“Chlorans!” Dorothy and Margaret shrieked as one, and five minds dwelt briefly upon that hideous and ultimately terrible race of amoeboid monstrosities who, living in an atmosphere of gaseous chlorine, made it a point to enslave or to destroy all the humanity of all the planets they could reach.
All five remembered, very vividly, the starkly unalloyed ferocity with which one race of Chlorans had attacked the planet Valeron; near which the Skylark of Valeron had been built and after which she had been named. They remembered the horrifyingly narrow margin by which those Chlorans had been defeated. They also remembered that the Chlorans had not even then been slaughtered. The Skylarkers had merely enclosed the planet Chlora in a stasis of time and sent it back — on a trip that would last, for everyone and everything outside that stasis, some four hundred years — to its own native solar system, from which it had been torn by a near-collision of suns in the long-gone past.
The Skylarkers should have blown Chlora into impalpable and invisible debris, and the men of the party had wanted to do just that, but Dorothy and Margaret and the essentially gentle Valeronians had been dead set against genocide.
Dorothy broke the short silence. “But how could they be, Dick?” she asked. “’Way out here? But of course, if we human beings could do it — ?” She paused.
“But of course,” Seaton agreed sourly. “Why not? Why shouldn’t they be as widespread as humanity is? Or even more so, if they have killed enough of us off? And why shouldn’t they be smarter than those others were? Look at how much we’ve learned in just months, not millennia, of time.”
Another and longer silence fell; which was broken by Seaton. “Well, two things are certain. They’re rabidly antisocial and they’ve got — at the moment — a lot more stuff than we have. They’ve got it to sell, like farmers have hay. It’s also a dead-sure cinch that we can’t do a thing — not anything — without a lot more data than we have now. It’ll take all the science of Norlamin and maybe a nickel’s worth besides to design and build what we’ll have to have. And they can’t go it blind. Nobody can. And we all know enough about Chlorans to know that we won’t get one iota or one of Peg’s smidgeons of information out of them by remote control. At the first touch of any kind of a high-order feeler they’ll bat our ears down… to a fare-thee-well. However, other means are available.”
And he glanced at a monitor where for some minutes a display had shown a planet of the galaxy from which their recent attacker had come.
During this fairly long — for Seaton — speech, and during the silence that had preceded it, two things had been happening.
First the controlling Brain of the ship had been carrying out a program of Seaton’s. Star by star, system by system, it had been scanning the components of the nearest galaxy to the scene of their encounter. It had in fact verified Seaton’s conclusions: the galaxy was dominated by Chlorans. Their works were everywhere. But it had also supported a — not a conclusion; a hope, more accurately — that Seaton had hardly dared put in words.
Although the Chlorans ruled this galaxy, there were oxygen-breathing, warm-blooded races in it too — serfs of the Chlorans of course, but nevertheless occupying their own planets — and it was one such planet that the Brain had finally selected and was now displaying on its monitor.
The other thing was that the auburn-haired beauty who was Mrs. Richard Ballinger Seaton had been eyeing her husband steadily. At first she had merely looked at him thoughtfully. Then look and mien had become heavily tinged, first with surprise and then with doubt and then with wonder; a wonder that turned into an incredulity that became more and more incredulous. Until finally, unable to hold herself in any longer, she broke in on him.
“Dick!” she cried. “You wouldn’t! You know you wouldn’t!”
“I wouldn’t? If not, who… ?” Changing his mind between two words, Seaton cut the rest of the sentence sharply off; shrugged his shoulders; and grinned, somewhat shamefacedly, back at her.
At this point Crane, who had been looking first at one of them and then at the other, put in: “I realize, Dorothy, that you and Dick don’t need either language or headsets to communicate with each other, but how about the rest of us? What, exactly, is it that you’re not as sure as you’d like to be that he wouldn’t do?”
Dorothy opened her mouth to reply, but Seaton beat her to it. “What I would do — and will because I’ll have to; because it’s my oyster and nobody else’s — is, after we sneak up as close as we can without touching off any alarms, take a landing craft and go get the data we absolutely have to have in absolutely the only way it can be gotten.”
“And that’s what I most emphatically do not like!” Dorothy blazed. “Dick Seaton, you are not going to land on an enslaved planet, alone and unarmed and afoot, as an investigating Committee of One! For one thing, we simply don’t have the time! Do we? I mean, poor old Valeron is simply a wreck! We’ve got to go somewhere and—”
But Seaton was shaking his head. “The Brain can handle that by itself,” he said. “All it needs is time. As a matter of fact, you’ve put your finger on a first-rate reason for my going in, alone. There’s simply not much else we can do until the Valeron is back in shape again.”
“Not your going in.” Dorothy blazed. “Flatly, positively no.”
Again Seaton shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t say I’m madly in love with the idea myself, but who’s any better qualified? Or as well? Because I know that you, Dottie, aren’t the type to advocate us sitting on our hands and letting them have all the races of humanity, wherever situate. So who?”
“Me,” Shiro said, promptly if ungrammatically. “Not as good, but good enough. You can tell me what data you want and I can and will get it, just as well as… ”
“Bounce back, both of you, you’ve struck a rubber fence!” Dunark snapped. “That job’s for Sitar and me.” The green-skinned princess waved her pistol in the air and nodded her head enthusiastically and her warlord went on, “You and I being brain-brothers, Dick, I’d know exactly what you want. And she and I would blast—”
“Yeah, that’s what I know damn well you’d do.” Seaton broke in, only to be interrupted in turn by Crane — who was not in the habit of interrupting anyone even once, to say nothing of twice.
“Excuse me, everyone,” he said, “but you’re all wrong, I think. My thought at the moment, Dick, is that your life is altogether too important to the project as a whole to be risked as you propose risking it. As to you others, with all due respect for your abilities, I do not believe that either of you is as well qualified for this kind of an investigation as I am—”
Margaret leaped to her feet in protest, but Crane went quietly on: ” — in either experience or training. However, we should not decide that point yet — or at all, for that matter. We are all too biased. I therefore suggest, Dick, that we feed the Brain everything, we have and keep on feeding it everything pertinent we can get hold of, until it has enough data to make that decision for us.”
“That makes sense,” Seaton said, and both Dorothy and Margaret nodded — but both with very evident reservations. “The first time anything has made sense today!”