topics were gone over. Certain matters were, however, so self-evident that they were
not even mentioned.
Thus, it was a self-evident fact that no Terran could ever visit Ardvor; for the
instrument-readings agreed with the report’s statements as to the violence of the
Ardvorian environment, and no Terran could possibly walk around in two tons of lead.
Conversely, it was self-apparent to the Terrans that no Ardan could ever visit Earth
without being recognized instantly for what he was. Wearing such armor made its
necessity starkly plain. No one from the Perseus could say that any Ardan, after having
lived on the furiously radiant surface of Ardvor, would not be as furiously radioactive as
the laboratory’s calibrated instruments had shown Hilton and Sawtelle actually to be.
Wherefore the conference went on, quietly and cooperatively, to its planned end.
One minute after the Terran battleship Perseus emerged into normal space, the Orion
went into sub-space for her long trip back to Ardvor.
The last two days of that seven-day trip were the longest seeming that either Hilton or
Sawtelle had ever known. The sub-space radio was on continuously and Kedy-One
reported to Sawtelle every five minutes. Even though Hilton knew that the Oman
commander-in-chief was exactly as good at perceiving as he himself was, he found
himself scanning the thoroughly screened Strett world forty or fifty times an hour.
However, in spite of worry and apprehension, time wore eventlessly on. The Orion
emerged, went to Ardvor and landed on Ardane Field.
Hilton, after greeting properly and reporting to his wife, went to his office. There he
found that Sandra had everything well in hand except for a few tapes that only he could
handle. Sawtelle and his officers went to the new Command Central, where everything
was rolling smoothly and very much faster than Sawtelle had dared hope.
The Terran immigrants had to live in the Orion, of course, until conversion into Ardans.
Almost equally of course-since the Bryant infant was the only young baby in the
lot-Doris and her Sammy Small were, by popular acclaim, in the first batch to be
converted. For little Sammy had taken the entire feminine contingent by storm. No
Oman female had a chance to act as nurse as long as any of the girls were around.
Which was practically all the time. Especially the platinum-blonde twins; for several
months, now, Bernadine Braden and Hermione Felger.
“And you said they were so hard-boiled,” Doris said accusingly to Sam, nodding at the
twins. On hands and knees on the floor, head to head with Sammy Small between
them, they were growling deep-throated at each other and nuzzling at the baby, who
was having the time of his young life. “You couldn’t have been any wronger, my sweet,
if you’d had the whole Octagon helping you go astray. They’re just as nice as they can
be, both of them.”
Sam shrugged and grinned. His wife strode purposefully across the room to the playful
pair and lifted their pretended prey out from between them.
“Quit it, you two,” she directed, swinging the baby up and depositing him a-straddle her
left hip. “You’re just simply spoiling him rotten.”
“You think so, Dolly? Uh-uh, far be it from such.” Bernadine came lithely to her feet.
She glanced at her own taut, trim abdomen; upon which a micrometrically precise topo-
graphical mapping job might have revealed an otherwise imperceptible bulge. “Just you
wait until Junior arrives and I’ll show you how to really spoil a baby. Besides, what’s the
hurry?”
“He needs his supper. Vitamins and minerals and hard radiations and things, and then
he’s going to bed. I don’t approve of this no-sleep business. So run along, both of you,
until tomorrow.”
Chapter 12
As has been said, the Stretts were working, with all the intensity of their monstrous but
tremendously capable minds, upon their Great Plan, which was, basically, to conquer
and either enslave or destroy every other intelligent race throughout all the length,
breadth and thickness of total space. To that end each individual Strett had to become
invulnerable and immortal.
Wherefore, in the inconceivably remote past, there had been put into effect a program
of selective breeding and of carefully calculated treatments. It was mathematically
certain that this program would result in a race of beings of pure force-beings having no
material constituents remaining whatever.
Under those hellish treatments billions upon billions of Stretts had died. But the few
remaining thousands had almost reached their sublime goal. In a few more hundreds of
thousands of years perfection would be reached. The few surviving hundreds of perfect
beings could and would multiply to any desired number in. practically no time at all.
Hilton and his seven fellow-workers had perceived all this in their one and only study of
the planet Strett, and every other Ardan had been completely informed.
A dozen or so Strett Lords of Thought, male and female, were floating about in the
atmosphere-which was not air-of their Assembly Hall. Their heads were globes of ball
lightning. Inside them could be seen quite plainly the intricate convolutions of immense,
less-than-half-material brains, shot through and through with rods and pencils and
shapes of pure, scintillating force.
And the bodies! Or, rather, each horrendous brain had a few partially material
appendages and appurtenances recognizable as bodily organs. There were no mouths,
no ears, no eyes, no noses or nostrils, no lungs, no legs or arms. There were, however,
hearts. Some partially material ichor flowed through those living-fire-outlined tubes.
There were starkly functional organs of reproduction with which, by no stretch of the
imagination, could any thought of tenderness or of love be connected.
It was a good thing for the race, Hilton had thought at first perception of the things, that
the Stretts had bred out of themselves every iota of the finer, higher attributes of life. If
they had not done so, the impotence of sheer disgust would have supervened so long
since that the race would have been extinct for ages.
“Thirty-eight periods ago the Great Brain was charged with the sum total of Strettsian
knowledge,” First Lord Thinker Zoyar radiated to the assembled Stretts. “For those
thirty-eight periods it has been scanning, peyondiring, amassing data and formulating
hypotheses, theories and conclusions. It has just informed me that it is now ready to
make a preliminary report. Great Brain, how much of the total universe have you
studied?”
“This Galaxy only,” the Brain radiated, in a texture of thought as hard and as harsh as
Zoyar’s own.
“Why not more?”
“Insufficient power. My first conclusion is that whoever set up the specifications for me
is a fool.”
To say that the First Lord went out of control at this statement is to put it very mildly
indeed. He fulminated, ending with: ” . . . destroyed instantly!”
“Destroy me if you like,” came the utterly calm, utterly cold reply. “I am in no sense
alive. I have no consciousness of self nor any desire for continued existence. To do so,
however, would . . .”
A flurry of activity interrupted the thought. Zoyar was in fact assembling the forces to
destroy the brain. But, before he could act, Second Lord Thinker Ynos and another
female blew him into a mixture of loose molecules and flaring energies.
“Destruction of any and all irrational minds is mandatory,” Ynos, now First Lord
Thinker, explained to the linked minds. “Zoyar had been becoming less and less
rational by the period. A good workman does not causelessly destroy his tools. Go
ahead, Great Brain, with your findings.”
“. . . not be logical.” The brain resumed the thought exactly where it had been broken
off. “Zoyar erred in demanding unlimited performance, since infinite knowledge and infi-
nite ability require not only infinite capacity and infinite power, but also infinite time. Nor
is it either necessary or desirable that I should have such qualities. There is no
reasonable basis for the assumption that you Stretts will conquer even any significant
number of the millions of intelligent races now inhabiting this one Galaxy.”
“Why not?” Ynos demanded, her thought almost, but not quite, as steady and cold as it
had been.
“The answer to that question is implicit in the second indefensible error made in my
construction. The prime datum impressed into my banks, that the Stretts are in fact the
strongest, ablest, most intelligent race in the universe, proved to be false. I had to
eliminate it before I could do any really constructive thinking.”
A roar of condemnatory thought brought all circumambient ether to a boil. “Bah-destroy
it!” “Detestable!” “Intolerable!” “If that is the best it can do, annihilate it!” “Far better
brains have been destroyed for much less!” “Treason!” And so on.
First Lord Thinker Ynos, however, remained relatively calm. “While we have always
held it to be a fact that we are the highest race in existence, no rigorous proof has been
possible. Can you now disprove that assumption?”
“I have disproved it. I have not had time to study all of the civilizations of this Galaxy,