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“I am ready, slave,” a deep bass voice rolled from the speaker, in the language of Prenk’s planet Ray-See-Nee. “Start the tape.”

Seaton pressed a button; the tape began to travel through the sender. For perhaps five minutes nothing happened. Then the sender stopped and a deeper, heavier voice came from the speaker: a voice directed at the filing clerk, but using Rayseenese…

Why? Seaton wondered to himself. Oh, I see. Soften ’em up. Scare the pants off of ’em, then put on the screws.

“Yield, clerk,” the new voice said.

“I yield with pleasure O Great One,” the clerk replied, and went rigidly motionless; not moving a finger or a foot.

“It pleases me to study this matter myself,” the giant voice went on as though the clerk had not spoken. “While slight, the possibility does exist that some of these verminous creatures have dared to plot against the Race Supreme. If this is merely another squabble among themselves for place it is of no interest; but if there is any trace of nonsubmission, vermin and city will cease to exist. I shall learn the deepest truth. They can make lying tapes, but no entity of this or of any other galaxy can lie to a Great One mind to mind.”

While the Great One talked, the picture on the screen began to change. The clerk began to fade out and something else began to thicken in. And Seaton, knowing what was coming, set himself in earnest and brought into play that part of his multi-compartmented mind that was the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of Norlamin.

This coming interview, he knew, must be vastly different from his meeting with the Supreme Great One of Chlora One. That had been a wide-open, hammer-and-tongs battle; a battle of sheer power of mind. Here it would have to be a matter of delicacy of control; of precision and of nicety and of skill as well as of power. He would have to play his mind as exactly and as subtly as Dorothy played her Stradivarius, for if the monster came to suspect any iota of the truth all hell would be out for noon with no pitch hot.

The screen cleared and Seaton saw what he had known he would see; a large, flatly ellipsoidal mass of something that was not quite a jelly not quite a solid; a monstrosity through whose transparent outer membrane there was visible a large, intricately convoluted brain. As Seaton looked at the thing it developed an immense eye, from which there poured directly into Seaton’s brain a beam of mental energy so incredibly powerful as to be almost tangible physically.

Braced as he was, every element of the man’s mind quivered under the impact of that callously hard-driven probe; but by exerting all his tremendous mental might he took it.

More, he was able to hold his Drasnik-taught defenses so tightly as to reveal only and precisely what the Great One expected to find — utter helplessness and abject submission.

That probe was not designed to kill. Or rather, the Great One did not care in the least whether it killed or not. It was intended to elicit the complete truth; and from any ordinary human mind it did.

“Can you lie to me, slave?” That tremendous voice resounded throughout every chamber of Seaton’s mind. “Or withhold from me any iota of the truth?”

“I cannot lie to you, O Great One; nor withhold from you any iota, however small, of the truth.” This took everything of camouflage and of defensive screen Seaton had; but he managed to reveal no sign at all of any of it.

“How much do you personally know, not of the details of the coup d’etat itself, but of the motivation underlying it?”

“Everything, O Great One, since I was Premier Ree-Toe Prenk’s right-hand man,” and Seaton reported the exact truth of Prenk’s motivation and planning.

The Great One’s probe vanished, the screen went dark, and the sender resumed its sending.

“Huh!” Seaton wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. “ ‘This dope isn’t of any interest, clerk old boy, so just file it away and forget it,’ His Nibs says. It’s a good thing he was after Prenk’s motivation, not mine. If he’d really bored in after mine I don’t know whether I could have kept things all nice and peaceful or not. I knew I’d been nudged, believe you me.”

“I believe you,” Crane said, looking into his friend’s eyes. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

And:

The reporter goggled in awe: “And you can still talk intelligently, sir?”

“Yeah.” Seaton answered both questions at once, but did not elaborate. “What did you get, Mart? Anything?”

“I learned where it is,” said Crane. Nothing else.

Small reward for weeks of effort and risk of life… and yet it was for that the entire campaign on the planet RaySee-Nee had been waged! The whole operation had been designed to get that one fact. A people had been given new hope; some hundreds had lost their lives; many thousands had received scars they would bear a long time; a regime had been deposed and a new one put in power.

But these were only by-products, only the small change of a victory which justified all of Seaton’s efforts… and would have its consequences in every part of the Universe, for incalculable times to come!

21. LLAMZLAM MERGON

RAY-SEE-NEE’s new department heads, in their meeting with Premier Ree-Toe Prenk in the Room of State, were in unanimous agreement that everything was under control.

Some quislings and recalcitrants had been shot and a few more would probably have to be. That was only to be expected. Yes, since all of the new incumbents had been jumped many grades in status and in authority and in salary, there was and would continue to be a certain amount of jealousy; but that was not of very much importance.

The jealous ones would either accept the facts of life or be shot. Period.

After the meeting was over Kay-Lee Barlo came up to Seaton. She now bore herself as though she had been born an Exalted; her ex-boss’ pistol swung jauntily at one very female hip as she walked. As she came up to him and took both his hands in hers, standing so close to him that her upstanding, outstanding hair-do almost tickled his nose, it became evident that her weapon had been fired quite recently. She wore no perfume, and the faint but unmistakable acrid odor of burned smokeless powder still clung to her hair.

“Oh, Ky-El!” she exclaimed, equal to equal now. “I’ll simply never be able to thank you enough. Nor will all Ray-See-Nee. This world will be an entirely different place to live on hereafter.”

“I sincerely hope so, Kay-Lee.” Seaton smiled into the girl’s eager, expressive face.

“Ray-See-Nee is lucky to have had as strong, able and just a man as Ree-Toe Prenk to take over.”

“As you said a while back, ‘You can say that again.’ He’s all of that. What he’s done already is marvelous. But everyone knows — he does, too, he’s put you up on a pedestal a mile high — that it’s you who put him in the saddle. That’s what I wanted mostly to tell you. Also, I wanted to ask you—” she paused and flushed slightly — “you’ll forget, won’t you please, what I said about that louse’s brains? I didn’t mean that, really; I’m not the type to cherish a grudge like that. I was a little… well, I’d been a little put out with him, just before you came in.” With which masterpiece of understatement she gave his hands another vigorous, friendly squeeze and, swinging around, walked hip-wiggling out of the room.

She thereupon took certain steps and performed certain actions which would have astonished Seaton very much, had he known about them. But he did not — until much later.

Prenk came up to the Skylarkers a few minutes later. He shook hands with each of the off-worlders; thanked them in rounded phrases. “I would like very much to have you stay here indefinitely, friends,” he concluded, “but I know of course that that is impossible. If all the resources of the world could be devoted to the project and if all our technical men could work on it undetected for a year, we could not build anything able to withstand those Chlorans’ beams.”