“Mart,” he said. “We have now got exactly what it takes to make big medicine on those Chloran apes. The only question is, do we wipe ’em completely out now or do we let ’em suffer a while longer? Suffer in durance vile?”
If he had waited a few hours longer to speak so, he would have kept his mouth shut; for that same afternoon the Skylark’s screens again went instantaneously into full powered incandescent defense. The Brain took evasive action at once; but it was five long hours before they got far enough away from the source of that incredible flood of energy so that it became ineffective and was cut off. During that five hours Seaton and Crane observed and computed and analyzed and thought. When it was over, Seaton scanned the Skylark’s reserve supply of power uranium; and his face was grim and hard when he called the others into conference.
“I wouldn’t have believed it possible,” he said flatly. “I can hardly believe it now, after watching it happen. Either they’ve been building stuff twenty-four hours a day ever since we left…” He paused.
“Or they’ve got myriads of myria-watts,” Dunark said into that pause, “that they couldn’t sync in then, but can now.”
“Could be,” Seaton agreed. “Let’s see if we can find anything out. We’re too far away to hold anything, even a planet. But with all of us looking we should be able to see something — and the gizmo can handle eight projections as easily as one. Has anybody got any better ideas?”
Since no one had, they tried it. “Riding the beam” is a weird sensation; a sense of duality of personality that must be experienced to be either appreciated or understood.
The physical body is here; its duplicate in patterns of pure force is there: the two separate entities see and hear and smell and taste and feel two entirely different environments at the same time. It is a thing that takes some getting used to; but all the Skylarkers except Lotus were used to it. And she, as has been intimated, was a quick study.
Seaton could not hold the projections anywhere near any planet; could not hold them even inside a solar system. Even with the vernier controls locked and Seaton’s hands resolutely off, the point of view jumped erratically about in fantastic leaps of hundreds of billions of miles. Not even the huge-and reinforced-mass of the Skylark of Valeron could hold them steady. They swept dizzily into the chromospheres of suns, out into the cold dark of interstellar vacuum, through tenuous gas clouds and past orbiting planets. In theory — if theory meant anything in this unexplored area — the fourth-dimensional “gizmo” should have been able to lock steadily on a target. In practice, they could hardly find a target to lock onto. All eight of the Skylarkers were synced in at once to the master controls, but their best efforts could not keep them even inside a solar system, much less give them the rock-steady fix that would have permitted them to spy on enemy activity.
And the magnitude of error grew. In a minute they were swinging in huge arcs of a parsec or more. In another minute the swings had become so enormous and so random that they could not measure them. Their speed was immense; they swung dizzyingly toward a cepheid variable and it winked at them like a traffic blinker, spun past a flare star and watched its great gouts of flame leap out and fall back.
Five minutes of this insane cavorting made half the party seasick, and they pulled out of projection and returned, gasping and staggering, to the welcome stability of the Skylark.
Seaton stuck it out for half an hour. Then he pushed the “cancel” button.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he growled. “Every time we wiggle a finger or a fly lights on a table it changes the shape of the whole ship. Oh, for something really rigid to build with!” (The eternal complaint of the precise worker in any field!) “But we each saw something. We’ll report in turn.”
Seaton gave a brief description of his own observations. He had seen something, no more than a flicker, but clearly big and Chloran-made. Dunark had spotted what sounded like the same planet-sized mass, but in the system of a G-3 star, as nearly as he could tell; Seaton’s had been an F. The others had seen nothing. Seaton nodded.
“Okay. There are at least two solar systems having fortified Chloran planets, with one more probable. Ideas, anybody?” Crane broke the ensuing silence. “I can’t come up with anything constructive. Just the opposite. There’s something basically wrong here, Dick. As I understand the TammonSeaton Theory, the operators involved here are all in the no-space-no-time field, so that distance does not enter. Hence it is possible in theory, and should be in practice, to place a bomb anywhere in all total space as accurately and as easily as you can touch the end of your nose with the tip of your finger.”
Dorothy whistled, Dunark looked shocked, and the others looked blank. Seaton scowled and said, “Yeah… But with all points in total space coexistent — Gunther’s Universe — how are you going to pick any given one out? What kind of an operator would it take? There’s a hole, Mart, in either the theory or in the reduction…” He paused, frowning in thought.
“Or both,” Crane said.
“Or both,” Seaton agreed. “Okay, let’s skip down and find it.”
They went down and worked with the Brain all the rest of the day; but they did not find the hole. Nor did they find it the next day, or the next. Then Seaton began to pace the floor.
“So, in all probability, another breakthrough is required,” Crane said. “And I can’t help you on that; I’m not the genius type.”
“Neither am I!” Seaton snorted. “In my book one flash-in-the-pan hunch does not make a genius… But here’s another angle, fella. If this thing can be worked out it’ll be so much better than that synchronization idea that it isn’t funny. Also, it might not take the years to work out. Don’t you think it’ll be worth while, Mart, to spend a few days seeing if we can set it up as a problem? See if we can take it out of the pure brainstorm category before we spring it on Rovol?”
“I do indeed,” and Seaton and Crane both went down to the control room and got into their master controllers. However; before that task was finished there was a surprise for Richard Seaton.
27. CO-BELLIGERENTS
“DuQuesne calling Seaton reply… ”
Since Seaton’s head was inside his master controller, no speaker sounded. Since everything pertaining to DuQuesne was on file in the Brain’s memory banks, there was no delay whatever in making the proper connections: Seaton cut in before the first send of the message; short as it was, was completed.
“What the hell, DuQuesne!” his thought blazed out. “I didn’t think even you would have the sublime guts to call on me again!”
“Save it, Seaton. This is important. Do you know how many solar systems of Chlorans there are in that galaxy where your Skylark of Valeron got burned out?”
Seaton paused for one microsecond. Then, cautiously: “No idea. Hundred, maybe. Or, in view of this — thousands?”
“You aren’t even warm. My apparatus put one hundred forty-nine million three hundred nineteen thousand two hundred ninety-seven of them into my tank before my scanners went out. And they hadn’t covered a quarter of the galaxy yet.”
“Je…” Seaton began, but shut himself up. Dorothy was listening in. “But to be able to use a sixth-order analsynth that long you must have had a little more… okay, gimme the dope.”
DuQuesne told his story, including his superpowered DQ and his Fenachrone crew, concluding, “We knocked out over fifteen thousand of them before I had to run. But of course that wasn’t a drop in the proverbial bucket. Worse, I doubt like the devil if any mobile base possible to build can ever get that close to them again. Apparently they sync in just enough stuff — no matter how much it takes — to cope with the maximum observed threat.”