“We can’t either. Not here,” Seaton said. “That’s why we have to go; but we’ll be back. I don’t know when; but we’ll be back some day.”
“I’m sure you will; and may Great My-Ko-Ta ward you and cherish you as you build.”
Back on what was left of their worldlet, now reconditioned to the extent that it was not likely to fall apart on the spot, and out in deep space once more, the Skylarkers began efficiently and expertly to put the pieces of their victory together.
They had located the Enemy. They even had an operating covert base in Chloran territory, to which they could return at any time. They had weapons which, in theory at least, could cope with anything the Chlorans were likely to own.
Yet Seaton fretted. The weapons were there, but his control was not adequate; the weapons had outgrown the control. Dealing with Chlorans was touchy business. You wanted all the space you could get between you and them. Yet, at any operating range which even Seaton, to say nothing of Crane and the others, considered safe, their striking power was simply too erratic to depend on.
“It’s a bust,” Seaton said gloomily. “Course, if worst came to worst I could go back to undercover methods. Smuggle in a bomb, maybe — just to throw their main centers off balance while the rest of you hit them with all we’ve got. I could stow away aboard one of those ore-scows taking the booty off Ray-See-Nee easily enough—”
“You talk like a man with a paper nose,” Dorothy scoffed. “I have a picture of that expedition — of you in armor, with air-tanks strapped on your back and lugging an underwater camera or projector around. Un-noticed… I don’t think.”
And Dunark added, “And since you haven’t got any idea of what to look for, you’d have to lug around a full analsynth set-up. A couple of tons of stuff. Uh-uh.”
Seaton grinned, unperturbed. “That’s what I was coming to. Getting in would be easy, but doing anything wouldn’t. And neither would getting out. But Mart, we’ve chopped one horn off of the dilemma, but we haven’t even touched the other. We’ve got to master that fourth-dimension rig; and we’re not even close. It’s a matter of kind, not merely of degree.”
“I can’t see that. If so, we could not have warded off their attack at all.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean the energies themselves; it’s the control of that much stuff. Synchronization, phasing in, combination, and so forth. Getting such stuff as that closely enough together. Look, Mart. This bit that we’ve got left of the Valeron is stuffed with machinery practically to the skin. She’s so small, relatively, that you wouldn’t think there’d be any trouble meshing in machines from various parts of her. But there is.
Plenty. It never showed up before because we never had to use a fraction of our total power before, but it showed up plenty back there. My beam was loose as ashes, andI’ve figured out why.
“Sixth-order stuff moves as many times faster than light as light does faster than a snail — maybe more. But it still takes a little time to get from one machine to another, inside even as small a globe as this is. See?”
Crane frowned in thought. “I see. I also see what the difficulties would be in anything large enough and strong enough to attack the Chlorans. It would mean timing each generator and each element of each projector; and each with a permissible variation of an infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond. That, of course, means Rovol and Caslor.”
“I suppose it does… unless we can figure out an easier, faster way… I don’t know whether the Chlorans have got anything like that or not, but they’ve got something. There ought to be some way of snitching it off of them.”
“Why must they have?” Dunark demanded. “It’s probably just a matter of size. They have a whole planet to fortify. Dozens of ’em if they want to. So it doesn’t have to be a matter of refinement at all. Just brutal, piled up, overwhelming power.”
“Could be,” Seaton agreed. “If so, we can’t match it, since the Valeron was as big as she could be and still have a factor of safety of two point two.” He paused in thought, then went on, “But with such refinement, we could take a planet no matter how loaded it was… I think. So maybe we’d better take off for Norlamin, at that.”
“One thing we should do first, perhaps,” Dorothy suggested. “Find out what that DuQuesne really did. He has me worried.”
“Maybe we should at that,” Seaton agreed. “I’d forgotten all about the big black ape.”
It was easy enough to find the line along which DuQuesne had traveled; the plug-chart was proof that he had not lied about that. They reached without incident the neighborhood of the point DuQuesne had marked on the chart. Seaton sent out a working projection of the device that, by intercepting and amplifying light-waves traversing open space, enabled him actually to see events that had happened in the not-too distant past.
He found the scene he wanted. He studied it, analyzed and recorded it. Then:
“He lied to me almost a hundred and eighty degrees,” Seaton said. “That beam came from that galaxy over there.” He jerked a thumb. “The alien who bothered him was in that galaxy. That much I’ll buy. But it doesn’t make sense that he’d go there. That alien was nobody he wanted to monkey with, that’s for dead sure. So where did he meet the Jelmi, if not in that galaxy?”
“On the moon, perhaps,” Margaret said.
“Possibly. I’ll compute it… no, the timing isn’t right—” Seaton thought for a moment — “but there’s no use guessing. That galaxy may be the first place to look for sign; but I’ll bet my case buck it’ll be a long, cold hunt. I’d like awfully well to have that gizmo — flip bombs past the Chlorans’ screens and walls with it…”
“From a distance greater than their working range?” Crane asked.
“That’s so, too… or maybe so, at that, chum. Who knows what you can do through the fourth? But it looks as though our best bet is to beat it to Norlamin, rebuild this wreck, and tear into that business of refinement of synchronization. So say you all?”
So said they all and Seaton, flipping on full-power sixth order drive, set course for Norlamin.
As the student will be aware, the events in this climactic struggle between the arch-enemies, Seaton and DuQuesne, were at this point reaching an area of maximum tension. It is curious to reflect that the outer symptom of this internal disruptive stress was, in the case of nearly every major component of the events to come, a psychological state of either satisfied achievement, or contented decision, or calm resignation. It is as though each of the major operatives were suffering from a universe-wide sense of false tranquility. On Ray-See-Nee, the new government felt its problems were behind it and only a period of solid, rewarding rebuilding lay ahead. (Although Kay-Lee Barlo had taken certain prudent precautions against this hope being illusory — as we shall see.) The Chlorans, proud and scornful in their absolute supremacy, had no hint that Seaton or anyone else was making or even proposed to make any effective moves against them. The Fenachrone, such few weary survivors as remained of them, had given themselves over to — not despair, no; but a proud acceptance of the fact that they were doomed.
There was in fact no tranquility in store for any of them! But they had not yet found that out.
Meanwhile the Jelmi, for example were just beginning to feel the first itch of new challenges. In their big new space rover, the Mallidaxian, Savant Tammon was as nearly perfectly happy as it is possible for a human or humanoid to be. He had made the greatest breakthrough of his career; perhaps the greatest breakthrough of all history. Exploring its many ramifications and determining its many as yet unsuspected possibilities would keep him busy for the rest of his life. Wherefore he was working fourteen or fifteen hours every day and reveling in every minute of it. He hummed happily to himself; occasionally he burst into song in a voice that was decidedly not of grand-operatic quality.