Dorothy’s face began to pale. “By that analogy you mean destroy the whole galaxy! How can such a thing be possible? It can’t possibly be possible!”
He told her how the operation could be performed. That apparatus that the Barlo women had dredged up out of nowhere had a lot of capabilities that did not appear on the surface. Blackie DuQuesne had perceived one set of those possibilities, and he and Blackie had been working on the hardware. They were calling it Project Rho.
Her face, already pale, turned white as he talked; and when he had finished:
“Project… Rho,” she breathed. “How utterly horrible! And yet… I never dreamed… have you talked to Martin yet?”
“No. You first. I don’t want to even think about pushing that kind of a button without being sure you’re standing at my back.”
“I’ll do better than that, Dick,” She looked him steadily in the eye. “I’ll take half of it. My finger will be right beside yours on that button.”
“You are an ace, ace. As maybe I’ve said once before.”
“Uh-huh, at least once — but we’re one, remember?” After a moment she went on, “But we can’t possibly sell the Norlaminians any such bill of goods as that.”
“I’ll say we can’t. They’d cry their eyes out all over the place. Or wait… When they find out that they can’t stop it, they’ll help save the human planets, which will be all to the good; the witches can use the help. But basically, the grand slam will be up to DuQuesne and his Fenachrone and the witches and Mart and me. Even Mart will need some persuasion, I’m afraid; and you’ll have to really work on Peg. She’ll simply have a litter of kittens.”
“Why, Dick; what a way to talk!” She smiled in spite of herself, but sobered quickly.
“She’ll come around, I’m sure; she’ll have to. But Dick, is it actually physically possible? It’s so huge!”
“Definitely. You see, we’ll be operating in a Gunther universe, so that mass as such won’t enter and power will be no problem. All we have to do is build an apparatus to alter the properties of space around and throughout the object to be moved — altering those properties in such a way as to make its three-dimensional attributes incompatible with those of its…”
She stopped him with an upraised band. “Hold it! Wait up, please. We’ll dispense with the high math, if you don’t mind. It’s the sheer size of the thing that scares me witless.”
Seaton did grin then. “Well, you’ve always known that making things bigger and better is the fondest thing I am of. But we know exactly how to do it, and I think we can get it done before the Norlaminians finish theirs. But DuQuesne should be about ready to take off. I’ll flip myself over there and see.”
He did so and said, “How’re you doing, Blackie?”
“A few minutes yet to finish final checking. I’ve been thinking. What kind of a celestial object will that galaxy be when we get done with it? Not a quasi-stellar, certainly; that’s only a star with the energy of a hundred thousand million stars. This will be a galaxy with the energy of a hundred thousand million galaxies — the energy of an entire universe.”
“Yeah. Something new, I’d say. It’ll give some astronomers a thrill, some day. But what I can’t compute is, whether or not it will sterilize the interstellar space of that galaxy.” Seaton said.
“Well, if it doesn’t, you might put the Osnomians and Urvanians on it. Keep ’em from thinking about fighting each other.”
“You know, Blackie, I’d thought of doing exactly that? ‘Great minds’ and so forth. ‘Bye now; be seein’ ya,” and Seaton flipped himself back home.
En route to his destination — barren planet in a starcluster on the opposite side of the galaxy from the Skylark of Valeron — DuQuesne again went into a huddle with Sleemet.
“So far, you’ve done a job,” he began. “What I told you to do — what I knew how to do — and done it well. But nothing else. Now I want something more than that. Something you can do, if you will, that I can’t. As you know, I’ve made arrangements so that in case of my death this whole planetoid goes up in an atomic blast. That was to keep you from killing me and making off with it. The same thing will happen, though, if those Chlorans kill me in the fracas that’s coming. It would seem as though that fact would be enough to make you make an honest-to-God Effort to be sure that they don’t kill me by doing your damnedest to help me kill them. Mentally. Both you and the Chlorans know more about one phase of that than I do — as yet. So, as added inducement to really top effort, if you’ll really tear into it on this Project Rho I’ll teach you everything I know that you can take. And I’ll help you build any kind of spacecraft you want before you leave; one even as big as this one. What do you say?”
Sleemet’s strange eyes glowed. “If you will go mind to mind with me on that I can now assure you of such cooperation as no member of my race has ever given to any non-Fenachrone form of life,” he declared; and DuQuesne handed him a headset.
It wasn’t easy, not even for such an accomplished liar as Marc C. DuQuesne was, to make the four-dim gizmo very much more incomprehensible than it actually was; but he accomplished the feat — and he actually did give Sleemet practically everything else.
The DQ went into a one-day orbit above one point of an immense plain of the barren planet that was its goal. A plain some ten thousand square miles of which became forthwith an Area of Work. Enormous mechanisms sprang into being, by means of which DuQuesne and several hundred top-bracket Fenachrone engineers sent gigantic beams of force hurtling across the galaxy to the Skylark of Valeron and to hundreds of thousands of other micrometrically determined points.
But not Sleemet. That wight, knowing now almost everything that DuQuesne knew, was working in his own private laboratory — working with all the power of his tremendous mind on the various mental aspects of the battle of giants to come.
Hour after hour, Crane worked in his master control at the base of the Brain, with Madame Barlo and Drasnik and Margaret, each wearing an extra-complex headset, sitting close to him. They were mapping and modeling three galaxies, on such a large scale that the vast “tank” of the Skylark of Valeron was millions of times too small. They were using a discus-shaped volume of open space some ten light-years in diameter and three light-years thick.
Galaxy DW-427-LU was already meticulously in place; its every celestial body being represented by a characteristically colored light. “Above” Galaxy DW-427-LU and “below” it (the terms are used in the explanatory sense only; “on one side of” and “on the other side of” could be used just as well) as close to it as possible, two other galaxies were being modeled; each as nearly like DW-427-LU in size and shape as could be found in that part of the First Universe. They were so close together that in many places the three models actually interpenetrated.
Now in the space-time continuum of the strictly material — the plenum in which we ungifted human beings live and which our friends the semanticists would have us believe is the only one having any reality — the map is not the territory. That is taken as being axiomatic. In the demesne of The Talent, however, known to some scholars as psionics and to scoffers as magic or witchcraft, the map is — and definitely! — the territory.
Thus, as Madame Barlo and Drasnik, those two matched poles of tremendous power; and Crane, the superlatively able coordinator and his matching pole Margaret; and that immense Brain — as these five labored together, the “map” (in this case the meticulously accurate space-chart) became filled with tendrils and filaments of psionic force, connecting models of suns with models of suns and those of planets with those of planets. And as those joinings occurred in the map, the same joinings occurred in the actual galaxies out in deep space.