The Skylark of Space - E. E. Smith (e book reading free txt) 📗

responded Seaton, as he placed the women beneath the copper bar⁠—the safest place in the vessel⁠—and leaped to the instrument board. Before he reached it, and while DuQuesne, Crane, and Dunark were hastening to the guns, the whine of giant helicopter-screws was plainly heard. A ranging shell from the first warship, sighted a little low, exploded against the side of the dock beneath them. He reached the levers just as the second shell screamed through the air a bare four feet above them. As he shot the Skylark into the air under five notches of power, a steady stream of the huge bombs poured through the spot where, an instant before, the vessel had been. Crane and DuQuesne aimed several shots at the battleships, which were approaching from all sides, but the range was so extreme that no damage was done.

They heard the continuous chattering of the machine gun operated by the Kofedix, however, and turned toward him. He was shooting, not at the warships, but at the city rapidly growing smaller beneath them; moving the barrel of the rifle in a tiny spiral; spraying the entire city with death and destruction! As they looked, the first of the shells reached the ground, just as Dunark ceased firing for lack of ammunition. They saw the palace disappear as if by magic, being instantly blotted out in a cloud of dust⁠—a cloud which, with a spiral motion of dizzying rapidity, increased in size until it obscured the entire city.

Having attained sufficient altitude to be safe from any possible pursuit and out of range of even the heaviest guns, Seaton stopped the vessel and went out into the main compartment to consult with the other members of the group, about their next move.

“It sure does feel good to get a breath of cool air, folks,” he said, as he drew with relief a deep breath of the air, which, at that great elevation, was of an icy temperature and very thin. He glanced at the little group of Kondalians as he spoke, then leaped back to the instrument board with an apology on his lips⁠—they were gasping for breath and shivering with the cold. He switched on the heating coils and dropped the Skylark rapidly in a long descent toward the ocean.

“If that is the temperature you enjoy, I understand at last why you wear clothes,” said the Kofedix, as soon as he could talk.

“Do not your planes fly up into the regions of low temperature?” asked Crane.

“Only occasionally, and all high-flying vessels are enclosed and heated to our normal temperature. We have heavy wraps, but we dislike to wear them so intensely that we never subject ourselves to any cold.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for tastes,” returned Seaton, “but I can’t hand your climate a thing. It’s hotter even than Washington in August; ‘and that,’ as the poet feelingly remarked, ‘is going some!’

“But there’s no reason for sitting here in the dark,” he continued, as he switched on the powerful daylight lamps which lighted the vessel with the nearest approach to sunlight possible to produce. As soon as the lights were on, Dorothy looked intently at the strange women.

“Now we can see what color they really are,” she explained to her lover in a low voice. “Why, they aren’t so very different from what they were before, except that the colors are much softer and more pleasing. They really are beautiful, in spite of being green. Don’t you think so, Dick?”

“They’re a handsome bunch, all right,” he agreed, and they were. Their skins were a light, soft green, tanned to an olive shade by their many fervent suns. Their teeth were a brilliant and shining grass-green. Their eyes and their long, thick hair were a glossy black.

The Kondalians looked at the Earthly visitors and at each other, and the women uttered exclamations of horror.

“What a frightful light?” exclaimed Sitar. “Please shut it off. I would rather be in total darkness than look like this!”

“What’s the matter, Sitar?” asked the puzzled Dorothy as Seaton turned off the lights. “You look perfectly stunning in this light.”

“They see things differently than we do,” explained Seaton. “Their optic nerves react differently than ours do. While we look all right to them, and they look all right to us, in both kinds of light, they look just as different to themselves under our daylight lamps as we do to ourselves in their green light. Is that explanation clear?”

“It’s clear enough as far as it goes, but what do they look like to themselves?”

“That’s too deep for me⁠—I can’t explain it, any better than you can. Take the Osnomian color mlap, for instance. Can you describe it?”

“It’s a kind of greenish orange⁠—but it seems as though it ought not to look like that color either.”

“That’s it, exactly. From the knowledge you received from the educator, it should be a brilliant purple. That is due to the difference in the optic nerves, which explains why we see things so differently from the way the Osnomians do. Perhaps they can describe the way they look to each other in our white light.”

“Can you, Sitar?” asked Dorothy.

“One word describes it⁠—‘horrible.’ ” replied the Kondalian princess, and her husband added:

“The colors are distorted and unrecognizable, just as your colors are to your eyes in our light.”

“Well, now that the color question is answered, let’s get going. I pretty nearly asked you the way, Dunark⁠—forgot that I know it as well as you do.”

The Skylark set off at as high an altitude as the Osnomians could stand. As they neared the ocean several great Mardonalian battleships, warned of the escape, sought to intercept them; but the Skylark hopped over them easily, out of range of their heaviest guns, and flew onward at such speed that pursuit was not even attempted. The ocean was quickly crossed. Soon the space-car came to rest over a great city, and Seaton pointed out the palace; which, with its landing dock nearby, was