“Not having a sense of humor, he can’t kid. He really slapped you on the wrist, friend. But why would it be such a horrible job to sync a few generators in?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” He went, worked for four solid hours with the Brain, and came back wearing a sheepish grin. “It’s true,” he reported. “I knew it’d be tricky, but I had no idea. You have to work intelligently, manipulably and reproducibly in time units of three times ten to the minus twenty — eighth of a second — the time it takes light to travel a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter.”
“Hush. You don’t expect me to understand that, do you?”
“I’ll say I don’t. I don’t expect to even really understand it myself.”
Seaton did not work on the problem every day until arrival, but he worked on it for over a hundred hours enough so that he began to realize how difficult it was.
The Skylark of Valeron entered the Green System, approached Norlamin, and went into orbit around it. The travelers boarded a shuttle, which thereupon began to slide down a landing-beam toward Rovol’s private dock.
The little craft settled gently into a neoprene-lined cup. The visitors disembarked and walked down a short flight of metallic steps, at the foot of which the ancient, whitebearded sage was waiting for them. He greeted them warmly — for a Norlaminian — and led them through the “garden” toward the metal-and-quartz palace that was his home.
“Oh, Dick, isn’t it wonderful!” Dorothy pressed his arm against her side. “It’s so much like Orlon’s and yet so different… ”
And it was both. The acreage of velvet-short, springy grass was about the same as that upon which they had landed so long before. The imperishable-metal statuary was similar. Here also were the beds of spectacular flowers and the hedges and sculptured masses of gorgeously vari-colored plant life. The tapestry wall, however — composed of millions upon millions of independently moving, flashing, selfluminous jewels of all the colors of the rainbow — ran for a good three hundred yards beside the walk. It was evident that the women of the Rovol had been working on it for hundreds of centuries instead of for mere hundreds of years. Instead of being only form and color, as was the wall of the Orlon, it was well along toward portraying the entire history of the Family Rovol.
Rovol wanted to entertain his guests instead of work, but Seaton objected. “Shame on you, Rovol. The Period of Labor is just starting, and remember how you fellows used to bat my ears down about there being definite and noninterchangeable times for work and for play and so forth?”
“That is of course true, youth,” Rovol agreed, equably enough. “I should not have entertained the idea for a moment. My companion will welcome the ladies and show them to your apartments. We will proceed at once to the Area of Experiment,” and he called an aircar by fingering a stud at his belt.
“I’ve been studying, as you suggested,” Seaton said then. “Can the thing be solved? The more I worked on it the more dubious I got.”
“Yes, but the application of its solution will be neither easy nor simple.” The aircar settled gently to the walk a few yards ahead of the party and Rovol and Seaton boarded it; Rovol still talking. “But you will be delighted to know that, thanks to your gift of the metal of power, what would have been a work of lifetimes can very probably be accomplished in a few mere years.”
Seaton was not delighted. Knowing what Rovol could mean by the word “few,” he was appalled; but there was nothing whatever he could do to speed things up.
He spent a couple of weeks rebuilding the Skylark of Valeron — with batteries of offensive and defensive weaponry where single machines had been — then stood around and watched the Norlaminians work. And as day followed day without anything being accomplished he became more and more tense and impatient. He concealed his feelings perfectly, he thought; but he should have known that he could hide nothing from the extremely percipient mind of the girl who was in every respect his other half.
“Dick, you’ve been jittering like a witch,” she said one evening, “about something I can’t see any reason for. But you have a reason, or you wouldn’t be doing it. So break down and tell me.”
“I can’t, confound it. I know I’m always in a rush to get a thing done, but not like this. I’m all of a twitter inside. I can’t sleep…”
Dorothy snickered. “You can’t? If what you were doing last night wasn’t sleeping it was the most reasonable facsimile thereof I’ve ever seen. Or heard.”
“Not like I ought to, I mean. Nightmares. Devils all the time sticking me with pitchforks. Do you believe in hunches?”
“No,” she said, promptly. “I never had any. Not a one.”
“I never did, either, and if this is one I never want to have another. But it could be a hunch that we ought to be investigating that alien galaxy of DuQuesne’s. Whatever it is, I want to go somewhere and I haven’t the faintest idea where.”
“Oh? Listen!” Dorothy’s eyes widened. “I’ll bet you’re getting an answer to that message we sent out!”
He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Can’t be. Telepathy has got to be something you can understand.”
“Who besides you ever said it would have to be telepathy? And who knows what telepathy would have to be like? Come on, let’s go tell Martin and Peggy!”
“Huh?” he yelped. “Tell M. Reynolds Crane, the hardest boiled skeptic that event went unhung, that I want to go skyshooting to hellangone off into the wild blue yonder just because I’ve got an itch that I can’t scratch?”
“Why not?” She looked him steadily in the eye. “We’re exploring terra incognita, Dick. How much do you really know about that mind of yours, the way it is now?”
“Okay. Maybe they’ll buy it; you did. Let’s go.”
They went; and, a little to Seaton’s surprise, Crane agreed with Dorothy. So did Margaret. Hence three hours later, the big sky-rover was on her way.
Four days out, however, Seaton said, “This isn’t the answer, I don’t think. The itch is still there. So what?”
There was silence for a couple of minutes, then Dorothy chuckled suddenly. Sobering quickly, she said, with a perfectly straight face, “I’ll bet it’s that new department head girl-friend of yours, Dick; the pistol-packing mama with the wiggle. She wants to see the big, bold, handsome Earthman again. And if it is, I’ll scratch…”
Seaton jumped almost out of his chair. “You’re not kidding half as much as you think you are, pet. That crack took a good scratch at exactly where it itches.” He put on his remote-control helmet and changed course. “And that helps still more.” He thought for minutes, then shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m not getting a thing… not anything more at all. How many of you remember either ReeToe Prenk or the girl well enough to picture either of them accurately in your minds?”
They all remembered one or both of the Rayseenians.
“Okay. This’ll sound silly. It is silly, for all the tea in China, but let’s try something. All join hands, picture either or both of them, and think at them as hard as we can. The thought is simply ‘we’re coming.’ Okay?”
More than half sheepishly, they tried it — and it worked. At least Seaton said, “Well, it worked, I guess. Anyway, for the first time in weeks, it’s gone. But I didn’t get a thing. Nothing whatever. Not even a hint either that we were being paged or that our reply was being received. Did any of you?”
None of them had.
“Huh!” Seaton snorted. “If this is telepathy they can keep it — I’ll take Morse’s original telegraph!”
A week or so after the Skylark of Valeron left the neighborhood of Ray-See-Nee, that planet’s new government began to have trouble. Ree-Toe Prenk had said and had believed that whoever controlled the capital controlled the world, but that was not true in his case. It had always been true previously because the incoming powers had always been of the same corrupt-to-the-core stripe as those who were ousted — and when corruption has been the way of life for generations it is deep-rooted indeed.