Two hundred two and three-quarters pounds. Ditto.
He examined the various items of equipment and of every-day use. There was his cutthroat razor, Osnomian — made of arenak — vastly sharper than any Earthly razor could possibly be honed and so incredibly hard that it could shave generation after generation of men with no loss whatever of edge.
Comb, brush, toothbrush, lotion — inside the drawers and out — every item was exactly as he had left it… clear down to the correctly-printed, peculiarly-distorted tubes of tooth-paste and of shaving cream; each of which, when he picked it up, fitted perfectly into the grip of his left hand.
“I’ll… be… totally… damned,” DuQuesne said then, aloud.
7. DUQUESNE AND KLAZMON
THE Skylark of Valeron swung in orbit around the sun of Earth. She was much more of worldlet than a spaceship, being a perfect sphere over a thousand kilometers in diameter. She had to be big. She had to house, among other things, the one-thousand-kilometers-diameter graduated circles of declination and of right ascension required to chart the thousands of millions of galaxies making up any given universe of the Cosmic All.
She was for the most part cold and dark. Even the master-control helmets, sprouting masses and mazes of thigh-thick bundles of hair-thin silver wire, hung inactivated in the neutral gray, featureless master-control room. The giant computer, however — the cubic mile of ultra-miniaturization that everyone called the “Brain” — was still in operation; and in the worldlet’s miles-wide chart-room, called the “tank,” there still glowed the enormous lenticular aggregation of points of light that was the chart of the First Universe — each tiny pool of light representing a galaxy composed of thousands of millions of solar systems.
A precisely coded thought impinged upon a receptor.
A relay clicked, whereupon a neighboring instrument, noting the passage of current through its vitals, went busily but silently to work, and an entire panel of instrumentation came to life.
Switch after switch snapped home. Field after field of time-stasis collapsed. The planetoid’s artificial sun resumed its shining; breezes began again to stir the leaves of trees and of shrubbery; insects resumed their flitting from bloom to once-more-scented bloom. Worms resumed their gnawings and borings beneath the green velvet carpets that were the lawns. Brooks began again to flow; gurglingly. Birds took up their caroling and chirping and twittering precisely where they had left off so long before; and three houses — there was a house now for Shiro and his bride of a month — became comfortably warm and softly, invitingly livable.
All that activity meant, of course, that the Seaton-Crane party would soon becoming aboard.
They were in fact already on the way, in Skylark Two; the forty-foot globe which, made originally of Osnomian arenak and the only spaceship they owned, had been “flashed over” into ultra-refractory inoson and now served as Captain’s gig, pinnace, dinghy, lifeboat, landing craft, and so forth — whatever any of the party wanted her to do. There were many other craft aboard the Skylark of Valeron, of course, of various shapes and sizes; but Two had always been the Seatons’ favorite “small boat.”
As Two approached the Valeron, directly in line with one of her huge main ports, Seaton slowed down to a dawdling crawl — a mere handful of miles per second — and thought into a helmet already on his head; and the massive gates of locks — of a miles-long succession of locks through the immensely thick skin of the planetoid — opened in front of flying Two and closed behind her. Clearing the last gate, Seaton put on a gee and a half of deceleration and brought the little flying sphere down to a soft and easy landing in her berth in the back yard of the Seatons’ house.
Eight people disembarked; five of whom were the three Seatons and Martin and Margaret Crane. (Infant Lucile Crane rode joyously on her mother’s left hip.) Seventh was short, chunky, lightning-fast Shiro, whose place in these Skylark annals has not been small. Originally Crane’s “man,” he had long since become Crane’s firm friend; and he was now as much of a Skylarker as was any of the others.
Eighth was Lotus Blossom, Shiro’s small, finely wrought, San Francisco-born and western-dressed bride, whom the others had met only that morning, just before leaving Earth. She looked like a living doll — but appearances can be so deceiving! She was in fact one of the most proficient female experts in unarmed combat then alive.
“Our house first, please, all of you,” Dorothy said. “We’ll eat before we do one single solitary thing else. I could eat that fabled missionary from the plains of Timbuctoo.”
Margaret laughed. “Hat and gown and hymnbook too,” she finished. “Me, too, Dick.”
“Okay by me; I could toy with a couple of morsels myself,” Seaton said, and pencils of force wafted the eight into the roomy kitchen of the house that was in almost every detail an exact duplicate of the Seatons’ home on Earth. “You’re the chief kitchen mechanic, Red-Top; strut your stuff.”
Dorothy looked at and thought into the controller — she no longer had to wear any of the limited-control headsets to operate them — and a damask-clothed table, set for six, laden with a wide variety of food and equipped with six carved oak chairs and two high-chairs, came instantly into being in the middle of the room.
The Nisei girl jumped violently; then smiled apologetically. “Shiro told me about such things, but… well, maybe I’ll get used to them sometimes I hope.”
“Sure you will, Lotus,” Seaton assured her. “It’s pretty weird at first, but you get used to it fast.”
“I sincerely hope so,” Lotus said, and eyed the six dinner places dubiously. She had thought that she was thoroughly American, but she wasn’t quite. Traditions are strong.
With an IQ that a Heidelberg student might envy, part of the crew of the most powerful vehicle man had ever seen, fully educated and trained… it was evident that Shiro’s dainty little bride was more than a little doubtful about sitting at that table.
Until Dorothy took her by the hand and sat her down. “This is where I like my friends to sit,” she announced. “Where I can see them.”
A flush dyed the porcelain-like perfection of Lotus’s skin. “I thank you, Mrs.—”
“Friends, remember?” Seaton broke in. “Call her Dot. Now let’s eat!”
Whereafter, they worked.
It may be wondered, among those historians not familiar with the saga of the Skylarks, why so much consternation and trouble should come from so small an event as the probabilistic speculation of a single Norlaminian sage that one mere human body, lately cast into the energy forms of the disembodied intelligences, might soon return into the universe in a viable form.
Such historians do not, of course, know Blackie DuQuesne.
While Seaton, Crane and the others were eating their meal, across distances to be measured in gigaparsecs, countless millions of persons were in one way or another busy at work on projects central to their own central concern. Seaton and Crane were not idle. They were waiting for further information… and at the same time, refurbishing the inner man with food, with rest and with pleasant company; but an hour later, after dinner, after the table and its appurtenances had vanished and the three couples were seated in the living room, more or less facing the fire, Seaton stoked up his battered black briar and Crane lighted one of his specially made cigarettes.
“Well?” Seaton demanded then. “Have you thank up anything you think is worth two tinker’s whoops in Hades?”
Crane smiled ruefully. “Not more than one, I’d say — if that many. Let’s consider that thought or message that Carfon is sending out. It will be received, he says, only by persons or entities who not only know more than we do about one or more specific things, but also are friendly enough to be willing to share their knowledge with us. And to make the matter murkier, we have no idea either of what it is that we lack or what it, whatever it is, is supposed to be able to do. Therefore Point One would, be: how are they going to get in touch with us? By what you called magic?”