Part 20

"I'll say it's just as well!" Dorothy emphatically agreed. "I wouldn't listen to that again, even for a millionth of a second, for a million dollars--but I wouldn't have missed it for another million, either. I don't know whether to beg you to listen to it, Peggy, or to implore you not to."

"Don't bother," Margaret replied positively. "Anything that could throw you into such a hysterical tantrum as that did, I don't want any of at all. None at all, in fact, it would be altogether too much for--"

"Got them, folks--all done!" Seaton exclaimed. "You can put on your headsets now."

A signal lamp had flashed brightly and he knew that those two gigantic brains, working in perfect synchronism, had done instantaneously all that they had been set to do.

"Are you dead sure that they got them all, Dick?"

"Absolutely, and they got them in less time than it took the filament of the lamp to heat up. You can bank on it that all seven of them are in the can. I go off half cocked and make mistakes, but those Brains don't--they can't."

Seaton was right. Though far away, even as universal distances go, the Intellectuals had felt that broadcast thought and had shot toward its source at their highest possible speed. For in all their long lives and throughout all their cosmic wanderings they had never encountered thoughts of such wide scope, such clear cogency, such tremendous power.

The discarnate entities approached the amazing pattern of mental force which was radiating so prodigally and addressed it; and in that instant there were shot out curvingly from each of the mechano-electrical brains a gigantic, hemispherical screen.

Developing outwardly from the two vessels as poles with the unimaginable velocity possible only to sixth-order forces, the two cups were barriers impenetrable to any sixth-order force, yet neither affected nor were affected by the gross manifestations which human senses can perceive. Thus Solar Systems, even the neutronium cores of stars, did not hinder their instantaneous development.

Hundreds of light-years in diameter though they were, the open edges of those semiglobes of force met in perfect alignment and fused smoothly, effortlessly, instantaneously together to form a perfect, thought-tight sphere. The violently radiating thought-pattern which had so interested the Intellectuals disappeared, and at the same instant the ultrasensitive organisms of the entities were assailed by the to them deafening and blinding crash and flash of the welding together along its equator of the far-flung hollow globe.

These simultaneous occurrences were the first intimations that everything was not what it appeared, and the disembodied intelligences flashed instantly into furious activity, too late by the smallest possible instant of time. The trap was sprung, the sphere was impervious at its every point, and, unless they could break through that wall, the Intellectuals were incarcerated until Seaton should release his screens.

* * * * *

Within the confines of the globe there were not a few suns and thousands of cubic parsecs of space upon whose stores of energy the Intellectuals could draw. Wherefore they launched a concerted attack upon the wall, hurling against it all the force they could direct. But they were not now contending against the power of any human, organic, finite brain. For Seaton's mind, powerfully composite though it was of the mightiest intellects of the First Galaxy, was only the primary impulse which was being impressed upon the grids and was being amplified to any desirable extent by the almost infinite power of those two cubic miles of coldly emotionless, perfectly efficient, mechano-electrical artificial Brains.

Thus against every frantic effort of the Intellectuals within it the sphere was contracted inexorably, and as it shrank, reducing the volume of space from which the prisoners could draw energy, their struggles became weaker and weaker. When the ball of force was only a few hundred miles in diameter and the two vessels were relatively at rest, Seaton erected auxiliary stations around it and assumed full control.

Rapidly then the prisoning sphere, little larger now than a toy balloon, was brought through the inoson wall of the _Skylark_ and held motionless in the air above the Brain room. A complex structure of force was built around it, about which in turn there appeared a framework of inoson, supporting sixteen massive bars of uranium.

Seaton took off his helmet and sighed. "There, that'll hold them for a while, I guess."

"What are you going to do with them?" asked Margaret.

"Darned if I know, Peg," he admitted ruefully. "That's been pulling my cork ever since we figured out how to catch them. We can't kill them and I'm afraid to let them go, because they're entirely too hot to handle. So in the meantime, pending the hatching out of a feasible method of getting rid of them permanently, I have simply put them in jail."

"Why, Dick, how positively brutal!" Dorothy exclaimed.

"Yeah? There goes your soft heart again, Red-Top, instead of your hard head. I suppose it would be positively O.K. to let them loose, so that they can dematerialize all four of us? But it isn't as bad as it sounds, because I've got a stasis of time around them. We can leave them in there for seventeen thousand million years and even their intellects won't know it, because for them no time at all shall have lapsed."

"No-o-o--of course we can't let them go scot-free," Dorothy admitted, "but we--I should--well, maybe couldn't you make a bargain with them to give them their liberty if they will go away and let us alone? They're such free spirits, surely they would rather do that than stay bottled up there forever."

"Since they are purely intellectual and hence immortal, I doubt very much if they'll dicker with us at all," Seaton replied. "Time doesn't mean a thing to them, you know; but since you insist I'll check the stasis and talk it over with them."

A tenuous projection, heterodyned upon waves far below the band upon which the captives had their being, crept through the barrier screen and Seaton addressed his thoughts to the entity known as "One."

"Being highly intelligent, you have already perceived that we are vastly more powerful than you are. Living in the flesh possesses many advantages over an immaterial existence. One of these is that it permitted us to pass through the fourth dimension, which you cannot do because your patterns are purely three-dimensional and inextensible. While in hyperspace we learned many things. Particularly we learned much of the really fundamental natures and relationships of time, space, and matter, gaining thereby a basic knowledge of all nature which is greater, we believe, than any that has ever before been possessed by any three-dimensional being.

"Not only can we interchange matter and energy as you do in your materializations and dematerializations, but we can go much farther than you can, working in levels which you cannot reach. For instance, I am projecting myself through this screen, which you cannot do because the carrier wave is far below your lowest attainable level.

"With all my knowledge, however, I admit that I cannot destroy you, since you can shrink as nearly to a mathematical point as I can compress this zone, and its complete coalescence would of course liberate you. Upon the other hand, you realize your helplessness inside that sphere. You can do nothing about it since it cuts off your sources of power.

"I can keep you imprisoned therein as long as I choose. I can set upon it forces which will keep you imprisoned until this two-hundred-kilogram ingot of uranium has dwindled down to a mass of less than one milligram. Knowing that the half-life period of that element is approximately five times ten to the ninth years, you can calculate for yourself the length of time during which you shall remain incarcerated.

"My wife, however, has a purely sentimental objection to confining you thus, and wishes to make an agreement with you whereby we may set you at liberty without endangering our own present existences. We are willing to let you go if you will agree to leave this universe forever. I realize, of course, that you are beyond either sentiment or passion and are possessed of no emotions whatever. Realizing this, I give you a choice, upon purely logical grounds, thus:

"Will you leave us and our universe alone, to work out our own salvation or our own damnation, as the case may be, or shall I leave you inside that sphere of force until its monitor bars are exhausted? Think well before you reply; for, know you, we all prefer to exist for a short time as flesh and blood rather than for all eternity as fleshless and immaterial intelligences. Not only that--we intend so to exist and we shall so exist!"

"We shall make no agreements, no promises," One replied. "Yours is the most powerful mind I have encountered--almost the equal of one of ours--and I shall take it."

"You just _think_ you will!" Seaton blazed. "You don't seem to get the idea at all. I am going to surround you with an absolute stasis of time, so that you will not even be conscious of imprisonment, to say nothing of being able to figure a way out of it, until certain more pressing matters have been taken care of. I shall then work out a method of removing you from this universe in such a fashion and to such a distance that if you should desire to come back here the time required would be, as far as humanity is concerned, infinite. Therefore it must be clear to you that you will not be able to get any of our minds, in any circumstances."

"I had not supposed that a mind of such power as yours could think so muddily," One reproved him. "In fact, you do not so think. You know as well as I do that the time with which you threaten me is but a moment. Your Galaxy is insignificant, your universe is but an ultramicroscopic mote in the cosmic all. We are not interested in them and would have left them before this had I not encountered your brain, the best I have seen in substance. That mind is highly important and that mind I shall have."

"But I have already explained that you can't get it, ever," protested Seaton, exasperated. "I shall be dead long before you get out of that cage."

"More of your purposely but uselessly confused thinking," retorted One. "You know well that your mind shall never perish, nor shall it diminish in vigor throughout all time to come. You have the key to knowledge, which you will hand down through all your generations. Planets, Solar Systems, Galaxies, will come and go, as they have since time first was; but your descendants will be eternal, abandoning planets as they age to take up their abodes upon younger, pleasanter worlds, in other systems and in other Galaxies--perhaps even in other universes.

"And I do not believe that I shall lose as much time as you think. You are bold indeed in assuming that your mind, able as it is, can imprison mine for even the brief period we have been discussing. At any rate, do as you please--we will make neither promises nor agreements."

XXIV.

Immense as the Norlaminian vessel was, getting her inside the planetoid was a simple matter to the Brain. Inside the _Skylark_ a dome bulged up, driving back the air; a circular section of the multilayered wall disappeared; Rovol's space-torpedo floated in; the wall was again intact; the dome vanished; the visitor settled lightly into the embrace of a mighty landing cradle which fitted exactly her slenderly stupendous bulk.

The Osnomian prince was the first to disembark, appearing unarmed; for the first time in his warlike life he had of his own volition laid aside his every weapon.

"Glad to see you, Dick," he said simply, but seizing Seaton's hand in both his own, with a pressure that said far more than his words. "We thought they got you, but you're bigger and better than ever--the worse jams you get into, the stronger you come out."

Seaton shook the hands enthusiastically. "Yeah, 'lucky' is my middle name--I could fall into a vat of glue and climb out covered with talcum powder and smelling like a bouquet of violets. But you've advanced more than I have," glancing significantly at the other's waist, bare now of its wonted assortment of lethal weapons. "You're going good, old son--we're all behind you!"

He turned and greeted the other new-comers in cordial and appropriate fashion, then all went into the control room.

During the long flight from Valeron to the First Galaxy no one paid any attention to course or velocity--a handful of cells in the Brain piloted the _Skylark_ better than any human intelligence could have done it. Each Norlaminian scientist studied rapturously new vistas of his specialty: Orlon the charted Galaxies of the First Universe, Rovol the minutely small particles and waves of the sixth order, Astron the illimitable energies of cosmic radiation, and so on.

Seaton spent day after day with the Brain, computing, calculating, thinking with a clarity and a cogency hitherto impossible, all to one end. What should he do, what _could_ he do, with those confounded Intellectuals? Crane, Fodan, and Drasnik spent their time in planning the perfect government--planetary, systemic, galactic, universal--for all intelligent races, wherever situated.

Sacner Carfon studied quietly but profoundly with Caslor of Mechanism, adapting many of the new concepts to the needs of his aqueous planet. Dunark and Urvan, their fiery spirits now subdued and strangely awed, devoted themselves as sedulously to the arts and industries of peace as they formerly had to those of war.

Time thus passed quickly, so quickly that, almost before the travelers were aware, the vast planetoid slowed down abruptly to feel her cautious way among the crowded stars of our Galaxy. Though a mere crawl in comparison with her inconceivable intergalactic speed, her present pace was such that the stars sped past in flaming lines of light. Past the double sun, one luminary of which had been the planet of the Fenachrone, she flew; past the Central System; past the Dark Mass, whose awful attraction scarcely affected her cosmic-energy drive--hurtling toward Earth and toward Earth's now hated master, DuQuesne.

DuQuesne had perceived the planetoid long since, and his robot-manned ships rushed out into space to do battle with Seaton's new and peculiar craft. But of battle there was none; Seaton was in no mood to trifle. Far below the level of DuQuesne's screens, the cosmic energies directed by the Brain drove unopposed upon the power bars of the space fleet of Steel and that entire fleet exploded in one space-filling flash of blinding brilliance. Then the _Skylark_, approaching the defensive screens, halted.

"I know that you're watching me, DuQuesne, and I know what you're thinking about, but you can't do it." Seaton, at the Brain's control, spoke aloud. "You realize, don't you, that if you clamp on a zone of force it'll throw the Earth out of its orbit?"

"Yes; but I'll do it if I have to," came back DuQuesne's cold accents. "I can put it back after I get done with you."

"You don't know it yet, big shot, but you are going to do exactly nothing at all!" Seaton snapped. "You see, I've got a lot of stuff here that you don't know anything about because you haven't had a chance to steal it yet, and I've got you stopped cold. I'm just two jumps ahead of you, all the time. I could hypnotize you right now and make you do anything I say, but I'm not going to--I want you to be wide awake and aware of everything that goes on. Snap on your zone if you want to--I'll see to it that the Earth stays in its orbit. Well, start something, you big, black ape!"

* * * * *

The screens of the _Skylark_ glowed redly as a beam carrying the full power of DuQuesne's installations was hurled against them--a beam behind which there was the entire massed output of Steel's world-girdling network of superpower stations. But Seaton's screens merely glowed; they did not radiate even under that Titanic thrust. For, as has been said, this new _Skylark_ was powered, not by intra-atomic energy, but by the cosmic energy liberated by all the disrupting atoms in all the suns of all the Galaxies of all the universes. Therefore her screens did not radiate; in fact, the furious blasts of DuQuesne's projectors only increased the stream of power being fed to her receptors and converters.

The mighty shields of the planetoid took every force that DuQuesne could send, then Seaton began to compress his zones, leaving open only the narrow band in the fourth order through which the force of gravitation makes itself manifest. Not only did he leave that band open, he so blocked it open that not even DuQuesne's zones of force, full-driven though they were, could close it.

In their closing those zones brought down over all Earth a pall of darkness of an intensity theretofore unknown. It was not the darkness of any possible night, but the appalling, absolute blackness of the utter absence of every visible wave from every heavenly body. As that unrelieved and unheralded blackness descended, millions of Earth's humanity went mad in unspeakable orgies of fright, of violence, and of crime.

But that brief hour of terror, horrible as it was, can be passed over lightly, for it ended forever any hope of world domination by any self-interested man or group, paving the way as it did for the heartiest possible reception of the government of right instead of by might so soon to be given to Earth's peoples by the sages of Norlamin.

Through the barriers both of mighty space ship and of embattled planet Seaton drove his sixth-order projection. Although built to be effective at universal distances the installation was equally efficient at only miles, since its control was purely mental. Therefore Seaton's image, solid and visible, materialized in DuQuesne's inner sanctum--to see DuQuesne standing behind Dorothy's father and mother, a heavy automatic pistol pressed into Mrs. Vaneman's back.

"That'll be all from you, I think," he sneered. "You can't touch me without hurting your beloved parents-in-law and you're too tender-hearted to do that. If you make the slightest move toward me all I've got to do is to touch the trigger. And I shall do that, anyway, right now, if you don't get out of this System and stay out. I am still master of the situation, you see."

"You are master of nothing, you murderous baboon!"

Even before Seaton spoke the first word his projection had acted. DuQuesne was fast, as has been said, but how fast are the fastest of human nervous and muscular reactions when compared with the speed of thought? DuQuesne's retina had not yet registered the fact that Seaton's image had moved when his pistol was hurled aside and he was pinioned by forces as irresistible as the cosmic might from which they sprang.

DuQuesne was snatched into the air of the room--was surrounded by a globe of energy--was jerked out of the building through a welter of crushed and broken masonry and concrete and of flailing, flying structural steel--was whipped through atmosphere, stratosphere, and empty space into the control room of the _Skylark of Valeron_. The inclosing shell of force disappeared and Seaton hurled aside his controlling helmet, for he knew that his iron self-control was fast giving way. He knew that wave upon wave of passion, of sheer hate, was rising, battering at the very gates of his mind; knew that if he wore that headset one second longer the Brain, actuated by his own uncontrollable thoughts, would passionlessly but mercilessly exert its awful power and blast his foe into nothingness before his eyes.

Thus at long last the two men, physically so like, so unlike mentally, stood face to face; hard gray eyes staring relentlessly into unyielding eyes of midnight black. Seaton was in a towering rage; DuQuesne, cold and self-contained as ever, was calmly alert to seize any possible chance of escape from his present predicament.

"DuQuesne, I'm telling you something," Seaton gritted through clenched teeth. "Prop back your ears and listen. You and I are going out in that projector. You are going to issue 'cease firing' orders to all your stations and tell them that you're all washed up--that a humane government is taking things over."

"Or else?"

"Or else I'll do, here and now, what I've been wanting to do to you ever since you shot up Crane's place that night--I will scatter your component atoms all the way from here to Valeron."

"But, Dick--" Dorothy began to protest.

"Don't butt in, Dot!"

Stern and cold, Seaton's voice was one his wife had never before heard. Never had she seen his face so hard, so bitterly implacable.

"Sympathy is all right in its place," Seaton went on, "but this is the showdown. The time for dealing tenderly with this piece of mechanism in human form is past. He has needed killing for a long time, and unless he toes the mark quick and careful he'll get it, right here and right now.

"And as for you, DuQuesne," turning again to the prisoner, "for your own good I'd advise you to believe that I'm not talking just to make a noise. This isn't a threat, it's a promise--get me?"

"You couldn't do it, Seaton, you're too--" Their eyes were still locked, but into DuQuesne's there had crept a doubt. "Why, I believe you _would_!" he exclaimed.

"I'll tell the cockeyed universe I will!" Seaton barked. "Last chance! Yes or no?"

"Yes." DuQuesne knew when to back down. "You win--temporarily at least," he could not help adding.

* * * * *

The projection went out and the required orders were given. Sunlight, moonlight, and starlight again bathed the world in wonted fashion. DuQuesne sat at ease in a cushioned chair, smoking Crane's cigarettes; Seaton stood scowling blackly, hands jammed deep into pockets, addressing the jury of Norlaminians.

"You see what a jam I'm in?" he complained. "I could be arrested for what I think of that bird. He ought to be killed, but I can't do it unless he gives me about half an excuse, and he's darn careful not to do that. So what?"

"The man has a really excellent brain, but it is slightly warped," Drasnik offered. "I do not believe, however, that it is beyond repair. It may well be that a series of mental operations might make of him a worth-while member of society."

"I doubt it." Seaton still scowled. "He'd never be satisfied unless he was all three rings of the circus. Being a big shot isn't enough--he's got to be the whole works, a regular Poo-Bah. He's naturally antisocial--he would always be making trouble and would never fit into a really civilized world. He _has_ got a wonderful brain; but he isn't human--Say, that gives me an idea!" His corrugated brow smoothed magically, his boiling rage was forgotten.

"DuQuesne, how would you like to become a pure intellect? A bodiless intelligence, immaterial and immortal, pursuing pure knowledge and pure power throughout all cosmos and all time, in company with seven other such entities?"

"What are you trying to do, kid me?" DuQuesne sneered. "I don't need any sugar coating on my pills. You are going to take me on a one-way ride--all right, go to it, but don't lie about it!"

"No; I mean it. Remember the one we met in the first _Skylark_? Well, we captured him and six others, and it's a very simple matter to dematerialize you so that you can join them. I'll bring them in, so that you can talk to them yourself."

The Intellectuals were brought into the control room, the stasis of time was released, and DuQuesne--via projection--had a long conversation with One.

"That's the life!" he exulted finally. "Better a million times over than any possible life in the flesh--the ideal existence! Think you can do it without killing me, Seaton?"

"Sure I can--I know both the words and the music."