‘Oh? More than one way? That makes it still worse. Would you be willing to sell us plans, or lease us ships … ?’
‘So that you could exploit other planets? We will not. You would get nowhere, even if you had an interstellar drive right now. You, personally, are a perfect example of what is wrong with this planet. Rapacious, insatiable – you violate every concept of ethics, common decency, and social responsibility. Your world’s technology is so far ahead of its sociology that you not only should be, but actually are being, held in quarantine.’
‘What?’
‘Exactly. One race I know of has been inspecting -you regularly for several hundreds of your years. They will not make contact with you, or allow you to leave your own world, until you grow up to something beyond the irresponsible-baby stage. Thus, about two and a half of your years ago, a starship of that race sent down a sensing element – unmanned, of course – to check your state of development. Brother Sovig votalized it with an atomic missile.’
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‘We did not do it,” the dictator declared. ‘It was the warmongering capitalists.’
‘You contemptible idiot,’ Oarlock said. ‘Are even you actually stupid enough to try to lie with your mind? To minds linked to your own and to mine?’
‘We did do it, then, but it was only a flying saucer.’
‘Just as this ship was, to you, only a flying saucer, I suppose. So here’s something else for you to think about, Brother Sovig, with whatever power your alleged brain is able to generate. When you shot down that senser, the starship did not rataliate, but went on without taking any notice of you. When you tried to shoot us down, we took some slight action, but did not kill anyone and are now discussing the situation. Listen carefully now, and remember – it is very possible that the next craft you attack in such utterly idiotic fashion will, without any more warning than you give, blow this whole planet into a ball of incandescent gas.’
‘Can that actually be done?’ the scientist asked. For the first time, he became really interested in the proceedings.
‘Very easily, Doctor Cheswick,’ Garlock replied. ‘We could do it ourselves with scarcely any effort and at very small cost. You are familiar, I suppose, with the phenomenon of ball lightning?’
‘Somewhat. Its mechanism has never been elucidated in any very satisfactory mathematics.’
‘Well, we have at our disposal a field some…’
‘Hold it, Clee,’ James warned. ‘Do you want to put out that kind of stuff around here?’
‘Ummmm … What do you think?’
James studied Cheswick’s mind. ‘Better than I thought,” he decided. ‘He has made two really worthwhile intuitions – a genius type. He’s been working on what amounts almost to the Coupler Theory for ten years. He’s almost got it, but you know intuitions of that caliber can’t be scheduled. He might get it tomorrow – or never. I’d say push him over the hump.’
‘Okay with me. We’ll take a vote – one blackball kills it Brownie? Just the link, of course. A few hints, perhaps, at application, but no technological data.’
‘I say give it to him. He’s earned it. Besides, he isn’t young any more and may die before he gets it, and that would lose
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them two or three hundred years.’ ‘Belle?’
‘In favour. Shall I drop the linkage? No,’ she answered her own question. ‘No other minds here will have any idea of what it means, and it may do some of them a bit of good to see one of their own minds firing on more than one barrel.’
‘Thank you, Galaxians.’ The scientist’s mind had been quivering with eagerness. ‘I am inexpressibly glad that you have found me worthy of so much help.’
Garlock entered Cheswick’s mind. First he impressed, indelibly, six symbols and their meanings. Second, a long and intricate equation, which the scientist studied avidly.
During the ensuing pause Garlock cut the president and chief of staff out of the linkage. ‘We have just given Cheswick a basic formula. In a couple of hundred years it will give you full telepathy, and then you will really begin to go up. There’s nothing secret about it – in fact, I’d advise full publication – but even so it might be a smart idea to give him both protection and good working conditions. Brains like his are apt to be centuries apart on any world.’
‘But this is … it could be … it must be?’ Cheswick exclaimed. ‘I never would have formulated thatl It isn’t quite implicit, of course, but from this, there derives the existence of, and the necessity for, electrogravitics – an entirely new field of reality and experiment in science!’
‘There does indeed,’ Garlock agreed, ‘and it is far indeed from being implicit. You leaped a tremendous gap. And yes, the resultant is more humanistic than technological.’
Belle was smiling and shaking her head at the same time. ‘How do you like them tid-bits, Clee?’ she asked. ‘Two hundred years in seventy eight seconds? You folks will have telepathy by the time your present crop of babies grows up. Clee, ain’t you sorry you got mad and blew your top and wanted to pick up your marbles and go home? Three such intuitions in one man’s lifetime beats par even for the genius course.’
‘It sure does,’ Garlock admitted ruefully. ‘I should have studied these minds – particularly his – before jumping at conclusions.’
‘May I say a few words?’ the president asked. ‘You may indeed, sir. I was hoping you would.’
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‘We have been discouraged, faced with an insoluble problem. Sovig and Lingonor, knowing that their own lives were forfeit anyway, were perfectly willing to destroy all the life on this world to make us yield. Now, however, with the insight and the encouragement you Galaxians have given us, the situation has changed. Reduced to ordinary high explosives, they cannot conquer us…’
‘Especially without an air-force,’ Lola put in. ‘I, personally, will see to it that every bomber and fighter plane they now have goes to the third moon. It will be your responsibility to see to it they do not rebuild.’
‘Thank you, Miss Montandon. We will see to it. As for our internal difficulties – I think, under certain conditions, they can be handled. Our lawless element’ – he glanced at the gangster – ‘can be made impotent. The corrupt practices of both capital and labor can be stopped. We have laws’ – here he looked at the members of Congress and the judge – ‘which can be enforced. The conditions I mentioned would be difficult at the moment, since so few of us are here and it is manifest that few if any of our people will believe that such people as you Galaxians really exist. Would it be possible for you, Miss Montandon, to spend a few days – or whatever time you can spare – in showing our Congress and as many others as possible, what humanity may hope to become?’
‘Of course, sir. I was planning on it.’
‘I’m afraid that is impossible,’ the chief of staff said.
‘Why, General Cordeen?’ Lola asked.
‘Because you’d be shot,’ Cordeen said, bluntly. ‘We have a very good Secret Service, it is true, and we would give you every protection possible; but such an all-out effort as would be made to assassinate you would almost certainly succeed.’
‘Shot?’ Garlock asked in surprise. ‘What with? You haven’t anything that could even begin to crack an Operator’s Shield.”
‘With this, sir.’ Cordeen held out his automatic pistol for inspection.
‘Oh, I hadn’t studied it… a pellet-projector…’
‘Pellet! Do you call a four-seventy-five slug a pellet?’
‘Not much of that, really … it shoots eight times – shoot all eight of them at her. None of them will touch her.’
‘What? I will not! One of those slugs will go through three
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women like her, front to back in line.’
‘I will, then.’ The pistol leaped into Oarlock’s hand. ‘Hold up one hand, Brownie, and catch ’em. Don’t let ’em splash. No deformation, so he can recognize his own pellets.’
Holding the unfamiliar weapon in a clumsy, highly unorthodox grip – something like a schoolgirl’s first attempt -Garlock glanced once at Lola’s upraised palm and eight shots roared out as fast as the gases of explosion could operate the mechanism. The pistol’s barrel remained rigidly motionless under all the stress of ultra-rapid fire. Lola’s slim, deeply-tanned arm did not even quiver under the impact of that storm of heavy bullets against her apparently unsupported hand. No one saw those bullets strike her palm, but everyone saw them drop into her cupped left hand, like drops of water dripping rapidly from the end of an icicle into a bowl.
‘Here are your pellets, General Cordeen.’ Lola handed them to him with a smile.
‘Good God!’ the general said.