Five minutes of this insane cavorting made half the party seasick, and they pulled out of projection and returned, gasping and staggering, to the welcome stability of the Skylark.
Seaton stuck it out for half an hour. Then he pushed the “cancel” button.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he growled. “Every time we wiggle a finger or a fly lights on a table it changes the shape of the whole ship. Oh, for something really rigid to build with!” (The eternal complaint of the precise worker in any field!) “But we each saw something. We’ll report in turn.”
Seaton gave a brief description of his own observations. He had seen something, no more than a flicker, but clearly big and Chloran-made. Dunark had spotted what sounded like the same planet-sized mass, but in the system of a G-3 star, as nearly as he could tell; Seaton’s had been an F. The others had seen nothing. Seaton nodded.
“Okay. There are at least two solar systems having fortified Chloran planets, with one more probable. Ideas, anybody?” Crane broke the ensuing silence. “I can’t come up with anything constructive. Just the opposite. There’s something basically wrong here, Dick. As I understand the TammonSeaton Theory, the operators involved here are all in the no-space-no-time field, so that distance does not enter. Hence it is possible in theory, and should be in practice, to place a bomb anywhere in all total space as accurately and as easily as you can touch the end of your nose with the tip of your finger.”
Dorothy whistled, Dunark looked shocked, and the others looked blank. Seaton scowled and said, “Yeah… But with all points in total space coexistent — Gunther’s Universe — how are you going to pick any given one out? What kind of an operator would it take? There’s a hole, Mart, in either the theory or in the reduction…” He paused, frowning in thought.
“Or both,” Crane said.
“Or both,” Seaton agreed. “Okay, let’s skip down and find it.”
They went down and worked with the Brain all the rest of the day; but they did not find the hole. Nor did they find it the next day, or the next. Then Seaton began to pace the floor.
“So, in all probability, another breakthrough is required,” Crane said. “And I can’t help you on that; I’m not the genius type.”
“Neither am I!” Seaton snorted. “In my book one flash-in-the-pan hunch does not make a genius… But here’s another angle, fella. If this thing can be worked out it’ll be so much better than that synchronization idea that it isn’t funny. Also, it might not take the years to work out. Don’t you think it’ll be worth while, Mart, to spend a few days seeing if we can set it up as a problem? See if we can take it out of the pure brainstorm category before we spring it on Rovol?”
“I do indeed,” and Seaton and Crane both went down to the control room and got into their master controllers. However; before that task was finished there was a surprise for Richard Seaton.
27. CO-BELLIGERENTS
“DuQuesne calling Seaton reply… ”
Since Seaton’s head was inside his master controller, no speaker sounded. Since everything pertaining to DuQuesne was on file in the Brain’s memory banks, there was no delay whatever in making the proper connections: Seaton cut in before the first send of the message; short as it was, was completed.
“What the hell, DuQuesne!” his thought blazed out. “I didn’t think even you would have the sublime guts to call on me again!”
“Save it, Seaton. This is important. Do you know how many solar systems of Chlorans there are in that galaxy where your Skylark of Valeron got burned out?”
Seaton paused for one microsecond. Then, cautiously: “No idea. Hundred, maybe. Or, in view of this — thousands?”
“You aren’t even warm. My apparatus put one hundred forty-nine million three hundred nineteen thousand two hundred ninety-seven of them into my tank before my scanners went out. And they hadn’t covered a quarter of the galaxy yet.”
“Je…” Seaton began, but shut himself up. Dorothy was listening in. “But to be able to use a sixth-order analsynth that long you must have had a little more… okay, gimme the dope.”
DuQuesne told his story, including his superpowered DQ and his Fenachrone crew, concluding, “We knocked out over fifteen thousand of them before I had to run. But of course that wasn’t a drop in the proverbial bucket. Worse, I doubt like the devil if any mobile base possible to build can ever get that close to them again. Apparently they sync in just enough stuff — no matter how much it takes — to cope with the maximum observed threat.”
“Could be. But how come you are interested? I know damn well what you want.”
“Not any more you don’t,” snapped DuQuesne’s thought.
“With every two-bit Tom, Dick, and Harry of a race in all space having atomic energy already, what’s the chance of a monopoly? So what good is Earth or anything else in the First Galaxy? I’ve changed my plans — you and Crane can both live forever, as far as I’m concerned.”
Seaton absorbed and filed that statement — guardedly. He only said:
“So what? Why should you give a whoop about the Chlorans? Don’t tell me you’re altruistic all of a sudden.”
“You apparently don’t see the point. Listen — the Fenachrone talked about mastering the cosmos. That race of Chlorans is quietly and unobtrusively doing it. It may be too late to stop them; and I didn’t help matters a bit by making them double or quadruple their synchronized output. You and I are, as far as we know, humanity’s ablest operators. Each of us has stuff the other lacks. If you and I together can’t stop them it can’t — as of now — be done. What do you say?”
Seaton pondered. What was DuQuesne’s angle this time? Or was the ape actually on the up and up? It did make sense, though — even though he was a louse and a heel and a case-hardened egomaniac, if it came down to a choice of which was going to be wiped out, those monsters or humanity… sure he would…
“Okay, Blackie. You give your word?”
“I give my word to act as one of your party until this Chloran thing is settled, one way or the other.”
A few days later, the ultra-fast speedster that Seaton had left on Ray-See-Nee hailed the Valeron, matched velocities with her, and was drawn aboard. Three women disembarked; one of whom was Kay-Lee Barlo. She introduced her black-haired mother, Madame Barlo; who, with the added poise and maturity of her extra twenty-odd years, was even better-looking than her daughter. She in turn introduced her mother, Grand Dame Barlo, who did not have a single white hair in her thick brown thatch and who did not look more than half as old as she must in reality have been.
“But, listen,” Seaton said. “You couldn’t use any sixth order stuff at first, so you must have been on the way for weeks. What happened? Trouble with the Chlorans?”
He had been talking to Kay-Lee, but her mother, who was very evidently the head of the party, answered him. “Oh, no. That is, they’ve tripled the quotas—” Seaton shot a glance at Crane. That tied in! — “but with the new machinery that did not bother us at all. No. We learned many weeks ago that you would have need of us, so we came.”
“Huh?” Seaton demanded, inelegantly. “What need?”
“We do not surely know. All we know is that it is written upon the Scroll that a time of need will come, and soon. All Ray-See-Nee is enormously and eternally in your debt: we are here to repay a tiny portion of that debt.”
“Can’t you tell me more about it than that?”
“A little; not much. We received your original message, but at that time there was nothing to connect it with you as Ky-El Mokak. In studying it we encountered something unknown upon Ray-See-Nee that increased a hundredfold our range and scope and strength: three male poles of power of tremendous magnitude, men who, we found out later, you already know. They are Drasnik and Fodan of the planet Norlamin and Sacner Carfon of Dasor. With three such pairs of poles of power — three is the one perfect number, you know — it was a simple matter to locate those interested in your message, to develop the powers that had been latent in such people as yourself—”