Skylark DuQuesne

21. LLAMZLAM MERGON

RAY-SEE-NEE’s new department heads, in their meeting with Premier Ree-Toe Prenk in the Room of State, were in unanimous agreement that everything was under control.

Some quislings and recalcitrants had been shot and a few more would probably have to be. That was only to be expected. Yes, since all of the new incumbents had been jumped many grades in status and in authority and in salary, there was and would continue to be a certain amount of jealousy; but that was not of very much importance.

The jealous ones would either accept the facts of life or be shot. Period.

After the meeting was over Kay-Lee Barlo came up to Seaton. She now bore herself as though she had been born an Exalted; her ex-boss’ pistol swung jauntily at one very female hip as she walked. As she came up to him and took both his hands in hers, standing so close to him that her upstanding, outstanding hair-do almost tickled his nose, it became evident that her weapon had been fired quite recently. She wore no perfume, and the faint but unmistakable acrid odor of burned smokeless powder still clung to her hair.

“Oh, Ky-El!” she exclaimed, equal to equal now. “I’ll simply never be able to thank you enough. Nor will all Ray-See-Nee. This world will be an entirely different place to live on hereafter.”

“I sincerely hope so, Kay-Lee.” Seaton smiled into the girl’s eager, expressive face.

“Ray-See-Nee is lucky to have had as strong, able and just a man as Ree-Toe Prenk to take over.”

“As you said a while back, ‘You can say that again.’ He’s all of that. What he’s done already is marvelous. But everyone knows — he does, too, he’s put you up on a pedestal a mile high — that it’s you who put him in the saddle. That’s what I wanted mostly to tell you. Also, I wanted to ask you—” she paused and flushed slightly — “you’ll forget, won’t you please, what I said about that louse’s brains? I didn’t mean that, really; I’m not the type to cherish a grudge like that. I was a little… well, I’d been a little put out with him, just before you came in.” With which masterpiece of understatement she gave his hands another vigorous, friendly squeeze and, swinging around, walked hip-wiggling out of the room.

She thereupon took certain steps and performed certain actions which would have astonished Seaton very much, had he known about them. But he did not — until much later.

Prenk came up to the Skylarkers a few minutes later. He shook hands with each of the off-worlders; thanked them in rounded phrases. “I would like very much to have you stay here indefinitely, friends,” he concluded, “but I know of course that that is impossible. If all the resources of the world could be devoted to the project and if all our technical men could work on it undetected for a year, we could not build anything able to withstand those Chlorans’ beams.”

“We can’t either. Not here,” Seaton said. “That’s why we have to go; but we’ll be back. I don’t know when; but we’ll be back some day.”

“I’m sure you will; and may Great My-Ko-Ta ward you and cherish you as you build.”

Back on what was left of their worldlet, now reconditioned to the extent that it was not likely to fall apart on the spot, and out in deep space once more, the Skylarkers began efficiently and expertly to put the pieces of their victory together.

They had located the Enemy. They even had an operating covert base in Chloran territory, to which they could return at any time. They had weapons which, in theory at least, could cope with anything the Chlorans were likely to own.

Yet Seaton fretted. The weapons were there, but his control was not adequate; the weapons had outgrown the control. Dealing with Chlorans was touchy business. You wanted all the space you could get between you and them. Yet, at any operating range which even Seaton, to say nothing of Crane and the others, considered safe, their striking power was simply too erratic to depend on.

“It’s a bust,” Seaton said gloomily. “Course, if worst came to worst I could go back to undercover methods. Smuggle in a bomb, maybe — just to throw their main centers off balance while the rest of you hit them with all we’ve got. I could stow away aboard one of those ore-scows taking the booty off Ray-See-Nee easily enough—”

“You talk like a man with a paper nose,” Dorothy scoffed. “I have a picture of that expedition — of you in armor, with air-tanks strapped on your back and lugging an underwater camera or projector around. Un-noticed… I don’t think.”

And Dunark added, “And since you haven’t got any idea of what to look for, you’d have to lug around a full analsynth set-up. A couple of tons of stuff. Uh-uh.”

Seaton grinned, unperturbed. “That’s what I was coming to. Getting in would be easy, but doing anything wouldn’t. And neither would getting out. But Mart, we’ve chopped one horn off of the dilemma, but we haven’t even touched the other. We’ve got to master that fourth-dimension rig; and we’re not even close. It’s a matter of kind, not merely of degree.”

“I can’t see that. If so, we could not have warded off their attack at all.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean the energies themselves; it’s the control of that much stuff. Synchronization, phasing in, combination, and so forth. Getting such stuff as that closely enough together. Look, Mart. This bit that we’ve got left of the Valeron is stuffed with machinery practically to the skin. She’s so small, relatively, that you wouldn’t think there’d be any trouble meshing in machines from various parts of her. But there is.

Plenty. It never showed up before because we never had to use a fraction of our total power before, but it showed up plenty back there. My beam was loose as ashes, andI’ve figured out why.

“Sixth-order stuff moves as many times faster than light as light does faster than a snail — maybe more. But it still takes a little time to get from one machine to another, inside even as small a globe as this is. See?”

Crane frowned in thought. “I see. I also see what the difficulties would be in anything large enough and strong enough to attack the Chlorans. It would mean timing each generator and each element of each projector; and each with a permissible variation of an infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond. That, of course, means Rovol and Caslor.”

“I suppose it does… unless we can figure out an easier, faster way… I don’t know whether the Chlorans have got anything like that or not, but they’ve got something. There ought to be some way of snitching it off of them.”

“Why must they have?” Dunark demanded. “It’s probably just a matter of size. They have a whole planet to fortify. Dozens of ’em if they want to. So it doesn’t have to be a matter of refinement at all. Just brutal, piled up, overwhelming power.”

“Could be,” Seaton agreed. “If so, we can’t match it, since the Valeron was as big as she could be and still have a factor of safety of two point two.” He paused in thought, then went on, “But with such refinement, we could take a planet no matter how loaded it was… I think. So maybe we’d better take off for Norlamin, at that.”

“One thing we should do first, perhaps,” Dorothy suggested. “Find out what that DuQuesne really did. He has me worried.”

“Maybe we should at that,” Seaton agreed. “I’d forgotten all about the big black ape.”

It was easy enough to find the line along which DuQuesne had traveled; the plug-chart was proof that he had not lied about that. They reached without incident the neighborhood of the point DuQuesne had marked on the chart. Seaton sent out a working projection of the device that, by intercepting and amplifying light-waves traversing open space, enabled him actually to see events that had happened in the not-too distant past.

He found the scene he wanted. He studied it, analyzed and recorded it. Then:

“He lied to me almost a hundred and eighty degrees,” Seaton said. “That beam came from that galaxy over there.” He jerked a thumb. “The alien who bothered him was in that galaxy. That much I’ll buy. But it doesn’t make sense that he’d go there. That alien was nobody he wanted to monkey with, that’s for dead sure. So where did he meet the Jelmi, if not in that galaxy?”

“On the moon, perhaps,” Margaret said.

“Possibly. I’ll compute it… no, the timing isn’t right—” Seaton thought for a moment — “but there’s no use guessing. That galaxy may be the first place to look for sign; but I’ll bet my case buck it’ll be a long, cold hunt. I’d like awfully well to have that gizmo — flip bombs past the Chlorans’ screens and walls with it…”

“From a distance greater than their working range?” Crane asked.

“That’s so, too… or maybe so, at that, chum. Who knows what you can do through the fourth? But it looks as though our best bet is to beat it to Norlamin, rebuild this wreck, and tear into that business of refinement of synchronization. So say you all?”

So said they all and Seaton, flipping on full-power sixth order drive, set course for Norlamin.

As the student will be aware, the events in this climactic struggle between the arch-enemies, Seaton and DuQuesne, were at this point reaching an area of maximum tension. It is curious to reflect that the outer symptom of this internal disruptive stress was, in the case of nearly every major component of the events to come, a psychological state of either satisfied achievement, or contented decision, or calm resignation. It is as though each of the major operatives were suffering from a universe-wide sense of false tranquility. On Ray-See-Nee, the new government felt its problems were behind it and only a period of solid, rewarding rebuilding lay ahead. (Although Kay-Lee Barlo had taken certain prudent precautions against this hope being illusory — as we shall see.) The Chlorans, proud and scornful in their absolute supremacy, had no hint that Seaton or anyone else was making or even proposed to make any effective moves against them. The Fenachrone, such few weary survivors as remained of them, had given themselves over to — not despair, no; but a proud acceptance of the fact that they were doomed.

There was in fact no tranquility in store for any of them! But they had not yet found that out.

Meanwhile the Jelmi, for example were just beginning to feel the first itch of new challenges. In their big new space rover, the Mallidaxian, Savant Tammon was as nearly perfectly happy as it is possible for a human or humanoid to be. He had made the greatest breakthrough of his career; perhaps the greatest breakthrough of all history. Exploring its many ramifications and determining its many as yet unsuspected possibilities would keep him busy for the rest of his life. Wherefore he was working fourteen or fifteen hours every day and reveling in every minute of it. He hummed happily to himself; occasionally he burst into song in a voice that was decidedly not of grand-operatic quality.

He had enlarged his private laboratory by tearing out four storerooms adjoining it; and the whole immense room was stacked to the ceiling with new apparatus and equipment. He was standing on a narrow catwalk, rubbing his bristly chin with the back of his hand as he wondered where he could put another two-ton tool, when Mergon and Luloy came swinging in; hand in hand as usual. Vastly different from Tammon, Mergon was not at all happy about the status quo.

“Listen, Tamm!” he burst out. “I’ve been yapping at you for a week and a half for a decision and your time is up as of right now. If you don’t pull your head out of the fourth dimension and make it right now I’ll do it myself and to hell with you and your authority as Captain-Commander.”

“Huh? What? Time? Decision? What decision?” It was plain that the old savant had no idea at all of what his first assistant was so wrought up about.

“You set course for Mallidax and said we were going back to Mallidax. That’s sheer idiocy and you know it. Of all places in the charted universe we should not go to, Mallidax is top and prime. We’re too close for comfort already. Even though Klazmon must have lost us back there in Sol’s system, he certainly picked us up again long ago and he’d give both wings and all his teeth for half the stuff you have here,” and Mergon waved both arms indicatively around the jam-packed room.

“Oh?” Tammon gazed owlishly at the pair. “There was some talk… but why should I care where we go? This is the merest trifle, Mergon. Do not bother me with trivia any more,” and Tammon cut communications with them as definitely as though he had thrown a switch.

Mergon shrugged his shoulders and Luloy giggled. “You’re it, boy. That’s what you get for sticking your neck out. All hail our new Captain-Commander!”

“Well, somebody had to. All our necks would have been in slings in another week. So pass the word, will you, and I’ll skip up to the control room and change course.”

Luloy spread the word; which was received with acclaim. Practically everybody aboard who was anybody agreed with Sennlloy when she said, “It’s high time somebody took over and Merg’s undoubtedly the best man for the job. Tammy’s a nice old dear, but ever since he got bitten by that fourth dimension germ he hasn’t known what month it is or which way is up or within forty million parsecs of where he it in space.”

“You see, Merg?” Luloy crowed, when it became evident that the shift in command was heartily approved. “I wouldn’t even dream of ever saying ‘I told you so’, but I said at the first meeting that you should be Captain commander, and now everybody thinks so, almost.”

“Yeah, almost,” he agreed; not at all enthusiastically. “Everybody except the half-wits. Pass the buck. Let George do it. Nobody with a brain firing on three barrels wants the job.”

“Why, that isn’t so, Merg. You know it isn’t!” she protested, indignantly.

“Well, I don’t want it,” he broke in, “but since Tamm wished it onto me I’ll take a crack at it.”

The Mallidaxian, swinging wide and braking down, hard, skirted the outermost edge of the Realm; the edge farthest away from Llurdiax. Mergon did not approach or signal to any planet of the Jelmi. Instead, he picked out an uninhabited Tellus-type planet four solar systems away from the Border and landed on it. And there, under cover of the superdreadnaught’s mighty defensive screens and with Captain-Commander Mergon tensely, on watch, the engineers and scientists disembarked, set up their high-order projectors, and went furiously to work building an enormous and enormously powerful dome.

The work went on uninterruptedly, day after day; for so many days that both Mergon and Luloy became concerned — the girl very highly so. “Do you suppose we’ve figured wrong?” she asked.

Mergon frowned. “I can’t be sure, of course, but I don’t think so. Pure logic, remember. Everything we’ve done has been designed to keep Klazmon guessing. Off balance. He’s fortified Llurdiax, that’s sure, but we don’t know how heavily and we can’t find out.”

He paused.

“Without using the gizmo, which of course is out,” said Luloy.

“Check. We haven’t sent any spy-rays or anything else. They wouldn’t have got us anything. But he certainly expected us to try. He’ll think we don’t care… which as a matter of fact, we don’t… too much. It’s almost a mathematical certainty that we can handle anything he can throw at us as of now. But if we give him time enough to build more really big stuff it’ll be just too bad.”

“And the horrible old monster is probably doing just exactly that,” Luloy said.

“I wouldn’t wonder. But we can finish the dome before he can build enough stuff, and he can’t let that happen. Especially since we’re not interfering with his prying and spying, but are treating him with the same contempt he used to treat us. That’ll bother him no end. Burn him up! Also… remember that stuff in the dome that no Llurd can possibly understand.”

Luloy laughed. “Because it isn’t anything whatever, really, except Llurd-bait? I’m scared that maybe they will understand it yet — even though I’m sure they won’t.”

“They can’t. Their minds won’t stretch that far in that direction,” Mergon said positively.

“They knew we made a breakthrough, so they’ll know that what they see is only a fraction of what the thing really is; and that’ll scare ’em. As much as Llurdi can be scared, that is. Which isn’t very much. So Klazmon will do something before our dome is finished. As I read the tea-leaves, he’ll have to.”

“But just suppose he doesn’t take the bait?”

“Then we’ll have to take the initiative. I don’t want to — it’d weaken our bargaining position tremendously — but I will if I have to.”

He did not have to. His analysis of the Llurdan mentality and temperament had been accurate.

Four full days before the scheduled date of completion of the dome, Klazmon’s full working projection appeared in the Mallidaxian’s control room. Mergon had detected its coming, but had done nothing to interfere with it. The Llurd quite obviously intended parley, not violence.

“Hail, brother Ilanzlan, Klazmon of the Llurdi,” Mergon greeted his visitor quietly, but in the phraseology of one ruler greeting another on the basis of unquestionable equality.

“Is there perhaps some service that I, Llanzlan Mergon of the Realm of the Jelmi, may perform for you and thus place you in my debt?”

This, to a human dictator, would have been effrontery intolerable; but Mergon had been pretty sure that it would have little or no effect, emotionally, upon Klazmon. Nor did it; to all seeming it had no effect at all. The Llurd merely said, “You wish me to believe that you Jelmi have made a breakthrough sufficiently important to justify the establishment of an independent but coexistent Realm of the Jelmi.”

This was in no sense a question; it was a flat statement. Mergon had been eminently correct in his assumption that he would not have to draw the Llurd a blueprint. Mergon quirked an eyebrow at Luloy, who pressed the button that signaled all the savants in the dome to drop their tools and dash back into the ship.

“That is correct,” Mergon said.

Klazmon’s projection remained motionless and silent; both Jelmi could almost perceive the Llurd’s thoughts. And Mergon, who had tracked the Llurd’s thoughts so unerringly so far, was practically certain that he was still on track.

Klazmon did not actually know whether the Jelmi had made a breakthrough or not. The Jelmi intended to make him believe that they had, and that breakthrough was something that made them either invulnerable or invincible, or both. Any of those matters or assumptions could be either true or false. One of them, the question of invulnerability, could be and should be tested without delay. If they were in fact invulnerable, no possible attack could harm them. If they were not invulnerable they were bluffing and lying and should therefore be eliminated.

Wherefore Mergon was not surprised when Klazmon’s projection vanished without having said another word — nor when, an instant after that vanishment, the Mallidaxian’s mighty defensive screens flared white.

They did not even pause at the yellow or the yellow white, but went directly to the blinding white; to the degree of radiance at which the vessel’s spare began automatically to cut in — spare after spare after spare.

After staring in silence for two long minutes, Mergon said, “We figured their most probable maximum offense and applied a factor of safety of three — and look at ’em!”

White-faced, Luloy licked her lips. “Mighty Llenderllon!” she cried. “How can they possibly deliver such an attack ’way out here?”

Then Mergon picked up his microphone and said, “Our screens are still holding and they’re protecting the dome; but we’re going to need a lot more defense. So go back out there, please, and give me everything you can.”

He then sat back — and stared tight-jawed at the everclimbing needles of his meters and at the unchanging blinding-white brilliance of his vessel’s screens.