After the meeting was over Kay-Lee Barlo came up to Seaton. She now bore herself as
though she had been born an Exalted; her ex-boss’ pistol swung jauntily at one very
female hip as she walked. As she came up to him and took both his hands in hers,
standing so close to him that her upstanding, outstanding hair-do almost tickled his
nose, it became evident that her weapon had been fired quite recently. She wore no
perfume, and the faint but unmistakable acrid odor of burned smokeless powder still
clung to her hair.
“Oh, Ky-El!” she exclaimed, equal to equal now. “I’ll simply never be able to thank you
enough. Nor will all Ray-See-Nee. This world will be an entirely different place to live on
hereafter.”
“I sincerely hope so, Kay-Lee.” Seaton smiled into the girl’s eager, expressive face.
“Ray-See-Nee is lucky to have had as strong, able and just a man as Ree-Toe Prenk to
take over.”
“As you said a while back, `You can say that again.’ He’s all of that. What he’s done
already is marvelous. But everyone knows-he does, too, he’s put you up on a pedestal
a mile high-that it’s you who put him in the saddle. That’s what I wanted mostly to tell
you. Also, I wanted to ask you-” she paused and flushed slightly-“you’ll forget, won’t you
please, what I said about that louse’s brains? I didn’t mean that, really; I’m not the type
to cherish a grudge like that. I was a little . . . well, I’d been a little put out with him, just
before you came in.” With which masterpiece of understatement she gave his hands
another vigorous, friendly squeeze and, swinging around, walked hip-wiggling out of the
room.
She thereupon took certain steps and performed certain actions which would have
astonished Seaton very much, had he known about them. But he did not-until much
later.
Prenk came up to the Skylarkers a few minutes later. He shook hands with each of the
off-worlders; thanked them in rounded phrases. “I would like very much to have you
stay here indefinitely, friends,” he concluded, “but I know of course that that is
impossible. If all the resources of the world could be devoted to the project and if all our
technical men could work on it undetected for a year, we could not build anything able
to withstand those Chlorans’ beams.”
“We can’t either. Not here,” Seaton said. “That’s why we have to go; but we’ll be back. I
don’t know when; but we’ll be back some day.”
“I’m sure you will: and may Great My-Ko-Ta ward you and cherish you as you build.”
Back on what was left of their worldlet, now reconditioned to the extent that it was not
likely to fall apart on the spot, and out in deep space once more, the Skylarkers began
efficiently and expertly to put the pieces of their victory together.
They had located the Enemy. They even had an operating covert base in Chloran
territory, to which they could return at any time. They had weapons which, in theory at
least, could cope with anything the Chlorans were likely to own.
Yet Seaton fretted. The weapons were there, but his control was not adequate; the
weapons had outgrown the control. Dealing with Chlorans was touchy business. You
wanted all the space you could get between you and them. Yet, at any operating range
which even Seaton, to say nothing of Crane and the others, considered safe, their
striking power was simply too erratic to depend on.
“It’s a bust,” Seaton said gloomily. “Course, if worst came to worst I could go back to
undercover methods. Smuggle in a bomb, maybe-just to throw their main centers off
balance while the rest of you hit them with all we’ve got. I could stow away aboard one
of those ore-scows taking the booty off Ray-See-Nee easily enough-”
“You talk like a man with a paper nose,” Dorothy scoffed. “I have a picture of that
expedition-of you in armor, with air-tanks strapped on your back and lugging an
underwater camera or projector around. Un-noticed . . . I don’t think.”
And Dunark added, “And since you haven’t got any idea of what to look for, you’d have
to lug around a full analsynth set-up. A couple of tons of stuff. Uh-uh.”
Seaton grinned, unperturbed. “That’s what I was coming to. Getting in would be easy,
but doing anything wouldn’t. And neither would getting out. But Mart, we’ve chopped
one horn off of the dilemma, but we haven’t even touched the other. We’ve got to
master that fourth-dimension rig; and we’re not even close. It’s a matter of kind, not
merely of degree.”
“I can’t see that. If so, we could not have warded off their attack at all.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean the energies themselves; it’s the control of that much stuff.
Synchronization, phasing in, combination, and so forth. Getting such stuff as that
closely enough together. Look, Mart. This bit that we’ve got left of the Valeron is stuffed
with machinery practically to the skin. She’s so small, relatively, that you wouldn’t think
there’d be any trouble meshing in machines from various parts of her. But there is.
Plenty. It never showed up before because we never had to use a fraction of our total
power before, but it showed up plenty back there. My beam was loose as ashes, and
I’ve figured out why.
“Sixth-order stuff moves as many times faster than light as light does faster than a
snail-maybe more. But it still takes a little time to get from one machine to another,
inside even as small a globe as this is. See?”
Crane frowned in thought. “I see. I also see what the difficulties would be in anything
large enough and strong enough to attack the Chlorans. It would mean timing each
generator and each element of each projector; and each with a permissible variation of
an infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond. That, of course, means Rovol and Caslor.” “I
suppose it does . . . unless we can figure out an easier, faster way . . . I don’t know
whether the Chlorans have got anything like that or not, but they’ve got something.
There ought to be some way of snitching it off of them.”
“Why must they have?” Dunark demanded. “It’s probably just a matter of size. They
have a whole planet to fortify. Dozens of ’em if they want to. So it doesn’t have to be a
matter of refinement at all. Just brutal, piled up, overwhelming power.”
“Could be,” Seaton agreed. “If so, we can’t match it, since the Valeron was as big as
she could be and still have a factor of safety of two point two.” He paused in thought,
then went on, “But with such refinement, we could take a planet no matter how loaded it
was . . . I think. So maybe we’d better take off for Norlamin, at that.”
“One thing we should do first, perhaps,” Dorothy suggested. “Find out what that
DuQuesne really did. He has me worried.”
“Maybe we should at that,” Seaton agreed. “I’d forgotten all about the big black ape.”
It was easy enough to find the line along which DuQuesne had traveled; the plug-chart
was proof that he had not lied about that. They reached without incident the
neighborhood of the point DuQuesne had marked on the chart. Seaton sent out a
working projection of the device that, by intercepting and amplifying light-waves
traversing open space, enabled him actually to see events that had happened in the
not-too distant past.
He found the scene he wanted. He studied it, analyzed and recorded it. Then:
“He lied to me almost a hundred and eighty degrees,” Seaton said. “That beam came
from that galaxy over there.” He jerked a thumb. “The alien who bothered him was in
that galaxy. That much I’ll buy. But it doesn’t make sense that he’d go there. That alien
was nobody he wanted to monkey with, that’s for dead sure. So where did he meet the
Jelmi, if not in that galaxy?”
“On the moon, perhaps,” Margaret said.
“Possibly. I’ll compute it . . . no, the timing isn’t right–2′ Seaton thought for a moment-
“but there’s no use guessing. That galaxy may be the first place to look for sign; but I’ll
bet my case buck it’ll be a long, cold hunt. I’d like awfully well to have that gizmo—flip
bombs past the Chlorans’ screens and walls with it . . .”
“From a distance greater than their working range?” Crane asked.
“That’s so, too . . . or maybe so, at that, chum. Who knows what you can do through the
fourth? But it looks as though our best bet is to beat it to Norlamin, rebuild this wreck,
and tear into that business of refinement of synchronization. So say you all?”
So said they all and Seaton, flipping on full-power sixth order drive, set course for