Practically all emotions were either illogical or unsane, or both.
To the illogical and unsane Fenachrone, however — physically, mentally, intellectually and psychologically — the situation was intolerable; one that simply could not be endured.
They were proud, haughty, intolerant; their race had always been so. Since time immemorial it had been bred into their innermost consciousnesses that they were the RACE SUPREME — destined unquestionably to be the absolute rulers of all things living or yet to live throughout all the transfinite reaches of the Cosmic All.
Holding this belief with every fiber of their beings, they had been plunged instantly into a condition of complete, utter helplessness.
Their vessel could not fight. While it was intact except for its tail-section and its power-pods, its every offensive projector was burned out; useless. Nor could they fight personally, either physically or mentally. Their physical strength, enormous as it was, was of no avail against the completely logical, completely matter-of-fact minds of the Llurdi.
Most galling condition of all, the Fenachrone were not treated as enemies; nor as menaces or threats; nor even as intelligent entities whose knowledges and abilities might be worthy of notice. These things were observed and recorded, to be sure, but only as component parts of a newly discovered class of objects, the Fenachrone; a class of objects that happened to be alive. The Fenachrone were neither more nor less noteworthy than were birds or barnacles.
Sleemet, no longer young and perhaps the proudest and most intractable and most intransigent of the lot, could not endure that treatment very long; but he did not bend.
The old adage “Where there’s life there’s hope,” simply is not true where such as the Llurdi and the Fenachrone are concerned. Sleemet lost all hope and broke; broke almost completely down.
He stopped eating. That did not bother the Llurdi in any way. Why should it? They were neither squeamish nor humane, any more than they were cruel or vindictive. The fact that certain of these creatures stopped taking nourishment under certain conditions was merely a datum to be observed and recorded.
But since Sleemet was big and strong, even for a Fenachrone, and had previously eaten very well indeed, it took him a long time to die. And as he weakened — as the bindings between flesh and spirit loosened more and ever more — he regressed more and ever more back into the youth of his race. Back and back. Still farther back; back into its very childhood; back to a time when his remote ancestors ate their meat alive and communicated with each other, sometimes by grunts and gestures, but more often by means of a purely mental faculty that was later to evolve into the power of ocular hypnosis.
Half conscious or less of his surroundings but knowing well that death was very near, Sleemet half-consciously sent out his race’s ages-old mental message — in extremity of the dying.
Marc C. DuQuesne knew vastly more about the Fenachrone than did any other man alive, not excluding Richard Seaton. He and Seaton were, as far as is known, the only two men ever to meet Fenachrone mind to mind and live through the experience; but DuQuesne had been in thought-helmet contact with a Fenachrone much longer and much more intimately and very much more interestedly than Seaton ever had — because of the tremendous intrinsic differences between the personalities of the two men.
Seaton, after having crippled a war-vessel of the Fenachrone, had pinned its captain against a wall with so many beams of force that he could not move his head and could scarcely move any other part of his monstrous body. Then, by means of a pair of thought-helmets, he had taken what of that captain’s knowledge he wanted. He had, however, handled that horribly unhuman brain very gingerly. He had merely read certain parts of it, as one reads an encyclopedia; at no time had his mind become en rapport with that of the monster. In fact, he had said to Crane:
“I’d hate to have much of that brain in my own skull — afraid I’d bite myself. I’m just going to look… and when I see something I want I’ll grab it and put it into my own brain.”
DuQuesne, however, in examining a navigating engineer of that monstrous race, had felt no such revulsion, contrariwise — although possibly not quite consciously — he had admired certain traits of Fenachrone character so much that he had gone en rapport with that engineer’s mind practically cell to cell; with the result that he had emerged from that mental union as nearly a Fenachrone himself as a human being could very well become.
Wherefore, as DuQuesne in his flying-planetoid-base approached the point of its course nearest to the planet Llurdiax, he began to feel the thinnest possible tendril of thought trying to make contact with one of the deepest chambers of his mind. He stiffened; shutting it off by using automatically an ability that he had not known consciously that he had. He relaxed; and, all interest now, tuned his mind to that feeler of thought, began to pull it in, and stopped — and the contact released a flood of Fenachrone knowledge completely new to him.
A Fenachrone, dying somewhere, wanted… wanted what? Not help, exactly. Notice? Attention? To gave something? DuQuesne was not enough of a Fenachrone to translate that one thought even approximately, and he was not interested enough to waste any time on it. It had something to do with the good of the race; that was close enough.
DuQuesne, frowning a little, sat back in his bucket seat and thought. He had supposed that the Fenachrone were all dead… but it made sense that Seaton couldn’t have killed all of a space-faring race, at that. But so what? He didn’t care how many Fenachrone died. But a lot of their stuff was really good, and he certainly hadn’t got it all yet, by any means; it might be smart to listen to what the dying monster had to say — especially since he, DuQuesne, was getting pretty close to the home grounds of Klazmon the Llurd.
Wherefore DuQuesne opened his mental shield: and, since his mind was still tuned precisely to the questing wave and since the DQ was now practically as close to Llurdiax as it would get on course 255U, he received a burst of thought that jarred him to the very teeth.
It is amazing how much information can be carried by a Fenachrone-compressed burst of thought. It was fortunate for DuQuesne that he had the purely Fenachrone abilities to decompress it, to spread it out and analyze it, and later, to absorb it fully.
The salient points, however, were pellucidly clear. The dying monster was First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet; and he and more than four thousand other Fenachrone were helpless captives of and were being studied to death by Llurdan scientists under the personal direction of Llanzlan Klazmon.
Realizing instantly what that meant — Klazmon would be out here in seconds with a probe, if nothing stronger — DuQuesne slammed on full-coverage screens at full power, thus sealing his entire worldlet bottle-tight against any and every spy-ray, beam, probe, band, zone of force and/or order of force that he knew anything about. Since this included everything he had known before this trip began, plus everything he had learned from Freemind One and from the Jelmi and from Klazmon himself, he was grimly certain that he was just as safe as though he were in God’s hip pocket from any possible form of three-dimensional observation or attack.
Cutting in his fourth-dimensional gizmo — how glad he was that he had studied it so long and so intensively that he knew more about it than its inventors did! — he flipped what he called its “eye” into the Fenachrone Reservation on distant Llurdiax. He seized Sleemet, bed and all, in a wrapping of force and deposited the bundle gently on the floor of the DQ’s control room, practically at his, DuQuesne’s feet. Fenachrone could breathe Earth air for hours without appreciable damage — they had proved that often enough and if he decided to keep any of them alive he’d make them some air they liked better.