Skylark DuQuesne

25. ROMAN CANDLES

COUNTLESS parsecs away, Marc C. DuQuesne was carrying out his own plans — plans which would have been a most unpleasant surprise for the Skylarkers had they known about them.

DuQuesne moved the surviving Fenachrone into his DQ easily enough and without incident. Housing was no problem. How could it be, with millions upon millions of cubic kilometers of space available and with automatic high-order constructors to do the work? Nor was atmosphere, nor food nor any other necessity or desideratum of Fenachronian life and/or well-being a problem.

Fenachrone engineers did it all — by operating special keyboards and by thinking into carefully limited headsets but none of them had any idea whatever of what it was that did any given task or how it did it. None of this knowledge, of either practice or theory, was in their science; and DuQuesne took great pains to be sure that none of them got any chance to learn any iota of it. He taught them, and they learned, purely by rote.

Like high-school girls learning to drive automobiles. They can become excellent drivers; but with only that type of instruction none of them will ever become able to design a hypoid gear or to understand in detail the operation of an automatic clutch.

The Fenachrone did not like such treatment. Sleemet in particular, when he began to recover some of the normal pugnaciously prideful spirit of his race, did not like it at all and said so; but DuQuesne did not care a particle whether he liked it or not.

DuQuesne’s snapping black eyes stared, contemptuously unaffected, into the furiously hypnotic, red-lighted black eyes of the Fenachrone. “You megalomaniacal cretin,” he sneered. “How can you possibly figure that it makes any difference whatever to me, what you like or don’t like? If you have any fraction of a brain you’d better start using it. If you haven’t or can’t or won’t, I’ll build you a duplicate of your original ship and turn you all loose today.”

“You will? In that case—” Sleemet got that far and stopped cold in mid-sentence.

“Yeah.” DuQuesne’s tone cut like a knife. “Exactly. We’re still within Klazmon’s range; we will be for quite a while yet. Do you want to be turned loose here?”

“Well, no.” If the thought occurred to him that DuQuesne was lying, he didn’t show it.

That was just as well for Sleemet and for the Fenachrone race. DuQuesne wasn’t.

“Maybe you have a brain of sorts, at that. But if you don’t forget this Master Race flapdoodle, all of it and fast, you’ll last quick. Remember how easily that self-styled Overlord wiped out your navy and then volatilized your whole stinking world? And how easily Klazmon of Llurdiax smacked your whole fleet down? And what a fool I made and am still making of Klazmon? And I know of one race that is as much ahead of mine as I am ahead of you; and of another race that may be somewhat ahead of us Xyhnnians in some ways. As I said, you’re about eleven hundred thousand years behind. Have you got brains enough to realize that instead of being top dog you’re just low man on the totem pole?”

“If you’re so high and we’re so low,” Sleemet snarled, “why did you take us away from the Llurd? Of what possible use can we be to you?”

“You have certain mental and physical qualities that may perhaps be of use in a project I have in mind. You are not only able and willing to fight, you really like to fight. These qualities should, theoretically, make you better in some respects than automatics in operating the offensive weapons of a base as large as this one is.” DuQuesne studied the Fenachrone appraisingly. “I do not really need you, but I am willing to make the experiment on the terms I have stated. I will allow you two Xylmnian minutes in which to decide whether or not to cooperate with me in such an experiment.”

“We will cooperate,” Sleemet said in less than one minute; whereupon DuQuesne told him in broad terms what he had in mind.

And for many days thereafter the two, so unlike physically but so similar in so many respects mentally, devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the finer and ever finer refine-ment of the placing and tuning of mechanisms and of the training of already hard-trained personnel.

But DuQuesne knew that, given the slightest opportunity, the Fenachrone would take high delight in killing him and taking the DQ. Wherefore he did not at any time trust any one of them as far as he could spit.

Moreover, DuQuesne was not quite as sure of his own victory as he had given the Fenachrone to understand. DuQuesne was not easy in his mind about Galaxy DW-427-LU. He hadn’t been, not since some superpowered enemy in that galaxy had attacked Seaton’s Skylark of Valeron without warning and had burned her down to a core before she could get out of range. And she hadn’t been able to fight back. That one blast back at them couldn’t have done any damage.

It had been that uneasiness that had been responsible for the DQ’s terrific armament and for DuQuesne’s wanting the Fenachrone for a crew. Wherefore, as soon as the Fenachrone were settled in their new quarters and before they had recovered enough of their normal combativeness to become completely unmanageable, DuQuesne got “on the com” with Sleemet.

“… I don’t give a damn what happens to Earth or to Norlamin. I’m no longer interested in either,” he said in part. “But I don’t want it to happen to me and you don’t want it to happen to you. You agree with me, I’m sure, that a good strategist does not leave an enemy behind him without knowing, at very least, who that enemy is and what he can do.”

“That is one of the basics, yes.”

“All right. Somebody in this galaxy here has more muscle than I like.” DuQuesne pointed out Galaxy DW-427-LU in his tank and told Sleemet what had happened to the Skylark of Valeron, then went on, “On theoretical grounds, the degree of synchronization could make all the difference.” He had reached by theory the same point that Seaton had arrived at by experience. “Hence, the greater the number of operators — of equal skill, of course — the tighter the output. The efficiency will vary directly as the cube of the number of operators.”

“I see.” Sleemet did see, and for the first time became really interested. “That will be to our advantage as well as yours. You will have to teach us much.”

“I’ll teach you everything you have to know. Nothing else.”

“That is assumed… But I see no possibility of assurance that you will keep your bargain… or will you go mind to mind that you will release us and build us a ship after this one expedition as your crew?”

“Yes. Without reservation.”

“In that case we will cooperate fully.”

And they did — and so it was that the DQ became the most fantastically armed and powered and defended fortress that had ever moved its own mass through space.

As the DQ approached Galaxy DW-427-LU, with everything she had either wide open or on the trips, DuQuesne braked her down and swung into what he called “the curve of fastest getaway” — and as he did so, in the instant, the mighty vessel’s every defense went blinding-white.

And in that same instant two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven Fenachrone, males and females but superlatively expert technicians all, pressed activating switches and took command, each of a tightly clustered battery of micrometrically synchronized generators.

And one black-browed, hard-eyed Tellurian, sat with his head buried in the DQ’s master-control helmet.

While he had not expected to find any significant fraction of what he actually found, he was not too appalled to go viciously and pin-point-accurately to work. Working through the fourth dimension, with the transfinite speed of thought, he hurled bomb after bomb after multi-billion kiloton superatomic bomb: and the target world of each one of those bombs became a sun.

And the DQ got away. She was by no means intact; but, since her skin had been very much thicker than the Valeron’s to start with, there was still some of it left when she got out of range.

Thereupon DuQuesne put on the headset of the DQ’s Brain and began to think. He had tried direct attack on the galaxy of Chlorans; it had failed. His next step, obviously, was to decide what his next step should be.

The flesh-and-blood brain that was thinking into the energy-and-metal Brain of the DQ was no whit less logical, no iota less unsentimental in its judgments than the great computer itself. Man-brain and machine-brain together considered the evidence.

Datum: The DQ was not up to handling Galaxy DW-427-LU. Datum: Not even the added muscle conferred by the willing cooperation of the Fenachrone was enough to make it so. Datum: No discoverable increase of its armaments or its crew would give it even a fighting chance against the energies that had just come so close to destroying it.

Wherefore—

Finally, an hour later, DuQuesne raised the microphone of a repeating sixth-order broadcasting transmitter to his lips and said — dispassionately, unemotionally and with no more expression than if he had been ordering up his lunch: “DuQuesne calling Seaton reply as before stop.”