‘Not being a gambler, I don’t have hunches very often, but I’ve got one now. In fact, I know one thing for certain damn sure. There isn’t one chance in seven thousand million of anything like this ever happening to you again. You’ll lose your shirt—that is, if you had a shirt to lose,” he added hastily.
‘You know, I think you’re right? I thought so myself, and you’re the second smart man to tell me the same thing.”
‘Who was the first one?”
‘That man at the club, Althagar, his name was. So, with three hunches on the same play, I’d be a fool not to play it that way. Besides, I’ll never get another wallop like that … my uncle’s been wanting me to be linguist in his bank, and with a million and three-quarters of my own I could buy half his bank and be a linguist and a cashier both. Then I couldn’t ever gamble again.”
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‘Huh? Why not?’
‘Because Vegians, especially young Vegians, like me, haven’t got any sense when it comes to gambling,’ Vesta explained, gravely. ‘They can’t tell the difference between their own money and the bank’s. So everybody who amounts to anything in a bank makes a no-gambling declaration and if one ever slips the insurance company boots him out on his ear and he takes a blaster and burns his head off…”
Cloud flashed a thought at Joan. ‘Is this another of your strictly Vegian customs?’
‘Not mine; I never heard of it before,’ she flashed back. ‘Very much in character, though, and it explains why Vegian bankers are regarded as being very much the upper crust.’
‘… so I am going to buy half of that bank. Thanks, chief, for helping me make up my mind. Good night, you two lovely people; I’m going to bed. I’m just about bushed.’ Vesta, tail high and with a completely new dignity in her bearing, strode away.
‘Me, too, Storm; on both counts,’ Joan thought at Cloud. ‘You ought to hit the hammock, too, instead of working half the night yet.’
‘Maybe so, but I want to know how things came out, and besides they may want some quick figuring done. Good night, little chum.’ His parting thought, while commonplace enough in phraseology, was in fact sheer caress; and Joan’s mind, warmly intimate, accepted it as such and returned it in kind.
Cloud left the ship and rode a scooter across the field to a very ordinary-looking freighter. In that vessel’s control room, however, there were three Lensmen and five Rigellians, all clustered around a tank-chart of a considerable fraction of the First Galaxy.
‘Hi, Cloud!’ Nordquist greeted him with a Lensed thought and introduced him to the others. ‘All our thanks for a really beautiful job of work. We’ll thank Miss Janowick tomorrow, when she’ll have a better perspective. Want to look?’
‘I certainly do. Thanks.’ Cloud joined the group at the chart and Nordquist poured knowledge into his mind.
Thlasoval, the boss of Chickladoria, had been under full mental surveillance every minute of every day. The scheme had worked perfectly. As the club closed, Thlasoval had sent the expected message; not by ordinary communications channels, of
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course, but via long-distance beamer. It was beamed three ways; to Tominga, Vegia, and Palmer III. That proved that Fairchild wasn’t on Chickladoria; if he had been, Thlasoval would have used a broadcaster, not a beamer.
Shows had been staged simultaneously on all four of Fair-child’s planets, and only on Vegia had the planetary manager’s message been broadcast. Fairchild was on Vegia, and he wouldn’t leave it: a screen had been thrown around the planet that a microbe couldn’t squirm through and it wouldn’t be relaxed until Fairchild was caught.
‘Simultaneous shows?’ Cloud interrupted the flow of information. ‘On four planets? He won’t connect the Vortex Blaster with it, at all, then.’
‘We think he will,’ the Lensman thought, narrowing down. ‘We’re dealing with a very shrewd operator. We hope he does, anyway, because a snooper put on you or any one of your key people would be manna from heaven for us.’
‘But how could he suspect us?’ Cloud demanded. ‘We couldn’t have been on four planets at once.’
‘You will have been on three of them, though; and I can tell you now that routing was not exactly coincidence.”
‘Oh … and I wasn’t informed?’
‘No. Top Brass didn’t want to disturb you too much, especially since we hoped to catch him before things got this far along. But you’re in it now, clear to the neck. You and your people will be under surveillance every second, from here on in, and you’ll be covered as no chief of state was ever covered in all history I
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15: Joan and Her Brains
The trip from Chickladoria to Vegia, while fairly long, was uneventful.
Joan spent her working hours, of course, at her regular job of rebuilding the giant computer. Cloud spent his at the galactic chart or in the control room staring into a tank; classifying, analyzing, building up and knocking down hypotheses and theories, wringing every possible drop of knowledge from all the data he could collect.
In their ‘spare’ time, of which each had quite a great deal, they worked together at their telepathy; to such good purpose that, when so working, verbal communication between them became rarer and rarer. And, alone or in a crowd, within sight of each other or not, in any place or at any time, asleep or awake, each had only to think at the other and they were instantly in full mental rapport.
And oftener and oftener there came those instaneously-fleet-ing touches of something infinitely more than mere telepathy; that fusion of minds which was so ultimately intimate that neither of the two could have said whether he longed for or dreaded its full coming the more. In fact, for several days before reaching Vegia, each knew that they could bring about that full fusion any time they chose to do so; but both shied away from its consummation, each as violently as the other.
Thus the trip did not seem nearly as long as it actually was.
The first order of business on Vegia, of course, was the extinguishment of its five loose atomic vortices—for which reason this was to be pretty much a planetary holiday, although that is of little concern here.
As the Vortex Blaster 11 began settling into position, the two scientists took their places. Cloud was apparently his usual self-controlled self, but Joan was white and strained—almost shaking. He sent her a steadying thought, but her block was up, solid.
‘Don’t take it so hard, Joanie,’ he said, soberly. ‘Margie’11 take ’em, I hope—but even if she doesn’t, there’s a dozen things not tried yet.’
‘That’s just the trouble—there aren’t! We put just about
_
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everything we had into Lulu; Margie is only a few milliseconds better. Perhaps there are a dozen things not tried yet, but I haven’t the faintest, foggiest smidgeon of an idea of what any of them could be. Margie is the last word, Storm—the best analogue computer it is possible to build with today’s knowledge.’
‘And I haven’t been a lick of help. I wish I could be, Joan.’
‘I don’t see how you can be … Oh, excuse me, Storm, I didn’t mean that half the way it sounds. Do you want to check the circuitry? I’ll send for the prints.’
‘No, I couldn’t even carry your water-bottle on that part of the job. I’ve got just a sort of a dim, half-baked idea that there’s a possibility that maybe I haven’t been giving you and your brains a square deal. By studying the graphs of the next three or four tests maybe I can find out whether …’
‘Lieutenant-Commander Janowick, we are in position,’ a crisp voice came from the speaker. ‘You may take over when ready, madam.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Joan nipped a switch and Margie took control of the ship and its armament—subject only to Cloud’s overriding right to fire at will.
‘Just a minute, Storm,’ Joan said then. ‘Unfinished business. Whether what?’
‘Whether there’s anything I can do—or fail to do—that might help; but I’ve got to have a lot more data.’
Cloud turned to his chart, Joan to hers; and nothing happened until Cloud blew out the vortex himself.
The same lack of something happened in the case of the next vortex, and also the next. Then, as the instruments began working in earnest on the fourth, Cloud reveiwed in his mind the figures of the three previous trials. On the first vortex, a big toughie, Margie had been two hundred fifty milliseconds short. On the second, a fairly small one, she had come up to seventy-five. On Number Three, middle-sized, the lag had been one twenty-five. That made sense. Lag was proportional to activity and it was just too bad for Margie. And just too damn bad for Joanie—the poor kid was just about to blow her stack …