Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
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 skull – afraid 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
give
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 jarred 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 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 died.’
‘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 Dr Marc 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.’
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 undetectable, 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 master-control 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 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 that race, heading for Llurdiax to … to what? To investigate 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 full-coverage 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.’