dangerous and quite immediate threat.
The mergons must be wider-spread even than originally planned and they must be on
the lookout for this Overlord Seaton. In fact, he might be worth interviewing personally.
It might be well worth while, some of these years, to take some time off and go to that
distant galaxy, purposely to make that Jelm Seaton’s acquaintance . . .
Shrugging his shoulders and shaking both wings, Klazmon cut off his projection and
called another meeting of his Board of Advisors.
He briefed them on what had happened; then went on:
“We must protect all our planets in the same way and to the same extent that this
planet Llurdiax is protected now: a course of action now necessary because of these
many Jelman and Jelmoid races that have been developing for untold millenia in their
unsane and illogical ways, with no semblance of or attempt at either guidance or
control.
“Second: any force of any such race that attacks us will be destroyed before it or they
can do us any harm.
“Third: the manufacture and distribution of mergons will continue indefinitely at the
present rate.
“Fourth: No chance or casual vessel or fleet traversing any part of the vast volume of
space to be covered by our mergons is to be destroyed, or even hailed, until I myself
decide what action, if any,. is to be taken.”
So saying, the Llanzlan Klazmon dismissed his advisors.
His great wings fanned idly as he contemplated what he had done. He was well pleased
with it. He had, he reflected, scratching his head contentedly with the tip of his tail,
provided for every possible contingency. Whatever this Jelm, or Jelmlike creature,
named Seaton might be or do, he would pose no real threat to the Ilanzlanate.
Of that Klazmon was one hundred per cent sure . . .
And wrong!
6 OF DISEMBODIED INTELLIGENCES
WE have now seen how the ripple of thought that began with the conference between
Seaton and his advisors from the Green System had spread throughout all of recorded
space, and how it had affected the lives and destinies of countless millions of persons
who had never heard of him.
Yet a few threads remain to be drawn into our net. And one of these threads represents
the strangest entities Seaton had encountered, ever . . . as well as the most deadly.
To understand what these entities are like, it is necessary to look back to their
beginnings.
These are most remote, both in space and in time. In a solar system so distant from
that of Sol as to be forever unknowable to anyone of Earth, and at a time an
inconceivably vast number of millennia in the past, there once existed a lusty and fertile
Tellus-type planet named Marghol. Over the usual millions of years mankind evolved on
Marghol and thrived as usual. And finally, also as usual and according to the scheduled
fate of all created material things, the planet Marghol grew old.
Whether or not a Tellus-type planet ordinarily becomes unfit to support human life
before its sun goes nova is not surely known. Nor does it matter very much; for, long
before either event occurs, the human race involved has developed a faster-than-light
drive and has at its disposal dozens or hundreds of Earth-like planets upon which even
subhuman life has not yet developed. The planet Marghol, however, while following the
usual pattern in general, developed a specific thing that was, as far as is known, unique
throughout all the reaches of total space and throughout all time up to the present.
On Marghol, during many, many millions of years of its prime, there had continued to
exist a small, tightly-inbred, self-perpetuating cult of thinkers-of men and women who
devoted their every effort and their total power to thought.
They themselves did not know what freak of mind or quirk of physical environment
made the ultimate outcome possible; but after those many millions of years, during
which the perpetually inbreeding group grew stronger and stronger mentally and weaker
and weaker physically, the seven survivors of the group succeeded finally in liberating
their minds-minds perfectly intact and perfectly functioning-from the gross and
perishable flesh of their physical bodies.
Then, able to travel at the unmeasurable speed of thought and with all future time in
which to work, they set out to learn everything there was to know. They would learn,
they declared, not only all about space and time and zero and infinity and animals and
people and life and death, but also everything else comprising or having anything to do
with the totality of existence that is the Cosmic All.
This quest for knowledge has been going on, through universe after universe and
through dimension after dimension, for a stretch of time that, given as a number in
Tellurian years, would be a number utterly incomprehensible to the human mind. For-
what perceptible or tangible difference is there, to the human mind, between a
googolplex of seconds and the same number of centuries? And, since these free minds
ordinarily kept track of time only by the life-cycles of suns, the period of time during
which they had already traveled and studied could have been either shorter or longer
than either of the two exact figures mentioned.
Seven free minds had left the planet Marghol. They called themselves, in lieu of names,
“One” to “Seven” in order of their liberation.
For a brief time-a mere cosmic eye-wink; a few hundreds of millions of years-there had
been eight, since One had consented to dematerialize one applicant for immortality.
The applicant Eight, however, sick and tired of eternal life, had committed suicide by
smashing his sixth-order being out of existence against Richard Seaton’s sixth-order
screens.
Now those seven free minds, accompanied by the free mind of Immortality Candidate
Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne, were flying through ultra-deep space in a time-stasis
capsule. This capsule, as has been said, was designed and powered to travel almost to
infinity in both space and time. But, as the Norlaminians pointed out to Seaton, his
basic assumptions were invalid.
Nothing happened, however, for week after week. Then, so immensely far out in
intergalactic space that even the vast bulk of a galaxy lying there would have been
invisible even to Palomar’s “Long Eye,” the hurtling, capsule struck a cloud of hydrogen
gas.
That gas was, by Earthly standards, a hard vacuum; but the capsule’s velocity by that
time was so immensely great that that cloud might just as well have been a mountain of
solid rock. The capsule’s directors tried, with all their prodigious might and speed to
avoid the obstruction, but even with fullest power they did not have time enough.
Eight mufti-ton power-bars of activated uranium flared practically instantaneously into
ragingly incandescent gas; into molecular, atomic, and subatomic vapor and debris. A –
fireball brighter than a sun glared briefly; then nothing whatever was visible where that
massive structure had been.
And out of that sheer emptiness came a cold, clear thought: the thought of Doctor Marc
C. DuQuesne.
“One, are you familiar enough with this region of space to estimate at all closely how
long we were in that stasis of time and where we now are with reference to the First
Galaxy?”
Freemind One did not exactly answer the question. “What matters it?” he asked. If the
thought of an immortal and already incredibly old and incredibly knowledgeful mind can
be said to show surprise, that thought did. “It should be clear, even to you of
infinitesimally short life, that any length of time expressible in any finite number of
definite time periods is actually but a moment. Also, the Cosmic All is vast indeed;
larger by many orders of magnitude than any that the boldest of your thinkers has as
yet dared to imagine.
“Whether or not space is infinite I do not know. Whether or not my life span will be
infinite I do not know. I do not as yet completely understand infinity. I do know, however,
that both infinite time and infinite space are requisite for the acquisition of infinite
knowledge, which is my goal; wherefore I am well content. You have no valid reason
whatever for wishing to return to your Earth. Instead, you should be as eager as I am to
explore and to study the as yet unknown.”
“I have unfinished business there.” DuQuesne’s thought was icy cold. “I’m going back
there whether you do or not.”
“To kill beings who have at best but an instant to live? To rule an ultra-microscopic
speck of cosmic dust? A speck whose fleeting existence is of but infinitesimal
importance to the Great Scheme of Things? Are you still infantile enough, despite your
recent transformation, to regard as valid such indefensible reasons as those?”
“They’re valid enough to me. And you’d have to go back, too, I should think. Or isn’t it
still true that science demands the dematerialization of the whole Skylark party?”