over to help Seaton and Crane . . . but not enough. The blow had been too powerful
and too sudden.
Both Seaton and Crane slumped bonelessly to the floor of the control room, leaving
their controllers empty and idle.
In that moment the one great pole of strength left to humankind was-Dr. Marc C.
DuQuesne.
To Dorothy Seaton, that moment was pure horror. It was every terrible fear she had
ever thought of, all come to pass at once: Seaton disabled, perhaps dying; DuQuesne
in control of all the mighty resources of the Skylark. Dorothy shrieked and leaped from
her chair
And was stopped in her tracks by DuQuesne’s shout, crackling out of a speaker to
emphasize his hard-driven thoughts:
“Dorothy! Margaret! Quit it! Pick up your loads and carry ’em. Pole to me!”
And Dorothy hesitated, irresolute, torn between her love for Seaton and her urgent duty
to help against the Chlorans, while the whole vast net of human mental energies
wavered and hung in the balance.
“Now!” snarled DuQuesne, the thought like a lash. “Move! To hell with the dead-”
Dorothy screamed again -“You’re still alive! But you won’t be long if you goof off!”
Rapidly he scanned the quavering net. “You Barlo women and your poles! Drop what
you’re doing and locate this interference for me-fast! All of you-find it for me so I can
slug it! Hunkie? Yeah-good girl! Stay with it just as you are!”
“But DuQuesne,” Dorothy protested, “I’ve got to . . :’ “Oh, hell!” DuQuesne wrenched
out, every nuance of his tone showing the tremendous strain under which he was
laboring. “Savant Sennlloy! You can’t be spared from there, but have you got a couple
of girls who can tune themselves to me?”
“Yes, Doctor DuQuesne.” Neither she or any other Jelm aboard understood why Seeker
Sevance of Xylmny had been masquerading as Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne of Tellus
when he received his Call. They all knew, however, that it had to do with his Seeking;
hence none of them did anything to interfere with it. “We have many very good
mentalists in our party.”
“Fine! Have two of ’em relieve these two weak sisters here-and fast!”
“Here we are, sir,” two thoughts came in, in unison. And two powerful female Jelman
minds-the minds of two girls with whom he was already very well acquainted-fitted
themselves snugglingly to his and picked up the loads that the two Earthwomen had
been unable to carry.
It was not that either of those Earthwomen was weak. Both were tremendously strong;
mentally and psychically. Both disliked DuQuesne so intensely, however, that it was
psychologically impossible for either of them to work with him. Of course, he regarded
that fact itself as an extreme weakness. Sentiment was as bad as sentimentality, he
held, and both bored him to tears.
“Ah, that’s better.” DuQuesne’s thought was a sigh. of relief. “That makes it at least
possible.”
And it did. DuQuesne and his two new assistants did not do much to keep the wave of
destruction sweeping through Galaxy DW-427-LU, but he and they, with a lot of very
high-powered Fenachrone help, did hold the Chloran attackers at bay until the three
witches and the three warlocks found the planet upon which the Chloran Galactic
Institute of Advanced Study was located. Then, with locked teeth and hard-set muscles
and sweating face, he made the superhuman effort required to drive that three-man
beam single-handed and keep those three rabid Chloran attackers at bay besides.
By a miracle of coordination and timing he did it-and practically collapsed when all
attack and all necessity of resistance ceased. The Chloran Institute simply ceased to
be. Its members died. DuQuesne recovered so quickly that no one else except the two
Jelman girls knew that he had been affected at all.
“Dorothy! Margaret! Break it up!” he snapped. Doctors had been working on Seaton and
Crane for minutes. Both were beginning to recover consciousness. Neither, apparently,
had been permanently damaged; and both their wives were making enthusiastically
joyful noises. “Come on, come on, take them home to do your slobbering over them.
The rest of us have work to do-or do you expect us to hold this demolition job up until
they organize another threesome to go to the mat with us?”
Stretchermen carried Seaton and Crane away; Dorothy and Margaret went along. The
Chloran blow at the lives of the two Skylarkers had been deadly and fast, but it had not
succeeded-quite.
And the “demolition job” went on.
In the great light-years-thick “tank” that was the psiontists’ working model of the three
galaxies they were manipulating, lights were winking out and reappearing as stars and
planets were hurled through four-dimensional curves to new orbits and positions.
Already Galaxy A-the “raw-material” source that was being used for a supply of
suns-was visibly dimmer, visibly poorer in stars. Tens of millions of them had already
been stolen away and tossed through four-space into Chloran suns in Galaxy
DW-427-LU. And when they reappeared, in a head-on collision course with those
Chloran suns, and struck, and destroyed themselves in the titanic outflow of energies
that produced super-nova blasts, the model of Galaxy DW-427-LU showed another tiny
but blindingly bright flare-and another-and another
There were more than fifty thousand million suns to move, in all. As the first targets had
been the strongest and most dangerous Chloran systems, resistance soon ceased to
matter; the task became monotonous, exhausting and minddeadening.
To the Chlorans, of course, it was something else again. They died in uncounted
trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous
flesh was charred, baked and desiccated in the split-second of the passing of the wave
front from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves began
to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Some died in terrible, frantic
efforts to escape …
But they all died.
And for each sun that DuQuesne’s remorseless net located and flung into the Chloran
galaxy, an oxygen-bearing, human-populated planet was snatched out of the teeth of
the resulting explosion and carried through four-space into the safety of Galaxy B, there
to slip quietly into orbit around a pre-selected, hospital sun. No human world was
destroyed in all of Galaxy DW-427-LU.
It went on and on … And then it was over.
Marc DuQuesne rose, stretched and yawned. “That’s all. Everybody dismissed,” he
said, and at once the vast psiontic
net ceased to be. He was alone for the first time in many hours.
His face was lined, his eyes deeper and darker than ever. Apart from that there was
no sign of the great extermination he had just conducted. He was simply Marc
DuQuesne. The man who slew a galaxy looked no different after the deed than he had
before.
He allowed his sense of perception to roam for a moment about the “working model”. In
Galaxy A, where billions of suns had gone through the stellar cycle of evolution for
billions of years, there was scarcely a corporal’s guard of primaries left. It was a
strange, almost a frightening sight. For with the loss of the suns the composition of the
galaxy had changed to something never before seen in all the plenum of universes.
Nearly every sun had had planets; nearly every planet remained behind when its sun
was stolen. Now they roamed at random-uncontrolled, barren, uninhabited-lacking not
only the light and heat of their primaries, but freed from their gravitational reins as well.
Galaxy B, on the other hand, looked quite normal-in “working model”. The planets it had
acquired, both from the “working model”. The planets it had acquired, both from the
exploded Chloran suns and from the looted solar systems of Galaxy A, were not even
visible. Galactically speaking, it was essentially unchanged; the additional mass of a
few billion planets did not matter, and each of the new planets was already in orbit
around a friendly sun. There would be readjustments, of course. It would be necessary
to keep a watch on the developments of each affected solar system, over a period of
years. But that was no problem of Marc DuQuesne’s.
But the Chloran galaxy! What was it?
In the “working model” it was rapidly becoming a single, light-years-thick concentration
of living flame. In the reality it was even huger, even more deadly. A name would be
invented for it some day-quasi-stellar? Or something greater still?
But that, too, was no longer a concern for Marc DuQuesne. He dropped from his mind,
without a qualm, the memory of the trillions of lives he had taken, the billions of worlds
he had dislocated. He ignored the question of Richard Ballinger Seaton, now stirring
back to conscious; ness, to worry-and ultimately, to reassurance-somewhere ‘, on the
Valeron. He had more pressing business to take care of. Personal business. And to
DuQuesne that was the most pressing of all.
Shrugging his shoulders, he sent Stephanie de Marigny a tight-beamed thought: