make at this point?”
“I have?” The Dasorian was surprised at first, but caught on quickly. “Oh-perhaps I
have, at that. By using Seaton’s power and that of the Brain on the Fodan-Carfon band
of the sixth, it will undoubtedly be possible to broadcast a thought that would affect
selected mentalities wherever situate in any galaxy of this universe.”
“But listen!” protested Seaton. “We don’t want to advertise how dumb we are all over
space!”
“Of course not. The thought would be very carefully built and highly selective. It would
tell who we are, what we have done, and what we intend and hope to. do. It would state
our abilities and-by inference, and only to those we seek-our lacks; and would invite all
qualified persons and entities to get in touch with us.”
Seaton looked abstracted for a moment. He was thinking. The notion of sending out a
beacon of thought was probably a good one-had to be a good one-after all, the
Norlaminians and Sacner Carfon knew what they were doing. Yet he could see
complications. The Fodan-Carfon band of the sixth order was still very new and very
experimental. “Can you make it selective?” he demanded. “I don’t mind telling our
prospective friends we need help-I don’t want to holler it to our enemies.”
The Dasorian’s deep voice chuckled. “It can not be made selective,” he said. “The
message would of necessity be on such a carrier as to be receivable by any intelligent
brain. Yet it can be hedged about with such safeguards, limitations and compulsions
that no one could or would pay attention to it except those who possess at least some
ability, overt or latent, to handle the Fodan-Carfon band.”
Seaton whistled through his teeth. “Wow! And just how are you going to clamp on such
controls as those? I don’t see how anything but magic-sheer, unadulterated, pure black
magic!-could swing that load.”
“Precisely. Or, rather, imprecisely. It is unfortunate that your term `magic’ is so
inexcusably loose and carries so many and so deplorable connotations and
implications. Shall we design and build the thought we wish to send out?”
The thought was designed and was built; and was launched into space with the
inconceivable, the utterly immeasurable velocity of its order of being.
A red-haired stripper called Madlyn Mannis, strutting her stuff in Tampa in Peninsula
Florida, felt it and almost got it; but, not being very strongly psychic, shrugged it off and
went on about the business of removing the last sequin bedecked trifle of her costume.
And, as close to the dancer as plenteous baksheesh could arrange for, a husky, good-
looking young petrochemical engineer named Charles K. van der Gleiss felt a thrill like
nothing he had ever felt before-but ascribed it, naturally enough, to the fact that this
was the first time he had ever seen Madlyn Mannis dance. And in Washington, D.C.
one Doctor Stephanie de Marigny, a nuclear physicist, pricked up her ears, tightened
the muscles of her scalp, and tried for. two full minutes to think of something she ought
to think of but couldn’t.
Out past the Green System the message sped, and past the dust and the incandescent
gas that had once been the noisome planet of the Fenachrone. Past worlds where
amphibians roared and bellowed; past planets of methane ice where crystalline life
brooded sluggishly on its destiny.
In the same infinitesimal instant it reached and passed the Rim Worlds of our galaxy;
touching many minds but really affecting none. Farther and farther out, with no
decrease whatever in speed, it flew; past the inconceivably tiny, inconceivably fast-
moving point that housed the seven greatest, most fearsome minds that the
Macrocosmic All had ever spawned-minds that, knowing all about that thought already,
ignored it completely.
Immensely farther out, it flashed through the galaxy in which was the solar system of
Ray-See-Nee-where, for the first time, it made solid contact with a mind in a body
human to the limit of classification. Kay-Lee Barlo, confidential secretary of Department
Head Bay-Lay Boyn, stiffened so suddenly that she stuttered into her microphone and
had to erase three words from a tape-and in that same instant her mother at home went
into deep trance.
And still farther out, in a galaxy lying almost on the universe’s Arbitrary Rim, in the
Realm of the Llurdi, the message found a much larger group of receivers. While none
of the practically enslaved Jelmi could do much of anything about that weirdly peculiar
and inexplicably guarded thought, many of them were very much interested m it;
particularly Valkyrie-like Sennlloy, a native of the planet Allondax and the master
biologist of all known space; ancient Tammon, the greatest genius of the entire Jelman
race; and newlyweds Mergon and Luloy, the Mallidaxian savants.
None of the monstrous Llurdi-not even their most monstrous “director”, Klazmon the
Fifteenth-being monstrous-could receive the message in any part. And how well that
was! For if those tremendously able aliens could have received that message, could
have understood it and acted upon it, how vastly different the history of all humanity
would have been!
2 LLURDI AND JELMI
THE distance from Earth to the Realm of the Llurdi is such that it is worth while to take
a moment to locate it in space.
It has been known for a long time that solar systems occur in lenticular aggregations
galled galaxies; each galaxy consisting of one or more thousands of millions of solar
systems. And for almost as long a time, since no definite or systematic arrangement of
the galaxies could be demonstrated, the terms “Universe” and “Cosmic All” were
interchangeable; each meaning the absolute totality of all matter and all space in
existence anywhere and everywhere.
There had been speculations, of course, that galaxies were arranged in lenticular
universes incomprehensibly vast in size, so that the term “Cosmic All” should be
reserved for a plurality of universes and a hyper-space of more than three spatial
dimensions.
Seaton and Crane in the Skylark of Valeron proved that our galaxy, the Milky Way, lies
in a lenticular universe by charting every galaxy in that universe. And they suggested to
the various learned societies that the two celestial aggregates should be named,
respectively, the First Galaxy and the First Universe.
Many millions of parsecs distant from Tellus and its First Galaxy, then, out near the
Arbitrary Rim of the First Universe, there lay the Realm of the Llurdi. This Realm, which
had existed for over seventy thousand Tellurian years, was made up of four hundred
eighty-two planets in exactly half that many solar systems.
Two planets in each populated system were necessary because the population of the
Realm was composed of two entirely different forms of highly intelligent life. Of these
two races the Jelmi-the subject race, living practically in vassalage-were strictly human
beings and lived on strictly Tellus-type worlds.
The master race, the Llurdi, had originated upon the harsh and hostile planet Llurdiax-
Llurdiaxorb Five-with its distant, wan, almost-never-seen sun and its incessant gales of
frigid, ice-laden, ammonia- and methane-impregnated, forty-pounds-to-the-square-inch
air. Like mankind, they wore clothing against the rigors of their environment. Unlike
mankind, however, they wore clothes only for protection, and only when protection was
actually necessary. Nor was Llurdiax harsh or forbidding-to them.
It was the best of all possible worlds. They would not colonize any planet that was not
as nearly as possible like the mother world of their race.
Llurdi, although they are erect, bifurcate, bi-laterally symmetrical, bi-sexual,
mammalian, and have a large crania and six-digited hands each having two opposed
thumbs, are not humanoids. Nor, despite their tremendous, insensitive, unfreezable
wings, are they either birds or bats. Nor flying cats, although they have huge, vertically-
slitted eyes and needle-sharp canine teeth that protrude well below and above their
upper and lower lips. Also, they have immensely strong and highly versatile tails; but
there is nothing simian about them or in their ancestry.
The Realm was not exactly an empire. Nor was Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth exactly
an emperor. The title “Llanzlan” translates, as nearly as possible, into “Director”; and
that was what Klazmon regarded himself as being.
It is true that what he said, went; and that if he didn’t like any existing law he expunged
it from all existence. But that was exactly the way things should be. How else could
optimum conditions be achieved and maintained in an everexpanding, ever-changing,
ever-rising economy? He ruled, he said and thoroughly believed, with complete reason
and perfect fairness and strictly in accordance with the findings of the universe’s largest
and most competent computers as to what was for the best good of all.
Wherefore everyone who did not agree with him was automatically, obviously, and
unquestionably-wrong.
Llurdias, the capital city of the world Llurdiax and of the Realm, had a population of just
over ten million and covered more than nine hundred square miles of ground. At its
geometrical center towered the mile-square, half-mile-high office-residence-palace (the