Skylark DuQuesne

27. CO-BELLIGERENTS

“DuQuesne calling Seaton reply… ”

Since Seaton’s head was inside his master controller, no speaker sounded. Since everything pertaining to DuQuesne was on file in the Brain’s memory banks, there was no delay whatever in making the proper connections: Seaton cut in before the first send of the message; short as it was, was completed.

“What the hell, DuQuesne!” his thought blazed out. “I didn’t think even you would have the sublime guts to call on me again!”

“Save it, Seaton. This is important. Do you know how many solar systems of Chlorans there are in that galaxy where your Skylark of Valeron got burned out?”

Seaton paused for one microsecond. Then, cautiously: “No idea. Hundred, maybe. Or, in view of this — thousands?”

“You aren’t even warm. My apparatus put one hundred forty-nine million three hundred nineteen thousand two hundred ninety-seven of them into my tank before my scanners went out. And they hadn’t covered a quarter of the galaxy yet.”

“Je…” Seaton began, but shut himself up. Dorothy was listening in. “But to be able to use a sixth-order analsynth that long you must have had a little more… okay, gimme the dope.”

DuQuesne told his story, including his superpowered DQ and his Fenachrone crew, concluding, “We knocked out over fifteen thousand of them before I had to run. But of course that wasn’t a drop in the proverbial bucket. Worse, I doubt like the devil if any mobile base possible to build can ever get that close to them again. Apparently they sync in just enough stuff — no matter how much it takes — to cope with the maximum observed threat.”

“Could be. But how come you are interested? I know damn well what you want.”

“Not any more you don’t,” snapped DuQuesne’s thought.

“With every two-bit Tom, Dick, and Harry of a race in all space having atomic energy already, what’s the chance of a monopoly? So what good is Earth or anything else in the First Galaxy? I’ve changed my plans — you and Crane can both live forever, as far as I’m concerned.”

Seaton absorbed and filed that statement — guardedly. He only said:

“So what? Why should you give a whoop about the Chlorans? Don’t tell me you’re altruistic all of a sudden.”

“You apparently don’t see the point. Listen — the Fenachrone talked about mastering the cosmos. That race of Chlorans is quietly and unobtrusively doing it. It may be too late to stop them; and I didn’t help matters a bit by making them double or quadruple their synchronized output. You and I are, as far as we know, humanity’s ablest operators. Each of us has stuff the other lacks. If you and I together can’t stop them it can’t — as of now — be done. What do you say?”

Seaton pondered. What was DuQuesne’s angle this time? Or was the ape actually on the up and up? It did make sense, though — even though he was a louse and a heel and a case-hardened egomaniac, if it came down to a choice of which was going to be wiped out, those monsters or humanity… sure he would…

“Okay, Blackie. You give your word?”

“I give my word to act as one of your party until this Chloran thing is settled, one way or the other.”

A few days later, the ultra-fast speedster that Seaton had left on Ray-See-Nee hailed the Valeron, matched velocities with her, and was drawn aboard. Three women disembarked; one of whom was Kay-Lee Barlo. She introduced her black-haired mother, Madame Barlo; who, with the added poise and maturity of her extra twenty-odd years, was even better-looking than her daughter. She in turn introduced her mother, Grand Dame Barlo, who did not have a single white hair in her thick brown thatch and who did not look more than half as old as she must in reality have been.

“But, listen,” Seaton said. “You couldn’t use any sixth order stuff at first, so you must have been on the way for weeks. What happened? Trouble with the Chlorans?”

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?”