“Now he’s a part of that stream of electrons, right?” Cercy asked.
“That’s what he told us,” Malley said.
“But still keeping his pattern, within the stream,” Cercy continued. “He has to, in order to get back into his own shape. Now we start the first disrupter.”
Harrison hooked the machine into circuit, and sent his helpers away.
“Here’s a running graph of the electron stream,” Cercy said. “See the difference?” On the graph there was an irregular series of peaks and valleys, constantly shifting and leveling. “Do you remember when you hypnotized the Ambassador? He talked about his friend who’d been killed in space.”
“That’s right,” Malley nodded. “His friend had been killed by something that had just popped up.”
“He said something else,” Cercy went on. “He told us that the basic organizing force of the Universe usually stopped things like that. What does that mean to you?”
“The organizing force,” Malley repeated slowly. “Didn’t Darrig say that that was a new natural law?”
“He did. But think of the implications, as Darrig did. If an organizing principle is engaged in some work, there must be something that opposes it. That which opposes organization is—”
“Chaos!”
“That’s what Darrig thought, and what we should have seen. The chaos is underlying, and out of it there arose an organizing principle. This principle, if I’ve got it right, sought to suppress the fundamental chaos, to make all things regular.
“But the chaos still boils out in spots, as Alfern found out. Perhaps the organizational pattern is weaker in space. Anyhow, those spots are dangerous, until the organizing principle gets to work on them.”
He turned to the panel. “Okay, Harrison. Throw in the second disrupter.” The peaks and valleys altered on the graph. They started to mount in crazy, meaningless configurations.
“Take Darrig’s message in the light of that. Chaos, we know, is underlying. Everything was formed out of it. The Gorgon Medusa was something that couldn’t be looked upon. She turned men into stone, you recall, destroyed them. So, Darrig found a relationship between chaos and that which can’t be looked upon. All with regard to the Ambassador, of course.”
“The Ambassador can’t look upon chaos!” Malley cried.
“That’s it. The Ambassador is capable of an infinite number of alterations and permutations. But something—the matrix—can’t change, because then there would be nothing left. To destroy something as abstract as a pattern, we need a state in which no pattern is possible. A state of chaos.”
The third disrupter was thrown into circuit. The graph looked as if a drunken caterpillar had been sketching on it.
“Those disrupters are Harrison’s idea,” Cercy said. “I told him I wanted an electrical current with absolutely no coherent pattern. The disrupters are an extension of radio jamming. The first alters the electrical pattern. That’s its purpose: to produce a state of patternlessness. The second tries to destroy the pattern left by the first; the third tries to destroy the pattern made by the first two. They’re fed back then, and any remaining pattern is systematically destroyed in circuit…I hope.”
“This is supposed to produce a state of chaos?” Malley asked, looking into the screen.
For a while there was only the whining of the machines and the crazy doodling of the graph. Then, in the middle of the Ambassador’s room, a spot appeared. It wavered, shrunk, expanded—
What happened was indescribable. All they knew was that everything within the spot had disappeared.
“Switch it off” Cercy shouted. Harrison cut the switch.
The spot continued to grow.
“How is it we’re able to look at it?” Malley asked, staring at the screen.
“The shield of Perseus, remember?” Cercy said. “Using it as a mirror, he could look at Medusa.”
“It’s still growing!” Malley shouted.
“There was a calculated risk in all this,” Cercy said. “There’s always the possibility that the chaos may go on, unchecked. If that happens, it won’t matter much what—”
The spot stopped growing. Its edges wavered and rippled, and then it started to shrink.
“The organizing principle,” Cercy said, and collapsed into a chair.
“Any sign of the Ambassador?” he asked, in a few minutes.
The spot was still wavering. Then it was gone. Instantly there was an explosion. The steel walls buckled inward, but held. The screen went dead.
“The spot removed all the air from the room,” Cercy explained, “as well as the furniture and the Ambassador.”
“He couldn’t take it,” Malley said. “No pattern can cohere, in a state of patternlessness. He’s gone to join Alfern.”
Malley started to giggle. Cercy felt like joining him, but pulled himself together.
“Take it easy,” he said. “We’re not through yet.”
“Sure we are! The Ambassador—”
“Is out of the way. But there’s still an alien fleet homing in on this region of space. A fleet so strong we couldn’t scratch it with an H-bomb. They’ll be looking for us.”
He stood up.
“Go home and get some sleep. Something tells me that tomorrow we’re going to have to start figuring out some way of camouflaging a planet.”
WARRIOR RACE
They never did discover whose fault it was. Fannia pointed out that if Donnaught had had the brains of an ox, as well as the build, he would have remembered to check the tanks. Donnaught, although twice as big as him, wasn’t quite as fast with an insult. He intimated, after a little thought, that Fannia’s nose might have obstructed his reading of the fuel gauge.
This still left them twenty light-years from Thetis, with a cupful of transformer fuel in the emergency tank.
“All right,” Fannia said presently. “What’s done is done. We can squeeze about three light-years out of the fuel before we’re back on atomics. Hand me The Galactic Pilot—unless you forgot that, too.”
Donnaught dragged the bulky microfilm volume out of its locker, and they explored its pages.
The Galactic Pilot told them they were in a sparse, seldom-visited section of space, which they already knew. The nearest planetary system was Hatterfield; no intelligent life there. Sersus had a native population, but no refueling facilities. The same with Illed, Hung and Porderai.
“Ah-ha!” Fannia said. “Read that, Donnaught. If you can read, that is.”
“Cascella,” Donnaught read, slowly and clearly, following the line with a thick forefinger. “Type M sun. Three planets, intelligent (AA3C) human-type life on second. Oxygen-breathers. Non-mechanical. Religious. Friendly. Unique social structure, described in Galactic Survey Report 33877242. Population estimate: stable at three billion. Basic Cascellan vocabulary taped under Cas33b2. Scheduled for resurvey 2375 A.D. Cache of transformer fuel left, beam coordinate 8741 kgl. Physical descript: Unocc. flatland.”
“Transformer fuel, boy!” Fannia said gleefully. “I believe we will get to Thetis, after all.” He punched the new direction on the ship’s tape. “If that fuel’s still there.”
“Should we read up on the unique social structure?” Donnaught asked, still poring over The Galactic Pilot.
“Certainly,” Fannia said. “Just step over to the main galactic base on Earth and buy me a copy.”
“I forgot,” Donnaught admitted slowly.
“Let me see,” Fannia said, dragging out the ship’s language library, “Cascellan, Cascellan… Here it is. Be good while I learn the language.” He set the tape in the hypnophone and switched it on. “Another useless tongue in my overstuffed head,” he murmured, and then the hypnophone took over.
* * * *
Coming out of transformer drive with at least a drop of fuel left, they switched to atomics. Fannia rode the beam right across the planet, locating the slender metal spire of the Galactic Survey cache. The plain was no longer unoccupied, however. The Cascellans had built a city around the cache, and the spire dominated the crude wood-and-mud buildings.