large sheet of paper, please?”
Seaton donned his helmet and a sheet of drafting paper covered exactly the table’s top,
adhering to it as though glued down.
“You mean to say, Doc, you’re going along with this magic flummery?” one of the Jelmi
asked.
“I certainly am,” Seaton said. “You will leave the room until this test is over. So will
everyone else with a mind closed to what these women are trying to do.” The scoffer
and two other Jelmi walked toward the door and Seaton quirked an eyebrow at
DuQuesne.
“I’m staying,” that worthy said. “I can’t say that I’m a hundred per cent sold; but I’m
interested enough to give it a solid try.”
The two older women stationed themselves, one at each end of the table; Kay-Lee
stood at her mother’s right, holding in her hand a red-ink ballpoint at least a foot long.
Majestic Fodan, the Chief of the Five of Norlamin, stood behind Madame Barlo, but did
not touch her; Drasnik and Sacner Carfon stood similarly behind Grand Dame Barlo
and Kay-Lee. Each of the three women rubbed a drop of something (it was actually
Seaton’s citrated blood) between thumb and forefinger and Madame Barlo said:
“You will all look fixedly at any one of the six of us and think of our success with
everything that in you lies. Help us with all your might to succeed; give us your total
mental strength. Kay-Lee, daughter, the time is … now!”
Reaching across the end of the table, Kay-Lee began to write a column eighteen inches
wide; the height of which was to be the thirty-six-inch width of the table. When she got
to the middle of the fourth line, however, a man gasped in astonishment and the pen’s
point stopped. This Jelm, a mathematician, had let his eyes slip from the operator to the
paper-and what he saw was high-very high!-math! Mathematics of a complexity that
none of those women, by any possible stretch of the imagination, could know anything
about!
“Quit peeking!” Seaton snarled, “You’re lousing up the whole deal! Concentrate! Think,
dammit, THINK!” Everyone resumed thinking and Kay-Lee resumed writing. She wrote
smoothly and effortlessly, with the precision and with almost the speed of the operating
point of a geometric lathe.
She wrote the first column and the second and the third and the fourth-six feet by three
feet of tightly packed equations and other mathematical shorthand. Then came twelve
feet of exquisitely detailed “wiring” diagram. Then, covering all the rest of the paper,
came working drawings of and meticulously detailed specifications for machines that no
one there had ever heard of.
Then all three women collapsed. As well they might; they had worked without a letup for
three hours.
Men and women sprang to their aid with restoratives, and they began to recover.
“Mister Fodan,” Madlyn Mannis said then, coming up to the Chief of the Five arm-in-arm
with Stephanie de Marigny. Her usually vivid face was strangely pale. “I can understand
Hunkie here having a place in a brawl like this, she’s got half the letters in the alphabet
after her name, but what good could I do? Possibly? I only went to school one day in
my life and that day it rained and the teacher didn’t come.”
“Formal education does not matter, child; it is what you intrinsically are that counts. You
and your friend Charles are two perfectly matched male and female poles of tre-
mendous power. You felt your paired power at work, I’m sure.”
“Wel-1-1, I felt something.” Madlyn looked up at her Charley, her eyes full of question
marks. “My whole brain was full of … well, it was all kind of spizzly, like champagne
tastes.” And:
“That’s it exactly,” van der Gleiss agreed.
Kay-Lee, fully recovered now, looked in surprise at some of the equations she had
written, then turned to Sacner Carfon. “Did it come out all right?” she asked hopefully.
“Oh, I hope it did!”
“I think so,” the porpoise-man replied. “At least, all of it I can understand makes sense.”
The T-8 engineer stared at Kay-Lee. “But didn’t you know what you were doing?”
“Of course she didn’t.” Again Madame Barlo did the talking. “None of us did,
consciously. We are not masters of The Power, but Its servants. We are merely Its
tools; the agents through which It does Its work.”
And, off to one side, Dorothy was saying, “Dick, those women actually are witches! I
liked Kay-Lee, too … but real, live, practicing witches! I got goose bumps as big as
peas. I don’t believe in witchcraft, darn it!”
“I don’t either. That is, I never did before … but what else are you going to call it now?”
28 PROJECT RHO
THE mathematicians and physical scientists began at once to study the wealth of new
data. Drasnik, the First of Psychology, after conferring with Fodan, with Sacner Carfon
and with each of the three witches in turn, actually rushed over to the group of
Tellurians. It was the first time Seaton. had ever seen an excited Norlaminian.
“Ah, youths of Tellus, I think you!” he enthused. “I thank you immensely for the
inestimable privilege of meeting the ladies Barlo! They possess a talent that is indubi-
tably of the most tremendous-”
“Talent?” Dorothy snorted. “Do you call witchcraft a talent? Why, the very idea of it
makes me . . .” She paused. “Uh-huh, me too,” Madlyn agreed fervently. “If I have to
believe in practicing witches I’ll go not-so-slowly nuts.” “Witchcraft, my children? Bosh
and fiddle-fiddle! It is a talent. Extremely rare and lamentably rudimentary in our part of
the universe, yet these women have it in astoundingly full measure. Unfortunately, you
have no name for it except `witchcraft’, which term has deplorable connotations. It is the
ability to … but the English has no words for that, either. But no matter, you have seen it
in fine, full action. Fodan and Sacner and I each have a very little of it . . .” “But those
women couldn’t possibly have known anything about that kind of stuff!” Madlyn
protested.
“Of course they didn’t. Richard here and Tammon and Doctor DuQuesne were the
principal sources of information. But all three of them together lacked a great deal of
having full knowledge, and the rest of us had very little indeed. While the comparison is
lamentably loose, consider a large, finely cut jigsaw puzzle. Seaton and DuQuesne and
Tammon could each assemble an area. But no two of the three areas were contiguous,
while none of the rest of us could fit more than a very few pieces together. But the
ladies Barlo-particularly Grand Dame Barlo, who is a veritable powerhouse of
strength-with some little help from the rest of us, exerted and directed The Power. The
Power that, by tapping the reservoir of infinite knowledge, enabled the scribe Kay-Lee
to fill in the missing parts of the puzzle.”
“But why . . .” Seaton began, but changed his mind. “I see. You didn’t tell me anything
about it because at that time it was both insignificant and inapplicable.”
“That is correct. As I was saying, our Fodan, who has more of it than any other entity
previously known, had perhaps the thousandth of what Kay-Lee, the weakest by far of
the three, has. That is why he is Chief of the Five. And they tell me that there are other
women of their race who also have this talent. Remarkable!” At this thought Drasnik,
who had quieted down, became excited all over again. “When this is all over I shall go
at once to Ray-SeeNee and study. Marvelous! They did not know even that it is a talent
or that, when they learn, there will be no need to drug themselves into,
half-unconsciousness to employ it successfully. Thank you again, young friends, for this
wonderful opportunity. Marvelous!” and Drasnik scurried away.
The Seatons and Madlyn and van der Gleiss stared after the Norlaminian until he was
out of sight. They turned and stared at each other.
“Well . . . I’ll . . . be . . . a . . . dirty . . . name,” Madlyn said.
Seaton was pacing the floor, talking to Dorothy, emitting a cloud of smoke from his
battered and reeking briar. “I like to do my thinking with you, ace.”
She chuckled. “At me, you mean, don’t you? That stuff is over my head like a beach
umbrella.”
“Don’t fish, sweetie. You not only have a body and some hair, but also a brain. One that
fires on all sixteen barrels all the time.”
She laughed delightedly. “Thank you so much. You know that isn’t true, but you also
know how I lap it up and purr. But to proceed, Dunark wants to smash them all with
planets, the way he was going to smash Urvania. Martin and Peggy, after talking the
way they did, crawfished and are now talking about enclosing the whole galaxy in a