By now Luloy’s aches and pains were forgotten. Eyes bright, she nodded. “You’re so right. Do you think one can be? Possibly? How?”
“By finding a solar system somewhere whose inhabitants know so much more than we do that the emanations of their sixth-order installations continuously or regularly at work will mask those of any full-scale tests we want to make. There must be some such race, somewhere in this universe. The Llurdi charted this universe long ago — they call it U-Prime — and I requisitioned copies of all the tapes. Second: the Llurdi are all strictly logical. Right?”
“That’s right,” the girl agreed. “Strictly. Insanely, almost, you might say.”
“So my idea is to do something as illogical as possible. They think we’ll head for a new planet of our own; either in this galaxy or one not too far away. So we won’t. We’ll drive at absolute max for the center of the universe, with the most sensitive feelers we have full out for very strong sixth-order emanations. En route, we’ll use every iota of brain-power aboard this heap in developing some new band of the sixth, being mighty careful to use so little power that the ship’s emanations will mask it. Having found the hiding place we want, we’ll tear into developing and building something, not only that the Llurdi haven’t got, but a thing that by use of which we can bust Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth loose from his wings and tail — and through which he can’t fight back. So, being absolutely — stupidly — logical about everything, what would His Supreme Omnipotence do about it?”
Luloy thought in silence for a few seconds, then tried unsuccessfully to whistle through battered, swollen lips. “Oh, boy!” she exclaimed, delightedly. “Slug him with a thing like that — demonstrate superiority — and the battle is over. He’ll concede us everything we want, full equality, independence, you name it, without a fight — without even an argument!”
Grinning, Mergon caught her arm and led her out of the room. Throughout the great hulk of the Llurd spaceship the other battered Jelmi veterans were beginning to stir. To each of them, Mergon explained his plan and from each came the same response. “Oh, boy!”
They began at once setting up their work plans.
The first project was to find — somewhere! — a planet generating sufficient sixth-order forces to screen what they were going to do. In the great vastnesses of the Over universe there were many such planets. They could have chosen that which was inhabited by Norlaminian or Dasorian peoples. They could have chosen one of a score which were comparatively nearby. They, in fact, ultimately chose and set course for the third planet of a comparatively small G-type star known to its people as Tellus, or Earth.
They could have given many reasons why this particular planet had been selected.
None of these reasons would have included the receipt of the brief pulse of telepathic communication which none of them, any longer, consciously remembered.
And back on Llurdiax the Llanzlan followed the progress of the fleeing ship of Jelm rebels with calm perception.
His great bat wings were already mending, even as the scars of the late assault on his headquarters were already nearly repaired by a host of servo-mechanisms. Deaf to the noise and commotion of the repairs, heedless of the healing wounds which any human would have devoted a month in bed to curing, the Llanzlan once again summoned his department heads and issued his pronouncement:
“War, being purely destructive, is a product of unsanity. The Jelmi are, however, unsane; many of them are insane. Thus, if allowed to do so, they commit warfare at unpredictable times and for incomprehensible, indefensible, and/or whimsical reasons.
Nevertheless, since the techniques we have been employing have been proven ineffective and therefore wrong, they will now be changed. During the tenure of this directive no more Jelmi will be executed or castrated: in fact, a certain amount of unsane thinking will not merely be tolerated but encouraged, even though it lead to the unsanity termed ‘war’. It should not, however, be permitted to exceed that quantity of ‘war’ which would result in the destruction of, let us say, three of their own planets.”
“’This course will entail a risk that we, as the ‘oppressors’ of the Jelmi, will be attacked by them. The magnitude of this risk — the probability of such an attack — cannot be calculated with the data now available. Also, these data are rendered even less meaningful by the complete unpredictability of the actions of the group of Jelmi released from study here.
“It is therefore directed that all necessary steps be taken particularly in fifth and sixth-order devices, that no even theoretically possible — attack on this planet will succeed.
“This meeting will now adjourn.”
It did; and within fifteen minutes heavy construction began — construction that was to go on at a pace and on a scale and with an intensity of drive theretofore unknown throughout the Realm’s long history. Whole worldlets were destroyed, scavenged for their minerals, their ores smelted in giant atomic space-borne foundries and cast and shaped into complex machines of offense and defense. Delicate networks of radiation surrounded every Jelm and Llurd world, ready to detect, trace, report and home on any artifact whatsoever which might approach them. Weapons capable of blasting moons out of orbit slipped into position in great latticework spheres of defensive emplacements.
The Llurdi were preparing for anything.
Llurdan computations were never wrong. Computers, however, even Llurdan computers, are not really smart, they can’t really think. Unlike the human brain, they can not arrive at valid conclusions from insufficient data. In fact, they don’t even try to. They stop working and say in words or by printing or typing or by flashing a light or by ringing a bell — “DATA INSUFFICIENT”: and then continue to do nothing until they are fed additional information.
Thus, while the Llanzlan and his mathematicians and logicians fed enough data into their machines to obtain valid conclusions, there were many facts that no Llurd then knew. And thus those conclusions, while valid, were woefully incomplete; they did not cover all of actuality by far.
For, in actuality, there had already begun a chain of events that was to render those mighty fortresses precisely as efficacious against one certain type of attack as that many cubic miles of sheerest vacuum.
4. LLURDI AND FENACHRONE
THE type of attack which was about to challenge the Llurdi was from a source no civilized human would have believed still existed.
If Richard Seaton, laboring at Earth’s own defenses uncountable parsecs away, had been told of it, he would flatly have declared the story a lie. He ought to know, he would have said. That particular danger to the harmony of the worlds had long since been destroyed… and he was the man who had destroyed it!
When the noisome planet of the Fenachrone was destroyed it was taken for granted that Ravindau and his faction of the Party of Postponement of Universal Conquest, who had fled from the planet just before its destruction, were the last surviving members of their monstrous race. When they in turn were destroyed it was assumed that no Fenachrone remained alive.
That assumption was wrong. There was another faction of the Party of Postponement much larger than Ravindau’s, much more secretive, and much better organized.
Its leader, one Sleemet, while an extremely able scientist, had taken lifelong pains that neither his name nor his ability should become known to any except a select few. He was as patriotic as was any other member of his race; he believed as implicitly as did any other that the Fenachrone should and one day would rule not only this one universe, but the entire Cosmic All. However, he believed, and as firmly, that The Day should not be set until the probability of success of the project should begin to approach unity as a limit.