Yes, that was it! The smart thing to do would be to watch it for a few seconds — determine exact distance, direction of flight, velocity, and so forth — before reporting to the Big Boss.

That would protect him either way.

Wherefore Sleemet had time to launch an analsynth projection along the indicated line.

He found a solar system containing two highly industrialized planets; one of which was cool, the other cold. One was peopled by those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned human beings; the other by a race of creatures even more monstrous and therefore even less entitled to exist.

He studied those planets and their inhabitants quickly but thoroughly, and the more he studied them the more derisive and contemptuous he became. They had no warships, no fortresses either above or below ground, no missiles, even! Their every effort and all their energies were devoted to affairs of peace!

Therefore, every detail having been recorded, including the gibberish being broadcast and tight beamed by various communications satellites, Sleemet pulled in his analsynth and sent out a full working projection.

He had already located great stores of prepared power uranium bars and blocks on both planets. Careless of detection now and working at his usual fantastic speed and with his usual perfect control, he built in seconds six tremendous pyramids upon each of the two doomed worlds — pyramids of now one-hundred-percent-convertible superatomic explosive. He assembled twenty-four exceedingly complex, carefully aimed forces and put them on trip. Then, glaring balefully into an almost opaque visiplate, he reached out without looking and rammed a plunger home — and in an instant those two distant planets became two tremendous fireballs of hellishly intolerable, mostly invisible, energies.

And almost eight thousand million highly intelligent creatures — eating, sleeping, loving, fighting, reading, thinking, working, playing — died in that utterly cataclysmic rending of two entire worlds.

Practically all of them died not knowing even that they had been hurt. A few — a very few — watch officers in interplanetary spaceships observed one or the other of those frightful catastrophes in time to have an instant’s warning of what was coming; but only three such officers, it became known later, had enough time to throw on their faster-than-light drives and thus outrun the ravening front of annihilation.

Cosmically, however, the thing didn’t amount to much. Its duration was very short indeed. While a little of each planet’s substance was volatilized, practically all of it was scarcely more than melted. When equilibrium was restored they did not shine like little suns. They scarcely glowed.

Hands quietly poised, Sleemet again paused in thought.

The fact that he had murdered almost eight billion people did not bother him at all. In fact, he did not think of the action at all, as murder or as killing or as anything else. If he had, the thought would have been the Fenachrone equivalent of “pesticide.” All space comprising the Cosmic All and every planet therein should and would belong to the Master Race; no competing race had any right whatever to live.

Should he, or should he not, explore the lines of those communications beams and destroy the other planets of this group? He should not, he decided. He would have to slow down, perhaps even change course; and it was quite possible that he was still within range of the sixth-order stuff of that self-styled Overlord. Besides, this group of queerly mixed entities would keep. After he had found a really distant Fenatype planet and had developed it, he would come back here and finish this minor chore.

But very shortly after making this decision Sleemet was given cause to know starkly that he had not investigated this civilization thoroughly enough by far; for his vessel was being assailed by forces of such incredible magnitude that his instantaneously reactive outer screen was already radiating in the high violet!

And, before he could do much more than put a hand to his construction panel, that outer screen began to show black spots of failure!

In Hall of Prime Computation, on Llurdiax, one entire panel of instrumentation went suddenly dead. The supervisor of that section flicked two testing switches, then scanned the last couple of inches of each of two tapes. Then he paused, for a moment stunned: knocked completely out of any Llurd’s calm poise. Then, licking his lips, he spoke; apparently to empty air:

“Llanzlan Klazmon, sir, Blaydaxorb Three and Blaydaxorb Five stopped reporting, simultaneously, eleven seconds ago. Orbiting pyrometers of both planets reported there to nuclear temperatures at the end-points of their respective transmissions. End of report, sir.”

The supervisor did not elaborate.

While he was appalled and terribly shocked — he had never imagined such disasters possible — it was not his job to comment or to deduce or to theorize. His business — his only business — was to report to a higher echelon the pertinent facts of any and all unusual events or conditions; the height of the echelon to which he reported being directly proportional to the unusualness and/or magnitude of the event or condition.

Since this event was unprecedented and of very great magnitude indeed, his report went straight to the top — thus overtaking and passing the report of Head Supervisor Marton, which was not yet ready for delivery.

Having reported the pertinent facts to the proper echelon. the section supervisor went calmly, almost unconcernedly, back to his job of supervising his section. He paid no more attention to the incident even when the llanzlan — fully recovered now from his wounds — who had been asleep in his penthouse apartment came into the Hall from the down flyway. (Everyone rode a force-beam up, but came down on his own wings.)

While Klazmon was not hurrying any more than usual, his usual technique was to drop a full half mile with folded wings before beginning to put on his brakes. Hence his tremendous wings and stabilizing surfaces sent blasts of cold, dense air throughout the whole end of the Hall as he slowed down for a high-G landing in his seat at his master control console. Fingers, thumbs, and tail-tip flashed over the banked and tiered keyboards of that console; and, all around the periphery of Llurdias, that miles-wide girdle of mighty fortresses came instantly to life.

A multi-layered umbrella of full-coverage screens flashed into being over the whole city and Klazmon, engineering his fifth-order projector, sent his simulacrum of pure force out to see what had happened in or to the solar system of Blaydaxorb.

He was now, to all intents and purposes, in two places at once.

He could see, hear, feel, taste, and smell exactly as well with one self as with the other.

He was, however, thoroughly accustomed to the peculiar sensations of having a complete personality; he could block out at will any perceptions of either self. And his immaterial self had two tremendous advantages over his material one. It could traverse incredibly immense distances in no measurable time; and, no matter where it went or what it encountered, his physical self would remain entirely unaffected.

In a mere flick of time, then, Klazmon was in the solar system of Blaydaxorb. The sun itself was unchanged, but in orbits three and five, where the two inhabited planets had been, there were two still — wildly — disturbed masses of liquids and gases.

He threw out a light, fast detector web, which located the marauding Fenachrone fleet in less than a second. Then, returning most of his attention to his console, he assembled seventeen exceedingly complex forces and hurled them, one at each vessel of the invading fleet.