Sexton did not answer at first, then only nodded. “Magic” was still a much less than real concept to him. He said, “If you say so — but remember the Peruvian Indian medicinemen and the cinchona bark that just happened to be full of quinine. So, whatever you want to call it — magic or extrasensory perception or an unknown band of the sixth or what-have-you — I’ll bet my last shirt it’ll be bio. And whoever pitches it at us will be good enough at it to know that they can hit us with it, so all we have to do about that is wait for it to happen. However, what I’m mostly interested in right now is nothing that far out, but what we know that a reincarnated Blackie DuQuesne could and probably would do.”
“Such as?”
“The first thing he’ll do, for all the tea in China, will be to design and set up some gadget or gizmo or technique to kill me with. Certainly me, and probably you, and quite possibly all of us.”
Dorothy and Margaret both gasped; but Crane nodded and said, “Check. I check you to your proverbial nineteen decimals. Also, and quite possibly along with that operation, an all-out attempt to reconquer Earth. He wouldn’t set out to destroy Earth, at this time, at least… would he, do you think?”
Sexton thought for seconds, then said, “My best guess would be no. He wants to boss it, not wipe it out. However, there are a few other things that might come…”
“Wait up, presh!” Dorothy snapped. “Those two will hold us for a while; especially the first one. I wish to go on record at this point to the effect that I want my husband alive, not dead.”
Sexton grinned. “You and me both, pet,” he said. “I’m in favor of it. Definitely. However, as long as I stay inside the Valeron here he doesn’t stand the chance of a snowflake in you-know-where of getting at me…”
How wrong Sexton was!
“… so the second point is the one that’s really of overriding importance. The rub is that we can’t make even a wild guess at when he’s going to get loose… He could be building his ship right now… so, Engineer Martin Crane, what’s your thought as to defending Earth; as adequately as possible but in the shortest possible time?”
Crane inhaled — slowly — a deep lungful of smoke, exhaled it even more slowly, and stubbed out the butt. “That’s a tall order, Dick,” he said, finally, “but I don’t think it’s hopeless. Since we know DuQuesne’s exact line of departure, we know at least approximately the line of his return. As a first-approximation idea we should, I think, cover that line thoroughly with hair-triggered automation. We should occupy the fourth and the fifth completely; thus taking care of everything we know that he knows… but as for the sixth…” Crane paused in thought.
“Yeah,” Sexton agreed. “That sixth order’s an entirely different breed of cats. It’s a pistol — a question with a capital Q. About all we can do on it, I’d say, is cover everything we know of it and then set up supersensitive analsynths coupled to all the automatic constructors and such-like gizmos we can dream up — with as big a gaggle of ground-and-lofty dreamers as we can round up. The Norlaminians, certainly; and Sacner Carfon for sure. If what he and Drasnik pulled off wasn’t magic it certainly was a remarkably reasonable facsimile thereof. All six of us; of course, and…”
“But what can you possibly want of us?” Shiro asked, and Dorothy said, “That goes double for Peggy and me, Dick. Of what good could we two possibly be, thinking about such stuff as that?”
Sexton flushed. “’Scuse, please; my error. I switched thinking without announcing the switch. I do know, though, that our minds all work differently — especially Shiro’s and double — especially Lotus’s — and that when you don’t have the faintest glimmering of what you’re getting into you don’t know what you’re going to have to have to cope with it.” He grinned.
“If you can untangle that, I mean,” he said.
“I think so,” said Crane, unruffled; he had had long practice in following Sexton’s lightning leaps past syntax. “And you think that this will enable us to deal with DuQuesne?”
“It’ll have to,” Sexton said positively. “One thing we know, something has to. He’s not going to send us a polite message asking to be friends — he’s going to hit with all he’s got. So,” he finished, “let’s hop to it. The Norlaminian observers’ reports are piling up on the tapes right now. And we’d all better keep our eyes peeled — as well as all the rest of our senses and instrumental — for Doctor Marc C. Blackie DuQuesne!”
And DuQuesne, so immensely far out in intergalactic space, at control board and computer, explored for ten solid hours the vastnesses of his new knowledge.
Then he donned a thought-helmet and thought himself up a snack; after eating which — scarcely tasting any part of it — he put in another ten solid hours of work. Then, leaning back in his form-fitting seat, he immersed himself in thought — and, being corporeal, no longer a pattern of pure force, went sound asleep.
He woke up a couple of hours later; stiff, groggy, and ravenous. He thought himself up a supper of steak and mushrooms, hashed browns, spinach, coffee, and apple pie a la mode. He ate it — with zest, this time — then sought his long-overdue bed.
In the morning, after a shower and a shave and a breakfast of crisp bacon and over-easy eggs, toast and butter and marmalade, and four cups of strong, black coffee, he sat down at his board and again went deep into thought. This time, he thought in words and sentences, the better to nail down his conclusions.
“One said I’d have precisely the same chance as before of living out my normal lifetime. Before what? Before the dematerialization or before Seaton got all that extra stuff?
Since he gave me sixth order drive, offense, defense, and communications, he could have — probably did — put me on a basis of equality with Seaton as of now. Would he have given me any more than that?”
DuQuesne paused and worked for ten busy minutes at computer and control board again. What he learned was in the form of curves and quantities, not words; he did not attempt to speak them aloud, but sat staring into space.
Then, satisfied that the probabilities were adequate to base a plan on, he spoke out loud again: “No. Why should he give me everything that Seaton’s got? He didn’t owe me anything.” To Blackie DuQuesne that was not a rueful complaint but a statement of fact. He went on. “Assume we both now have a relatively small part of the spectrum of the sixth-order forces, if I keep using this drive — Ouch! What the living hell was that?”
DuQuesne leaped to his feet. “That” had been a sixth-order probe, at the touch of which his vessel’s every course of defensive screen had flared into action.
DuQuesne was — not shaken, no. But he was surprised, and he didn’t like to be surprised.
There should have been no probes out here!
The probe had been cut off almost instantaneously; but “almost” instantaneously is not quite zero time, and sixth-order forces operate at the speed of thought. Hence, in that not-quite-zero instant of time during which the intruding mind had been in contact with his own, DuQuesne learned a little. The creature was undoubtedly highly intelligent and, as undoubtedly, unhuman to the point of monstrosity… and DuQuesne had no doubt whatever in his own mind that the alien would think the same of any Tellurian.
DuQuesne studied his board and saw, much to his surprise, that only one instrument showed any drain at all above maintenance level, and that one was a milliammeter — the needle of which was steady on the scale at a reading of one point three seven mils! He was not being attacked at all — merely being observed — and by an observation system that was using practically no power at all!
Donning a helmet, so as to be able himself to operate at the speed of thought, DuQuesne began — very skittishly and very gingerly indeed — to soften down his spheres and zones and shells and solid fields of defensive force. He softened and softened them down; down to the point at which a working projection could come through and work.