itself somewhat to the contours of their bodies, was almost as hard as rock.
Nevertheless, it was the most comfortable bed either of them had ever had. When they
were ready to go to sleep, Temple said:
“Drat it, those Omans stilt want to come in and sleep with us. In the room, I mean. And
they suffer so. They’re simply radiating silent suffering and oh-so-submissive reproach.
Shall we let ’em come in?”
“That’s strictly up to you, sweetheart. It always has been.” “I know. I thought they’d quit
it sometime, but I guess they never will. I still want an illusion of privacy at times, even
though they know all about everything that goes on. But we might let ’em in now, just
while we sleep, and throw ’em out again as soon as we wake up in the morning?”
“You’re the boss.” Without additional invitation the four Omans came in and arranged
themselves neatly on the floor, on all four sides of the bed. Temple had barely time to
cuddle up against Hilton, and he to put his arm closely around her, before they both
dropped into profound and dreamless sleep.
“Not so fast, Jarve give us a chance, please!” Kathryn, now Mrs. Lane Saunders,
pleaded. She shook her head. “We don’t see how any stable indigenous life can have
developed at all, unless . . .”
“Unless what? Natural shielding?” Hilton asked, and Kathy eyed her husband.
“Right,” Saunders said. “The earliest life-forms must have developed a shield before
they could evolve and stabilize. Hence, whatever it is that is in our skins was not a
triumph of Masters’ science. They took it from Nature.”
“Oh? Oh!” These were two of Sandra’s most expressive monosyllables, followed by a
third. “Oh. Could be, at that. But how could . . . no, cancel that.”
“You’d better cancel it, Sandy. Give us a couple of months, and maybe we can answer
a few elementary questions.”
Now inside the Hall, all the teams, from Astronomy to Zoology, went efficiently to work.
Everyone knew what to look for, how to find it, and how to study it.
“The First Team doesn’t need you now too much, does it, Jarve?” Sawtelle asked.
“Not particularly. In fact, I was just going to get back onto my own job.”
“Not yet. I want to talk to you,” and the two went into a long discussion of naval affairs.
At eight hours next morning all the specialists met at the new Hall of Records.
This building, an exact duplicate of the old one, was located on a mesa in the foothills
southwest of the natatorium, in a luxuriant grove at sight of which Karns stopped and
began to laugh.
“I thought I’d seen everything,” he remarked. “But yellow pine, spruce, tamarack,
apples, oaks, palms, oranges, cedars, joshua trees and cactus-just to name a few-all
growing on the same quarter-section of land?”
“Just everything anybody wants, is all,” Hilton said. “But are they really growing? Or
just straight synthetics? LaneKathy-this is your dish.”
Chapter 11
The Stretts’ fuel-supply line had been cut long since. Many Strett cargo-carriers had
been destroyed. The enemy would of course have a very heavy reserve of fuel on
hand: But there was no way of knowing how large it was, how many warships it could
supply, or how long it would last.
Two facts were, however, unquestionable. First, the Stretts were building a fleet that in
their minds would be invincible. Second, they would attack Ardane as soon as that fleet
could be made ready. The unanswerable question was: how long would that take?
“So we want to get every ship we have. How many? Five thousand? Ten? Fifteen? We
want them converted to maximum possible power as soon as we possibly can,”
Sawtelle said, “and I want to get out there with my boys to handle things.”
“You aren’t going to. Neither you nor your boys are expendable. Particularly you.” Jaw
hard-set, Hilton studied the situation for minutes. “No. What we’ll do is take your Oman,
Kedy. We’ll re-set the Guide to drive into him everything you and the military Masters
ever knew about arms, armament, strategy, tactics and so on. And we’ll add everything
I know of coordination, synthesis and perception. That ought to make him at least a
junior-grade military genius.”
“You can play that in spades. I wish you could do it to me.”
“I can-if you’ll take the full Oman transformation. Nothing else can stand the
punishment.”
“I know. No, I don’t want to be a genius that badly.” “Check. And we’ll take the resultant
Kedy and make nine duplicates of him. Each one will learn from and profit by the
mistakes made by the preceding numbers and will assume command the instant his
preceding number is killed.”
“Oh, you expect, then . . .?”
“Expect? No. I know it damn well, and so do you. That’s why we Ardans will stay
aground. Why the Kedys’ first job will be to make the heavy stuff in and around Ardane
as heavy as it can be made. Why it’ll all be on twenty-four-hour alert. Then they can put
as many thousands of Omans as you please to work at modernizing all the Oman ships
you want and doing anything else you say. Check?”
Sawtelle thought for a couple of minutes. “A few details, is all. But that can be ironed
out as we go along.”
Both men worked then, almost unremittingly for six solid days, at the end of which time
both drew tremendous sighs of relief. They had done everything possible for them to
do. The defense of Ardvor was now rolling at fullest speed toward its gigantic objective.
Then captain and director, in two Oman ships with fifty men and a thousand Omans,
leaped the world-girdling ocean to the mining operation of the Stretts. There they found
business strictly as usual. The strippers still stripped; the mining meths still roared and
snarled their inch-wise ways along their geometrically perfect terraces; the little carriers
still skittered busily between the various miners and the storage silos. The fact that
there was enough concentrate on hand to last a world for a hundred years made no
difference at all to these automatics; a crew of erector-meths was building new silos as
fast as existing ones were being filled.
Since the men now understood everything that was going on, it was a simple matter for
them to stop the whole Strett operation in its tracks. Then every man and every Oman
leaped to his assigned job. Three days later, all the meths went back to work. Now,
however, they were working for the Ardans.
The miners, instead of concentrate, now emitted vastly larger streams of
Navy-Standard pelleted uranexite. The carriers, instead of one-gallon cans, carried
five-ton drums. The silos were immensely larger-thirty feet in diameter and towering two
hundred feet into the air. The silos were not, however, being used as yet. One of the
two Oman ships had been converted into a fuel-tanker and its yawning holds were
being filled first.
The Orion went back to Ardane and an eight-day wait began. For the first time in over
seven months Hilton found time actually to loaf; and he and Temple, lolling on the
beach or hiking in the mountains, enjoyed themselves and each other to the full.
All too soon, however, the heavily laden tanker appeared in the sky over Ardane. The
Orion joined it; and the two ships slipped into sub-space for Earth.
Three days out, Hilton used his sense of perception to release the thought-controlled
blocks that had been holding all the controls of the Perseus in neutral. He informed her
officers by releasing a public-address tape-that they were now free to return to Terra.
Three days later, one day short of Sol, Sawtelle got Five-Jet Admiral Gordon’s office on
the sub-space radio. An officious underling tried to block him, of course.
“Shut up, Perkins, and listen,” Sawtelle said, brusquely. “Tell Gordon I’m bringing in
one hundred twenty thousand two hundred forty-five metric tons of pelleted uranexite.
And if he isn’t on this beam in sixty seconds he’ll never get a gram of it.”
The admiral, outraged almost to the point of apoplexy, came in, “Sawtelle, report
yourself for court-martial at . . .” “Keep still, Gordon,” the captain snapped. In sheer
astonishment old Five-Jets obeyed. “I am no longer Terran Navy; no longer subject to
your orders. As a matter of cold fact, I am no longer human. For reasons which I will
explain later to the full Advisory Board, some of the personnel of Project Theta Orionis
underwent transformation into a form of life able to live in an environment of
radioactivity so intense as to kill any human being in ten seconds. Under certain
conditions we will supply, free of charge, F.O.B. Terra or Luna, all the uranexite the
Solar System can use. The conditions are these,” and he gave them. “Do you accept