Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘War, being purely destructive, is a product of unsanity. The Jelmi are, however, unsane; many of them are insane. Thus, if allowed to do so, they commit warfare at unpredictable times and for incomprehensible, indefensible, and/or whimsical reasons. Nevertheless, since the techniques we have been employing have been proven ineffective and therefore wrong, they will now be changed. During the tenure of this directive no more Jelmi will be executed or castrated: in fact, a certain amount of unsane thinking will not merely be tolerated but encouraged, even though it lead to the unsanity termed “war”. It should not, however, be permitted to exceed that quantity of “war” which would result in the destruction of, let us say, three of their own planets.
‘This course will entail a risk that we, as the “oppressors” of the Jelmi, will be attacked by them. The magnitude of this risk – the probability of such an attack – cannot be calculated with the data now available. Also, these data are rendered even less meaningful by the complete unpredictability of the actions of the group of Jelmi released from study here.
‘It is therefore directed that all necessary steps be taken particularly in fifth- and sixth-order devices, that no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed.
‘This meeting will now adjourn.’
It did; and within fifteen minutes heavy construction began – construction that was to go on at a pace and on a scale and with an intensity of drive theretofore unknown throughout the Realm’s long history. Whole worldlets were destroyed, scavenged for their minerals, their ores smelted in giant atomic space-borne foundries and cast and shaped into complex machines of offense and defense. Delicate networks of radiation surrounded every Jelm and Llurd world, ready to detect, trace, report, and home on any artifact whatsoever which might approach them. Weapons capable of blasting moons out of orbit slipped into position in great latticework spheres of defensive emplacements.
The Llurdi were
preparing for anything.
Llurdan computations were never wrong. Computers, however, even Llurdan computers, are not really smart – they can’t really think. Unlike the human brain, they can not arrive at valid conclusions from insufficient data. In fact, they don’t even try to. They stop working and say – in words or by printing or typing or by flashing a light or by ringing a bell – ‘DATA INSUFFICIENT’: and then continue to do nothing until they are fed additional information.
Thus, while the Llanzlan and his mathematicians and logicians fed enough data into their machines to obtain valid conclusions, there were many facts that no Llurd then knew. And thus those conclusions, while valid, were woefully incomplete; they did not cover all of actuality by far.
For, in actuality, there had already begun a chain of events that was to render those mighty fortresses precisely as efficacious against one certain type of attack as that many cubic miles of sheerest vacuum.
The type of attack which was about to challenge the Llurdi was from a source no civilized human would have believed still existed.
If Richard Seaton, laboring at Earth’s own defenses uncountable parsecs away, had been told of it, he would flatly have declared the story a lie. He ought to know, he would have said. That particular danger to the harmony of the worlds had long since been destroyed … and he was the man who had destroyed it!
When the noisome planet of the Fenachrone was destroyed it was taken for granted that Ravindau and his faction of the Party of Postponement of Universal Conquest, who had fled from the planet just before its destruction, were the last surviving members of their monstrous race. When they in turn were destroyed it was assumed that no Fenachrone remained alive.
That assumption was wrong. There was another faction of the Party of Postponement much larger than Ravindau’s, much more secretive, and much better organized.
Its leader, one Sleemet, while an extremely able scientist, had taken lifelong pains that neither his name nor his ability should become known to any except a select few. He was as patriotic as was any other member of his race; he believed as implicitly as did any other that the Fenachrone should and one day would rule not only this one universe, but the entire
Cosmic All. However, he believed, and as firmly, that The Day should not be set until the probability of success of the project should begin to approach unity as a limit.
According to Sleemet’s exceedingly rigorous analysis, the time at which success would become virtually certain would not arrive for at least three hundred Fenachronian years.
From the day of Fenor’s accession to the throne Sleemet had been grimly certain that this Emperor Fenor – headstrong, basically ignorant, and inordinately prideful even for an absolute monarch of the Fenachrone – would set The Day during his own reign; centuries before its proper time.
Therefore, for over fifty years, Sleemet had been preparing for exactly the eventuality that came about, and:
Therefore, after listening to only a few phrases of the ultimatum given to Emperor Fenor by Sacner Carfon of Dasor, speaking for the Overlord Seaton and his Forces of Universal Peace, Sleemet sent out his signal and:
Therefore, even before Ravindau’s forces began to board their single vessel Sleemet’s fleet of seventeen superdreadnoughts was out in deep space, blasting at full-emergency fifth-order cosmic-energy drive away from the planet so surely doomed.
Surely
doomed? Yes. Knowing vastly more about the sixth order than did any other of his race, he was the only one of his race who knew anything about the Overlord of the Central System; of who and what that Overlord was and of what that Overlord had done. He, Sleemet, did not want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton. Not then or ever.
Curse Fenor’s abysmal stupidity! Since a whole new Fenachrone planet would now have to be developed, the Conquest could not be begun for
more
than three hundred years!
While Sleemet knew much more about the sixth order than Ravindau did, he did not have the sixth-order drive and it took him and his scientists and engineers several months to develop and to perfect it. Thus their fleet was still inside the First Galaxy when they finally changed drives and began really to travel – on a course that, since it was laid out to reach the most distant galaxies of the First Universe, would of necessity lie within two and a quarter hundreds of thousands of light-years of the galaxy in which the Realm of the Llurdi lay.
As has been intimated, the Llurdi were literal folk. When any Llanzlan issued a directive he meant it literally, and it was always as literally carried out.
Thus, when Llanzlan Klazmon ordered the construction of an installation of such a nature that ‘no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed’ he meant precisely that – and that was precisely what was built. Nor, since the Llurdi had full command of the fourth and fifth orders, and some sixth-order apparatus as well, was the task overlong in the doing.
The entire one-hundred-six-mile circumference of
Llurdias and a wide annulus outside the city proper were filled with tremendous fortresses; each of which was armed and powered against any contingency to which Computer Prime – almost half a cubic mile of miniaturization packed with the accumulated knowledges and happenings of some seventy thousand years – could assign a probability greater than point zero zero zero one.
Each of those fortresses covered five acres of ground; was low and flat. Each was built of super-hard, super-tough, super-refractory synthetic. Each had twenty-seven high-rising, lightning-rod-like spikes of the same material. Fortress-shell and spikes through closed spaced cast-in tubes and the entire periphery of each fortress, as well as dozens of interior relief-points, went deep into constantly water-soaked, heavily salted ground. Each fortress sprouted scores of antennae – parabolic, box, flat, and straight – and scores of heavily insulated projectors of shapes to be defined only by a professional mathematician of solid geometry.
And
how
the Llurdan detectors could now cover space! The Jelm Mergon, long before his abortive attempt to break jail, had developed a miniaturized monitor station that could detect, amplify, and retransmit on an aimed tight beam any fifth- or sixth-order signal from and to a distance of many kiloparsecs.
Hundreds of these ‘mergons’ were already out in deep space. Now mergons were being manufactured in lots of a thousand, and in their thousands they were being hurled outward from Llurdiax, to cover – by relays
en cascade
– not only the Llurdan galaxy and a great deal of intergalactic space, but also a good big chunk of inter-universal space as well.
The Fenachrone fleet bored on through inter-galactic space at its distance-devouring sixth-order pace. Its fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order detector webs fanned out far – ‘far’ in the astronomical sense of the word – ahead of it. They were set to detect, not only the most tenuous cloud of gas, but also any manifestation whatever upon any of the known bands of any of those orders. Similar detectors reached out to an equal distance above and below and to the left of and to the right of the line of flight; so that the entire forward hemisphere was on continuous web of ultra-tenuous but ultra-sensitive detection.
And, as that fleet approached a galaxy lying well to ‘starboard’ – the term was still in use aboard ship except for matters of record, since the direction of action of artificial gravity, whatever its actual direction, was always ‘down’ – two sets of detectors tripped at once.
The squat and monstrous officer on watch reported this happening instantly, of course, to Sleemet himself; and of course Sleemet himself went instantly into action. He energized his flagship’s immense fifth-order projector.
Those detections could have only one meaning. There was at least one solar system in that galaxy peopled by entities advanced
enough to work with forces of at least the fifth order. They should be destroyed – that is, he corrected himself warily, unless they were allied with or belonged to that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Overlord of the Central System of the First Galaxy … But no, at this immense distance the probability of that was vanishingly small.
They might, however, have weapons of the sixth. The fact that there were no such devices in operation at the moment did not preclude that possibility.
Very unlike the late unlamented Fenor, he, First Scientist Sleemet, was not stupidly and arrogantly sure that the Fenachrone were in fact the ablest,
most
intelligent, and most powerful race of beings in existence. He would investigate, of course. But he would do it cautiously.
The working projections of the Fenachrone were tight patterns of force mounted on tight beams. Thus, until they began to perform exterior work, they were virtually undetectable except by direct interception and hard-driven specific taps. Sleemet knew this to be a fact; whether the projection was on, above, or below the target planet’s surface and even though that planet was so far away that it would take light hundreds of centuries to make the one-way trip.
The emanations of his vessels’ sixth-order cosmic-energy drive, however, were very distinctly something else. They could not be damped out or masked and they could be detected very easily by whoever or whatever it was that was out there … Yes, an exploration would not change matters at all …
As a matter of fact, the Fenachrone Fleet’s emanations had been detected a full two seconds since.
A far-outpost mergon had picked them up and passed them along to a second, which in turn had relayed them inward to its Number Three, which finally had delivered them to Computer Prime on incredibly distant Llurdiax.
There, in Hall Prime of Computation, a section supervisor had flicked the switch that had transferred the unusual bit of information to his immediate superior, Head Supervisor Klaton – who had at sight of it gone into a tizzy (for a Llurd) of worrying his left ear with the tip of his tail. He stared at the motionless bit of tape as though it were very apt indeed to bite him in the eye.
What to do? Should he disturb the Llanzlan with this or not?
This was a nose-twitching borderline case if there ever was one. If he didn’t, and it turned out to be something important, he’d get his tail singed – he’d be reduced to section supervisor. But if he did, and it didn’t, he’d get exactly the same treatment … However, the thing, whatever it might be, was so
terrifically
far away …
Yes, that was it! The smart thing to do would be to watch it for a few seconds – determine exact distance, direction of flight, velocity, and so forth – before reporting to the Big Boss. That would protect him either way.
Wherefore Sleemet had time to launch an analsynth
projection along the indicated line.
He found a solar system containing two highly industrialized planets; one of which was cool, the other cold. One was peopled by those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned human beings; the other by a race of creatures even more monstrous and therefore even less entitled to exist.
He studied those planets and their inhabitants quickly but thoroughly, and the more he studied them the more derisive and contemptuous he became. They had no warships, no fortresses either above or below ground, no missiles, even! Their every effort and all their energies were devoted to affairs of
peace
!
Therefore, every detail having been recorded, including the gibberish being broadcast and tightbeamed by various communications satellites, Sleemet pulled in his analsynth and sent out a full working projection.
He had already located great stores of prepared power-uranium bars and blocks on both planets. Careless of detection now and working at his usual fantastic speed and with his usual perfect control, he built in seconds six tremendous pyramids upon each of the two doomed worlds – pyramids of now one-hundred-percent-convertible superatomic explosive. He assembled twenty-four exceedingly complex, carefully aimed forces and put them on trip. Then, glaring balefully into an almost opaque visiplate, he reached out without looking and rammed a plunger home – and in an instant those two distant planets became two tremendous fireballs of hellishly intolerable, mostly invisible, energies.