mighty fortresses precisely as efficacious against one certain type of attack as that
many cubic miles of sheerest vacuum.
4, LLURDI AND FENACHRONE
THE type of attack which was about to challenge the Llurdi was from a source no
civilized human would have believed still existed.
If Richard Seaton, laboring at Earth’s own defenses uncountable parsecs away, had
been told of it, he would flatly have declared the story a lie. He ought to know, he would
have said. That particular danger to the harmony of the worlds had long since been
destroyed . . . and he was the man who had destroyed it!
When the noisome planet of the Fenachrone was destroyed it was taken for granted
that Ravindau and his faction of the Party of Postponement of Universal Conquest, who
had fled from the planet just before its destruction, were the last surviving members of
their monstrous race. When they in turn were destroyed it was assumed that no
Fenachrone remained alive.
That assumption was wrong. There was another faction of the Party of Postponement
much larger than Ravindau’s, much more secretive, and much better organized.
Its leader, one Sleemet, while an extremely able scientist, had taken lifelong pains that
neither his name nor his ability should become known to any except a select few. He
was as patriotic as was any other member of his race; he believed as implicitly as did
any other that the Fenachrone should and one day would rule not only this one
universe, but the entire Cosmic All. However, he believed, and as firmly, that The Day
should not be set until the probability of success of the project should begin to approach
unity as a limit.
According to Sleemet’s exceedingly rigorous analysis, the time at which success would
become virtually certain would not arrive for at least three hundred Fenachronian years.
From the day of Fenor’s accession to the throne Sleemet had been grimly certain that
this Emperor Fenor-head-strong, basically ignorant, and inordinately prideful even for
an absolute monarch of the Fenachrone-would set The Day during his own reign;
centuries before its proper time.
Therefore, for over fifty years, Sleemet had been preparing for exactly the eventuality
that came about, and:
Therefore, after listening to only a few phrases of the ultimatum given to Emperor Fenor
by Sacner Carfon of Dasor, speaking for the Overlord Seaton and his Forces of
Universal Peace, Sleemet sent out his signal and:
Therefore, even before Ravindau’s forces began to board their single vessel Sleemet’s
fleet of seventeen superdreadnoughts was out in deep space, blasting at full-
emergency fifth-order cosmic-energy drive away from the planet so surely doomed.
Surely doomed? Yes. Knowing vastly more about the sixth order than did any other of
his race, he was the only one of his race who knew anything about the Overlord of the
Central System; of who and what that Overlord was and of what that Overlord had
done. He, Sleemet, did not want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton. Not then or ever.
Curse Fenor’s abysmal stupidity! Since a whole new Fenachrone planet would now
have to be developed, the Conquest could not be begun for more than three hundred
years!
While Sleemet knew much more about the sixth order than Ravindau did, he did not
have the sixth-order drive and it took him and his scientists and engineers several
months to develop and to perfect it. Thus their fleet was still inside the First Galaxy
when they finally changed drives and began really to travel-on a course that, since it
was laid out to reach the most distant galaxies of the First Universe, would of necessity
lie within two and a quarter hundreds of thousands of light-years of the galaxy in which
the Realm of the Llurdi lay.
As has been intimated, the Llurdi were literal folk. When any llanzlan issued a directive
he meant it literally, and it was always as literally carried out.
Thus, when Llanzlan Klazmon ordered the construction of an installation of such a
nature that “no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed” he meant
precisely that-and that was precisely what was built. Nor, since the Llurdi had full
command of the fourth and fifth orders, and some sixth-order apparatus as well, was
the task overlong in the doing.
The entire one-hundred-six-mile circumference of Llurdias and a wide annulus outside
the city proper were filled with tremendous fortresses; each of which was armed and
powered against any contingency to which Computer Prime -almost half a cubic mile of
miniaturization packed with the accumulated knowledges and happenings of some
seventy thousand years-could assign a probability greater than point zero zero zero
one.
Each of those fortresses covered five acres of ground; was low and flat. Each was built
of super-hard, super-tough, super-refractory synthetic. Each had twenty-seven
highrising, lightning-rodlike spikes of the same material. Fortress-shell and spikes
through closely spaced cast-in tubes; and the entire periphery of each fortress, as well
as dozens of interior relief-points, went deep into constantly water-soaked, heavily
salted ground. Each fortress sprouted scores of antennae-parabolic, box, flat, and
straight-and scores of heavily insulated projectors of shapes to be defined only by a
professional mathematician of solid geometry.
And how the Llurdan detectors could now cover space! The Jelm Mergon, long before
his abortive attempt to break jail, had developed a miniaturized monitor station that
could detect, amplify, and retransmit on an aimed tight beam any fifth- or sixth-order
signal from and to a distance of many kiloparsecs.
Hundreds of these “mergons” were already out in deep space. Now mergons were
being manufactured in lots of a thousand, and in their thousands they were being
hurled outward from Llurdiax, to cover-by relays en cascadenot only the Llurdan galaxy
and a great deal of intergalactic space, but also a good big chunk of inter-universal
space as well.
The Fenachrone fleet bored on through inter-galactic space at its distance-devouring
sixth-order pace. Its fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order detector webs fanned out far-“far” in
the astronomical sense of the word-ahead of it. They were set to detect, not only the
most tenuous cloud of gas, but also any manifestation whatever upon any of the known
bands of any of those orders. Similar detectors reached out to an equal distance above
and below and to the left of and to the right of the line of flight; so that the entire forward
hemisphere was on continuous web of ultra-tenuous but ultra-sensitive detection.
And, as that fleet approached a galaxy lying well to “starboard”-the term was still in use
aboard ship except for matters of record, since the direction of action of artificial gravity,
whatever its actual direction, was always “down”-two sets of detectors tripped at once.
The squat and monstrous officer on watch reported this happening instantly, of course,
to Sleemet himself; and of course Sleemet himself went instantly into action. He
energized his flagship’s immense fifth-order projector.
Those detections could have only one meaning. There was at least one solar system in
that galaxy peopled by entities advanced enough to work with forces of at least the fifth
order. They should be destroyed-that is, he corrected himself warily, unless they were
allied with or belonged to that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Overlord of the Central
System of the First Galaxy . . . But no, at this immense distance the probability of that
was vanishingly small.
They might, however, have weapons of the sixth. The fact that there were no such
devices in operation at the moment did not preclude that possibility.
Very unlike the late unlamented Fenor he, First Scientist Sleemet, was not stupidly and
arrogantly sure that the Fenachrone were in fact the ablest, most intelligent, and most
powerful race of beings in existence. He would investigate, of course. But he would do it
cautiously.
The working projections of the Fenachrone were tight patterns of force mounted on tight
beams. Thus, until they began to perform exterior work, they were virtually indetectable
except by direct interception and hard-driven specific taps. Sleemet knew this to be a
fact; whether the projection was on, above, or below the target planet’s surface and
even though that planet was so far away that it would take light hundreds of centuries to
make the oneway trip.
The emanations of his vessels’ sixth-order cosmic-energy drive, however, were very
distinctly something else. They could not be damped out or masked and they could be
detected very easily by whoever or whatever it was that was out there . . . Yes, an
exploration would not change matters at all…
As a matter of fact, the Fenachrone Fleet’s emanations had been detected a full two
seconds since.
A far-outpost mergon had picked it up and passed it along to a second, which in turn
had relayed it inward to its Number Three, which finally had delivered it to Computer
Prime on incredibly distant Llurdiax.
There, in Hall Prime of Computation, a section supervisor had flicked the switch that
had transferred the unusual bit of information to his immediate superior, Head