"No one knows. Some day, whatever it is that we have will be recognized as having

existence and will be really studied. Until then, all we can do is follow the ancient ritual."

 

"I think I'll talk to Ky-El about it. But listen. Witches with any claim at all to decency

simply don't put geases on people. But what if he's so far away that we can't reach him

any other way?"

 

The older woman frowned, then said, "In that case, my dear, we'll never, never tell

anyone a thing about it."

 

23 RE-SETTING OF THE PREMIER

 

As the Skylark of Valeron approached Galaxy DW-427LU, Dorothy said, "Dick, I

suppose it's occurred to you more than once that I'm not much of a woman."

 

"You aren't? I'd say' you'd do until the real thing showed up." Seaton, who had been

thinking of the problem of synchronization instead of his wife, changed voice instantly

when he really looked at her and saw what a black mood she was in. "You're the

universe's best, is all, ace. I knew you were feeling a little low in your mind, but not . . .

listen, sweetheart. What could possiby make you think you aren't the absolute top?"

 

She did not answer the question. Instead, "What do you think you're going to get into

this time?"

 

"Nothing much, I'm sure. Prenk's probabiv running out of ammunition. We can make

more in five minutes than he can in five years."

 

"I'm sure that isn't it. You're going into personal danger again and I'll be expected to sit

up here in the Skylark eating my heart out wondering if you're alive or dead. You don't

see Sitar going through that with Dunark."

 

"Wait up, sweetheart. Mores and customs, remember?"

 

"Mores and customs be damned! Do you remember exactly what Sitar said and exactly

how she said it? Did it sound like mores and customs to you? Was there any element

whatever of suttee in it?"

 

"But listen, Dottie-" He took her gently in his arms.

 

"You listen!" she rushed on. "If he dies she doesn't want to keep on living and she

won't. And she doesn't care who knows it. Maybe it started that way-society's sanction

but that was her personal profession of faith. And I feel the same way. If you die I don't

want to keep on living and won't. So next time I'm going with you."

 

Being an American male, he could not accept that without an argument. "But there's

Dickie," he said.

 

"There are also her three children oil Osnome. I learned something from her about what

the basic, rock-bottom attitude of a woman toward her man ought to be. Even from little

Lotus. She's no bigger than a minute and a half, but what did she do? So while we're

having this moment of truth let's be rock-bottom honest with each other for the first time

in our lives instead of mouthing the platitudes of our society. I'm not a story-book

mother, Dick. If it ever comes right down to a choice, you know how I'll decide and how

long it will take!"

 

Seaton could not get in touch with Ree-Toe Prenk, of course, until the Valeron was

actually inside Galaxy DW427-LU; but as soon as communication could be established

Kay-Lee Barlo asked eagerly, "You did get our thought, then, Ky-El? Mother's and

mine? We didn't feel that we were quite reaching you."

 

"Not exactly," Seaton replied. "I didn't get any real thought at all; just a feeling that I

ought to be going somewhere that bothered me no end until I headed this way. But

since it was you people calling, I'm mighty glad I got what little I did."

 

The Skylark went into orbit around Ray-See-Nee and the Skylarkers climbed into a

landing-craft that Seaton had designed and built specifically for the occasion. It was a

miniature battleship-one of the deadliest fighting ships of its size and heft ever built.

And this time the whole party was heavily armed. Dunark and Sitar were in full

Osnomian panoply of war. Dorothy wore a pair of her long-barrelled .38 target pistols in

leg-holsters under her bouffant skirt. Even little Lotus wore two .25 automatics. "I don't

know whether I can hit anybody with one of these or not," she had said while Dorothy

was rigging her. "I'd much rather work hand to hand. But if they're too far away to get at

I can at least make a lot of noise and look like I'm doing something."

 

They were met at the spaceport by two platoons of the Premier's Guard, led by

Captain-General Sy-By Takeel himself. They were guarded like visiting royalty from the

spaceport to the Capitol Building and up into the Room of State, where they were

greeted with informal cordiality by Prenk and by Kay-Lee, who was now an Exalted of

the Thirty-Fifth, besides being First Deputy Premier.

 

Prenk seated his guests, not on stools in front of and below his throne-like desk, but at

a long conference table with Seaton as its head. The two lieutenants posted guards

outside the two immense doors at the far end of the vast room and stationed the rest of

their men in position to cover both entrances. Takeel, with velvet slippers over his field-

boots, stood on Prenk's desk, commanding the entire room, with a machine-gun-like

weapon cradled expertly and accustomedly in the crook of his left arm.

 

"Are things this bad?" Seaton asked. "I knew it was tough when you told us to come

loaded for bear-but this?"

 

"They're exactly this bad. These two-" Prenk jerked a thumb at Kay-Lee and at Takeel-

"are the only two people on this whole world that I know I can trust. Until quite recently I

was sure I held the city-but now I'm not at all sure of holding even this building. I can

only hope that you're not too late. I'll tell you what the situation is; then you will tell me,

please, if there is anything you can do. about it."

 

He talked for twelve minutes. Then:

 

"P-s-s-s-st!" Kay-Lee hissed. "Danger! Coming-nearing us-fast! I can feel it-taste it-

smell it! Get ready quick!" She sprang to her feet, drew her pistol, and arranged a

dozen clips of cartridges meticulously on the table in front of her.

 

The Osnomians' chairs crashed backward, their heavy coats flew off, and they stood

tensely ready, machine pistols in all four hands. And, seconds later, the other

Skylarkers were on their feet and ready too. The Captain-General had not heard the

low-voiced warning, but he had seen the action and that was enough. Trigger-nerved

Dunark's chair had no sooner struck the floor on its first bounce than Takeel was going

into his shooting stance, with his weapon flipping around into firing position as though it

were sliding in a greased groove; the while glaring ferociously at his senior lieutenant-

who thereupon began to have an acute attack of the jitters.

 

It was the commander's savage motion, actually, that ruined the attackers' split-second

schedule. For, at a certain second, the two lieutenants were to shoot their captain; then

to shoot Prenk and Kay-Lee Barlo; and then, as the attack proper was launched, they

were to kill as many of their own men as they could. Thus, knowing what a savage

performer the Captain-General was with his atrocious weapon, their hands were forced;

they had to act a couple of seconds too soon. They tried-but with two short bursts so

close together as to be practically one, Takeel cut them down. Cut them both almost

literally in two.

 

Thus, when the two great doors were blasted simultaneously down and the attackers

stormed in with guns ablaze, they did not find a half-dead and completely demoralized

Guard and a group of surprised visitors. Instead:

 

The mercenaries were neither dead nor demoralized. They knew exactly what to do and

were doing it. Dunark and Sitar had the fire-power of half a company of trained troops

and were using it to the fullest full. The Captain general, from his coign of vantage atop

the desk, was spraying both entrances with bullets like a gardener watering two flower-

beds with a hose. Kay-Lee was throwing lead almost as fast as Takeel was; changing

magazines with such fluent speed and precision as to miss scarcely a shot. Dorothy,

nostrils flaring and violet eyes blazing, was shooting as steadily and as accurately as

though she were out on the range marking up another possible. Even tiny Lotus, with

one of her .25's clutched in both hands, was shooting as fast as she could pull the

trigger.

 

It was Seaton, however, who ended the battle. He waited long enough to be absolutely

sure of what was going on, then fired twice with his left-hand magnum-through the

doorways, high over the heads of the attackers, far down the corridors.

 

There were two terrific explosions; followed by one long rumbling crash as that whole

section of the building either went somewhere else or collapsed into rubble. Falling and

flying masonry and steel and razor-edged shards of structural glass killed almost

everyone outside the heavily reenforced wall of the Room of State. The shock-waves of

the blasts, raging through the doorways, killed half of the enemy massed there and

blew the others half the length of the room. And, continuing on with rapidly decreasing

force, knocked most of the Skylarkers flat and blew the Captain general off of. the desk

and clear back against the wall.

 

"Sangram's head!" that worthy yelled, scrambling to his feet with machine-gun again-or

still? He had not for an instant lost control of that!-at the ready. "What in Japnonk's

rankest hell was that?"

 

"X-plosive shell," Seaton said, his voice as hard as his eyes. "This time I came loaded

for bear. Now we'll mop up and find out what's been going on. I gather, sir, that your two

platoon leaders were in on it?"

 

"Yes. It's a shame I had to kill 'em without asking 'em a few questions." He did not

explain that he had had neither the time in which nor the weapon with which merely to

wound them seriously enough so that neither of them could fight back with any sort of

weapon. There was no need.

 

"That won't make too much difference." Seaton looked around; first at his own crew and

then at the guards, half of whom were down. Medics and first-aid men were rushing in

to work on them. He looked again, more closely, at his people and at Prenk and Kay-

Lee. Not one of them, apparently, had even been scratched.

 

That, however, was logical. The mercenaries were hardtrained fighting men, shooting

`was their business. Hence the attackers' orders had been to shoot the guards first, and

there had been no time to evaluate the actual situation and to change the plan of

attack. Hence, as far as anyone knew, not a single bullet had been aimed at the far end

of the room.

 

Seaton took a pair of headsets out of his pocket and applied one of them, first to one of

the two lieutenants' heads, then to the other.

 

"Uh-huh," he grunted then. "That ape didn't know too much, but this one was going to

be the new captain-general. I suppose you've got a recorder, Ree-Toe?"

 

"I'll get it, sir!" Kay-Lee exclaimed; and Prenk, eyes bulging, gasped:

 

"Don't tell me you can read a dead brain, sir!"

 

"Oh, yes. They keep their charges, sometimes for days.'

 

Kay-Lee handed Seaton a microphone then, and he spoke into it for ten minutes the

while three Rayseenian faces went through gamuts of emotion; each culminating in the

same expression of joyous satisfaction.

 

When Seaton paused for breath Prenk said in awe, "That machine is certainly a

something . . . I don't suppose . . ." He stopped.

 

"I do suppose, yes. I'll give you a few sets, with blueprints, and show you how they

work," and Seaton went on with his reading.

 

A few minutes later he cut off the mike and said, "That ape over there," he pointed, "is

one of the Big Wheels. Have someone latch onto him, Ree-Toe; we'll read him next.

He's one you'll be really interested in, so I'll hook you up in parallel with me so you can

get everything he knows into your own brain." He took a third headset from his pocket

and began to adjust its settings, going on, "It takes a different set-up . . . so . . . and

goes on your head so."

 

"That ape" was a fattish, sallow-faced man of fifty, who had been directing operations

from outside the room and had intended to stay outside it until everything was secure

within. He had been blown into the room and halfway along its length by the force of the

blasts. He was pretty badly smashed up, but he was beginning to regain consciousness

and was weakly trying to get to his feet.

 

This unlucky wight was a mine of information indeed, but Prenk stopped the mining

operation after only a couple of minutes of digging.

 

"Sy-By," he said. "Two more of your officers you can shoot." He gave two names. "Then

come back here with some men you think you can trust and we'll test 'em to make sure.

By that time I'll have a list of people for you to round up and bring in for examination."

 

There is no need to follow any farther the Premier's progress in cleaning up his planet.

In fact, only one more incident that occurred there is of interest here-one that occurred

while Seaton and Dorothy were getting ready for bed in one of the suites of honor. She

put both arms around him suddenly; he pressed her close.

 

"Dick, I belonged there. Beside you. Every fiber of my being belonged there. That was

exactly where I belonged."

 

"I know you did, sweet. I'll have to admit it. But . . ."

 

She put her hand over his mouth. "But nothing, my dearest. No buts. I've killed rats and

rattlesnakes, and that wasn't any different. Not a bit different in any way."

 

Of the more than five thousand Fenachrone who had left their noisome home planet in

Sleemet's flagship, almost seven hundred had died and more were dying.

 

It was not that the Llurdi were physically cruel to them or abused them in any way. They

didn't. Nor were they kind; they were conspicuously and insultingly neutral and

indifferent to them. Conspicuous and insulting, that is, to the hypersensitive minds of

the captives. In their own minds, the Llurdi were acting strictly according to logic. Every

item of the subjects' environment duplicated precisely its twin on the subjects' home

world. What more could logically be done? Nothing.

 

The Llurdi observed the mental anguish of the Fenachrone, of course, and recorded

their emotions quite accurately, but with no emotional reactions whatever of their own.

Practically all emotions were either illogical or unsane, or both.

 

To the illogical and unsane Fenachrone, however-physically, mentally, intellectually and

psychologically-the situation was intolerable; one that simply could not be endured.

 

They were proud, haughty, intolerant; their race had always been so. Since time

immemorial it had been bred into their innermost consciousnesses that they were the

RACE SUPREME-destined unquestionably to be the absolute rulers of all things living

or yet to live throughout all the transfinite reaches of the Cosmic All.

 

Holding this belief with every fiber of their beings, they had been plunged instantly into a

condition of complete, utter helplessness.

 

Their vessel could not fight. While it was intact except for its tail-section and its power-

pods, its every offensive projector was burned out; useless. Nor could they fight

personally, either physically or mentally. Their physical strength, enormous as it was,

was of no avail against the completely logical, completely matter-of-fact minds of the

Llurdi.

 

Most galling condition of all, the Fenachrone were not treated as enemies; nor as

menaces or threats; nor even as intelligent entities whose knowledges and abilities

might be worthy of notice. These things were observed and recorded, to be sure, but

only as component parts of a newly discovered class of objects, the Fenachrone; a

class of objects that happened to be alive. The Fenachrone were neither more nor less

noteworthy than were birds or barnacles.

 

Sleemet, no longer young and perhaps the proudest and most intractable and most

intransigent of the lot, could not endure that treatment very long; but he did -not bend.

The old adage "Where there's life there's hope," simply is not true where such as the

Llurdi and the Fenachrone are concerned. Sleemet lost all hope and broke; broke

almost completely down.

 

He stopped eating. That did not bother the Llurdi in any way. Why should it? They were

neither squeamish nor humane, any more than they were cruel or vindictive. The fact

that certain of these creatures stopped taking nourishment under certain conditions was

merely a datum to be observed and recorded.

 

But since Sleemet was big and strong, even for a Fenachrone, and had previously

eaten very well indeed, it took him a long time to die. And as he weakened-as the

bindings between flesh and spirit loosened more and ever more -he regressed more

and ever more back into the youth of his race. Back and back. Still farther back; back

into its very childhood; back to a time when his remote ancestors ate their meat alive

and communicated with each other, sometimes by grunts and gestures, but more often

by means of a purely mental faculty that was later to evolve into the power of ocular

hypnosis.

 

Half conscious or less of his surroundings but knowing well that death was very near,

Sleemet half-consciously sent out his race's ages-old mental message-in-extremity of

the dying.

 

Marc C: DuQuesne knew vastly more about the Fenachrone than did any other man

alive, not excluding Richard Seaton. He and Seaton were, as far as is known, the only

two men ever to meet Fenachrone mind to mind and live through the experience; but

DuQuesne had been in thoughthelmet contact with a Fenachrone much longer and

much more intimately and very much more interestedly than Seaton ever had-because

of the tremendous intrinsic differences between the personalities of the two men.

 

Seaton, after having crippled a war-vessel of the Fenachrone, had pinned its captain

against a wall with so many beams of force that he could not move his head and could

scarcely move any other part of his monstrous body. Then, by means of a pair of

thought-helmets, he had taken what of that captain's knowledge he wanted. He had,

however, handled that horribly unhuman brain very gingerly. He had merely read certain

parts of it, as one reads an encyclopedia; at no time had his mind become en rapport

with that of the monster. In fact, he had said to Crane:

 

"I'd hate to have much of that brain in my own skullafraid I'd bite myself. I'm just going

to look . . . and when I see something I want I'll grab it and put it into my own brain."

 

DuQuesne, however, in examining a navigating engineer of that monstrous race, had

felt no such revulsion, contrariwise-although possibly not quite consciously-he had

admired certain traits of Fenachrone character so much that he had gone en rapport

with that engineer's mind practically cell to cell; with the result that he had emerged

from that mental union as nearly a Fenachrone himself as a human being could very

well become.

 

Wherefore, as DuQuesne in his flying-planetoid-base approached the point of its

course nearest to the planet Llurdiax, he began to feel the thinnest possible tendril of

thought trying to make contact with one of the deepest chambers of his mind. He

stiffened; shutting it off by using automatically an ability that he had not known

consciously that he had. He relaxed; and, all interest now, tuned his mind to that feeler

of thought, began to pull it in, and stopped-and the contact released a flood of

Fenachrone knowledge completely new to him.

 

A Fenachrone, dying somewhere, wanted . . . wanted what? Not help, exactly. Notice?

Attention? To gave something? DuQuesne was not enough of a Fenachrone to

translate that one thought even approximately, and he was not interested enough to

waste any time on it. It had something to do with the good of the race; that was close

enough.

 

DuQuesne, frowning a little, sat back in his bucket seat and thought. He had supposed

that the Fenachrone were all dead . . . but it made sense that Seaton couldn't have

killed all of a space-faring race, at that. But so what? He didn't care how many

Fenachrone died. But a lot of their stuff was really good, and he certainly hadn't got it all

yet, by any means; it might be smart to listen to what the dying monster had to say-

especially since he, DuQuesne, was getting pretty close to the home grounds of

Klazmon the Llurd.

 

Wherefore DuQuesne opened his mental shield: and, since his mind was still tuned

precisely to the questing wave and since the DQ was now practically as close to

Llurdiax as it would get on course 255U, he received a burst of thought that iarred him

to the very teeth.

 

It is amazing how much information can be carried by a Fenachrone-compressed burst

of thought. It was fortunate for DuQuesne that he had the purely Fenachrone abilities to

decompress it, to spread it out and analyze it, and later, to absorb it fully.

 

The salient points, however, were pellucidly clear. The dying monster was First Scientist

Fleet Admiral Sleemet; and he and more than four thousand other Fenachrone were

helpless captives of and were being studied to death by Llurdan scientists under the

personal direction of Llanzlan Klazmon.

 

Realizing instantly what that meant-Klazmon would be out here in seconds with a

probe, if nothing stronger--DuQuesne slammed on full-coverage screens at full power,

thus sealing his entire worldlet bottle-tight against any and every spy-ray, beam, probe,

band, zone of force and/or order of force that he knew anything about. Since this

included everything he had known before this trip began, plus everything he had

learned from Freemind One and from the Jelmi and from Klazmon himself, he was

grimly certain that he was just as safe as though he were in God's hip pocket from any

possible form of three-dimensional observation or attack.

 

Cutting in his fourth-dimensional gizmo-how glad he was that he had studied it so long

and so intensively that he knew more about it than its inventors did!-he flipped what he

called its "eye" into the Fenachrone Reservation on distant Llurdiax. He seized

Sleemet, bed and all, in a wrapping of force and deposited the bundle gently on the

floor of the DQ's control room, practically at his, DuQuesne's feet. Fenachrone could

breathe Earth air for hours without appreciable damage-they had proved that often

enough and if he decided to keep any of them alive he'd make them some air they liked

better.

 

Second, he brought over a doctor, complete with kit and instruments and supplies; and

third, the Fenachrone equivalent of a registered nurse.

 

"You, doctor!" DuQuesne snapped, in Fenachronian. "I don't know whether this

spineless weakling is too far gone to save or not. Or whether he is worth saving or not.

But since he was actually in charge of your expedition-to-preserve-the-race I will listen

to what he has to say instead of blasting him out of hand. So give him a shot of the

strongest stuff you have-or is he in greater need of food than of stimulant?"

 

DuQuesne did not know whether the doctor would cooperate with a human being or

not. But he did-whether from lack of spirit of his own or from desire to save his chief,

DuQuesne did not care enough to ask.

 

"Both," the doctor said, "but nourishment first, by all means. Intravenous, nurse,

please," and doctor and nurse went to work with the skill and precision of their highly

trained crafts.

 

And, somewhat to DuQuesne's surprise, Sleemet began immediately to rally; and in

three-quarters of an hour he had regained full consciousness.

 

"You spineless worm!" Duquesne shot at the erstwhile invalid, in true Fenachrone tone

and spirit. "You gutless wonder! You pusillanimous weakling, you sniveling coward! Is it

the act of a noble of the Fenachrone to give up, to yield supinely, to surrender

ignominiously to a fate however malign while a spark of life endures?"

 

Sleemet was scarcely stirred by this vicious castigation. He raised dull eyes-eyes

shockingly lifeless to anyone who had ever seen the ruby-lighted, flame-shot wells of

vibrant force that normal Fenachrone eyes were-and said lifelessly, "There is a point,

the certainty of death, at which struggle becomes negative instead of positive. It merely

prolongs the agony. Having passed that point, I die."

 

"There is no such point, idiot, while life lasts! Do I look like Klazmon of Llurdiax?"

 

"No, but death is no less certain at your hands than at his."

 

"Why should it be, stupid?" and DuQuesne's sneer was extra-high-voltage stuff, even

for Doctor Mare C. DuQuesne.

 

Now was the crucial moment. IF he could take all those Fenachrone over, and IF he

could control them after they got back to normal, what a crew they would make! He

stared contemptuously at the ex-admiral and went on:

 

"Whether or not you and your four thousand die in the near future is up to you. While I

do not have to have a crew, I can use one efficiently for a few weeks. If you choose to

work with me I will, at the end of that time, give you a duplicate of your original

spaceship and will see to it that you are allowed to resume your journey wherever you

wish."

 

"Sir, the Fenachrone do not . . :' the doctor began stiffly.

 

"Shut up, you poor, dumb clown!" DuQuesne snapped.

 

"Haven't you learned anything? That instead of being the strongest race in space you

are one of the weakest? You have one choice merely-cooperate or die. And that is not

yours, but Sleemet's. Sleemet?"

 

"But how do I know that if . . ."

 

"If you have any part of a brain, fool, use it! What matters it to me whether Fenachrone

live or die? I'm not asking you anything; I'm telling you under what conditions I will save

your lives. If you want to argue the matter I'll put you three-and the bed-back where you

were and be on my way. Which do you prefer?"

 

Sleemet had learned something. He had been beaten down flat enough so that he

could learn something-and he realized that he had much to learn from any race who

could do what his rescuer had just done.

 

"We will work with you," Sleemet said. "You will, I trust, instruct us concerning how you

liberated us three and propose to liberate the others?"

 

"I can't. It was fourth-dimensional translation." DuQuesne lied blandly. "Did you ever try

to explain the color `blue' to a man born blind? No scientist of your race will be able to

understand either the theory or the mechanics of fourth dimensional translation for

something like eleven hundred thousand of your years."

 

24 DU QUESNE AND SLEEMET

 

EN route to the galaxy in which DuQuesne's aliens supposedly lived, Dorothy said, "Say

Dick. I forgot to ask you something. What did you ever find out about that thought

business of Kay-Lee's?"

 

"Huh?" Seaton was surprised. "What was there to find out? How are you going to

explain the mechanism of thought-by unscrewing the inscrutable? She said, and I

quote, `We didn't feel that we were quite reaching you,' unquote. So it was she and

Ree-Toe Prenk. Obviously. Holding hands or something-across a Ouija board or some

other focusing device, probably. Staring into each other's eyes to link minds and direct

the thought."

 

"But they did hit you with something," she insisted, "and it bothers me. They can do it

and we can't."

 

"No sweat, pet. That isn't a circumstance to what you do every time you think at a

controller to order up a meal or whatever. How do you do that? Different people,

different abilities, is all. Anyway, Earth mediums have done that kind of thing for ages. If

you're really interested, you can take some time off and learn it, next time we're on Ray-

See-Nee. But for right now, my red-headed beauty, we've got something besides that

kind of monkey-business to worry about."

 

"That's right, we have," and Dorothy forgot the minor matter in thinking of the major.

"Those aliens. Have you and Martin figured out a modus operandi?"

 

"More or less. Go in openly, like tourists, but with everything we've got not only on the

trips but hyped up to as nearly absolutely instantaneous reactivity as the Brain can

possibly get it."

 

Both DuQuesne's DQ and Seaton's Skylark of Valeron were within range of Llurdiax.

DuQuesne, however, as has been said, was covering up as tightly as he could.

Everything that could be muzzled or muffled was muzzled or muffled, and he was

traveling comparatively slowly, so as to put out the minimum of detectable high-order

emanation. Furthermore, his screens were shoved out to such a tremendous distance,

and were being varied so rapidly and so radically in shape, that no real pattern existed

to be read. The DQ was not indetectable, of course, but it would have taken a great

deal of highly specialized observation and analysis to find her.

 

The Skylark of Valeron, on the other hand, was coming in wide open: "Like a tourist," as

Seaton had told Dorothy the plan was to do.

 

In the llanzlanate on Llurdiax, therefore, an observer alerted Klazmon, who flew

immediately to his mastercontrol panel. He checked the figures the observer had given

him, and was as nearly appalled as a Llurd could become. An artificial structure of that

size and mass-it was certainly not a natural planetoid-had never even been thought of

by any builder of record. He measured its acceleration-the Valeron was still braking

down at max and his eyes bulged. That thing, tremendous as it was, had the power-to-

mass ratio of a speedster! In spite of its immense size it was actually an intergalactic

flyer!

 

He launched a probe, as he had done so many times before-but with entirely

unexpected results.

 

The stranger's guardian screens were a hundred times as reactive as any known to

Llurdan science. He was not allowed time for even the briefest of mental contacts or for

any real observation at all. So infinitesimal had been the instant usable time that only

one fact was clear. The entities in that mobile monstrosity were-positively-Jelmoids.

 

Not true Jelmi, certainly. He knew all about the Jelmi. Those tapes bore unmistakable

internal evidence of being true and complete records and there was no hint anywhere in

them of anything like this. If not the Jelmi, who? Ah, yes, the Fenachrone, whose fleet .

. . no, Sleemet knew nothing of such a construction . . . and he was not exactly of the

same race . . . ah, yes, that one much larger ship that had escaped. The probability was

high that its one occupant belonged to precisely the same Jelmoid race as did the

personnel of this planetoid. The escaped one had reported Klazmon's cursory

investigation as an attack. It was a virtual certainty, therefore, that this was a battleship

of gat race, heading for Llurdiax to . . . to what? To investiate merely? No.

 

Nor merely to parley. They had made no attempt whatever to communicate. (It did not

occur to Klazmon, then or ever, that his own fiercely driven probe could not possibly

have been taken for an attempt at communication. He had fully intended to

communicate, as soon as he had seized the mind of whoever was in command of the

strange spacecraft.) And now, with the stranger's incredible fullcoverage screen in

operation, communication was and would remain impossible.

 

But he had data sufficient for action. These Jelmoids, like all others he knew, were

rabidly anti-social, illogical, unreasoning, unsane and insane. They were-definitely-

surplus population.

 

So thinking, Llanzlan Klazmon launched his attack.

 

As the Skylark entered that enigmatic galaxy, Seaton was not in his home, with only a

remote-control helmet with which to work. He was in the control room itself, at the base

of the Brain, with the tremendously complex-master-control itself surrounding his head.

Thus he was attuned to and in instantaneous contact with every activated cell of that

gigantic Brain. It was ready to receive and to act upon with the transfinite speed of

thought any order that Seaton would think. Nor would any such action interfere in any

way with the automatics that Seaton had already set up.

 

"I'm going to stay here all day," Seaton said, "and all night tonight, too, if necessary."

 

But he did not have to stay there even all day. In less than four hours the llanzlan drove

his probe and Seaton probed practically instantaneously back. And since Seaton's

hyped-up screens were a hundred times faster than the Llurd's, Seaton "saw" a

hundred times as much as Klazmon did. He saw the city Llurdias in all its seat-of-

empire pride and glory. He perceived its miles-wide girdle of fortresses. He perceived

the llanzlanate; understood its functions and purposes. He entered the Hall of

Computation and examined minutely the beings and the machines at work there.

 

How could all this be? Because the speed of thought, if not absolutely infinite, is at least

transfinite; immeasurable to man. And the Valeron's inorganic brain and Seaton's

organic one were, absolutely and super-intimately, the two component parts of one

incredibly able, efficient and proficient whole.

 

Thus, when the alien's attack was launched in all its fury and almost all of the Valeron's

mighty defensive engines went simultaneously into automatic action, the coded

chirpings that the Brain employed to summon human help did not sound: that Brain's

builder, fellow, boss, and perfect complement was already on the job.

 

And thus, since no warning had been given, the other Skylarkers were surprised when

Seaton called them all down into the control room.

 

They were even more surprised when they saw how white and strained his face was.

 

"This may become veree unfunny," he said. "'Tsa good thing I muscled her up or we'd

be losing some skin and some of our defense. As it is, we're holding 'em and we've got

a few megas in reserve. Not enough to be really happy about, but some. And we're

building more, of course. However, that ape down there has undoubtedly got a lot of

stuff otherwheres on the planet that he can hook in pretty fast, so whatever we're going

to do we'd better do right now."

 

"They didn't try to communicate at all?" Crane asked. "Strange for a race of such

obviously high attainments."

 

"Not a lick," Seaton said, flatly. "Just a probe; the hardest and sharpest probe I ever

saw. When I blocked it Whammo!"

 

"You probed, too, of course," Dorothy said. "What did you find out? Are they really

monstrous, as DuQuesne said, out purely to kill?"

 

"Just that. He wasn't lying a nickel's worth on that. His Nibs down there had already

decided that we were surplus population and should be eliminated, and he set right out

to do it. So, unless some of you have some mighty valid reasons not to, I'm going to try

my damndest to eliminate him, right now."

 

"We could run, I suppose," Margaret suggested-but not at all enthusiastically.

 

"I doubt it. Not without letting him burn us down to basketball size, like the Chlorans did.

He undoubtedly let us get this close on purpose so we couldn't."

 

Since no one else said anything, Seaton energized everything of offense he had. He

tuned it as precisely as he possibly could. He assembled it into the tightest, solidest,

hardest beam he could possibly build. Then, involuntarily tensing his muscles and

bunching his back, he drove the whole gigantic thing squarely at where he knew the

llanzlanate was.

 

The Llurd's outer screen scarcely flickered as it went black in nothing flat of time. The

intermediate screen held for eighty-three hundredths of a second. Then the practically

irresistible force of that beam met the practically immovable object that was Klazmon's

last line of defense. And as it clawed and bit and tore and smashed in ultrapyrotechnic

ferocity, solar-like flares of raw energy erupted from the area of contact and the very

ether writhed and seethed and warped under the intolerable stresses of the utterly

incomprehensible forces there at grips.

 

This went on . . . and on . . . and on.

 

Even to Seaton, who knew only that he was up against an enemy nearly as potent as

the Chlorans, the full import of the enormous struggle of energies then being waged

was far from clear. We can wonder now, and ask ourselves what the fate of the

universe might have been if the Skylark's Norlaminian designers had skimped on a

course of screens, or overlooked a detail of defense. Surely its consequences would

have been cataclysmic! Not only to Seaton and his Skylarker, watching grim-faced as

their gauges revealed the enormous flow of destructive forces battling each other to

annihilation for countless parsecs in every direction. Not only to the Jelmi, or the Rey-

See-Neese, or the Norlaminians, or Earth itself . . . but to countless generations yet

unborn, on planets not yet discovered . . .

 

But they held.

 

And after ten endless minutes of such terrible gouts and blasts of destruction as no

planet could endure for a moment, Seaton heard a voice speak to him.

 

He had never heard it before, but it said in good American English: "Good morning, my

friends. Or perhaps, by your clocks, it is good afternoon? I am the Llanzlan Mergon of

Jelin, and I perceive that you are under attack by our old acquaintances, the Llurdi.

You, I am sure, are the Seatons and the Cranes, about whom we heard so much on

Earth, but whom we were not able to find."

 

Even though the Llurdi had been absolute rulers of all the .planets of the Jelmi for many

thousands of years, it was easy for them to accept, and to adopt themselves to, the

new condition of coexistence with the Realm of the Jelmi on terms of equality. That was

the way they were built.

 

The llanzlan fed the new data into Computer Prime and issued its findings as a

directive. Since this directive was the product of pure logic, that was all there was to it.

 

With the Jelmi, however, even with a much simpler and easier agenda, things were

distinctly otherwise. Everyone knows how difficult it is to change the political thinking of

even a part of any human world. How, then, of the two hundred forty whole planets of

the Jelmi? The conservatives did not want any change at all. Not even to

independence. The radicals wanted everything changed; but each faction wanted each

item changed in a different fashion. And the moderates, as usual, did .not agree with

either extreme wing on anything.

 

And, also as usual, no one faction would play ball with any other. Each would have its

own way in setting up the Realm or there would be no Realm-it would pick up its

marbles and go home.

 

Fortunately, however, the eight hundred best brains of the entire Jelman race were

together in one place-in the fully operative base that the Mallidaxian's dome had now

become. Their numbers included the most capable and most highly trained specialists

in every field of Jelman endeavor and they all had been living together and working

together for many months.

 

They knew better than to go off half cocked. They would have to develop a master-plan

upon which they could all agree. Unanimously. Nothing less would do. Having

developed such a plan they would put it into effect, each person or planetary group

upon his or her or their home world. The constitution thus fabricated would be put into

effect by reason if possible, by force if necessary. It was not to be amended except by

process contained within itself.

 

Thus the Constitutional Committee of Eight Hundred was still living in the base and was

still hard at work when the Officer of the Day called Mergon-who, after glancing at

plates and instruments, called Luloy.

 

The .ether was showing strains of a magnitude not observed since the Battle for

Independence. A Llurd ship was putting out everything he had; fighting full-out against

asomething-whose battle-screen covered such an immensity of space that Mergon

could scarcely believe his instruments.

 

Luloy quirked an eyebrow. "Well, what are we waiting for?"

 

"Nothing," and Mergon, who could now handle projections through the fourth

dimension, launched them. "I'll keep us invisible while we see what that thing is and

how big it really is."

 

They went and saw-and the more they studied the immensity that was the Skylark of

Valeron the more they marveled. Finally, in the Valeron's control room and still invisible,

they studied the worldlet's personnel; the while talking to each other in the flesh at the

Mallidaxian's main panel.

 

"Except for the ~ green-skinned couple they are Tellurians," the girl insisted.

"Everything about that-that ship, if you can call it a ship-is Tellurian. Just look at those

clothes. You never saw anything like that anywhere except on Tellus and you never

will."

 

"We never heard anything about anything like that mobile fortress on Tellus, either," he

objected, "and we certainly would have if they'd known anything about it. How could

they hide it?"

 

"Maybe it's so new that not too many people know about it yet. Anyway, whatever the

truth about that, we heard a lot about Seaton and Crane. Especially Seaton. According

to the lore, he's their principal god's right-hand man. He can do anything."

 

"Or a devil's, depending on who you talked, to. But we wrote that off as just that-lore. If

not propaganda."

 

"We'll have to write it back on again. Those two have to be Seaton and Crane-there, the

Jelm-sized one with his head in the controller, and that other bean-pole type standing

there smoking a . . . a cigarette, they call it. And that smoking business clinches it.

Nobody but Tellurians burn their lungs out with smoke."

 

"Okay." Mergon thickened their projections up to full visibility and spoke:

 

"You must be the Seatons and the Cranes, about whom we heard so much on Earth

but whom we were not able to find."

 

Crane the Imperturbable was startled out of his imperturbability when Mergon and Luloy

appeared in the Valeron's control room and Mergon spoke to him in English. But he did

not show it-very much!-and realized in a moment what the truth was.

 

"We are," Crane said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. These people would

understand the gesture. "I'm M. Reynolds Crane; Doctor Seaton is occupied at the

moment. You are of course the people who had the spaceship on the moon. We have

come all the way out here in the hope of finding you somewhere in this galaxy."

 

"Oh? Oh, you want the fourth-dimensional device."

 

"Exactly." Crane then introduced the others, and finally Seaton; who, having assured

himself that the Brain could handle the stalemate without him, had disengaged himself

from the master controller and had joined the party.

 

"That's right," Seaton said. "Since nothing like it is known to any science with which we

are familiar, we hope to learn about it from you. But that . . . those monsters . . . they

aren't, by any chance, friends of yours, are they?"

 

Luloy laughed. "No. Not exactly . . . or maybe they are, after a fashion, now. But the

Llurdi were our unquestioned masters for so many thousands of years that they haven't

yet decided to treat us or anyone who looks like us with the courtesy reserved for

equals. You see, the llanzlan would have communicated with you in thought after he

had investigated you a little."'

 

"Yeah." Seaton's smile was grim. "With the stiffest, hardest probe he could build? And

I'm supposed to sit still for that kind of manhandling?"

 

"No." Mergon took over. "No one but a Llurd could have expected you to. This situation

is somewhat unfortunate. Until very recently they have always had overwhelmingly

superior power. They never had any effective opposition until we wore them down a

little, just recently." Mergon explained the situation in as few words as possible,

concluding, "So this battle, while not due exactly to misunderstanding, is unfortunate.

What I propose is that Luloy and I visit Klazmon via projection, as we are now visiting

you, and explain matters to him as we have explained them to you. I take it you will

cease fire if he does?"

 

"Of course. We didn't come here to start a war, or to bother him in any way; just to see

you. So I'll do better than that; I'll cut my offense right now."

 

He thought at the Brain and the raging inferno above the llanzlanate went suddenly

calm and still. "That beam is no pencil of force, believe me. If it should get through it

would volatilize his palace and half the city, and that would be unfortunate-heyl He's quit

slugging, too!"

 

"Of course," Mergon said. "As I told you, he is-all Llurdi are-completely and perfectly

logical. With their own brand of logic, of course. Insanely logical, to our way of thinking .

. or perhaps unsanely may be the better word. On the basis of the data he then had it

was logical for him to attack you. Your cease-fire was a new datum, one that he cannot

as yet evaluate. He has deduced the fact that we Jehni caused it, but he does not know

why you stopped. Hence he has restored the status quo ante, pending our explanation.

He wants additional data. If our explanation is satisfactory-data sufficient-he'll probably

just let the whole matter drop. If not-if it's data insufficient-I wouldn't know. He'll do

whatever he decides is the logical thing to do-which is 'way beyond my guess-point. He

might even resume the attack exactly where he left off; although I think he'll be able to

deduce a reason not to."

 

Seaton whistled through his teeth. "Holy . . . cat!" he said. "If that's pure logic I'll take

vanilla. But how will you make the approach?"

 

"Very easily. If two of you will permit us to bring you over here we will send four working

projections into the Llanzlan Klazmon's study, where I'm sure he's expecting us. You,

Doctor Seaton, and your Dorothy, perhaps?"

 

"Not I!" Dorothy declared, shaking her head vigorously. "Uh-uh. Into battle, yes; this, no.

If I never see a monster like that it'll be twenty minutes too soon. You're it, Martin."

 

"One more thing," Mergon went on, as Seaton and Crane appeared in the flesh beside

him. "Since the Llurdi refuse to learn any language except their own, I must teach you

Llurdan," and he held out two Jelman thought-caps:

 

"I prefer my own," Seaton said, after a very short trial.

 "So will you, I think," and he sent back for four of the Skylark's latest models.

 

The two Jelmi put two of them on. "Oh, I do indeed!" Luloy exclaimed, and Mergon

added, "As was to have been expected, we have much to learn from you, friends."

 

"But listen," Seaton said. "You gave the ape all the dope on that fourth-dimensional

thing. Isn't he apt to toss a superatomic into our Brain with it?"

 

"There's no possibility whatever of that, either soon or later. Not soon because, since

they work slowly and thoroughly, it will be months yet before they have a full-scale

machine. Nor later, because the mutual destruction of four hundred eighty-two

populated planets-excuse me, four hundred eighty, now-is not logical in any system of

logic, however cockeyed that system may be."

 

It took Seaton a fraction of a second to get it, but when he did, it rocked him. "Oh! I

hadn't figured on you coming all the way in. But does he know you will?"

 

"He certainly does know it!" Luloy broke in. "Beyond a doubt; or what you call

peradventure."

 

"Oh," Seaton said again. "And that's why he isn't going to resume hostilities with

ordinary weapons, either? Thanks, you two, a million. We appreciate it. Okay; we're

ready, I guess."

 

The four projections appeared in front of the llanzlan's desk. He was expecting them.

"Well?" he asked.

 

Mergon began to explain, but Seaton cut him off. Mergon could not possibly feel equal

to Klazmon in a face-to-face; Seaton could and did.

 

"I can explain us better than you can, friend Mergon," he said. Then, to the Llurd, "We

came here to visit the human beings whom you call the Jelmi. We did not have, have

not now, and do not expect to have any interest whatever in you Llurdi or in anything

Llurdan. Our purpose is to promote intergalactic commerce and interhuman friendship.

The various human races have different abilities and different artifacts and different

knowledges-many of each of which are of benefit to other human races.

 

"You made an unprovoked attack on us. Know now, Llanzlan Klazmon, that I do not

permit invasion, either mental or physical, by any entity-man, beast, god, devil or Llurd-

of this or of any other galaxy. Although I can imagine few subjects upon which you and I

could converse profitably, if you wish to talk to me as one intelligent and logical entity

to,another I will so converse. But I repeat-I will not permit invasion.

 

"If you wish to resume battle on that account that is your right and your privilege. You

will note, however, that our attack was metered precisely to a point just below your

maximum capability of resistance. Know now that if you force us to destroy your city

and perhaps your world it will not have been the first city or the first world we have been

forced to destroy; nor, with a probability of point nine nine nine, will it have been the

last. Do you want peace with us or war?"

 

"Peace. Data sufficient," Klazmon said immediately. "I have recorded the fact that there

is at least one Jelmoid race other than the Jelmi themselves of which some

representatives are both able and willing to employ almost Llurdan logic," and he

switched his attention from the projections to the tape he hod been studying--cutting

communications as effectively as though he had removed himself to another world.

 

Back in the Mallidaxian, while Luloy stared at Seaton almost in awe, Mergon said, "That

was a beautiful job, Doctor Seaton. Perfect! Much better than I could have done. You

used flawless Llurdan logic."

 

"Thanks to the ace in the hole you gave me. with your briefing, I could do it. I'd hate to

have to run a bluff on that ape. What's next on the agenda, Savant Mergon?"

 

"Make it `Merg', please; and I'll call you `Dick'. Now that this is settled, why don't you put

your fortress-planetoid on automatic and let us bring you all here, so that our peoples

may become friends in person and may begin work upon tasks of mutual interest?"

 

"That's a thought, friend; that really is a thought," Seaton said, and it was done

forthwith.

 

Aboard the Mallidaxian, Seaton cut the social amenities as short as he courteously

could; then went with inseparable Mergon and Luloy to Tammon's laboratory. That

fourth dimensional gizmo was what he was interested in. With his single-mindedness

that was all he was interested in, at the moment, of the entire Jelman culture. All four

donned Skylark thought-helmets and Seaton set out to learn everything there was to be

known about that eight million cubic feet of esoteric apparatus. And Mergon, who didn't

know much of anything about recent developments, was eager to catch up.

 

Seaton did not learn all about the fourth-dimensional device in one day, nor in one

week; but when he had it all filed away in the Brain he asked, "Is that all you have of it?"

He did not mean to be insulting; he was only greatly surprised.

 

The old savant bristled and Seaton apologized hastily. "I didn't mean to belittle your

achievement in any sense, sir. It's probably the greatest breakthrough ever made. But it

doesn't seem to be complete."

 

"Of course it isn't complete!" Tammon snapped. "I've been working on it only-"

 

"Oh, I didn't mean that," Seaton broke in. "The concept is incomplete. In several ways.

For instance, if fourth dimensional translation is used as a weapon, you have no

defense against it."

 

"Of course there's no defense against it!" Tammon defended his brain-child like a

tigress defending her young. "By the very nature of things there can't be any defense

against it!"

 

At that, politeness went by the board. "You're wrong," Seaton said, flatly. "By the very

nature of things there has to be. All nature is built on a system of checks and balances.

Doing a job so terrifically big and so brand new, I doubt if anybody could get the whole

thing at once. Let's go over the theory again, together, with a microscope, to see if we

can't add something to it somewhere?"

 

Tammon agreed, but reluctantly. Deep down in his own mind he did not believe that any

other mind could improve upon any particular of his work. As the review progressed,

however, he became more and more enthusiastic. As well he might; for the

mathematics section of Richard Seaton's multi-compartmented mind contained,

indexed and cross-index, all the work done by countless grand masters of the subject

during half a million years.

 

Luloy started to pull her helmet off, but Mergon stopped her with a direct thought. "I'm

lost, too, sweet, but keep on listening. We can get bits here and there-and we'll

probably never have the chance again to watch two such minds at work."

 

"Hold it!' Seaton snapped, half an hour later. "Back up -there! This integral here. Limits

zero to pi over two. You're limiting the thing to a large but definitely limited volume of

your generalized N-dimensional space. I think it should be between zero and infinity-

and while we're at it let's scrap half of the third determinant in that no-space-no-time

complex. Let's see what happens if we substitute the gamma function here and the chi

there and the xi there and the omicron down there in the corner."

 

"But why?" the old savant protested. "I don't see any possible reason for any of it."

 

Seaton grinned. "There isn't any-any more than there was for your original brainstorm. If

there had been the Norlaminian would have worked this whole shebang out a hundred

thousand years ago. It's nothing but a hunch, but it's strong enough so I want to follow it

up-okay? Fine then, integrating that, we get . . ."

 

Five hours later, Tammon took his helmet off and stared at Seaton with wonder in his

eyes. "Do you realize just what you've done, young man? You have made a break

through at least equal to my own. Opened up a whole vast new field-a field parallel to

my own, perhaps, but in no sense the same."

 

"I wouldn't say that. Merely an enlargement. All I did was follow a hunch."

 

"An intuition," Tammon corrected him. "What else, pray, makes breakthroughs?"

 

And Luloy, on the way out of the laboratory hand in hand with Mergon, said, "I had no

idea that Tellus ever did or ever could produce anybody like him. He is their god's fair-

haired child, for a fact. Sennlloy will have to know about this, Merg."

 

"She will indeed-I was sure you'd think of that."

 

And as soon as Dorothy could get Seaton alone that evening she stared at him with a

variety of emotions playing over her face. As though she had never seen him before; or

as though she were getting acquainted with him all over again. "I've been talking to

Sennlloy," she announced. "Or, rather, she's been talking to me. She didn't lose much

time, did she?"

 

Seaton blushed to the roots of his hair. "I'll say she didn't. Not any. She knocked me for

a block-long row of ash cans."

 

"Uh-huh. Me, too-and how! She told me you said I'd blow my red top and I just about

did, until she explained. She's quite a gal, isn't she? And what a shape! You know, I'm

awfully glad I'm not too bad in that shape department myself, or I'd die of mortification

looking at them? But Dick-don't you suppose there are any people in this whole

cockeyed universe except us and the Rayseenians who don't run around naked all the

time?"

 

"I wouldn't know; but what has all that got to do with the price of hasheesh c.i.f.

Istanbul?"

 

"It ties in. She must have thought I was some kind of an idiot child, but she didn't show

it. She couldn't really understand my taboos, she said, since they were not in her own

heredity, but she could accept them as facts in mine and work within their limitations."

Dorothy blushed, but went on, "I'd be the only Prime Operator-and so forth. You know

about the `and so forth'. Anyway, before she got done she actually made me feel

ashamed of myself! They really need your genes, Dick. You didn't let on, did you, that

DuQuesne's a Tellurian, too?"

 

"I'll say I didn't! The less they think that ape and I came from the same world, the better

I'll like it."

 

"You and me both. Well, she didn't actually say so, but when she found out what kind of

genes you have she decided to pour every one of DuQuesne's right down the drain."

 

"Could be." Seaton didn't agree with that conclusion at all, but he was too smart to

argue the point.

 

At breakfast the following morning Seaton said, "You chirped it, birdie, about their

thinking us some kind of idiot children. Besides, the First Principle and Prime Tenet of

all diplomacy has always been, `When in Rome be a Roman candle'. So I think we'd all

better peel to the raw as of now. You and I had better, whether the rest do or not.

Check?"

 

"Check-but I think they will. We're horribly conspicuous, dressed. People look at us as

though we were things that had escaped from a zoo. And all the Green System people

have always thought we were more than somewhat loco in the coco for covering up so

much. We'll get used to it easily enough-look at the nudists. So lead on, my bold and

valiant-I follow thee to the bitter end of all my raiment."

 

"I knew you would, ace. Let's go spread the gospel."

 

When they approached the Cranes and the Japanese on the subject, Margaret threw

back her black-thatched head and laughed. "We must be psychic-we were going to

spring the same thing on you. And after all, actually, how much do our bathing suits

hide? Yours or mine either one? And we have it to show, too-so here goes! The last

one undressed is Stinker of the Day!" She began to unzip, then paused and looked at

Lotus.

 

The Nisei girl shrugged. "We all should, of course, I won't like it and I positively know I'll

never get used to it, but if you two do I will too if it kills me."

 

"'At-a-girl, Lambie!" Margaret put her arm around the beautifully formed little body and

squeezed. "But you just wait-you'll have it really made. None of them ever saw anything

like you before, you gorgeous little doll, you. With your size and build you'll be the

absolute Queen of the May!"

 

25 ROMAN CANDLES

 

COUNTLESS parsecs away, Marc C. DuQuesne was carrying out his own plans-plans

which would have been a most unpleasant surprise for the Skylarkers had they known

about them.

 

DuQuesne moved the surviving Fenachrone into his DQ easily enough and without

incident. Housing was no problem. How could it be, with millions upon millions of cubic

kilometers of space available and with automatic high-order constructors to do the

work? Nor was atmosphere, nor food nor any other necessity or desideratum of

Fenachronian life and/or well-being a problem.

 

Fenachrone engineers did it all-by operating special keyboards and by thinking into

carefully limited headsets but none of them had any idea whatever of what it was that

did any given task or how it did it. None of this knowledge, of either practice or theory,

was in their science; and DuQuesne took great pains to be sure that none of them got

any chance to learn any iota of it. He taught them, and they learned, purely by rote.

 

Like high-school girls learning to drive automobiles. They can become excellent drivers;

but with only that type of instruction none of them will ever become able to design a

hypoid gear or to understand in detail the operation of an automatic clutch.

 

The Fenachrone did not like such treatment. Sleemet in particular, when he began to

recover some of the normal pugnaciously prideful spirit of his race, did not like it at all

and said so; but DuQuesne did not care a particle whether he liked it or not.

 

DuQuesne's snapping black eyes stared, contemptuously unaffected, into the furiously

hypnotic, red-lighted black eyes of the Fenachrone. "You megalomaniacal cretin," he

sneered. "How can you possibly figure that it makes any difference whatever to me,

what you like or don't like? If you have any fraction of a brain you'd better start using it.

If you haven't or can't or won't, I'll build you a duplicate of your original ship and turn you

all loose today."

 

"You will? In that case-" Sleemet got that far and stopped cold in mid-sentence.

 

"Yeah." DuQuesne's tone cut like a knife. "Exactly. We're still within Klazmon's range;

we will be for quite a while yet. Do you want to be turned loose here?"

 

"Well, no." If the thought occurred to him that DuQuesne was lying, he didn't show it.

That was just as well for Sleemet and for the Fenachrone race. DuQuesne wasn't.

 

"Maybe you have a brain of sorts, at that. But if you don't forget this Master Race

flapdoodle, all of it and fast, you'll last quick. Remember how easily that self-styled

Overlord wiped out your navy and then volatilized your whole stinking world? And how

easily Klazmon of Llurdiax smacked your whole fleet down? And what a fool I made and

am still making of Klazmon? And I know of one race that is as much ahead of mine as I

am ahead of you; and of another race that may be somewhat ahead of us Xyhnnians in

some ways. As I said, you're about eleven hundred thousand years behind. Have you

got brains enough to realize that instead of being top dog you're just low man on the

totem pole?"

 

"If you're so high and we're so low," Sleemet snarled, "why did you take us away from

the Llurd? Of what possible use can we be to you?"

 

"You have certain mental and physical qualities that may perhaps be of use in a project

I have in mind. You are not only able and willing to fight, you really like to fight. These

qualities should, theoretically, make you better in some respects than automatics in

operating the offensive weapons of a base as large as this one is." DuQuesne studied

the Fenachrone appraisingly. "I do not really need you, but I am willing to make the

experiment on the terms I have stated. I will allow you two Xylmnian minutes in which to

decide whether or not to cooperate with me in such an experiment."

 

"We will cooperate," Sleemet said in less than one minute; whereupon DuQuesne told

him in broad terms what he had in mind.

 

And for many days thereafter the two, so unlike physically but so similar in so many

respects mentally, devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the finer and ever finer refine-

 

ment of the placing and tuning of mechanisms and of the training of already

hard-trained personnel.

 

But DuQuesne knew that, given the slightest opportunity, the Fenachrone would take

high delight in killing him and taking the DQ. Wherefore he did not at any time trust any

one of them as far as he could spit.

 

Moreover, DuQuesne was not quite as sure of his own victory as he had given the

Fenachrone to understand. DuQuesne was not easy in his mind about Galaxy DW-

 

427-LU. He hadn't been, not since some superpowered enemy in that galaxy had

attacked Seaton's Skylark of Valeron without warning and had burned her down to a

core before she could get out of range. And she hadn't been able to fight back. That

one blast back at them couldn't have done any damage.

 

It had been that uneasiness that had been responsible for the DQ's terrific armament

and for DuQuesne's wanting the Fenachrone for a crew. Wherefore, as soon as the

Fenachrone were settled in their new' quarters and before they had recovered enough

of their normal combativeness to become completely unmanageable, DuQuesne got

"on the com" with Sleemet.

 

 

". . . I don't give a damn what happens to Earth or to Norlamin. I'm no longer interested

in either," he said in part. "But I don't want it to happen to me and you don't want it to

happen to you. You agree with me, I'm sure, that a good strategist does not leave an

enemy behind him without knowing, at very least, who that enemy is and what he can

do."

 

"That is one of the basics, yes."

 

"All right. Somebody in this galaxy here has more muscle than I like." DuQuesne

pointed out Galaxy DW-427-LU in his tank and told Sleemet what had happened to the

Skylark of Valeron, then went on, "On theoretical grounds, the degree of

synchronization could make all the difference." He had reached by theory the

same-point that Seaton had arrived at by experience. "Hence, the greater the number of

operators-of equal skill, of course-the tighter the output. The efficiency will vary directly

as the cube of the number of operators."

 

"I see." Sleemet did see, and for the first time became really interested. "That will be to

our advantage as well as yours. You will have to teach us much."

 

"I'll teach you everything you have to know. Nothing else."

 

"That is assumed . . . But I see no possibility of assurance that you will keep your

bargain . . . or will you go mind to mind that you will release us and build us a ship after

this one expedition as your crew?"

 

"Yes. Without reservation."

 

"In that case we will cooperate fully."

 

And they did-and so it was that the DQ became the most fantastically armed and

powered and defended fortress that had ever moved its own mass through space.

 

As the DQ approached Galaxy DW-427-LU, with everything she had either wide open

or on the trips, DuQuesne braked her down and swung into what he called "the curve of

fastest getaway"-and as he did so, in the instant, the mighty vessel's every defense

went blinding-white.

 

And in that same instant two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven Fenachrone, males

and females but superlatively expert technicians all, pressed activating switches and

took command, each of a tightly clustered battery of micrometrically synchronized

generators.

 

And one black-browed, hard-eyed Tellurian, sat with his head buried in the DQ's

master-control helmet.

 

While he had not expected to find any significant fraction of what he actually found, he

was not too appalled to go viciously and pin-point-accurately to work. Working through

the fourth dimension, with the transfinite speed of thought, he hurled bomb after bomb

after multi-billion kiloton superatomic bomb: and the target world of each one of those

bombs became a sun.

 

And the DQ got away. She was by no means intact; but, since her skin had been very

much thicker than the Valeron's to start with, there was still some of it left when she got

out of range.

 

Thereupon DuQuesne put on the headset of the DQ's Brain and began to think. He had

tried direct attack on the galaxy of Chlorans; it had failed. His next step, obviously,

was-to decide what his next step should be.

 

The flesh-and-blood brain that was thinking into the energy-and-metal Brain of the DQ

was no whit less logical, no iota less unsentimental in its judgments than the great

computer itself. Man-brain and machine-brain together considered the evidence.

Datum: The DQ was not up to handling Galaxy DW-427-LU. Datum: Not even the

added muscle conferred by the willing cooperation of the Fenachrone was enough to

make it so. Datum: No discoverable increase of its armaments or its crew would give it

even a fighting chance against the energies that had just come so close to destroying it.

 

Wherefore

 

Finally, an hour later, DuQuesne raised the microphone of a repeating sixth-order

broadcasting transmitter to his lips and said-dispassionately, unemotionally and with no

more expression than if he had been ordering up his lunch: "DuQuesne calling Seaton

reply as before stop."

 

26 THE TALENT

 

Seaton had thought that the visit to the Jelmi would be a short one, just long enough to

get the "gizmo," but his own breakthrough put an end to such thinking. It took days to

reduce the theory to practice and weeks to build into the Skylark of Valeron the gigantic

installations Seaton wanted.

 

The very enormity of the breakthrough changed all plans, dislocated all schedules. To

the Jelmi the fourth dimensional translator had been a phenomenon-a weapon -in itself.

It had extremely valuable applications, and each of them offered a long career of study.

That was enough for them. But to Seaton and Crane and the Norlaminians it was

something more than that; it was an effect, a new and unexplored area of knowledge, to

be fitted somehow into the known and computed structure of sixth-order perhaps of

other-order-effects; and to be used and considered in conjunction with them. It was a

theorist's dream -and an engineer's nightmare.

 

Meanwhile, as the male Skylarkers, their Jelm colleagues and the Norlaminians were

busily getting done the impossible task of exploring a whole new field of knowledge and

transmuting it into actual structures and gigantic machines, the women of the party

were exploring the life of an alien race ... and having the time of their respective lives

doing it. Sitar, of course, was in her element. Bare skin and jewelry she liked. She liked

to look at and to feel her mink coat, she said, but she hated to have to wear it; and as

for that horrible, scratchy underwear-augh! Hence, now that the personal gravity

controls were personal heaters as well, she was really enjoying herself.

 

Dorothy and Margaret, of course, took to it as though to the manner born. In three days

neither of them was any more conscious of nudity than was Sennlloy herself. Even

Lotus got used to it. While she could never become an enthusiastic nudist, she said,

she did stop blushing. In fact, she almost stopped feeling like blushing.

 

"Dick," Dorothy said one evening, "I've finally made contact with them on music."

 

"Music!" he snorted. "Huh! It sounds to me like a gaggle of tomcats yowling on a back

fence."

 

She laughed. "It's unworldly, of course, but a lot of it is beautiful, in a weird sort of way,

and they have some magnificent techniques. I've been trying everything on them, you

know, and they've just been sitting on their hands. I'll give you three guesses as-to what

I finally hit them with."

 

"Strauss waltzes? Jazz? Don't tell me it was rock-'n'-roll." She laughed. "Old-fashioned

ragtime. Not what they call rag these days, but real syncopation. And polkas. Specifi-

 

cally, three old, old recordings-with improved sound, of course. Pee Wee Hunt's Twelfth

Street Rag, Plehal Brothers' Beer Barrel Polka, and-of all things!-Glahe Musette's Hot

Pretzels. They simply grabbed the ball and ran all over the place with it. What they

came up with is neither rag nor polka-in fact, it's like nothing ever heard before on any

world-but it's really toe-tingling stuff. Comes the dance tomorrow evening I'll show you

some steps and leaps and bounds that will knock your eyes right out of their sockets."

 

"I believe that, if what the gals have been teaching me is any criterion. You have to be a

mind-reader, an adagio dancer and a ground-and-lofty tumbler, and have an eidetic

memory. But I hope I won't smash any of the girls' arches down or kick any of their

-faces in."

 

"Don't fish, darling. I know how good you are. Ain't I been practicing with you for lo,

these many periods?"

 

At the dance it became clear that Seaton's statement was (as, it must be admitted,

some of his statements were!) somewhat exaggerated. There was a great deal of

acrobatics -Seaton and Sennlloy took advantage of every clear space to perform

handspring-and-flip routines in unison. But everything was strictly according to what

each person could do and wished to do. Thus, men.and women alike danced with the

Osnomians as though they were afraid of breaking them in two-which they were. And

thus Lotus was, as Margaret had foretold that she would be, the belle of the ball.

Hard-trained gymnast and acrobat that she was, her feet were off the floor most of the

time; and before the dance was an hour old she was being tossed delightedly by her

partner of the moment over the heads of half a dozen couples to some other man who

was signaling for a free catch.

 

Three days before the Skylark's departure, Mergon announced that there would be a

full-formal farewell party on the evening before the takeoff.

 

"What are you going to wear, Dick?" Crane asked. Seaton grinned. "Urvan of Urvania's

royal regalia. All of it. You?"

 

"I'm going as Tarnan, the Karbix of Osnome; with guns, knives, bracelets and legbands

complete. And a pair of forty-fives besides."

 

"Nice! And I'll wear my three-fifty-sevens, then, too. If I can find a place to hang them on

anywhere."

 

And Dorothy and Margaret each wore about eleven quarts of gems.

 

As the eight guests entered the dining hall-last, as protocol dictated-and the eight

hundred Jelmi rose to their feet as one, the spectacle was something that not one of

the six Tellurians would ever forget. DuQuesne had seen a few Jelmi in full formal

panoply; but here were eight hundred of them!

 

After the sumptuous meal the tables vanished; music-a spine-tingling, not-too-fast

march-swelled into being; and dancing began.

 

Dancing, if dancing it could be called, that bore no relationship whatever to the

boisterous sport of which there had been so much. Each step and motion and

genuflection and posture was stately, graceful, poised and studied. The whole was very

evidently the finished product of centuries of refinement and perfection of technique.

And at its close each of the eight honored guests was amazed to find that their

movements had been so artfully yet inconspicuously guided that each of them had

grasped hands once with every Jelm on the floor.

 

And on the way to their quarters Dorothy, her eyes brimming with unshed tears,

pressed Seaton's arm against her side. "Oh, Dick, wasn't that simply wonderful? I could

cry. Only once in my life before has anything ever hit me as hard as that did."

 

Well on the way back to Galaxy DW-427-LU, Seaton was humming happily to himself.

He had gone through everything for the umpteenth time and for the umpteenth time had

found everything good.

 

"Mart," he said. "We have now got exactly what it takes to make big medicine on those

Chloran apes. The only question is, do we wipe 'em completely out now or do we let

'em suffer a while longer? Suffer in durance vile?"

 

If he had waited a few hours longer to speak so, he would have kept his mouth shut; for

that same afternoon the Skylark's screens again went instantaneously into full powered

incandescent defense. The Brain took evasive action at once; but it was five long hours

before they got far enough away from the source of that incredible flood of energy so

that it became ineffective and was cut off. During that five hours Seaton and Crane

observed and computed and analyzed and thought. When it was over, Seaton scanned

the Skylark's reserve supply of power uranium; and his face was grim and hard when

he called the others into conference.

 

"I wouldn't have believed it possible," he said flatly. "I can hardly believe it now, after

watching it happen. Either they've been building stuff twenty-four hours a day ever since

we left . . ." He paused.

 

"Or they've got myriads of myria-watts," Dunark said into that pause, "that they couldn't

sync in then, but can now."

 

"Could be," Seaton agreed. "Let's see if we can find anything out. We're too far away to

hold anything, even a planet. But with all of us looking we should be able to see

something-and the gizmo can handle eight projections as easily as one. Has anybody

got any better ideas?"

 

Since no one had, they tried it. "Riding the beam" is a weird sensation; a sense of

duality of personality that must be experienced to be either appreciated or understood.

The physical body is here; its duplicate in patterns of pure force is there: the two

separate entities see and hear and smell and taste and feel two entirely different

environments at the same time. It is a thing that takes some getting used to; but all the

Skylarkers except Lotus were used to it. And she, as has been intimated, was a quick

study.

 

Seaton could not hold the projections anywhere near any planet; could not hold them

even inside a solar system. Even with the vernier controls locked and Seaton's hands

resolutely off, the point of view jumped erratically about in fantastic leaps of hundreds of

billions of miles. Not even the huge-and reinforced-mass of the Skylark of Valeron could

hold them steady. They swept dizzily into the chromospheres of suns, out into the cold

dark of interstellar vacuum, through tenuous gas clouds and past orbiting planets. In

theory-if theory meant anything in this unexplored area-the fourth-dimensional "gizmo"

should have been able to lock steadily on a target. In practice, they could hardly find a

target to lock onto. All eight of the Skylarkers were synced in at once to the master

controls, but their best efforts could not keep them even inside a solar system, much

less give them the rock-steady fix that would have permitted them to spy on enemy

activity.

 

And the magnitude of error grew. In a minute they were swinging in huge arcs of a

parsec or more. In another minute the swings had become so enormous and so

random that they could not measure them. Their speed was immense; they swung

dizzyingly toward a cepheid variable and it winked at them like a traffic blinker, spun

past a flare star and watched its great gouts of flame leap out and fall back.

 

Five minutes of this insane cavorting made half the party seasick, and they pulled out of

projection and returned, gasping and staggering, to the welcome stability of the Skylark.

Seaton stuck it out for half an hour. Then he pushed the "cancel" button.

 

"That's what I was afraid of," he growled. "Every time we wiggle a finger or a fly lights

on a table it changes the shape of the whole ship. Oh, for something really rigid to build

with!" (The eternal complaint of the precise worker in any field!) "But we each saw

something. We'll report in turn."

 

Seaton gave a brief description of his own observations. He had seen something, no

more than a flicker, but clearly big and Chloran-made. Dunark had spotted what

sounded like the same planet-sized mass, but in the system of a G-3 star, as nearly as

he could tell; Seaton's had been an F. The others had seen nothing. Seaton nodded.

"Okay. There are at least two solar systems having fortified Chloran planets, with one

more probable. Ideas, anybody?" Crane broke the ensuing silence. "I can't come up

with anything constructive. Just the opposite. There's something basically wrong here,

Dick. As I understand the TammonSeaton Theory, the operators involved here are all in

the no-space-no-time field, so that distance does not enter. Hence it is possible in

theory, and should be in practice, to place a bomb anywhere in all total space as

accurately and as easily as you can touch the end of your nose with the tip of your

finger."

 

Dorothy whistled, Dunark looked shocked, and the others looked blank. Seaton scowled

and said, "Yeah ... But with all points in total space coexistent-Gunther's Universe how

are you going to pick any given one out? What kind of an operator would it take?

There's a hole, Mart, in either the theory or in the reduction . . ." He paused, frowning in

thought.

 

"Or both," Crane said.

 

"Or both," Seaton agreed. "Okay, let's skip down and find it."

 

They went down and worked with the Brain all the rest of the day; but they did not find

the- hole. Nor did they find it the next day, or the next. Then Seaton began to pace the

floor.

 

"So, in all probability, another breakthrough is required," Crane said. "And I can't help

you on that; I'm not the genius type."

 

"Neither am I!" Seaton snorted. "In my book one flash-in-the-pan hunch does not

make a genius . . . But here's another angle, fella. If this thing can be worked out it'll

be so much better than that synchronization idea that it isn't funny. Also, it might not

take the years to work out. Don't you think it'll be worth while, Mart, to spend a few

days seeing if we can set it up as a problem? See if we can take it out of the pure

brainstorm category before we spring it on Rovol?"

 

"I do indeed," and Seaton and Crane both went down to the control room and got into

their master controllers. However; before that task was finished there was a surprise for

Richard Seaton.

 

27  CO-BELLIGERENTS

 

"DuQuesne calling Seaton reply ... "

 

Since Seaton's head was inside his master controller, no speaker sounded. Since

everything pertaining to DuQuesne was on file in the Brain's memory banks, there was

no delay whatever in making the proper connections: Seaton cut in before the first send

of the message; short as it was, was completed.

 

"What the hell, DuQuesne!" his thought blazed out. "I didn't think even you would have

the sublime guts to call on me again!"

 

"Save it, Seaton. This is important. Do you know how many solar systems of Chlorans

there are in that galaxy where your Skylark of Valeron got burned out?"

 

Seaton paused for one microsecond. Then, cautiously: "No idea. Hundred, maybe. Or,

in view of this-thousands?"

 

"You aren't even warm. My apparatus put one hundred forty-nine million three hundred

nineteen thousand two hundred ninety-seven of them into my tank before my scanners

went out. And they hadn't covered a quarter of the galaxy yet."

 

"Je . . ." Seaton began, but shut himself up. Dorothy was listening in. "But to be able to

use a sixth-order analsynth that long you must have had a little more ... okay, gimme

the dope."

 

DuQuesne told his story, including his superpowered DQ and his Fenachrone crew,

concluding, "We knocked out over fifteen thousand of them before I had to run. But of

course that wasn't a drop in the proverbial bucket. Worse, I doubt like the devil if any

mobile base possible to build can ever get that close to them again. Apparently they

sync in just enough stuff-no matter how much it takes-to cope with the maximum

observed threat."

 

"Could be. But how come you are interested? I know damn well what you want."

 

"Not any more you don't," snapped DuQuesne's thought

 

"With every two-bit Tom, Dick, and Harry of a race in all space having atomic energy

already, what's the chance of a monopoly? So what good is Earth or anything else in

the First Galaxy? I've changed my plans-you and Crane can both live forever, as far as

I'm concerned."

 

Seaton absorbed and filed that statement-guardedly. He only said:

 

"So what? Why should you give a whoop about the Chlorans? Don't tell me you're

altruistic all of a sudden." "You apparently don't see the point. Listen-the Fenachrone

talked about mastering the cosmos. That race of Chlorans is quietly and unobtrusively

doing it. It may be too late to stop them; and I didn't help matters a bit by making them

double or quadruple their synchronized output. You and I are, as far as we know,

humanity's ablest operators. Each of us has stuff the other lacks. If you and I together

can't stop them it can't-as of now-be done. What do you say?"

 

Seaton pondered. What was DuQuesne's angle this time? Or was the ape actually on

the up and up? It did make sense, though-even though he was a louse and a heel and

a case-hardened egomaniac, if it came down to a choice of which was going to be

wiped out, those monsters or humanity ... sure he would ...

 

"Okay, Blackie. You give your word?"

 

"I give my word to act as one of your party until this Chloran thing is settled, one way or

the other."

 

A few days later, the ultra-fast speedster that Seaton had left on Ray-See-Nee hailed

the Valeron, matched velocities with her, and was drawn aboard. Three women disem-

 

barked; one of whom was Kay-Lee Barlo. She introduced her black-haired mother,

Madame Barlo; who, with the added poise and maturity of her extra twenty-odd years,

was even better-looking than her daughter. She in turn introduced her mother, Grand

Dame Barlo, who did not have a single white hair in her thick brown thatch and who did

not look more than half as old as she must in reality have been.

 

"But, listen," Seaton said. "You couldn't use any sixth order stuff at first, so you must

have been on the way for weeks. What happened? Trouble with the Chlorans?"

 

He had been talking to Kay-Lee, but her mother, who was very evidently the head of the

party, answered him. "Oh, no. That is, they've tripled the quotas-" Seaton shot a glance

at Crane. That tied in!-"but with the new machinery that did not bother us at all. No. We

learned many weeks ago that you would have need of us, so we came."

 

"Huh?" Seaton demanded, inelegantly. "What need?" "We do not surely know. All we

know is that it is written upon the Scroll that a time of need will come, and soon. All

Ray-See-Nee is enormously and eternally in your debt: we are here to repay a tiny

portion of that debt."

 

"Can't you tell me more about it than that?"

 

"A little; not much. We received your original message, but at that time there was

nothing to connect it with you as Ky-El Mokak. In studying it we encountered something

unknown upon Ray-See-Nee that increased a hundredfold our range and scope and

strength: three male poles of power of tremendous magnitude, men who, we found out

later, you already know. They are Drasnik and Fodan of the planet Norlamin and

Sacner Carfon of Dasor. With three such pairs of poles of power-three is the one

perfect number, you know-it was a simple matter to locate those interested in your

message, to develop the powers that had been latent in such people as yourself-"

 

"What?" Seaton yelped. That was all he could get out. "-and Dr. DuQuesne and others,

yes," Madame Barlo went on smoothly. "You were, of course, not aware you possessed

them."

 

"That's putting it mildly, ace," said Seaton. "You mean l am ... I hate to use the word ...

well, `psychic'?"

 

"The word is of no importance," said the woman impatiently. "Use any word you like.

The fact is that you do have this power; we have developed it . . . and we now propose

to put it to use."

 

Seaton's reply to that has not been recorded for posterity. Perhaps it is as well. Let it

only be said that even twenty-four hours later he was no more than half-convinced ...

but it was the half of him that was convinced that was governing his actions.

 

One of the data that helped convince him was the fact that Madame Barlo and her

daughter had not merely located these "poles of power"-they had summoned them to

the Skylark! They had not waited for Seaton's concurrence; before Seaton even knew

what they were up to, all the named individuals from three galaxies and a dozen planets

were on the way.

 

A shipload of Norlaminians and Dasorians-including the three pre-eminent "male poles

of power"-was the contingent first to arrive. Then came Tammon and Sennlloy and

Mergon and Luloy and half a hundred other Jelmi; bringing with them three Tellurians:

Madlyn Mannis, the red-haired stripper; Doctor Stephanie de Marigny of the Rare

Metals Laboratory; and Charles K. van der Gleiss, Petrochemical Engineer T-8. And

last, but by less than an hour, came Marc C. DuQuesne in person.

 

"Hi, Hunkie," he said, shaking hands cordially. "A little out of your regular orbit? Like

me?"

 

"More than a little, Blackie-like you." She showed two deep dimples in a wide and

friendly smile. "And if you have any idea of what I'm here for I'd be delighted to have

you tell me what it is."

 

"I scarcely know what I'm here for myself," and DuQuesne turned to the others; nodding

at them as though he had left them only minutes before. He was no whit embarrassed

or ill at ease; nor conscious of any resentment or ill will directed at him. He was actually

as unconcerned as, and bore himself very much like, a world-renowned specialist called

into consultation on an unusually difficult case.

 

Before the situation could become strained, the three Rayseenian women came into the

big conference room and approached the conference table-a table forty feet long and

three feet wide.

 

Their faces were white; their eyes were wide and staring. All three were doped to the

ears. "Doctor Seaton," Madam Barlo said, "you will cover the top of this table with one

large sheet of paper, please?"

 

Seaton donned his helmet and a sheet of drafting paper covered exactly the table's top,

adhering to it as though glued down.

 

"You mean to say, Doc, you're going along with this magic flummery?" one of the Jelmi

asked.

 

"I certainly am," Seaton said. "You will leave the room until this test is over. So will

everyone else with a mind closed to what these women are trying to do." The scoffer

and two other Jelmi walked toward the door and Seaton quirked an eyebrow at

DuQuesne.

 

"I'm staying," that worthy said. "I can't say that I'm a hundred per cent sold; but I'm

interested enough to give it a solid try."

 

The two older women stationed themselves, one at each end of the table; Kay-Lee

stood at her mother's right, holding in her hand a red-ink ballpoint at least a foot long.

 

Majestic Fodan, the Chief of the Five of Norlamin, stood behind Madame Barlo, but did

not touch her; Drasnik and Sacner Carfon stood similarly behind Grand Dame Barlo

and Kay-Lee. Each of the three women rubbed a drop of something (it was actually

Seaton's citrated blood) between thumb and forefinger and Madame Barlo said:

 

"You will all look fixedly at any one of the six of us and think of our success with

everything that in you lies. Help us with all your might to succeed; give us your total

mental strength. Kay-Lee, daughter, the time is ... now!"

 

Reaching across the end of the table, Kay-Lee began to write a column eighteen inches

wide; the height of which was to be the thirty-six-inch width of the table. When she got

to the middle of the fourth line, however, a man gasped in astonishment and the pen's

point stopped. This Jelm, a mathematician, had let his eyes slip from the operator to the

paper-and what he saw was high-very high!-math! Mathematics of a complexity that

none of those women, by any possible stretch of the imagination, could know anything

about!

 

"Quit peeking!" Seaton snarled, "You're lousing up the whole deal! Concentrate! Think,

dammit, THINK!" Everyone resumed thinking and Kay-Lee resumed writing. She wrote

smoothly and effortlessly, with the precision and with almost the speed of the operating

point of a geometric lathe.

 

She wrote the first column and the second and the third and the fourth-six feet by three

feet of tightly packed equations and other mathematical shorthand. Then came twelve

feet of exquisitely detailed "wiring" diagram. Then, covering all the rest of the paper,

came working drawings of and meticulously detailed specifications for machines that no

one there had ever heard of.

 

Then all three women collapsed. As well they might; they had worked without a letup for

three hours.

 

Men and women sprang to their aid with restoratives, and they began to recover.

 

"Mister Fodan," Madlyn Mannis said then, coming up to the Chief of the Five arm-in-arm

with Stephanie de Marigny. Her usually vivid face was strangely pale. "I can understand

Hunkie here having a place in a brawl like this, she's got half the letters in the alphabet

after her name, but what good could I do? Possibly? I only went to school one day in

my life and that day it rained and the teacher didn't come."

 

"Formal education does not matter, child; it is what you intrinsically are that counts. You

and your friend Charles are two perfectly matched male and female poles of tre-

 

mendous power. You felt your paired power at work, I'm sure."

 

"Wel-1-1, I felt something." Madlyn looked up at her Charley, her eyes full of question

marks. "My whole brain was full of ... well, it was all kind of spizzly, like champagne

tastes." And:

 

"That's it exactly," van der Gleiss agreed.

 

Kay-Lee, fully recovered now, looked in surprise at some of the equations she had

written, then turned to Sacner Carfon. "Did it come out all right?" she asked hopefully.

"Oh, I hope it did!"

 

"I think so," the porpoise-man replied. "At least, all of it I can understand makes sense."

 

The T-8 engineer stared at Kay-Lee. "But didn't you know what you were doing?"

 

"Of course she didn't." Again Madame Barlo did the talking. "None of us did,

consciously. We are not masters of The Power, but Its servants. We are merely Its

tools; the agents through which It does Its work."

 

And, off to one side, Dorothy was saying, "Dick, those women actually are witches! I

liked Kay-Lee, too ... but real, live, practicing witches! I got goose bumps as big as

peas. I don't believe in witchcraft, darn it!"

 

"I don't either. That is, I never did before ... but what else are you going to call it now?"

 

28  PROJECT RHO

 

THE mathematicians and physical scientists began at once to study the wealth of new

data. Drasnik, the First of Psychology, after conferring with Fodan, with Sacner Carfon

and with each of the three witches in turn, actually rushed over to the group of

Tellurians. It was the first time Seaton. had ever seen an excited Norlaminian.

 

"Ah, youths of Tellus, I think you!" he enthused. "I thank you immensely for the

inestimable privilege of meeting the ladies Barlo! They possess a talent that is indubi-

 

tably of the most tremendous-"

 

"Talent?" Dorothy snorted. "Do you call witchcraft a talent? Why, the very idea of it

makes me . . ." She paused. "Uh-huh, me too," Madlyn agreed fervently. "If I have to

believe in practicing witches I'll go not-so-slowly nuts." "Witchcraft, my children? Bosh

and fiddle-fiddle! It is a talent. Extremely rare and lamentably rudimentary in our part of

the universe, yet these women have it in astoundingly full measure. Unfortunately, you

have no name for it except `witchcraft', which term has deplorable connotations. It is the

ability to ... but the English has no words for that, either. But no matter, you have seen it

in fine, full action. Fodan and Sacner and I each have a very little of it . . ." "But those

women couldn't possibly have known anything about that kind of stuff!" Madlyn

protested.

 

"Of course they didn't. Richard here and Tammon and Doctor DuQuesne were the

principal sources of information. But all three of them together lacked a great deal of

having full knowledge, and the rest of us had very little indeed. While the comparison is

lamentably loose, consider a large, finely cut jigsaw puzzle. Seaton and DuQuesne and

Tammon could each assemble an area. But no two of the three areas were contiguous,

while none of the rest of us could fit more than a very few pieces together. But the

ladies Barlo-particularly Grand Dame Barlo, who is a veritable powerhouse of

strength-with some little help from the rest of us, exerted and directed The Power. The

Power that, by tapping the reservoir of infinite knowledge, enabled the scribe Kay-Lee

to fill in the missing parts of the puzzle."

 

"But why . . ." Seaton began, but changed his mind. "I see. You didn't tell me anything

about it because at that time it was both insignificant and inapplicable."

 

"That is correct. As I was saying, our Fodan, who has more of it than any other entity

previously known, had perhaps the thousandth of what Kay-Lee, the weakest by far of

the three, has. That is why he is Chief of the Five. And they tell me that there are other

women of their race who also have this talent. Remarkable!" At this thought Drasnik,

who had quieted down, became excited all over again. "When this is all over I shall go

at once to Ray-SeeNee and study. Marvelous! They did not know even that it is a talent

or that, when they learn, there will be no need to drug themselves into,

half-unconsciousness to employ it successfully. Thank you again, young friends, for this

wonderful opportunity. Marvelous!" and Drasnik scurried away.

 

The Seatons and Madlyn and van der Gleiss stared after the Norlaminian until he was

out of sight. They turned and stared at each other.

"Well . . . I'll . . . be . . . a . . . dirty . . . name," Madlyn said.

 

Seaton was pacing the floor, talking to Dorothy, emitting a cloud of smoke from his

battered and reeking briar. "I like to do my thinking with you, ace."

 

She chuckled. "At me, you mean, don't you? That stuff is over my head like a beach

umbrella."

 

"Don't fish, sweetie. You not only have a body and some hair, but also a brain. One that

fires on all sixteen barrels all the time."

 

She laughed delightedly. "Thank you so much. You know that isn't true, but you also

know how I lap it up and purr. But to proceed, Dunark wants to smash them all with

planets, the way he was going to smash Urvania. Martin and Peggy, after talking the

way they did, crawfished and are now talking about enclosing the whole galaxy in a

stasis of time . . ."

 

"Huh? That's news to me. How's he figuring on doing it-did he say?"

 

"Uh-uh. I didn't talk to him. Peggy says he isn't going to say anything about it until he

can present the package." "He should live so long. But 'scue, please; go ahead." "Only

one more. Fodan, the simple-minded old darling, wants to work with them. Convert

them!"

 

"Yeah. Make Christians of 'em. I've got a life-sized picture in technicolor of anybody

ever accomplishing that feat. The trouble is, everybody wants to do something different

and none of their ideas are any good at all."

 

"Oh? I noticed that you haven't been enthusiastic about any of them. Pretty grim, in

fact. Why not?"

 

"Because none of 'em will come even close to getting 'em all and this has got to be a

one hundred point zero zero zero per cent cleanup. You know how they operate on a

cancer. They cut deep enough and wide enough to get it all. Every cell. If they don't get

it all it spreads all over the body and the patient dies. This is a cancer. It's already eaten

just. about all of that galaxy by Chlora-typing planets wherever they go-or rather,

enslaved humans are doing it for them-and it's spreading fast. And when that galaxy

begins to get crowded they won't just jump to one other; they'll go for hundreds or

thousands of galaxies and there goes the ball game. So that cancer has got to be

operated on before it spreads any farther."

 

Dorothy's face began to pale. "By that analogy you mean destroy the whole galaxy!

How can such a thing be possible? It can't possibly be possible!"

 

He told her how the operation could be performed. That apparatus that the Barlo

women had dredged up out of nowhere had a lot of capabilities that did not appear on

the surface. Blackie DuQuesne had perceived one set of those possibilities, and he and

Blackie had been working on the hardware. They were calling it Project Rho.

 

Her face, already pale, turned white as he talked; and when he had finished:

 

"Project ... Rho," she breathed. "How utterly horrible! And yet . . . I never dreamed . . ,

have you talked to Martin yet?"

 

"No. You first. I don't want to even think about pushing that kind of a button without

being sure you're standing at my back."

 

"I'll do better than that, Dick," She looked him steadily in the eye. "I'll take half of it. My

finger will be right beside yours on that button."

 

"You are an ace, ace. As maybe I've said once before." "Uh-huh, at least once-but

we're one, remember?" After a moment she went on, "But we can't possibly sell the

Norlaminians any such bill of goods as that."

 

"I'll say we can't. They'd cry their eyes out all over the place. Or wait.. When they find

out that they can't stop it, they'll help save the human planets, which will be all to the

good; the witches can use the help. But basically, the grand slam will be up to

DuQuesne and his Fenachrone and the witches and Mart and me. Even Mart will need

some persuasion, I'm afraid; and you'll have to really work on Peg. She'll simply have a

litter of kittens."

 

"Why, Dick; what a way to talk!" She smiled in spite of herself, but sobered quickly.

"She'll come around, I'm sure; she'll have to. But Dick, is it actually physically possible?

It's so huge!"

 

"Definitely. You see, we'll be operating in a Gunther universe, so that mass as such

won't enter and power will be no problem. All we have to do is build an apparatus to

alter the properties of space around and throughout the object to be moved-altering

those properties in such a way as to make its three-dimensional attributes incompatible

with those of its . . ."

 

She stopped him with an upraised band. "Hold it! Wait up, please. We'll dispense with

the high math, if you don't mind. It's the sheer size of the thing that scares me witless."

 

Seaton did grin then. "Well, you've always known that making things bigger and better

is the fondest thing I am of. But we know exactly how to do it, and I think we can get it

done before the Norlaminians finish theirs. But DuQuesne should be about ready to

take off. I'll flip myself over there and see."

 

He did so and said, "How're you doing, Blackie?"

 

"A few minutes yet to finish final checking. I've been thinking. What kind of a celestial

object will that galaxy be when we get done with it? Not a quasi-stellar, certainly; that's

only a star with the energy of a hundred thousand million stars. This will be a galaxy

with the energy of a hundred thousand million galaxies-the energy of an entire

universe."

 

"Yeah. Something new, I'd say. It'll give some astronomers a thrill, some day. But what I

can't compute is, whether or not it will sterilize the interstellar space of that galaxy,"

Seaton said.

 

"Well, if it doesn't, you might put the Osnomians and Urvanians on it. Keep 'em from

thinking about fighting each other."

 

"You know, Blackie, I'd thought of doing exactly that? `Great minds' and so forth. `Bye

now; be seein' ya," and Seaton flipped himself back home.

 

En route to his destination-barren planet in a starcluster on the opposite side of the

galaxy from the Skylark of Valeron-DuQuesne again went into a huddle with Sleemet.

 

"So far, you've done a job," he began. "What I told you to do-what I knew how to do-and

done it well. But nothing else. Now I want something more than that. Something you

can do, if you will, that I can't. As you know, I've made arrangements so that in case of

my death this whole planetoid goes up in an atomic blast. That was to keep you from

killing me and making off with it. The same thing will happen, though, if those Chlorans

kill me in the fracas that's coming. It would seem as though that fact would be enough

to make you make an honest-to-God Effort to be sure that they don't kill me by doing

your damnedest to help me kill them. Mentally. Both you and the Chlorans know more

about one phase of that than I do-as yet. So, as added inducement to really top effort, if

you'll really tear into it on this Project Rho I'll teach you everything I know that you can

take. And I'll help you build any kind of spacecraft you want before you leave; one even

as big as this one. What do you say?"

 

Sleemet's strange eyes glowed. "If you will go mind to mind with me on that I can now

assure you of such cooperation as no member of my race has ever given to any

non-Fenachrone form of life," he declared; and DuQuesne handed him a headset.

 

It wasn't easy, not even for such an accomplished liar as Marc C. DuQuesne was, to

make the four-dim gizmo very much more incomprehensible than it actually was; but

he accomplished the feat-and he actually did give Sleemet practically everything else.

 

The DQ went into a one-day orbit above one point of an immense plain of the barren

planet that was its goal. A plain some ten thousand square miles of which became

forthwith an Area of Work. Enormous mechanisms sprang into being, by means of

which DuQuesne and several hundred top-bracket Fenachrone engineers sent.

gigantic beams of force hurtling across the galaxy to the Skylark of Valeron and to

hundreds of thousands of other micrometrically determined points. .

 

But not Sleemet. That wight, knowing now almost everything that DuQuesne knew, was

working in his own private laboratory-working with all the power of his tremendous mind

on the various mental aspects of the battle of giants to come.

 

Hour after hour, Crane worked in his master control at the base of the Brain, with

Madame Barlo and Drasnik and Margaret, each wearing an extra-complex headset, sit-

 

ting close to him. They were mapping and modeling three galaxies, on such a large

scale that the vast "tank" of the Skylark of Valeron was millions of times too small. They

were using a discus-shaped volume of open space some ten light-years in diameter

and three light-years thick.

 

Galaxy DW-427-LU was already meticulously in place; its every celestial body being

represented by a characteristically colored light. "Above" Galaxy DW-427-LU and

"below" it (the terms are used in the explanatory sense only; "on one side of" and "on

the other side of" could be used just as well) as close to it as possible, two other

galaxies were being modeled; each as nearly like DW-427-LU in size and shape as

could be found in that part of the First Universe. They were so close together that in

many places the three models actually interpenetrated.

 

Now in the space-time continuum of the strictly material -the plenum in which we

ungifted human beings live and which our friends the semanticists would have us

believe is the only one having any reality-the map is not the territory. That is taken as

being axiomatic. In the demesne of The Talent, however, known to some scholars as

psionics and to scoffers as magic or witchcraft, the map is-and definitely!-the territory.

 

Thus, as Madame Barlo and Drasnik, those two matched poles of tremendous power;

and Crane, the superlatively able coordinator and his matching pole Margaret; and that

immense Brain-as these five labored together, the "map" (in this case the meticulously

accurate space-chart) became filled with tendrils and filaments of psionic force,

connecting models of suns with models of suns and those of planets with those of

planets. And as those joinings occurred in the map, the same joinings occurred in the

actual galaxies out in deep space.

 

Those joinings were invisible, it is true, and intangible, and indetectable to any physical

instrument. But they were nevertheless as real as was the almost infinite power from

which they sprang.

 

The other pairs of psiontists were also hard at work. Fodan and Grand Dame Barlo,

Sacner Carfon and KayLee, Charles van der Gleiss and Madlyn Mannis, Mergon and

his Luloy, Tammon and Sennlloy-all were shooting heavy charges fast and flawlessly

straight. And as all those matched pairs labored, and as the automatics of pure psionic

force they produced reproduced themselves in geometric ratio, the intergalactic

couplings increased at a rate that was that ratio squared.

 

Seaton was fantastically busy, too. He was deep in his controller, with Dorothy and

Stephanie de Marigny, both helmeted, one on each side of him. Dorothy, was, of

course, his matched pole of power; Stephanie was his link to DuQuesne. He, too, was

operating a ten-thousand-square-mile Area of Work with the speed of thought and he

was not making any mistakes. It is true that the Skylark of Valeron was the biggest thing

he had ever built before, and that the members with which he was working now were

parsecs instead of inches long. Nevertheless each one fitted perfectly into place and

every one that was supposed to connect with anything of DuQuesne's connected

perfectly therewith. After many hours of this furiously grinding work, a myriad of hells

began to break out, at the rate of hundreds of thousands per second. Of hells, that is,

infinitely hotter than anything imaginable by man. Of super-novae, no less. In one

galaxy, A, a large hot sun vanished..

 

It reappeared instantaneously-with no lapse of time whatever-close beside the sun of a

Chloran-dominated solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU.

 

And in that same no-time the Tellus-type planet in the Chloran system vanished

therefrom and reappeared in a precisely similar orbit around a Type G dwarf sun in

Galaxy B, the third galaxy in the psiontists' tremendous working model.

 

And those two suns in the Chloran solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU, with

photospheres in contact and with intrinsic velocities not only diametrically opposed but

increased horribly by their mutual force of gravitation, crashed together in direct central

impact and splashed with tremendous force.

 

Except for the heat, the collision might have lasted for a long time. But heat was the

all-important factor-the starkly incomprehensible heat of hundreds of millions of

Centigrade degrees.

 

Each of those suns was already an atomic furnace in precise equilibrium;, generating

and radiating the energy of some five million tons per second of matter being converted

completely into energy. Thus there was no place for the added energy of billions of tons

of matter to go. It could not be absorbed and it could not be radiated. Therefore the

whole enormous mass of super-hot, super-dense material began to go into the long

series of ultra-atomic explosions that is the formation of a supersuper-nova-the most

utterly, the most fantastically violent display of pure, raw energy known to or possible in

the universe of man.

 

Flares and prominences of this insanely detonating material were hurled upward and

outward for millions upon millions of miles. Shock-wave after shock-wave, so hellishly

hot as to be invisible for days, raged and raved spherically outward; converting

instantaneously all the flotsam in their paths into their own unknown composition or

atomic and subatomic debris. Planets lasted a little longer. Oceans and mountain

ranges boiled briefly; after which each world evaporated comparatively slowly, as does

a drop of water riding a cushion of its own steam on a hot steel plate. And the sphere of

annihilation, ravening outward with unabated ferocity, reached and passed the

outermost limits of the Chloran solar system and kept on going ...

 

On and on ... And on ...

 

Until there came to pass an event which not even Seaton, not even Madame Barlo

herself had foreseen . . . and an event which nearly canceled all their efforts and their

lives as well; for the Chlorans were not left without resources even in the destruction of

their galaxy ...

 

29  DU QUESNE TO THE RESCUE

 

As has been said, the Chlorans of Galaxy DW-427-LU as a race were more conversant

with the Talent than were any of the human or near-human races of the First Galaxy:

that is, with the phases or facets of it that had to do with the remarkable hypnotic

qualities of their minds. Thus their mathematicians were more or less familiar with

no-spaceno-time theory, and some of the Greater Great Ones had played with it a little

more or less for fun, in practice. Since they had never had any real use for it as a

weapon, however, it had never been fully developed.

 

Thus there were no detectors or feeling for that type of attack. "It was not sixth-order,

but no-space-no-time, which is no-order." Thus millions upon millions of Chloran

planets were destroyed without any intelligent entity either giving or receiving warning

that an attack was being made.

 

And that was the way Richard Seaton wanted it. This was not a game; not a chivalric

tournament. This was a matter of life and death, in which the forces of human

civilization, outnumbered untold billions to one, needed all the advantage they could

get.

 

Unfortunately for Seaton's desires and expectations, the Chlorans had a Galactic

Institute for Advanced Study.

 

In common with all such institutions everywhere, its halls harbored at least one devotee

of any nameable subject, however recondite or arcane that subject might be. So there

was one old professor of advanced optical hypnosis who, as a hobby, had been delving

into no-space-no-time for a couple of hundred years. He did not feel the light prelim-

 

inary surveying tendrils of the human witches; but when the big Gunther beams began

to come in he became interested fast and got busy fast.

 

He called his first assistant and his most advanced student -the latter a Greater Great

One who was also interested in and a possessor of the Talent and thus familiar with the

mysterious power of the number three-and, synchronizing their three minds, they traced

those beams to the Skylark of Valeron and the DQ, and to Seaton and to Crane and to

DuQuesne.

 

"First," the professor told his two weaker fellows, "we will attune our Union of Three to

theirs and break it apart with blasts of psionic force. Then, each of us having tuned to

one of the separated strands, we will kill the three murderers forthwith."

 

And the Chlorans proceeded to do their best to bring this event about-and their best

was very potent indeed.

 

If things did not quite work out the way they had planned it, it was no fault of the

individual Chlorans. Their minds were fully capable of killing three "murderers" at a

distance. The first enormous surge of mental energy they thrust into the Tellurian union

of minds destroyed its fabric. The coupling of "poles of power" was wrenched asunder.

The individual minds of the operators were left alone against the Chloran thrust . . . and

each of the three Chlorans selected one of the three mightiest intellects of their

enemies and commanded it to die.

 

In that moment, Seaton, Crane and DuQuesne were seized and pinned. The minds that

thundered destruction at them were not merely of great intrinsic power, carefully

trained: they were backed up by all the million-year evolution of Chloran science, aided

by the impact of total surprise.

 

The three helpless Tellurians were helpless before they knew what hit them.

 

But they did not die. What saved them was DuQuesne's bargain with the Fenachrone.

Sleemet had had a few microseconds' warning by that Fenachrone ferocity, and the

backing of every last member of his feral race.

 

His primary purpose was, of course, the defense of DuQuesne's life-not for the sake of

DuQuesne, to be sure, but for the protection of the Fenachrone. He succeeded.

DuQuesne's rigidity melted and he was back in control of himself, his own great intellect

reinforcing Sleemet's counterblows. The two of them had enough psionic power left

over to help Seaton and Crane . . . but not enough. The blow had been too powerful

and too sudden.

 

Both Seaton and Crane slumped bonelessly to the floor of the control room, leaving

their controllers empty and idle.

 

In that moment the one great pole of strength left to humankind was-Dr. Marc C.

DuQuesne.

 

To Dorothy Seaton, that moment was pure horror. It was every terrible fear she had

ever thought of, all come to pass at once: Seaton disabled, perhaps dying; DuQuesne

in control of all the mighty resources of the Skylark. Dorothy shrieked and leaped from

her chair

 

And was stopped in her tracks by DuQuesne's shout, crackling out of a speaker to

emphasize his hard-driven thoughts:

 

"Dorothy! Margaret! Quit it! Pick up your loads and carry 'em. Pole to me!"

 

And Dorothy hesitated, irresolute, torn between her love for Seaton and her urgent duty

to help against the Chlorans, while the whole vast net of human mental energies

wavered and hung in the balance.

 

"Now!" snarled DuQuesne, the thought like a lash. "Move! To hell with the dead-"

Dorothy screamed again -"You're still alive! But you won't be long if you goof off!"

Rapidly he scanned the quavering net. "You Barlo women and your poles! Drop what

you're doing and locate this interference for me-fast! All of you-find it for me so I can

slug it! Hunkie? Yeah-good girl! Stay with it just as you are!"

 

"But DuQuesne," Dorothy protested, "I've got to . . :' "Oh, hell!" DuQuesne wrenched

out, every nuance of his tone showing the tremendous strain under which he was

laboring. "Savant Sennlloy! You can't be spared from there, but have you got a couple

of girls who can tune themselves to me?"

 

"Yes, Doctor DuQuesne." Neither she or any other Jelm aboard understood why Seeker

Sevance of Xylmny had been masquerading as Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne of Tellus

when he received his Call. They all knew, however, that it had to do with his Seeking;

hence none of them did anything to interfere with it. "We have many very good

mentalists in our party."

 

"Fine! Have two of 'em relieve these two weak sisters here-and fast!"

 

"Here we are, sir," two thoughts came in, in unison. And two powerful female Jelman

minds-the minds of two girls with whom he was already very well acquainted-fitted

themselves snugglingly to his and picked up the loads that the two Earthwomen had

been unable to carry.

 

It was not that either of those Earthwomen was weak. Both were tremendously strong;

mentally and psychically. Both disliked DuQuesne so intensely, however, that it was

psychologically impossible for either of them to work with him. Of course, he regarded

that fact itself as an extreme weakness. Sentiment was as bad as sentimentality, he

held, and both bored him to tears.

 

"Ah, that's better." DuQuesne's thought was a sigh. of relief. "That makes it at least

possible."

 

And it did. DuQuesne and his two new assistants did not do much to keep the wave of

destruction sweeping through Galaxy DW-427-LU, but he and they, with a lot of very

high-powered Fenachrone help, did hold the Chloran attackers at bay until the three

witches and the three warlocks found the planet upon which the Chloran Galactic

Institute of Advanced Study was located. Then, with locked teeth and hard-set muscles

and sweating face, he made the superhuman effort required to drive that three-man

beam single-handed and keep those three rabid Chloran attackers at bay besides.

 

By a miracle of coordination and timing he did it-and practically collapsed when all

attack and all necessity of resistance ceased. The Chloran Institute simply ceased to

be. Its members died. DuQuesne recovered so quickly that no one else except the two

Jelman girls knew that he had been affected at all.

 

"Dorothy! Margaret! Break it up!" he snapped. Doctors had been working on Seaton and

Crane for minutes. Both were beginning to recover consciousness. Neither, apparently,

had been permanently damaged; and both their wives were making enthusiastically

joyful noises. "Come on, come on, take them home to do your slobbering over them.

The rest of us have work to do-or do you expect us to hold this demolition job up until

they organize another threesome to go to the mat with us?"

 

Stretchermen carried Seaton and Crane away; Dorothy and Margaret went along. The

Chloran blow at the lives of the two Skylarkers had been deadly and fast, but it had not

succeeded-quite.

 

And the "demolition job" went on.

 

In the great light-years-thick "tank" that was the psiontists' working model of the three

galaxies they were manipulating, lights were winking out and reappearing as stars and

planets were hurled through four-dimensional curves to new orbits and positions.

Already Galaxy A-the "raw-material" source that was being used for a supply of

suns-was visibly dimmer, visibly poorer in stars. Tens of millions of them had already

been stolen away and tossed through four-space into Chloran suns in Galaxy

DW-427-LU. And when they reappeared, in a head-on collision course with those

Chloran suns, and struck, and destroyed themselves in the titanic outflow of energies

that produced super-nova blasts, the model of Galaxy DW-427-LU showed another tiny

but blindingly bright flare-and another-and another

 

There were more than fifty thousand million suns to move, in all. As the first targets had

been the strongest and most dangerous Chloran systems, resistance soon ceased to

matter; the task became monotonous, exhausting and minddeadening.

 

To the Chlorans, of course, it was something else again. They died in uncounted

trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous

flesh was charred, baked and desiccated in the split-second of the passing of the wave

front from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves began

to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Some died in terrible, frantic

efforts to escape ...

 

But they all died.

 

And for each sun that DuQuesne's remorseless net located and flung into the Chloran

galaxy, an oxygen-bearing, human-populated planet was snatched out of the teeth of

the resulting explosion and carried through four-space into the safety of Galaxy B, there

to slip quietly into orbit around a pre-selected, hospital sun. No human world was

destroyed in all of Galaxy DW-427-LU.

 

It went on and on ... And then it was over.

 

Marc DuQuesne rose, stretched and yawned. "That's all. Everybody dismissed," he

said, and at once the vast psiontic

net ceased to be. He was alone for the first time in many hours.

 

His face was lined, his eyes deeper and darker than ever. Apart from that there was

no sign of the great extermination he had just conducted. He was simply Marc

DuQuesne. The man who slew a galaxy looked no different after the deed than he had

before.

 

He allowed his sense of perception to roam for a moment about the "working model". In

Galaxy A, where billions of suns had gone through the stellar cycle of evolution for

billions of years, there was scarcely a corporal's guard of primaries left. It was a

strange, almost a frightening sight. For with the loss of the suns the composition of the

galaxy had changed to something never before seen in all the plenum of universes.

Nearly every sun had had planets; nearly every planet remained behind when its sun

was stolen. Now they roamed at random-uncontrolled, barren, uninhabited-lacking not

only the light and heat of their primaries, but freed from their gravitational reins as well.

 

Galaxy B, on the other hand, looked quite normal-in "working model". The planets it had

acquired, both from the "working model". The planets it had acquired, both from the

exploded Chloran suns and from the looted solar systems of Galaxy A, were not even

visible. Galactically speaking, it was essentially unchanged; the additional mass of a

few billion planets did not matter, and each of the new planets was already in orbit

around a friendly sun. There would be readjustments, of course. It would be necessary

to keep a watch on the developments of each affected solar system, over a period of

years. But that was no problem of Marc DuQuesne's.

 

But the Chloran galaxy! What was it?

 

In the "working model" it was rapidly becoming a single, light-years-thick concentration

of living flame. In the reality it was even huger, even more deadly. A name would be

invented for it some day-quasi-stellar? Or something greater still?

 

But that, too, was no longer a concern for Marc DuQuesne. He dropped from his mind,

without a qualm, the memory of the trillions of lives he had taken, the billions of worlds

he had dislocated. He ignored the question of Richard Ballinger Seaton, now stirring

back to conscious; ness, to worry-and ultimately, to reassurance-somewhere ', on the

Valeron. He had more pressing business to take care of. Personal business. And to

DuQuesne that was the most pressing of all.

 

Shrugging his shoulders, he sent Stephanie de Marigny a tight-beamed thought:

 

"Hunkie-some time before you go back to Washington, can I flip you over to the DQ for

a private conference that we know will be private?"

 

Her beautifully dimpled smile flashed on. "I should say not! You know I'm not that kind

of a. . ." she began; then, as she perceived how much in earnest be was, she changed

tone instantly and went on, "Of course, Blackie. Any time. Just give me time to pack a

toothbrush and my pajamas. Top Secret, or can you give me a hint to allay my 'satiable

curiosity?"

 

"Hint; large economy size. Every time I think of what those damned observers are doing

to you-feeding a mind like yours with an eye-dropper instead of a seventy-two inch

pipeline-it makes me madder and madder. I can give you everything that Seaton, I,

Crane and half the Norlaminians know, and give it to you in five hours."

 

"You can what?" The thought was a mental scream. She licked her lips, gulped twice,

and said, "In that case we needn't wait for either toothbrush or pajamas. Do it now."

 

He laughed deeply. "I wasn't sure that would be your attitude, but I'm glad it is. But I

can't do it this minute. I have to help Sleemet finish building his planetoid, watch him

very carefully for a while on course and do a couple of other crash-pri chores. Three or

four days, probably. Say Saturday, seventeen hours?"

 

"That'll be fine, Blackie, and thanks. I'll be here with my ears pinned back and my teeth

filed down to needle points."

 

30  EMPEROR

 

THE Fenachrone bad taken off and DuQuesne had watched them go, taking extreme

precautions-none of which, it turned out, had been necessary-that they did not eliminate

either him or the rest of the party as soon as it became safe for them to do so. He had

taken Stephanie de Marigny and all her belongings aboard, saying that he was going

close enough to Tellus so that it would be no trouble at all to drop her off there. And

lastly, when Seaton and Crane had insisted upon thanking him for what he had done:

 

"Save it," he had sneered. "Remember, that time on XWorld, what I told you to do with

that kind of crap! That still goes," and he had taken off at full touring drive on course

one seven five Universal. This course, which would give the First Galaxy a near miss,

was the most direct route to a galaxy that was distant indeed; the galaxy lying on the

extreme southern rim of the First Universe; the galaxy in which the DQ had been built;

the galaxy that DuQuesne had surveyed so thoroughly and which he intended to rule.

 

DuQuesne and Stephanie were in the DQ's control room, which was an exact duplicate

of the Skylark of Valeron's. He placed her in the seat that on the Valeron was Crane's,

showed her how to elevate herself into his own station.

 

"Oh," she said. "You're going to give me the whole gigantic Brain?"

 

"That's the best and easiest way to do it. I boiled down about ten thousand lifetimes of

knowledge and experience into ten half-hour sessions. The ten tapes on that player

there are coded instructions for the Brain-what to give you and how. There are minds

who could take the whole jolt in seconds, but yours and mine aren't that type-yet. But

you'll get it all in five hours. Every detail. It'll shock you all hell's worth and it'll scare you

right out of your panties, but it won't hurt you and it won't damage your brain. Yours is

one of the very few human brains that can take it. I'll start it and in five hours I'll be

back. Ready?"

 

"As much so as I ever will be, I guess. Go."

 

He started the player; and, after waiting a few minutes to be sure that everything was

going as programmed, he left the room. . .

 

He came back in just as the machine clicked off, lowered her "chair," and lifted her to

her feet. "Good-God-In-Heaven!" she gasped. Her skin, normally so dark, was a

yellowish white; so pate that her scattered freckles stood out sharply, each one in bold

relief. "I don't . . . I can't . . . I simply can't grasp it! I know that I know it, but . . ." She

paused.

 

He shook his head in sympathy. Which, for Marc C. DuQuesne, was a rare gesture

indeed. "I know. I couldn't tell you what it would be like no possible warning can be

enough. But that's the bare minimum you'll have to start with, and it won't take you very

long to assimilate it all. Ready for some talk?"

 

"Not only ready, I'm eager. First, though, I want to give you a vote of full confidence. I'm

sure that you'll succeed in everything you try from now on; even to becoming Emperor

Marc the First of some empire."

 

"Huh? Where did you get that?"

 

"By reading between the lines. Do you think I'm stupid, is that why you gave me all

this?"

 

"Okay. You've always known, as an empirical, non-germane fact, that the Earth and all

it carries isn't even a flyspeck in a galaxy, to say nothing of a universe; but now you

know and really understand just how little it actually does amount to."

 

She shuddered. "Yes. It's ... it's appalling."

 

"Not when viewed in the proper perspective. I set out to rule Earth, yes; but after I

began to learn something I lost that idea in a hurry. For a long time now I haven't

wanted Earth or any part of it. Its medical science is dedicated whole-heartedly to the

deterioration of the human race by devoting its every effort to the preservation of the

lives of the unfit. In Earth's wars its best men-its best breeding stock-are killed. Earth

simply is not, worth saving even if it could be saved; which I doubt. Neither is Norlamin.

Not because its conquest is at present impossible, but because the Norlaminians aren't

worth anything, either. All they do -all they can do-is think. They haven't done anything

constructive in their entire history and they never will. They're such bred-in-the-bone

pacifists-look at the way the damned sissies acted in this Chloran thing-that it is

psychologically impossible for any one of them to pull a trigger. No; Sleemet had the

right idea. And Ravindauyou have him in mind?"

 

"Vividly. Preserve the race-in his way and on his terms."

 

"You're a precisionist; that's my idea exactly. To pick out a few hundred people-we

won't need many, as there are billions already where we're going-as much as possible

like us, and build a civilization that will be what a civilization ought to be."

 

The girl gasped, but her eyes began to sparkle. "'In a distant galaxy', as Ravindau

said?"

 

"Very distant. Clear out on the rim of this universe. The last galaxy out on the rim, in

fact; five degrees east of Universal south."

 

"And you'll be Emperor Marc the First after all. But you won't live long enough to rule

very much."

 

"You're wrong, Steff. The ordinary people are already there, and it's ridiculous for a

sound and healthy body to deteriorate and die at a hundred. We'll live ten or fifteen

times that long, what witli what I already know and the advances our medical science

will make. Especially with the elimination of the unfit."

 

"Sterilization, you mean?"

 

"No; death. Don't go soft on me, girl. There will be no second-class citizens, at least in

the upper stratum. Testing for that stratum will be by super-computer. Upper-stratum

families will be fairly large."

 

"Families?" she broke in. "You've come to realize, then, that the family is the sine qua

non of civilization?"

 

"I've always known that." Forestalling another interruption with a wave of his hand, he

went on, "I know. I've never been a family man. On Earth or in our present cultures I

would never become one. But skipping that for the moment, it's your turn now."

 

"I like it." She thought in silence for a couple of minutes, then went on, "It must be an

autocracy, of course, and you're the man to make it work. The only flaw I can see is that

even absolute authority can not make a dictated marriage either tolerable or productive.

It automatically isn't, on both counts."

 

"Who said anything about dictated marriage? Free choice within the upper stratum and

by test from the lower. With everybody good breeding stock, what difference will it make

who marries whom?"

 

"Oh. I see. That does it, of course. Contrary to all appearances, then, you actually do

believe in love. The implication has been pellucidly clear all along that you expect . . ."

 

"'Expect' is too strong a word. Make it that I'm 'exploring the possibility of'."

 

"I'll accept that. You are exploring the possibility of me becoming your empress. From

all the given premises, the only valid conclusion is that you love me. Check?"

 

"The word 'love' has so many and such tricky meanings that it is actually meaningless.

Thus, I don't know whether I love you or not, in your interpretation of the term. If it

means to you that I will jump off of a cliff or blow my brains out if you refuse, I don't. Or

that I'll pine away and not marry a second best, I don't. If, however, it means a lot of

other things, I do. Whatever it means, will you marry me?"

 

"Of course I will, Blackie. I've loved you a long time."