E. E. Smith

“ Fundamentally we have accomplished nothing and we know nothing. We know but little more than we knew countless thousands of cycles ago, when our home planet was still substance. We know nothing of time; we know nothing of space; we know nothing even of the fourth dimension save that the three of us who rotated themselves into it have never returned. And until one of us succeeds in building a neutralizing pattern we can never die—we must face a drab and cheerless eternity of existence as we now are. ”

“ Suddenly—in an instant—had appeared the two monstrosities who had been taken to the capital. And in that same fleeting instant one of the monsters was leaping at him. And ahead of that monster there came lashing out an enormous anchor chain, one of whose links of solid steel no ordinary mortal could lift; an anchor chain hurtling toward him with a velocity and a momentum upon that tenuous hyperworld unthinkable.
The almost-immaterial flesh of the hyperman could no more withstand that fiercely driven mass of metal than can a human body ward off an armor-piercing projectile in full flight. ”

“ Raging but impotent, Seaton stood motionless beside his friend's wife upon the slowly rising lift; while Crane, Dorothy, and Shiro remained in the control room of the Skylark. All were helpless, incapable alike of making a single movement not authorized by their grotesque captors. Feeble the hypermen were, as has been said; but at the first tensing of a human muscle in revolt there shot from the insulated teeth of the grappling hypertrident such a terrific surge of unbearably poignant torture that any thought of resistance was out of the question. ”

“ Seaton blazed back.
"There is one thing that I believe you can do," Eight put in. "Your barrier wall should be able to free me from this intolerable condition of eternal life!" And he hurled himself forward with all his prodigious force against that nullifying wall.
Instantly the screen flamed into incandescence; converters and generators whined and shrieked as hundreds of pounds of power uranium disappeared under that awful load. But the screens held, and in an instant it was over. ”

“ DuQuesne spoke aloud, to render even more trenchantly cutting the crackling mental comments as they leaped across space, each thought lashing the officer like the biting, tearing tip of a bull whip.
"Better men than you have been beaten by overconfidence," he went on, "and better plans than yours have come to nought through underestimating the resources in brain and power of the opposition. You are not the first race in the history of the universe to go down because of false pride, and you will not be the last. ”

“ Thus died the devoted and high-souled band who had saved their civilization; but in that death each man was granted the boon which, deep in his heart, he had craved. They had died quickly and violently, fighting for a cause they knew to be good.
The suns passed, each upon his appointed way. The cosmic forces ceased to war and to the tortured and ravaged planet there at last came peace. The surviving children of Valeron emerged from their subterranean retreats and undauntedly took up the task of rebuilding their world. ”

“ No sun was visible, nor moon, nor the tiniest twinkling star. Where should be the heavens there was merely a void of utter, absolute black, appalling in its uncompromising profundity. Indeed, the Terrestrials would have thought themselves blind were it not for the forbidding, Luciferean vegetation which, self-luminous with a ghastly bluish-violet pseudo-light, extended outward—flat—in every direction to infinity.
"What's the matter with it, Dick?" demanded Margaret, shivering. "It's horrible, awful, unsettling. Surely anything that is actually seen must be capable of description? ”

“ You, however, youths of an unusually youthful and turbulent race, could not be expected to view the passing of such a one as Seaton from our own mature viewpoint."
"I'll tell the universe that I don't look at things the way you do!" barked DuQuesne scathingly. "When I go back to Earth—if I go—I shall at least have tried. I've got a life-sized picture of myself standing idly by while some one else tries for seven hundred years to decipher the indecipherable!"
"There speaks the impetuousness of youth," the old man chided. ”

“ He had to struggle against an insane urge to do something, anything; even to dash madly about in the absolute blackness of hyperspace in a mad attempt—doomed to certain failure before it was begun—to reach Skylark Two before she should vanish from four-dimensional space.
Thus, while Seaton grew more and more tense momently, more and ever more desperately frustrate, the abysmally oppressive hypernight wore illimitably on. Creeping—plodding—d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g endlessly along; extending itself fantastically into the infinite reaches of all eternity. ”

“ After a few days of impatient waiting and of eager anticipation, Seaton had settled down into the friendly and companionable routine of the flight. But inaction palled upon his vigorous nature and, physical outlet denied, he began to delve deeper and deeper into the almost-unknown, scarcely plumbed recesses of his new mind—a mind stored with the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations of the Rovol and of the Drasnik; generations of specialists in research in two widely separated fields of knowledge. ”

“ For we cannot die. We are simply patterns of force eternal, marking the passage of time only by the life cycles of the suns of the Galaxies.
"Why, I envy even the creatures inhabiting the planets throughout the Galaxy we visited but a moment ago. Partially intelligent though they are, struggling and groping, each individual dying after only a fleeting instant of life; born, growing old, and passing on in a minute fraction of a millionth of one cycle—yet I envy even them." ”

“ Above all, remember the mental attitude toward Seaton—hero worship. He is not only the greatest man that Earth ever produced; he is the king-pin of the entire Galaxy, and we rate him just a hair below the Almighty. Think that thought with every cell of your brain. ”

“ 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-boatlike, 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 good-by, Mart—you know my hunch. You got one, too?" ”

“ Dorothy called. She had remained at the visiplate, staring into the impenetrable darkness. "See, it just flashed on! We're falling toward ground of some kind. It doesn't look like any planet I ever saw before, either—it's perfectly endless and it's perfectly flat."
The others rushed to the plates and saw, instead of the utter blackness of a moment before, an infinite expanse of level, uncurving hyperland. Though so distant from it that any planetary curvature should have been evident, they could perceive no such curvature. ”

“ DuQuesne expected no opposition, for with a beam less potent by far he had consumed utterly a vessel built of arenak—arenak, that Osnomian synthetic which is five hundred times as strong, tough, and hard as Earth's strongest, toughest, or hardest alloy steel.
Yet that annihilating needle of force struck that transparent surface and rebounded from it in scintillating torrents of fire. Struck and rebounded, struck and clung; boring in almost imperceptibly as its irresistible energy tore apart, electron by electron, the surprisingly obdurate substance of the cruiser's wall. ”

“ Will you leave us and our universe alone, to work out our own salvation or our own damnation, as the case may be, or shall I leave you inside that sphere of force until its monitor bars are exhausted? Think well before you reply; for, know you, we all prefer to exist for a short time as flesh and blood rather than for all eternity as fleshless and immaterial intelligences. ”

“ Break out a bale of waste, the emergency candles, and all that sort of stuff you can find."
DuQuesne turned to the Fenachrone, who stood utterly lax, inanimate, and stared deep into those now dull and expressionless eyes.
"You," he directed crisply, "will build at once, as quickly as you can, two dummies which will look exactly like Loring and myself. They must be lifelike in every particular, with faces capable of expressing the emotions of surprise and of anger, and with right arms able to draw weapons upon signal—my signal. ”

“ The immense fortress was complete and had been tested in every part, from the ranked batteries of gigantic converters and generators down to the most distant outlying visiray viewpoint. It was powered, armed, equipped, provisioned, garrisoned. Every once-populated city was devoid of life, its inhabitants having dispersed over the face of the globe, to live in isolated groups until it had been decided whether the proud civilization of Valeron was to triumph or to perish. ”

“ Much as they love life, it would be infinitely better for them to spare a few minutes of it than to live forever."
But there was no reply. One had vanished; had darted at utmost speed toward the Skylark. Eight followed him instantly. Light-centuries of distance meant no more to them than to Seaton's own projector, and they soon reached the hurtling space ship; a space ship moving with all its unthinkable velocity, yet to them motionless—what is velocity when there are no reference points by which to measure it? ”

“ And from somewhere in the vacuum above that planet's forbidding surface there emanated a thought—a thought coldly clear, abysmally hopeless.
"I have but one remaining aim in this life. While I have failed again, as I have failed innumerable times in the past, I shall keep on trying until I succeed in assembling in sufficient strength the exact forces necessary to disrupt this sixth-order pattern which is I."
"You speak foolishly, Eight, as does each of us now and again," came instant response. "There is much more to see, much more to do, much more to learn. Why be discouraged or disheartened? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was merely a bare, mountainless, depthless sphere of rock and metal. Though sunless, it was not dark; it glowed with a strong, white light which emanated from the rocky soil itself. Nothing animate was visible, nor was there a sign that any form of life, animal or vegetable, had ever existed there.
"You can talk if you want to," Seaton observed, noticing that Dorothy was holding back by main strength a torrent of words. "They can't hear us—there's no audio in the circuit."
"What do you mean by 'they,' Dick?" she demanded. "You said it was an inhabited planet. That one isn't inhabited. ”

“ Roban brought up his last and strongest argument. "They are as savage as we are, if not more so. As you say, the necessity for continuous warfare ceased with the destruction of Mardonale, but are we to leave our whole planet defenseless against an interplanetary attack from Urvania?"
"They dare not attack us," declared Tarnan, "any more than we dare attack them. Seaton the overlord decreed that the people of us two first to attack the other dies root and branch, and we all know that the word of the overlord is no idle, passing breath." ”

“ Sacner Carfon, the porpoiselike, hairless, naked Dasorian councilor, heaved his six and a half feet of height and his five hundredweight of mass into Dunark's vessel and greeted the Osnomian prince with a grave and friendly courtesy.
"Yes, friend, everything is wonderfully well with Dasor," he answered Dunark's query. "Now that our one lack, that of power, has been supplied, our lives can at last be lived to the full, unhampered by the limitations which we have hitherto been compelled to set upon them. But this from Norlamin is terrible news indeed. ”