Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘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 refinement 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 pinpoint-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.’
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, 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, while 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 syncopation. And polkas. Specifically, 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 hand-spring-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 signalling 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 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 Taman, 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 those 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.