Skylark DuQuesne

22. THE GEAS

As the Llurd’s attack mounted to higher and ever higher plateaus of fury, Mergon slid along his bench to his fourth dimensional controls and there appeared on the floor beside him a lithium-hydride fusion bomb, armed and ready.

He stared at it, his jaw-muscles tightening into lumps. Luloy stared at the thing, too, and her face became even paler than it had been.

“But could you, Merg?” she asked, through stiff lips. “I… I mean, you couldn’t possibly… could you?”

“I don’t know,” he said harshly, scarcely separating locked teeth. “I may have to whether I can or not. We had a factor of safety of three. Two point nine of them are in now and the last tenth is starting up. The dome can’t put out more than that.”

“I know! But if we blow the llanzlanate up, won’t they kill all the Jelmi of all our worlds and start breeding a more tractable race of slaves?”

“That’s the way I read it. In that case we eight hundred could get away clean and start a better civilization somewhere out of range.”

She shuddered. “In that case would life be worth living?”

“It’s a tough decision to make… since the alternative could be for us to kill all the Llurdi.”

“Oh, no!” she cried. “But don’t you think, Merg, that he’ll cooperate? They’re absolutely logical, you know.”

“Maybe. In one way I think so, but I simply can’t see any absolute ruler making such an abject surrender. However, we’ve got to decide right now and we’ll have to stick to our decision — we both know that he can’t be bluffed. If it comes right down to it we can do one of three things. First, commit suicide for our whole eight hundred by not touching the bomb off. Second, wipe them out. Third, let them wipe out all Jelmi except us. What’s your vote?”

“Llenderllon help me! Put that way, there’s — oh, look!” she screamed, in a miraculously changed tone of voice.

“The master-meter! It’s slowing down! It’s going to stop!” She uttered an ear-splitting shriek of pure joy and hurled herself into her husband’s arms.

“It’s stabilized, for a fact,” Mergon said, after their emotions had subsided to something approaching normal “He’s throwing everything he’s got at us. We’re holding him, but just barely, so the question is—”

“One thing first,” she broke in. “My vote. I hate to say it, but we can’t let them kill our race.”

He put his arm around her and squeezed. “That’s what I was sure you’d say. The question now is, how long do we let him stew in his own juice before we skip over there and talk peace terms?”

“Not long enough to let him build more generators than we can to fry us with,” she replied, promptly if a bit unclearly. “One day? Half a day? A quarter?”

“But long enough to let him know he’s licked,” Mergon said. “I’d say one full day would be just about right So let’s go get us some sleep.”

“Sleep! Llenderllon’s eyeballs! Can you even think of such a thing as sleep after all this?”

“Certainly I can. So can you — you’re all frazzled out. Come on girl, we’re hitting the sheets.”

“Why, I won’t be able to sleep a wink until this is all over!”

But she was wrong; in ten minutes they were both sleeping the sleep of exhaustion.

Twelve hours later she came suddenly awake, rolled over toward him, and shook him vigorously by the shoulder. “Wake up, you!”

He grumbled something and tried to pull away from her grip.

She shook him again. “Wake up, you great big oaf! Suppose that beast Klazmon has got more generators built and our screens are all failing?”

He opened one eye. “If they fail, sweet, we won’t know a thing about it.” He opened the other eye and, three-quarter awake now, went on, “Do you think I’m running this ship single-handed? What do you think the other officers are for?”

“But they aren’t you,” she declared, with completely feminine illogic where her husband was concerned. “So hurry up and get up and we’ll go see for ourselves.”

“Okay, but not ’til after breakfast, if I have to smack you down. So punch us up a gallon of coffee, huh? And a couple slabs of ham and six or eight eggs? Then we’ll go see.”

They ate and went and saw. The screens still flared at the same blinding white, but there were no signs of overloading or of failure. They could, the Third Officer bragged, keep it up for years. Everything was under control.

“You hope,” Mergon said — but not to the officer. He said that under his breath as he and Luloy turned away toward their own station.

Much to Mergon’s relief, nothing happened during the rest of the day, and at the end of the twenty-fourth hour he sent the actual bomb and working projections of himself and Luloy into the llanzlanate. Into the llanzlan’s private study, where Klazmon was hard at work.

It was an immense room, and one in which a good anthropologist could have worked delightedly for weeks. The floor was bare, hard, smooth-polished; fantastically inlaid in metal and colored quartz and turquoise and jade. The pictures — framed mostly in extruded stainless steel portrayed scenes (?) and things (?) and events (?) never perceived by any Earthly sense and starkly incomprehensible to any Earthly mind. The furniture was… “weird” is the only possible one-word description. Every detail of the room proclaimed that here was the private retreat of a highly talented and very eminent member of a culture that was old, wide and high.

“Hail, Llanzlan Klazmon,” Mergon said quietly, conversationally. “You will examine this bomb, please, to make sure that, unlike us two, it is actual and practical.”

The Llurd’s eyes had bulged a little and the tip of his tail had twitched slightly at the apparition. That was all. He picked up an instrument with a binocular eyepiece, peered through it for a couple of seconds, and put it down. “It is actual and practical,” he agreed.

Whatever emotions may have been surging through the llanzlan’s mind, his control was superb. He did not ask them how they had done it, or why, or any other question. After the event he knew much and could guess more — and he was perhaps the starkest realist of the most starkly realistic race of intelligent beings yet known to live.

“You realize, of course, that we do not intend to fire it except as the ultimately last resort.”

“I do now.”

“Ah, yes. Our conduct throughout has surprised you; especially that we did not counterattack.”

“If not exactly surprised at least did not anticipate that Jelmi would or could act with practically Llurdan logic,” the Llurd conceded.

“We can. And when we think it best, we do. We suggest that you cut off your attack. We will then put on air-suits and return here in person, to discuss recent developments as reasoning and logical entities should.”

The Llurd was fast on the uptake. He knew that, given time, he could crush this threat; but he knew that he would not have the time. He could see ahead as well as Mergon could to the total destruction of two hundred forty more planets. Wherefore he barked a couple of syllables at a com and the furiously incandescent screens of the Mallidaxian went cold and dark.

Jelmi and bomb disappeared. Mergon and Luloy donned gas-tight, self-contained, plastic-helmeted coveralls and reappeared in the Llanzlan’s study. Klazmon seated them courteously in two Jelman easy-chairs — which looked atrociously out of place in that room — and the peace conference, which was to last for days, began.

“First,” the llanzlan said, “this breakthrough that you have accomplished. At what stage in the negotiations do you propose to give me the complete technical specifications of it?”

“Now,” Mergon said, and a yard-high stack of tapes appeared on the floor beside the Llurd’s desk. It was the entire specs and description of the fourth-dimensional translator. Nothing was omitted or obscured.

“Oh? I see. There is, then, much work yet to be done on it. Work that only you Jelmi can do.”

“That is true, as you will learn from those tapes. Now,” said Mergon, settling down to the bargaining session, “first, we have shown you that Jelmi capable of doing genius-type work cannot be coerced into doing it. Second, the fact is that it is psychologically impossible for us to do such work under coercion. Third, we believe firmly that free and in dependent Jelmi can coexist with the Llurdi. Fourth, we believe equally firmly that for the best good of both races they should so coexist…”

And at that first day’s end, after supper, Luloy said, “Merg, I simply would not have believed it. Ever. I’m not sure I really believe it now. But you know I almost like — I actually admire that horrible monster in some ways!”

Seaton called Rovol of Rays, on Norlamin, as soon as he could reach him. He told him the story of what he had done on Ray-See-Nee, and what he hoped to gain by it, in detail, then went on to ask his help on the control of the fourth-dimensional translator.

“You see, Rovol, at perfect sync it would — theoretically — take zero power. I don’t expect the unattainable ideal, of course—” he winked at Dorothy — “just close enough so we can pack enough stuff into the Valeron to handle everything they can throw at us and still have enough left over to fight back with.”

“Ah, youth, a fascinating problem indeed. I will begin work on it at once, and will call in certain others in whose provinces some aspects of it lie. By the time you arrive here we will perhaps have determined whether or not any solution is at present possible.”

“What?” Seaton yelped. “Why — I thought — surely—” he almost stuttered. “I thought you’d have it done by then — maybe be sending it out to meet us, even.”

The old Norlaminian’s paternally forbearing sigh was highly expressive. “Still the heedless, thoughtless youth, in spite of all our teachings. You have not studied the problem yourself at all.”

“Well, not very much, I admit.”

“I advise you to do so. If you devote to it every period of labor between now and your arrival here you may perhaps be able to talk about it intelligently,” and Rovol cut com.

Dorothy whistled. She didn’t whistle very often, but she could do it very expressively.

“Yeah,” Seaton said, ruefully. “And the old boy wasn’t kidding, either.”

“Not having a sense of humor, he can’t kid. He really slapped you on the wrist, friend. But why would it be such a horrible job to sync a few generators in?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” He went, worked for four solid hours with the Brain, and came back wearing a sheepish grin. “It’s true,” he reported. “I knew it’d be tricky, but I had no idea. You have to work intelligently, manipulably and reproducibly in time units of three times ten to the minus twenty — eighth of a second — the time it takes light to travel a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter.”

“Hush. You don’t expect me to understand that, do you?”

“I’ll say I don’t. I don’t expect to even really understand it myself.”

Seaton did not work on the problem every day until arrival, but he worked on it for over a hundred hours enough so that he began to realize how difficult it was.

The Skylark of Valeron entered the Green System, approached Norlamin, and went into orbit around it. The travelers boarded a shuttle, which thereupon began to slide down a landing-beam toward Rovol’s private dock.

The little craft settled gently into a neoprene-lined cup. The visitors disembarked and walked down a short flight of metallic steps, at the foot of which the ancient, whitebearded sage was waiting for them. He greeted them warmly — for a Norlaminian — and led them through the “garden” toward the metal-and-quartz palace that was his home.

“Oh, Dick, isn’t it wonderful!” Dorothy pressed his arm against her side. “It’s so much like Orlon’s and yet so different… ”

And it was both. The acreage of velvet-short, springy grass was about the same as that upon which they had landed so long before. The imperishable-metal statuary was similar. Here also were the beds of spectacular flowers and the hedges and sculptured masses of gorgeously vari-colored plant life. The tapestry wall, however — composed of millions upon millions of independently moving, flashing, selfluminous jewels of all the colors of the rainbow — ran for a good three hundred yards beside the walk. It was evident that the women of the Rovol had been working on it for hundreds of centuries instead of for mere hundreds of years. Instead of being only form and color, as was the wall of the Orlon, it was well along toward portraying the entire history of the Family Rovol.

Rovol wanted to entertain his guests instead of work, but Seaton objected. “Shame on you, Rovol. The Period of Labor is just starting, and remember how you fellows used to bat my ears down about there being definite and noninterchangeable times for work and for play and so forth?”

“That is of course true, youth,” Rovol agreed, equably enough. “I should not have entertained the idea for a moment. My companion will welcome the ladies and show them to your apartments. We will proceed at once to the Area of Experiment,” and he called an aircar by fingering a stud at his belt.

“I’ve been studying, as you suggested,” Seaton said then. “Can the thing be solved? The more I worked on it the more dubious I got.”

“Yes, but the application of its solution will be neither easy nor simple.” The aircar settled gently to the walk a few yards ahead of the party and Rovol and Seaton boarded it; Rovol still talking. “But you will be delighted to know that, thanks to your gift of the metal of power, what would have been a work of lifetimes can very probably be accomplished in a few mere years.”

Seaton was not delighted. Knowing what Rovol could mean by the word “few,” he was appalled; but there was nothing whatever he could do to speed things up.

He spent a couple of weeks rebuilding the Skylark of Valeron — with batteries of offensive and defensive weaponry where single machines had been — then stood around and watched the Norlaminians work. And as day followed day without anything being accomplished he became more and more tense and impatient. He concealed his feelings perfectly, he thought; but he should have known that he could hide nothing from the extremely percipient mind of the girl who was in every respect his other half.

“Dick, you’ve been jittering like a witch,” she said one evening, “about something I can’t see any reason for. But you have a reason, or you wouldn’t be doing it. So break down and tell me.”

“I can’t, confound it. I know I’m always in a rush to get a thing done, but not like this. I’m all of a twitter inside. I can’t sleep…”

Dorothy snickered. “You can’t? If what you were doing last night wasn’t sleeping it was the most reasonable facsimile thereof I’ve ever seen. Or heard.”

“Not like I ought to, I mean. Nightmares. Devils all the time sticking me with pitchforks. Do you believe in hunches?”

“No,” she said, promptly. “I never had any. Not a one.”

“I never did, either, and if this is one I never want to have another. But it could be a hunch that we ought to be investigating that alien galaxy of DuQuesne’s. Whatever it is, I want to go somewhere and I haven’t the faintest idea where.”

“Oh? Listen!” Dorothy’s eyes widened. “I’ll bet you’re getting an answer to that message we sent out!”

He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Can’t be. Telepathy has got to be something you can understand.”

“Who besides you ever said it would have to be telepathy? And who knows what telepathy would have to be like? Come on, let’s go tell Martin and Peggy!”

“Huh?” he yelped. “Tell M. Reynolds Crane, the hardest boiled skeptic that event went unhung, that I want to go skyshooting to hellangone off into the wild blue yonder just because I’ve got an itch that I can’t scratch?”

“Why not?” She looked him steadily in the eye. “We’re exploring terra incognita, Dick. How much do you really know about that mind of yours, the way it is now?”

“Okay. Maybe they’ll buy it; you did. Let’s go.”

They went; and, a little to Seaton’s surprise, Crane agreed with Dorothy. So did Margaret. Hence three hours later, the big sky-rover was on her way.

Four days out, however, Seaton said, “This isn’t the answer, I don’t think. The itch is still there. So what?”

There was silence for a couple of minutes, then Dorothy chuckled suddenly. Sobering quickly, she said, with a perfectly straight face, “I’ll bet it’s that new department head girl-friend of yours, Dick; the pistol-packing mama with the wiggle. She wants to see the big, bold, handsome Earthman again. And if it is, I’ll scratch…”

Seaton jumped almost out of his chair. “You’re not kidding half as much as you think you are, pet. That crack took a good scratch at exactly where it itches.” He put on his remote-control helmet and changed course. “And that helps still more.” He thought for minutes, then shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m not getting a thing… not anything more at all. How many of you remember either ReeToe Prenk or the girl well enough to picture either of them accurately in your minds?”

They all remembered one or both of the Rayseenians.

“Okay. This’ll sound silly. It is silly, for all the tea in China, but let’s try something. All join hands, picture either or both of them, and think at them as hard as we can. The thought is simply ‘we’re coming.’ Okay?”

More than half sheepishly, they tried it — and it worked. At least Seaton said, “Well, it worked, I guess. Anyway, for the first time in weeks, it’s gone. But I didn’t get a thing. Nothing whatever. Not even a hint either that we were being paged or that our reply was being received. Did any of you?”

None of them had.

“Huh!” Seaton snorted. “If this is telepathy they can keep it — I’ll take Morse’s original telegraph!”

A week or so after the Skylark of Valeron left the neighborhood of Ray-See-Nee, that planet’s new government began to have trouble. Ree-Toe Prenk had said and had believed that whoever controlled the capital controlled the world, but that was not true in his case. It had always been true previously because the incoming powers had always been of the same corrupt-to-the-core stripe as those who were ousted — and when corruption has been the way of life for generations it is deep-rooted indeed.

There were, of course, other factors behind the unrest. But neither Prenk nor any other human knew about them then.

All the district bosses had always gone along with the Big Boss as a matter of course.

Not one of them cared a whit who ran the world, as long as his own privileges and perquisites and powers and takes were not affected. Prenk, however, was strictly honest and strictly just. If he should succeed in taking over Ray-See-Nee’s government in full, every crook and boodler on the planet would lose everything he had; possibly even his life. Thus, while the new Premier held the capital — in a rapidly deteriorating grip — his influence outside that city’s limits varied inversely as about the fourth power of the distance.

This resistance, while actual enough, was in no sense overt. Every order was ostensibly obeyed to the letter; but everything deteriorated at an accelerating rate and Prenk could do nothing whatever about it. Whenever and wherever Prenk was not looking, business went on as usual gambling, drugs, prostitution, crime and protection — but he could not prove any of it. Neither uniformed police nor detectives could find anything much amiss.

They made arrests, but no suspect was ever convicted: The prosecution’s cases were weak. The juries brought in verdicts of “innocent”, usually, without leaving the box.

Even when, in desperation, Prenk went — supposedly top secretly — to an outlying city, fully prepared to stage a questioning that would have made Torquemada blush, he did nothing and he learned nothing. Every person on his list had vanished tracelessly and every present incumbent had abundant proof of innocence. Nor did any of them know why they had been promoted so suddenly. They were just lucky, they guessed.

It was indeed baffling. It would have been less so if Prenk had had any notion of the universe-wide stir of mighty events just beginning to bubble — if he had been able, as we are now able, to fit together all these patchwork stories into one nearly Norlaminian fabric of universal history.

But he wasn’t — and, for his peace of mind, perhaps that was just as well!

Premier Ree-Toe Prenk sat at his desk in the Room of State. Kay-Lee Barlo, shapely legs crossed and pistol at hip, sat at his left. Sy-By Takeel, the new Captain-General of the Guard, stood at ease at his right.

“Whoever is doing this is a smooth, shrewd operator,” Prenk said. “So much so that you two are the only people I can trust. And I don’t suppose either of you will ever be approached. Probably neither of you would be bought even if you offered yourselves ever so deftly for sale.”

“I wouldn’t be, certainly,” Takeel said. “Captains general of mercenaries don’t sell out. I wouldn’t answer for any of my lieutenants, though, if there’s loot to be had. There is here, I take it?”

“Unlimited quantities, apparently. So you, too, are subject to assassination?”

The soldier shrugged. “Oh, yes, it’s an occupational hazard. How about you, Exalted Barlo? No chance either, I’d say?”

“None at all. My stand is too well known. Half my people would stab me in the back if they dared to and they all look me in the eye and lie in their Mi-Ko-Ta-cursed teeth. I wish Ky-El Mokak and his people would get back here quick,” Kay-Lee said wistfully.

“So do I,” Prenk said, glumly. “But even if we had a sixth-order tightbeamer and could use it, we haven’t the slightest idea of where he came from or where he went to.”

“That’s true.” She nibbled at her lip. “But listen. I’m a psychic. It runs in the women of some families, you know, being… well, what most people call witches, kind of. My talent isn’t fully developed yet, but mother and I together could witch-wish at him to come back here as fast as he can and I’m sure he would.”

The soldier’s face showed quite plainly what he thought of the idea, but Prenk nodded — if more than somewhat dubiously. “I’ve heard of that ‘witch-wishing’ business, and that it sometimes works. So go home right now and get at it, Kay-Lee, and give it everything you and your mother both can put out.”

Kay-Lee went home forthwith and went into executive session with her mother; a handsome, black-haired woman of forty-odd. “And I have positive identification,” the girl concluded. “His blood was all over the place — positively quarts of it — and I saved some just in case.” And, of course, she had — prudently, wisely and, as it turned out, luckily for all concerned!

The older woman’s face cleared. “That’s good. Without a positive, I’m afraid it would be hopeless at what the distance probably is by this time. Run and get the witch-holly, dear, while I fix the incense.”

They each ate seven ritually preserved witch-holly berries and inhaled seven deep drafts of aromatic smoke. While they were waiting for the powerful drugs to take effect, Kay-Lee asked, “How much of this rigamarole is chemistry, do you suppose, mother, and how much is just hocus-pocus?”

“No one knows. Some day, whatever it is that we have will be recognized as having existence and will be really studied. Until then, all we can do is follow the ancient ritual.”

“I think I’ll talk to Ky-El about it. But listen. Witches with any claim at all to decency simply don’t put geases on people. But what if he’s so far away that we can’t reach him any other way?”

The older woman frowned, then said, “In that case, my dear, we’ll never, never tell anyone a thing about it.”