“Just that. He wasn’t lying a nickel’s worth on that. His Nibs down there had already decided that we were surplus population and should be eliminated, and he set right out to do it. So, unless some of you have some mighty valid reasons not to, I’m going to try my damndest to eliminate him, right now.”
“We could run, I suppose,” Margaret suggested — but not at all enthusiastically.
“I doubt it. Not without letting him burn us down to basketball size, like the Chlorans did. He undoubtedly let us get this close on purpose so we couldn’t.”
Since no one else said anything, Seaton energized everything of offense he had. He tuned it as precisely as he possibly could. He assembled it into the tightest, solidest, hardest beam he could possibly build. Then, involuntarily tensing his muscles and bunching his back, he drove the whole gigantic thing squarely at where he knew the llanzlanate was.
The Llurd’s outer screen scarcely flickered as it went black in nothing flat of time. The intermediate screen held for eighty-three hundredths of a second. Then the practically irresistible force of that beam met the practically immovable object that was Klazmon’s last line of defense. And as it clawed and bit and tore and smashed in ultrapyrotechnic ferocity, solar-like flares of raw energy erupted from the area of contact and the very ether writhed and seethed and warped under the intolerable stresses of the utterly incomprehensible forces there at grips.
This went on… and on… and on.
Even to Seaton, who knew only that he was up against an enemy nearly as potent as the Chlorans, the full import of the enormous struggle of energies then being waged was far from clear. We can wonder now, and ask ourselves what the fate of the universe might have been if the Skylark’s Norlaminian designers had skimped on a course of screens, or overlooked a detail of defense. Surely its consequences would have been cataclysmic! Not only to Seaton and his Skylarker, watching grim-faced as their gauges revealed the enormous flow of destructive forces battling each other to annihilation for countless parsecs in every direction. Not only to the Jelmi, or the Rey-See-Neese, or the Norlaminians, or Earth itself… but to countless generations yet unborn, on planets not yet discovered…
But they held.
And after ten endless minutes of such terrible gouts and blasts of destruction as no planet could endure for a moment, Seaton heard a voice speak to him.
He had never heard it before, but it said in good American English: “Good morning, my friends. Or perhaps, by your clocks, it is good afternoon? I am the Llanzlan Mergon of Jelm, and I perceive that you are under attack by our old acquaintances, the Llurdi.
You, I am sure, are the Seatons and the Cranes, about whom we heard so much on Earth, but whom we were not able to find.”
Even though the Llurdi had been absolute rulers of all the planets of the Jelmi for many thousands of years, it was easy for them to accept, and to adopt themselves to, the new condition of coexistence with the Realm of the Jelmi on terms of equality. That was the way they were built.
The llanzlan fed the new data into Computer Prime and issued its findings as a directive. Since this directive was the product of pure logic, that was all there was to it.
With the Jelmi, however, even with a much simpler and easier agenda, things were distinctly otherwise. Everyone knows how difficult it is to change the political thinking of even a part of any human world. How, then, of the two hundred forty whole planets of the Jelmi? The conservatives did not want any change at all. Not even to independence. The radicals wanted everything changed; but each faction wanted each item changed in a different fashion. And the moderates, as usual, did not agree with either extreme wing on anything.
And, also as usual, no one faction would play ball with any other. Each would have its own way in setting up the Realm or there would be no Realm — it would pick up its marbles and go home.
Fortunately, however, the eight hundred best brains of the entire Jelman race were together in one place — in the fully operative base that the Mallidaxian’s dome had now become. Their numbers included the most capable and most highly trained specialists in every field of Jelman endeavor and they all had been living together and working together for many months.
They knew better than to go off half cocked. They would have to develop a master-plan upon which they could all agree. Unanimously. Nothing less would do. Having developed such a plan they would put it into effect, each person or planetary group upon his or her or their home world. The constitution thus fabricated would be put into effect by reason if possible, by force if necessary. It was not to be amended except by process contained within itself.
Thus the Constitutional Committee of Eight Hundred was still living in the base and was still hard at work when the Officer of the Day called Mergon — who, after glancing at plates and instruments, called Luloy.
The ether was showing strains of a magnitude not observed since the Battle for Independence. A Llurd ship was putting out everything he had; fighting full-out against a something — whose battle-screen covered such an immensity of space that Mergon could scarcely believe his instruments.
Luloy quirked an eyebrow. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
“Nothing,” and Mergon, who could now handle projections through the fourth dimension, launched them. “I’ll keep us invisible while we see what that thing is and how big it really is.”
They went and saw — and the more they studied the immensity that was the Skylark of Valeron the more they marveled. Finally, in the Valeron’s control room and still invisible, they studied the worldlet’s personnel; the while talking to each other in the flesh at the Mallidaxian’s main panel.
“Except for the green-skinned couple they are Tellurians,” the girl insisted.
“Everything about that — that ship, if you can call it a ship — is Tellurian. Just look at those clothes. You never saw anything like that anywhere except on Tellus and you never will.”
“We never heard anything about anything like that mobile fortress on Tellus, either,” he objected, “and we certainly would have if they’d known anything about it. How could they hide it?”
“Maybe it’s so new that not too many people know about it yet. Anyway, whatever the truth about that, we heard a lot about Seaton and Crane. Especially Seaton. According to the lore, he’s their principal god’s right-hand man. He can do anything.”
“Or a devil’s, depending on who you talked, to. But we wrote that off as just that — lore. If not propaganda.”
“We’ll have to write it back on again. Those two have to be Seaton and Crane — there, the Jelm-sized one with his head in the controller, and that other bean-pole type standing there smoking a… a cigarette, they call it. And that smoking business clinches it. Nobody but Tellurians burn their lungs out with smoke.”
“Okay.” Mergon thickened their projections up to full visibility and spoke:
“You must be the Seatons and the Cranes, about whom we heard so much on Earth but whom we were not able to find.”
Crane the Imperturbable was startled out of his imperturbability when Mergon and Luloy appeared in the Valeron’s control room and Mergon spoke to him in English. But he did not show it — very much! — and realized in a moment what the truth was.
“We are,” Crane said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. These people would understand the gesture. “I’m M. Reynolds Crane; Doctor Seaton is occupied at the moment. You are of course the people who had the spaceship on the moon. We have come all the way out here in the hope of finding you somewhere in this galaxy.”