Hundreds upon hundreds of the completely helpless captives died — died without affecting in any smallest respect the treatment received by the survivors — and as their utter helplessness struck in deeper and deeper, the Fenachrone grew steadily weaker, both physically and mentally.
This was no surprise to their captors, the Llurdi. Nor was it in any sense a disappointment. To them the Fenachrone were tools; and they were being tempered and shaped to their task…
On Earth, leaving Stephanie de Marigny’s apartment, DuQuesne went back to the Capital D and took off on course one hundred seventy-five Universal — that is, five degrees east of Universal South. He went that way because in that direction lay the most completely unexplored sector of the First Universe and he did not want company.
Earth and the First Galaxy lay on the edge of the First Quadrant. Llurdiax and its Realm lay in the Second. So did the Empire of the Chlorans and his own imaginary planet Xylmny. The second galaxy along that false line, which might also attract Seaton, lay in the Third. He didn’t want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton and this course was mathematically the best one to take to get out of and keep out of Seaton’s way.
Therefore he would follow it clear out to the Fourth Quadrant rim of the First Universe.
As the Capital D bored a hole through the protesting ether DuQuesne took time out from his thinkings to consider women. First, he considered Stephanie de Marigny; with a new and not at all unpleasant thrill as he did so. He considered Sennlloy and Luloy and some unattached women of the Jelmi. They all left him completely cold; and he was intellectually honest enough to know why and to state that “why” to himself. The Jelmi were so much older than the humanity of Earth that they were out of his class. He could stand equality — definitely; in fact, that was what he wanted — but he could not live with and would not try to live with any woman so demonstrably his superior.
But Hunkie — ah, there was a man’s woman! His equal; his perfect equal in every respect; with a brain to match one of the finest bodies ever built. She didn’t play hard to get, she was hard to get; but once got she’d stay got. She’d stand at a man’s back ’till his belly caved in.
Slowed to a crawl, as Universal speed goes, the Capital D entered the outermost galaxy of the Rim of the Universe and DuQuesne energized his highest-powered projector. He studied the Tellus-type planets of hundreds of solar systems. Many of these planets were inhabited, but he did not reveal himself to the humanity of any of them.
He landed on an uninhabited planet and went methodically to work. He bulldozed out an Area of Work. He set up his batteries of machine tools; coupling an automatic operator of pure force to each tool as it was set up. Then he started work on the Brain; which took longer than all the rest of the construction put together. It was an exact duplicate of that of the Skylark of Valeron; one cubic mile of tightly packed ultra-miniaturized components; the most tremendous and most tremendously capable super-computer known to man.
While the structure of the two brains was identical, their fillings were not. As has been said, there were certain volumes — blocks of cells — in the Valeron’s brain that DuQuesne had not been able to understand. These blocks he left inoperative — for the time being.
Conversely, DuQuesne either had or wanted powers and qualities and abilities that Seaton neither had nor wanted; hence certain blocks that were as yet inoperative in Seaton’s vast fabrication were fully operative in DuQuesne’s.
It is a well-known fact that white-collar men, who sit at desks and whose fellowship with machines is limited to week-end drives in automobiles, scoff heartily at the idea that any two machines of the same make and model do or can act differently from each other except by reason of wear. With increasing knowledge of an acquaintance with machines, however — especially with mechanisms of the more complex and sophisticated sorts — this attitude changes markedly. The men and women who operate such machines swear unanimously that those machines do unquestionably have personalities; each its unique and peculiar own.
Thus, while the fact can not be explained in logical or “common” sense terms, those two giants brains were as different in personality as were the two men who built them.
Nor was DuQuesne’s worldlet, which he named the DQ, very much like the Skylark of Valeron except in shape. It was bigger. Its skin was much thicker and much denser and much more heavily armed. The individual mechanisms were no larger — the Valeron’s were the biggest and most powerful that DuQuesne knew how to build — but there were so many of them that he was pretty sure of being safe from anyone. Even from whoever it was that had mauled the Valeron so unmercifully — whom he, DuQuesne, did not intend to approach. Ever.
It was, in fact, his prayerful hope that both mauler and maulee — Seaton himself — would ultimately emerge from that scufe whittled down to a size where he would not have to consider them again.
He did not in fact, consider them; nor did he consider the captive Fenachrone in the pens of Llurdiax; nor the Jelmi; nor — and this, perhaps, was his greatest mistake did he consider, because he did not know about, a mother and daughter of whose existence neither he nor any other Tellus-type human being had yet heard.
He simply built himself the most power space vessel he could imagine, armed it, launched it… and set out to recapture the Universe Seaton had once taken away from him.
The revolution on the planet Ray-See-Nee was over and Richard Seaton, disguised under the identity of Ky-El Mokak, was ready to take the one tactical move for which all the effort and struggle on the planet had been only the preliminaries. But first he needed to know what had happened to his shipmates and friends; he had been busy enough fighting his own fights and taking his own prisoners to have temporarily lost sight of them.
Wherefore, in Ray-See-Nee’s palatial Capitol Building, in the Room of State — which, except for the absence of an actual throne, was in effect a throne-room — Seaton turned his prisoner over to a guard and rounded up his own crew, so that they could look each other over and compare notes.
Sitar, limping badly but with fur coat still glossily immaculate, proudly displayed a left leg bandaged from the knee all the way up. “A slash from here, clear down to there.” The Osnomian princess ran a fore-finger along a line six or seven inches long. “And a bullet right through there. That was the gaudiest fight I was ever in in my whole life!”
Dunark, whose right arm was in a sling, spoke up. “She got that slash saving my life. I’d just taken this one through the shoulder—” he pointed — “and was paralyzed for a second. So she kicked her leg up in the way — while she was flipping a gun around to blow this guy apart, you know so his knife went into her leg instead of my neck.”
“Yes, but go on and tell them about how many times you—” Sitar began.
“Sh-h-h-h,” Dunark said, and she subsided. “Maybe some day we’ll write a book. How about you, Mart? I notice you’ve been standing up all the time.”
“I’ll be standing up or lying on my face for a while, I guess.” But that wouldn’t account for the cane,” Seaton objected. “Come clean, guy.”
“One through the hip — thigh, rather, low down — no bones broken.”
Shiro, who had a broken arm, would not talk at first, but they finally got the story out of him. His last opponent had been just too big and too strong and too well trained to be easy meat, but Shiro had finally got him with a leg-lock around the neck. “But how about you, Dick?” Shiro asked. “Whoever wrapped you up must get hospital supplies at wholesale.”