Chapter 14

SEATON opened his eyes and gazed about him wonderingly. Only half conscious, bruised and sore in every part, he could not remember what had happened. Instinctively drawing a deep breath, he coughed as the plus-pressure gas filled his lungs, bringing with it a complete understanding of the situation. He tore off his helmet and drew himself across to Dorothy's couch.

She was still alive!  

He placed her face downward upon the floor and began artificial respiration. Soon he was rewarded by the coughing he had longed to hear. Snatching off her helmet, he seized her in his arms, while she sobbed convulsively on his shoulder. The first ecstasy of their greeting over, she started guiltily.

"Oh, Dick! See about Peggy—I wonder if . . ."

"Never mind," Crane said. "She is doing nicely."

Crane had already revived the stranger. DuQuesne was nowhere in sight. Dorothy blushed vividly and disengaged her arms from around Seaton's neck. Seaton, also blushing, dropped his arms and Dorothy floated away, clutching frantically at a hand-hold just out of her reach.

"Pull me down, Dick !" Dorothy laughed.

Seaton grabbed her ankle unthinkingly, neglecting his own anchorage, and they floated in the air together. Martin and Margaret, each holding a line, laughed heartily.

"Tweet, tweet—I'm a canary," Seaton said, flapping his arms. "Toss us a line, Mart."

"A Dicky-bird, you mean," Dorothy said.

Crane studied the floating pair with mock gravity.

"That is a peculiar pose, Dick. What is it supposed to represent—Zeus sitting on his throne?"

"I'll sit on your neck, you lug, if you don't get a wiggle on with that rope !"

As he spoke, however he came within reach of the ceiling, and could push himself and his companion to a line.

Seaton put a bar into one of the engines and, after flashing the warning light, applied a little power. The Skylark seemed to leap under them; then everything had its normal weight once more.

 "Now that things have settled down a little," Dorothy said, "I'll introduce you two to Miss Margaret Spencer, a very good friend of mine. These are the boys I told you so much about, Peggy. This is Dr. Dick Seaton, my fiancé. He knows everything there is to be known about atoms, electrons, neutrons, and so forth. And this is Mr. Martin Crane, who is a simply wonderful inventor. He made all these engines and things."

"I may have heard of Mr. Crane," Margaret said, eagerly. "My father was an inventor, too, and he used to talk about a man named Crane who invented a lot of instruments for supersonic planes. He said they revolutionized flying. I wonder if you are that Mr. Crane?"

"That is unjustifiedly high praise, Miss Spencer," Crane replied, uncomfortable, "but as I have done a few things along that line I could be the man he referred to."

"If I may change the subject," Seaton said, "where's DuQuesne?"

"He went to clean up. Then he was going to the galley to check damage and see about something to eat."

"Stout fella!" Dorothy applauded. "Food! And especially about cleaning up—if you know what I mean and I think you do. Come on, Peggy, I know where our room is."

"What a girl!" Seaton said as the women left, Dorothy half supporting her companion.. "She's bruised and beat up from one end to the other. She's more than half dead yet—she didn't have enough life left in her to flag a hand-car. She can't even walk; she can just barely hobble. And did she let out one single yip? I ask to know. 'Business as usual,' all the way, if it kills her. What a girl!"

"Include Miss Spencer in that, too, Dick. Did she 'let out any yips'? And she was not in nearly as good shape as Dorothy was, to start with."

"That's right," Seaton agreed, wonderingly. "She's got plenty of guts, too. Those two women, Marty my old and stinky chum, are blinding flashes and deafening reports. . . . Well, let's go get a bath and shave. And shove the air-conditioners up a couple of notches, will you?"

When they came back they found the two girls seated at one of the ports. "Did you dope yourself up, Dot?" Seaton asked.

"Yes, both of us. With amylophene. I'm getting to be a slave to the stuff." She made a wry face.

Seaton grimaced too. "So did we. Ouch! Nice stuff that amylophene."

"But come over here and look out of this window. Did you ever see anything like it?"

As the four heads bent, so close together, an awed silence fell upon the little group. For the blackness of the black of the interstellar void is not the darkness of an earthly night, but the absolute absence of light—a black beside which that of platinum dust is merely gray. Upon this indescribably black backdrop there glowed faint patches which were nebulae; there blazed hard, brilliant, mufti-colored, dimensionless points of light which were stars.

"Jewels on black velvet," Dorothy breathed. "Oh, gorgeous . . . wonderful !"

Through their wonder a thought struck Seaton. He leaped to the board. "Look here, Mart. I didn't recognize a thing out there and I wondered why. We're heading away from the Earth and we must be making plenty of light-speeds. The swing around that big dud was really something, of course, but the engine should have . . . or should it?"

"I think not . . . Unexpected, but not a surprise. That close to Roche's Limit, anything might happen."

"And did, I guess. We'll have to check for permanent deformations. But this object- compass still works—let's see how far we are away from home."

They took a reading and both men figured the distance.

"What d'you make it, Mart? I'm afraid to tell you my result"

"Forty-six point twenty-seven light-centuries. Check?"

"Check. We're up the well-known creek without a paddle. . . . The time was twenty-three thirty-two by the chronometer—good thing you built it to stand going through a stone-crusher. My watch's a total loss. They all are, I imagine. We'll read it again in an hour or so and see how fast we're going. I'll be scared witless to say that figure out loud, too."  

"Dinner is announced," said DuQuesne, who had been standing at the door, listening.

The wanderers, battered, stiff, and sore, seated themselves at a folding table. While eating, Seaton watched the engine—when he was not watching Dorothy—and talked to her. Crane and Margaret chatted easily. DuQuesne, except when addressed directly, maintained a self-sufficient silence.

After another observation Seaton said, "DuQuesne, we're almost five thousand light- years away from Earth, and getting farther away at about one light-year per minute."

"It'd be poor technique to ask how you know?"

"It would. Those figures are right. But we've got only four bars of copper left. Enough to stop us and some to spare, but not nearly enough to get us back, even by drifting—too many lifetimes on the way."

"So we land somewhere and dig us some copper."

"Check. What I wanted to ask you—isn't a copper-bearing sun apt to have copper- bearing planets?"

"I'd say so."

"Then take the spectroscope, will you, and pick out a sun somewhere up ahead—down ahead, I mean—for us to shoot at? And Mart, I s'pose we'd better take our regular twelve-hour tricks—no, eight; we've got to either trust the guy or kill him I'll take the first watch. Beat it to bed."

"Not so fast." Crane said. "If I remember correctly, it's my turn."

"Ancient history doesn't count. I'll flip you a pickle for it. Heads, I win."

Seaton won, and the worn-out travelers went to their rooms all except Dorothy, who lingered to bid her lover a more intimate good night.

Seated beside him, his arm around her and her head on his shoulder, she sat blissfully until she noticed, for the first time, her bare left hand. She caught her breath and her eyes grew round.

" 'Smatter, Red?"

"Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed in dismay, "I simply forgot everything about taking what was left of my ring out of the doctor's engine!"

"Huh? What are you talking about?"

She told him; and he told her about Martin and himself.

"Oh, Dick—Dick—it's so wonderful to be with you again!" she concluded. "I lived as many years as we covered miles!"

 "It was tough . . . you had it a lot worse than we did . . . but it makes me ashamed all over to think of the way I blew my stack at Wilson's. If it hadn't been for Martin's  cautious old bean we'd've . . . we owe him a lot, Dimples."

"Yes, we do . . . but don't worry about the debt, Dick. Just don't ever let slip a word to Peggy about Martin being rich, is all."

"Oh, a matchmaker now? But why not? She wouldn't think any less of him—that's one reason I'm marrying you, you know—for your money."

Dorothy snickered sunnily. "I know. But listen, you poor, dumb, fortune-hunting darling—if Peggy had any idea that Martin is the one and only M. Reynolds Crane she'd curl right up into a ball. She'd think he'd think she was chasing him and then he would think so. As it is, he acts perfectly natural. He hasn't talked that way to any girl except me for five years, and he wouldn't talk to me until he found out for sure I wasn't out after him."

"Could be, pet," Seaton agreed. "On one thing you really chirped it—he's been shot at so much he's wilder than a hawk!"

At the end of eight hours Crane took over and Seaton stumbled to his room, where he slept for over ten hours like a man in a trance. Then, rising, he exercised and went out into the saloon.

Dorothy, Peggy, and Crane were at breakfast; Seaton joined them. They ate the gayest, most carefree meal they had had since leaving earth. Some of the worst bruises still showed a little, but, under the influence of the potent if painful amylophene, all soreness, stiffness, and pain had disappeared.

After they had finished eating, Seaton said, "You suggested, Mart, that those gyroscope bearings may have been stressed beyond the yield-point. I'll take an integrating goniometer . . ."

"Break that down to our size, Dick—Peggy's and mine," Dorothy said.

"Can do. Take some tools and see if anything got bent out of shape back there. It might be an idea, Dot, to come along and hold my head while I think."

"That is an idea—if you never have another one."

Crane and Margaret went over and sat down at one of the crystal-clear ports. She told him her story frankly and fully, shuddering with horror as she recalled the awful, helpless fall during which Perkins had been killed.

"We have a heavy score to settle with that Steel crowd and with DuQuesne," Crane said, slowly. "We can convict him of abduction now. . . . Perkins' death wasn't murder, then?"

"Oh, no. He was just like a mad animal. He had to kill him. But the doctor, as they call him is just as bad. He's so utterly heartless and ruthless, so cold and scientific, it gives me the compound shivers, just to think about him."

"And yet Dorothy said he saved her life?"

"He did, from Perkins; but that was just as strictly pragmatic as everything else he has ever done. He wanted her alive: dead, she wouldn't have been any use to him. He's as nearly a robot as any human being can be, that's what I think."

"I'm inclined to agree with you. . . . Nothing would please Dick better than a good excuse for killing him."

"He isn't the only one. And the way he ignores what we all feel shows what a machine he is. . . . What's that?" The Skylark had lurched slightly.

"Just a swing around a star, probably." He looked at the board, then led her to a lower port. "We are passing the star Dick was heading for, far too fast to stop. DuQuesne will pick out another. See that planet over there"—he pointed—"and that smaller one, there?"

She saw the two planets—one like a small moon, the other much smaller—and watched the sun increase rapidly in size as the Skylark flew on at such a pace that any earthly distance would have been covered as soon as it was begun. So appalling was their velocity that the ship was bathed in the light of that strange sun only for moments, then was surrounded again by darkness.

Their seventy-two-hour flight without a pilot had seemed a miracle; now it seemed entirely possible that they could fly in a straight line for weeks without encountering any obstacle, so vast was the emptiness in comparison with the points of light scattered about in it. Now and then they passed closely enough to a star so that it seemed to move fairly rapidly; but for the most part the stars stood, like distant mountain peaks to travelers in a train, in the same position for many minutes.

Awed by the immensity of the universe, the two at the window were silent, not with the silence of embarrassment but with that of two friends in the presence of a thing far beyond the reach of words. As they stared out into infinity, each felt as never before the pitiful smallness of the whole world they had known, and the insignificance of human beings and their works. Silently their minds reached out to each other in understanding.

Unconsciously Margaret half shuddered and moved closer to Crane; and a tender look came over Crane's face as he looked down at the beautiful young woman at his side. For she was beautiful. Rest and food had erased the marks of her imprisonment. Dorothy's deep and unassumed faith in the ability of Seaton and Crane had quieted her fears. And finally, a costume of Dorothy's well-made—and exceedingly expensive!—clothes, which fitted her very well and in which she looked her best and knew it, had completely restored her self-possession.

He looked up quickly and again studied the stars; but now, in addition to the wonders of space, he saw a mass of wavy black hair, high-piled upon a queenly head; deep brown eyes veiled by long, black lashes; sweet, sensitive lips; a firmly rounded, dimpled chin; and a beautifully formed young body.

"How stupendous . . . how unbelievably great this is. . . ." Margaret whispered. "How vastly greater than any perception one could possibly get on Earth . . . and yet . . ."

She paused, with her lip caught under two white teeth, then went on, hesitatingly, "But doesn't it seem to you, Mr. Crane, that there is something in man as great as even all this? That there must be, or Dorothy and I could not be sailing out here in such a wonderful thing as this Skylark, which you and Dick Seaton have made?"

Days passed. Dorothy timed her waking hours with those of Seaton—preparing his meals and lightening the tedium of his long vigils at the board—and Margaret did the same thing for Crane. But often they assembled in the saloon, while DuQuesne was on watch, and there was much fun and laughter, as well as serious discussion, among the four. Margaret, already adopted as a friend, proved a delightful companion. Her ready tongue, her quick, delicate wit, and her facility of expression delighted all three.

One day Crane suggested to Seaton that they should take notes, in addition to the photographs they had been taking.

"I know comparatively little of astronomy, but, with the instruments we have, we should be able to get data, especially on planetary systems, which would be of interest to astronomers. Miss Spencer, being a secretary, could help us?"

"Sure," Seaton said. "That's an idea—nobody else ever had a chance to do it before."

"I'll be glad to—taking notes is the best thing I do!" Margaret cried, and called for pad and pencils.

After that, the two worked together for several hours on each of Martin's off shifts.

The Skylark passed one solar system after another, with a velocity so great that it was impossible to land. Margaret's association with Crane, begun as a duty, became a very real pleasure for them both. Working together in research, sitting together at the board in easy conversation or in equally easy silence, they compressed into days more real companionship than is usually possible in months.

Oftener and oftener, as time went on, Crane found the vision of his dream home floating in his mind as he steered the Skylark in her meteoric flight or as he lay strapped into his narrow bunk. Now, however, the central figure of the vision, instead of being a blur, was clear and sharply defined. And for her part, Margaret was drawn more and more to the quiet and unassuming, but steadfast young inventor, with his wide knowledge and his keen, incisive mind.

The Skylark finally slowed down enough to make a landing possible, and course was laid toward the nearest planet of a copper-bearing sun. As vessel neared planet a wave of excitement swept through four of the five. They watched the globe grow larger, glowing white, its outline softened by the atmosphere surrounding it. It had two satellites; its sun, a great, blazing orb, looked so big and so hot that Margaret became uneasy.

"Isn't it dangerous to get so close, Dick?"

"Uh-uh. Watching the pyrometers is part of the pilot's job. Any overheating and he'd snatch us away in a hurry."

They dropped into the atmosphere and on down, almost to the surface. The air was breatheable, its composition being very similar to that of Earth's air, except that the carbon dioxide was substantially higher. Its pressure was somewhat high, but not too much; its temperature, while high, was endurable. The planet's gravitational pull was about ten per cent higher than Earth's. The ground was almost hidden by a rank growth of vegetation, but here and there appeared glade-like openings.

Landing upon one of the open spaces, they found the ground solid and stepped out. What appeared to be a glade was in reality a rock; or rather a ledge of apparently solid metal, with scarcely a loose fragment to be seen. At one end of the ledge rose a giant tree, wonderfully symmetrical, but of a peculiar form, its branches being longer at the top than at the bottom and having broad, dark-green leaves, long thorns, and odd, flexible, shoot-like tendrils. It stood as an outpost of the dense vegetation beyond. The fern-trees, towering two hundred feet or more into the air were totally unlike the forests of Earth. They were an intensely vivid green and stood motionless in the still, hot air. Not a sign of animal life was to be seen; the whole landscape seemed to be asleep.

"A younger planet than ours," DuQuesne said. "In the Carboniferous, or about. Aren't those fern-trees like those in the coal measures, Seaton?"

"Check—I was just trying to think what they reminded me of. But it's this ledge that interests me no end. Who ever heard of a chunk of noble metal this big?"

"How do you know it's noble?" Dorothy asked.

"No corrosion, and its probably been sitting here for a million years." Seaton, who had walked over to one of the loose lumps, kicked it with his heavy shoe. It did not move.

He bent over to pick it up, with one hand. It still did not move. With both hands and all the strength of his back he could lift it, but that was all.

"What do you make of this, DuQuesne?"

DuQuesne lifted the mass, then took out his knife and scraped. He studied the freshly-exposed metal and the scrapings, then scraped and studied again.

"Hmm. Platinum group, almost certainly . . . and the only known member of that group with that peculiar bluish sheen is your X."

"But didn't we agree that free X and copper couldn't exist on the same planet, and that planets of copper-bearing suns carry copper?"

"Yes, but that doesn't make it true. If this stuff is X, it'll give the cosmologists something to fight about for the next twenty years. I'll take these scrapings and run a couple of quickies."

"Do that, and I'll gather in these loose nuggets. If it's X—and I'm pretty sure it mostly is—that'll be enough to run all the power-plants of Earth for ten thousand years."

Crane and Seaton, accompanied by the two girls, rolled the nearer pieces of metal up to the ship. Then, as the quest led them farther and farther afield, Crane protested.

"This is none too safe, Dick."

"It looks perfectly safe to me. Quiet as a—"

Margaret screamed. Her head was turned, looking backward at the Skylark; her face was a mask of horror.

Seaton drew his pistol as he whirled, only to check his finger on the trigger and lower his hand. "Nothing but X-plosive bullets," he said, and the four watched a thing come out slowly from behind their ship.

Its four huge, squat legs supported a body at least a hundred feet long, pursy and ungainly; at the end of a long, sinuous neck a small head seemed composed entirely of cavernous mouth armed with row upon row of carnivorous teeth. Dorothy gasped with terror; both girls shrank closer to the two men, who maintained a baffled silence as the huge beast slid its hideous head along the hull of the vessel.

"I can't shoot, Mart—it'd wreck the boat—and if I had any solids they wouldn't be any good."

"No. We had better hide until it goes away. You two take that ledge, we'll take this one."

"Or gets far enough away from the Skylark so we can blow him apart," Seaton added as, with Dorothy close beside him, he dropped behind the low bulwark.

Margaret, her staring eyes fixed upon the monster, remained motionless until Crane touched her gently and drew her down to his side. "Don't be frightened, Peggy. It will go away soon."

"I'm not, now—much." She drew a deep breath. "If you weren't here, though, Martin, I'd be dead of pure fright."

His arm tightened around her; then he forced it to relax. This was neither the time nor the place. . . .

A roll of gunfire came from the Skylark. The creature roared in pain and rage, but was quickly silenced by the stream of .50-caliber machine-gun bullets.

"DuQuesne's on the job—let's go!" Seaton cried, and the four rushed up the slope. Making a detour to avoid the writhing body, they plunged through the opening door. DuQuesne closed the lock. They huddled together in overwhelming relief as an appalling tumult arose outside.

The scene, so quiet a few moments before, was horribly changed. The air seemed filled with hideous monsters. Winged lizards of prodigious size hurtled through the air to crash against the Skylark's armored hull. Flying monstrosities, with the fangs of tigers, attacked viciously. Dorothy screamed and started back as a scorpion-like thing ten feet in length leaped at the window in front of her, its terrible sting spraying the quartz with venom. As it fell to the ground a spider—if an eight legged creature with spines instead of  hair, faceted eyes, and a bloated globular body weighing hundreds of pounds may be called a spider—leaped upon it; and, mighty mandibles against the terrible sting, a furious battle raged. Twelve-foot cockroaches climbed nimbly across the fallen timber of the morass and began feeding voraciously on the carcass of the creature DuQuesne had killed.  They were promptly driven away by another animal, a living nightmare of that reptilian age which apparently combined the nature and disposition of tyrannosaurus rex with a physical shape approximating that of the saber-tooth tiger. This newcomer towered fifteen feet high at the shoulders and had a mouth disproportionate even to his great size; a mouth armed with sharp fangs three feet in length. He had barely begun his meal, however, when he was challenged by another nightmare, a thing shaped more or less like a crocodile.

The crocodile charged. The tiger met him head on, fangs front and rending claws outstretched. Clawing, striking, tearing savagely, an avalanche of bloodthirsty rage, the combatants stormed up and down the little island.

Suddenly the great tree bent over and lashed out against both animals. It transfixed them with its thorns, which the watchers now saw were both needle-pointed and barbed. It ripped at them with its long branches, which were in fact highly lethal spears. The broad leaves, equipped with sucking disks, wrapped themselves around the hopelessly impaled victims. The long, slender twigs or tendrils, each of which now had an eye at its extremity, waved about at a safe distance.

After absorbing all of the two gladiators that was absorbable the tree resumed its former position, motionless in all its strange, outlandish beauty.

Dorothy licked her lips, which were almost as white as her face. "I think I'm going to be sick," she remarked, conversationally.

"No you aren't." Seaton tightened his arm. "Chin up, ace."

"Okay, chief. Maybe not—this time." Color began to reappear on her cheeks. "But Dick, will you please blow up that horrible tree? It wouldn't be so bad if it were ugly, like the rest of the things, but it's so beautiful!"

"I sure will. I think we'd better get out of here. This is no place to start a copper mine, even if there's any copper here, which there probably isn't. . . . It is X, DuQuesne, isn't it?"

"Yes. Ninety-nine plus per cent, at least."

"That reminds me." Seaton turned to DuQuesne, hand outstretched. "You squared it, Blackie. Say the word the war's all off."

DuQuesne ignored the hand. "Not on my side," he said, evenly. "I act as one of the party as long as I'm with you. When we get back, however, I still intend to take both of you out of circulation." He went to his room.

"Well, I'll be a . . ." Seaton bit off a word. "He ain't a man he's a cold-blooded fish!"

"He's a machine—a robot" Margaret declared. "I always thought so, and now I know it!"

"We'll pull his cork when we get back," Seaton said. "He asked for it—we'll give him both barrels!"

Crane went to the board, and soon they were approaching another planet, which was surrounded by a dense fog. Descending slowly, they found it to be a mass of boiling-hot steam and rank vapor, under enormous pressure.

The next planet looked barren and dead. Its atmosphere was clear, but of a peculiar yellowish-green color. Analysis showed over ninety per cent chlorine. No life of any Earthly type could exist naturally upon such a world and a search for copper, even in space-suits, would be extremely difficult if not impossible.

"Well," Seaton said, as they were once more in space, "We've got copper enough to visit quite a few more solar systems if we have to. But there's a nice, hopeful-looking planet right over there. It may be the one we're looking for."

Arriving in the belt of atmosphere, they tested it as before and found it satisfactory.