“Ah, that’s better.” DuQuesne’s thought was a sigh of relief. “That makes it at least possible.”
And it did. DuQuesne and his two new assistants did not do much to keep the wave of destruction sweeping through Galaxy DW-427-LU, but he and they, with a lot of very high-powered Fenachrone help, did hold the Chloran attackers at bay until the three witches and the three warlocks found the planet upon which the Chloran Galactic Institute of Advanced Study was located. Then, with locked teeth and hard-set muscles and sweating face, he made the superhuman effort required to drive that three-man beam single-handed and keep those three rabid Chloran attackers at bay besides.
By a miracle of coordination and timing he did it — and practically collapsed when all attack and all necessity of resistance ceased. The Chloran Institute simply ceased to be. Its members died. DuQuesne recovered so quickly that no one else except the two Jelman girls knew that he had been affected at all.
“Dorothy! Margaret! Break it up!” he snapped. Doctors had been working on Seaton and Crane for minutes. Both were beginning to recover consciousness. Neither, apparently, had been permanently damaged; and both their wives were making enthusiastically joyful noises. “Come on, come on, take them home to do your slobbering over them. The rest of us have work to do — or do you expect us to hold this demolition job up until they organize another threesome to go to the mat with us?”
Stretchermen carried Seaton and Crane away; Dorothy and Margaret went along. The Chloran blow at the lives of the two Skylarkers had been deadly and fast, but it had not succeeded — quite.
And the “demolition job” went on.
In the great light-years-thick “tank” that was the psiontists’ working model of the three galaxies they were manipulating, lights were winking out and reappearing as stars and planets were hurled through four-dimensional curves to new orbits and positions.
Already Galaxy A — the “raw-material” source that was being used for a supply of suns — was visibly dimmer, visibly poorer in stars. Tens of millions of them had already been stolen away and tossed through four-space into Chloran suns in Galaxy DW-427-LU. And when they reappeared, in a head-on collision course with those Chloran suns, and struck, and destroyed themselves in the titanic outflow of energies that produced super-nova blasts, the model of Galaxy DW-427-LU showed another tiny but blindingly bright flare — and another — and another.
There were more than fifty thousand million suns to move, in all. As the first targets had been the strongest and most dangerous Chloran systems, resistance soon ceased to matter; the task became monotonous, exhausting and mind-deadening.
To the Chlorans, of course, it was something else again. They died in uncounted trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous flesh was charred, baked and desiccated in the split-second of the passing of the wave front from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves began to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Some died in terrible, frantic efforts to escape…
But they all died.
And for each sun that DuQuesne’s remorseless net located and flung into the Chloran galaxy, an oxygen-bearing, human-populated planet was snatched out of the teeth of the resulting explosion and carried through four-space into the safety of Galaxy B, there to slip quietly into orbit around a pre-selected, hospital sun. No human world was destroyed in all of Galaxy DW-427-LU.
It went on and on… And then it was over.
Marc DuQuesne rose, stretched and yawned. “That’s all. Everybody dismissed,” he said, and at once the vast psiontic net ceased to be. He was alone for the first time in many hours.
His face was lined, his eyes deeper and darker than ever. Apart from that there was no sign of the great extermination he had just conducted. He was simply Marc DuQuesne. The man who slew a galaxy looked no different after the deed than he had before.
He allowed his sense of perception to roam for a moment about the “working model”. In Galaxy A, where billions of suns had gone through the stellar cycle of evolution for billions of years, there was scarcely a corporal’s guard of primaries left. It was a strange, almost a frightening sight. For with the loss of the suns the composition of the galaxy had changed to something never before seen in all the plenum of universes.
Nearly every sun had had planets; nearly every planet remained behind when its sun was stolen. Now they roamed at random — uncontrolled, barren, uninhabited — lacking not only the light and heat of their primaries, but freed from their gravitational reins as well.
Galaxy B, on the other hand, looked quite normal — in “working model”. The planets it had acquired, both from the “working model”. The planets it had acquired, both from the exploded Chloran suns and from the looted solar systems of Galaxy A, were not even visible. Galactically speaking, it was essentially unchanged; the additional mass of a few billion planets did not matter, and each of the new planets was already in orbit around a friendly sun. There would be readjustments, of course. It would be necessary to keep a watch on the developments of each affected solar system, over a period of years. But that was no problem of Marc DuQuesne’s.
But the Chloran galaxy! What was it?
In the “working model” it was rapidly becoming a single, light-years-thick concentration of living flame. In the reality it was even huger, even more deadly. A name would be invented for it some day — quasi-stellar? Or something greater still?
But that, too, was no longer a concern for Marc DuQuesne. He dropped from his mind, without a qualm, the memory of the trillions of lives he had taken, the billions of worlds he had dislocated. He ignored the question of Richard Ballinger Seaton, now stirring back to consciousness, to worry — and ultimately, to reassurance — somewhere, on the Valeron. He had more pressing business to take care of. Personal business. And to DuQuesne that was the most pressing of all.
Shrugging his shoulders, he sent Stephanie de Marigny a tight-beamed thought:
“Hunkie — some time before you go back to Washington, can I flip you over to the DQ for a private conference that we know will be private?”
Her beautifully dimpled smile flashed on. “I should say not! You know I’m not that kind of a…” she began; then, as she perceived how much in earnest be was, she changed tone instantly and went on, “Of course, Blackie. Any time. Just give me time to pack a toothbrush and my pajamas. Top Secret, or can you give me a hint to allay my ‘satiable curiosity’?”
“Hint; large economy size. Every time I think of what those damned observers are doing to you — feeding a mind like yours with an eye-dropper instead of a seventy-two inch pipeline — it makes me madder and madder. I can give you everything that Seaton, I, Crane and half the Norlaminians know, and give it to you in five hours.”
“You can what?” The thought was a mental scream. She licked her lips, gulped twice, and said, “In that case we needn’t wait for either toothbrush or pajamas. Do it now.”
He laughed deeply. “I wasn’t sure that would be your attitude, but I’m glad it is. But I can’t do it this minute. I have to help Sleemet finish building his planetoid, watch him very carefully for a while on course and do a couple of other crash-pri chores. Three or four days, probably. Say Saturday, seventeen hours?”
“That’ll be fine, Blackie, and thanks. I’ll be here with my ears pinned back and my teeth filed down to needle points.”
30. EMPEROR
THE Fenachrone had taken off and DuQuesne had watched them go, taking extreme precautions — none of which, it turned out, had been necessary — that they did not eliminate either him or the rest of the party as soon as it became safe for them to do so. He had taken Stephanie de Marigny and all her belongings aboard, saying that he was going close enough to Tellus so that it would be no trouble at all to drop her off there. And lastly, when Seaton and Crane had insisted upon thanking him for what he had done: