“Yeah. Something new, I’d say. It’ll give some astronomers a thrill, some day. But what I can’t compute is, whether or not it will sterilize the interstellar space of that galaxy.” Seaton said.
“Well, if it doesn’t, you might put the Osnomians and Urvanians on it. Keep ’em from thinking about fighting each other.”
“You know, Blackie, I’d thought of doing exactly that? ‘Great minds’ and so forth. ‘Bye now; be seein’ ya,” and Seaton flipped himself back home.
En route to his destination — barren planet in a starcluster on the opposite side of the galaxy from the Skylark of Valeron — DuQuesne again went into a huddle with Sleemet.
“So far, you’ve done a job,” he began. “What I told you to do — what I knew how to do — and done it well. But nothing else. Now I want something more than that. Something you can do, if you will, that I can’t. As you know, I’ve made arrangements so that in case of my death this whole planetoid goes up in an atomic blast. That was to keep you from killing me and making off with it. The same thing will happen, though, if those Chlorans kill me in the fracas that’s coming. It would seem as though that fact would be enough to make you make an honest-to-God Effort to be sure that they don’t kill me by doing your damnedest to help me kill them. Mentally. Both you and the Chlorans know more about one phase of that than I do — as yet. So, as added inducement to really top effort, if you’ll really tear into it on this Project Rho I’ll teach you everything I know that you can take. And I’ll help you build any kind of spacecraft you want before you leave; one even as big as this one. What do you say?”
Sleemet’s strange eyes glowed. “If you will go mind to mind with me on that I can now assure you of such cooperation as no member of my race has ever given to any non-Fenachrone form of life,” he declared; and DuQuesne handed him a headset.
It wasn’t easy, not even for such an accomplished liar as Marc C. DuQuesne was, to make the four-dim gizmo very much more incomprehensible than it actually was; but he accomplished the feat — and he actually did give Sleemet practically everything else.
The DQ went into a one-day orbit above one point of an immense plain of the barren planet that was its goal. A plain some ten thousand square miles of which became forthwith an Area of Work. Enormous mechanisms sprang into being, by means of which DuQuesne and several hundred top-bracket Fenachrone engineers sent gigantic beams of force hurtling across the galaxy to the Skylark of Valeron and to hundreds of thousands of other micrometrically determined points.
But not Sleemet. That wight, knowing now almost everything that DuQuesne knew, was working in his own private laboratory — working with all the power of his tremendous mind on the various mental aspects of the battle of giants to come.
Hour after hour, Crane worked in his master control at the base of the Brain, with Madame Barlo and Drasnik and Margaret, each wearing an extra-complex headset, sitting close to him. They were mapping and modeling three galaxies, on such a large scale that the vast “tank” of the Skylark of Valeron was millions of times too small. They were using a discus-shaped volume of open space some ten light-years in diameter and three light-years thick.
Galaxy DW-427-LU was already meticulously in place; its every celestial body being represented by a characteristically colored light. “Above” Galaxy DW-427-LU and “below” it (the terms are used in the explanatory sense only; “on one side of” and “on the other side of” could be used just as well) as close to it as possible, two other galaxies were being modeled; each as nearly like DW-427-LU in size and shape as could be found in that part of the First Universe. They were so close together that in many places the three models actually interpenetrated.
Now in the space-time continuum of the strictly material — the plenum in which we ungifted human beings live and which our friends the semanticists would have us believe is the only one having any reality — the map is not the territory. That is taken as being axiomatic. In the demesne of The Talent, however, known to some scholars as psionics and to scoffers as magic or witchcraft, the map is — and definitely! — the territory.
Thus, as Madame Barlo and Drasnik, those two matched poles of tremendous power; and Crane, the superlatively able coordinator and his matching pole Margaret; and that immense Brain — as these five labored together, the “map” (in this case the meticulously accurate space-chart) became filled with tendrils and filaments of psionic force, connecting models of suns with models of suns and those of planets with those of planets. And as those joinings occurred in the map, the same joinings occurred in the actual galaxies out in deep space.
Those joinings were invisible, it is true, and intangible, and indetectable to any physical instrument. But they were nevertheless as real as was the almost infinite power from which they sprang.
The other pairs of psiontists were also hard at work. Fodan and Grand Dame Barlo, Sacner Carfon and KayLee, Charles van der Gleiss and Madlyn Mannis, Mergon and his Luloy, Tammon and Sennlloy — all were shooting heavy charges fast and flawlessly straight. And as all those matched pairs labored, and as the automatics of pure psionic force they produced reproduced themselves in geometric ratio, the intergalactic couplings increased at a rate that was that ratio squared.
Seaton was fantastically busy, too. He was deep in his controller, with Dorothy and Stephanie de Marigny, both helmeted, one on each side of him. Dorothy, was, of course, his matched pole of power; Stephanie was his link to DuQuesne. He, too, was operating a ten-thousand-square-mile Area of Work with the speed of thought and he was not making any mistakes. It is true that the Skylark of Valeron was the biggest thing he had ever built before, and that the members with which he was working now were parsecs instead of inches long. Nevertheless each one fitted perfectly into place and every one that was supposed to connect with anything of DuQuesne’s connected perfectly therewith. After many hours of this furiously grinding work, a myriad of hells began to break out, at the rate of hundreds of thousands per second. Of hells, that is, infinitely hotter than anything imaginable by man. Of super-novae, no less. In one galaxy, a large hot sun vanished…
It reappeared instantaneously — with no lapse of time whatever — close beside the sun of a Chloran-dominated solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU.
And in that same no-time the Tellus-type planet in the Chloran system vanished therefrom and reappeared in a precisely similar orbit around a Type G dwarf sun in Galaxy B, the third galaxy in the psiontists’ tremendous working model.
And those two suns in the Chloran solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU, with photospheres in contact and with intrinsic velocities not only diametrically opposed but increased horribly by their mutual force of gravitation, crashed together in direct central impact and splashed with tremendous force.
Except for the heat, the collision might have lasted for a long time. But heat was the all-important factor — the starkly incomprehensible heat of hundreds of millions of Centigrade degrees.
Each of those suns was already an atomic furnace in precise equilibrium, generating and radiating the energy of some five million tons per second of matter being converted completely into energy. Thus there was no place for the added energy of billions of tons of matter to go. It could not be absorbed and it could not be radiated. Therefore the whole enormous mass of super-hot, super-dense material began to go into the long series of ultra-atomic explosions that is the formation of a supersuper-nova — the most utterly, the most fantastically violent display of pure, raw energy known to or possible in the universe of man.