“Me,” Shiro said, promptly if ungrammatically. “Not as good, but good enough. You can tell me what data you want and I can and will get it, just as well as… ”
“Bounce back, both of you, you’ve struck a rubber fence!” Dunark snapped. “That job’s for Sitar and me.” The green-skinned princess waved her pistol in the air and nodded her head enthusiastically and her warlord went on, “You and I being brain-brothers, Dick, I’d know exactly what you want. And she and I would blast—”
“Yeah, that’s what I know damn well you’d do.” Seaton broke in, only to be interrupted in turn by Crane — who was not in the habit of interrupting anyone even once, to say nothing of twice.
“Excuse me, everyone,” he said, “but you’re all wrong, I think. My thought at the moment, Dick, is that your life is altogether too important to the project as a whole to be risked as you propose risking it. As to you others, with all due respect for your abilities, I do not believe that either of you is as well qualified for this kind of an investigation as I am—”
Margaret leaped to her feet in protest, but Crane went quietly on: ” — in either experience or training. However, we should not decide that point yet — or at all, for that matter. We are all too biased. I therefore suggest, Dick, that we feed the Brain everything, we have and keep on feeding it everything pertinent we can get hold of, until it has enough data to make that decision for us.”
“That makes sense,” Seaton said, and both Dorothy and Margaret nodded — but both with very evident reservations. “The first time anything has made sense today!”
17. Ky-El MOKAK THE WILDER
THE first thing Seaton and Crane had to do, of course, was to figure out how to get back somewhere near Galaxy DW-427-LU, within fourth-order range of that one particular extremely powerful Chloran system, without using enough sixth-order stuff to touch off any alarms — but still enough to make the trip in days instead of in months.
Some sixth-order emanations could be neutralized by properly phased and properly placed counter-generators; the big question being, how much?
The answer turned out to be, according to Crane, “Not enough” — but, according to Seaton, “Satisfactory”. At least, it did make the trip not only possible, but feasible. And during the days of that trip each Skylarker worked — with the Brain or with a computer or with pencil and paper or with paint or India ink and a brush, each according to his bent — on the problem of what could be done about the Chlorans.
They made little headway, if any at all. They did not have enough data. Inescapably, the attitude of each was very strongly affected by what he or she knew about the Chlorans they had already encountered. They were all smart enough to know that this was as indefensible as it was inevitable.
Thus, while each of them developed a picture completely unlike anyone else’s as to what the truth probably was, none of them was convinced enough of the validity of his theory to defend it vigorously. Thus it was discussion, not argument, that went on throughout the cautious approach to the forbidden territory and the ultra-cautious investigation of the Tellus-type planet the Brain had selected through powerful optical telescopes and by means of third and fourth-order apparatus. Then they fell silent, appalled; for that world was inhabited by highly intelligent human beings and what had been done to it was shocking indeed.
They had seen what had been done to the planet Valeron. This was worse; much worse. On Valeron the ruins had been recognizable as having once been cities. Even those that had been blown up or slagged down by nuclear energies had shown traces of what they had once been. There had been remnants and fragments of structural members, unfused portions of the largest buildings, recognizable outlines and traces of thoroughfares and so on. But here, where all of the big cities and three-fourths or more of the medium-sized ones had been, there were now only huge sheets of glass.
Sheets of glass ranging in area from ten or fifteen square miles up to several thousands of square miles, and variously from dozens up to hundreds of feet thick; level sheets of cracked and shattered, almost transparent, vari-colored glass. The people of the remaining cities and towns and villages were human. In fact, they were white Caucasians, as white and as Caucasian as the citizens of Tampa or of Chicago or of Portland, Oregon or of Portland, Maine. Neither Seaton nor Shiro, search as they would, could find any evidence that any Oriental types then lived or ever had lived on that world — to Shiro’s lasting regret. He, at least, was eliminated as a spy.
“Well, Dottie?” Seaton asked.
She gnawed her lip. “Well… I suppose we’ll have to do something — but hey!” she exclaimed, voice and expression changing markedly. “How come you think you have to go down there at all to find out what the score is? You’ve snatched people right and left all over the place with ordinary beams and things, long before anybody ever heard of that sixth-order, fourth-dimensional gizmo.”
Seaton actually blushed. “That’s right, my pet,” he admitted. “Once again you’ve got a point. I’ll pick one out that’s so far away from everybody else that he won’t be missed for a while. Maybe two’d be better.”
Since it was an easy matter to find isolated specimens of the humanity of that world, it was less than an hour later that two men — one from a town, one found wandering alone in the mountains — were being examined by the Brain.
And what an examination! Everything in their minds — literally everything, down to the last-least-tiniest coded “bit” of every long-chain proteinoid molecule of every convolution of their brains — everything was being transferred to the Valeron’s Great Brain; was being filed away in its practically unfillable memory banks.
When the transfer was complete, Sitar drew her pistol, very evidently intending to do away with the natives then and there. But Dorothy of course would not stand for that.
Instead, she herself put them back into a shell of force and ran them through the Valeron’s locks and down into a mountain cave, which she then half-filled with food. “I’d advise you two,” she told them then, in their own language, “to stay put here for a few days and keep out of trouble. If you really want to get yourselves killed, though, that’s all right with me. Go ahead any time.”
When Dorothy brought her attention back into the control room, the Brain had finished its analysis of the data it had just secured from the natives, had correlated it with all their pertinent data it had in its banks, and was beginning to put out its synthesized report.
That report came in thought; in diamond-sharp, diamond-clear thought that was not only super-intelligible and super-audible, but also was more starkly visible than any possible tri-di. It gave, as no possible other form of report could give, the entire history of the race to which those two men belonged. It described in detail and at length the Chlorans and the relationship between the two races, and went on to give, in equal detail, the most probable course of near-term events. It told Seaton that he should investigate this planet Ray-See-Nee in person. It told him in fine detail what to wear, where to go, and practically every move to make for the ensuing twenty-four hours.
At that point the report stopped, and when Seaton demanded more information, the Brain balked. “Data in sufficient,” it thought, and everyone there would have sworn that the Great Brain actually had a consciousness of self as it went on, “This construct — ?” it actually meant “I” — “is not built to guess, but deals only in virtual certainties; that is, with probabilities that approximate unity to twelve or more nines. With additional data, this matter can be explored to a depth quite strictly proportional to the sufficiency of the data. That is all.”