Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
That report came in thought; in diamond-sharp, diamond-clear thought that was not only super-intelligible and super-audible, but also was more starkly visible than any possible tri-di. It gave, as no possible other form of report could give, the entire history of the race to which those two men belonged. It described in detail and at length the Chlorons and the relationship between the two races, and went on to give, in equal detail, the most probable course of near-term events. It told Seaton that he should investigate this planet Ray-See-Nee in person. It told him in fine detail what to wear, where to go, and practically every move to make for the ensuing twenty-four hours.
At that point the report stopped, and when Seaton demanded more information, the Brain baulked. ‘Data insufficient,’ it thought, and everyone there would have sworn that the great Brain actually had a consciousness of self as it went on, ‘This construct –’ it actually meant I – ‘is not built to guess, but deals only in virtual certainties; that is, with probabilities that approximate unity to twelve or more nines. With additional data, this matter can be explored to a depth quite strictly proportional to the sufficiency of the data. That is all.’
‘That’s the package, Dottie,’ Seaton said then. ‘If we want to reach the Chlorans without them reaching us first, there’s how. That makes it a force, wouldn’t you say?’
Dorothy wasn’t sure. ‘For twenty-four hours, I guess,’ she agreed, dubiously. ‘After which time I think I’ll be screaming for you to come back here and feed that monster some more data. So be mighty darn sure to get some.’
‘I’ll try to, that’s for sure. But the really smart thing to
do might be to take this wreckage half a dozen galaxies away and put the Brain to work rebuilding her while I’m down there investigating.’
‘D’you think I’ll sit still for
that?
’ Dorothy blazed. ‘If you do, you’re completely out of your mind!’
And even Crane did not subscribe to the idea. ‘Why?’ he asked, ‘Just to tear her down again after you’ve found out what we’ll have to have?’
‘That’s so, too.’ Seaton thought for a moment, gray eyes narrowed and focused on infinity, translating the imperatives of the Brain into practical measures. Then he nodded. ‘All right. I admit I’ll feel better about the deal with you people and the Brain standing by.’
And Seaton, now lean and hard and deeply tanned, sat down in his master controller and began to manufacture the various items he would need; exactly as the Brain told him to make them.
And next morning, as the sun began to peer over the crest of the high mountain ridge directly below the
Skylark of Valeron
, Seaton came to ground, hid his tiny landing-craft in a cave at the eighteen-thousand-foot level, and hiked the fifteen miles down-mountain to the nearest town.
He now looked very little indeed like the Dr Richard B. Seaton of the Rare Metals Laboratory. He was almost gaunt. His skin was burned to a shade consistent with years of exposure to wind and weather. His hair had very evidently been cut – occasionally – with shears by his own hand; his beard had been mowed – equally occasionally – with those same shears.
He wore crudely made, heavy, hobnailed, high-laced boots; a pair of baggy, unsymmetrical breeches of untanned deerskin; and a shapeless, poor-grade leather coat that had been patched crudely and repeatedly at elbows and shoulders and across the back. He also wore what was left of a hard hat.
As he strode into the town and along its main street, more than one pair of eyes looked at him and then looked again, for the people of that town were not used to seeing anyone walk purposefully. Nor was the sloppily uniformed guard at the entrance to City Hall. This wight – who couldn’t have been a day over fifteen – opened his eyes, almost straightened up and said:
‘Halt, you. Who’a you? Whatcha want?’
‘Business,’ Seaton said, briskly. ‘To see the mayor, Ree-Toe Prenk.’
‘Awri’; g’wan in,’ and the youth relapsed into semi-stuporous leaning on his ratty-looking rusty rifle.
It was easy enough to find His Honor’s office, since it was the only one in the building doing any business at all. Seaton paused just inside the doorway and looked around. Everything was shabby and neglected. The wall-to-wall carpet was stained and dirty, worn through to the floor in several places. The divider-rail leaned drunkenly, forward here, backward there. The vacant receptionist’s desk was as battered and scarred as though it had been through a war. The place hadn’t been cleaned for months, and not very thoroughly
then.
And the people in that office were in perfect sync with their surroundings. Half a dozen melancholy-looking people, men and women, sat listlessly on hard, straight-backed chairs; staring glumly, fixedly at nothing; completely disinterested, apparently, in whether they were called into the inner office or not.
And the secretary! She was dressed in what looked like a gunny-sack. She was scrawny. Her unkempt, straight, lank hair was dirty-mouse brown in color. She didn’t look very bright. She was, however, the only secretary in sight, so Seaton strode up to her desk.
‘Miss What’s-your-name!’ he snapped. ‘Can you, without rupturing a blood-vessel, come to life long enough to do half a minute’s work?’
The girl jumped, started to rise to her feet at her desk, and blushed. ‘Why, yes … yes, sir, I mean. What can we do for you, Mister –’
‘I’m Ky-El Mokak. I want to talk to Hizzonner about turning myself in.’
That brought her to life fast. ‘About
what?
’ she cried and her half-scream was followed instantly by a deeper, louder voice from the intercom.
His Honor had not been asleep after all. ‘You
what?
All right, Fy-Ly, send him in; but be sure he hasn’t got a gun first.’
‘Gun? What would I be doing with a gun?’ Seaton patted his pockets, shucked off his dilapidated coat, and made a full turn to show that he was clean. Then, seeing no coat-rack or hangers, he pitched the coat and hat into a corner and strode into the inner office.
It was, if possible, in even worse shape than the outer one. The man behind the desk was fifty-odd years old; lean and bald. He looked worried, dyspeptic and nervous. He held a hand-weapon – which was not the least bit rusty – in workmanlike fashion in a competent-looking right hand. It was not pointed directly at Seaton’s midsection. It evidently did not have to be.
‘What I’d ought to do right now,’ the man said quietly, ‘is blow your brains out without letting you say a word. You’re another damn rat. A fink – a spy – maybe a revver or an under-grounder, even. You don’t look like any wilder I ever saw brought in.’
The Brain had not dumped Seaton on a strange and dangerous new planet without providing him with a full ‘knowledge’ of its history, its mores and even its dialects. Through the educators Seaton had received enough of Ray-See-Nee’s cultural patterns to be able to carry off his role. He knew what His Honor was thinking about; he knew, even, very accurately just how far the man could be pushed, where his real sympathies lay, and what he could be counted upon to do about it.
Wherefore Seaton said easily: ‘Of course I don’t. I’ve got a brain. Those lard-headed chasseurs couldn’t catch me in a thousand years. None of ’em can detect a smell on a skunk.
And you won’t shoot me, not with the bind you’re in. You aren’t a damn enough fool to. You wouldn’t shoot a crippled kid on crutches, let alone a full-grown, able-bodied man.’
Prenk shivered a little, but that was all. ‘Who says I’m in a bind? What kind of a bind?’
‘I say so,’ Seaton said, flatly. ‘You’re hitting bottom right now. You’re using half-grown kids: girls, even. How many weeks is it to be before you don’t make quota and your town and everything and everybody in it get turned into a lake of lava?’
Prenk trembled visibly and his face turned white. ‘You win,’ he said unsteadily, and put his pistol back into the top right-hand drawer of his desk. ‘Whoever you are, you know the score and aren’t afraid to talk about it. You’d have no papers, of course – on you, at least … Let’s see your arm.’
‘No number.’ Seaton rolled up his left sleeve and held his forearm out for examination. ‘Look close. Scars left by good surgery are fine, but they can’t be made invisible.’
‘I know they can’t.’ His Honor looked very closely indeed, then drew a tremendously deep breath of relief. ‘You
are a
wilder! You mean to say you’ve been up in the hills ever since the Conquest without getting caught?’
‘That’s right. I told you I’m smart, and the brains of a whole platoon of chasseurs, all concentrated down into one, wouldn’t equip a half-witted duck.’
‘But they’ve got
dogs
!’
‘Yeah, but they aren’t smart, either. Not very much smarter than the chasseurs are. Hell, I’ve been living on those dogs half the time. Pretty tough, fried or roasted, but boiled long enough they make mighty tasty stew.’
‘Mi-Ko-Ta’s beard! Who
are
you, really, and what were you, before?’
‘I told you, I’m Ky-El Mokak. I am – was, rather – a Class Twelve Fellow of the Institute of Mining Engineers. Recognize the ring?’ Seaton went to the desk and placed his left hand flat on its surface.
Prenk studied the massive ornament. It had been fabricated, in strict external accord with the Brain’s visualization of what it should have been, from synthesized meteoric metal – metal that had actually never been in open space, to say nothing of ever having been anywhere near the gray-lichened walls of the revered institute that Seaton had never seen.
Having examined the ring minutely, Prenk looked up and nodded; his whole manner changed. ‘I recognize the ring and I can read the symbols. A
Twelve
! It’s a shame to register and brand you. If you say so I’ll let it drop.’
‘I’ll say so. I’m not committing myself that deep yet.’
‘All right, but why did you come in? Or is it true that whatever undergrounds spring up are smashed flat in a week?’
I don’t know. I couldn’t find any. Not one, and I searched every square mile for a thousand miles north, east, south, and west of here. And I didn’t find anybody who wasn’t too dangerous to travel with, and I’m gregarious. Also, I don’t like caves and I don’t like camp cooking and I don’t like living off the land – and I do like music and books and art and educated people
and so on – in other words, I found out that I can’t revert to savagery. And, not least, I like women and there aren’t any out there. What few ever make it up there die fast.’
‘I’m beginning to believe you.’ A little of the worry and harassment left His Honor’s face. ‘One more question. Why, knowing the jam we’re in, did you come here instead of going somewhere where you’d be safe?’
‘Because, on the basis of stuff I picked up here and there, you and I together can make it safe here. I can fix your mining machinery easily enough so you can make quota every week with no sweat; so the town won’t get slagged down; not right away, anyway. You aren’t a quisling, and my best guess is that most of the spies and storm-troopers have sneaked out or have been pulled out because of what’s supposed to be about to happen here,’ Seaton said.
Prenk stared thoughtfully at Seaton. ‘You don’t appear to be the suicidal type. But you know as well as I do that just making quota won’t be enough for very long. What have you really got in mind, Ky-El Mokak?’
Seaton thought for a moment. Then, shrugging his shoulders, he dug down into his baggy breeches and brought out two closely folded headsets.
‘Put one of these on. It isn’t a player or a recorder; just a kind of super-telephone. A fast way of exchanging information.’
Prenk wore it for a couple of minutes, then took it off, staring suspiciously in turn at it and at Seaton. ‘Why didn’t I ever hear of anything like
that
before?’ he demanded. Seaton didn’t answer the question and Prenk went on, ‘Oh; secret. Okay. But what makes you think you can set up an underground right out here in the open?’
‘There’s no reason in the world why we can’t,’ Seaton declared. ‘Especially since we’d just be reviving one that everybody, including the Premier and you yourself, thinks is smashed flat and is about to be liquidated.’
This was the second really severe test Seaton had made of the Brain’s visualizations, and it too stood solidly up. All Prenk said was, ‘You’re doing the talking; keep it up,’ but his hands, clenching tightly into fists, showed that Seaton’s shot had struck the mark.
‘I’ve talked enough,’ Seaton said then. ‘From here on I’d be just guessing. It’s your turn to talk.’
‘All right. It’s too late now, I’m afraid, for anything to make any difference. Yes, I was the leader of a faction that believed in decent, humane, civilized government, but we weren’t here then, we were in the capital. Our coup failed. And those of us who were caught were exiled here and arrangements were made for us to be the next wipe-out.’
‘Some of your party survived, then. Could you interest them again, do you think?’
‘Without arms and equipment,
no. That was why we failed.’
‘Equipment would be no problem.’
‘It wouldn’t?’ Prenk’s eyes began to light up.
‘No.’ Seaton did not elaborate, but went on, ‘The problem is people and morale. I can’t supply people and we have to start here, not over in the capital. Self-preservation. We’ve got to make quota. Your people have been hammered down so flat that they don’t give a whoop whether they live or die. As I said, I can fix the machinery, but that of itself won’t be enough. We’ll have to give ’em a shot in the arm of hope.’
‘Okay, and thanks.’
And no one in the outer office, not even the secretary, so much as looked up as the two men, talking busily, walked out.
DuQuesne, en route to Earth, knew just what a madhouse Earth was, and in just what respects. He knew just how nearly impossible it was to buy machine tools of any kind. He also knew just what an immense job it was going to be to build a duplicate of the
Skylark of Valeron
. Or, rather, to build the tools that would build the machines that would in turn build the planetoid. With his high-order constructors he
could
build most of those primary machine tools himself; perhaps all of them in time; but time was exactly what he did not have. Time was decidedly of the essence.