“What?” Seaton yelped. That was all he could get out. ” — and Dr. DuQuesne and others, yes,” Madame Barlo went on smoothly. “You were, of course, not aware you possessed them.”
“That’s putting it mildly, ace,” said Seaton. “You mean l am… I hate to use the word… well, ‘psychic’?”
“The word is of no importance,” said the woman impatiently. “Use any word you like. The fact is that you do have this power; we have developed it… and we now propose to put it to use.”
Seaton’s reply to that has not been recorded for posterity. Perhaps it is as well. Let it only be said that even twenty-four hours later he was no more than half-convinced… but it was the half of him that was convinced that was governing his actions.
One of the data that helped convince him was the fact that Madame Barlo and her daughter had not merely located these “poles of power” — they had summoned them to the Skylark! They had not waited for Seaton’s concurrence; before Seaton even knew what they were up to, all the named individuals from three galaxies and a dozen planets were on the way.
A shipload of Norlaminians and Dasorians — including the three pre-eminent “male poles of power” — was the contingent first to arrive. Then came Tammon and Sennlloy and Mergon and Luloy and half a hundred other Jelmi; bringing with them three Tellurians:
Madlyn Mannis, the red-haired stripper; Doctor Stephanie de Marigny of the Rare Metals Laboratory; and Charles K. van der Gleiss, Petrochemical Engineer T-8. And last, but by less than an hour, came Marc C. DuQuesne in person.
“Hi, Hunkie,” he said, shaking hands cordially. “A little out of your regular orbit? Like me?”
“More than a little, Blackie — like you.” She showed two deep dimples in a wide and friendly smile. “And if you have any idea of what I’m here for I’d be delighted to have you tell me what it is.”
“I scarcely know what I’m here for myself,” and DuQuesne turned to the others; nodding at them as though he had left them only minutes before. He was no whit embarrassed or ill at ease; nor conscious of any resentment or ill will directed at him. He was actually as unconcerned as, and bore himself very much like, a world-renowned specialist called into consultation on an unusually difficult case.
Before the situation could become strained, the three Rayseenian women came into the big conference room and approached the conference table-a table forty feet long and three feet wide.
Their faces were white; their eyes were wide and staring. All three were doped to the ears. “Doctor Seaton,” Madam Barlo said, “you will cover the top of this table with one large sheet of paper, please?”
Seaton donned his helmet and a sheet of drafting paper covered exactly the table’s top, adhering to it as though glued down.
“You mean to say, Doc, you’re going along with this magic flummery?” one of the Jelmi asked.
“I certainly am,” Seaton said. “You will leave the room until this test is over. So will everyone else with a mind closed to what these women are trying to do.” The scoffer and two other Jelmi walked toward the door and Seaton quirked an eyebrow at DuQuesne.
“I’m staying,” that worthy said. “I can’t say that I’m a hundred per cent sold; but I’m interested enough to give it a solid try.”
The two older women stationed themselves, one at each end of the table; Kay-Lee stood at her mother’s right, holding in her hand a red-ink ballpoint at least a foot long.
Majestic Fodan, the Chief of the Five of Norlamin, stood behind Madame Barlo, but did not touch her; Drasnik and Sacner Carfon stood similarly behind Grand Dame Barlo and Kay-Lee. Each of the three women rubbed a drop of something (it was actually Seaton’s citrated blood) between thumb and forefinger and Madame Barlo said:
“You will all look fixedly at any one of the six of us and think of our success with everything that in you lies. Help us with all your might to succeed; give us your total mental strength. Kay-Lee, daughter, the time is… now!”
Reaching across the end of the table, Kay-Lee began to write a column eighteen inches wide; the height of which was to be the thirty-six-inch width of the table. When she got to the middle of the fourth line, however, a man gasped in astonishment and the pen’s point stopped. This Jelm, a mathematician, had let his eyes slip from the operator to the paper — and what he saw was high — very high! — math! Mathematics of a complexity that none of those women, by any possible stretch of the imagination, could know anything about!
“Quit peeking!” Seaton snarled, “You’re lousing up the whole deal! Concentrate! Think, dammit, THINK!” Everyone resumed thinking and Kay-Lee resumed writing. She wrote smoothly and effortlessly, with the precision and with almost the speed of the operating point of a geometric lathe.
She wrote the first column and the second and the third and the fourth-six feet by three feet of tightly packed equations and other mathematical shorthand. Then came twelve feet of exquisitely detailed “wiring” diagram. Then, covering all the rest of the paper, came working drawings of and meticulously detailed specifications for machines that no one there had ever heard of.
Then all three women collapsed. As well they might; they had worked without a let-up for three hours.
Men and women sprang to their aid with restoratives, and they began to recover.
“Mister Fodan,” Madlyn Mannis said then, coming up to the Chief of the Five arm-in-arm with Stephanie de Marigny. Her usually vivid face was strangely pale. “I can understand Hunkie here having a place in a brawl like this, she’s got half the letters in the alphabet after her name, but what good could I do? Possibly? I only went to school one day in my life and that day it rained and the teacher didn’t come.”
“Formal education does not matter, child; it is what you intrinsically are that counts. You and your friend Charles are two perfectly matched male and female poles of tremendous power. You felt your paired power at work, I’m sure.”
“Wel-l-l, I felt something.” Madlyn looked up at her Charley, her eyes full of question marks. “My whole brain was full of… well, it was all kind of spizzly, like champagne tastes.” And:
“That’s it exactly,” van der Gleiss agreed.
Kay-Lee, fully recovered now, looked in surprise at some of the equations she had written, then turned to Sacner Carfon. “Did it come out all right?” she asked hopefully.
“Oh, I hope it did!”
“I think so,” the porpoise-man replied. “At least, all of it I can understand makes sense.”
The T-8 engineer stared at Kay-Lee. “But didn’t you know what you were doing?”
“Of course she didn’t.” Again Madame Barlo did the talking. “None of us did, consciously. We are not masters of The Power, but Its servants. We are merely Its tools; the agents through which It does Its work.”
And, off to one side, Dorothy was saying, “Dick, those women actually are witches! I liked Kay-Lee, too… but real, live, practicing witches! I got goose bumps as big as peas. I don’t believe in witchcraft, darn it!”
“I don’t either. That is, I never did before… but what else are you going to call it now?”
28. PROJECT RHO
THE mathematicians and physical scientists began at once to study the wealth of new data. Drasnik, the First of Psychology, after conferring with Fodan, with Sacner Carfon and with each of the three witches in turn, actually rushed over to the group of Tellurians. It was the first time Seaton had ever seen an excited Norlaminian.