The mighty screen showed a sight fearful enough to chill any man’s gusto.
Ahead was a broad sweep of space, jeweled with winking stars. Dead-center glowed softly a small yellow sun, with the tiny green crescent of their target, the Nucleus-world, hanging pendant to it. But between the fleet and the yellow star—
There were seven of them, black serpentine shapes hovering in the chill vacuum of deep space on stupendous, slowly-beating wings, fanged like world-huge bats of space. In that endless, dizzy moment, as reason swayed and tottered on the red brink of madness, Abdekiel somehow found time to wonder what those giant bat-wings beat against, in the airless void? Light-wavicles, perhaps, or even quanta-bundles … he knew not … but knew at a glance that these seven monsters were in motion, sliding ponderously through the stars directly at the Barbarian fleet… .
“Space-dragons!” Tonguth whispered. “I have heard legends of them, but never saw them in the flesh till now. Their wing-span must be a full million miles! Look at those mouths … vast enough to engulf a moon at a single gulp!”
“It is not possible … space-life,” the shaman hissed, face draining to a sickly, dead hue. “Their bodies must be mailed and armored with fantastic density, to endure the biting cold of the airless void.”
“Those wings are vast enough to enshadow a world,” old Gorm moaned from his control console. “What shall we do, Lord? My radarscopes give but a blur of ‘noise’—but vision alone tells me they are traveling straight towards us, and at a speed equal to our own. Shall we turn aside?”
“Not yet—not yet!” Drask’s voice rang harshly against the throbbing silence. “We turn aside for nothing! Man the laser-cannons! Perhaps we can blast them out of space!”
“They will be upon us in another instant,” Shangkar growled, clasping his axe futilely, eyes blazing with desperate fury.
Long snake-necks extended, eyes blazing venomous green fire, fanged maws gaping open, the seven space-dragons closed with the nomad-fleet—and half a hundred laser-cannons bellowed with incandescent fury, ravening beams of raw energy pouring through the void, lighting half a solar system with their blasts of inconceivable heat.
No substance known in all the mighty Universe of Stars could withstand such an assault for more than seconds. The massive shield of a planet would itself vomit forth stupendous plumes of incandescent gas before those batteries of disintegrating force.
The space-pirates held their breaths, waiting, hoping—
Then panic truly struck.
For the dragons came imperturbably on, in the face of the blinding beams of naked energy. Not a single league-long scale of their impregnable bodies was injured by the dazzing fury of the rays!
10.
THE COUNCIL OF WIZARDS
LURN FELT as if the last few days had been a weird, fantastic dream. Events so curious and different, jammed into so brief a span of time, lent a sense of nightmarish unreality to her experiences.
First, Drask’s discovery of her secret role as spy for the Goddess, then imprisonment, miraculous escape, the incredible unmasking of Perion as the mysterious and mighty White Wizard of Parlion … then their swift departure from the trader’s world and the race through space to weird, ghostly Xulthoom. She had watched with awe and amazement Calastor’s heroic struggle to destroy the Star Rovers and prevent their inexorable attack on the Nucleus-world.
For two days and nights the White Wizard remained awake, strapped to a battery of fantastic machines, a curious crystal helmet fastened to his head. With the aid of obscure antisomnificant drugs from remote Delaquoth the World of the Narcotic-Blenders, he had conquered fatigue and sleep, staving off exhaustion for fifty-three hours, while his amazingly-developed brain, amplified by mechanistic means, probed the Mist-World far below their invisible, orbiting ship.
To her, this was magic of the most inexplicable kind. But he had carefully explained the scientific principles behind what he was attempting to perform.
“We of the White Adepts know that the ultimate weapon is a medium for the conquest of the human mind,” he had explained to her as they ate a simple, hurried meal. “Men have always realized this, and from the dawn of history have invented various means of overcoming the minds of others … from the indirect attempts of poetry, music, propaganda, semantics, and psychology, through more blunt and overwhelming devices: hypnosis, narcotics, and the like.”
He had gestured towards the complex device into which he would soon be strapped again. “The ultimate perfection is simplicity itself. Mastery of a human mind can only be achieved through fullest use of another human mind. This instrument amplifies and focuses my mental images, broadcasting them to receptive minds on Xulthoom below. I am trying to play upon the primitive terrors and superstitions which are integral to the nature of the Barbarian, and his chief weakness.”
He grinned, a flash of mischief momentarily relieving the pallor of weariness and strain in his face.
“The Warlord’s choice of Xulthoom as the next milestone in his pattern of conquest played directly into my hands—thanks be to Shalakh, Lord of Luck! With its repellent Hooded Men, the brooding mystery of the age-old castle, the mind-torturing monotony of the crystalline desert, the ever-whining wind, the illusion-making mists, it seems almost created and designed with my plan in mind! So I envision for them black phantoms … whispering voices … icy, clutching fingers … and the tight-beam broadcasts the artificial emotion of terror into the consciousness of the Rovers, until by now they are starting at every shadow, every sound, their tempers exploding into murderous rage at the slightest opposition or fancied insult. A few more days of this and I will have the entire fleet at each others’ throats!”
“It still sounds like sorcery to me, the more you try to explain it by science,” Lurn confessed, pouring him another cup of steaming, fragrant kaf.
“Not really. The phenomenon we call ‘thought’ is simply a coded pattern of electrical impulses. The human brain is really nothing more or less than a marvelously compact and efficient electrochemical battery. The Adepts of Parlion discovered by sheer accident the dynamics that led up to the perfection of this device.” He nodded at the crystal helmet “They were exploring the full length of the electromagnetic spectrum, seeking to fill in the blank spots in our mastery of the full range of waveforms of radiant energy—”
He broke off, seeing the bafflement in her great wondering eyes—lovely eyes, it suddenly occurred to him, and in a hauntingly beautiful face.
“It begins to sound like magic when I begin to use these technical terms, eh? Well, let me put it this way. Light travels in waves, Lurn, like the ripples on a still pond. The color of this light is controlled by the distance between the ripples. Ripples very close together strike the nerves in our eyes in a steady stream. Rat-tat-tatatat. We see a color—purple. Ripples further apart—‘slower’ waves, rat … tat … tat—we see blue. The slower the wave, and we go through the colors, blue, green, yellow, to red. Are you understanding this?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Listen carefully, then. For upon this is based all of the magic and miracles of Parlion. This is the secret of our power.” ( … Speaking of color, he thought, bemused, her eyes are dimmest, shadowy purple… .) Firmly exerting control over his wandering thoughts, he continued his revelations.
“Now, beyond the colors we can see, light continues to vibrate—in both directions, ‘slower’ at one end, to what we call infrared rays, down all the way to radio waves. The distance between one ‘wavecrest’ and the next, in the radio-section of the spectrum, is astonishingly large, measured in kilometers. While up above the octave of visible light, at the purple end as you might say, are ultraviolet rays—the invisible part of sunlight that tans your skin. Above that— and the waves are getting closer together all the time, remember—come x-rays, gamma and lambda radiation, cosmic rays and, presumably, even higher wavelengths. You see, girl, all forms of energy seem to belong to the spectrum. The difference between radio, light, and cosmic rays is just a matter of frequency—the ‘quickness’ or ‘slowness’ with which the waves ‘hit’ an object.”