“Talent?” Dorothy snorted. “Do you call witchcraft a talent? Why, the very idea of it makes me…” She paused. “Uh-huh, me too,” Madlyn agreed fervently. “If I have to believe in practicing witches I’ll go not-so-slowly nuts.”
“Witchcraft, my children? Bosh and fiddle — fiddle! It is a talent. Extremely rare and lamentably rudimentary in our part of the universe, yet these women have it in astoundingly full measure. Unfortunately, you have no name for it except ‘witchcraft’, which term has deplorable connotations. It is the ability to… but the English has no words for that, either. But no matter, you have seen it in fine, full action. Fodan and Sacner and I each have a very little of it…”
“But those women couldn’t possibly have known anything about that kind of stuff!” Madlyn protested.
“Of course they didn’t. Richard here and Tammon and Doctor DuQuesne were the principal sources of information. But all three of them together lacked a great deal of having full knowledge, and the rest of us had very little indeed. While the comparison is lamentably loose, consider a large, finely cut jigsaw puzzle. Seaton and DuQuesne and Tammon could each assemble an area. But no two of the three areas were contiguous, while none of the rest of us could fit more than a very few pieces together. But the ladies Barlo — particularly Grand Dame Barlo, who is a veritable powerhouse of strength — with some little help from the rest of us, exerted and directed The Power. The Power that, by tapping the reservoir of infinite knowledge, enabled the scribe Kay-Lee to fill in the missing parts of the puzzle.”
“But why…” Seaton began, but changed his mind. “I see. You didn’t tell me anything about it because at that time it was both insignificant and inapplicable.”
“That is correct. As I was saying, our Fodan, who has more of it than any other entity previously known, had perhaps the thousandth of what Kay-Lee, the weakest by far of the three, has. That is why he is Chief of the Five. And they tell me that there are other women of their race who also have this talent. Remarkable!” At this thought Drasnik, who had quieted down, became excited all over again. “When this is all over I shall go at once to Ray-See-Nee and study. Marvelous! They did not know even that it is a talent or that, when they learn, there will be no need to drug themselves into, half-unconsciousness to employ it successfully. Thank you again, young friends, for this wonderful opportunity. Marvelous!” and Drasnik scurried away.
The Seatons and Madlyn and van der Gleiss stared after the Norlaminian until he was out of sight. They turned and stared at each other.
“Well… I’ll… be… a… dirty… name,” Madlyn said.
Seaton was pacing the floor, talking to Dorothy, emitting a cloud of smoke from his battered and reeking briar. “I like to do my thinking with you, ace.”
She chuckled. “At me, you mean, don’t you? That stuff is over my head like a beach umbrella.”
“Don’t fish, sweetie. You not only have a body and some hair, but also a brain. One that fires on all sixteen barrels all the time.”
She laughed delightedly. “Thank you so much. You know that isn’t true, but you also know how I lap it up and purr. But to proceed, Dunark wants to smash them all with planets, the way he was going to smash Urvania. Martin and Peggy, after talking the way they did, crawfished and are now talking about enclosing the whole galaxy in a stasis of time…”
“Huh? That’s news to me. How’s he figuring on doing it — did he say?”
“Uh-uh. I didn’t talk to him. Peggy says he isn’t going to say anything about it until he can present the package.”
“He should live so long. But ’scue, please; go ahead.”
“Only one more. Fodan, the simple-minded old darling, wants to work with them. Convert them!”
“Yeah. Make Christians of ’em. I’ve got a life-sized picture in technicolor of anybody ever accomplishing that feat. The trouble is, everybody wants to do something different and none of their ideas are any good at all.”
“Oh? I noticed that you haven’t been enthusiastic about any of them. Pretty grim, in fact. Why not?”
“Because none of ’em will come even close to getting ’em all and this has got to be a one hundred point zero zero zero per cent cleanup. You know how they operate on a cancer. They cut deep enough and wide enough to get it all. Every cell. If they don’t get it all it spreads all over the body and the patient dies. This is a cancer. It’s already eaten just about all of that galaxy by Chlora-typing planets wherever they go — or rather, enslaved humans are doing it for them — and it’s spreading fast. And when that galaxy begins to get crowded they won’t just jump to one other; they’ll go for hundreds or thousands of galaxies and there goes the ball game. So that cancer has got to be operated on before it spreads any farther.”
Dorothy’s face began to pale. “By that analogy you mean destroy the whole galaxy! How can such a thing be possible? It can’t possibly be possible!”
He told her how the operation could be performed. That apparatus that the Barlo women had dredged up out of nowhere had a lot of capabilities that did not appear on the surface. Blackie DuQuesne had perceived one set of those possibilities, and he and Blackie had been working on the hardware. They were calling it Project Rho.
Her face, already pale, turned white as he talked; and when he had finished:
“Project… Rho,” she breathed. “How utterly horrible! And yet… I never dreamed… have you talked to Martin yet?”
“No. You first. I don’t want to even think about pushing that kind of a button without being sure you’re standing at my back.”
“I’ll do better than that, Dick,” She looked him steadily in the eye. “I’ll take half of it. My finger will be right beside yours on that button.”
“You are an ace, ace. As maybe I’ve said once before.”
“Uh-huh, at least once — but we’re one, remember?” After a moment she went on, “But we can’t possibly sell the Norlaminians any such bill of goods as that.”
“I’ll say we can’t. They’d cry their eyes out all over the place. Or wait… When they find out that they can’t stop it, they’ll help save the human planets, which will be all to the good; the witches can use the help. But basically, the grand slam will be up to DuQuesne and his Fenachrone and the witches and Mart and me. Even Mart will need some persuasion, I’m afraid; and you’ll have to really work on Peg. She’ll simply have a litter of kittens.”
“Why, Dick; what a way to talk!” She smiled in spite of herself, but sobered quickly.
“She’ll come around, I’m sure; she’ll have to. But Dick, is it actually physically possible? It’s so huge!”
“Definitely. You see, we’ll be operating in a Gunther universe, so that mass as such won’t enter and power will be no problem. All we have to do is build an apparatus to alter the properties of space around and throughout the object to be moved — altering those properties in such a way as to make its three-dimensional attributes incompatible with those of its…”
She stopped him with an upraised band. “Hold it! Wait up, please. We’ll dispense with the high math, if you don’t mind. It’s the sheer size of the thing that scares me witless.”
Seaton did grin then. “Well, you’ve always known that making things bigger and better is the fondest thing I am of. But we know exactly how to do it, and I think we can get it done before the Norlaminians finish theirs. But DuQuesne should be about ready to take off. I’ll flip myself over there and see.”
He did so and said, “How’re you doing, Blackie?”
“A few minutes yet to finish final checking. I’ve been thinking. What kind of a celestial object will that galaxy be when we get done with it? Not a quasi-stellar, certainly; that’s only a star with the energy of a hundred thousand million stars. This will be a galaxy with the energy of a hundred thousand million galaxies — the energy of an entire universe.”