“Fine!” He glanced again at his watch. “Go get it, be sure it’s loaded, buckle it on and wear it. Show your badge, play the recording and lay down the law. If there’s any argument, shoot to kill. We aren’t fooling.” He glanced at the prisoner. “He’ll be out of your way. I’m taking him downstairs pretty soon to answer some questions.”
“I — I thank you, sir. I can’t tell you how much. But you — I mean… well, I—” the girl was a study in mixed emotions. Her nostrils flared and her whole body was tense with the beyond-imagining thrill of what had just occurred;. but at the same time she was so acutely embarrassed that she could scarcely talk. “I want to tell you, sir, that I wasn’t trying to curry…” She broke off in confusion and gulped twice.
“Curry? I know you weren’t. You aren’t the toadying type. That’s one reason you got it — but just a second.”
He looked again at his watch and did not put it down; but in a few seconds raised the ring to his lips and asked, “Are you there, Ree-Toe?”
“Here, Ky-El,” the tiny ring-voice said.
“Mission accomplished, including selection and installation of department head.”
“Splendid! Are you hurt?”
“Not badly. Scratch across my back. How’re we doing?”
“Better even than expected. The Premier is dead, I don’t know yet exactly how. All your people are all right except for some not-too-serious wounds. Ours, only ten dead reported so far. The army came over to a man. You have earned a world’s thanks this day, Ky-El, and its eternal gratitude.”
Seaton blushed. “Skip it, chief. Any change in schedule?”
“None.”
“Okay. Off.” Seaton, lowering his hand to his side, turned to Kay-Lee.
She, who had not quite been able to believe all along that all this was actually happening to her, was staring at him in wide-eyed awe. “You are a biggie!” she gasped. “A great big biggie, Your Exalted, to talk to the Premier himself like that! So this unbelievable appointment will stick!”
“It will stick. Definitely. So chin high and don’t spare the horses, Your Exalted; and I’ll see you at the meeting. Until then, so-long.”
Seaton cut his prisoner loose and half-led, half-dragged him, gibbering and begging, out of the room. Almost Seaton regretted it was over; the work on Ray-See-Nee had been pleasurable, as well as useful.
But — now he had his base of operations, unknown to the Chlorans, on a planet they thought safely their own. Now he could go on with his campaign against them. Seaton was well aware that the universe held other enemies than the Chlorans, but his motto was one thing at a time.
However, it is instructive now to see just what two of those inimical forces were up to at this one — one which knew it was in trouble… and one which did not!
20. DUQUESNE AND FENACHROME
BEFORE the world of the Fenachrone was destroyed by Civilization’s superatomic bombs it was a larger world than Earth, and a denser, and with a surface gravity very much higher. It was a world of steaming jungle; of warm and reeking fog; of tepid, sullenly steaming water; of fantastically lush vegetation unknown to Earthly botany.
Wind there was none, nor sunshine. Very seldom was the sun of that reeking world visible at all through the omnipresent fog, and then only as a pale, wan disk; and what of its atmosphere was not fog was hot and humid and sulphurously stinking air.
And as varied the worlds, so varied the people. The Fenachrone, while basically humanoid, were repulsively and monstrously short, wide and thick. They were immensely strong physically, and their mentalities were as monstrous as their civilization was many thousands of years older than that of Earth; their science was equal to ours in most respects and ahead of it in some.
Most monstrous of all the facets of Fenachrone existence, however, was their basic philosophy of life. Might was right. Power was not only the greatest good; it was the only good. The Fenachrone were the MASTER RACE, whose unquestionable destiny it was to be the unquestionable masters of the entire space-time continuum — of the summated totality of the Cosmic All.
For many thousands of years nothing had happened to shake any Fenachrone’s rock-solid conviction of the destiny of their race. Progress along the Master-Race line had been uninterrupted. In fact, it had never been successfully opposed. The Fenachrone had already wiped out, without really extending themselves, all the other civilizations within a hundred parsecs or so of their solar system. But up to the time of Emperor Fenor no ruler of the Fenachrone had become convinced that the time had come to set the Day of Conquest — the day upon which the Big Push was to begin.
But rash, headstrong, egomaniacal Fenor insisted upon setting The Day in his own reign — which was why First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet had set up his underground so long before. He was just as patriotic as any other member of his race; just as thoroughly sold on the idea of the inevitable ultimate supremacy over all created thing wherever situated; but his computations did not indicate that success was as yet quite certain.
How right Sleemet was!
He knew that he was right after hearing the first few words of Sacner Carfon’s ultimatum to Emperor Fenor; that was why he had pushed the panic button for the eighty-five-thousand-odd members of his faction to flee the planet right then.
He knew it still better when, after Fenor’s foolhardly defiance of Sacner Carfon, of the Overlord, and of the Forces of Universal Peace, his native planet became a minor sun behind his flying fleet.
Even then, however, Sleemet had not learned very much — at least, nowhere nearly enough.
At first glance it might seem incredible that, after such an experience, Sleemet could have so lightly destroyed two such highly industrialized worlds about which he knew so little. It might seem as though it must have been impressed upon his mind that the Fenachrone were not the ablest, strongest, wisest, smartest, most highly advanced and most powerful form of life ever created. Deeper study will show, however, that with his heredity and conditioning he could not possibly have done anything else.
Sleemet probably did not begin really to realize the truth until the Llurd Klazmon so effortlessly — apparently — wiped out sixteen of his seventeen superdreadnoughts, then crippled his flagship beyond resistance or repair and sent it hurtling through space toward some completely unknown destination.
His first impulse, like that of all his fellows, was to storm and to rage and to hurl things and to fight. But there was no one to fight; and storming and raging and hurling and smashing things did not do any good. In fact, nothing they could do elicited any attention at all from their captors.
Wherefore, as days stretched out endlessly and monotonously into endless and monotonous weeks, all those five thousand-odd Fenachrone — males and females, adults and teen-agers and children and babies — were forced inexorably into a deep and very un-Fenachronian apathy.
And when the hulk of the flagship arrived at the Llanzlanate on far Llurdiax, things went immediately from bad to worse. The volume of space into which the Fenachrone were moved had a climate exactly like that of their native city on their native world. All its artifacts — its buildings, and its offices and its shops and its foods and its drinks and its everything else — were precisely what they should have been.
Ostensibly, they were encouraged to live lives even more normal than ever before (if such an expression is allowable); to breed and to develop and to evolve; and especially to perform breakthroughs in science.
Actually, however, it was practically impossible for them to do anything of their own volition; because they were being studied and analyzed and tested every minute of every day. Studied coldly and logically and minutely; with an utterly callous ferocity unknown to even such a ferocious race as the Fenachrone themselves were.