Part 10

"As I said, defeat was forced upon us. Yes, we must accept defeat."

"Then broadcast the order to cease firing. Order Terra to drop its arms and submit."

"Will the integrity of our people be preserved?"

"Unconditional surrender does not permit terms."

"I will surrender unconditionally--but I demand the right to be treated as a worthy opponent."

"Your defeat at our hands was inevitable."

"We know that."

"Then why did you fight?"

"Only to gain your respect as an enemy."

Lindoo bowed his head briefly. "You have our respect. You have had our respect enough to cause a major change in the Master Plan. You will not be treated with contempt. There will be no looting, no pillage. Not if you will submit without further fight."

"Your terms I accept."

And Kennebec picked up the communicator and snapped the switch to General Broadcast.

* * * * *

And on Procyon IV, four survivors clustered around a crude, haywired receiver picked up the message. When it was through, they left their hidden cave full of Loard-vogh souvenirs. Openly they walked to the nearest encampment and knocked on the stockade.

And across the Galaxy to Vorgan, Lord of All, went the final word:

"The Solarian Sector is complete. All Solarians are being tested for adaptability, and upon completion will be trans-shipped to the proper situations in the Loard-vogh empire. Terra, Sol, and the entire Mutation Area will be left devoid of life."

Within hours, Lindoo was working on the problem of displacement. He--and all of the Loard-vogh--worked madly to complete this project. For all of them wanted to leave, forever, the former Planet of Terror.

Terra--conquered, completely!

XVII.

Lindoo's return from the Solar Sector was that of a conqueror. There were speeches and parades, and public demonstrations; and the hours wore by interminably. Lindoo knew just how important his victory had been, and yet how obvious had been his chances of winning. Even the Head of Strategy of a proud and tyrannical race could feel within him the seeds of discontent. He suffered the publicity because such propaganda was necessary, and as soon as he could, he sought private audience with Vorgan.

"Hail the conquering hero," greeted Vorgan, as Lindoo entered. The tone was slightly sarcastic.

Lindoo was not hurt. "How many know?" he asked the Lord of All.

"Very few--thanks to a pleased fate."

"But we know," said Lindoo bitterly. "What a victory. A bulldozer crushing an ant hill; a pile driver smashing eggs; an elephant warding off mosquitoes."

"And yet," Vorgan told him, "unlimited freedom would build the ant hill beyond the ability of the bulldozer, and the mosquitoes could smother the elephant if their numbers filled the atmosphere. It was necessary."

Lindoo nodded. "We lost seventeen million of our first-line fighting men. They were bitter opponents."

"Think of what might have happened if they'd expanded for another two thousand years."

"That would be double their scientific history, I think," agreed Lindoo. "They've been expanding on a high order exponential curve. Another two thousand years would have put a barrier across the Galaxy with the Solar Sector at the center, and the Loard-vogh might never complete their plan. We acted rightly, Vorgan. But in spite of seventeen million men lost, and in spite of the danger to our plans, I feel that there is something strictly awry. They are an intelligent race. They must have known their inability to win--yet they fought like demons. We could well afford to lose seventeen million expendables. They could not, yet--?"

"Did they?"

"They must have. Our forces may have been overeager. An attacking force usually loses more than the defending force. Our fighter psychology is more battle-minded than theirs, for our soldiers are trained to think only in terms of battle. But even so, Vorgan, the tacticians and statisticians estimate that we could have lost no more than two to one. And granting that, it means a loss of eight and one half million men lost from the Solar Sector."

* * * * *

Vorgan thought that over. "They could ill afford to lose that many of their prime citizens."

"And knowing that, and knowing that they are of a high order of intelligence, I ask again: Why did they fight?"

"Could it have been sheer desperation?"

"There was calculated strategy in their battle plan. There was a purpose, I tell you. It is obscure to me, but there was a definite plan, and no plan is executed without a purpose."

"Could they have hoped to hold us off?"

"Never. They knew our strength. They knew our plan. They understood our purpose, and they recognized our determination. Does the weakling, knowing all factors, fight against his superior?"

"It might have been the determination--knowing they must lose--to take as many enemies with them as possible."

"The cornered rat technique?"

"It has been done before," observed Vorgan.

Lindoo agreed. "You were not there," he told the Lord of All. "Their plan bore the stamp of a superior strategist who had some purpose in mind. A purpose that required him to fight a losing battle for other reasons than the cornered rat technique. You see, Vorgan, the cornered rat technique presents a rather peculiar psychological problem. It is a suicide-fighter's psychology. And suicide fighters operate in a vastly different manner than a man who is fighting for something beyond the abstract concepts of a victory for his contemporaries and his descendants. Even the most vicious and well-trained of suicide fighters is inferior to a reasonably well trained man wrested from his home and impressed for service. The psychology of the suicide fighter evolves into a seeking-for-death technique, which lessens his survival factor over a man fighting to preserve his integrity--and fighting to get the battle over with so that he can go home and resume his daily life. We know that. That is why the Loard-vogh fighter is supreme. He is no suicide fighter. He is vicious because he has been wrested from his home and family, and his tenure of service depends upon his ability. Since a victorious soldier is mustered out of arms and sent home sooner than a lax one, it urges all men to perform great deeds, act in a superior manner, and to be victorious in the shortest time so that he may return to his daily life. The Terrans are far from suicide fighters, Lord of All. Their theories of warfare are similar to ours. In fact," smiled Lindoo thoughtfully, "every race that offers us a stiff resistance seems to have come to that conclusion."

"Then what was their purpose? Seems to me that they must have been fighting for something."

"I don't know. They will fight if outnumbered, of course. The entire Solar Sector is composed of forms of life with a bitterly high value of survival factor. That, coupled with high intelligence, should indicate that surrender offers the greater number of survivals."

"Perhaps you do not understand their psychology."

Lindoo admitted this. "I have with me their mental leader--the former susceptible Billy Thompson. Perhaps we may get some idea by questioning him."

"Have him brought in," agreed Vorgan.

He pressed a button.

A crack opened in the ceiling, and down from above there dropped a reflection-free sheet of perfect glass. It slid in fitted slides, and sealed off the room into two sections.

The section occupied by Lindoo and his emperor was large and roomy, but the other section was small, a sort of cove, off of the main room. A man-at-arms moved an ornate chair that stopped the descent of the glass, and when the sheet of glass reached the floor, men-at-arms went around the edges and sealed it with a gluey mixture that came from portable pressure-guns. This was done on both sides, and as those on the small side left the room through the tiny square door, one of them snapped a button on the wall. The invisible and soundless atomizer-vents in the ceiling filled the air with a gentle spray of the best bactericide known to the Loard-vogh.

The tiny door opened again, and Billy Thompson entered, leaving his glass case attached to the door frame on the other side.

His nose wrinkled at the smell of the bactericide, but he grinned at the precautions. He, the vanquished, still held sway over their fears.

Thompson advanced and saluted. Then he waited.

"Arrogant, to boot," snapped Vorgan to Lindoo. His voice came to Billy out of the speaker in the ceiling, and Thompson stifled the natural impulse to face the position from which came the voice. He faced Vorgan.

"Not arrogant," he said quietly. "I merely request the respect shown to a vanquished, but adequate adversary."

"Our adversaries are always vanquished," snapped Lindoo. "And they become our slaves."

"A slave you may consider me," nodded Billy. "That I can not change. But the self-respect I have for having been vanquished only after a bitter fight requires me to consider myself more than a voiceless slave. You can not change that."

Vorgan looked at Lindoo. "Was that your reason for fighting?" asked the Lord of All.

"The basic reason for all strife," said Billy, "is to impose your will upon your adversaries."

Vorgan and Lindoo nodded impatiently.

"We fought to impose our will upon you. Our will is that we of the Solar Sector gain your respect, slaves though we must be."

"And you were willing to lose eight and one half million men to gain that respect?"

"Your estimate is wrong. We lost but seven thousand souls--five thousand of which were civilians caught in the backwash and splash-over from our fighting."

"Seven thous--" exploded Vorgan, visibly shaken.

"Seventeen million--" cried Lindoo hoarsely.

"Your losses?" asked Billy of Lindoo.

The Head of Strategy nodded.

"It is deplorable. I am sorry--"

"How dare you!" thundered Vorgan. "How dare you, a slave, to feel sorry for your masters?"

Thompson smiled wanly. "Would I get better treatment if I claimed to be glad of your losses?"

"I'll have your throat--"

"Careful, Lord of All, you are not being fair. I am damned for being sorry and equally damned if I feel glad. Do you prefer my sympathy or my hatred?"

"You brazen, arrogant--"

"Vorgan, I and all of the Solar Sector are at your mercy. We fought you to prove our ability, and to gain your respect. Had we surrendered without a fight, we would have gained your contempt. Also," smiled Thompson, "it is foreign to our psychology to give up easily. But the main reason for fighting was to extract from you a modicum of respect. That we have done."

"You assume--"

"I know. You are puzzled by my temerity, amused by my position, and completely baffled by my purpose. Were it not so, I would be dead instead of here, behind this protecting glass. For otherwise you wouldn't bother with a race so dangerous to your very lives. Am I correct?"

"Assume so. And proceed."

* * * * *

"The thing that makes us dangerous to you is the same thing that will make us useful to you."

"A moment. At this point I can wait no longer," said Lindoo. "Before this bold Terran leads us too far from the subject, I must know: How did you preserve your forces in that bitter fighting where your ships fell like hail?"

"We ran out of ships, not men," smiled Thompson. "We adapted a phase of the snatcher beam to personnel-protection. Each man carried a focal attractor in his clothing. Ship-destruction triggered a fast time-constant multi-driver circuit that inclosed each man in the incompressible spheres of the atomic crusher principle. They were withdrawn from the stricken ship while it was still exploding and brought back safely to a redistributing station where they re-entered the battle in a new ship."

"We'll make a note of that," rumbled Vorgan. Lindoo looked a bit ashamed of himself for not having thought of it before.

"Now, Terran," said Lindoo, "there was talk of a secret weapon. What was it and why was it not used?"

"As a means of destruction," explained Thompson, "nothing of that nature exists. Terra's secret weapon in this case lies within your own minds. We were fighting for survival, and the retention of our integrity. Our secret weapon is the respect we extracted from you in fighting valiantly and losing necessarily. Our secret weapon is our minds and our ability to employ logic and data to a problem and come up with an answer. The personnel snatcher is but one phase of this weapon we possess. You admire it. It is, of course, yours by right of conquest. Other developments will be yours, also. But they would be lost if we had been merely trampled over and our interesting facets ignored by the high councils of the Loard-vogh. You have a horde of problems, Lord of All. A myriad of problems that we of Terra may solve. I offer you the Solar Sector as a research area!"

"You offer?" asked Vorgan, puzzled. "You infer that we have not taken?"

"Permit us our integrity. Sol is our home. Sol is unfit for you, and Terrans are not well liked in your empire because of the living death we carry. Permit us to remain in the Solar Sector and we will be your research area."

"And free to breed discontent?" asked Lindoo.

"Are we fools? Our battle was to impress you with our ability to be recognized as worthy. Another fight would prove our lack of intellectual grasp of the truth. Permit us to live as we were, and you will have all of the benefits of our rather harsh environment to aid you in your plan. Were you of another psychology, I'd offer alliance, but being what you are I can but offer allegiance."

"Offers!" scorned Vorgan impatiently. "We demand."

"You cannot force mental activity," reminded Thompson. "You can drive a slave to fetch and carry, to become agricultural, to be menial. But you can never drive a man into mental activity. The subconscious mind will block. The subconscious mind will divert, and will work against those who drive, and the result will be complete loss of Sol's children and the benefits of a violent heredity. Permit us to remain as we are. Put overseers there, communications offices. We will solve your problems."

* * * * *

Lindoo whispered to Vorgan for a moment. The Lord of All snapped off the communicator, and he and the Head of Strategy spoke for an hour while Billy waited in silence, wondering what they had in mind. Finally Vorgan turned the communicator on again and said:

"Terran, if what you say is true, you are correct in your assumption that Sol will be of value as she is. I offer you a chance to prove it. Sscantoo is against all forms of alliance. Sscantoo will ally herself with any other race temporarily to fight us. The entire Galaxy may spring against us if Sscantoo can not be subdued. We must attack Sscantoo in the due course of time.

"There is one difficulty, however. The Sscantovians are not a gregarious race. Eventually we shall have the same trouble with Sscantoo as we have had with Tlembo. The catmen will seek a worthy adversary, and cause us to attack some sector long before our plan calls for it. Your premature battle was but one in several caused by Tlembo, all of which bring the Loard-vogh out of line and off balance like a runner careening downhill. Numberless though we may seem, we cannot overrun the Galaxy until our numbers permit it. It must be taken slowly and with definite pattern.

"Now, Terran, we can wait one year before we hit Sscantoo. I'll give you that one year, Terran. In that year, you must devise a means of gathering Sscantoo into the Loard-vogh empire. It must be done without battle. It must be done without losing a man--no, that is expecting too much," smiled the Lord of All nastily, "it must be done without losing more than one hundred men! That does not include Sscantovians, of course."

"Within one year," said Billy Thompson, "we will hand you Sscantoo as a willing part of the Loard-vogh empire. It will be done without battle, without losing more than one hundred men in the process. What will happen to the Sscantovians I will not presume to care, but I shall destroy as few as possible. During that year, of course, we will be free to work?"

"I will countermand the order displacing all Solar Persons save a small percentage willing to act as data clerks and research co-ordinators," said Vorgan. "That is my will."

"You will be more than amply repaid," said Thompson. "And one research we will make to provide the Galaxy with adequate protection against visiting Terrans, and protection for those visiting the Solar Sector. That, too, is a promise."

Within an hour, Thompson was on his way back to Terra. A year, he had. And four months would be gone ere he landed on Terra, and another long period of time would pass before he could get to Sscantoo. All in all, Billy felt that he had too little time.

Yet he smiled. For even in defeat, Terra would not lose her integrity. And how bad is slavery when the master prefixes his request with "Please"?

XVIII.

Billy Thompson fretted for four long months in the confines of the returning spacecraft. He was not idle. Daily he spent his time in the communications room, talking and conferring with his laboratory staff on Terra.

The order freeing the Solar Sector of its displacement of peoples took about ten days to clear, and another ten days to settle. It was swift; no Loard-vogh wanted to remain in that section of the Galaxy anyway. And though most of the worlds were cleaning up the shambles of the bitter struggle, the laboratory staff and research organizations went to work with a will. Let the others clean up the mess; it was their job to make the cleaning worth while by coming up with the answer to Billy's problem.

For only the right answer would leave Terrans around to inhabit a cleaned-up Terra.

So Billy fretted because he had to confer by voice alone. It did not matter that the secondary radiation from his subtransmitter, exciting bands in the electromagnetic spectrum near forty megacycles, would not reach Sol for hundreds of years, and that relative to his ship, the beams were hurled out backwards instead of coming forward toward Sol. But the four months were not entirely wasted. By the time that Billy landed, conferred with Kennebec on the future, discussed the major problem with a few Terran scientists, and then took off and finally arrived at the stellar laboratory on VanMaanen's Star's only, God-forsaken planet, they knew several hundred things that would not work.

Hendricks, the chief of staff, smiled wearily as Billy entered the safety dome and flipped back his space helmet.

"Hi, Billy. I hope you have a few new ideas."

"Nope. Not right now. I've been busier than the devil for the past seventy hours."

"So've we, on the last seventeen suggestions. We ran out of ideas when you ran into Terra. Now what?"

Billy grinned. "I'd like to see the quake area."

Hendricks blinked, blanched briefly, and then smiled wanly. "I thought so. Nothing to see, though. We do have a slow-action movie of the debacle. Reminds me of something out of a superthriller, shot in miniature. We had the sphere beam set up in duplex, one taking power out of the star, supplying the other beam which was clutching about five thousand miles of the star's core. The projectors were anchored to the crust of Brimstone, here, and we started pulling. We pulled like a dentist working on an impacted wisdom tooth. Unlike the dentist, the tooth stayed. We broke several beams, each one doing a bit of crust-cracking when the pressure let up. Then we took a big bite and heaved for all we were worth. A slab of crust about seven miles square heaved up, tilted like a poorly-trimmed raft in a heavy sea, and slid sidewise into the semi-plastic inner core of Brimstone."

"I'll bet it was bad, huh?"

* * * * *

"We all got away. The planet heaved and gurgled for a week before it settled down. But Brimstone is less strained than Terra and aside from a few scattered quakes now and then, she's quiet. Made a mess of that district, though. Horrible roaring, clouds of boiling steam, and all the trimmings out of a 'Birth of Terra' animated moving picture."

"Try it with an anchor set in the planet's core?"

"Yeah, but that's too much like anchoring a towline in a cup of custard. Too plastic. We might do it if stars weren't so confounded far apart. Beams get awfully thin on that projection even if we could make it, which I doubt."

"And if we could," said Billy, "we'd have to wait a few years while the beams got to our stars. They propagate at the speed of light, you know."

"Wonder if we could drop a beam from close by, go into superdrive and race for the other star, stretching--"

"What causes the traction?"

"The ... ah ... I see what you mean. It's the fact that the beam itself is ponderable and unyielding. Superdrive or no, the beam would propagate at speed of light and the superdriven ship would either be held back or the beam would break because of the space between excitation pulses. O.K., Billy, how do we jerk a hunk out of a star core?"

"We can't do the Samson Trick," said Billy, "but--"

"Samson Trick?"

"Samson was supposed to have brought the temple down about his ears by taking two of the main pillars and pulling one against the other. Well, we can't pull one star core against another, but why can't we set up a tripod, anchored in the stellar core, and then use that as a base for hauling with another beam? And feed power for the gadget from other stellar intake beams right from the star itself."

"In other words a sort of reflex Samson Trick? You make the star pull itself apart, with the aid of mankind and a few thousand years of technical development. I'll have the boys get to work."

"Did you get any compression?"

Hendricks shook his head.

"That was a vain hope. The stellar core is under hard compression already. O.K., Jim. Oh, Hello, Cliff."

"Hi, Billy. So you sold them a bill of goods?"

"Unless we get results, Lane, it'll be a bill of goods. If we come through, we're not bad off. Where's your sidekick?"

"Stellor? He'll be along directly. But look, Billy, what do you intend to do with this dingcrank when you get it working? Tear the guts out of the Sscantovian System?"

"Nope. Just insurance."

"We'll need it," grinned Lane. "You cut out a large hunk of selling when you ask Linzete and his gang of rugged, predatory individualists to form an alliance with the Loard-vogh."

"Trouble is that 'alliance' isn't the right word. I'm offering the grand and glorious opportunity of becoming willing subjects to the Loard-vogh."

"Huh. Never was a cat that took to being ordered around. Gosh, they're worse than we are. We'll take orders if it will do us any good. But Sscantovians? _Phoooo._"

"Well," said Billy, "when a lion tamer enters a cage full of cats he gets results. But most of them are well equipped with a revolver, a whip, and a four-legged stool. I'll walk in easily, tell the catmen to be nice, and wave my whip. But the whip has got to be loaded. Linzete wouldn't fall for a bluff. Cats don't. You've got to show 'em the stuff, and then you get your answer. Well, we've a couple of other things to try."

* * * * *

"We aren't licked yet," nodded Lane cheerfully. "But look, Billy, I'm still befuddled by Downing's stinking slow, methodical way of doing things. As I get it, Toralen Ki and Hotang Lu told us that we'd all be increased in mental stature after the Transformation."

"Sure. We are."

"I don't notice anything."