Five hours later, Tammon took his helmet off and stared at Seaton with wonder in his eyes. “Do you realize just what you’ve done, young man? You have made a break through at least equal to my own. Opened up a whole vast new field — a field parallel to my own, perhaps, but in no sense the same.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Merely an enlargement. All I did was follow a hunch.”
“An intuition,” Tammon corrected him. “What else, pray, makes breakthroughs?”
And Luloy, on the way out of the laboratory hand in hand with Mergon, said, “I had no idea that Tellus ever did or ever could produce anybody like him. He is their god’s fair-haired child, for a fact. Sennlloy will have to know about this, Merg.”
“She will indeed — I was sure you’d think of that.”
And as soon as Dorothy could get Seaton alone that evening she stared at him with a variety of emotions playing over her face. As though she had never seen him before; or as though she were getting acquainted with him all over again. “I’ve been talking to Sennlloy,” she announced. “Or, rather, she’s been talking to me. She didn’t lose much time, did she?”
Seaton blushed to the roots of his hair. “I’ll say she didn’t. Not any. She knocked me for a block-long row of ash cans.”
“Uh-huh. Me, too — and how! She told me you said I’d blow my red top and I just about did, until she explained. She’s quite a gal, isn’t she? And what a shape! You know, I’m awfully glad I’m not too bad in that shape department myself, or I’d die of mortification looking at them? But Dick — don’t you suppose there are any people in this whole cockeyed universe except us and the Rayseenians who don’t run around naked all the time?”
“I wouldn’t know; but what has all that got to do with the price of hasheesh in Istanbul?”
“It ties in. She must have thought I was some kind of an idiot child, but she didn’t show it. She couldn’t really understand my taboos, she said, since they were not in her own heredity, but she could accept them as facts in mine and work within their limitations.”
Dorothy blushed, but went on, “I’d be the only Prime Operator — and so forth. You know about the ‘and so forth’. Anyway, before she got done she actually made me feel ashamed of myself! They really need your genes, Dick. You didn’t let on, did you, that DuQuesne’s a Tellurian, too?”
“I’ll say I didn’t! The less they think that ape and I came from the same world, the better I’ll like it.”
“You and me both. Well, she didn’t actually say so, but when she found out what kind of genes you have she decided to pour every one of DuQuesne’s right down the drain.”
“Could be.” Seaton didn’t agree with that conclusion at all, but he was too smart to argue the point.
At breakfast the following morning Seaton said, “You chirped it, birdie, about their thinking us some kind of idiot children. Besides, the First Principle and Prime Tenet of all diplomacy has always been, ‘When in Rome be a Roman candle’. So I think we’d all better peel to the raw as of now. You and I had better, whether the rest do or not. Check?”
“Check — but I think they will. We’re horribly conspicuous, dressed. People look at us as though we were things that had escaped from a zoo. And all the Green System people have always thought we were more than somewhat loco in the coco for covering up so much. We’ll get used to it easily enough — look at the nudists. So lead on, my bold and valiant — I follow thee to the bitter end of all my raiment.”
“I knew you would, ace. Let’s go spread the gospel.”
When they approached the Cranes and the Japanese on the subject, Margaret threw back her black-thatched head and laughed. “We must be psychic — we were going to spring the same thing on you. And after all, actually, how much do our bathing suits hide? Yours or mine either one? And we have it to show, too — so here goes! The last one undressed is Stinker of the Day!” She began to unzip, then paused and looked at Lotus.
The Nisei girl shrugged. “We all should, of course, I won’t like it and I positively know I’ll never get used to it, but if you two do I will too if it kills me.”
“’At-a-girl, Lambie!” Margaret put her arm around the beautifully formed little body and squeezed. “But you just wait — you’ll have it really made. None of them ever saw anything like you before, you gorgeous little doll, you. With your size and build you’ll be the absolute Queen of the May!”
25. ROMAN CANDLES
COUNTLESS parsecs away, Marc C. DuQuesne was carrying out his own plans — plans which would have been a most unpleasant surprise for the Skylarkers had they known about them.
DuQuesne moved the surviving Fenachrone into his DQ easily enough and without incident. Housing was no problem. How could it be, with millions upon millions of cubic kilometers of space available and with automatic high-order constructors to do the work? Nor was atmosphere, nor food nor any other necessity or desideratum of Fenachronian life and/or well-being a problem.
Fenachrone engineers did it all — by operating special keyboards and by thinking into carefully limited headsets but none of them had any idea whatever of what it was that did any given task or how it did it. None of this knowledge, of either practice or theory, was in their science; and DuQuesne took great pains to be sure that none of them got any chance to learn any iota of it. He taught them, and they learned, purely by rote.
Like high-school girls learning to drive automobiles. They can become excellent drivers; but with only that type of instruction none of them will ever become able to design a hypoid gear or to understand in detail the operation of an automatic clutch.
The Fenachrone did not like such treatment. Sleemet in particular, when he began to recover some of the normal pugnaciously prideful spirit of his race, did not like it at all and said so; but DuQuesne did not care a particle whether he liked it or not.
DuQuesne’s snapping black eyes stared, contemptuously unaffected, into the furiously hypnotic, red-lighted black eyes of the Fenachrone. “You megalomaniacal cretin,” he sneered. “How can you possibly figure that it makes any difference whatever to me, what you like or don’t like? If you have any fraction of a brain you’d better start using it. If you haven’t or can’t or won’t, I’ll build you a duplicate of your original ship and turn you all loose today.”
“You will? In that case—” Sleemet got that far and stopped cold in mid-sentence.
“Yeah.” DuQuesne’s tone cut like a knife. “Exactly. We’re still within Klazmon’s range; we will be for quite a while yet. Do you want to be turned loose here?”
“Well, no.” If the thought occurred to him that DuQuesne was lying, he didn’t show it.
That was just as well for Sleemet and for the Fenachrone race. DuQuesne wasn’t.
“Maybe you have a brain of sorts, at that. But if you don’t forget this Master Race flapdoodle, all of it and fast, you’ll last quick. Remember how easily that self-styled Overlord wiped out your navy and then volatilized your whole stinking world? And how easily Klazmon of Llurdiax smacked your whole fleet down? And what a fool I made and am still making of Klazmon? And I know of one race that is as much ahead of mine as I am ahead of you; and of another race that may be somewhat ahead of us Xyhnnians in some ways. As I said, you’re about eleven hundred thousand years behind. Have you got brains enough to realize that instead of being top dog you’re just low man on the totem pole?”
“If you’re so high and we’re so low,” Sleemet snarled, “why did you take us away from the Llurd? Of what possible use can we be to you?”