Part 21

DuQuesne and the caged Intellectuals poised in the air, Seaton threw a zone around cage and man, the inner zone of course disappearing as the outer one went on. DuQuesne's body disappeared--but not so his intellect.

"That was the first really bad mistake you ever made, Seaton," the same sneering, domineering, icily cold DuQuesne informed Seaton's projection in level thought. "It was bad because you can't ever remedy it--you _can't_ kill me now! And now I _will_ get you--what's to hinder me from doing anything I please?"

"I am, bucko," Seaton informed him cheerfully. "I told you quite a while ago that you'd be surprised at what I could do, and that still goes as it lays. But I'm surprised at your rancor and at the survival of your naughty little passions. What d'you make of it, Drasnik? Is it simply a hangover, or may it be permanent in his case?"

"Not permanent, no," Drasnik decided. "It is only that he has not yet become accustomed to his changed state of being. Such emotions are definitely incompatible with pure mentality and will disappear in a short time."

"Well, I'm not going to let him think even for a minute that I slipped up on his case," Seaton declared. "Listen, you. If I hadn't been dead sure of being able to handle you I would have killed you instead of dematerializing you. And don't get too cocky about my not being able to kill you yet, either, if it comes to that. It shouldn't be impossible to calculate a zone in which there would be no free energy whatever, so that you would starve to death. But don't worry, I'm not going to do it unless I have to."

"Just what do you think you _are_ going to do?"

"See that miniature space ship there? I am going to compress you and your new playmates into this spherical capsule and surround you with a stasis of time. Then I am going to send you on a trip. As soon as you are out of the Galaxy this bar here will throw in a cosmic-energy drive--not using the power of the bar itself, you understand, but only employing its normal radiation of energy to direct and to control the energy of space--and you will depart for scenes unknown with an acceleration equal to the sixth power of the velocity of light. You will travel at that acceleration until this small bar is gone. It will last approximately ninety thousand million years, which, as One will assure you, is but a moment.

"Then these large bars, which will still be big enough to do the work, will rotate your capsule into the fourth dimension. This is desirable, not only to give you additional distance, but also to destroy any orientation you may have remaining, in spite of the stasis of time and the not inconsiderable distance already covered. When and if you get back into three-dimensional space you will be so far away from here that you will certainly need most of what is left of eternity to find your way back here." Then, turning to the ancient physicist of Norlamin: "O.K., Rovol?"

"An exceedingly scholarly bit of work," Rovol applauded.

"It is well done, son," majestic Fodan gravely added. "Not only is it a terrible thing indeed to take away a life, but it is certain that the unknowable force is directing these disembodied mentalities in the engraving upon the sphere of a pattern which must forever remain hidden from our more limited senses."

Seaton thought into the headset for a few seconds, then again projected his mind into the capsule.

"All set to go, folks?" he asked. "Don't take it too hard--no matter how many millions of years the trip lasts, you won't know anything about it. Happy landings!"

The tiny space-ship prison shot away, to transport its contained bodiless intelligences into the indescribable immensities of the super-universe; of the cosmic all; of that ultimately infinite space which can be knowable, if at all, only to such immortal and immaterial, to such incomprehensibly gigantic, mentalities as were theirs.

EPILOGUE

The erstwhile overlord and his wife sat upon an ordinary davenport in their own home, facing a fireplace built by human labor, within which nature-grown logs burned cracklingly. Dorothy wriggled luxuriously, fitting her gorgeous auburn head even more snugly into the curve of Seaton's mighty shoulder, her supple body even more closely into the embrace of his brawny arm.

"It's funny, isn't it, lover, the way things turn out? Space ships and ordinary projectors and forces and things are all right, but I'm awfully glad that you turned that horrible Brain over to the Galactic Council in Norlamin and said you'd never build another. Maybe I shouldn't say it, but it's ever so much nicer to have you just a man again, instead of a--well, a kind of a god or something."

"I'm glad of it, too, Dorothy mine--I couldn't hold the pose. When I got so mad at DuQuesne that I had to throw away the headset I realized that I never could get good enough to be trusted with that much dynamite."

"We're both really human, and I'm glad of it. It's funny, too," she went on dreamily, "the way we jumped around and how much we missed. From here across thousands of Solar Systems to Osnome, and from Norlamin across thousands of Galaxies to Valeron. And yet we haven't seen either Mars or Venus, our next-door neighbors, and there are lots of places on Earth, right in our own back yard, that we haven't seen yet, either."

"Well, since we're going to stick around here for a while, maybe we can catch up on our local visitings."

"I'm glad that you are getting reconciled to the idea; because where you go I go, and if I can't go you can't, either, so you've _got_ to stay on Earth for a while, because Richard Ballinger Seaton the Second is going to be born right here, and not off in space somewhere!"

"Sure he is, sweetheart. I'm with you, all the way--you're a blinding flash and a deafening report, dear little girl friend, and, as I may have intimated previously, I love you."

"Just as I love you--it's wonderful, isn't it, how supremely happy you and I are? I wish more people could be like us--more of them will be, too, won't they, after this new planetary government has shown them what coöperation can do?"

"They're bound to, dear. It'll take time, of course--racial hates and fears cannot be overcome in a day--but the people of our old Earth are not too dumb to learn."

Auburn head close to brown, they stared into the flickering flames in silence; the wonderfully satisfying silence of perfect comradeship, perfect sympathy, perfect understanding, perfect and perfected love.

For these two the problems of life were few and small.