Multi-billion-dollar corporations were springing up all over Earth. Each sought out and began to develop a Tellus-type planet of its own, to bring up as a civilized planet or merely to exploit as it saw fit. Each was clamoring for and using every possible artifice of persuasion, lobbying, horse-trading, and out-and-out bribery and corruption to obtain — spaceships, personnel, machinery light and heavy, office equipment, and supplies. All the employables of Earth, and many theretofore considered unemployable, were at work.
Earth was a celestial madhouse…
It is no wonder, then, that Seaton and Crane were haggard and worn when they had to turn their jobs over to two upper-bracket Norlaminians and leave Earth.
Their situation thereafter was not much better.
The first steps were easy — anyway, the decisions involved were easy; the actual work involved was roughly equivalent to the energy budget of several Sol-type suns. It is an enormous project to set up a line of defense hundreds of thousands of miles long; especially when the setters-up do not know exactly what to expect in the way of attack.
They knew, in fact, only one thing: that the Norlaminians had made a probabilistic statement that Marc C. DuQuesne was likely to be present among them before long.
That was excuse, reason and compulsion enough to demand the largest and most protracted effort they could make. The mere preliminaries involved laying out axes of action that embraced many solar systems, locating and developing sources of materials and energies that were enough to smother a hundred suns. As that work began to shape up, Seaton and Crane came face to face with the secondary line of problems… and at that point Seaton suddenly smote himself on the forehead and cried: “Dunark!”
Crane looked up. “Dunark? Why, yes, Dick. Quite right. Not only is he probably the universe’s greatest strategist, but he knows the enemy almost as well as you and I do.”
“And besides,” Seaton added, “he doesn’t think like us. Not at all. And that’s what we want; so I’ll call him now and we’ll compute a rendezvous.”
Wherefore, a few days later, Dunark’s Osnomian cruiser matched velocities with the hurtling worldlet and began to negotiate its locks. Seaton shoved up the Valeron’s air-pressure, cut down its gravity, and reached for the master thermostat.
“Not too hot, Dick,” Dorothy said. “Light gravity is all right, but make them wear some clothes any time they’re outside their special quarters. I simply won’t run around naked in my own house. And I won’t have them doing it, either.”
Seaton laughed. “The usual eighty-three degrees and twenty-five per cent humidity. They’ll wear clothes, all right. She’ll be tickled to death to wear that fur coat you gave her — she doesn’t get a chance to, very often — and we can stand it easily enough,” and the four Tellurians went out to the dock to greet their green-skinned friends of old: Crown Prince Dunark and Crown Princess Sitar of Osnome, one of the planets of the enormous central sun of the Central System.
Warlike, bloodthirsty, supremely able Dunark; and Sitar, his lovely, vivacious — and equally warlike — wife. He was wearing ski-pants (Osnome’s temperature, at every point on its surface and during every minute of every day of the year, is one hundred degrees Fahrenheit), a heavy sweater, wool socks, and fur-lined moccasins. She wore a sweater and slacks under her usual fantastic array of Osnomian jewelry; and over it, as Seaton had predicted, the full-length mink coat. Each was wearing only one Osnomian machine pistol instead of the arsenal that had been their customary garb such a short time before.
The three men greeted each other warmly and executed a six-hand handshake; the while the two white women and the green one went into an arms-wrapped group; each talking two hundred words to the minute.
A couple of days later, the Norlaminian task-force arrived and a council of war was held that lasted for one full working day. Then, the defense planned in length and in depth, construction began. Seaton and Crane sat in the two master-control helmets of the Brain. Rovol worked with the brain of the Norlaminian spaceship. Dozens of other operators, men and women, worked at and with other, less powerful devices.
On the surface of a nearby planet, ten thousand square miles of land were leveled and paved to form the Area of Work. Stacks and piles and rows and assortments of hundreds of kinds of structural members appeared as though by magic. Gigantic beams of force, made visible by a thin and dusty pseudo-mist, flashed here and there; seizing this member and that and these and them and those and joining them together with fantastic speed to form enormous towers and platforms and telescope-like things and dirigible tubes and projectors.
Some of these projectors took containers of pure force out to white dwarf stars after neutronium. Others took faidons — those indestructible jewels that are the sine qua non of higher-order operation — out to the cores of stars to be worked into lenses of various shapes and sizes. Out into the environment of scores of millions of degrees of temperature and of scores of millions of tons per square inch of pressure that is the only environment in which the faidon can be worked by any force known to the science of man.
The base-line, which was to be built of enormous, absolutely rigid beams of force, could not be of planetary, or even of orbital dimensions. It had to extend, a precisely measured length, from the core of a star to that of another, having as nearly as possible the same proper motion, over a hundred parsecs away. Thus it took over a week to build and to calibrate that base-line; but, once that was done, the work went fast.
The most probable lines of approach were blocked by fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order installations of tremendous range and of planetary power; less probable ones by defenses of somewhat lesser might; supersensitive detector webs fanned out everywhere. And this work, which would have required years a short time before, was only a matter of a couple of weeks for the gigantic constructor-projectors now filling the entire Area of Work.
When everything that anyone could think of doing had been done, Seaton lit his pipe, jammed both hands into his pockets, and turned to his wife. “Well, we’ve got it made, now what are we going to do with it? Sit on our hands until Blackie DuQuesne trips a trigger or some Good Samaritan answers our call? I’d give three nickels to know whether he’s loose yet or not, and if he is loose, just where he is at this moment.”
“I’d raise you a dime,” she said; and then, since Dorothy Seaton concealed an extremely useful brain under her red curls, she added slowly, “And maybe… you know what the Norlaminians deduced: that, upon liberation, he’d be rematerialized? That he’d have a very good spaceship. That, before attacking us, he would recruit personnel, both men and women, both from need of their help and from loneliness… wait up — loneliness! Whoa girl, probably would he get loneliest for?”
Seaton snapped his fingers. “I can make an awfully good guess. Hunkie de Marigny.”
“Hunkie de Who? Oh, I remember. That big moose with the black hair and the shape.”
Seaton laughed. “Funny, isn’t it, that such an accurate description can be so misleading? But my guess is, if he’s back she knows it… I think it’d be smart to flip myself over to the Bureau and see what I can find out. Want to come along?”
“Uh-uh; she isn’t my dish of tea.”
Seaton projected his solid-seeming simulacrum of pure force to distant Tellus, to Washington, and to the sidewalk in front of the Bureau. He mounted the steps, entered the building, said “Hi, Gorgeous” to the shapely blonde receptionist, and took an elevator to the sixteenth floor; where he paused briefly in thought.