Читать книгу Skylark DuQuesne - Edward Elmer Smith - Страница 6

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The type of attack which was about to challenge the Llurdi was from a source no civilized human would have believed still existed.

If Richard Seaton, laboring at Earth’s own defenses uncountable parsecs away, had been told of it, he would flatly have declared the story a lie. He ought to know, he would have said. That particular danger to the harmony of the worlds had long since been destroyed ... and he was the man who had destroyed it!

When the noisome planet of the Fenachrone was destroyed it was taken for granted that Ravindau and his faction of the Party of Postponement of Universal Conquest, who had fled from the planet just before its destruction, were the last surviving members of their monstrous race. When they in turn were destroyed it was assumed that no Fenachrone remained alive.

That assumption was wrong. There was another faction of the Party of Postponement much larger than Ravindau’s, much more secretive, and much better organized.

Its leader, one Sleemet, while an extremely able scientist, had taken lifelong pains that neither his name nor his ability should become known to any except a select few. He was as patriotic as was any other member of his race; he believed as implicitly as did any other that the Fenachrone should and one day would rule not only this one universe, but the entire Cosmic All. However, he believed, and as firmly, that The Day should not be set until the probability of success of the project should begin to approach unity as a limit.

According to Sleemet’s exceedingly rigorous analysis, the time at which success would become virtually certain would not arrive for at least three hundred Fenachronian years.

From the day of Fenor’s accession to the throne Sleemet had been grimly certain that this Emperor Fenor—headstrong, basically ignorant, and inordinately prideful even for an absolute monarch of the Fenachrone—would set The Day during his own reign; centuries before its proper time.

Therefore, for over fifty years, Sleemet had been preparing for exactly the eventuality that came about, and:

Therefore, after listening to only a few phrases of the ultimatum given to Emperor Fenor by Sacner Carfon of Dasor, speaking for the Overlord Seaton and his Forces of Universal Peace, Sleemet sent out his signal and:

Therefore, even before Ravindau’s forces began to board their single vessel Sleemet’s fleet of seventeen superdreadnoughts was out in deep space, blasting at full-emergency fifth-order cosmic-energy drive away from the planet so surely doomed.

Surely doomed? Yes. Knowing vastly more about the sixth order than did any other of his race, he was the only one of his race who knew anything about the Overlord of the Central System; of who and what that Overlord was and of what that Overlord had done. He, Sleemet, did not want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton. Not then or ever.

Curse Fenor’s abysmal stupidity! Since a whole new Fenachrone planet would now have to be developed, the Conquest could not be begun for more than three hundred years!

While Sleemet knew much more about the sixth order than Ravindau did, he did not have the sixth-order drive and it took him and his scientists and engineers several months to develop and to perfect it. Thus their fleet was still inside the First Galaxy when they finally changed drives and began really to travel—on a course that, since it was laid out to reach the most distant galaxies of the First Universe, would of necessity lie within two and a quarter hundreds of thousands of light-years of the galaxy in which the Realm of the Llurdi lay.

As has been intimated, the Llurdi were literal folk. When any llanzlan issued a directive he meant it literally, and it was always as literally carried out.

Thus, when Llanzlan Klazmon ordered the construction of an installation of such a nature that “no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed” he meant precisely that—and that was precisely what was built. Nor, since the Llurdi had full command of the fourth and fifth orders, and some sixth-order apparatus as well, was the task overlong in the doing.

The entire one-hundred-six-mile circumference of Llurdias and a wide annulus outside the city proper were filled with tremendous fortresses; each of which was armed and powered against any contingency to which Computer Prime—almost half a cubic mile of miniaturization packed with the accumulated knowledges and happenings of some seventy thousand years—could assign a probability greater than point zero zero zero one.

Each of those fortresses covered five acres of ground; was low and flat. Each was built of super-hard, super-tough, super-refractory synthetic. Each had twenty-seven high-rising, lightning-rodlike spikes of the same material. Fortress-shell and spikes through closely spaced cast-in tubes; and the entire periphery of each fortress, as well as dozens of interior relief-points, went deep into constantly water-soaked, heavily salted ground. Each fortress sprouted scores of antennae—parabolic, box, flat, and straight—and scores of heavily insulated projectors of shapes to be defined only by a professional mathematician of solid geometry.

And how the Llurdan detectors could now cover space! The Jelm Mergon, long before his abortive attempt to break jail, had developed a miniaturized monitor station that could detect, amplify, and retransmit on an aimed tight beam any fifth-or sixth-order signal from and to a distance of many kiloparsecs.

Hundreds of these “mergons” were already out in deep space. Now mergons were being manufactured in lots of a thousand, and in their thousands they were being hurled outward from Llurdiax, to cover—by relays en cascade—not only the Llurdan galaxy and a great deal of intergalactic space, but also a good big chunk of inter-universal space as well.

The Fenachrone fleet bored on through intergalactic space at its distance-devouring sixth-order pace. Its fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order detector webs fanned out far—“far” in the astronomical sense of the word—ahead of it. They were set to detect, not only the most tenuous cloud of gas, but also any manifestation whatever upon any of the known bands of any of those orders. Similar detectors reached out to an equal distance above and below and to the left of and to the right of the line of flight; so that the entire forward hemisphere was on continuous web of ultra-tenuous but ultra-sensitive detection.

And, as that fleet approached a galaxy lying well to “starboard”—the term was still in use aboard ship except for matters of record, since the direction of action of artificial gravity, whatever its actual direction, was always “down”—two sets of detectors tripped at once.

The squat and monstrous officer on watch reported this happening instantly, of course, to Sleemet himself; and of course Sleemet himself went instantly into action. He energized his flagship’s immense fifth-order projector.

Those detections could have only one meaning. There was at least one solar system in that galaxy peopled by entities advanced enough to work with forces of at least the fifth order. They should be destroyed—that is, he corrected himself warily, unless they were allied with or belonged to that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Overlord of the Central System of the First Galaxy ... But no, at this immense distance the probability of that was vanishingly small.

They might, however, have weapons of the sixth. The fact that there were no such devices in operation at the moment did not preclude that possibility.

Very unlike the late unlamented Fenor he, First Scientist Sleemet, was not stupidly and arrogantly sure that the Fenachrone were in fact the ablest, most intelligent, and most powerful race of beings in existence. He would investigate, of course. But he would do it cautiously.

The working projections of the Fenachrone were tight patterns of force mounted on tight beams. Thus, until they began to perform exterior work, they were virtually indetectable except by direct interception and hard-driven specific taps. Sleemet knew this to be a fact; whether the projection was on, above, or below the target planet’s surface and even though that planet was so far away that it would take light hundreds of centuries to make the one-way trip.

The emanations of his vessels’ sixth-order cosmic-energy drive, however, were very distinctly something else. They could not be damped out or masked and they could be detected very easily by whoever or whatever it was that was out there ... Yes, an exploration would not change matters at all ...

As a matter of fact, the Fenachrone Fleet’s emanations had been detected a full two seconds since.

A far-outpost mergon had picked it up and passed it along to a second, which in turn had relayed it inward to its Number Three, which finally had delivered it to Computer Prime on incredibly distant Llurdiax.

There, in Hall Prime of Computation, a section supervisor had flicked the switch that had transferred the unusual bit of information to his immediate superior, Head 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 inter-planetary 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 thermonuclear 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 Klarton, 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 multi-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 chlorine-breathing, amoeboid monstrosities inhabiting Galaxy DW-427-LU. Those creatures, however, as far as any Llurd had ever learned, had always confined their activities to their own galaxy. If, Klazmon thought grimly to himself, those insanely murderous amoeboids had decided to extend their operations into the Galaxy of the Llurdi, they would find such extension a very expensive one indeed.

Wherefore, hunched now over a black-filtered visiplate, with slitted eyes narrow and cat-whiskers stiffly outthrust; with both hands manipulating high-ratio vernier knobs in infinitesimal arcs; Klazmon shoveled on the coal.