Skylark DuQuesne

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 thank you!” he enthused. “I thank you immensely for the inestimable privilege of meeting the ladies Barlo! They possess a talent that is indubitably 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-See-Nee 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 stasis of time…”

“Huh? That’s news to me. How’s he figuring on doing it — did he say?”

“Uh-uh. I didn’t talk to him. Peggy says he isn’t going to say anything about it until he can present the package.”

“He should live so long. But ’scue, please; go ahead.”

“Only one more. Fodan, the simple-minded old darling, wants to work with them. Convert them!”

“Yeah. Make Christians of ’em. I’ve got a life-sized picture in technicolor of anybody ever accomplishing that feat. The trouble is, everybody wants to do something different and none of their ideas are any good at all.”

“Oh? I noticed that you haven’t been enthusiastic about any of them. Pretty grim, in fact. Why not?”

“Because none of ’em will come even close to getting ’em all and this has got to be a one hundred point zero zero zero per cent cleanup. You know how they operate on a cancer. They cut deep enough and wide enough to get it all. Every cell. If they don’t get it all it spreads all over the body and the patient dies. This is a cancer. It’s already eaten just about all of that galaxy by Chlora-typing planets wherever they go — or rather, enslaved humans are doing it for them — and it’s spreading fast. And when that galaxy begins to get crowded they won’t just jump to one other; they’ll go for hundreds or thousands of galaxies and there goes the ball game. So that cancer has got to be operated on before it spreads any farther.”

Dorothy’s face began to pale. “By that analogy you mean destroy the whole galaxy! How can such a thing be possible? It can’t possibly be possible!”

He told her how the operation could be performed. That apparatus that the Barlo women had dredged up out of nowhere had a lot of capabilities that did not appear on the surface. Blackie DuQuesne had perceived one set of those possibilities, and he and Blackie had been working on the hardware. They were calling it Project Rho.

Her face, already pale, turned white as he talked; and when he had finished:

“Project… Rho,” she breathed. “How utterly horrible! And yet… I never dreamed… have you talked to Martin yet?”

“No. You first. I don’t want to even think about pushing that kind of a button without being sure you’re standing at my back.”

“I’ll do better than that, Dick,” She looked him steadily in the eye. “I’ll take half of it. My finger will be right beside yours on that button.”

“You are an ace, ace. As maybe I’ve said once before.”

“Uh-huh, at least once — but we’re one, remember?” After a moment she went on, “But we can’t possibly sell the Norlaminians any such bill of goods as that.”

“I’ll say we can’t. They’d cry their eyes out all over the place. Or wait… When they find out that they can’t stop it, they’ll help save the human planets, which will be all to the good; the witches can use the help. But basically, the grand slam will be up to DuQuesne and his Fenachrone and the witches and Mart and me. Even Mart will need some persuasion, I’m afraid; and you’ll have to really work on Peg. She’ll simply have a litter of kittens.”

“Why, Dick; what a way to talk!” She smiled in spite of herself, but sobered quickly.

“She’ll come around, I’m sure; she’ll have to. But Dick, is it actually physically possible? It’s so huge!”

“Definitely. You see, we’ll be operating in a Gunther universe, so that mass as such won’t enter and power will be no problem. All we have to do is build an apparatus to alter the properties of space around and throughout the object to be moved — altering those properties in such a way as to make its three-dimensional attributes incompatible with those of its…”

She stopped him with an upraised band. “Hold it! Wait up, please. We’ll dispense with the high math, if you don’t mind. It’s the sheer size of the thing that scares me witless.”

Seaton did grin then. “Well, you’ve always known that making things bigger and better is the fondest thing I am of. But we know exactly how to do it, and I think we can get it done before the Norlaminians finish theirs. But DuQuesne should be about ready to take off. I’ll flip myself over there and see.”

He did so and said, “How’re you doing, Blackie?”

“A few minutes yet to finish final checking. I’ve been thinking. What kind of a celestial object will that galaxy be when we get done with it? Not a quasi-stellar, certainly; that’s only a star with the energy of a hundred thousand million stars. This will be a galaxy with the energy of a hundred thousand million galaxies — the energy of an entire universe.”

“Yeah. Something new, I’d say. It’ll give some astronomers a thrill, some day. But what I can’t compute is, whether or not it will sterilize the interstellar space of that galaxy.” Seaton said.

“Well, if it doesn’t, you might put the Osnomians and Urvanians on it. Keep ’em from thinking about fighting each other.”

“You know, Blackie, I’d thought of doing exactly that? ‘Great minds’ and so forth. ‘Bye now; be seein’ ya,” and Seaton flipped himself back home.

En route to his destination — barren planet in a starcluster on the opposite side of the galaxy from the Skylark of Valeron — DuQuesne again went into a huddle with Sleemet.

“So far, you’ve done a job,” he began. “What I told you to do — what I knew how to do — and done it well. But nothing else. Now I want something more than that. Something you can do, if you will, that I can’t. As you know, I’ve made arrangements so that in case of my death this whole planetoid goes up in an atomic blast. That was to keep you from killing me and making off with it. The same thing will happen, though, if those Chlorans kill me in the fracas that’s coming. It would seem as though that fact would be enough to make you make an honest-to-God Effort to be sure that they don’t kill me by doing your damnedest to help me kill them. Mentally. Both you and the Chlorans know more about one phase of that than I do — as yet. So, as added inducement to really top effort, if you’ll really tear into it on this Project Rho I’ll teach you everything I know that you can take. And I’ll help you build any kind of spacecraft you want before you leave; one even as big as this one. What do you say?”

Sleemet’s strange eyes glowed. “If you will go mind to mind with me on that I can now assure you of such cooperation as no member of my race has ever given to any non-Fenachrone form of life,” he declared; and DuQuesne handed him a headset.

It wasn’t easy, not even for such an accomplished liar as Marc C. DuQuesne was, to make the four-dim gizmo very much more incomprehensible than it actually was; but he accomplished the feat — and he actually did give Sleemet practically everything else.

The DQ went into a one-day orbit above one point of an immense plain of the barren planet that was its goal. A plain some ten thousand square miles of which became forthwith an Area of Work. Enormous mechanisms sprang into being, by means of which DuQuesne and several hundred top-bracket Fenachrone engineers sent gigantic beams of force hurtling across the galaxy to the Skylark of Valeron and to hundreds of thousands of other micrometrically determined points.

But not Sleemet. That wight, knowing now almost everything that DuQuesne knew, was working in his own private laboratory — working with all the power of his tremendous mind on the various mental aspects of the battle of giants to come.

Hour after hour, Crane worked in his master control at the base of the Brain, with Madame Barlo and Drasnik and Margaret, each wearing an extra-complex headset, sitting close to him. They were mapping and modeling three galaxies, on such a large scale that the vast “tank” of the Skylark of Valeron was millions of times too small. They were using a discus-shaped volume of open space some ten light-years in diameter and three light-years thick.

Galaxy DW-427-LU was already meticulously in place; its every celestial body being represented by a characteristically colored light. “Above” Galaxy DW-427-LU and “below” it (the terms are used in the explanatory sense only; “on one side of” and “on the other side of” could be used just as well) as close to it as possible, two other galaxies were being modeled; each as nearly like DW-427-LU in size and shape as could be found in that part of the First Universe. They were so close together that in many places the three models actually interpenetrated.

Now in the space-time continuum of the strictly material — the plenum in which we ungifted human beings live and which our friends the semanticists would have us believe is the only one having any reality — the map is not the territory. That is taken as being axiomatic. In the demesne of The Talent, however, known to some scholars as psionics and to scoffers as magic or witchcraft, the map is — and definitely! — the territory.

Thus, as Madame Barlo and Drasnik, those two matched poles of tremendous power; and Crane, the superlatively able coordinator and his matching pole Margaret; and that immense Brain — as these five labored together, the “map” (in this case the meticulously accurate space-chart) became filled with tendrils and filaments of psionic force, connecting models of suns with models of suns and those of planets with those of planets. And as those joinings occurred in the map, the same joinings occurred in the actual galaxies out in deep space.

Those joinings were invisible, it is true, and intangible, and indetectable to any physical instrument. But they were nevertheless as real as was the almost infinite power from which they sprang.

The other pairs of psiontists were also hard at work. Fodan and Grand Dame Barlo, Sacner Carfon and KayLee, Charles van der Gleiss and Madlyn Mannis, Mergon and his Luloy, Tammon and Sennlloy — all were shooting heavy charges fast and flawlessly straight. And as all those matched pairs labored, and as the automatics of pure psionic force they produced reproduced themselves in geometric ratio, the intergalactic couplings increased at a rate that was that ratio squared.

Seaton was fantastically busy, too. He was deep in his controller, with Dorothy and Stephanie de Marigny, both helmeted, one on each side of him. Dorothy, was, of course, his matched pole of power; Stephanie was his link to DuQuesne. He, too, was operating a ten-thousand-square-mile Area of Work with the speed of thought and he was not making any mistakes. It is true that the Skylark of Valeron was the biggest thing he had ever built before, and that the members with which he was working now were parsecs instead of inches long. Nevertheless each one fitted perfectly into place and every one that was supposed to connect with anything of DuQuesne’s connected perfectly therewith. After many hours of this furiously grinding work, a myriad of hells began to break out, at the rate of hundreds of thousands per second. Of hells, that is, infinitely hotter than anything imaginable by man. Of super-novae, no less. In one galaxy, a large hot sun vanished…

It reappeared instantaneously — with no lapse of time whatever — close beside the sun of a Chloran-dominated solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU.

And in that same no-time the Tellus-type planet in the Chloran system vanished therefrom and reappeared in a precisely similar orbit around a Type G dwarf sun in Galaxy B, the third galaxy in the psiontists’ tremendous working model.

And those two suns in the Chloran solar system in Galaxy DW-427-LU, with photospheres in contact and with intrinsic velocities not only diametrically opposed but increased horribly by their mutual force of gravitation, crashed together in direct central impact and splashed with tremendous force.

Except for the heat, the collision might have lasted for a long time. But heat was the all-important factor — the starkly incomprehensible heat of hundreds of millions of Centigrade degrees.

Each of those suns was already an atomic furnace in precise equilibrium, generating and radiating the energy of some five million tons per second of matter being converted completely into energy. Thus there was no place for the added energy of billions of tons of matter to go. It could not be absorbed and it could not be radiated. Therefore the whole enormous mass of super-hot, super-dense material began to go into the long series of ultra-atomic explosions that is the formation of a supersuper-nova — the most utterly, the most fantastically violent display of pure, raw energy known to or possible in the universe of man.

Flares and prominences of this insanely detonating material were hurled upward and outward for millions upon millions of miles. Shock-wave after shock-wave, so hellishly hot as to be invisible for days, raged and raved spherically outward; converting instantaneously all the flotsam in their paths into their own unknown composition or atomic and subatomic debris. Planets lasted a little longer. Oceans and mountain ranges boiled briefly; after which each world evaporated comparatively slowly, as does a drop of water riding a cushion of its own steam on a hot steel plate. And the sphere of annihilation, ravening outward with unabated ferocity, reached and passed the outermost limits of the Chloran solar system and kept on going…

On and on… And on…

Until there came to pass an event which not even Seaton, not even Madame Barlo herself had foreseen… and an event which nearly canceled all their efforts and their lives as well; for the Chlorans were not left without resources even in the destruction of their galaxy…