The Skylark of Space quotes

Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which he had been electrolyzing his solution of “X,” the unknown metal.

For as soon as he had removed the beaker the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive.

“I don’t think that’s necessary, Mart. Don’t you think that’s carrying caution to extremes?”

“Possibly⁠—but I would rather be a live coward than a dead hero, wouldn’t you?”

“You chirped it, old scout, I sure would. I never did like the looks of that old guy with the scythe, and I would hate to let DuQuesne feel that he had slipped something over on me at my own game.

There is no more danger in this trip than there is in one to Mars. At all events, I am going whether you want me to or not, so save your breath.”

“You lie like a thief, Mart⁠—you know what we are up against as well as I do. But if you insist on coming along, I’m sure glad to have you.”

As their hands met in a crushing grip, the bars were brought up and loaded into the carriers. Waving goodbye to Wilson, they closed the massive door and took their positions.

“I admire your nerve, Miss Vaneman. I didn’t suppose that that animal over there would show such a wide streak of yellow, but I was rather afraid that you girls might go to pieces.”

“I’m scared blue, of course,” Dorothy admitted frankly, “but hysterics won’t do any good, and we simply must get back.”

“Certainly, we must and we will,” stated DuQuesne calmly. “If you like, you might find something for us to eat in the galley there, while I see what I can do with this board that I wrecked with my head.

“Yes, it feels that way because we have nothing to judge by.

Slowing down in one direction feels exactly like starting up in the opposite one.

There is no means of knowing whether we are standing still, going away from the earth, or going toward it, since we have nothing stationary upon which to make observations.

He took out a pair of large night-glasses and peered through them for several minutes.

“Good God! It’s a dead sun, and we’re nearly onto it! It looks as large as our moon!”

Springing to the board, he whirled the bar into the vertical. He took down a strange instrument, went to the bottom window, and measured the apparent size of the dark star.

The two men joined the girls and peered out into space through the window, which was completely invisible, so clear was the glass. As the four heads bent, so close together, an awed silence fell upon the little group.

For the blackness of the interstellar void was not the dark of an earthly night, but the absolute black of the absence of all light, beside which the black of platinum dust is pale and gray; and laid upon this velvet were the jewel stars.

They were not the twinkling, scintillating beauties of the earthly sky, but minute points, so small as to seem dimensionless, yet of dazzling brilliance.

“Well, may I be kicked to death by little red spiders!” exclaimed Seaton, dumbfounded, as the other disappeared. “

He ain’t a man, he’s a fish!

”

Nothing happened, however, and they disembarked, finding walking somewhat difficult because of the great mass of the planet. Looking around, they could see no sign of life, but they felt a presence near them—a vast, invisible something.

Suddenly, out of the air in front of Seaton, a man materialized: a man identical with him in every feature and detail, even to the smudge of grease under one eye, the small wrinkles in his heavy blue serge suit, and the emblem of the American Chemical Society upon his watch-fob.

“Hello, folks,” the stranger began in Seaton’s characteristic careless speech. “I see you’re surprised at my knowing your language. You’re a very inferior race of animals—don’t even understand telepathy, don’t understand the luminiferous ether, or the relation between time and space.

If I can derive the formula before you reach the boundaries of my home-space, beyond which I cannot go, I shall let you go free. Deriving the formula will be a neat little problem.

It should be fairly easy, as it involves only a simple integration in ninety-seven dimensions.

”

Until we went through this last experience I had intended to wait—but why should we wait?

Life is not lived in years alone, and you know how much I love you, my dearest!

” he finished, passionately.

“

It is dishonorable for a soldier of Earth to kill a helpless prisoner,

” he said briefly. “We cannot understand it, but we must not attempt to sway him in any point of honor.”

Darting hither and thither, the space-car tore through vessel after vessel of the Mardonalian fleet.

She was an embodied thunderbolt; a huge, irresistible, indestructible projectile, directed by a keen brain inside it⁠—the brain of Richard Seaton, roused to his highest fighting pitch and fighting for everything that man holds dear.

Tortured by the terrible silent waves, which, now that the protecting vacuum had been destroyed, were only partially stopped by the fur suits;