Those joinings were invisible, it is true, and intangible, and indetectable to any physical instrument. But they were nevertheless as real as was the almost infinite power from which they sprang.

The other pairs of psiontists were also hard at work. Fodan and Grand Dame Barlo, Sacner Carfon and KayLee, Charles van der Gleiss and Madlyn Mannis, Mergon and his Luloy, Tammon and Sennlloy — all were shooting heavy charges fast and flawlessly straight. And as all those matched pairs labored, and as the automatics of pure psionic force they produced reproduced themselves in geometric ratio, the intergalactic couplings increased at a rate that was that ratio squared.

Seaton was fantastically busy, too. He was deep in his controller, with Dorothy and Stephanie de Marigny, both helmeted, one on each side of him. Dorothy, was, of course, his matched pole of power; Stephanie was his link to DuQuesne. He, too, was operating a ten-thousand-square-mile Area of Work with the speed of thought and he was not making any mistakes. It is true that the Skylark of Valeron was the biggest thing he had ever built before, and that the members with which he was working now were parsecs instead of inches long. Nevertheless each one fitted perfectly into place and every one that was supposed to connect with anything of DuQuesne’s connected perfectly therewith. After many hours of this furiously grinding work, a myriad of hells began to break out, at the rate of hundreds of thousands per second. Of hells, that is, infinitely hotter than anything imaginable by man. Of super-novae, no less. In one galaxy, a large hot sun vanished…

It reappeared instantaneously — with no lapse of time whatever — close beside the sun of a Chloran-dominated solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU.

And in that same no-time the Tellus-type planet in the Chloran system vanished therefrom and reappeared in a precisely similar orbit around a Type G dwarf sun in Galaxy B, the third galaxy in the psiontists’ tremendous working model.

And those two suns in the Chloran solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU, with photospheres in contact and with intrinsic velocities not only diametrically opposed but increased horribly by their mutual force of gravitation, crashed together in direct central impact and splashed with tremendous force.

Except for the heat, the collision might have lasted for a long time. But heat was the all-important factor — the starkly incomprehensible heat of hundreds of millions of Centigrade degrees.

Each of those suns was already an atomic furnace in precise equilibrium, generating and radiating the energy of some five million tons per second of matter being converted completely into energy. Thus there was no place for the added energy of billions of tons of matter to go. It could not be absorbed and it could not be radiated. Therefore the whole enormous mass of super-hot, super-dense material began to go into the long series of ultra-atomic explosions that is the formation of a supersuper-nova — the most utterly, the most fantastically violent display of pure, raw energy known to or possible in the universe of man.

Flares and prominences of this insanely detonating material were hurled upward and outward for millions upon millions of miles. Shock-wave after shock-wave, so hellishly hot as to be invisible for days, raged and raved spherically outward; converting instantaneously all the flotsam in their paths into their own unknown composition or atomic and subatomic debris. Planets lasted a little longer. Oceans and mountain ranges boiled briefly; after which each world evaporated comparatively slowly, as does a drop of water riding a cushion of its own steam on a hot steel plate. And the sphere of annihilation, ravening outward with unabated ferocity, reached and passed the outermost limits of the Chloran solar system and kept on going…

On and on… And on…

Until there came to pass an event which not even Seaton, not even Madame Barlo herself had foreseen… and an event which nearly canceled all their efforts and their lives as well; for the Chlorans were not left without resources even in the destruction of their galaxy…

29. DUQUESNE TO THE RESCUE

As has been said, the Chlorans of Galaxy DW-427-LU as a race were more conversant with the Talent than were any of the human or near-human races of the First Galaxy: that is, with the phases or facets of it that had to do with the remarkable hypnotic qualities of their minds. Thus their mathematicians were more or less familiar with no-space-no-time theory, and some of the Greater Great Ones had played with it a little more or less for fun, in practice. Since they had never had any real use for it as a weapon, however, it had never been fully developed.

Thus there were no detectors or feeling for that type of attack. “It was not sixth-order, but no-space-no-time, which is no-order.” Thus millions upon millions of Chloran planets were destroyed without any intelligent entity either giving or receiving warning that an attack was being made.

And that was the way Richard Seaton wanted it. This was not a game; not a chivalric tournament. This was a matter of life and death, in which the forces of human civilization, outnumbered untold billions to one, needed all the advantage they could get.

Unfortunately for Seaton’s desires and expectations, the Chlorans had a Galactic Institute for Advanced Study.

In common with all such institutions everywhere, its halls harbored at least one devotee of any nameable subject, however recondite or arcane that subject might be. So there was one old professor of advanced optical hypnosis who, as a hobby, had been delving into no-space-no-time for a couple of hundred years. He did not feel the light preliminary surveying tendrils of the human witches; but when the big Gunther beams began to come in he became interested fast and got busy fast.

He called his first assistant and his most advanced student — the latter a Greater Great One who was also interested in and a possessor of the Talent and thus familiar with the mysterious power of the number three — and, synchronizing their three minds, they traced those beams to the Skylark of Valeron and the DQ, and to Seaton and to Crane and to DuQuesne.

“First,” the professor told his two weaker fellows, “we will attune our Union of Three to theirs and break it apart with blasts of psionic force. Then, each of us having tuned to one of the separated strands, we will kill the three murderers forthwith.”

And the Chlorans proceeded to do their best to bring this event about — and their best was very potent indeed.

If things did not quite work out the way they had planned it, it was no fault of the individual Chlorans. Their minds were fully capable of killing three “murderers” at a distance. The first enormous surge of mental energy they thrust into the Tellurian union of minds destroyed its fabric. The coupling of “poles of power” was wrenched asunder.

The individual minds of the operators were left alone against the Chloran thrust… and each of the three Chlorans selected one of the three mightiest intellects of their enemies and commanded it to die.

In that moment, Seaton, Crane and DuQuesne were seized and pinned. The minds that thundered destruction at them were not merely of great intrinsic power, carefully trained: they were backed up by all the million-year evolution of Chloran science, aided by the impact of total surprise.

The three helpless Tellurians were helpless before they knew what hit them.

But they did not die. What saved them was DuQuesne’s bargain with the Fenachrone.

Sleemet had had a few microseconds’ warning by that Fenachrone ferocity, and the backing of every last member of his feral race.

His primary purpose was, of course, the defense of DuQuesne’s life — not for the sake of DuQuesne, to be sure, but for the protection of the Fenachrone. He succeeded.