Nor merely to parley. They had made no attempt whatever to communicate. (It did not occur to Klazmon, then or ever, that his own fiercely driven probe could not possibly have been taken for an attempt at communication. He had fully intended to communicate, as soon as he had seized the mind of whoever was in command of the strange spacecraft.) And now, with the stranger’s incredible full-coverage screen in operation, communication was and would remain impossible.
But he had data sufficient for action. These Jelmoids, like all others he knew, were rabidly anti-social, illogical, unreasoning, unsane and insane. They were — definitely — surplus population.
So thinking, Llanzlan Klazmon launched his attack.
As the Skylark entered that enigmatic galaxy, Seaton was not in his home, with only a remote-control helmet with which to work. He was in the control room itself, at the base of the Brain, with the tremendously complex master-control itself surrounding his head.
Thus he was attuned to and in instantaneous contact with every activated cell of that gigantic Brain. It was ready to receive and to act upon with the transfinite speed of thought any order that Seaton would think. Nor would any such action interfere in any way with the automatics that Seaton had already set up.
“I’m going to stay here all day,” Seaton said, “and all night tonight, too, if necessary.”
But he did not have to stay there even all day. In less than four hours the llanzlan drove his probe and Seaton probed practically instantaneously back. And since Seaton’s hyped-up screens were a hundred times faster than the Llurd’s, Seaton “saw” a hundred times as much as Klazmon did. He saw the city Llurdias in all its seat-of-empire pride and glory. He perceived its miles-wide girdle of fortresses. He perceived the llanzlanate; understood its functions and purposes. He entered the Hall of Computation and examined minutely the beings and the machines at work there.
How could all this be? Because the speed of thought, if not absolutely infinite, is at least transfinite; immeasurable to man. And the Valeron’s inorganic brain and Seaton’s organic one were, absolutely and super-intimately, the two component parts of one incredibly able, efficient and proficient whole.
Thus, when the alien’s attack was launched in all its fury and almost all of the Valeron’s mighty defensive engines went simultaneously into automatic action, the coded chirpings that the Brain employed to summon human help did not sound: that Brain’s builder, fellow, boss, and perfect complement was already on the job.
And thus, since no warning had been given, the other Skylarkers were surprised when Seaton called them all down into the control room.
They were even more surprised when they saw how white and strained his face was.
“This may become veree unfunny,” he said. “ ’Tsa good thing I muscled her up or we’d be losing some skin and some of our defense. As it is, we’re holding ’em and we’ve got a few megas in reserve. Not enough to be really happy about, but some. And we’re building more, of course. However, that ape down there has undoubtedly got a lot of stuff otherwheres on the planet that he can hook in pretty fast, so whatever we’re going to do we’d better do right now.”
“They didn’t try to communicate at all?” Crane asked. “Strange for a race of such obviously high attainments.”
“Not a lick,” Seaton said, flatly. “Just a probe; the hardest and sharpest probe I ever saw. When I blocked it Whammo!”
“You probed, too, of course,” Dorothy said. “What did you find out? Are they really monstrous, as DuQuesne said, out purely to kill?”
“Just that. He wasn’t lying a nickel’s worth on that. His Nibs down there had already decided that we were surplus population and should be eliminated, and he set right out to do it. So, unless some of you have some mighty valid reasons not to, I’m going to try my damndest to eliminate him, right now.”
“We could run, I suppose,” Margaret suggested — but not at all enthusiastically.
“I doubt it. Not without letting him burn us down to basketball size, like the Chlorans did. He undoubtedly let us get this close on purpose so we couldn’t.”
Since no one else said anything, Seaton energized everything of offense he had. He tuned it as precisely as he possibly could. He assembled it into the tightest, solidest, hardest beam he could possibly build. Then, involuntarily tensing his muscles and bunching his back, he drove the whole gigantic thing squarely at where he knew the llanzlanate was.
The Llurd’s outer screen scarcely flickered as it went black in nothing flat of time. The intermediate screen held for eighty-three hundredths of a second. Then the practically irresistible force of that beam met the practically immovable object that was Klazmon’s last line of defense. And as it clawed and bit and tore and smashed in ultrapyrotechnic ferocity, solar-like flares of raw energy erupted from the area of contact and the very ether writhed and seethed and warped under the intolerable stresses of the utterly incomprehensible forces there at grips.
This went on… and on… and on.
Even to Seaton, who knew only that he was up against an enemy nearly as potent as the Chlorans, the full import of the enormous struggle of energies then being waged was far from clear. We can wonder now, and ask ourselves what the fate of the universe might have been if the Skylark’s Norlaminian designers had skimped on a course of screens, or overlooked a detail of defense. Surely its consequences would have been cataclysmic! Not only to Seaton and his Skylarker, watching grim-faced as their gauges revealed the enormous flow of destructive forces battling each other to annihilation for countless parsecs in every direction. Not only to the Jelmi, or the Rey-See-Neese, or the Norlaminians, or Earth itself… but to countless generations yet unborn, on planets not yet discovered…
But they held.
And after ten endless minutes of such terrible gouts and blasts of destruction as no planet could endure for a moment, Seaton heard a voice speak to him.
He had never heard it before, but it said in good American English: “Good morning, my friends. Or perhaps, by your clocks, it is good afternoon? I am the Llanzlan Mergon of Jelm, and I perceive that you are under attack by our old acquaintances, the Llurdi.
You, I am sure, are the Seatons and the Cranes, about whom we heard so much on Earth, but whom we were not able to find.”
Even though the Llurdi had been absolute rulers of all the planets of the Jelmi for many thousands of years, it was easy for them to accept, and to adopt themselves to, the new condition of coexistence with the Realm of the Jelmi on terms of equality. That was the way they were built.
The llanzlan fed the new data into Computer Prime and issued its findings as a directive. Since this directive was the product of pure logic, that was all there was to it.
With the Jelmi, however, even with a much simpler and easier agenda, things were distinctly otherwise. Everyone knows how difficult it is to change the political thinking of even a part of any human world. How, then, of the two hundred forty whole planets of the Jelmi? The conservatives did not want any change at all. Not even to independence. The radicals wanted everything changed; but each faction wanted each item changed in a different fashion. And the moderates, as usual, did not agree with either extreme wing on anything.