“Put it on!” Pagadan said, curling herself comfortably and happily into her desk chair. “So they found Mommy, eh? Never had such fun before I started slumming around with humans. What were the destructive results?”
“They did all right. An estimated forty-five percent of the scouts right on the strike—and they figure it will be over eighty before the survivors get out of pursuit range. One of the destroyers and a couple of the cruiser’s strike-ships were slightly damaged when the core blew up. Nothing serious.”
The visual recording appeared on the communication screen a moment later. It was very brief, as seen from the cruiser—following its hornet-swarm of released strike-ships in on the great, flat, scaly-looking pancake bulk of the Mother Disk, while a trio of destroyers closed down on either side. As a fight, Pagadan decided critically, it was also the worst flop she’d seen in years, considering that the trapped quarry was actually a layered composite of several thousand well-armed scouts! For a brief instant, the barriers of every charging Vegan ship blazed a warning white; then the screen filled momentarily with a rainbow-hued sparkle of scouts scattering under the lethal fire of the attackers—and the brighter flashing of those that failed.
As both darkened out and the hunters swirled off in pursuit of the fugitive swarms, an ellipsoid crystalline core, several hundred yards in diameter, appeared where the Disk had lain in space. The Bjanta breeding center. It seemed to expand slightly.
An instant later, it was a miniature nova.
* * *
Pagadan blinked and nodded approvingly as the screen went blank.
“Tidy habit! Saves us a lot of trouble. But we made the only real haul of the day, Viper, old girl!” She grimaced. “So now we’ve still got to worry about that sleepwalking silly little planet of Ulphi, and the one guy on it who isn’t . . . isn’t sleepwalking, anyway. And a couple of other—” She straightened up suddenly. “Who’s that working your communicators now?”
“That’s the robot-tracker you put on the Department of Cultures investigator on Ulphi,” the Viper informed her. “He wants to come in to tell you the lady’s got herself into some kind of jam with the population down there. Shall I switch him to the O-Ship and have the Agent-Trainee check and take over, if necessary?”
“Hold it!” Pagadan’s hands flew out towards the section of instrument panel controlling the communicators. “Not if it’s the D.C. girl! That would mess up all my plans. The tracker’s ready and equipped to see nothing happens to her before I get there. Just put that line through to me, fast!”
Some while later, she summoned Hallerock to the O-Ship’s communicator.
” . . . So I’m picking you up in a few minutes and taking you on board the Viper. Central Lab wants a set of structural recordings of these pickled Bjantas right away—and you’ll have to do it, because I won’t have the time.”
“What happened?” her aide inquired, startled.
“Nothing very serious,” Pagadan said soothingly. “But it’s likely to keep me busy for the next few hours. Our D.C. investigator on Ulphi may have got an accidental whiff of what’s rancid on the planet—anyway, somebody’s trying to get her under mental control right now! I’ve got her covered by a tracker, of course, so she’s in no real danger; but I’ll take the Viper’s skiff and go on down as soon as I get you on board. By the way, how soon can you have the hospital ship prepared for its job?”
Hallerock hesitated a moment. “I suppose it’s ready to start any time. I finished treating the last of the personnel four hours ago.”
“Good boy,” Pagadan applauded. “I’ve got something in mind—not sure yet whether it will work. But that attack on the D.C. might make it possible for us to wind up the whole Ulphi operation inside the next twenty-four hours!”
* * *
It had started out, three weeks before, looking like such a nice little mission. Since it was her fifth assignment in four months, and since there had been nothing even remotely nice about any of the others, Pagadan could appreciate that.
Nothing much to do for about three or four weeks now, she’d thought gratefully as she hauled out her skiff for a brief first survey of the planet of Ulphi. She had landed as an ostensible passenger on a Vegan destroyer, the skiff tucked away in one of the destroyer’s gun locks, while the Viper went on orbit at a safe distance overhead. That gleaming deep-space machine looked a trifle too impressive to be a suitable vehicle for Pelial, the minor official of Galactic Zones, which was Pagadan’s local alias. And as Ulphi’s entire population was planet-bound by congenital space-fear, the skiff would provide any required amount of transportation, while serving principally as living quarters and a work-office.
But there would be really nothing to do. Except, of course, to keep a casual eye on the safety of the other Vegans newly arrived on the planet and cooperate with the Fleet in its unhurried preparations to receive the Bjantas, who were due to appear in about a month for the ninth of their series of raids on Ulphi. Those obliging creatures conducted their operations in cycles of such unvarying regularity that it was a pleasure to go to work on them, once you’d detected their traces and could muster superior force to intercept their next return.
On Ulphi Bjantas had been reaping their harvest of life and what they could use of civilization’s treasures and tools at periods which lay just a fraction over three standard years apart. It had done no very significant damage as yet, since it had taken eight such raids to frighten the population into revealing its plight by applying for membership in the far-off Confederacy of Vega and the protection that would bring them. The same cosmic clockwork which first set the great Disk on this course would be returning it now, predictably, to the trap Vega had prepared.
Nothing for Pagadan to worry about. Nobody, actually, seemed to have much confidence that the new shell-cracker beams installed on the Viper to pick up a couple of Bjantas in an unexploded condition would work as they should, but that problem was Lab’s and not hers. And, feeling no doubt that she’d earned a little vacation, they were presenting her meanwhile with these next three weeks on Ulphi. The reports of the officials of other Confederacy government branches who had preceded Pagadan here had described it as a uniquely charming little backwater world of humanity, cut off by the development of planetary space-fear from the major streams of civilization for nearly four hundred years. Left to itself in its amiable climate, Ulphi had flowered gradually into a state of quaint and leisurely prettiness.
So went the reports!
Jauntily, then, Pagadan set forth in her skiff to make an aerial survey of this miniature jewel of civilization and pick out a few of the very best spots for some solid, drowsy loafing.
Two days later, her silver hair curled flat to her skull with outraged shock, she came back on board the Viper. The activated telepath transmitter hummed with the ship’s full power, as it hurled her wrathful message to G.Z. Headquarters Central on the planet of Jeltad—in Vega’s system, eight thousand light-years away.
* * *
At Central on Jeltad, a headquarters clerk, on his way out to lunch, paused presently behind the desk of another. His manner was nervous.
“What’s the Pyramid Effect?” he inquired.
“You ought to know,” his friend replied. “If you don’t, go punch it from Restricted Psych-Library under that heading. I’ve got a final mission report coming through.” He glanced around. “How come the sudden urge for knowledge, Linky?”
Linky jerked a thumb back towards his desk transmitter. “I got that new Lannai Z.A. on just before the end of my stretch. She was blowing her silver top about things in general—had me lining up interviews with everybody from Snoops to the Old Man for her! The Pyramid Effect seems to be part of it.”
The other clerk snickered. “She’s just diving into a mission then. I had her on a few times while she was in Zonal Training. She’ll swear like a Terran till she hits her stride. After that, the rougher things get the sweeter she grows. You want to wait a little? If I get this beam through, I’ll turn it over to a recorder and join you for lunch.”
“All right.” Linky hesitated a moment and then drifted back towards his desk. At a point well outside the vision range of its transmitter screen, he stopped and listened.
” . . . Well, why didn’t anybody know?” Pagadan’s voice came, muted but crackling. “That Department of Cultures investigator has been on Ulphi for over a month now, and others just as long! You get copies of their reports, don’t you? You couldn’t put any two of them together without seeing that another Telep-Two thinks he’s invented the Pyramid Effect out here—there isn’t a thing on the crummy little planet that doesn’t show it! And I’ll be the daughter of a C-Class human,” she added bitterly, “if it isn’t a type-case in full flower, with all the trimmings! Including immortalization and the Siva Psychosis. No, I do not want Lab to home any of their findings out to me! Tell them I’m staying right here on telepath till they’ve sorted out what I gave them. Where’s Snoops, that evil little man? Or can somebody locate that fuddle-headed, skinny, blond clerk I had on a few minutes—”