“Quit peeking!” Seaton snarled, “You’re lousing up the whole deal! Concentrate! Think, dammit, THINK!” Everyone resumed thinking and Kay-Lee resumed writing. She wrote smoothly and effortlessly, with the precision and with almost the speed of the operating point of a geometric lathe.
She wrote the first column and the second and the third and the fourth-six feet by three feet of tightly packed equations and other mathematical shorthand. Then came twelve feet of exquisitely detailed “wiring” diagram. Then, covering all the rest of the paper, came working drawings of and meticulously detailed specifications for machines that no one there had ever heard of.
Then all three women collapsed. As well they might; they had worked without a let-up for three hours.
Men and women sprang to their aid with restoratives, and they began to recover.
“Mister Fodan,” Madlyn Mannis said then, coming up to the Chief of the Five arm-in-arm with Stephanie de Marigny. Her usually vivid face was strangely pale. “I can understand Hunkie here having a place in a brawl like this, she’s got half the letters in the alphabet after her name, but what good could I do? Possibly? I only went to school one day in my life and that day it rained and the teacher didn’t come.”
“Formal education does not matter, child; it is what you intrinsically are that counts. You and your friend Charles are two perfectly matched male and female poles of tremendous power. You felt your paired power at work, I’m sure.”
“Wel-l-l, I felt something.” Madlyn looked up at her Charley, her eyes full of question marks. “My whole brain was full of… well, it was all kind of spizzly, like champagne tastes.” And:
“That’s it exactly,” van der Gleiss agreed.
Kay-Lee, fully recovered now, looked in surprise at some of the equations she had written, then turned to Sacner Carfon. “Did it come out all right?” she asked hopefully.
“Oh, I hope it did!”
“I think so,” the porpoise-man replied. “At least, all of it I can understand makes sense.”
The T-8 engineer stared at Kay-Lee. “But didn’t you know what you were doing?”
“Of course she didn’t.” Again Madame Barlo did the talking. “None of us did, consciously. We are not masters of The Power, but Its servants. We are merely Its tools; the agents through which It does Its work.”
And, off to one side, Dorothy was saying, “Dick, those women actually are witches! I liked Kay-Lee, too… but real, live, practicing witches! I got goose bumps as big as peas. I don’t believe in witchcraft, darn it!”
“I don’t either. That is, I never did before… but what else are you going to call it now?”
28. PROJECT RHO
THE mathematicians and physical scientists began at once to study the wealth of new data. Drasnik, the First of Psychology, after conferring with Fodan, with Sacner Carfon and with each of the three witches in turn, actually rushed over to the group of Tellurians. It was the first time Seaton had ever seen an excited Norlaminian.
“Ah, youths of Tellus, I thank you!” he enthused. “I thank you immensely for the inestimable privilege of meeting the ladies Barlo! They possess a talent that is indubitably of the most tremendous—”
“Talent?” Dorothy snorted. “Do you call witchcraft a talent? Why, the very idea of it makes me…” She paused. “Uh-huh, me too,” Madlyn agreed fervently. “If I have to believe in practicing witches I’ll go not-so-slowly nuts.”
“Witchcraft, my children? Bosh and fiddle — fiddle! It is a talent. Extremely rare and lamentably rudimentary in our part of the universe, yet these women have it in astoundingly full measure. Unfortunately, you have no name for it except ‘witchcraft’, which term has deplorable connotations. It is the ability to… but the English has no words for that, either. But no matter, you have seen it in fine, full action. Fodan and Sacner and I each have a very little of it…”
“But those women couldn’t possibly have known anything about that kind of stuff!” Madlyn protested.
“Of course they didn’t. Richard here and Tammon and Doctor DuQuesne were the principal sources of information. But all three of them together lacked a great deal of having full knowledge, and the rest of us had very little indeed. While the comparison is lamentably loose, consider a large, finely cut jigsaw puzzle. Seaton and DuQuesne and Tammon could each assemble an area. But no two of the three areas were contiguous, while none of the rest of us could fit more than a very few pieces together. But the ladies Barlo — particularly Grand Dame Barlo, who is a veritable powerhouse of strength — with some little help from the rest of us, exerted and directed The Power. The Power that, by tapping the reservoir of infinite knowledge, enabled the scribe Kay-Lee to fill in the missing parts of the puzzle.”
“But why…” Seaton began, but changed his mind. “I see. You didn’t tell me anything about it because at that time it was both insignificant and inapplicable.”
“That is correct. As I was saying, our Fodan, who has more of it than any other entity previously known, had perhaps the thousandth of what Kay-Lee, the weakest by far of the three, has. That is why he is Chief of the Five. And they tell me that there are other women of their race who also have this talent. Remarkable!” At this thought Drasnik, who had quieted down, became excited all over again. “When this is all over I shall go at once to Ray-See-Nee and study. Marvelous! They did not know even that it is a talent or that, when they learn, there will be no need to drug themselves into, half-unconsciousness to employ it successfully. Thank you again, young friends, for this wonderful opportunity. Marvelous!” and Drasnik scurried away.
The Seatons and Madlyn and van der Gleiss stared after the Norlaminian until he was out of sight. They turned and stared at each other.
“Well… I’ll… be… a… dirty… name,” Madlyn said.
Seaton was pacing the floor, talking to Dorothy, emitting a cloud of smoke from his battered and reeking briar. “I like to do my thinking with you, ace.”
She chuckled. “At me, you mean, don’t you? That stuff is over my head like a beach umbrella.”
“Don’t fish, sweetie. You not only have a body and some hair, but also a brain. One that fires on all sixteen barrels all the time.”
She laughed delightedly. “Thank you so much. You know that isn’t true, but you also know how I lap it up and purr. But to proceed, Dunark wants to smash them all with planets, the way he was going to smash Urvania. Martin and Peggy, after talking the way they did, crawfished and are now talking about enclosing the whole galaxy in a stasis of time…”
“Huh? That’s news to me. How’s he figuring on doing it — did he say?”
“Uh-uh. I didn’t talk to him. Peggy says he isn’t going to say anything about it until he can present the package.”
“He should live so long. But ’scue, please; go ahead.”
“Only one more. Fodan, the simple-minded old darling, wants to work with them. Convert them!”
“Yeah. Make Christians of ’em. I’ve got a life-sized picture in technicolor of anybody ever accomplishing that feat. The trouble is, everybody wants to do something different and none of their ideas are any good at all.”
“Oh? I noticed that you haven’t been enthusiastic about any of them. Pretty grim, in fact. Why not?”
“Because none of ’em will come even close to getting ’em all and this has got to be a one hundred point zero zero zero per cent cleanup. You know how they operate on a cancer. They cut deep enough and wide enough to get it all. Every cell. If they don’t get it all it spreads all over the body and the patient dies. This is a cancer. It’s already eaten just about all of that galaxy by Chlora-typing planets wherever they go — or rather, enslaved humans are doing it for them — and it’s spreading fast. And when that galaxy begins to get crowded they won’t just jump to one other; they’ll go for hundreds or thousands of galaxies and there goes the ball game. So that cancer has got to be operated on before it spreads any farther.”