The Great One’s probe vanished, the screen went dark, and the sender resumed its sending.

“Huh!” Seaton wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. “ ‘This dope isn’t of any interest, clerk old boy, so just file it away and forget it,’ His Nibs says. It’s a good thing he was after Prenk’s motivation, not mine. If he’d really bored in after mine I don’t know whether I could have kept things all nice and peaceful or not. I knew I’d been nudged, believe you me.”

“I believe you,” Crane said, looking into his friend’s eyes. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

And:

The reporter goggled in awe: “And you can still talk intelligently, sir?”

“Yeah.” Seaton answered both questions at once, but did not elaborate. “What did you get, Mart? Anything?”

“I learned where it is,” said Crane. Nothing else.

Small reward for weeks of effort and risk of life… and yet it was for that the entire campaign on the planet RaySee-Nee had been waged! The whole operation had been designed to get that one fact. A people had been given new hope; some hundreds had lost their lives; many thousands had received scars they would bear a long time; a regime had been deposed and a new one put in power.

But these were only by-products, only the small change of a victory which justified all of Seaton’s efforts… and would have its consequences in every part of the Universe, for incalculable times to come!

21. LLAMZLAM MERGON

RAY-SEE-NEE’s new department heads, in their meeting with Premier Ree-Toe Prenk in the Room of State, were in unanimous agreement that everything was under control.

Some quislings and recalcitrants had been shot and a few more would probably have to be. That was only to be expected. Yes, since all of the new incumbents had been jumped many grades in status and in authority and in salary, there was and would continue to be a certain amount of jealousy; but that was not of very much importance.

The jealous ones would either accept the facts of life or be shot. Period.

After the meeting was over Kay-Lee Barlo came up to Seaton. She now bore herself as though she had been born an Exalted; her ex-boss’ pistol swung jauntily at one very female hip as she walked. As she came up to him and took both his hands in hers, standing so close to him that her upstanding, outstanding hair-do almost tickled his nose, it became evident that her weapon had been fired quite recently. She wore no perfume, and the faint but unmistakable acrid odor of burned smokeless powder still clung to her hair.

“Oh, Ky-El!” she exclaimed, equal to equal now. “I’ll simply never be able to thank you enough. Nor will all Ray-See-Nee. This world will be an entirely different place to live on hereafter.”

“I sincerely hope so, Kay-Lee.” Seaton smiled into the girl’s eager, expressive face.

“Ray-See-Nee is lucky to have had as strong, able and just a man as Ree-Toe Prenk to take over.”

“As you said a while back, ‘You can say that again.’ He’s all of that. What he’s done already is marvelous. But everyone knows — he does, too, he’s put you up on a pedestal a mile high — that it’s you who put him in the saddle. That’s what I wanted mostly to tell you. Also, I wanted to ask you—” she paused and flushed slightly — “you’ll forget, won’t you please, what I said about that louse’s brains? I didn’t mean that, really; I’m not the type to cherish a grudge like that. I was a little… well, I’d been a little put out with him, just before you came in.” With which masterpiece of understatement she gave his hands another vigorous, friendly squeeze and, swinging around, walked hip-wiggling out of the room.

She thereupon took certain steps and performed certain actions which would have astonished Seaton very much, had he known about them. But he did not — until much later.

Prenk came up to the Skylarkers a few minutes later. He shook hands with each of the off-worlders; thanked them in rounded phrases. “I would like very much to have you stay here indefinitely, friends,” he concluded, “but I know of course that that is impossible. If all the resources of the world could be devoted to the project and if all our technical men could work on it undetected for a year, we could not build anything able to withstand those Chlorans’ beams.”

“We can’t either. Not here,” Seaton said. “That’s why we have to go; but we’ll be back. I don’t know when; but we’ll be back some day.”

“I’m sure you will; and may Great My-Ko-Ta ward you and cherish you as you build.”

Back on what was left of their worldlet, now reconditioned to the extent that it was not likely to fall apart on the spot, and out in deep space once more, the Skylarkers began efficiently and expertly to put the pieces of their victory together.

They had located the Enemy. They even had an operating covert base in Chloran territory, to which they could return at any time. They had weapons which, in theory at least, could cope with anything the Chlorans were likely to own.

Yet Seaton fretted. The weapons were there, but his control was not adequate; the weapons had outgrown the control. Dealing with Chlorans was touchy business. You wanted all the space you could get between you and them. Yet, at any operating range which even Seaton, to say nothing of Crane and the others, considered safe, their striking power was simply too erratic to depend on.

“It’s a bust,” Seaton said gloomily. “Course, if worst came to worst I could go back to undercover methods. Smuggle in a bomb, maybe — just to throw their main centers off balance while the rest of you hit them with all we’ve got. I could stow away aboard one of those ore-scows taking the booty off Ray-See-Nee easily enough—”

“You talk like a man with a paper nose,” Dorothy scoffed. “I have a picture of that expedition — of you in armor, with air-tanks strapped on your back and lugging an underwater camera or projector around. Un-noticed… I don’t think.”

And Dunark added, “And since you haven’t got any idea of what to look for, you’d have to lug around a full analsynth set-up. A couple of tons of stuff. Uh-uh.”

Seaton grinned, unperturbed. “That’s what I was coming to. Getting in would be easy, but doing anything wouldn’t. And neither would getting out. But Mart, we’ve chopped one horn off of the dilemma, but we haven’t even touched the other. We’ve got to master that fourth-dimension rig; and we’re not even close. It’s a matter of kind, not merely of degree.”

“I can’t see that. If so, we could not have warded off their attack at all.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean the energies themselves; it’s the control of that much stuff. Synchronization, phasing in, combination, and so forth. Getting such stuff as that closely enough together. Look, Mart. This bit that we’ve got left of the Valeron is stuffed with machinery practically to the skin. She’s so small, relatively, that you wouldn’t think there’d be any trouble meshing in machines from various parts of her. But there is.

Plenty. It never showed up before because we never had to use a fraction of our total power before, but it showed up plenty back there. My beam was loose as ashes, andI’ve figured out why.

“Sixth-order stuff moves as many times faster than light as light does faster than a snail — maybe more. But it still takes a little time to get from one machine to another, inside even as small a globe as this is. See?”

Crane frowned in thought. “I see. I also see what the difficulties would be in anything large enough and strong enough to attack the Chlorans. It would mean timing each generator and each element of each projector; and each with a permissible variation of an infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond. That, of course, means Rovol and Caslor.”

“I suppose it does… unless we can figure out an easier, faster way… I don’t know whether the Chlorans have got anything like that or not, but they’ve got something. There ought to be some way of snitching it off of them.”