For many thousands of years nothing had happened to shake any Fenachrone’s rock-solid conviction of the destiny of their race. Progress along the Master-Race line had been uninterrupted. In fact, it had never been successfully opposed. The Fenachrone had already wiped out, without really extending themselves, all the other civilizations within a hundred parsecs or so of their solar system. But up to the time of Emperor Fenor no ruler of the Fenachrone had become convinced that the time had come to set the Day of Conquest — the day upon which the Big Push was to begin.
But rash, headstrong, egomaniacal Fenor insisted upon setting The Day in his own reign — which was why First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet had set up his underground so long before. He was just as patriotic as any other member of his race; just as thoroughly sold on the idea of the inevitable ultimate supremacy over all created thing wherever situated; but his computations did not indicate that success was as yet quite certain.
How right Sleemet was!
He knew that he was right after hearing the first few words of Sacner Carfon’s ultimatum to Emperor Fenor; that was why he had pushed the panic button for the eighty-five-thousand-odd members of his faction to flee the planet right then.
He knew it still better when, after Fenor’s foolhardly defiance of Sacner Carfon, of the Overlord, and of the Forces of Universal Peace, his native planet became a minor sun behind his flying fleet.
Even then, however, Sleemet had not learned very much — at least, nowhere nearly enough.
At first glance it might seem incredible that, after such an experience, Sleemet could have so lightly destroyed two such highly industrialized worlds about which he knew so little. It might seem as though it must have been impressed upon his mind that the Fenachrone were not the ablest, strongest, wisest, smartest, most highly advanced and most powerful form of life ever created. Deeper study will show, however, that with his heredity and conditioning he could not possibly have done anything else.
Sleemet probably did not begin really to realize the truth until the Llurd Klazmon so effortlessly — apparently — wiped out sixteen of his seventeen superdreadnoughts, then crippled his flagship beyond resistance or repair and sent it hurtling through space toward some completely unknown destination.
His first impulse, like that of all his fellows, was to storm and to rage and to hurl things and to fight. But there was no one to fight; and storming and raging and hurling and smashing things did not do any good. In fact, nothing they could do elicited any attention at all from their captors.
Wherefore, as days stretched out endlessly and monotonously into endless and monotonous weeks, all those five thousand-odd Fenachrone — males and females, adults and teen-agers and children and babies — were forced inexorably into a deep and very un-Fenachronian apathy.
And when the hulk of the flagship arrived at the Llanzlanate on far Llurdiax, things went immediately from bad to worse. The volume of space into which the Fenachrone were moved had a climate exactly like that of their native city on their native world. All its artifacts — its buildings, and its offices and its shops and its foods and its drinks and its everything else — were precisely what they should have been.
Ostensibly, they were encouraged to live lives even more normal than ever before (if such an expression is allowable); to breed and to develop and to evolve; and especially to perform breakthroughs in science.
Actually, however, it was practically impossible for them to do anything of their own volition; because they were being studied and analyzed and tested every minute of every day. Studied coldly and logically and minutely; with an utterly callous ferocity unknown to even such a ferocious race as the Fenachrone themselves were.
Hundreds upon hundreds of the completely helpless captives died — died without affecting in any smallest respect the treatment received by the survivors — and as their utter helplessness struck in deeper and deeper, the Fenachrone grew steadily weaker, both physically and mentally.
This was no surprise to their captors, the Llurdi. Nor was it in any sense a disappointment. To them the Fenachrone were tools; and they were being tempered and shaped to their task…
On Earth, leaving Stephanie de Marigny’s apartment, DuQuesne went back to the Capital D and took off on course one hundred seventy-five Universal — that is, five degrees east of Universal South. He went that way because in that direction lay the most completely unexplored sector of the First Universe and he did not want company.
Earth and the First Galaxy lay on the edge of the First Quadrant. Llurdiax and its Realm lay in the Second. So did the Empire of the Chlorans and his own imaginary planet Xylmny. The second galaxy along that false line, which might also attract Seaton, lay in the Third. He didn’t want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton and this course was mathematically the best one to take to get out of and keep out of Seaton’s way.
Therefore he would follow it clear out to the Fourth Quadrant rim of the First Universe.
As the Capital D bored a hole through the protesting ether DuQuesne took time out from his thinkings to consider women. First, he considered Stephanie de Marigny; with a new and not at all unpleasant thrill as he did so. He considered Sennlloy and Luloy and some unattached women of the Jelmi. They all left him completely cold; and he was intellectually honest enough to know why and to state that “why” to himself. The Jelmi were so much older than the humanity of Earth that they were out of his class. He could stand equality — definitely; in fact, that was what he wanted — but he could not live with and would not try to live with any woman so demonstrably his superior.
But Hunkie — ah, there was a man’s woman! His equal; his perfect equal in every respect; with a brain to match one of the finest bodies ever built. She didn’t play hard to get, she was hard to get; but once got she’d stay got. She’d stand at a man’s back ’till his belly caved in.
Slowed to a crawl, as Universal speed goes, the Capital D entered the outermost galaxy of the Rim of the Universe and DuQuesne energized his highest-powered projector. He studied the Tellus-type planets of hundreds of solar systems. Many of these planets were inhabited, but he did not reveal himself to the humanity of any of them.
He landed on an uninhabited planet and went methodically to work. He bulldozed out an Area of Work. He set up his batteries of machine tools; coupling an automatic operator of pure force to each tool as it was set up. Then he started work on the Brain; which took longer than all the rest of the construction put together. It was an exact duplicate of that of the Skylark of Valeron; one cubic mile of tightly packed ultra-miniaturized components; the most tremendous and most tremendously capable super-computer known to man.
While the structure of the two brains was identical, their fillings were not. As has been said, there were certain volumes — blocks of cells — in the Valeron’s brain that DuQuesne had not been able to understand. These blocks he left inoperative — for the time being.
Conversely, DuQuesne either had or wanted powers and qualities and abilities that Seaton neither had nor wanted; hence certain blocks that were as yet inoperative in Seaton’s vast fabrication were fully operative in DuQuesne’s.
It is a well-known fact that white-collar men, who sit at desks and whose fellowship with machines is limited to week-end drives in automobiles, scoff heartily at the idea that any two machines of the same make and model do or can act differently from each other except by reason of wear. With increasing knowledge of an acquaintance with machines, however — especially with mechanisms of the more complex and sophisticated sorts — this attitude changes markedly. The men and women who operate such machines swear unanimously that those machines do unquestionably have personalities; each its unique and peculiar own.