blast huge masses of solid inoson out of the Valeron’s thick skin and hurl them at
frightful speed out into space.
And the Valeron was not fighting back. She couldn’t:
This fact, more than anything else, rocked DuQuesne to the core and gave him the
measure of the power at the disposal of the “inimical” entities of that galaxy. For he,
knowing the Valeron’s strength, now knew starkly that she was being attacked by forces
of a magnitude never even approximated by the wildest imaginings of man.
Scowling in concentration, he kept on watching the disaster. Watched while those
utterly unbelievable forces peeled the Valeron down like an onion, layer after kilometer-
thick layer. Watched until that for which he had almost ceased to hope finally took
place. The Valeron, down now to the merest fraction of her original size burned and
blasted down to the veriest core-struck back. And that counterstroke was no love-tap.
The ether and all the subethers seethed and roiled under the vehemence of that
devastating bolt of energy.
The Skylark of Valeron vanished from DuQuesne’s plate; that plate went black; and
DuQuesne stood up and stretched the kinks out of his muscles. Seaton could of course
flit away on the sixth; but he, DuQuesne, couldn’t. Not without being detected and
getting burned to a crisp. Against the forces that he had just seen in action against the
Skylark of Valeron, DuQuesne’s own Capital D didn’t stand the proverbial chance of the
nitrocellulose dog chasing the asbestos cat in hell.
If the Skylark of Valeron had been hurt, half-demolished and reduced to an irreducible
core of fighting muscle before it could mount one successful counter-blow against this
new and unexpected enemy, then the Capital D would be reduced to its primitive gases.
DuQuesne rapidly, soberly and accurately came to the conclusion that he simply did not
own ship enough to play in this league. Not yet . . .
Wherefore he pussyfooted it away from there at an acceleration of only a few lights;
and he put many parsecs of distance between himself and the scene of recent
hostilities before he cut in his space-annihilating sixth-order drive and began really to
travel. He did not know whether Seaton and his party were surviving; he did not care.
He did not know the identity of the race which had hurt them so badly, so fast.
What DuQuesne knew was that, as a bare minimum, he needed something as big as
the Valeron, plus the fourth dimensional tricks he had learned from the Jelmi, plus a
highly developed element of caution based on the scene he had just witnessed. And he
knew what to do about it, and where to go to do it; wherefore his course was laid for the
First Galaxy and Earth.
Hundreds of thousands of parsecs away from the scene of disaster, Seaton cut his
drive and began gingerly to relax the terrific power of his defensive screens.
No young turtle, tentatively poking his head out of his shell to see if the marauding gulls
had left, was more careful than Seaton. He had been caught off base twice. He did not
propose to let it happen again.
Another man might have raged and sworn at DuQuesne for his treachery; or panicked
at the fear inspired by the fourth-dimensional transmitter DuQuesne had come up with,
or the massive blow that had fallen from nowhere. Seaton did not. The possibility-no,
the virtual certainty of treachery from DuQuesne he had accepted and discounted in the
first second of receiving DuQuesne’s distress call. He had accepted the risks, and
grimly calculated that in any encounter, however treacherous, DuQuesne would fail;
and he had been right. The sudden attack from out of nowhere, however, was
something else again. What made it worse was not that Seaton had no idea of its
source or reason. The thing that caused his eyes to narrow, his face to wear a hard,
thoughtful scowl was that he in fact had a very good idea indeed-and he didn’t like it.
But for the moment they were free. Seaton checked and double-checked every gauge
and warning device and nodded at last.
“Good,” he said then, “I was more than half expecting a kick in the pants, even way out
here. The next item on our agenda is a council of war; so cluster ’round, everybody, and
get comfortable.” He turned control over to the Brain, sat down beside Dorothy, stoked
his pipe, and went on:
“Point one; DuQuesne. He got stuff somewhere-virtually certainly from the Jelmi-at
least the fourth-dimensional transmitter and we don’t know what else, that he didn’t put
out anything about. Naturally. And he sucked me in like Mary’s little lamb. Also
naturally. At hindsight I’m a blinding flash and a deafening report. I’ve got a few
glimmerings, but you’re the brain, Mart; so give out with analysis and synthesis.”
Crane did so; covering the essential points and concluding: “Since the plug-chart was
accurate, the course was accurate. Therefore, besides holding back vital information,
DuQuesne lied about one or both of two things: the point at which the signal was
received and the direction from which it came.”
“Well, you can find out about that easily enough,” Dorothy said. “You know, that dingus
you catch light-waves with, so as to see exactly what went on years and years ago. Or
wouldn’t it work, this far away?”
Seaton nodded. “Worth a try. Dunark?”
“I say go after DuQuesne!” the Osnomian said viciously. “Catch him and blow him and
his Captial D to hellangone up!”
Seaton shook his head. “I can’t buy that-at the moment. Now that he’s flopped again at
murder, I don’t think he’s of first importance any more. You see, I haven’t mentioned
Point Two yet, which is a datum I didn’t put into the pot because I wanted to thrash
Point One out first. It’s about who the enemy really are. When I finally got organized to
slug them a good one back, I followed the shot. They knew they’d been nudged, believe
me. So much so that in the confusion I got quite a lot of information. They’re Chlorans.
Or, if not exactly like the Chlorans of Chlora, that we had all the trouble with, as nearly
identical as makes no difference.”
“Chlorans!” Dorothy and Margaret shrieked as one, and five minds dwelt briefly upon
that hideous and ultimately terrible race of amoeboid monstrosities who, living in an
atmosphere of gaseous chlorine, made it a point to enslave or to destroy all the
humanity of all the planets they could reach.
All five remembered, very vividly, the starkly unalloyed ferocity with which one race of
Chlorans had attacked the planet Valeron; near which the Skylark of Valeron had been
built and after which she had been named. They remembered the horrifyingly narrow
margin by which those Chlorans had been defeated. They also remembered that the
Chlorans had not even then been slaughtered. The Skylarkers had merely enclosed the
planet Chlora in a stasis of time and sent it back-on a trip that would last, for everyone
and everything outside that stasis, some four hundred years-to its own native solar
system, from which it had been torn by a near-collision of suns in the longgone past.
The Skylarkers should have blown Chlora into impalpable and invisible debris, and the
men of the party had wanted to do just that, but Dorothy and Margaret and the
essentially gentle Valeronians had been dead set against genocide.
Dorothy broke the short silence. “But how could they be, Dick?” she asked. “‘Way out
here? But of course, if we human beings could do it–?’ She paused.
“But of course,” Seaton agreed sourly. “Why not? Why shouldn’t they be as widespread
as humanity is? Or even more so, if they have killed enough of us off? And why
shouldn’t they be smarter than those others were? Look at how much we’ve learned in
just months, not millennia, of time.”
Another and longer silence fell; which was broken by Seaton. “Well, two things are
certain. They’re rabidly antisocial and they’ve got-at the moment-a lot more stuff than
we have. They’ve got it to sell, like farmers have hay. It’s also a dead-sure cinch that we
can’t do a thing-not anything-without a lot more data than we have now. It’ll take all the
science of Norlamin and maybe a nickel’s worth besides to design and build what we’ll
have to have. And they can’t go it blind. Nobody can. And we all know enough about
Chlorans to know that we won’t get one iota or one of Peg’s smidgeons of information
out of them by remote control. At the first touch of any kind of a highorder feeler they’ll
bat our ears down . . . to a fare-thee-well. However, other means are available.”
And he glanced at a monitor where for some minutes a display had shown a planet of
the galaxy from which their recent attacker had come.