have you back before they can get you out of sight. Everything around here is thin almost to the point of being immaterial, you know – you could whip an army of them in purely physical combat, and I could tear this whole joint up by the roots.’

‘A la Samson? I believe that you could, at that.’ Margaret smiled.

‘Yeah; or rather, you can play you’re Paul Bunyan, and I’ll be Babe, the big blue ox. We’ll show this flock of proptailed gilli-wimpuses just how we gouged out Lake Superior to make a he-man’s soup bowl!’

‘You make me feel a lot better, Dick, even if I do remember that Babe was forty-seven ax handles across the horns.’ Margaret laughed, but sobered quickly. ‘But here we are – oh, I
do
hope that he leaves me with you!’

They stopped beside a metal grill, in front of which
was poised another hyperman, his propeller tail idling slowly. He had thought that he was to be Seaton’s jailer, and as he swung the barred gate open he engaged the Terrestrial’s escort in optical conversation – a conversation which gave Seaton the mere instant of time for which he had been waiting.

‘So these are the visitors from outer space, whose bodies are so much denser than solid metal?’ he asked curiously. ‘Have they given you much trouble?’

‘None at all. I touched that one only once, and this one, that you are to keep here, wilted at only the third step of force. The orders are to keep them under control every minute, however. They are stupid, senseless brutes, as is of course to be expected from their mass and general make-up. They have not given a single sign of intelligence of even the lowest order, but their strength is apparently enormous, and they might do a great deal of damage if allowed to break away from the trident.’

‘All right; I’ll hold him constantly until I am relieved,’ and the jailer, lowering his own trident, extended a long, tentacular arm toward the grooved and knobbed shaft of the one whose teeth were already imbedded in Seaton’s tissues.

Seaton had neither perceived nor sensed anything of this conversation, but he was tense and alert; tight-strung to take advantage of even the slightest slackening of the grip of the grappling fingers of the controller. Thus in the bare instant of transfer of control from one weird being to the other he acted – instantaneously and highly effectively.

With a twisting leap he whirled about, wrenching himself free from the punishing teeth of the grapple. Lightning hands seized the shaft and swung the weapon in a flashing arc. Then, with all the quickness of his highly trained muscles and with all the power of his brawny right arm, Seaton brought the controller down full upon the grotesque head of the hyperman.

He had given no thought to the material character of weapon or of objective; he had simply wrenched himself free and struck instinctively, lethally, knowing that freedom had to be won then or never. But he was not wielding an Earthly club or an Osnomian bar; nor was the flesh opposing him the solid substance of a human and three-dimensional enemy.

At impact the fiercely driven implement flew into a thousand pieces, but such was the power behind it that each piece continued on, driving its relentless way through the tenuous body substance of the erstwhile guard. That body subsided instantly upon the floor, a shapeless and mangled mass of oozing, dripping flesh. Weaponless now, holding only the shattered butt of the ex-guard’s trident, Seaton turned to front the other guard who, still holding Margaret helpless, was advancing upon him, wide-open trident to the fore.

He hurled the broken stump; then as the guard nimbly
dodged the flying missile, he leaped to the barred door of the cell. He seized it and jerked mightily; and as the anchor bolts of the hinges tore out of the masonry he swung the entire gate in a full-sweeping circle. Through the soft body the interlaced bars tore, cutting it into grisly, ghastly dice, and on, across the hall, tearing into and demolishing the opposite wall.

‘All right, Peg, or did he shock you?’ Seaton demanded.

‘All right, I guess – he didn’t have time to do much of anything.’

‘Fine, let’s snap it up, then. Or wait a minute. I’d better get us a couple of shields. We’ve got to keep them from getting those stingarees into us again – as long as we can keep them away from us we can do about as we please around here, but if they ever get hold of us again it’ll be just too bad.’

While Seaton was speaking he had broken away and torn out two great plates or doors of solid metal, and, handing one of them to his companion, he went on: ‘Here, carry this in front of you and we’ll go places and do things.’

But in that time, short as it was, the alarm had been given, and up the corridor down which they must go was advancing a corps of heavily armed beings. Seaton took one quick step forward, then realizing the impossibility of forcing his way through such a horde without impalement, he leaped backward to the damaged wall and wrenched out a huge chunk of masonry. Then, while the upper wall and the now unsupported ceiling collapsed upon him, their fragments touching his hard body lightly and bouncing off like so many soft pillows, he hurled that chunk of material down the hall and into the thickest ranks of the attackers.

Through the close-packed phalanx it tore as would a plunging tank through massed infantry, nor was it alone.

Mass after mass of rock was hurled as fast as the Earthman could bend and straighten his mighty back, and the hypermen broke ranks and fled in wild disorder.

For to them Seaton was not a man of flesh and blood, lightly tossing pillows of eiderdown along a corridor, through an assemblage of wraithlike creatures. He was to them a monstrous being, constructed of something harder, denser, and tougher than any imaginable metal. A being driven by engines of unthinkable power, who stood unharmed and untouched while masses of stone, brickwork, and structural steel crashed down upon his bare head. A being who caught those falling masses of granite and concrete and steel and hurled them irresistibly through rank after rank of flesh-and-blood men!

‘Let’s go, Peg!’ Seaton gritted. ‘The way’s clear now, I guess – we’ll show those horse-faced hippocampuses that what it takes to do things, we’ve got!’

Through the revolting, reeking shambles of the corpse-littered corridor they gingerly made their way. Past the scene of the battle, past intersection after intersection they retraced their course, warily and suspiciously
at first. But no ambush had been laid – the hypermen were apparently only too glad to let them go in peace – and soon they were hurrying along as fast as Margaret could walk.

They were soon to learn, however, that the denizens of this city of four-dimensional space had not yet given up the chase. Suddenly the yielding floor dropped away beneath their feet and they fell, or rather, floated, easily and slowly downward. Margaret shrieked in alarm, but the man remained unmoved and calm.

‘’Sall right, Peg,’ he assured her. ‘We want to go clear down to the bottom of this dump, anyway, and this’ll save us the time and trouble of walking down. All right; that is, if we don’t sink into the floor so deep when we hit that we won’t be able to get ourselves out of it. Better spread out that shield so you’ll fall on it – it won’t hurt you, and it may help a lot.’

So slowly were they falling that they had ample time in which to prepare for the landing; and, since both Seaton and Margaret were thoroughly accustomed to weightless maneuvering in free space, their metal shields were flat beneath them when they struck the lowermost floor of the citadel. Those shields were crushed, broken, warped and twisted as they were forced into the pavement by the force of the falling bodies – as would be the steel doors of a bank vault upon being driven broadside on, deep into a floor of solid concrete.

But they served their purpose; they kept the bodies of the Terrestrials from sinking beyond their depth into the floor of the hyperdungeon. As they struggled to their feet, unhurt, and saw that they were in a large, cavernous room, six searchlight-like projectors came into play, enveloping them in a flood of soft, pinkish-white light.

Seaton stared about him, uncomprehending, until he saw that one of the hypermen, caught accidentally in the beam, shriveled horribly and instantly into a few floating wisps of luminous substance which in a few seconds disappeared entirely.

‘Huh! Death rays!’ he exclaimed then. ‘’Sa good thing for us we’re essentially three-dimensional yet, or we’d probably never have known what struck us. Now let’s see – where’s our river? Oh, yes; over this way. Wonder if we’d better take these shields along? Guess not, they’re pretty well shot – we’ll pick us up a couple of good ones on the way, and I’ll get you a grill like this one to use as a flail.’

‘But there’s no door on that side!’ Margaret protested.

‘So what? We’ll roll our own as we go along.’

His heavy boot crashed against the wall before them, and a section of it fell outward. Two more kicks and they were through, hurrying along passages which Seaton knew led toward the buried river, breaking irresistibly through solid walls whenever the corridor along which they
were moving angled away from his chosen direction.

Their progress was not impeded. The hyperbeings were willing – yes, anxious – for their unmanageable prisoners to depart and made no further attempts to bar their path. Thus the river was soon reached.

The airship in which they had been brought to the hypercity was nowhere to be seen, and Seaton did not waste time looking for it. He had been unable to understand the four-dimensional controls even while watching them in operation, and he realized that even if he could find the vessel the chance of capturing it and of escaping in it were slight indeed. Therefore throwing an arm around his companion, he leaped without ado into the speeding current.