Supervisor Klarton-who had at sight of it gone into a tizzy (for a Llurd) of worrying his
left ear with the tip of his tail. He stared at the motionless bit of tape as though it were
very apt indeed to bite him in the eye.
What to do? Should he disturb the llanzlan with this or not?
This was a nose-twitching borderline case if there ever was one. If he didn’t, and it
turned out to be something important, he’d get his tail singed-he’d be reduced to section
supervisor. But if he did, and it didn’t, he’d get exactly the same treatment . . However,
the thing, whatever it might be, was so terrifically far away . . .
Yes, that was it! The smart thing to do would be to watch it for a few seconds-determine
exact distance, direction of flight, velocity, and so forth-before reporting to the Big Boss.
That would protect him either way.
Wherefore Sleemet had time to launch an analsynth projection along the indicated line.
He found a solar system containing two highly industrialized planets; one of which was
cool, the other cold. One was peopled by those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned human
beings; the other by a race of creatures even more monstrous and therefore even less
entitled to exist.
He studied those planets and their inhabitants quickly but thoroughly, and the more he
studied them the more derisive and contemptuous he became. They had no warships,
.no fortresses either above or below ground, no missiles, even! Their every effort and all
their energies were devoted to affairs of peace!
Therefore, every detail having been recorded, including the gibberish being broadcast
and tight beamed by various communications satellites, Sleemet pulled in his analsynth
and sent out a full working projection.
He had already located great stores of prepared power uranium bars and blocks on
both planets. Careless of detection now and working at his usual fantastic speed and
with his usual perfect control, he built in seconds six tremendous pyramids upon each
of the two doomed worlds-pyramids of now one-hundred-percent-convertible
superatomic explosive. He assembled twenty-four exceedingly complex, carefully aimed
forces and put them on trip. Then, glaring balefully into an almost opaque visiplate, he
reached out without looking and rammed a plunger home-and in an instant those two
distant planets became two tremendous fireballs of hellishly intolerable, mostly invisible,
energies.
And almost eight thousand million highly intelligent creatures-eating, sleeping, loving,
fighting, reading, thinking, working, playing-died in that utterly cataclysmic rending of
two entire worlds.
Practically all of them died not knowing even that they had been hurt. A few-a very few-
watch officers in interplanetary spaceships observed one or the other of those frightful
catastrophes in time to have an instant’s warning of what was coming; but only three
such officers, it became known later, had enough time to throw on their faster-than-light
drives and thus outrun the ravening front of annihilation.
Cosmically, however, the thing didn’t amount to much. Its duration was very short
indeed. While a little of each planet’s substance was volatilized, practically all of it was
scarcely more than melted. When equilibrium was restored they did not shine like little
suns. They scarcely glowed.
Hands quietly poised, Sleemet again paused in thought.
The fact that he had murdered almost eight billion people did not bother him at all. In
fact, he did not think of the action at all, as murder or as killing or as anything else. If he
had, the thought would have been the Fenachrone equivalent of “pesticide.” All space
comprising the Cosmic All and every planet therein should and would belong to the
Master Race; no competing race had any right whatever to live.
Should he, or should he not, explore the lines of those communications beams and
destroy the other planets of this group? He should not, he decided. He would have to
slow down, perhaps even change course; and it was quite possible that he was still
within range of the sixth-order stuff of that self-styled Overlord. Besides, this group of
queerly mixed entities would keep. After he had found a really distant Fenatype planet
and had developed it, he would come back here and finish this minor chore.
But very shortly after making this decision Sleemet was given cause to know starkly that
he had not investigated this civilization thoroughly enough by far; for his vessel was
being assailed by forces of such incredible magnitude that his instantaneously reactive
outer screen was already radiating in the high violet!
And, before he could do much more than put a hand to his construction panel, that
outer screen began to show black spots of failure!
In Hall of Prime Computation, on Llurdiax, one entire panel of instrumentation went
suddenly dead. The supervisor of that section flicked two testing switches, then
scanned the last couple of inches of each of two tapes. Then he paused, for a moment
stunned: knocked completely out of any Llurd’s calm poise. Then, licking his lips, he
spoke; apparently to empty air:
“Llanzlan Klazmon, sir, Blaydaxorb Three and Blaydaxorb Five stopped reporting,
simultaneously, eleven seconds ago. Orbiting pyrometers of both planets reported
theretonuclear temperatures at the end-points of their respective transmissions. End of
report, sir.”
The supervisor did not elaborate.
While he was appalled and terribly shocked-he had never imagined such disasters
possible-it was not his job to comment or to deduce or to theorize. His business-his only
business-was to report to a higher echelon the pertinent facts of any and all unusual
events or conditions; the height of the echelon to which he reported being directly
proportional to the unusualness and/or magnitude of the event or condition.
Since this event was unprecedented and of very great magnitude indeed, his report
went straight to the top-thus overtaking and passing the report of Head Supervisor
Marton, which was not yet ready for delivery.
Having reported the pertinent facts to the proper echelon. the section supervisor went
calmly, almost unconcernedly, back to his job of supervising his section. He paid no
more attention to the incident even when the llanzlan-fully recovered now from his
wounds-who had been asleep in his penthouse apartment came into the Hall from the
down flyway. (Everyone rode a force-beam up, but came down on his own wings.)
While Klazmon was not hurrying any more than usual, his usual technique was to drop
a full half mile with folded wings before beginning to put on his brakes. Hence his
tremendous wings and stabilizing surfaces sent blasts of cold, dense air throughout the
whole end of the Hall as he slowed down for a high-G landing in his seat at his master
control console. Fingers, thumbs, and tail-tip flashed over the banked and tiered
keyboards of that console; and, all around the periphery of Llurdias, that miles-wide
girdle of mighty fortresses came instantly to life.
A mufti-layered umbrella of full-coverage screens flashed into being over the whole city
and Klazmon, engineering his fifth-order projector, sent his simulacrum of pure force
out to see what had happened in or to the solar system of Blaydaxorb.
He was now, to all intents and purposes, in two places at once.
He could see, hear, feel, taste, and smell exactly as well with one self as with the other.
He was, however, thoroughly accustomed to the peculiar sensations of having a
complete personality; he could block out at will any perceptions of either self. And his
immaterial self had two tremendous advantages over his material one. It could traverse
incredibly immense distances in no measurable time; and, no matter where it went or
what it encountered, his physical self would remain entirely unaffected.
In a mere flick of time, then, Klazmon was in the solar system of Blaydaxorb. The sun
itself was unchanged, but in orbits three and five, where the two inhabited planets had
been, there were two still-wildly-disturbed masses of liquids and gases.
He threw out a light, fast detector web, which located the marauding Fenachrone fleet
in less than a second. Then, returning most of his attention to his console, he
assembled seventeen exceedingly complex forces and hurled them, one at each vessel
of the invading fleet.
Actually, Klazmon was little if any more affected than was Sleemet the Fenachrone
about either that utterly frightful loss of life as such or the loss of those two planets as
such. The Realm was big enough so that the total destruction of those two planets-of
any two planets except of course Llurdiax itself-was unimportant to the economy of the
Realm as a whole. No; what burned the llanzlan up made it mandatory that that fleet
and the entire race whose people manned it should, after thorough study, be wiped
completely out-was the brazenness, the uncivilized and illogical savagery, the incredible
effrontery of this completely intolerable insult to the realm of the Llurdi and to imperial
Klazmon its llanzlan.
Klazmon knew of only one race who made a habit of performing such atrocities; such
wanton, illogical, insane offenses against all sense and all reason: those