Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
The three men greeted each other warmly and executed a six-hand handshake; the while the two white women and the green one went into an arms-wrapped group; each talking two hundred words to the minute.
A couple of days later, the Norlaminian task-force arrived and a council of war was held that lasted for one full working day. Then, the defense planned in length and in depth, construction began. Seaton and Crane sat in the two master-control helmets of the Brain. Rovol worked with the brain of the Norlaminian spaceship. Dozens of other operators, men and women, worked at and with other, less powerful devices.
On the surface of a nearby planet, ten thousand square miles of land were leveled and paved to form the Area of Work. Stacks and piles and rows and assortments of hundreds of kinds of structural members appeared as though by magic. Gigantic beams of force, made visible by a thin and dusty pseudo-mist, flashed here and there; seizing this member and that and these and them and those and joining them together with fantastic speed to form enormous towers and platforms and telescope-like things and dirigible tubes and projectors.
Some of these projectors took containers of pure force out to white dwarf stars after neutronium. Others took faidons – those indestructible jewels that are the
sine qua non of
higher-order operations – out to the cores of stars to be worked into lenses of various shapes and sizes. Out into the environment of scores of millions of degrees of temperature and of scores of millions of tons per square inch of pressure that is the only environment in which the faidon can be worked by any force known to the science of man.
The base-line, which was to be built of enormous, absolutely rigid beams of force, could not be of planetary, or even of orbital dimensions. It had to extend, a precisely measured length, from the core of a star to that of another, having as nearly as possible the same proper motion, over a hundred parsecs away. Thus it took over a week to build and to calibrate that base-line; but, once that was done, the work went fast.
The most probable lines of approach were blocked by fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order installations of tremendous range and of planetary power; less probable ones by defenses of somewhat lesser might; supersensitive detector webs fanned out everywhere. And this work, which would have required years a short time before, was only a matter of a couple of weeks for the gigantic constructor-projectors now filling the entire Area of Work.
When everything that anyone could think of doing had been done, Seaton lit his pipe, jammed both hands into his pockets, and turned to his wife. ‘Well, we’ve got it made – now what are we going to do with
it? Sit on our hands until Blackie DuQuesne trips a trigger or some Good Samaritan answers our call? I’d give three nickels to know whether he’s loose yet or not, and if he is loose, just where he is at this moment.’
‘I’d raise you a dime,’ she said; and then, since Dorothy Seaton concealed an extremely useful brain under her red curls, she added slowly, ‘And maybe … you know what the Norlaminians deduced: that, upon liberation, he’d be rematerialized? That he’d have a very good spaceship. That, before attacking us, he would recruit personnel, both men and women, both from need of their help and from loneliness … wait up –
loneliness!
Who – a girl, probably – would he get loneliest for?’
Seaton snapped his fingers. ‘I can make an awfully good guess. Hunkie de Marigny.’
‘Hunkie de Who? Oh, I remember. That big moose with the black hair and the shape.’
Seaton laughed. ‘Funny, isn’t it, that such an accurate description can be so misleading? But my guess is, if he’s back she knows it … I think it’d be smart to flip myself over to the Bureau and see what I can find out. Want to come along?’
‘Uh-uh; she isn’t my dish of tea.’
Seaton projected his solid-seeming simulacrum of pure force to distant Tellus, to Washington, and to the sidewalk in front of the Bureau. He mounted the steps, entered the building, said ‘Hi, Gorgeous’ to the shapely blonde receptionist, and took an elevator to the sixteenth floor; where he paused briefly in thought.
He hadn’t better see Hunkie first, or only; Ferdinand Scott, the world’s worst gossip, would talk about it, and Hunkie would draw her own conclusions. He’d pull Scotty’s teeth first.
Wherefore he turned into the laboratory beside the one that once had been his own. ‘Hi, Scotty,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘don’t tell me they’ve actually got you
working
for a change.’
Scott, a chunky youth with straw-colored hair that needed cutting, jumped off of his stool and shook hands vigorously. ‘Hi, Dickie, old top! Alla time work. “Slavey” Scott; that’s me. But boy oh boy,
did
I goof on that “Nobody Holme” bit! You and that bottle of waste solution, that you stirred the whole world up with like goulash! Why can’t anything like that ever happen to me? But I s’pose I’d’ve blown the whole world to hellangone up instead of just putting it into the God-awful shape it’s in now, like you and Blackie DuQuesne did.
Wow
, what a mess!’
‘Yeah. Speaking of DuQuesne – seen him lately?’
‘Not since the big bust. The Norlaminians probably know all about him.’
They don’t. I asked. They lost him.’
‘Well, you might ask Hunkie de Marigny.
She’ll know if anybody does.’
‘Oh – she still here?’
‘Yeah. Most of us are, and will be.’
Seaton chatted for another minute, then, ‘Take it easy, guy,’ he said; and went up the corridor to Room 1631. The door was wide open, so he went in without knocking.
‘Park it. Be with you in a moment,’ a smooth contralto voice said, and Seaton sat down on a chair near the door.
The woman – Dr Stephanie de Marigny, nuclear physicist and good at her trade – kept both eyes fastened on a four-needle meter about eighteen inches in front of her nose. Her well-kept hands and red-nailed fingers, working blind with the sure precision of those of a world-champion typist, opened and closed switches, moved sliders and levers, and manipulated a dozen or so vernier knobs in tiny arcs.
There was nothing to show any uninformed observer what she was doing. Whatever it was that she was working on could have been behind that instrument-filled panel – or down in some sub-basement – or at the Proving Grounds down the Potomac – or a million miles or parsecs out in space. Whatever it was or wherever, as she worked the four needles of the master-meter closer and closer together as each needle approached the center-zero mark of the meter’s scale –
Until finally the four hair-thin flat needles were exactly in line with each other and with the hair-thin zero mark. Whereupon four heavy plungers drove home and every light on the panel flashed green and went out.
‘On the button,’ she said then, aloud. She rose to her feet, stretched as gracefully and luxuriously and unselfconsciously as does a cat, and turned toward her visitor.
‘Hi, Hunkie,’ Seaton said. ‘Can you spare me a minute?’
‘Nice to see you again, Dick.’ She came toward him, hand outstretched. ‘I could probably be talked into making it two minutes.’
The word ‘big’, while true, was both inadequate and misleading. Stephanie de Marigny was tall – five feet ten in her nylons – and looked even taller because of her three-inch heels, her erect posture, and because of the mass of jet-black hair piled high on her head.
Her breasts jutted; her abdomen was flat and hard; her wide, flat hips flared out from a startlingly narrow waist; and her legs would have made any professional glamor-photographer drool And her face, if not as beautiful as her body, was fully as striking. Her unplucked eyebrows, as black as her hair, were too long and too thick and too bushy and grew too nearly together above a nose that was as much of a beak as DuQuesne’s own. The lashes over her deep brown eyes were simply incredible. Her cheekbones were too large and too prominent. Her fire-engine-red mouth was too big. Her square chin and her hard, clean line of jaw were too outstanding;
demanded too much notice. Her warm, friendly, dimple-displaying smile, however, revealed the charm that was actually hers.
Seaton said, ‘As always, you’re really a treat for the optic nerve.’
She ignored the compliment. ‘You aren’t; you look like a catastrophe looking for a place to happen. You ought to take better care of yourself, Dick. Get some sleep once in a while.’
‘I’m going to, as soon as I can. But what I came in for – have you heard anything of Blackie lately?’
‘No. Not since he got delusions of grandeur. Why? Should I have?’
‘Not that I know of. I just thought maybe you two had enough of a thing on so you’d keep in touch.’
‘Uh-uh. I ran around with him a little, is all. Nothing serious. Of all the men I know who understand and appreciate good music, he’s the youngest, the best-looking, and the most fun. Also the biggest. I can wear high heels and not tower over him, which I can’t do with most men …’ She paused, nibbling at her lower lip, then went on, ‘My best guess is that he’s out on one of the new planets somewhere, making several hundred thousand tax-free dollars per year. That’s what I’m going to be doing as soon as I finish Observers’ School here.’
‘You’re the gal who can do it, too. Luck, Hunkie.’
‘Same to you, Dick. Drop in again, any time you’re around.’
And aboard the
Skylark of Valeron
, Seaton turned to Dorothy with a scowl. ‘Nobody’s seen him or heard anything of him, so he probably isn’t loose yet. I
hate
this waiting. Confound it, I wish the big black ape would get loose and start something!’
Although Seaton did not know it, DuQuesne had and was about to.
It happened that night, after Seaton had gone to bed.
The message came in loud and clear on Seaton’s private all-hours receiver, monitored and directed by the unsleeping Brain:
‘… Seaton reply on tight beam of the sixth stop DuQuesne calling Seaton reply on tight beam of the sixth stop DuQuesne calling …’
Coming instantly awake at the sound of his name, Seaton kicked off the covers, thought a light on, and, setting hands and feet, made a gymnast’s twisting, turning leap over Dorothy without touching her. There was plenty of room on his own side of the bed, but the direct route was quicker. He landed on his feet, took two quick steps, and slapped the remote-control helmet on his head.
‘Trace this call. Hit its source with a tight beam of the sixth,’ he thought into the helmet; then took it off and said aloud, You’re coming in loud and clear. What gives?’
‘Loud and clear here. All hell’s out for noon. I just met the damndest alien any science-fiction fan ever imagined – teeth, wings, tail – the works. Klazmon by name; boss of two hundred forty-one planets
full of monsters just like him. He’s decided that all humanity everywhere should be liquidated; and it looks as though he may have enough stuff to do just that.’
Dorothy had sat up in bed, sleepily. She made a gorgeously beautiful picture, Seaton thought; wearing a wisp of practically nothing and her hair a tousled auburn riot. As the sense of DuQuesne’s words struck home, however, a look of horror spread over her face and she started to say something; but Seaton touched his lips with a forefinger and she, wide awake now, nodded.
‘Nice summary, DuQuesne,’ Seaton said then. ‘Now break it down into smaller pieces, huh?’ and DuQuesne went on to give a verbatim report of his interview with Llanzlan Klazmon of the Realm of the Llurdi.
‘So much for facts,’ DuQuesne said. ‘Now for inferences and deductions. You know how, when you’re thinking with anyone, other information, more or less relevant and more or less clear, comes along? A sort of side-band effect?’
‘Yeah, always. I can see how you picked up the business about the stranger ships that way. But how sure are you that those seventeen ships were
Fenachrone?
’
‘Positive. That thought was
clear
. And for that matter, there must be others running around loose somewhere. How possible is it, do you think, to wipe out completely a race that has had spaceships as long as they have?’
‘Could be,’ agreed Seaton. ‘And this ape Klazmon figured it that we were the same race, basically, both mentally – savage, egocentric, homicidal – and physically. How could he arrive at any such bobbled-up, cockeyed conclusions as that?’
‘For him, easily enough. Klazmon is just about as much like us as we are like those X-planet cockroaches. Imagine a man-sized bat, with a super-able tail, cat’s eyes and teeth, humanoid arms and hands, a breastbone like the prow of a battleship, pectoral muscles the size of forty-pound hams, and—’
‘Wait up a sec – this size thing. His projection?’
‘That’s right. Six feet tall. He wasn’t the type to shrink or expand it.’
‘I’ll buy that. And strictly logical – with their own idea of what logic is.’
‘Check. According to which logic we’re surplus population and are to be done away with. So I decided to warn you as to what the human race is up against and to suggest a meeting with you that we
know
can’t be listened in on. Check?’
‘Definitely. We’ll lock our sixths on and instruct our computers to compute and effect rendezvous at null relative velocity in minimum time. Can do?’
‘Can do – am doing,’ DuQuesne said; and Seaton, donning his helmet, perceived that the only fifth- or sixth-order stuff anywhere near the
Skylark of Valeron
– except what she was putting out herself, of course – was the thin, tight beam that was the base-line.
Seaton thought into his helmet for a few seconds; then,
discarding it, he went around the bed, got into it on his own side, and started to kiss Dorothy a second goodnight.
‘But, Dick,’ she protested. ‘That DuQuesne! Do you think it’s safe to let him come actually aboard?’
‘Yes. Not only safe, but necessary – we don’t want to be blabbing that kind of stuff all over a billion parsecs of space. And safe because I still say we’re better than he is at anything he wants to start, for fun, money, chalk, or marbles. So goodnight again, ace of my bosom.’
‘Hadn’t you better notify somebody else first? Especially the Norlaminians?’