Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
But for the moment they were free. Seaton checked and double-checked every gauge and warning device and nodded at last.
‘Good,’ he said then, ‘I was more than half expecting a kick in the pants, even way out here. The next item on our agenda is a council of war; so cluster round, everybody, and get comfortable.’ He turned control over to the Brain, sat down beside Dorothy, stoked his pipe, and went on:
‘Point one: DuQuesne. He got stuff somewhere – virtually certainly from the Jelmi – at least the fourth-dimensional transmitter and we don’t know what else, that he didn’t put out anything about. Naturally. And he sucked me in like Mary’s little lamb. Also naturally. At hindsight I’m a blinding flash and a deafening report. I’ve got a few glimmerings, but you’re the brain, Mart; so give out with analysis and synthesis.’
Crane did so; covering the essential points and concluding: ‘Since the plug-chart was accurate, the course was accurate. Therefore, besides holding back vital information, DuQuesne lied about one or both of two things: the point at which the signal was received and the direction from which it came.’
‘Well, you can find out about that easily enough,’ Dorothy said. You know, that dingus you catch light-waves with, so as to see exactly what went on years and years ago. Or wouldn’t it work, this far away?’
Seaton nodded. ‘Worth a try. Dunark?’
‘I say go after DuQuesne!’ the Osnomian said viciously. ‘Catch him and blow him and his
Capital D
to hellangone up!’
Seaton shook his head. ‘I can’t buy that – at the moment. Now that he’s flopped again at murder, I don’t think he’s of first importance any more. You see, I haven’t mentioned point two yet, which is a datum I didn’t put into the pot because I wanted to thrash point one out first. It’s about who the enemy really are. When I finally got organized to slug them a good one back, I followed the shot. They knew they’d been nudged, believe me. So much so that in the confusion I got quite a lot of information.
They’re Chlorans. Or, if not exactly like the Chlorans of Chlora, that we had all the trouble with, as nearly identical as makes no difference.
‘
Chlorans!
’ Dorothy and Margaret shrieked as one, and five minds dwelt briefly upon that hideous and ultimately terrible race of amoeboid monstrosities who, living in an atmosphere of gaseous chlorine, made it a point to enslave or to destroy all the humanity of all the planets they could reach.
All five remembered, very vividly, the starkly unalloyed ferocity with which one race of Chlorans had attacked the planet Valeron; near which the
Skylark of Valeron
had been built and after which she had been named. They remembered the horrifyingly narrow margin by which those Chlorans had been defeated. They also remembered that the Chlorans had not even then been slaughtered. The Skylarkers had merely enclosed the planet Chlora in a stasis of time and sent it back – on a trip that would last, for everyone and everything outside that stasis, some four hundred years – to its own native solar system, from which it had been torn by a near-collision of suns in the long-gone past. The Skylarkers should have blown Chlora into impalpable and invisible debris, and the men of the party had wanted to do just that, but Dorothy and Margaret and the essentially gentle Valeronians had been dead set against genocide.
Dorothy broke the short silence. ‘But how
could
they be, Dick?’ she asked. ‘Way out here? But of course, if we human beings could do it –’ She paused.
‘But of course,’ Seaton agreed sourly. ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t they be as widespread as humanity is? Or even more so, if they have killed enough of us off? And why shouldn’t they be smarter than those others were? Look at how much we’ve learned in just months, not millennia, of time.’
Another and longer silence fell; which was broken by Seaton. ‘Well, two things are certain. They’re rabidly antisocial and they’ve got – at the moment – a lot more stuff than we have. They’ve got it to sell, like farmers have hay. It’s also a dead-sure cinch that we can’t do a thing – not
anything
– without a lot more data than we have now. It’ll take all the science of Norlamin and maybe a nickel’s worth besides to design and build what we’ll have to have. And they can’t go it blind. Nobody can. And we all know enough about Chlorans to know that we won’t get one iota or one of Peg’s smidgeons of information out of them by remote control. At the first touch of any kind of a high-order feeler they’ll bat our ears down … to a fare-thee-well. However, other means are available.’
During this fairly long – for Seaton – speech, and during the silence that had preceded it, two things had been happening.
First the controlling Brain of the ship had been carrying out a program of Seaton’s. Star by star, system by system, it had been scanning the components of the nearest galaxy to the scene of their encounter. It had in fact verified Seaton’s conclusions: the galaxy was dominated by
Chlorans. Their works were everywhere. But it had also supported a – not a conclusion; a hope, more accurately – that Seaton had hardly dared put in words. Although the Chlorans ruled this galaxy, there were oxygen-breathing, warm-blooded races in it too – serfs of the Chlorans of course, but nevertheless occupying their own planets – and it was one such planet that the Brain had finally selected and was now displaying on its monitor.
The other thing was that the auburn-haired beauty who was Mrs Richard Ballinger Seaton had been eyeing her husband steadily. At first she had merely looked at him thoughtfully. Then look and mien had become heavily tinged, first with surprise and then with doubt and then with wonder; a wonder that turned into an incredulity that became more and more incredulous. Until finally, unable to hold herself in any longer, she broke in on him.
‘Dick!’ she cried. ‘You
wouldn’t
! You
know
you wouldn’t!’
‘I wouldn’t? If not, who …?’ Changing his mind between two words, Seaton cut the rest of the sentence sharply off; shrugged his shoulders; and grinned, somewhat shamefacedly, back at her.
At this point Crane, who had been looking first at one of them and then at the other, put in: ‘I realize, Dorothy, that you and Dick don’t need either language or headsets to communicate with each other, but how about the rest of us? What, exactly, is it that you’re not as sure as you’d like to be that he wouldn’t do?’
Dorothy opened her mouth to reply, but Seaton beat her to it. ‘What I would do – and will because I’ll have to; because it’s my oyster and nobody else’s – is, after we sneak up as close as we can without touching off any alarms, take a landing craft and go get the data we absolutely have to have in absolutely the only way it can be gotten.’
‘And that’s what I most emphatically do
not
like!’ Dorothy blazed. ‘Dick Seaton, you are
not
going to land on an enslaved planet, alone and unarmed and afoot, as an investigating Committee of One! For one thing, we simply don’t have the time! Do we? I mean, poor old
Valeron
is simply a wreck! We’ve got to go somewhere and—’
But Seaton was shaking his head. ‘The Brain can handle that by itself,’ he said. ‘All it needs is time. As a matter of fact, you’ve put your finger on a first-rate reason for my going in, alone. There’s simply not much else we can do until the
Valeron
is back in shape again.’
‘Not
your
going in.’ Dorothy blazed. ‘Flatly, positively
no!’
Again Seaton shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can’t say I’m madly in love with the idea myself, but who’s any better qualified? Or as well? Because I know that you, Dottie, aren’t the type to advocate us sitting on our hands and letting them have all the races of humanity, wherever situated. So who?’
‘Me,’ Shiro said, promptly if ungrammatically. ‘Not as good, but good enough. You can tell me what data you want and
I can and will get it, just as well as—’
‘Bounce back, both of you, you’ve struck a rubber fence!’ Dunark snapped. ‘That job’s for Sitar and me.’ The green-skinned princess waved her pistol in the air and nodded her head enthusiastically and her warlord went on, ‘You and I being brain-brothers, Dick, I’d know exactly what you want. And she and I would blast—’
‘Yeah, that’s what I know damn well you’d do.’ Seaton broke in, only to be interrupted in turn by Crane – who was not in the habit of interrupting anyone even once, to say nothing of twice.
‘Excuse me, everyone,’ he said, ‘but you’re all wrong, I think. My thought at the moment, Dick, is that your life is altogether too important to the project as a whole to be risked as you propose risking it. As to you others, with all due respect for your abilities, I do not believe that either of you is as well qualified for this kind of an investigation as I am –’
Margaret leaped to her feet in protest, but Crane went quietly on: ‘– in either experience or training. However, we should not decide that point yet – or at all, for that matter. We are all too biased. I therefore suggest, Dick, that we feed the Brain everything we have and keep on feeding it everything pertinent we can get hold of, until it has enough data to make that decision for us.’
‘
That
makes sense,’ Seaton said, and both Dorothy and Margaret nodded – but both with very evident reservations. ‘The first time anything has made sense today!’
The first thing Seaton and Crane had to do, of course, was to figure out how to get back somewhere near Galaxy DW-427-LU, within fourth-order range of that one particular extremely powerful Chloran system, without using enough sixth-order stuff to touch off any alarms – but still enough to make the trip in days instead of in months. Some sixth-order emanations could be neutralized by properly phased and properly placed counter-generators; the big question being, how much?
The answer turned out to be, according to Crane, ‘Not enough’ – but, according to Seaton, ‘Satisfactory.’ At least, it did make the trip not only possible, but feasible. And during the days of that trip each Skylarker worked – with the Brain or with a computer or with pencil and paper or with paint or India ink and a brush, each according
to his bent – on the problem of what could be done about the Chlorans.
They made little headway, if any at all. They did not have enough data. Inescapably, the attitude of each was very strongly affected by what he or she knew about the Chlorans they had already encountered. They were all smart enough to know that this was as indefensible as it was inevitable.
Thus, while each of them developed a picture completely unlike anyone else’s as to what the truth probably was, none of them was convinced enough of the validity of his theory to defend it vigorously. Thus it was discussion, not argument, that went on throughout the cautious approach to the forbidden territory and the ultra-cautious investigation of the Tellus-type planet the Brain had selected through powerful optical telescopes and by means of third- and fourth-order apparatus. Then they fell silent, appalled; for that world was inhabited by highly intelligent human beings and what had been done to it was shocking indeed.
They had seen what had been done to the planet Valeron. This was worse; much worse. On Valeron the ruins had been recognizable as having once been cities. Even those that had been blown up or slagged down by nuclear energies had shown traces of what they had once been. There had been remnants and fragments of structural members, unfused portions of the largest buildings, recognizable outlines and traces of thoroughfares and so on. But here, where all of the big cities and three-fourths or more of the medium-sized ones had been, there were now only huge sheets of glass.
Sheets of glass ranging in area from ten or fifteen square miles up to several thousands of square miles, and variously from dozens up to hundreds of feet thick: level sheets of cracked and shattered, almost transparent, vari-colored glass. The people of the remaining cities and towns and villages were human. In fact, they were white Caucasians – as white and as Caucasian as the citizens of Tampa or of Chicago or of Portland, Oregon or of Portland, Maine. Neither Seaton nor Shiro, search as they would, could find any evidence that any Oriental types then lived or ever had lived on that world – to Shiro’s lasting regret. He, at least, was eliminated as a spy.
‘Well, Dottie?’ Seaton asked.
She gnawed her lip. ‘Well … I suppose we’ll have to do
something
– but hey!’ she exclaimed, voice and expression changing markedly. ‘How come you think you have to go down there at all to find out what the score is? You’ve snatched people right and left all over the place with ordinary beams and things,
long
before anybody ever heard of that sixth-order, fourth-dimensional gizmo.’
Seaton actually blushed. ‘That’s right, my pet,’ he admitted. ‘Once again you’ve got a point. I’ll pick one out that’s so far away from everybody else that he won’t be missed for a while. Maybe two’d be better.’
Since it was an easy matter to find isolated
specimens of the humanity of that world, it was less than an hour later that two men – one from a town, one found wandering alone in the mountains – were being examined by the Brain. And
what
an examination! Everything in their minds – literally everything, down to the last-least-tiniest coded ‘bit’ of every long-chain proteinoid molecule of every convolution of their brains – everything was being transferred to the
Valeron’s
great Brain; was being filed away in its practically unfillable memory banks.
When the transfer was complete, Sitar drew her pistol, very evidently intending to do away with the natives then and there. But Dorothy of course would not stand for that. Instead, she herself put them back into a shell of force and ran them through the
Valeron’s
locks and down into a mountain cave, which she then half-filled with food. ‘I’d advise you two,’ she told them then, in their own language, ‘to stay put here for a few days and keep out of trouble. If you really
want
to get yourselves killed, though, that’s all right with me. Go ahead any time.’
When Dorothy brought her attention back into the control room, the Brain had finished its analysis of the data it had just secured from the natives, had correlated it with all their pertinent data it had in its banks, and was beginning to put out its synthesized report.