He had been talking to Kay-Lee, but her mother, who was very evidently the head of the party, answered him. “Oh, no. That is, they’ve tripled the quotas—” Seaton shot a glance at Crane. That tied in! — “but with the new machinery that did not bother us at all. No. We learned many weeks ago that you would have need of us, so we came.”
“Huh?” Seaton demanded, inelegantly. “What need?”
“We do not surely know. All we know is that it is written upon the Scroll that a time of need will come, and soon. All Ray-See-Nee is enormously and eternally in your debt: we are here to repay a tiny portion of that debt.”
“Can’t you tell me more about it than that?”
“A little; not much. We received your original message, but at that time there was nothing to connect it with you as Ky-El Mokak. In studying it we encountered something unknown upon Ray-See-Nee that increased a hundredfold our range and scope and strength: three male poles of power of tremendous magnitude, men who, we found out later, you already know. They are Drasnik and Fodan of the planet Norlamin and Sacner Carfon of Dasor. With three such pairs of poles of power — three is the one perfect number, you know — it was a simple matter to locate those interested in your message, to develop the powers that had been latent in such people as yourself—”
“What?” Seaton yelped. That was all he could get out. ” — and Dr. DuQuesne and others, yes,” Madame Barlo went on smoothly. “You were, of course, not aware you possessed them.”
“That’s putting it mildly, ace,” said Seaton. “You mean l am… I hate to use the word… well, ‘psychic’?”
“The word is of no importance,” said the woman impatiently. “Use any word you like. The fact is that you do have this power; we have developed it… and we now propose to put it to use.”
Seaton’s reply to that has not been recorded for posterity. Perhaps it is as well. Let it only be said that even twenty-four hours later he was no more than half-convinced… but it was the half of him that was convinced that was governing his actions.
One of the data that helped convince him was the fact that Madame Barlo and her daughter had not merely located these “poles of power” — they had summoned them to the Skylark! They had not waited for Seaton’s concurrence; before Seaton even knew what they were up to, all the named individuals from three galaxies and a dozen planets were on the way.
A shipload of Norlaminians and Dasorians — including the three pre-eminent “male poles of power” — was the contingent first to arrive. Then came Tammon and Sennlloy and Mergon and Luloy and half a hundred other Jelmi; bringing with them three Tellurians:
Madlyn Mannis, the red-haired stripper; Doctor Stephanie de Marigny of the Rare Metals Laboratory; and Charles K. van der Gleiss, Petrochemical Engineer T-8. And last, but by less than an hour, came Marc C. DuQuesne in person.
“Hi, Hunkie,” he said, shaking hands cordially. “A little out of your regular orbit? Like me?”
“More than a little, Blackie — like you.” She showed two deep dimples in a wide and friendly smile. “And if you have any idea of what I’m here for I’d be delighted to have you tell me what it is.”
“I scarcely know what I’m here for myself,” and DuQuesne turned to the others; nodding at them as though he had left them only minutes before. He was no whit embarrassed or ill at ease; nor conscious of any resentment or ill will directed at him. He was actually as unconcerned as, and bore himself very much like, a world-renowned specialist called into consultation on an unusually difficult case.
Before the situation could become strained, the three Rayseenian women came into the big conference room and approached the conference table-a table forty feet long and three feet wide.
Their faces were white; their eyes were wide and staring. All three were doped to the ears. “Doctor Seaton,” Madam Barlo said, “you will cover the top of this table with one large sheet of paper, please?”
Seaton donned his helmet and a sheet of drafting paper covered exactly the table’s top, adhering to it as though glued down.
“You mean to say, Doc, you’re going along with this magic flummery?” one of the Jelmi asked.
“I certainly am,” Seaton said. “You will leave the room until this test is over. So will everyone else with a mind closed to what these women are trying to do.” The scoffer and two other Jelmi walked toward the door and Seaton quirked an eyebrow at DuQuesne.
“I’m staying,” that worthy said. “I can’t say that I’m a hundred per cent sold; but I’m interested enough to give it a solid try.”
The two older women stationed themselves, one at each end of the table; Kay-Lee stood at her mother’s right, holding in her hand a red-ink ballpoint at least a foot long.
Majestic Fodan, the Chief of the Five of Norlamin, stood behind Madame Barlo, but did not touch her; Drasnik and Sacner Carfon stood similarly behind Grand Dame Barlo and Kay-Lee. Each of the three women rubbed a drop of something (it was actually Seaton’s citrated blood) between thumb and forefinger and Madame Barlo said:
“You will all look fixedly at any one of the six of us and think of our success with everything that in you lies. Help us with all your might to succeed; give us your total mental strength. Kay-Lee, daughter, the time is… now!”
Reaching across the end of the table, Kay-Lee began to write a column eighteen inches wide; the height of which was to be the thirty-six-inch width of the table. When she got to the middle of the fourth line, however, a man gasped in astonishment and the pen’s point stopped. This Jelm, a mathematician, had let his eyes slip from the operator to the paper — and what he saw was high — very high! — math! Mathematics of a complexity that none of those women, by any possible stretch of the imagination, could know anything about!
“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.”
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, p
lease. 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?”
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