“That won’t make too much difference.” Seaton looked around; first at his own crew and then at the guards, half of whom were down. Medics and first-aid men were rushing in to work on them. He looked again, more closely, at his people and at Prenk and Kay-Lee. Not one of them, apparently, had even been scratched.
That, however, was logical. The mercenaries were hardtrained fighting men, shooting was their business. Hence the attackers’ orders had been to shoot the guards first, and there had been no time to evaluate the actual situation and to change the plan of attack. Hence, as far as anyone knew, not a single bullet had been aimed at the far end of the room.
Seaton took a pair of headsets out of his pocket and applied one of them, first to one of the two lieutenants’ heads, then to the other.
“Uh-huh,” he grunted then. “That ape didn’t know too much, but this one was going to be the new captain-general. I suppose you’ve got a recorder, Ree-Toe?”
“I’ll get it, sir!” Kay-Lee exclaimed; and Prenk, eyes bulging, gasped: “Don’t tell me you can read a dead brain, sir!”
“Oh, yes. They keep their charges, sometimes for days.”
Kay-Lee handed Seaton a microphone then, and he spoke into it for ten minutes the while three Rayseenian faces went through gamuts of emotion; each culminating in the same expression of joyous satisfaction.
When Seaton paused for breath Prenk said in awe, “That machine is certainly a something… I don’t suppose…” He stopped.
“I do suppose, yes. I’ll give you a few sets, with blueprints, and show you how they work,” and Seaton went on with his reading.
A few minutes later he cut off the mike and said, “That ape over there,” he pointed, “is one of the Big Wheels. Have someone latch onto him, Ree-Toe; we’ll read him next.
He’s one you’ll be really interested in, so I’ll hook you up in parallel with me so you can get everything he knows into your own brain.” He took a third headset from his pocket and began to adjust its settings, going on, “It takes a different set-up… so… and goes on your head so.”
“That ape” was a fattish, sallow-faced man of fifty, who had been directing operations from outside the room and had intended to stay outside it until everything was secure within. He had been blown into the room and halfway along its length by the force of the blasts. He was pretty badly smashed up, but he was beginning to regain consciousness and was weakly trying to get to his feet.
This unlucky wight was a mine of information indeed, but Prenk stopped the mining operation after only a couple of minutes of digging.
“Sy-By,” he said. “Two more of your officers you can shoot.” He gave two names. “Then come back here with some men you think you can trust and we’ll test ’em to make sure.
By that time I’ll have a list of people for you to round up and bring in for examination.”
There is no need to follow any farther the Premier’s progress in cleaning up his planet.
In fact, only one more incident that occurred there is of interest here — one that occurred while Seaton and Dorothy were getting ready for bed in one of the suites of honor. She put both arms around him suddenly; he pressed her close.
“Dick, I belonged there. Beside you. Every fiber of my being belonged there. That was exactly where I belonged.”
“I know you did, sweet. I’ll have to admit it. But…”
She put her hand over his mouth. “But nothing, my dearest. No buts. I’ve killed rats and rattlesnakes, and that wasn’t any different. Not a bit different in any way.”
Of the more than five thousand Fenachrone who had left their noisome home planet in Sleemet’s flagship, almost seven hundred had died and more were dying.
It was not that the Llurdi were physically cruel to them or abused them in any way. They didn’t. Nor were they kind; they were conspicuously and insultingly neutral and indifferent to them. Conspicuous and insulting, that is, to the hypersensitive minds of the captives. In their own minds, the Llurdi were acting strictly according to logic. Every item of the subjects’ environment duplicated precisely its twin on the subjects’ home world. What more could logically be done? Nothing.
The Llurdi observed the mental anguish of the Fenachrone, of course, and recorded their emotions quite accurately, but with no emotional reactions whatever of their own.
Practically all emotions were either illogical or unsane, or both.
To the illogical and unsane Fenachrone, however — physically, mentally, intellectually and psychologically — the situation was intolerable; one that simply could not be endured.
They were proud, haughty, intolerant; their race had always been so. Since time immemorial it had been bred into their innermost consciousnesses that they were the RACE SUPREME — destined unquestionably to be the absolute rulers of all things living or yet to live throughout all the transfinite reaches of the Cosmic All.
Holding this belief with every fiber of their beings, they had been plunged instantly into a condition of complete, utter helplessness.
Their vessel could not fight. While it was intact except for its tail-section and its power-pods, its every offensive projector was burned out; useless. Nor could they fight personally, either physically or mentally. Their physical strength, enormous as it was, was of no avail against the completely logical, completely matter-of-fact minds of the Llurdi.
Most galling condition of all, the Fenachrone were not treated as enemies; nor as menaces or threats; nor even as intelligent entities whose knowledges and abilities might be worthy of notice. These things were observed and recorded, to be sure, but only as component parts of a newly discovered class of objects, the Fenachrone; a class of objects that happened to be alive. The Fenachrone were neither more nor less noteworthy than were birds or barnacles.
Sleemet, no longer young and perhaps the proudest and most intractable and most intransigent of the lot, could not endure that treatment very long; but he did not bend.
The old adage “Where there’s life there’s hope,” simply is not true where such as the Llurdi and the Fenachrone are concerned. Sleemet lost all hope and broke; broke almost completely down.
He stopped eating. That did not bother the Llurdi in any way. Why should it? They were neither squeamish nor humane, any more than they were cruel or vindictive. The fact that certain of these creatures stopped taking nourishment under certain conditions was merely a datum to be observed and recorded.
But since Sleemet was big and strong, even for a Fenachrone, and had previously eaten very well indeed, it took him a long time to die. And as he weakened — as the bindings between flesh and spirit loosened more and ever more — he regressed more and ever more back into the youth of his race. Back and back. Still farther back; back into its very childhood; back to a time when his remote ancestors ate their meat alive and communicated with each other, sometimes by grunts and gestures, but more often by means of a purely mental faculty that was later to evolve into the power of ocular hypnosis.
Half conscious or less of his surroundings but knowing well that death was very near, Sleemet half-consciously sent out his race’s ages-old mental message — in extremity of the dying.
Marc C. DuQuesne knew vastly more about the Fenachrone than did any other man alive, not excluding Richard Seaton. He and Seaton were, as far as is known, the only two men ever to meet Fenachrone mind to mind and live through the experience; but DuQuesne had been in thought-helmet contact with a Fenachrone much longer and much more intimately and very much more interestedly than Seaton ever had — because of the tremendous intrinsic differences between the personalities of the two men.
Seaton, after having crippled a war-vessel of the Fenachrone, had pinned its captain against a wall with so many beams of force that he could not move his head and could scarcely move any other part of his monstrous body. Then, by means of a pair of thought-helmets, he had taken what of that captain’s knowledge he wanted. He had, however, handled that horribly unhuman brain very gingerly. He had
merely read certain parts of it, as one reads an encyclopedia; at no time had his mind become en rapport with that of the monster. In fact, he had said to Crane:
“I’d hate to have much of that brain in my own skull — afraid I’d bite myself. I’m just going to look… and when I see something I want I’ll grab it and put it into my own brain.”
DuQuesne, however, in examining a navigating engineer of that monstrous race, had felt no such revulsion, contrariwise — although possibly not quite consciously — he had admired certain traits of Fenachrone character so much that he had gone en rapport with that engineer’s mind practically cell to cell; with the result that he had emerged from that mental union as nearly a Fenachrone himself as a human being could very well become.
Wherefore, as DuQuesne in his flying-planetoid-base approached the point of its course nearest to the planet Llurdiax, he began to feel the thinnest possible tendril of thought trying to make contact with one of the deepest chambers of his mind. He stiffened; shutting it off by using automatically an ability that he had not known consciously that he had. He relaxed; and, all interest now, tuned his mind to that feeler of thought, began to pull it in, and stopped — and the contact released a flood of Fenachrone knowledge completely new to him.
A Fenachrone, dying somewhere, wanted… wanted what? Not help, exactly. Notice? Attention? To gave something? DuQuesne was not enough of a Fenachrone to translate that one thought even approximately, and he was not interested enough to waste any time on it. It had something to do with the good of the race; that was close enough.
DuQuesne, frowning a little, sat back in his bucket seat and thought. He had supposed that the Fenachrone were all dead… but it made sense that Seaton couldn’t have killed all of a space-faring race, at that. But so what? He didn’t care how many Fenachrone died. But a lot of their stuff was really good, and he certainly hadn’t got it all yet, by any means; it might be smart to listen to what the dying monster had to say — especially since he, DuQuesne, was getting pretty close to the home grounds of Klazmon the Llurd.
Wherefore DuQuesne opened his mental shield: and, since his mind was still tuned precisely to the questing wave and since the DQ was now practically as close to Llurdiax as it would get on course 255U, he received a burst of thought that jarred him to the very teeth.
It is amazing how much information can be carried by a Fenachrone-compressed burst of thought. It was fortunate for DuQuesne that he had the purely Fenachrone abilities to decompress it, to spread it out and analyze it, and later, to absorb it fully.
The salient points, however, were pellucidly clear. The dying monster was First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet; and he and more than four thousand other Fenachrone were helpless captives of and were being studied to death by Llurdan scientists under the personal direction of Llanzlan Klazmon.
Realizing instantly what that meant — Klazmon would be out here in seconds with a probe, if nothing stronger — DuQuesne slammed on full-coverage screens at full power, thus sealing his entire worldlet bottle-tight against any and every spy-ray, beam, probe, band, zone of force and/or order of force that he knew anything about. Since this included everything he had known before this trip began, plus everything he had learned from Freemind One and from the Jelmi and from Klazmon himself, he was grimly certain that he was just as safe as though he were in God’s hip pocket from any possible form of three-dimensional observation or attack.
Cutting in his fourth-dimensional gizmo — how glad he was that he had studied it so long and so intensively that he knew more about it than its inventors did! — he flipped what he called its “eye” into the Fenachrone Reservation on distant Llurdiax. He seized Sleemet, bed and all, in a wrapping of force and deposited the bundle gently on the floor of the DQ’s control room, practically at his, DuQuesne’s feet. Fenachrone could breathe Earth air for hours without appreciable damage — they had proved that often enough and if he decided to keep any of them alive he’d make them some air they liked better.
Second, he brought over a doctor, complete with kit and instruments and supplies; and third, the Fenachrone equivalent of a registered nurse.
“You, doctor!” DuQuesne snapped, in Fenachronian. “I don’t know whether this spineless weakling is too far gone to save or not. Or whether he is worth saving or not.
But since he was actually in charge of your expedition-to-preserve-the-race I will listen to what he has to say instead of blasting him out of hand. So give him a shot of the strongest stuff you have — or is he in greater need of food than of stimulant?”
DuQuesne did not know whether the doctor would cooperate with a human being or not. But he did — whether from lack of spirit of his own or from desire to save his chief, DuQuesne did not care enough to ask.
“Both,” the doctor said, “but nourishment first, by all means. Intravenous, nurse, please,” and doctor and nurse went to work with the skill and precision of their highly trained crafts.
And, somewhat to DuQuesne’s surprise, Sleemet began immediately to rally; and in three-quarters of an hour he had regained full consciousness.
“You spineless worm!” DuQuesne shot at the erstwhile invalid, in true Fenachrone tone and spirit. “You gutless wonder! You pusillanimous weakling, you sniveling coward! Is it the act of a noble of the Fenachrone to give up, to yield supinely, to surrender ignominiously to a fate however malign while a spark of life endures?”
Sleemet was scarcely stirred by this vicious castigation. He raised dull eyes-eyes shockingly lifeless to anyone who had ever seen the ruby-lighted, flame-shot wells of vibrant force that normal Fenachrone eyes were — and said lifelessly, “There is a point, the certainty of death, at which struggle becomes negative instead of positive. It merely prolongs the agony. Having passed that point, I die.”
“There is no such point, idiot, while life lasts! Do I look like Klazmon of Llurdiax?”
“No, but death is no less certain at your hands than at his.”
“Why should it be, stupid?” and DuQuesne’s sneer was extra-high-voltage stuff, even for Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne.
Now was the crucial moment. IF he could take all those Fenachrone over, and IF he could control them after they got back to normal, what a crew they would make! He stared contemptuously at the ex-admiral and went on:
“Whether or not you and your four thousand die in the near future is up to you. While I do not have to have a crew, I can use one efficiently for a few weeks. If you choose to work with me I will, at the end of that time, give you a duplicate of your original spaceship and will see to it that you are allowed to resume your journey wherever you wish.”
“Sir, the Fenachrone do not…” the doctor began stiffly.
“Shut up, you poor, dumb clown!” DuQuesne snapped.
“Haven’t you learned anything? That instead of being the strongest race in space you are one of the weakest? You have one choice merely — cooperate or die. And that is not yours, but Sleemet’s. Sleemet?”
“But how do I know that if…”
“If you have any part of a brain, fool, use it! What matters it to me whether Fenachrone live or die? I’m not asking you anything; I’m telling you under what conditions I will save your lives. If you want to argue the matter I’ll put you three — and the bed — back where you were and be on my way. Which do you prefer?”
Sleemet had learned something. He had been beaten down flat enough so that he could learn something — and he realized that he had much to learn from any race who could do what his rescuer had just done.
“We will work with you,” Sleemet said. “You will, I trust, instruct us concerning how you liberated us three and propose to liberate the others?”
“I can’t. It was fourth-dimensional translation.” DuQuesne lied blandly. “Did you ever try to explain the color ‘blue’ to a man born blind? No scientist of your race will be able to understand either the theory or the mechanics of fourth dimensional translation for something like eleven hundred thousand of your years.�
��
24. DUQUESNE AND SLEEMET
EN route to the galaxy in which DuQuesne’s aliens supposedly lived, Dorothy said, “Say Dick. I forgot to ask you something. What did you ever find out about that thought business of Kay-Lee’s?”
“Huh?” Seaton was surprised. “What was there to find out? How are you going to explain the mechanism of thought — by unscrewing the inscrutable? She said, and I quote, “We didn’t feel that we were quite reaching you,” unquote. So it was she and Ree-Toe Prenk. Obviously. Holding hands or something — across a Ouija board or some other focusing device, probably. Staring into each other’s eyes to link minds and direct the thought.”
“But they did hit you with something,” she insisted, “and it bothers me. They can do it and we can’t.”
“No sweat, pet. That isn’t a circumstance to what you do every time you think at a controller to order up a meal or whatever. How do you do that? Different people, different abilities, is all. Anyway, Earth mediums have done that kind of thing for ages. If you’re really interested, you can take some time off and learn it, next time we’re on Ray-See-Nee. But for right now, my red-headed beauty, we’ve got something besides that kind of monkey-business to worry about.”
“That’s right, we have,” and Dorothy forgot the minor matter in thinking of the major.
“Those aliens. Have you and Martin figured out a modus operandi?”
“More or less. Go in openly, like tourists, but with everything we’ve got not only on the trips but hyped up to as nearly absolutely instantaneous reactivity as the Brain can possibly get it.”
Both DuQuesne’s DQ and Seaton’s Skylark of Valeron were within range of Llurdiax.
DuQuesne, however, as has been said, was covering up as tightly as he could.
Everything that could be muzzled or muffled was muzzled or muffled, and he was traveling comparatively slowly, so as to put out the minimum of detectable high-order emanation. Furthermore, his screens were shoved out to such a tremendous distance, and were being varied so rapidly and so radically in shape, that no real pattern existed to be read. The DQ was not indetectable, of course, but it would have taken a great deal of highly specialized observation and analysis to find her.
Skylark DuQuesne s-4 Page 23
