“Okay. Of the seventy planets, all have Op fields and all have two or more Operators; one planet has forty-four of them. Only sixty-one of the planets, however, have Primes old enough for us to detect. Each of these worlds has two, and only two, Primes—one male and one female—and on each world the two Primes are of approximately the same age. On fifteen of these worlds the Primes are not yet adult. On the forty-six remaining worlds, the Primes are young adults, from pretty much like us four down to considerably younger. None of these couples is married-for-family. None of the girls has as yet had a child or is now pregnant.
“Now as to the information circulating all over this planet about us. Part of it is false. Part of it is misleading—to impress the military mind. Thus, the fact is that the Pleiades, as far as we know, is the only starship in the whole galaxy. Also, the information is very incomplete, especially as to the all-important fact that we were lost in space for some time before we discovered that the only possible controller of the Gunther Drive is the human mind.…”
“What!!!!” and argument raged until Garlock stopped it by declaring that he would prove it in the Margonians’ own ship.
Then Garlock and Belle together went on to explain and to describe—not even hinting, of course, that they had ever been outside the galaxy or had even thought of trying to do so—their concept of what the Galaxian Societies of the Galaxy would and should do; or what the Galaxian Service could, should, and would become—the Service to which they both intended to devote their lives. It wasn’t even in existence yet, of course. Fao and Deggi were the only other Primes they had ever talked to in their lives. That was why they were so eager to help the Margonians get their ship built. The more starships there were at work, the faster the Service would grow into a really tremendous.…
“Fao’s getting ready to blow her top,” Delcamp flashed Garlock a tight-beamed thought. “If I were doing it I’d have to start right now.”
“I’ll let her work up a full head of steam, then smack her bow-legged.”
“Cheers, brother! I hope you can handle her!”
…organization. Then, when enough ships were working and enough Galaxian Societies were rolling, there would be the Regional organizations and the Galactic Council.…
“So, on a one-planet basis and right out of your own little fat head,” Fao sneered, “you have set yourself up as Grand High Chief Mogul, and all the rest of us are to crawl up to you on our bellies and kiss your feet?”
“If that’s the way you want to express it, yes. However, I don’t know how long I personally will be in the pilot’s bucket. As I told you, I will enforce the basic tenet that top Gunther is top boss—man, woman, snake, fish, or monster.”
“Top Gunther be damned!” Fao blazed. “I don’t and won’t take orders from any man—in hell or in heaven or on this Earth or on any planet of any.…”
“Fao!” Delcamp exclaimed, “Please keep still—please!”
“Let her rave,” Garlock said, coldly. “This is just a three-year-old baby’s tantrum. If she keeps it up, I’ll give her the damnedest jolt she ever got in all her spoiled life.”
Belle whistled sharply to call Fao’s attention, then tight-beamed a thought. “If you’ve got any part of a brain, slick chick, you’d better start using it. The boy friend not only plays rough, but he doesn’t bluff.”
“To hell with all that!” Fao rushed on. “We don’t have anything to do with your organization—go on back home or anywhere else you want to. We’ll finish our own ship and build our own organization and run it to suit ourselves. We’ll.…”
“That’s enough of that.” Garlock penetrated her shield as easily as he had the man’s, and held her in lock. “You are not going to wreck this project. You will start behaving yourself right now or I’ll spread your mind wide open for Belle and Deggi to look at and see exactly what kind of a half-baked jerk you are. If that doesn’t work, I’ll put you into a Gunther-blocked cell aboard the Pleiades and keep you there until the ship is finished and we leave Margonia. How do you want it?”
Fao was shocked as she had never been shocked before. At first she tried viciously to fight; but, finding that useless against the appalling power of the mind holding hers, she stopped struggling and began really to think.
“That’s better. You’ve got what it takes to think with. Go ahead and do it.”
And Fao Talaho did have it. Plenty of it. She learned.
“I’ll be good,” she said, finally. “Honestly. I’m ashamed, really, but after I got started I couldn’t stop. But I can now, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure you can, too. I know exactly how it is. All us Primes have to get hell knocked out of us before we amount to a whoop in Hades. Deggi got his one way, I got mine another, you got yours this way. No, neither of the others knows anything about this conversation and they won’t. This is strictly between you and me.”
“I’m awfully glad of that. And I think I…yes, damn you, thanks!”
Garlock released her and, after a few sobs, a couple of gulps, and a dabbing at her eyes with an inadequate handkerchief, she said: “I’m sorry, Deggi, and you, too, Belle. I’ll try not to act like such a fool any more.”
Delcamp and Belle both stared at Garlock; Belle licked her lips.
“No comment,” he thought at the man; and, to Belle, “She just took a beating. Will you sheathe your claws and take a lot of pains to be extra nice to her the rest of the day?”
“Why, surely. I’m always nice to anybody who is nice to me.”
“Says you,” Garlock replied, skeptically, and all four went to work as though nothing had happened.
They went through the shops and the almost-finished ship. They studied blueprints. They met all the Operators and discussed generators and fields of force and mathematics and paraphysics and Guntherics. They argued so hotly about mental control that Garlock had James bring thePleiades over to new-christened Galaxian Field so that he could prove his point then and there.
Entlore and Holson came along this time, as well as the ComOff; and all three were nonplussed and surprised to see each member of the “crackpot” group hurl the huge starship from one solar system to any other one desired, apparently merely by thinking about it. And the “crackpots” were extremely surprised to find themselves hopelessly lost in uncharted galactic wildernesses every time they did not think, definitely and positively, of one specific destination. Then Garlock took a chance. He had to take it sometime; he might just as well do it now.
“See if you can hit Andromeda, Deggi,” he suggested.
While Belle, James, and Lola held their breaths, Delcamp tried. The starship went toward the huge nebula, but stopped at the last suitable planet on the galaxy’s rim.
“Can you hit Andromeda?” Delcamp asked, more than half jealously, and Belle tensed her muscles.
“Never tried it,” Garlock said, easily. “I suppose, though, since you couldn’t kick the old girl out of our good old home galaxy, she’ll just sit right here for me, too.”
He went through the motions and the Pleiades did sit right there—which was exactly what he had told her to do. And everybody—even the “crackpots”—breathed more easily.
And Belle was “nice” to Fao; she didn’t use her claws, even once, all day. And, just before quitting time—
“Does he… I mean, did he ever…well, sort of knock you around?” Fao asked.
“I’ll say he hasn’t!” Belle’s nostrils flared slightly at the mere thought. “I’d stick a knife into him, the big jerk.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean physically.…”
“Through my blocks? A Prime’s blocks? Don’t be ridiculous, Fao!”
“What do you mean, ‘ridiculous’?” Fao snapped. “You tried my blocks. What did they feel like to you—mosquito netting? What I thought was.… Oh, all he really said was that all Primes had to have hell knocked out of them before they could be any good. That he had had it one way, Deggi another, and me a third. I see—you haven’t had yours
yet.”
“I certainly haven’t. And if he ever tries it, I’ll.…”
“Oh, he won’t. He couldn’t, very well, because after you’re married, it would.…”
“Did the big lug tell you I was going to marry him?”
“Of course not. No fringes, even. But who else are you going to marry? If the whole universe was clear full of the finest men imaginable—pure dreamboats, no less—can you even conceive of you marrying any one of them except him?”
“I’m not going to marry anybody. Ever.”
“No? You, with your Prime’s mind and your Prime’s body, not have any children? And you tell me not to be ridiculous?”
That stopped Belle cold, but she wouldn’t admit it. Instead—“I don’t get it. What did he do to you, anyway?”
Fao’s block set itself so tight that it took her a full minute to soften it down enough for even the thinnest thought to get through. “That’s something nobody will ever know. But anyway, unless…unless you find another Prime as strong as Clee is—and I don’t really think there are any, do you?”
“Of course there aren’t. There’s only one of his class, anywhere. He’s it,” Belle said, with profound conviction.
“That makes it tough for you. You’ll have the toughest job imaginable. The very toughest. I know.”
“Huh? What job?”
“Since Clee won’t do it for you, and since nobody else can, you’ll have to just simply knock hell out of yourself.”
And in Garlock’s room that night, getting ready for bed, Belle asked suddenly, “Clee, what in hell did you do to Fao Talaho?”
“Nothing much. She’s a mighty good egg, really.”
“Could you do it, whatever it was, to me?”
“I don’t know; I never tried it.”
“Would you, then, if I asked you to?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Answer that yourself.”
“And it was ‘nothing much,’ it says here in fine print. But I think I know just about what it was. Don’t I?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“You knocked hell out of yourself, didn’t you?”
“I lied to her about that. I’m still trying to.”
“So I’ve got to do it to myself. And I haven’t started yet?”
“Check. But you’re several years younger than I am, you know.”
Belle thought it over for a minute, then stubbed out her cigarette and shrugged her shoulders. “No sale. Put it back on the shelf. I like me better the way I am. That is, I think I do.… In a way, though, I’m sorry, Clee darling.”
“Darling? Something new has been added. I wish you really meant that, ace.”
“I’m still ‘ace’ after what I just said? I’m glad, Clee. ‘Ace’ is ever so much nicer than ‘chum.’”
“Ace. The top of the deck. You are, and always will be.”
“As for meaning it, I wish I didn’t.” Ready for bed, Belle was much more completely and much less revealingly dressed than during her working hours. She slid into bed beside him, pulled the covers up to her chin, and turned off the light by glancing at the switch. “If I thought anything could ever come of it, though, I’d do it if I had to pound myself unconscious with a club. But I wouldn’t be here, then, either—I’d scoot into my own room so fast my head would spin.”
“You wouldn’t have to. You wouldn’t be here.”
“I wouldn’t, at that. That’s one of the things I like so much about you. But honestly, Clee—seriously, screens-down honestly—can you see any possible future in it?”
“No. Neither of us would give that much. Neither of us can. And there’s nothing one-sided about it; I’m no more fit to be a husband than you are to be a wife. And God help our children—they’d certainly need it.”
“We’d never have any. I can’t picture us living in marriage for nine months without committing at least mayhem. Why, in just the little time we’ve been paired, how many times have you thrown me out of this very room, with the fervent hope that I’d drown in deep space before you ever saw me again?”
“At a guess, about the same number of times as you have stormed out under your own power, slamming the door so hard it sprung half the seams of the ship and swearing you’d slice me up into sandwich meat if I ever so much as looked at you again.”
“That’s what I mean. But how come we got off on this subject, I wonder? Because when we aren’t fighting, like now, it’s purely wonderful. So I’ll say it again. Good night, Clee, darling.”
“Good night, ace.” In the dark his lips sought hers and found them.
The fervor of her kiss was not only much more intense than any he had ever felt before. It was much, very much more intense than Belle Bellamy had either wanted it or intended it to be.
Next morning, at the workman’s hour of eight o’clock, the four Tellurians appeared in the office of Margonia’s Galaxian Field.
“The first thing to do, Deggi, is to go over in detail your blueprints for the generators and the drive,” Garlock said.
“I suppose so. The funny pictures, eh?” Delcamp had learned much, the previous day; his own performance with the Pleiades had humbled him markedly.
“By no means, my friend,” Garlock said, cheerfully. “While your stuff isn’t exactly like ours—it couldn’t be, hardly; the field is so big and so new—that alone is no reason for it not to work. James can tell you. He’s the Solar System’s top engineer. What do you think, Jim?”
“What I saw in the ship yesterday will work. What few of the prints I saw yesterday will fabricate, and the fabrications will work. The main trouble with this project, it seems to me, is that nobody’s building the ship.”
“What do you mean by that crack?” Fao blazed.
“Just that. You’re a bunch of prima donnas; each doing exactly as he pleases. So some of the stuff is getting done three or four times, in three or four different ways, while a lot of it isn’t getting done at all.”
“Such as?” Delcamp demanded, and—
“Well, if you don’t like the way we are doing things you can.…” Fao began.
“Just a minute, everybody.” Lola came in, with a disarming grin. “How much of that is hindsight, Jim? You’ve built one, you know—and from all accounts, progress wasn’t nearly as smooth as your story can be taken to indicate.”
“You’ve got a point there, Lola,” Garlock agreed. “We slid back two steps for every three we took forward.”
“Well…maybe,” James admitted.
“So why don’t you, Fao and Deggi, put Jim in charge of construction?”
Fao threw back her silvery head and glared, but Delcamp jumped at the chance. “Would you, Jim?”
“Sure—unless Miss Talaho objects.”
“She won’t.” Delcamp’s eyes locked with Fao’s, and Fao kept still. “Thanks immensely, Jim. And I know what you mean.” He went over to a cabinet of wide, flat drawers and brought back a sheaf of drawings. Not blueprints, but original drawings in pencil. “Such as this. I haven’t even got it designed yet, to say nothing of building it.”
James began to leaf through the stack of drawings. They were full of erasures, re-drawings, and such notations as “See sheets 17-B, 21-A, and 27-F.” Halfway through the pile he paused, turned backward three sheets, and studied for minutes. Then, holding that one sheet by a corner, he went rapidly through the rest of the stack.
“This is it,” he said then, pulling the one sheet out and spreading it flat. “What we call Unit Eight—the heart of the drive.” Then, tight-beamed to Garlock:
“This is the thing that you designed in toto and that I never could understand any part of. All I did was build it. It must generate those Prime fields.”
“Probably,” Garlock flashed back. “I didn’t understand it any too well myself. How does it look?”
“He isn’t even close. He’s got only half of the constants down, and half of the ones he has got down are wrong. Look at this m
ess here.…”
“I’ll take your word for it. I haven’t your affinity for blueprints, you know, or your eidetic memory for them.”
“Do you want me to give him the whole works?”
“We’ll have to, I think. Or the ship might not work at all.”
“Could be—but how about intergalactic hops?”
“He couldn’t do it with the Pleiades, so he won’t be able to with this. Besides, if we change it in any particular he might. You see, I don’t know very much more about Unit Eight than you do.”
“That could be, too.” Then, as though just emerging from his concentration on the drawings, James thought at Delcamp and Fao, but on the open, general band.
“A good many errors and a lot of blanks, but in general you’re on the right track. I can finish up this drawing in a couple of hours, and we can build the unit in a couple of days. With that in place, the rest of the ship will go fast.
“If Miss Talaho wants me to,” he concluded, pointedly.
“Oh, I do, Jim—really I do!” At long last, stiff-backed Fao softened and bent. She seized both his hands. “If you can, it’d be too wonderful for words!”
“Okay. One question. Why are you building your ship so small?”
“Why, it’s plenty big enough for two,” Delcamp said. “For four, in a pinch. Why did you make yours so big? Your Main is big enough almost for a convention hall.”
“That’s what we figured it might have to be, at times,” Garlock said. “But that’s a very minor point. With yours so nearly ready to flit, no change in size is indicated now. But Belle and I have got to have another conference with the legal eagle. So if you and Brownie, Jim, will ’port whatever you need out of the Pleiades, we’ll be on our way.
“So long—see you in a few days,” he added, and the Pleiades vanished; to appear instantaneously high above the stratosphere over what was to become the Galaxian Field of Earth.
“Got a minute, Gene?” he sent a thought.
“For you two Primes, as many as you like. We haven’t started building or fencing yet, as you suggested, but we have bought all the real estate. So land the ship anywhere out there and I’ll send a jeep out after you.”
The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 109
