Reply on tight beam of the sixth. DuQuesne calling Seaton . . .”
8 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
WHEN Seaton and Crane had begun to supply the Earth with ridiculously cheap power,
they had expected an economic boom and a significant improvement in the standard of
living. Neither of them had any idea, however, of the effect upon the world’s economy
that their space-flights would have; but many tycoons of industry did.
They were shrewd operators, those tycoons. As one man they licked their chops at the
idea of interstellar passages made in days. They gloated over thoughts of the multifold
increase in productive capacity that would have to be made so soon; as soon as
commerce was opened up with dozens and then with hundreds of Tellus-type worlds,
inhabited by human beings as human as those of Earth. And when they envisioned
hundreds and hundreds of uninhabited Tellustype worlds, each begging to be grabbed
and exploited by whoever got to it first with enough stuff to hold it and to develop it . . .
they positively drooled.
These men did not think of money as money, but as their most effective and most
important tool: a tool to be used as knowledgeably as the old-time lumberjack used his
axe.
Thus, Earth was going through convulsions of change more revolutionary by far than
any it had experienced throughout all previous history. All those pressures building up
at once had blown the lid completely off. Seaton and Crane and their associates had
been working fifteen hours a day for months training people in previously unimagined
skills; trying to keep the literally exploding economy from degenerating into complete
chaos.
They could not have done it alone, of course. In fact, it was all that a thousand
Norlaminian “Observers” could do to keep the situation even approximately in hand.
And even the Congress-mirabile dictu!-welcomed those aliens with open arms; for it
was so hopelessly deadlocked in trying to work out any workable or enforceable laws
that it was accomplishing nothing at all.
All steel mills were working at one hundred ten per cent of capacity. So were almost all
other kinds of plants. Machine tools were in such demand that no estimated time of
delivery could be obtained. Arenak, dagal, and inoson, those wonder-materials of the
construction industry, would be in general supply some day; but that day would not be
allowed to come until the changeover could be made without disrupting the entire
economy. Inoson especially was confined to the spaceship builders; and, while every
pretense was being made that production was being increased as fast as possible, the
demand for spaceships was so insatiable that every hulk that could leave atmosphere
was out in deep space.
Multi-billion-dollar corporations were springing up all over Earth. Each sought out and
began to develop a Tellustype planet of its own, to bring up as a civilized planet or
merely to exploit as it saw fit. Each was clamoring for and using every possible artifice
of persuasion, lobbying, horse-trading, and out-and-out bribery and corruption to obtain-
spaceships, personnel, machinery light and heavy, office equipment, and supplies. All
the employables of Earth, and many theretofore considered unemployable, were at
work.
Earth was a celestial madhouse . . .
It is no wonder, then, that Seaton and Crane were haggard and worn when they had to
turn their jobs over to two upper-bracket Norlaminians and leave Earth.
Their situation thereafter was not much better.
The first steps were easy-anyway, the decisions involved were easy; the actual work
involved was roughly equivalent to the energy budget of several Sol-type suns. It is an
enormous project to set up a line of defense hundreds of thousands of miles long;
especially when the setters-up do not know exactly what to expect in the way of attack.
They knew, in fact, only one thing: that the Norlaminians had made a probabilistic
statement that Marc C. DuQuesne was likely to be present among them before long.
That was excuse, reason and compulsion enough to demand the largest and most
protracted effort they could make. The mere preliminaries involved laying out axes of
action that embraced many solar systems, locating and developing sources of materials
and energies that were enough to smother a hundred suns. As that work began to
shape up, Seaton and Crane came face to face with the secondary line of problems . . .
and at that point Seaton suddenly smote himself on the forehead and cried: “Dunark!”
Crane looked up. “Dunark? Why, yes, Dick. Quite right. Not only is he probably the
universe’s greatest strategist, but he knows the enemy almost as well as you and I do.”
“And besides,” Seaton added, “he doesn’t think like us. Not at all. And that’s what we
want; so I’ll call him now and we’ll compute a rendezvous.”
Wherefore, a few days later, Dunark’s Osnomian cruiser matched velocities with the
hurtling worldlet and began to negotiate its locks. Seaton shoved up the Valeron’s
airpressure, cut down its gravity, and reached for the master thermostat.
“Not too hot, Dick,” Dorothy said. “Light gravity is all right, but make them wear some
clothes any time they’re outside their special quarters. I simply won’t run around naked
in my own house. And I won’t have them doing it, either.”
Seaton laughed. “The usual eighty-three degrees and twenty-five per cent humidity.
They’ll wear clothes, all right. She’ll be tickled to death to wear that fur coat you gave
her-she doesn’t get a chance to, very often-and we can stand it easily enough,” and the
four Tellurians went out to the dock to greet their green-skinned friends of old: Crown
Prince Dunark and Crown Princess Sitar of Osnome, one of the planets of the
enormous central sun of the Central System.
Warlike, bloodthirsty, supremely able Dunark; and Sitar, his lovely, vivacious-and
equally warlike-wife. He was wearing ski-pants (Osnome’s temperature, at every point
on its surface and during every minute of every day of the year, is one hundred degrees
Fahrenheit), a heavy sweater, wool socks, and fur-lined moccasins. She wore a sweater
and slacks under her usual fantastic array of Osnomian jewelry; and over it, as Seaton
had predicted, the full-length mink coat. Each was wearing only one Osnomian machine
pistol instead of the arsenal that had been their customary garb such a short time
before.
The three men greeted each other warmly and executed a six-hand handshake; the
while the two white women and the green one went into an arms-wrapped group; each
talking two hundred words to the minute.
A couple of days later, the Norlaminian task-force arrived and a council of war was held
that lasted for one full working day. Then, the defense planned in length and in depth,
construction began. Seaton and Crane sat in the two master-control helmets of the
Brain. Rovol worked with the brain of the Norlaminian spaceship. Dozens of other
operators, men and women, worked at and with other, less powerful devices.
On the surface of a nearby planet, ten thousand square miles of land were leveled and
paved to form the Area of Work. Stacks and piles and rows and assortments of
hundreds of kinds of structural members appeared as though by magic. Gigantic beams
of force, made visible by a thin and dusty pseudo-mist, flashed here and there; seizing
this member and that and these and them and those and joining them together with
fantastic speed to form enormous towers and platforms and telescope-like things and
dirigible tubes and projectors.
Some of these projectors took containers of pure force out to white dwarf stars after
neutronium. Others took faidons-those indestructible jewels that are the sine qua non of
higher-order operation-out to the cores of stars to be worked into lenses of various
shapes and sizes. Out into the environment of scores of millions of degrees of
temperature and of scores of millions of tons per square inch of pressure that is the
only environment in which the faidon can be worked by any force known to the science
of man.
The base-line, which was to be built of enormous, absolutely rigid beams of force, could
not be of planetary, or even of orbital dimensions. It had to extend, a precisely
measured length, from the core of a star to that of another, having as nearly as possible
the same proper motion, over a hundred parsecs away. Thus it took over a week to
build and to calibrate that base-line; but, once that was done, the work went fast.
The most probable lines of approach were blocked by fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order
installations of tremendous range and of planetary power; less probable ones by
defenses of somewhat lesser might; supersensitive detector webs fanned out
everywhere. And this work, which would have required years a short time before, was
only a matter of a couple of weeks for the gigantic constructor-projectors now filling the
entire Area of Work.
When everything that anyone could think of doing had been done, Seaton lit his pipe,