The Skylark of Valeron

The Skylark of Valeron by E.E. Smith

E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Valeron opens with a space chase already in progress: DuQuesne, Loring, and a captured Fenachrone engineer speed toward the Fenachrone home world in the arenak cruiser Violet. DuQuesne drugs the engineer with pentabarb, learns his mind, and uses him, plus lifelike dummies, to bluff past the planet's detector screens. When a patrol ship investigates, the dummies are destroyed and the engineer is taken aboard; DuQuesne then gasses the patrol crew and seizes their scout ship. He mines the dead officers' brains for knowledge, ambushes and captures a Fenachrone battleship by posing as a "space-crazy" incident, and slaughters its crew one by one to absorb their expertise, all while sending false reports to headquarters. While DuQuesne loiters to gather more data, the Fenachrone mobilize a huge defensive fleet, apparently against an unseen attacker. DuQuesne spies on headquarters, gets caught, and taunts the Fenachrone general before fleeing. Moments later the entire planet explodes — the work of Dunark and Seaton, unbeknownst to DuQuesne — and only his ship and one other Fenachrone vessel escape. DuQuesne searches in vain for the perpetrator, correctly suspects Seaton, and sets off on a months-long voyage back toward the Green System, coaching Loring on a cover story (they are "Donovan" and "Loring," humble Seaton-Crane engineers) to deceive whoever helped Seaton. Meanwhile, aboard Skylark Three, Seaton, using knowledge absorbed from the Norlaminians, builds a thought-detecting sixth-order projector and discovers a materialized, artificial planet inhabited by the "pure intellectuals" — disembodied, eternal mental entities. One of them, the despairing Eight, wishes for death; the leader, One, tries to compel Seaton's party to join their bodiless existence, then attacks the Skylark with inexhaustible cosmic-force beams when refused. Facing depletion of their power in forty hours, Seaton and Crane devise a desperate escape: rotating the small Skylark Two into the fourth dimension. The rotation succeeds, plunging Seaton, Dorothy, the Cranes, and Shiro into a bewildering four-dimensional hyperspace, where they must relearn perception (Dorothy discovers that "seeing" hyperobjects means mentally reducing them to three-dimensional surfaces). Their ship falls into a hyperplanet inhabited by tenuous, sea-horse-like "hypermen" who capture Seaton and Margaret with painful neural tridents, examine them uncomprehendingly as unintelligent brutes, and imprison them. Seaton breaks free, kills two guards with brute force amplified by his far denser three-dimensional body, and he and Margaret fight through hyperbeasts, a lightless "hypernight," and a jungle to navigate back toward the ship, using landmarks and an improvised surveying method. Under aerial attack near the excavation site, they leap and fight their way down to Skylark Two, where Seaton discovers Dorothy and the Cranes still frozen, seemingly untouched by time, and kills their captors. As the hypermen mount a final assault, the humans' bodies and surroundings suddenly begin reverting toward their original three-dimensional state, and Seaton reaches the master switch just as the rotation reverses. Meanwhile, DuQuesne reaches Norlamin, is mistaken for a grieving friend of the "lost" Seaton, and is given a duplicate Skylark Three by the unsuspecting Rovol along with full technical instruction, ostensibly to search for Seaton. Instead he abandons that pretext once out of Norlaminian observation range, circles back to Earth, and begins seizing global power: cowing World Steel's Brookings, publicly demonstrating overwhelming force by neutralizing navies and killing racketeers, and positioning himself to become the hidden master behind a puppet world government, all while privately contemplating dominion over the entire Galaxy and reckoning with how to eventually deal with Norlamin.

By E.E. Smith · First published 1948 · Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Fantasy · 24 chapters · 94,951 words

First lines

Day after day a spherical space ship of arenak tore through the illimitable reaches of the interstellar void. She had once been a war vessel of Osnome; now, rechristened the _Violet_, she was bearing two Terrestrials and a Fenachrone -- Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne of World Steel, "Baby Doll" Loring, his versatile and accomplished assistant, and the squat and monstrous engineer of the flagship _Y427W_ -- from the Green System toward the Solar System of the Fenachrone. The mid-point of the stupendous flight had long since been passed; the _Violet_ had long been "braking down" with a negative acceleration of five times the velocity of light.

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science fiction · space opera · adventure · alien civilizations · interstellar travel · romance · heroic journey · technology · military · exploration · fantasy elements · epic battles

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