“Could be,” agreed Seaton. “And this ape Klazmon figured it that we were the same race, basically, both mentally — savage, egocentric, homicidal — and physically. How could he arrive at any such bobbled-up, cockeyed conclusions as that?”
“For him, easily enough. Klazmon is just about as much like us as we are like those X-planet cockroaches. Imagine a man-sized bat, with a super-able tail, cat’s eyes and teeth, humanoid arms and hands, a breastbone like the prow of a battleship, pectoral muscles the size of forty-pound hams, and—”
“Wait up a sec — this size thing. His projection?”
“That’s right. Six feet tall. He wasn’t the type to shrink or expand it.”
“I’ll buy that. And strictly logical — with their own idea of what logic is.”
“Check. According to which logic we’re surplus population and are to be done away with. So I decided to warn you as to what the human race is up against and to suggest a meeting with you that we know can’t be listened in on. Check?”
“Definitely. We’ll lock our sixths on and instruct our computers to compute and effect rendezvous at null relative velocity in minimum time. Can do?”
“Can do — am doing,” DuQuesne said; and Seaton, donning his helmet, perceived that the only fifth- or sixth-order stuff anywhere near the Skylark of Valeron — except what she was putting out herself, of course — was the thin, tight beam that was the base-line.
Seaton thought into his helmet for a few seconds; then, discarding it, he went around the bed, got into it on his own side, and started to kiss Dorothy a second good night.
“But, Dick,” she protested. “That DuQuesne! Do you think it’s safe to let him come actually aboard?”
“Yes. Not only safe, but necessary — we don’t want to be blabbing that kind of stuff all over a billion parsecs of space. And safe because I still say we’re better than he is at anything he want to start, for fun, money, chalk, or marbles. So good night again, ace of my bosom.”
“Hadn’t you better notify somebody else first? Especially the Norlaminians?”
“You said it, presh; I sure should.” Seaton put on his helmet; and it was a long time before either of the Seatons got back to sleep. Long for Dorothy, heroically keeping eyes closed and breathing regularly so that her husband would not know how shaken and terrified she really was; long for Seaton himself, who lay hour upon endless hour, hands linked behind his head, gray eyes staring fiercely up into the darkness.
It had been a long time since Richard Ballinger Seaton and Marc C. DuQuesne had locked horns last. This galaxy — this cluster — this whole First Universe was not large enough for the two of them. When they met again one of them would dispose of the other.
It was as simple as that. Yet Seaton had accepted a call for help. The whole enormous complex of defenses that he had labored so hard and long to erect again DuQuesne would now be diverted to another, perhaps even a greater, threat to the safety of civilization. It was right and proper that this should be so.
But Seaton knew that whatever the best interests of civilization in this matter, there could and would never be any greater personal threat to himself than was incarnate in the cold, hard, transcendentally logical person of Blackie DuQuesne.
9. AMONG THE JELMI
AND half a universe away other events were moving to fruition.
As has been said, the eight hundred Jelmi aboard the ship that had once been a Llurdan cruiser were the selected pick of the teeming billions of their race inhabiting two hundred forty-one planets. The younger ones had been selected for brains, ability, and physical perfection; the older ones for a hundred years or more of outstanding scientific achievement. And of the older group, Tammon stood out head and shoulders above all the rest. He was the Einstein of his race.
He looked a vigorous, bushily gray-haired sixty; but was in fact two hundred eleven Mallidaxian years old.
Tammon was poring over a computed graph, measuring its various characteristics with vernier calipers, a filar microscope, and an integrating planimeter, when Mergon and Luloy came swinging hand in hand into his laboratory. Both were now fully recovered from the wounds they had suffered in that hand-to-hand battle with the Llurdi on now far-distant Llurdiax. Muscles moved smoothly under the unblemished bronze of Mergon’s skin; Luloy’s swirling shoulder-length mop of gleaming chestnut hair was a turbulent glory.
“Hail, Tamm,” the two said in unison, and Mergon went on: “Have you unscrewed the inscrutability of that anomalous peak yet?”
Tammon picked up another chart and scowled at a sharp spike going up almost to the top of the scale. “This? I’m not exactly sure yet, but I may have. At least, by recomputing with an entirely new and more-than-somewhat weird set of determinors, I got this,” and he ran his fingertip along the smooth curve on the chart he had been studying.
Mergon whistled through his teeth and Luloy, after staring for a moment said, “Wonderful! Expound, oh sage, and elucidate.”
“It had to have at least one component in the sixth, on the level of thought, but no known determinors would affect it. Therefore I applied the mathematics of symbolic logic to a wide variety of hunches, dreams, I’ve-been-here-or-done-this-befores, premonitions, intuitions…”
“Llenderllon’s eyeballs!” Luloy broke in. “So that was what you ran us all through the wringer for, a while back.”
“Precisely. Using these new determinors in various configurations — dictated not by mathematical reasoning, but by luck and by hunch and by perseverance — I finally obtained a set of uniquely manipulable determinants that yielded this final smooth curve, the exactly fitting equation of which reduces beautifully to…”
“Hold it, Tamm,” Mergon said, “you’re losing me,” and Luloy added, “You lost me long ago. What does it mean?”
“It will take years to explore its ramifications, but one fact is clear: the fourth dimension of space does actually exist. Therefore the conclusion seems inescapable that…”
“Stop it!” Luloy snapped. “This is terribly dangerous stuff to be talking about. That terrific kind of a breakthrough is just exactly what Klazmon — the beast! — has been after for years. And you know very well that we’re not really free; that he has us under constant surveillance.”
“But by detector only,” Mergon said. “A full working projection at this distance? Uh-uh. It might be smart, though, to be a little on the careful side, at that.”
Days lengthened into weeks. The ex-Llurdan cruiser, renamed the Mallidax and converted into a Jelman worldlet, still hurtled along a right-line course toward the center of the First Universe, at a positive-and-negative acceleration that would keep her — just barely! — safe against collision with intergalactic clouds of gas or dust.
The objective of their flight was a small sun, among whose quite undistinguished family of planets were a moderate-sized oxygen-bearing world and its rather large, but otherwise uninteresting companion moon.
Tammon, hot on the trail of his breakthrough in science, kept his First Assistant Mergon busy fourteen or sixteen hours per day designing and building — and sometimes inventing — new and extremely special gear; and Mergon in turn drove Luloy, his wife and Girl Friday, as hard as he drove himself.
Tammon, half the time, wore armor and billion-volt gloves against the terribly lethal forces he was tossing so nonchalantly from point to point. Mergon, only slightly less powerfully insulated, had to keep his variable-density goggles practically opaque against the eye-tearing frequencies of his welding arcs. And even Luloy, much as she detested the feel of clothing against her skin, was as armored and as insulated as was either of the men as she tested and checked and double-checked and operated, with heavily gloved flying fingers, the maze of unguarded controls that was her constructor station.