Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
And almost eight thousand million highly intelligent creatures – eating, sleeping, loving, fighting, reading, thinking, working, playing – died in that utterly cataclysmic rending of two entire worlds.
Practically all of them died not knowing even that they had been hurt. A few – a
very
few – watch officers in interplanetary spaceships observed one or the other of those frightful catastrophes in time to have an instant’s warning of what was coming; but only three such officers, it became known later, had enough time to throw on their faster-than-light drives and thus outrun the ravening front of annihilation.
Cosmically, however, the thing didn’t amount to much. Its duration was very short indeed. While a little of each planet’s substance was volatilized, practically all of it was scarcely more than melted. When equilibrium was restored they did not shine like little suns. They scarcely glowed.
Hands quietly poised, Sleemet again paused in thought.
The fact that he had murdered almost eight billion people did not bother him at all. In fact, he did not think of the action at all, as murder or as killing or as anything else. If he had, the thought would have been the Fenachrone equivalent of ‘pesticide’. All space comprising the Cosmic All and every planet therein should and would belong to the Master
Race; no competing race had any right whatever to live.
Should he, or should he not, explore the lines of those communications beams and destroy the other planets of this group? He should not, he decided. He would have to slow down, perhaps even change course; and it was quite possible that he was still within range of the sixth-order stuff of that self-styled Overlord. Besides, this group of queerly mixed entities would keep. After he had found a really distant Fenatype planet and had developed it, he would come back here and finish this minor chore.
But very shortly after making this decision Sleemet was given cause to know starkly that he had not investigated this civilization thoroughly enough by far; for his vessel was being assailed by forces of such incredible magnitude that his instantaneously reactive outer screen was already radiating in the high violet!
And, before he could do much more than put a hand to his construction panel, that outer screen began to show black spots of failure!
In the Hall of Prime Computation, on Llurdiax, one entire panel of instrumentation went suddenly dead. The supervisor of that section flicked two testing switches, then scanned the last couple of inches of each of two tapes. Then he paused, for a moment stunned: knocked completely out of any Llurd’s calm poise. Then, licking his lips, he spoke apparently to empty air:
‘Llanzlan Klazmon, sir, Blaydaxorb Three and Blaydaxorb Five stopped reporting, simultaneously, eleven seconds ago. Orbiting pyrometers of both planets reported thermonuclear temperatures at the end-points of their respective transmissions. End of report, sir.’
The supervisor did not elaborate.
While he was appalled and terribly shocked – he had never imagined such disasters possible – it was not his job to comment or to deduce or to theorize. His business – his
only
business – was to report to a higher echelon the pertinent facts of any and all unusual events or conditions; the height of the echelon to which he reported being directly proportional to the unusual-ness and/or magnitude of the event or condition.
Since this event was unprecedented and of very great magnitude indeed, his report went straight to the top – thus overtaking and passing the report of Head Supervisor Kalton, which was not yet ready for delivery.
Having reported the pertinent facts to the proper echelon, the section supervisor went calmly, almost unconcernedly, back to his job of supervising his section. He paid no more attention to the incident even when the Llanzlan – fully recovered now from his wounds – who had been asleep in his penthouse apartment came into the hall from the down-flyway. (Everyone rode a force-beam up, but came down on his own wings.)
While Klazmon was not hurrying any more than usual, his usual technique was to drop a full half-mile with folded wings before
beginning to put on his brakes. Hence his tremendous wings and stabilizing surfaces sent blasts of cold, dense air throughout the whole end of the hall as he slowed down for a high-G landing in his seat at his master-control console. Fingers, thumbs, and tail-tip flashed over the banked and tiered keyboards of that console; and, all around the periphery of Llurdias, that miles-wide girdle of mighty fortresses came instantly to life.
A multi-layered umbrella of full-coverage screens flashed into being over the whole city and Klazmon, engineering his fifth-order projector, sent his simulacrum of pure force out to see what had happened in or to the solar system of Blaydaxorb.
He was now, to all intents and purposes, in two places at once.
He could see, hear, feel, taste, and smell exactly as well with one self as with the other. He was, however, thoroughly accustomed to the peculiar sensations of having a complete personality; he could block out at will any perceptions of either self. And his immaterial self had two tremendous advantages over his material one. It could traverse incredibly immense distances in no measurable time; and, no matter where it went or what it encountered, his physical self would remain entirely unaffected.
In a mere flick of time, then, Klazmon was in the solar system of Blaydaxorb. The Sun itself was unchanged, but in orbits three and five, where the two inhabited planets had been, there were two still-wildly-disturbed masses of liquids and gases.
He threw out a light, fast detector web, which located the marauding Fenachrone fleet in less than a second. Then, returning most of his attention to his console, he assembled seventeen exceedingly complex forces and hurled them, one at each vessel of the invading fleet.
Actually, Klazmon was little if any more affected than was Sleemet the Fenachrone about either that utterly frightful loss of life as such or the loss of those two planets as such. The Realm was big enough so that the total destruction of those two planets – of
any
two planets except of course Llurdiax itself – was unimportant to the economy of the Realm as a whole. No; what burned the Llanzlan up – made it mandatory that that fleet and the entire race whose people manned it should, after thorough study, be wiped completely out – was the brazenness, the uncivilized and illogical savagery, the incredible effrontery of this completely intolerable insult to the realm of the Llurdi and to imperial Klazmon its Llanzlan.
Klazmon knew of only one race who made a habit of performing such atrocities; such wanton, illogical, insane offenses against all sense and all reason: those chlorine-breathing, amoeboid monstrosities inhabiting Galaxy DW-427-LU. Those creatures, however, as far as any Llurd had ever learned, had always confined their activities to their own galaxy. If, Klazmon thought grimly to himself, those insanely murderous amoeboids
had decided to extend their operations into the Galaxy of the Llurdi, they would find such extension a very expensive one indeed.
Wherefore, hunched now over a black-filtered visiplate, with slitted eyes narrow and cat-whiskers stiffly outthrust; with both hands manipulating high-ratio vernier knobs in infinitesimal arcs; Klazmon shoveled on the coal.
As has been said, the Llurdi were a literal folk. Klazmon’s directive had specified ‘… that no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed.’
Hence that was precisely what had been built. No conceivable force or combination of forces, however applied and even at pointblank range, could crack Llurdiax’s utterly impenetrable shields.
Nor was that all; for Llurdan engineers, as well as Llurdan philosophers, were thoroughly familiar with the concept that ‘The best defense is a powerful offense.’ Wherefore Llurdiax’s offensive projectors were designed to smash down any theoretically possible threat originating anywhere within a distance that light would require one and three-quarters millions of Tellurian years to traverse.
Under the thrustings and the stabbings, the twistings and the tearings, the wrenchings and the bludgeonings of those frightful fields of force, seventeen sets of Fenachrone defensive screens – outer, intermediate, and inner – went successively upward through the visible spectrum, through the ultra-violet, and into the black of failure; baring the individual vessel’s last lines of defense, the wall-shields themselves.
Then Klazmon increased the power, gouging and raving at those ultra-stubborn defenses until those defenses were just barely holding; at which point he relaxed a little, read his verniers, leaned back in his bucket seat, and took stock.
The marauding spaceships were tremendous things; cigar-shaped; flying in hollow-globe formation with one vessel – the flagship, of course – at the exact center; spaced so closely that their screens had overlapped – overlapped in such fashion that unless and until that shell of force was broken no attack could be made upon that central ship.
So far, so good. With the overwhelming superiority of ultimate-planetary over any at-all-probable mobile installations
he, Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth, had smashed that shell completely. He could, he was sure, destroy all those vessels as completely.
But it would not do at all to destroy even one of them without examining both it and its crew. Klazmon
had
to know the who and the what and the wherefore and the how and the why. Therefore, leaving all of his attacking beams exactly as they were, Klazmon assembled another gigantic beam – the entire output of one Llurdiaxian fortress – and hurled it against the tail-section of the flagship.
Wall-shield and tail-section vanished in a few nano-seconds of time; and not only the tail-section, but also a few hundreds of yards of the flagship’s prodigious length as well, became a furiously raging fireball; a sphere of violence incredible.
Klazmon drove his projection forward then, through the now unresisting steel wall and into the control room; where it was met by blasts of force from the hand-weapons of the Fenachrone officers.
This demonstration, however, lasted for only a second or two. Then those officers, knowing what it was that was standing there so unconcernedly, abandoned their physical assault and attacked the invading projection with the full power of the huge, black, flame-shot wells of hypnotic force that were their eyes. When the mental attack also failed they merely stood there; glaring a hatred that was actually tangible.
Klazmon immobilized each one of the officers individually with pencils of force and began to study them intensively. While much shorter and thicker and wider and immensely stronger than the Jelmi of the Realm, they were definitely Jelmoid in every important respect … yes, the two races had certainly had a common ancestry, and not too far back. Also, their thinking and conduct were precisely as was to be expected of any Jelman or Jelmoid race that had been allowed to develop in its unsane and illogical way for many thousands of years without the many benefits of Llurdan control!
They would of course have thought-exchange gear; any race of their evident advancement must have … ah, yes; over there.
Now – which of these wights would be the admiral? That one wearing the multiplex scanner would be the pilot; that one facing the banks of dials and gauges would be the prime engineer; those six panels
had
to be battle panels, so those six monsters had to be gunnery officers … ah!
That one there – off by himself; seated (in spite of the fact that with their short, blocky legs no Fenachrone had any need, ever, to sit) at a desk that was practically a throne; facing no gadgetry and wearing consciously an aura of power and authority – that one would be the one Klazmon wanted.
Klazmon’s projection flashed up to the motionlessly straining admiral. The helmets of the ‘mechanical educator’ snapped onto the Llurd’s quietly studious head and onto the head with the
contemptuously sneering face – the head of First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet of the Fenachrone.
That face, however, lost its sneer instantly, for Sleemet – even more overweeningly and brutally and vaingloriously prideful now than were the lower echelons of his race – had never imagined the possibility of the existence of such a mind as this monstrous invader had.
Klazmon’s mind, the product of seventy thousand years of coldly logical evolution, tore ruthlessly into the mind of the Fenachrone. It bored into and twisted at that straining mind’s hard-held blocks; it battered and shattered them; it knocked them down flat.
Then Klazmon, omnivorous scholar that he was, set about transferring to his own brain practically everything that the Fenachrone had ever learned. Klazmon learned, as Richard Seaton had learned previously, that all Fenachrone have authority and responsibility and were meticulous record-keepers. He learned what had happened to the civilization of the Fenachrone and to its world, and who had done it and how; he learned that each and every captain knew exactly the same and had exactly the same records as did First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet himself; he learned that each vessel, alone by itself, was thoroughly capable of re-creating the entire Fenachrone civilization and culture.
A few of the many other thousands of things that Klazmon learned were: that there were many Jelman and Jelmoid – human and humanoid, that is – races living in what they called the First Galaxy. That all these races were alike in destructiveness, belligerence to the point of war-lust, savagery, implacability, vengefulness, intolerance, and frightfulness generally. Not one of them (by Klazmon’s light!) had any redeeming features or qualities whatever. That all these races must be destroyed if any worthwhile civilization were ever to thrive and spread.
There was no word in any language of the Realm of the Llurdi corresponding even remotely to ‘genocide’. If there had been, Klazmon would have regarded it as an etymological curiosity. All those surviving Fenachrone would have to die: no such race as that had any right whatever to live.
Before being destroyed, however, they would have to be studied with Llurdan thoroughness; and any and all worthwhile ideas and devices and other artifacts should be and would be incorporated into the Llurdan-Jelman way of life.