During this fairly long-for Seaton-speech, and during the silence that had preceded it,
two things had been happening.
First the controlling Brain of the ship had been carrying out a program of Seaton’s. Star
by star, system by system, it had been scanning the components of the nearest galaxy
to the scene of their encounter. It had in fact verified Seaton’s conclusions: the galaxy
was dominated by Chlorans. Their works were everywhere. But it had also supported a-
not a conclusion; a hope, more accurately-that Seaton had hardly dared put in words.
Although the Chlorans ruled this galaxy, there were oxygen-breathing, warm-blooded
races in it too-serfs of the Chlorans of course, but nevertheless occupying their own
planets-and it was one such planet that the Brain had finally selected and was now
displaying on its monitor.
The other thing was that the auburn-haired beauty who was Mrs. Richard Ballinger
Seaton had been eyeing her husband steadily. At first she had merely looked at him
thoughtfully. Then look and mien had become heavily tinged, first with surprise and
then with doubt and then with wonder; a wonder that turned into an incredulity that
became more and more incredulous. Until finally, unable to hold herself in any longer,
she broke in on him.
“Dick!” she cried. “You wouldn’t! You know you wouldn’t!”
“I wouldn’t? If not, who . . . ?” Changing his mind between two words, Seaton cut the
rest of the sentence sharply off; shrugged his shoulders; and grinned, somewhat
shamefacedly, back at her.
At this point Crane, who had been looking first at one of them and then at the other, put
in: “I realize, Dorothy, that you and Dick don’t need either language or headsets to
communicate with each other, but how about the rest of us? What, exactly, is it that
you’re not as sure as you’d like to be that he wouldn’t do?”
Dorothy opened her mouth to reply, but Seaton beat her to it. “What I would do-and will
because I’ll have to; because it’s my oyster and nobody else’s-is, after we sneak up as
close as we can without touching off any alarms, take a landing craft and go get the
data we absolutely have to have in absolutely the only way it can be gotten.”
“And that’s what I most emphatically do not like!” Dorothy blazed. “Dick Seaton, you are
not going to land on an enslaved planet, alone and unarmed and afoot, as an
investigating Committee of One! For one thing, we simply don’t have the time! Do we? I
mean, poor old Valeron is simply a wreck! We’ve got to go somewhere and-”
But Seaton was shaking his head. “The Brain can handle that by itself,” he said. “All it
needs is time. As a matter of fact, you’ve put your finger on a first-rate reason for my
going in, alone. There’s simply not much else we can do until the Valeron is back in
shape again.”
“Not your going in.” Dorothy blazed. “Flatly, positively no.”
Again Seaton shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t say I’m madly in love with the idea
myself, but who’s any better qualified? Or as well? Because I know that you, Dottie,
aren’t the type to advocate us sitting on our hands and letting them have all the races of
humanity, wherever situate. So who?”
“Me,” Shiro said, promptly if ungrammatically. “Not as good, but good enough. You can
tell me what data you want and I can and will get it, just as well as . . . ”
“Bounce back, both of you, you’ve struck a rubber fence!” Dunark snapped. “That job’s
for Sitar and me.” The green-skinned princess waved her pistol in the air and nodded
her head enthusiastically and her warlord went on, “You and I being brain-brothers,
Dick, I’d know exactly what you want. And she and I would blast-”
“Yeah, that’s what I know damn well you’d do.” Seaton broke in, only to be interrupted
in turn by Crane-who was not in the habit of interrupting anyone even once, to say
nothing of twice.
“Excuse me, everyone,” he said, “but you’re all wrong, I think. My thought at the
moment, Dick, is that your life is altogether too important to the project as a whole to be
risked as you propose risking it. As to you others, with all due respect for your abilities, I
do not believe that either of you is as well qualified for this kind of an investigation as I
am-”
Margaret leaped to her feet in protest, but Crane went quietly on: “-in either experience
or training. However, we should not decide that point yet-or at all, for that matter. We
are all too biased. I therefore suggest, Dick, that we feed the Brain everything, we have
and keep on feeding it everything pertinent we can get hold of, until it has enough data
to make that decision for us.”
“That makes sense,” Seaton said, and both Dorothy and Margaret nodded-but both with
very evident reservations. “The first time anything has made sense today!”
17 Ky-El MOKAK THE WILDER
THE first thing Seaton and Crane had to do, of course, was to figure out how to get
back somewhere near Galaxy DW-427-LU, within fourth-order range of that one
particular extremely powerful Chloran system, without using enough sixth-order stuff to
touch off any alarms-but still enough to make the trip in days instead of in months.
Some sixth-order emanations could be neutralized by properly phased and properly
placed counter-generators; the big question being, how much?
The answer turned out to be, according to Crane, “Not enough”-but, according to
Seaton, “Satisfactory”. At least, it did make the trip not only possible, but feasible. And
during the days of that trip each Skylarker worked-with the Brain or with a computer or
with pencil and paper or with paint or India ink and a brush, each according to his bent-
on the problem of what could be done about the Chlorans.
They made little headway, if any at all. They did not have enough data. Inescapably,
the attitude of each was very strongly affected by what he or she knew about the
Chlorans they had already encountered. They were all smart enough to know that this
was as indefensible as it was inevitable.
Thus, while each of them developed a picture completely unlike anyone else’s as to
what the truth probably was, none of them was convinced enough of the validity of his
theory to defend it vigorously. Thus it was discussion, not argument, that went on
throughout the cautious approach to the forbidden territory and the ultra-cautious
investigation of the Tellus-type planet the Brain had selected through powerful optical
telescopes and by means of third and fourth-order apparatus. Then they fell silent,
appalled; for that world was inhabited by highly intelligent human beings and what had
been done to it was shocking indeed.
They had seen what had been done to the planet Valeron. This was worse; much
worse. On Valeron the ruins had been recognizable as having once been cities. Even
those that had been blown up or slagged down by nuclear energies had shown traces
of what they had once been. There had been remnants and fragments of structural
members, unfused portions of the largest buildings, recognizable outlines and traces of
thoroughfares and so on. But here, where all of the big cities and three-fourths or more
of the medium-sized ones had been, there were now only huge sheets of glass.
Sheets of glass ranging in area from ten or fifteen square miles up to several thousands
of square miles, and variously from dozens up to hundreds of feet thick: level sheets of
cracked and shattered, almost transparent, vari-colored glass. The people of the
remaining cities and towns and villages were human. In fact, they were white
Caucasiansas white and as Caucasian as the citizens of Tampa or of Chicago or of
Portland, Oregon or of Portland, Maine. Neither Seaton nor Shiro, search as they
would, could find any evidence that any Oriental types then lived or ever had lived on
that world-to Shiro’s lasting regret. He, at least, was eliminated as a spy.
“Well, Dottie?” Seaton asked.
She gnawed her lip. “Well . . . I suppose we’ll have to do something-but hey!” she
exclaimed, voice and expression changing markedly. “How come you think you have to
go down there at all to find out what the score is? You’ve snatched people right and left
all over the place with ordinary beams and things, long before anybody ever heard of
that sixth-order, fourth-dimensional gizmo.”
Seaton actually blushed. “That’s right, my pet,” he admitted. “Once again you’ve got a
point. I’ll pick one out that’s so far away from everybody else that he won’t be missed for
a while. Maybe two’d be better.”
Since it was an easy matter to find isolated specimens of the humanity of that world, it
was less than an hour later that two men-one from a town, one found wandering alone