Dorothy, Margaret, and Crane sat around a small table, fingering tall glasses in which ice-cubes tinkled faintly.
Seaton paced the floor, with his right hand in his breeches pocket and his left holding his pipe, which he brandished occasionally in the air to emphasize a point.
“Considering that we can’t do anything at all on unmuffled high-order stuff except when an ore-scow is here, masking our emanations,” Seaton was saying, “we haven’t done too bad. However, I wouldn’t wonder if we’d just about run out of time and we’re right between the devil and the deep blue sea. Mart, what’s your synthesis?”
Crane sipped his drink and cleared his throat. “You’re probably right in one respect, Dick. They apparently make a spectacle of these destructions of cities; not for the Chlorans’ amusement — I doubt very much if they enjoy or abhor anything, as we understand the term — but to keep the rest of the population of this world in line. Whether or not the quisling dictator of this world arranged for this city to be the next sacrifice, it is certain that we have interfered with the expected course of events to such an extent that the powers-that-be will at least investigate. But I can’t quite see the dilemma.”
“I can,” Dorothy said. “They have to have a grisly example, once every so often; and since this one didn’t develop on schedule maybe they’ll go crying to mama instead of trying to handle us themselves. You see, they may know more about us than we think they do.”
“That’s true, of course—” Crane began, but Seaton broke in.
“So I say it’s time to let Ree-Toe Prenk in on the whole deal and add him to our Council of War,” he declared, and talk went on.
They were still discussing the situation twenty minutes later, when someone tapped gently on the front door.
The Osnomians leaped to their feet, pistols in all four hands. The two Japanese leaped to their feet and stood poised, knees and elbows slightly flexed, ready for action. Forty-five-caliber automatics appeared in the hands of the three at the table, and Crane flipped his remote control helmet onto his head. Seaton, magnum in hand, snapped on the outside lights and peered out through the recently installed one-way glass of the door.
“Speak of the devil,” he said in relief. “It’s Hizzoner.” He opened the door wide and went on, “Come in, Your Honor. We were just talking about you.”
Prenk came in, his eyes bulging slightly at the sight of the arsenal of armament now being put back into holsters. They bulged still more as he looked at the Japanese, and he gulped as he stared fascinatedly at the green-skinned Osnomians.
“I knew, of course, within a couple of days,” Prenk said then, quietly, “that you who call yourself Ky-El Mokak were not confining your statements to the exact truth. No wilder could possibly have done what you were doing; but by that time I knew that you, whoever you were, were really on our side. I had no suspicion until this moment, however, that you were actually from another world. I thought that your speech to the miners was what you said it was going to be, ‘a shot in the arm of hope’ It now seems more than slightly possible that you were talking about the very matters I came here tonight to see you about. Certain supplies, you will remember!”
“I remember. I lied to you, yes. Wholesale and retail. But how else could I have made the approach, the mood you were in, without blowing everything higher than up?”
“Your technique was probably the best possible, I admit.”
“Okay. Yes, we’re from a galaxy so far away from here that you could barely find it with the biggest telescope this world ever had. Our business at the moment is to wipe out every Chloran in this region of space, but we can’t do it without — among other things — a lot more data than we now have. And we’ll need weeks of time, mostly elsewhere, for preparation.
“But before we go too deeply into that you must meet my associates. People, this is His Honor Ree-Toe Prenk; what you might call the Mayor of the City of Ty-Ko-Ma of the Planet Ray-See-Nee. You know all about him. ReeToe, this is Hi-Fi Mokak, my wife — Lo-Test and Hi-Test Crane, husband and wife—” and he went on with two more pairs of coined names.
“Hi-Fi indeed!” Dorothy snorted, under her breath, in English. “Just you wait ’til I get you alone tonight, you egregious clown!”
“Wha’d’ya mean ‘clown’?” he retorted. “Try your hand sometime at inventing seven names on the spur of the moment!”
Seaton then put on a headset, slipped one over Prenk’s head, and said in thought:
“This is what is left — the rest, you might say — of our mobile base the Skylark of Valeron.”
and went on to show him and to describe to him the Great Brain, the immense tank-chart of the entire First Universe, the tremendous driving engines and even more tremendous engines of offense and of defense.
Prenk was held spellbound and speechless, for this “residue,” hundreds of kilometers in diameter and hundreds of millions of tons in weight, was so utterly beyond any artificial structure Prenk had ever imagined that he simply could not grasp its magnitude at all.
And when Seaton went on to show him a full mental picture of what that base had been before the battle with the Chlorans and what it would have to be before they could begin to move against the Chlorans — the one-thousand kilometer control-circles, the thousands of cubic kilometers of solidly packed offensive and defensive gear, the scores of fantastically braced and buttressed layers of inoson that composed the worldlet’s outer skin — he was so strongly affected as to be speechless in fact.
“I… I see. That is… a little, maybe… ” he stammered, then subsided into silence.
“Yes, it is a bit big to get used to all at once,” Seaton agreed. “It needs a lot of work. Some we’re doing; some of it can’t be done anywhere near here; but we don’t want to leave without being reasonably sure that you and your people will be alive when we get back. So we want a lot of information from you.”
“I’ll be glad to tell you everything I know or can find out.,”
“Thanks. Ideas, first. How much do you think the quisling Big Shots actually know? What do you think they’ll do about it? What do you think His Magnificence the Dictator will do? And what should we do about what he thinks he’s going to do? In a few days we’ll want all the information you can get — facts, names, dates, places, times, and personnel. Also one sample copy of each and every item of equipment desired; with numbers wanted and times and places of delivery. Brother Prenk, you have the floor.”
“One advantage of a small town and a group like ours,” Prenk said, slowly, “is that everybody knows everybody else’s business. Thus, we all knew who the spies were, but the people were all so low in their minds that they simply did not care whether they lived or died. We had done our best and had failed; most of us had given up hope completely. Now, however, the few remaining spies have been locked up and are under control. They and the overseers are still reporting, but—” he smiled wolfishly — “they are saying precisely and only what I tell them to say. This condition can’t last very long; but, after what you just showed me, I’m pretty sure I can make it last long enough. We have organized a really efficient force of guerrilla fighters and our plans for the capital are…”
A couple of weeks later, then, three hundred fifty-eight highly trained men and one highly trained woman set out.
A woman? Yes. Dorothy had protested vigorously.
“But Sitar! You aren’t going, surely? Surely you’re staying home?”
“Staying home!” the green girl had blazed. “The First Wife of a prince of Osnome goes with her prince wherever he goes. She fights beside him, at need she dies beside him. Would you have him die fighting and me live an hour? I’d blow myself to bits!”