Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
There were more than fifty thousand million suns to move, in all. As the first targets had been the strongest and most dangerous
Chloran systems, resistance soon ceased to matter; the task became monotonous, exhausting and mind-deadening.
To the Chlorans, of course, it was something else again. They died in uncounted trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous flesh was charred, baked and desiccated in the split-second of the passing of the wave front from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves began to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Some died in terrible, frantic efforts to escape …
But they all died.
And for each sun that DuQuesne’s remorseless net located and flung into the Chloran galaxy, an oxygen-bearing, human-populated planet was snatched out of the teeth of the resulting explosion and carried through four-space into the safety of Galaxy B, there to slip quietly into orbit around a pre-selected, hospitable sun. No human world was destroyed in all of Galaxy DW-427-LU.
It went on and on …
And then it was over.
Marc DuQuesne rose, stretched and yawned. ‘That’s all. Everybody dismissed,’ he said, and at once the vast psionic net ceased to be. He was alone for the first time in many hours.
His face was lined, his eyes deeper and darker than ever. Apart from that there was no sign of the great extermination he had just conducted. He was simply Marc DuQuesne. The man who slew a galaxy looked no different after the deed than he had before.
He allowed his sense of perception to roam for a moment about the ‘working model’. In Galaxy A, where billions of suns had gone through the stellar cycle of evolution for billions of years, there was scarcely a corporal’s guard of primaries left. It was a strange, almost a frightening sight. For with the loss of the suns the composition of the galaxy had changed to something never before seen in all the plenum of universes. Nearly every sun had had planets; nearly every planet remained behind when its sun was stolen. Now they roamed at random – uncontrolled, barren, uninhabited – lacking not only the light and heat of their primaries, but freed from their gravitational reins as well.
Galaxy B, on the other hand, looked quite normal – in ‘working model’. The planets it had acquired, both from the exploded Chloran suns and from the looted solar systems of Galaxy A, were not even visible. Galactically speaking, it was essentially unchanged; the additional mass of a few billion planets did not matter, and each of the new planets was already in orbit around a friendly sun. There would be readjustments, of course. It would be necessary to keep a watch on the developments of
each affected solar system, over a period of years. But that was no problem of Marc DuQuesne’s.
But the Chloran galaxy! What
was
it?
In the ‘working model’ it was rapidly becoming a single, light-years-thick concentration of living flame. In the reality it was even huger, even more deadly. A name would be invented for it some day – quasi-stellar? Or something greater still?
But that, too, was no longer a concern for Marc DuQuesne. He dropped from his mind, without a qualm, the memory of the trillions of lives he had taken, the billions of worlds he had dislocated. He ignored the question of Richard Ballinger Seaton, now stirring back to consciousness, to worry – and ultimately, to reassurance – somewhere on the
Valeron.
He had more pressing business to take care of. Personal business. And to DuQuesne that was the most pressing of all.
Shrugging his shoulders, he sent Stephanie de Marigny a tight-beamed thought:
‘Hunkie – some time before you go back to Washington, can I flip you over to the
DQ
for a private conference that we know will be private?’
Her beautifully dimpled smile flashed on. ‘I should say not! You know I’m not
that
kind of a …’ she began; then, as she perceived how much in earnest he was, she changed tone instantly and went on, ‘Of course, Blackie. Any time. Just give me time to pack a toothbrush and my pajamas. Top Secret, or can you give me a hint to allay my ’satiable curiosity?’
‘Hint; large economy size. Every time I think of what those damned observers are doing to you – feeding a mind like
yours
with an eye-dropper instead of a seventy-two-inch pipeline – it makes me madder and madder. I can give you everything that Seaton, I, Crane and half the Norlaminians know, and give it to you in five hours.’
‘You can
what
?’ The thought was a mental scream. She licked her lips, gulped twice, and said, ‘In that case we needn’t wait for either toothbrush or pajamas. Do it now.’
He laughed deeply. ‘I wasn’t sure that would be your attitude, but I’m glad it is. But I can’t do it this minute. I have to help Sleemet finish building his planetoid, watch him very carefully for a while on course and do a couple of other crash-pri chores. Three or four days, probably. Say Saturday, seventeen hours?’
‘That’ll be fine, Blackie, and thanks. I’ll be here with my ears pinned back and my teeth filed down to needle points.’
The Fenachrone had taken off and DuQuesne had watched
them go, taking extreme precautions – none of which, it turned out, had been necessary – that they did not eliminate either him or the rest of the party as soon as it became safe for them to do so. He had taken Stephanie de Marigny and all her belongings aboard, saying that he was going close enough to Tellus so that it would be no trouble at all to drop her off there. And lastly, when Seaton and Crane had insisted upon thanking him for what he had done:
‘Save it,’ he had sneered. ‘Remember, that time on X-World, what I told you to do with that kind of crap! That still goes,’ and he had taken off at full touring drive on course one seven five Universal. This course, which would give the First Galaxy a near miss, was the most direct route to a galaxy that was distant indeed; the galaxy lying on the extreme southern rim of the First Universe; the galaxy in which the
DQ
had been built; the galaxy that DuQuesne had surveyed so thoroughly and which he intended to rule.
DuQuesne and Stephanie were in the DQ’s control room, which was an exact duplicate of the
Skylark of Valeron’s
. He placed her in the seat that on the
Valeron
was Crane’s, showed her how to elevate herself into his own station.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re going to give me the whole gigantic Brain?’
‘That’s the best and easiest way to do it. I boiled down about ten thousand lifetimes of knowledge and experience into ten half-hour sessions. The ten tapes on that player there are coded instructions for the Brain – what to give you and how. There are minds who could take the whole jolt in seconds, but yours and mine aren’t that type – yet. But you’ll get it all in five hours. Every detail. It’ll shock you all hell’s worth and it’ll scare you right out of your panties, but it won’t hurt you and it won’t damage your brain. Yours is one of the very few human brains that
can
take it. I’ll start it and in five hours I’ll be back. Ready?’
‘As much so as I ever will be, I guess. Go.’
He started the player; and, after waiting a few minutes to be sure that everything was going as programmed, he left the room …
He came back in just as the machine clicked off, lowered her ‘chair,’ and lifted her to her feet.
‘Good – God – in Heaven!’ she gasped. Her skin, normally so dark, was a yellowish white; so pale that her scattered freckles stood out sharply, each one in bold relief. ‘I don’t. I can’t … I simply can’t
grasp
it! I know it, but …’ She paused.
He shook his head in sympathy. Which,
for Marc C. DuQuesne, was a rare gesture indeed. ‘I know. I couldn’t tell you what it would be like – no possible warning can be enough. But that’s the bare minimum you’ll have to start with, and it won’t take you very long to assimilate it all. Ready for some talk?’
‘Not only ready, I’m eager. First, though, I want to give you a vote of full confidence. I’m sure that you’ll succeed in everything you try from now on; even to becoming Emperor Marc the First of some empire.’
‘Huh? Where did you get
that
?’
‘By reading between the lines. Do you think I’m stupid, is that why you gave me all this?’
‘Okay. You’ve always known, as an empirical, non-germane fact, that the Earth and all it carries isn’t even a flyspeck in a galaxy, to say nothing of a universe; but now you know and really understand just how little it actually does amount to.’
She shuddered. ‘Yes. It’s … it’s appalling.’
‘Not when viewed in the proper perspective. I set out to rule Earth, yes; but after I began to learn something I lost that idea in a hurry. For a long time now I haven’t wanted Earth or any part of it. Its medical science is dedicated whole-heartedly to the deterioration of the human race by devoting its every effort to the preservation of the lives of the unfit. In Earth’s wars its best men – its best breeding stock – are killed. Earth simply is not worth saving even if it could be saved; which I doubt. Neither is Norlamin. Not because its conquest is at present impossible, but because the Norlaminians aren’t worth anything, either. All they do – all they
can
do – is think. They haven’t done anything constructive in their entire history and they never will. They’re such bred-in-the-bone pacifists – look at the way the damned sissies acted in this Chloran thing – that it is psychologically impossible for any one of them to pull a trigger. No; Sleemet had the right idea. And Ravindau – you have him in mind?’
‘Vividly. Preserve the race – in
his
way and on
his terms
.’
‘You’re a precisionist; that’s my idea exactly. To pick out a few hundred people – we won’t need many, as there are billions already where we’re going – as much as possible like us, and build a civilization that will be what a civilization ought to be.’
The girl gasped, but her eyes began to sparkle. ‘“In a distant galaxy”, as Ravindau said?’
‘Very distant. Clear out on the rim of this universe. The last galaxy out on the rim, in fact; five degrees east of Universal south.’
‘And you’ll be Emperor Marc the First after all. But you won’t live long enough to rule very much.’
‘You’re wrong, Steff. The ordinary people are already there, and it’s ridiculous for a sound and healthy body to deteriorate and die at a hundred. We’ll live ten or fifteen times that long, what with
what I already know and the advances our medical science will make. Especially with the elimination of the unfit.’
‘Sterilization, you mean?’
‘No; death. Don’t go soft on me, girl. There will be no second-class citizens, at least in the upper stratum. Testing for that stratum will be by super-computer. Upper-stratum families will be fairly large.’
‘Families?’ she broke in. ‘You’ve come to realize, then, that the family is the
sine qua non
of civilization?’
‘I’ve always known that.’ Forestalling another interruption with a wave of his hand, he went on, ‘I know. I’ve never been a family man. On Earth or in our present cultures I would never become one. But skipping that for the moment, it’s your turn now.’
‘I like it.’ She thought in silence for a couple of minutes, then went on, ‘It must be an autocracy, of course, and you’re the man to make it work. The only flaw I can see is that even absolute authority can not make a dictated marriage either tolerable or productive. It automatically isn’t, on both counts.’
‘Who said anything about dictated marriage? Free choice within the upper stratum and by test the lower. With everybody good breeding stock, what difference will it make who marries whom?’
‘Oh. I see. That does it, of course. Contrary to all appearances, then, you actually do believe in love. The implication has been pellucidly clear all along that you expect—’
‘“Expect” is too strong a word. Make it that I’m “exploring the possibility of”. ’
‘I’ll accept that. You are exploring the possibility of me becoming your empress. From all the given premises, the only valid conclusion is that you love me. Check?’
‘The word “love” has so many and such tricky meanings that it is actually meaningless. Thus, I don’t know whether I love you or not, in your interpretation of the term. If it means to you that I will jump off a cliff or blow my brains out if you refuse, I don’t. Or that I’ll pine away and not marry a second best, I don’t. If, however, it means a lot of other things, I do. Whatever it means, will you marry me?’
‘Of course I will, Blackie. I’ve loved you a long time.’
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Skylark
1. The Skylark of Space
(1928)
2. Skylark Three
(1948)
3. Skylark of Valeron
(1949)
4. Skylark DuQuesne
(1966)
Lensman
1. Triplanetary
(1934)
*
2. First Lensman
(1950)
*
3. Galactic Patrol
(1950)
*
4. Gray Lensman
(1951)
*
5. Second Stage Lensmen
(1953)
*
6. Children of the Lens
(1954)
*
7. The Vortex Blaster
(aka
Masters of the Vortex
) (1960)
*
Subspace
1. Subspace Explorers
(1965)
2. Subspace Encounter
(1983)
Family D’Alembert (with Stephen Goldin)
1. Imperial Stars
(1976)
2. Stranglers’ Moon
(1976)
3. The Clockwork Traitor
(1976)
4. Getaway World
(1977)