Skylark DuQuesne

3. FREE [?]

SOME hours later, far out in deep space, the ex-Llurdan scout cruiser — now named the Mallidax, after the most populous Jelman planet of the Realm — bored savagely through the ether. Its crew of late revolutionaries, still dazed by the fact that they were still alive, recuperated in their various ways.

In one of the larger, more luxurious cabins Luloy of Mallidax lay prone on a three-quarter-size-bed, sobbing convulsively, uncontrollably. Her left eye was swollen shut.

The left side of her face and most of her naked body bore livid black and blue bruises — bruises so brutally severe that the marks of Kalton’s sense-whip punishment, incurred earlier for insubordination, were almost invisible. A dozen bandages showed white against the bronzed skin of her neck and shoulders and torso and arms and legs.

“Oh, snap out of it, Lu, please!” Mergon ordered, almost brusquely. He was a burly youth with crew-cut straw-colored hair; and he, too, showed plenty of evidence of having been to the wars. He had even more bruises and bandages than she did. “Don’t claim that you wanted to be a martyr any more than I did. And they can engrave it on a platinum plaque that I’m damned glad to get out of that fracas alive.”

Stopping her crying by main strength, the girl hauled herself up into a half-sitting position and glared at the man out of her one good eye.

“You… you clod!” she stormed. “It isn’t that at all! And you know it as well as I do. It’s just that we… they… he… not a single one of them so much as… why, we might just as well have been merely that many mosquitoes — midges — worse, exactly that many perfectly innocuous saprophytic bacilli.”

“Exactly,” he agreed, sourly, and her glare changed to a look almost of surprise. “That’s precisely what we were. It’s humiliating, yes. It’s devastating and it’s frustrating. We tried to hit the Llurdi where it hurt, and they ignored us. Agreed. I don’t like it a bit better than you do; but caterwauling and being sorry for yourself isn’t going to help matters a—”

“Caterwauling! Being sorry for myself! If that’s what you think, you can…”

“Stop it, Lu!” he broke in sharply, “before I have to spank your fanny to a rosy blister!”

She threw up her head in defiance; then what was almost a smile began to quirk at the corners of her battered mouth. “You can’t, Merg,” she said, much more quietly than she had said anything so far. “Look — it’s all red, green, blue, yellow, and black already. That last panel I bounced off of was no pillow, friend.”

“Llenderllon’s favor, sweetheart!” Bending over, he kissed her gingerly, then drew a deep breath of relief. “You scared me like I don’t know when I’ve been scared before.” he admitted. “We need you too much — and I love you too much — to have you go off the deep end now. Especially now, when for the first time in our lives we’re in position to do something.”

“Such as what?” Luloy’s tone was more lifeless than skeptical. “How many of our whole race are worth saving, do you think? How many Jelmi of all our worlds can be made to believe that their present way of life is anything short of perfection?”

“Very few, probably,” Mergon conceded. “As of now. But — ?”

He paused, looking around their surroundings. The spaceship, which had once been one of the Llurdi’s best, might have a few surprises for them. It was a matter for debate whether the Llurdi might not have put concealed spy devices in the rooms. On balance, however, Mergon thought not. The Llurdi operated on grander scales than that.

He said, “Luloy, listen. We tried to fight our way to freedom by attacking the Llurdi right where it hurts, in center of their power. We lost the battle. But we have what we were fighting for, don’t we? Why do you think they let us go, perfectly free?”

Luloy’s eye brightened a little, but not too much. “That’s plain enough. Since they couldn’t make us produce either new theories or children in captivity, they’re giving us what they say is complete freedom, so that we’ll produce both. How stupid do they think we are? How stupid can they get? If we could have wrecked their long eyes, yes, we could have got away clean to a planet in some other galaxy, ’way out of their range; but now? If I know anything at all, it’s that they’ll hold a tracer beam — so weak as to be practically indetectable, of course — on us forever.”

“I think you’re right,” Mergon said, and paused. Luloy looked at him questioningly and he went on, “I’m sure you are, but I don’t think it’s us they are aiming at. They’re probably taking the long view — betting that, with a life-long illusion of freedom, we’ll have children of our own free will…

Luloy nodded thoughtfully. “And we would,” she said, definitely. “All of us would. For, after all, if we on this ship all die childless what chance is there that any other Jelmi will try it again for thousands of years? And our children would have a chance, even if we never have another.”

“True. But on the other hand, how many generations will it take for things now known to be facts to degenerate into myths? To be discredited completely, in spite of the solidest records we can make as to the truth and the danger?”

Luloy started to gnaw her lip, but winced sharply and stopped the motion. “I see what you mean. Inevitable. But you don’t seem very downcast about it, so you have an idea. Tell me, quick!”

“Yes, but I’m just hatching it; I haven’t mentioned it even to Tammon yet, so I don’t know whether it will work or not. At present a sixth-order breakthrough can’t be hidden from even a very loose surveillance. Right?”

By now Luloy’s aches and pains were forgotten. Eyes bright, she nodded. “You’re so right. Do you think one can be? Possibly? How?”

“By finding a solar system somewhere whose inhabitants know so much more than we do that the emanations of their sixth-order installations continuously or regularly at work will mask those of any full-scale tests we want to make. There must be some such race, somewhere in this universe. The Llurdi charted this universe long ago — they call it U-Prime — and I requisitioned copies of all the tapes. Second: the Llurdi are all strictly logical. Right?”

“That’s right,” the girl agreed. “Strictly. Insanely, almost, you might say.”

“So my idea is to do something as illogical as possible. They think we’ll head for a new planet of our own; either in this galaxy or one not too far away. So we won’t. We’ll drive at absolute max for the center of the universe, with the most sensitive feelers we have full out for very strong sixth-order emanations. En route, we’ll use every iota of brain-power aboard this heap in developing some new band of the sixth, being mighty careful to use so little power that the ship’s emanations will mask it. Having found the hiding place we want, we’ll tear into developing and building something, not only that the Llurdi haven’t got, but a thing that by use of which we can bust Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth loose from his wings and tail — and through which he can’t fight back. So, being absolutely — stupidly — logical about everything, what would His Supreme Omnipotence do about it?”

Luloy thought in silence for a few seconds, then tried unsuccessfully to whistle through battered, swollen lips. “Oh, boy!” she exclaimed, delightedly. “Slug him with a thing like that — demonstrate superiority — and the battle is over. He’ll concede us everything we want, full equality, independence, you name it, without a fight — without even an argument!”

Grinning, Mergon caught her arm and led her out of the room. Throughout the great hulk of the Llurd spaceship the other battered Jelmi veterans were beginning to stir. To each of them, Mergon explained his plan and from each came the same response. “Oh, boy!”

They began at once setting up their work plans.

The first project was to find — somewhere! — a planet generating sufficient sixth-order forces to screen what they were going to do. In the great vastnesses of the Over universe there were many such planets. They could have chosen that which was inhabited by Norlaminian or Dasorian peoples. They could have chosen one of a score which were comparatively nearby. They, in fact, ultimately chose and set course for the third planet of a comparatively small G-type star known to its people as Tellus, or Earth.

They could have given many reasons why this particular planet had been selected.

None of these reasons would have included the receipt of the brief pulse of telepathic communication which none of them, any longer, consciously remembered.

And back on Llurdiax the Llanzlan followed the progress of the fleeing ship of Jelm rebels with calm perception.

His great bat wings were already mending, even as the scars of the late assault on his headquarters were already nearly repaired by a host of servo-mechanisms. Deaf to the noise and commotion of the repairs, heedless of the healing wounds which any human would have devoted a month in bed to curing, the Llanzlan once again summoned his department heads and issued his pronouncement:

“War, being purely destructive, is a product of unsanity. The Jelmi are, however, unsane; many of them are insane. Thus, if allowed to do so, they commit warfare at unpredictable times and for incomprehensible, indefensible, and/or whimsical reasons.

Nevertheless, since the techniques we have been employing have been proven ineffective and therefore wrong, they will now be changed. During the tenure of this directive no more Jelmi will be executed or castrated: in fact, a certain amount of unsane thinking will not merely be tolerated but encouraged, even though it lead to the unsanity termed ‘war’. It should not, however, be permitted to exceed that quantity of ‘war’ which would result in the destruction of, let us say, three of their own planets.”

“’This course will entail a risk that we, as the ‘oppressors’ of the Jelmi, will be attacked by them. The magnitude of this risk — the probability of such an attack — cannot be calculated with the data now available. Also, these data are rendered even less meaningful by the complete unpredictability of the actions of the group of Jelmi released from study here.

“It is therefore directed that all necessary steps be taken particularly in fifth and sixth-order devices, that no even theoretically possible — attack on this planet will succeed.

“This meeting will now adjourn.”

It did; and within fifteen minutes heavy construction began — construction that was to go on at a pace and on a scale and with an intensity of drive theretofore unknown throughout the Realm’s long history. Whole worldlets were destroyed, scavenged for their minerals, their ores smelted in giant atomic space-borne foundries and cast and shaped into complex machines of offense and defense. Delicate networks of radiation surrounded every Jelm and Llurd world, ready to detect, trace, report and home on any artifact whatsoever which might approach them. Weapons capable of blasting moons out of orbit slipped into position in great latticework spheres of defensive emplacements.

The Llurdi were preparing for anything.

Llurdan computations were never wrong. Computers, however, even Llurdan computers, are not really smart, they can’t really think. Unlike the human brain, they can not arrive at valid conclusions from insufficient data. In fact, they don’t even try to. They stop working and say in words or by printing or typing or by flashing a light or by ringing a bell — “DATA INSUFFICIENT”: and then continue to do nothing until they are fed additional information.

Thus, while the Llanzlan and his mathematicians and logicians fed enough data into their machines to obtain valid conclusions, there were many facts that no Llurd then knew. And thus those conclusions, while valid, were woefully incomplete; they did not cover all of actuality by far.

For, in actuality, there had already begun a chain of events that was to render those mighty fortresses precisely as efficacious against one certain type of attack as that many cubic miles of sheerest vacuum.