Skylark duquesne, p.19
Skylark Duquesne, page 19
Seaton grinned. "She had only one patient." He told his own story, then went on, "Since we can all walk, let's go over and see what they're finding out."
Ree-Toe Prenk had said that he wanted all thirty-one of the department heads taken alive if possible; but he had known that it would not be possible. He was surprised and highly pleased, in fact, that only six of the High Exalteds had been killed or had taken their own lives.
There is no need to go into the details of that questioning. Seaton took no part in any of it; nor did any of his group. He did not offer to help and Prenk did not ask him.
Nor is it necessary to describe the operation outside the palace. The rebels had learned much from their previous failure, and they now had all the arms, ammunition and supplies they needed. Thus, before sunset that day every known quisling had been shot and every suspect was under surveillance. Premier Ree-Toe Prenk sat firmly in the Capitol City's saddle; and whoever controlled that city always controlled the world.
Hours before control was assured, however, Prenk called Seaton. "About the daily report to Chloran headquarters that is due in half an hour," the new Premier said. "I am wondering if you have any ideas. Our ordinary reports are not dangerous to make, since they are made to underlings whose only interest in the human race is to encode and file our reports properly. But, since their automatic instruments have recorded much of this change of government, it will have to be reported in detail. And a Great One, or even a Greater Great One, may become interested, in which case the reporter's mind may be searched." Prenk looked thoughtful, then shook his head. "There's no use trying to gloss it over. In an event like this the Greatest Great One himself will very probably become interested and the reporter will die on the spot. In any case, even with an ordinary Great One, his mind will be shattered for life."
"I see," Seaton said. "I didn't think of it, but I'm not surprised. We've tangled with Chlorans before. But cheer up. I locked eyes with their Supreme Great One..."
"You didn't!" Prenk broke in, - in amazement. "You actually did?"
"I actually did, and I knocked him-it?-loose from his teeth." Regretfully Seaton added, "But we can't make a. battle out of this." He scowled in concentration for a minute, then went on, "Okay, there's more than one way to stuff a goose. I'll make the report. Let's go."
Wherefore, twenty-five minutes later, Seaton sat at an ultra-communicator panel in Communications, ready to flip a switch.
The reporter whose shift it was stood off to one side, out of the cone of vision of the screen. Crane sat-gingerly, sidewise, and on a soft pillow-well within the cone of visibility of the screen, at what looked like an ordinary communications panel, but was in fact a battery of all the analytical instruments known to the science of Norlamin.
"But, Your Exalted," said the highly nervous reporter. "I'm very glad indeed that you're doing this instead of me, but won't they notice that it isn't me? And probably do something about it?"
"I'm sure they won't." Seaton had already considered the point. "I doubt very much, in view of their contempt for other races, if they ever bother to differentiate between any one human being and any other one. Like us and beetles."
The reporter breathed relief. "They probably don't, sir, at that. They don't seem to pay any attention to us as individuals."
Seaton braced himself and, exactly on the tick of time, flipped the switch. Knowing that the amoeboids could assume any physical form they pleased and as a matter of course assumed the form most suitable for the job, he was not surprised to see that the filing clerk looked like an overgrown centipede with a hundred or so long, flexible tentacles ending in three-fingered "hands"-a dozen or so of which were manipulating the gadgetry of a weirdly complex instrument-panel. He was somewhat surprised, however, in spite of what he had been told, that the thing did not develop an eye and look at him; did not even direct a thought at him. Instead:
"I am ready, slave," a deep bass voice rolled from the speaker, in the language of Prenk's planet Ray-See-Nee. "Start the tape."
Seaton pressed a button; the tape began to travel through the sender. For perhaps five minutes nothing happened. Then the sender stopped and a deeper, heavier voice came from the speaker: a voice directed at the filing clerk, but using Rayseenese...
Why? Seaton wondered to himself. Oh, I see. Soften 'em up. Scare the pants off of 'em, then put on the screws.
"Yield, clerk," the new voice said.
"I yield with pleasure O Great One," the clerk replied, and went rigidly motionless; not moving a finger or a foot.
"It pleases me to study this matter myself," the giant voice went on as though the clerk had not spoken. "While slight, the possibility does exist that some of these verminous creatures have dared to plot against the Race Supreme. If this is merely another squabble among themselves for place it is of no interest; but if there is any trace of nonsubmission, vermin and city will cease to exist. I shall learn the deepest truth. They can make lying tapes, but no entity of this or of any other galaxy can lie to a Great One mind to mind."
While the Great One talked, the picture on the screen began to change. The clerk began to fade out and something else began to thicken in. And Seaton, knowing what was coming, set himself in earnest and brought into play that part of his multi-compartmented mind that was the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of Norlamin.
This coming interview, he knew, must be vastly different from his meeting with the Supreme Great One of Chlora One. That had been a wide-open, hammer-and-tongs battle; a battle of sheer power of mind. Here it would have to be a matter of delicacy of control; of precision and of nicety and of skill as well as of power. He would have to play his mind as exactly and as subtly as Dorothy played her Stradivarius, for if the monster came to suspect any iota of the truth all hell would be out for noon with no pitch hot.
The screen cleared and Seaton saw what he had known he would see; a large, flatly ellipsoidal mass of something that was not quite a jelly not quite a solid; a monstrosity through whose transparent outer membrane there was visible a large, intricately convoluted brain. As Seaton looked at the thing it developed an immense eye, from which there poured directly into Seaton's brain a beam of mental energy so incredibly powerful as to be almost tangible physically.
Braced as he was, every element of the man's mind quivered under the impact of that callously hard-driven probe; but by exerting all his tremendous mental might he took it.
More, he was able to hold his Drasnik-taught defenses so tightly as to reveal only and precisely what the Great One expected to find-utter helplessness and abject submission.
That probe was not designed to kill. Or rather, the Great One did not care in the least whether it killed or not. It was intended to elicit the complete truth; and from any ordinary human mind it did.
"Can you lie to me, slave?" That tremendous voice resounded throughout every chamber of Seaton's mind. "Or withhold from me any iota of the truth?"
"I cannot lie to you, O Great One; nor withhold from you any iota, however small, of the truth." This took everything of camouflage and of defensive screen Seaton had; but he managed to reveal no sign at all of any of it.
"How much do you personally know, not of the details of the coup d'etat itself, but of the motivation underlying it?"
"Everything, O Great One, since I was Premier Ree-Toe Prenk's right-hand man," and Seaton reported the exact truth of Prenk's motivation and planning.
The Great One's probe vanished, the screen went dark, and the sender resumed its sending.
"Huh!" Seaton wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. " 'This dope isn't of any interest, clerk old boy, so just file it away and forget it,' His Nibs says. It's a good thing he was after Prenk's motivation, not mine. If he'd really bored in after mine I don't know whether I could have kept things all nice and peaceful or not. I knew I'd been nudged, believe you me."
"I believe you," Crane said, looking into his friend's eyes. "Are you sure you're all right?"
And: The reporter goggled in awe: "And you can still talk intelligently, sir?"
"Yeah." Seaton answered both questions at once, but did not elaborate. "What did you get, Mart? Anything?"
"I learned where it is," said Crane. Nothing else.
Small reward for weeks of effort and risk of life... and yet it was for that the entire campaign on the planet RaySee-Nee had been waged! The whole operation had been designed to get that one fact. A people had been given new hope; some hundreds had lost their lives; many thousands had received scars they would bear a long time; a regime had been deposed and a new one put in power.
But these were only by-products, only the small change of a victory which justified all of Seaton's efforts... and would have its consequences in every part of the Universe, for incalculable times to come!
21 LLAMZLAM MERGON
RAY-SEE-NEE's new department heads, in their meeting with Premier Ree-Toe Prenk in the Room of State, were in unanimous agreement that everything was under control.
Some quislings and recalcitrants had been shot and a few more would probably have to be. That was only to be expected. Yes, since all of the new incumbents had been jumped many grades in status and in authority and in salary, there was and would continue to be a certain amount of jealousy; but that was not of very much importance. The jealous ones would either accept the facts of life or be shot. Period.
After the meeting was over Kay-Lee Barlo came up to Seaton. She now bore herself as though she had been born an Exalted; her ex-boss' pistol swung jauntily at one very female hip as she walked. As she came up to him and took both his hands in hers, standing so close to him that her upstanding, outstanding hair-do almost tickled his nose, it became evident that her weapon had been fired quite recently. She wore no perfume, and the faint but unmistakable acrid odor of burned smokeless powder still clung to her hair.
"Oh, Ky-El!" she exclaimed, equal to equal now. "I'll simply never be able to thank you enough. Nor will all Ray-See-Nee. This world will be an entirely different place to live on hereafter."
"I sincerely hope so, Kay-Lee." Seaton smiled into the girl's eager, expressive face.
"Ray-See-Nee is lucky to have had as strong, able and just a man as Ree-Toe Prenk to take over."
"As you said a while back, 'You can say that again.' He's all of that. What he's done already is marvelous. But everyone knows-he does, too, he's put you up on a pedestal a mile high-that it's you who put him in the saddle. That's what I wanted mostly to tell you.
Also, I wanted to ask you-" she paused and flushed slightly-"you'll forget, won't you please, what I said about that louse's brains? I didn't mean that, really; I'm not the type to cherish a grudge like that. I was a little... well, I'd been a little put out with him, just before you came in." With which masterpiece of understatement she gave his hands another vigorous, friendly squeeze and, swinging around, walked hip-wiggling out of the room.
She thereupon took certain steps and performed certain actions which would have astonished Seaton very much, had he known about them. But he did not-until much later.
Prenk came up to the Skylarkers a few minutes later. He shook hands with each of the off-worlders; thanked them in rounded phrases. "I would like very much to have you stay here indefinitely, friends," he concluded, "but I know of course that that is impossible. If all the resources of the world could be devoted to the project and if all our technical men could work on it undetected for a year, we could not build anything able to withstand those Chlorans' beams."
"We can't either. Not here," Seaton said. "That's why we have to go; but we'll be back. I don't know when; but we'll be back some day."
"I'm sure you will: and may Great My-Ko-Ta ward you and cherish you as you build."
Back on what was left of their worldlet, now reconditioned to the extent that it was not likely to fall apart on the spot, and out in deep space once more, the Skylarkers began efficiently and expertly to put the pieces of their victory together.
They had located the Enemy. They even had an operating covert base in Chloran territory, to which they could return at any time. They had weapons which, in theory at least, could cope with anything the Chlorans were likely to own.
Yet Seaton fretted. The weapons were there, but his control was not adequate; the weapons had outgrown the control. Dealing with Chlorans was touchy business. You wanted all the space you could get between you and them. Yet, at any operating range which even Seaton, to say nothing of Crane and the others, considered safe, their striking power was simply too erratic to depend on.
"It's a bust," Seaton said gloomily. "Course, if worst came to worst I could go back to undercover methods. Smuggle in a bomb, maybe-just to throw their main centers off balance while the rest of you hit them with all we've got. I could stow away aboard one of those ore-scows taking the booty off Ray-See-Nee easily enough-"
"You talk like a man with a paper nose," Dorothy scoffed. "I have a picture of that expedition-of you in armor, with air-tanks strapped on your back and lugging an underwater camera or projector around. Un-noticed... I don't think."
And Dunark added, "And since you haven't got any idea of what to look for, you'd have to lug around a full analsynth set-up. A couple of tons of stuff. Uh-uh."
Seaton grinned, unperturbed. "That's what I was coming to. Getting in would be easy, but doing anything wouldn't. And neither would getting out. But Mart, we've chopped one horn off of the dilemma, but we haven't even touched the other. We've got to master that fourth-dimension rig; and we're not even close. It's a matter of kind, not merely of degree."
"I can't see that. If so, we could not have warded off their attack at all."
"Oh, I didn't mean the energies themselves; it's the control of that much stuff.
Synchronization, phasing in, combination, and so forth. Getting such stuff as that closely enough together. Look, Mart. This bit that we've got left of the Valeron is stuffed with machinery practically to the skin. She's so small, relatively, that you wouldn't think there'd be any trouble meshing in machines from various parts of her. But there is. Plenty. It never showed up before because we never had to use a fraction of our total power before, but it showed up plenty back there. My beam was loose as ashes, and I've figured out why.
"Sixth-order stuff moves as many times faster than light as light does faster than a snail- maybe more. But it still takes a little time to get from one machine to another, inside even as small a globe as this is. See?"
Crane frowned in thought. "I see. I also see what the difficulties would be in anything large enough and strong enough to attack the Chlorans. It would mean timing each generator and each element of each projector; and each with a permissible variation of an infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond. That, of course, means Rovol and Caslor." "I suppose it does... unless we can figure out an easier, faster way... I don't know whether the Chlorans have got anything like that or not, but they've got something. There ought to be some way of snitching it off of them."
"Why must they have?" Dunark demanded. "It's probably just a matter of size. They have a whole planet to fortify. Dozens of 'em if they want to. So it doesn't have to be a matter of refinement at all. Just brutal, piled up, overwhelming power."
"Could be," Seaton agreed. "If so, we can't match it, since the Valeron was as big as she could be and still have a factor of safety of two point two." He paused in thought, then went on, "But with such refinement, we could take a planet no matter how loaded it was... I think. So maybe we'd better take off for Norlamin, at that."
"One thing we should do first, perhaps," Dorothy suggested. "Find out what that DuQuesne really did. He has me worried."
"Maybe we should at that," Seaton agreed. "I'd forgotten all about the big black ape."
It was easy enough to find the line along which DuQuesne had traveled; the plug-chart was proof that he had not lied about that. They reached without incident the neighborhood of the point DuQuesne had marked on the chart. Seaton sent out a working projection of the device that, by intercepting and amplifying light-waves traversing open space, enabled him actually to see events that had happened in the not- too distant past.
He found the scene he wanted. He studied it, analyzed and recorded it. Then: "He lied to me almost a hundred and eighty degrees," Seaton said. "That beam came from that galaxy over there." He jerked a thumb. "The alien who bothered him was in that galaxy. That much I'll buy. But it doesn't make sense that he'd go there. That alien was nobody he wanted to monkey with, that's for dead sure. So where did he meet the Jelmi, if not in that galaxy?"
"On the moon, perhaps," Margaret said.
"Possibly. I'll compute it... no, the timing isn't right--2' Seaton thought for a moment- "but there's no use guessing. That galaxy may be the first place to look for sign; but I'll bet my case buck it'll be a long, cold hunt. I'd like awfully well to have that gizmo---flip bombs past the Chlorans' screens and walls with it..."
"From a distance greater than their working range?" Crane asked.
"That's so, too... or maybe so, at that, chum. Who knows what you can do through the fourth? But it looks as though our best bet is to beat it to Norlamin, rebuild this wreck, and tear into that business of refinement of synchronization. So say you all?"
So said they all and Seaton, flipping on full-power sixth order drive, set course for Norlamin.
As the student will be aware, the events in this climactic struggle .between the arch- enemies, Seaton and DuQuesne, were at this point reaching an area of maximum tension. It is curious to reflect that the outer symptom of this internal disruptive stress was, in the case of nearly every major component of the events to come, a psychological state of either satisfied achievement, or contented decision, or calm resignation. It is as though each of the major operatives were suffering from a universe-wide sense of false tranquility. On Ray-See-Nee, the new government felt its problems were behind it and only a period of solid, rewarding rebuilding lay ahead. (Although Kay-Lee Barlo had taken certain prudent precautions against this hope being illusory -as we shall see.) The Chlorans, proud and scornful in their absolute supremacy, had no hint that Seaton or anyone else was making or even proposed to make any effective moves against them.
