XX.
Valeron was making her last stand. Her back was against the wall. The steadily contracting ring of Chloran force had been driven inward until only one thin line of fortified works lay between it and the great dome covering the city itself. Within a week at most, perhaps within days, that voracious flood of lava would lick into and would dissolve that last line of defense. Then what of Valeron?
All the scientists of the planet had toiled and had studied, day and night, but to no avail. Each new device developed to halt the march of the encroaching constricting band of destruction had been nullified in the instant of its first trial.
"They must know every move we make, to block us so promptly," Quedrin Radnor had mused one day. "Since they certainly have no visiray viewpoints of material substance within our dome, they must be able to operate a spy ray using only the narrow gravity band, a thing we have never been able to accomplish. If they can project such viewpoints of pure force through such a narrow band, may they not be able to project a full materialization and thus destroy us? But, no, that band is—must be—altogether too narrow for that."
Stirred by these thoughts he had built detectors to announce the appearance of any nongravitational forces in the gravity band and had learned that his fears were only too well founded. While the enemy could not project through the open band any forces sufficiently powerful to do any material damage, they were thus in position to forestall any move which the men of Valeron made to ward off their inexorably approaching doom.
Far beneath the surface of the ground, in a room which was not only sealed but was surrounded with every possible safeguard, nine men sat at a long table, the Bardyle at its head.
"—and nothing can be done?" the coördinator was asking. "There is no possible way of protecting the edges of the screens?"
"None." Radnor's voice was flat, his face and body alike were eloquent of utter fatigue. He had driven himself to the point of collapse, and all his labor had proved useless. "Without solid anchorages we cannot hold them—as the ground is fused they give way. When the fused area reaches the dome the end will come. The outlets of our absorbers will also be fused, and with no possible method of dissipating the energy being continuously radiated into the dome we shall all die, practically instantaneously."
"But I judge you are trying something new, from the sudden cutting off of nearly all our weight," stated another.
"Yes. I have closed the gravity band until only enough force can get through to keep us in place on the planet, in a last attempt to block their spy rays so that we can try one last resort—" He broke off as an intense red light suddenly flared into being upon a panel. "No; even that is useless. See that red light? That is the pilot light of a detector upon the gravity band. The Chlorans are still watching us. We can do nothing more, for if we close that band any tighter we shall leave Valeron entirely and shall float away, to die in space."
As that bleak announcement was uttered the councilors sat back limply in their seats. Nothing was said—what was there to say? After all, the now seemingly unavoidable end was not unexpected. Not a man at that table had really in his heart thought it possible for peaceful Valeron to triumph against the superior war craftiness of Chlora.
They sat there, staring unseeing into empty air, when suddenly in that air there materialized Seaton's projection. Since its reception has already been related, nothing need be said of it except that it was the Bardyle himself who was the recipient of that terrific wave of mental force. As soon as the Terrestrial had made clear his intentions and his desires, Radnor leaped to his feet, a man transformed.
"A laboratory of radiation!" he exclaimed, his really profound exhaustion forgotten in a blaze of new hope. "Not only shall I lead him to such a laboratory, but my associates and I shall be only too glad to do his bidding in every possible way."
Followed closely by the visitor, Radnor hurried buoyantly along a narrow hall and into a large room in which, stacked upon shelves, lying upon benches and tables, and even piled indiscriminately upon the floor, there was every conceivable type and kind of apparatus for the generation and projection of etheric forces.
Seaton's flashing glance swept once around the room, cataloguing and classifying the heterogeneous collection. Then, while Radnor looked on in a daze of incredulous astonishment, that quasi-solid figure of force made tangible wrought what was to the Valeronian a scientific miracle. It darted here and there with a speed almost impossible for the eye to follow, seizing tubes, transformers, coils, condensers, and other items of equipment, connecting them together with unbelievable rapidity into a mechanism at whose use the bewildered Radnor, able physicist though he was, could not even guess.
The mechanical educator finished, Seaton's image donned one of its sets of multiple headphones and placed another upon the unresisting head of his host. Then into Radnor's already reeling mind there surged an insistent demand for his language, and almost immediately the headsets were tossed aside.
"There, that's better!" Seaton—for the image was, to all intents and purposes, Seaton himself—exclaimed. "Now that we can talk to each other we'll make those jelly brains hard to catch. They'll think they've got hold of a wild cat by the tail pretty quick now, and they'll be yelling for help to let go."
"But the Chlorans are watching everything you do," protested Radnor, "and we cannot block them out without cutting off our gravity entirely. They will therefore be familiar with any mechanism we may construct and will be able to protect themselves against it."
"They just think they will," was the grim response. "I can't close the gravity band without disaster, any more than you could, but I can find any spy ray they can use and send back along it a jolt that'll burn their eyes out. You see, there's a lot of stuff down on the edge of the fourth order that neither you folks nor the Chlorans know anything about yet, because you haven't had enough thousands of years to study it."
While he was talking, Seaton had been furiously at work upon a small generator, and now he turned it on.
"If they can see through that," he said, "they're a lot smarter than I think they are. Even if they're bright enough to have figured out what I was doing while I was doing it, it won't do them any good, because this outfit will scramble any beam they can send through that band."
"I must bow to your superior knowledge, of course," Radnor said gravely, "but I should like to ask one question. You are working a full materialization through less than a quarter of the gravity band—something that has always been considered impossible. Is there no danger that the Chlorans may analyze your patterns and thus duplicate your feat?"
"Not a chance," Seaton assured him positively. "This stuff I am using is on a tight beam, so tight that it is absolute proof against analysis or interference. It took the Norlaminians—and they're a race of real thinkers—over eight thousand years to go from the beams you and the Chlorans are using down to what I'm showing you. Therefore I'm not afraid that the opposition will pick it up in the next week or two. But we'd better get busy in a big way. Your most urgent need, I take it, is for something—anything—that will stop that surface of force before it reaches the skirt of your defensive dome and blocks your dissipators?"
"Exactly!"
"All right. We'll build you a four-way fourth-order projector to handle full materializations—four way to handle four attackers in case they get desperate and double their program. With it you will send working images of yourselves into the power rooms of the Chloran ships and clamp a short circuiting field across the secondaries of their converters. Of course they can bar you out with a zone of force if they detect you before you can kill the generators of their zones, but that will be just as good, as far as we're concerned—they can't do a thing as long as they're on, you know. Now put on the headset again and I'll give you the dope on the projector. Better get a recorder, too, as there'll be some stuff that you won't be able to carry in your head."
The recorder was brought in and from Seaton's brain there flowed into it and into the mind of Radnor the fundamental concepts and complete equations and working details of the new instrument. Upon the Valeronian's face was first blank amazement, then dawning comprehension, and lastly sheer, wondering awe as, the plan completed, he removed the headset. He began a confused panegyric of thanks, but Seaton interrupted him briskly.
"'Sall right, Radnor, you'd do the same thing for us if things were reversed. Humanity has got to stick together against all the vermin of all the universes. But, say, I'm getting a yen to see this mess all cleaned up, myself—think I'll stick around and help you build it. You're all in, clear to the neck, but you won't rest until the Chlorans are whipped—I can't blame you for that, I wouldn't either—and I'm fresh as a daisy. Let's go!"
In a few hours the complex machine was done. Radnor and Siblin were seated at two of the sets of controls, associate physicists at the others.
"Since I don't know any more about their system of conversion than you do, I can't tell you in detail what to do," Seaton was issuing final instructions. "But whatever you do, don't monkey with their primaries—shortening them would overload their liberators and blow this whole Solar System over into the next Galaxy. Take time to be dead sure that you've got the secondaries of their main converters, and slap a short circuit on as many of them as you can before they cut you off with a zone. You'll probably find a lot of liberator-converter sets on vessels of that size, but if you can kill the ones that feed the zone generators they're our meat."
"You are much more familiar with such things than we are," Radnor remarked. "Would you not like to come along?"
"I'll say I would, but I can't," Seaton replied instantly. "This isn't me at all, you know. But let's see—"
"Oh, of course," Radnor apologized. "In working with you so long and so cordially I forgot for the moment that you are not here in person."
"Nope, can't be done." Seaton frowned, still immersed in the hitherto unstudied problem of the reprojection of a projected image. "Need over two hundred thousand relays and—um—synchronization—neuro-muscular—not on this outfit. Wonder if it can be done at all? Have to look into it sometime—but excuse me, Radnor, I was thinking and got lost. Ready to go? I'll watch you on the plate here and be ready to offer advice—not that you'll need it. Shoot!"
Radnor snapped on the power and he and his aid shot their projections into one of the opposing fortresses, Siblin and his associate going into the other. Through compartment after compartment of the immense structures the as yet invisible projections went, searching for the power rooms. They were not hard to find, extending as they did nearly the full length of the stupendous structures; vaulted caverns filled with linked pairs of mastodonic fabrications, the liberator-converters.
Springing in graceful arcs from heavily insulated posts in the ends of one machine of each pair were five great bus-bars, which Radnor and Siblin recognized instantly as secondary leads from the converters—the gigantic mechanisms which, taking the raw intra-atomic energy from the liberators, converted it into a form in which it could be controlled and utilized.
Neither Radnor nor Siblin had ever heard of five-phase energy of any kind, but those secondaries were unmistakable. Therefore all four images drove against the fivefold bars their perfectly conducting fields of force. Four converters shrieked wildly, trying to wrench themselves from their foundations; insulation smoked and burst wildly into yellow flame; the stubs of the bars grew white-hot and began to fuse; and in a matter of seconds a full half of each prodigious machine subsided to the floor, a semimolten, utterly useless mass.
They drove their fields of force against the fivefold bars.
Similarly went the next two in each fortress, and the next—then Radnor's two projections were cut off sharply as the Chloran's impenetrable zone of force went on, and that fortress, all its beams and forces inoperative, floated off into space.
Siblin and his partner were more fortunate. When the amœbus commanding their prey threw in his zone switch nothing happened. Its source of power had already been destroyed, and the two Valeronian images went steadily down the line of converters, in spite of everything the ragingly frantic monstrosities could do to hinder their progress.
The terrible beam of destruction held steadily upon that fortress by the beamers in Valeron's mighty dome had never slackened its herculean efforts to pierce the Chloran screens. Now, as more and more of the converters of that floating citadel were burned out those screens began to radiate higher and higher into the ultra-violet. Soon they went down, exposing defenseless metal to the blasting, annihilating fury of the beam, to which any conceivable substance is but little more resistant than so much vacuum.
There was one gigantic, exploding flash, whose unbearable brilliance darkened even the incandescent radiance of the failing screen, and Valeron's mighty beam bored on, unimpeded. And where that mastodonic creation had floated an instant before there were only a few curling wisps of vapor.
"Nice job of clean-up, boys—fine!" Seaton clapped a friendly hand upon Radnor's shoulder. "Anybody can handle them now. Better you take a week off and catch up on sleep. I could do with a little shut-eye myself, and you've been on the job a lot longer than I have."
"But hold on—don't go yet!" Radnor exclaimed in consternation. "Why, our whole race owes its very existence to you—wait at least until our Bardyle can have a word with you!"
"That isn't necessary, Radnor. Thanks just the same, but I don't go in for that sort of thing, any more than you would. Besides, we'll be here in the flesh in a few days and I'll talk to him then. So long!" and the projection disappeared.
In due time Skylark Two came lightly to a landing in a parkway near the council hall, to be examined curiously by an excited group of Valeronians who wondered audibly that such a tiny space ship should have borne their salvation. The four Terrestrials, sure of their welcome, stepped out and were greeted by Siblin, Radnor, and the Bardyle.
"I must apologize, sir, for my cavalier treatment of you at our previous meeting." Seaton's first words to the coördinator were in sincere apology. "I trust that you will pardon it, realizing that something of the kind was necessary in order to establish communication."
"Speak not of it, Richard Seaton. I suffered only a temporary inconvenience, a small thing indeed compared to the experience of encountering a mind of such stupendous power as yours. Neither words nor deeds can express to you the profound gratitude of our entire race for what you have done for Valeron.
"I am informed that you personally do not care for extravagant praise, but please believe me to be voicing the single thought of a world's people when I say that no words coined by brain of man could be just, to say nothing of being extravagant, when applied to you. I do not suppose that we can do anything, however slight, for you in return, in token that these are not entirely empty words?"
"You certainly can, sir," Seaton made surprising answer. "We are so completely lost in space that without a great deal of material and of mechanical aid we shall never be able to return to, nor even to locate in space, our native Galaxy, to say nothing of our native planet."
A concerted gasp of astonishment was his reply, then he was assured in no uncertain terms that the resources of Valeron were at his disposal.
A certain amount of public attention had of course to be endured; but Seaton and Crane, pleading a press of work upon their new projectors, buried themselves in Radnor's laboratory, leaving it to their wives to bear the brunt of Valeronian adulation.
"How do you like being a heroine, Dot?" Seaton asked one evening, as the two women returned from an unusually demonstrative reception in another city.
"We just revel in it, since we didn't do any of the real work—it's just too perfectly gorgeous for words," Dorothy replied shamelessly. "Especially Peggy." She eyed Margaret mischievously and winked furtively at Seaton. "Why, you ought to see her—she could just simply roll that stuff up on a fork and eat it, as though it were that much soft fudge!"
Since the scientific and mechanical details of the construction of a fifth-order projector have been given in full elsewhere there is no need to repeat them here. Seaton built his neutronium lens in the core of the near-by white dwarf star, precisely as Rovol had done it from distant Norlamin. He brought it to Valeron and around it there began to come into being a duplicate of the immense projector which the Terrestrials had been obliged to leave behind them when they abandoned gigantic Skylark Three to plunge through the fourth dimension in tiny Two.
"Maybe it's none of my business, Radnor," Seaton turned to the Valeronian curiously during a lull in their work, "but how come you're still simply shooting away those Chloran vessels by making them put out their zones of force? Why didn't you hop over there on your projector and blow their whole planet over into the next Solar System? I would have done that long ago if it had been me, I think."
"We did visit Chlora once, with something like that in mind, but our attempt failed lamentably," Radnor admitted sheepishly. "You remember that peculiar special sense, that mental force that Siblin tried to describe to you? Well, it was altogether too strong for us. My father, possessing one of the strongest minds of Valeron, was in the chair, but they mastered him so completely that we had to recall the projection by cutting off the power to prevent them from taking from his mind by force the methods of transmission which you taught us and which we were then using."
"Hmm! So that's it, huh?" Seaton was greatly interested. "Maybe I'll take one on the chin, but I'm going to lock horns with that bunch of squidges myself, one of these days. When this projector gets itself done I'll skip over there and try them a whirl—with this fifth-order outfit I think maybe I'll be able to make big medicine on them."
True to his word, Seaton's first use of the new mechanism was to assume the offensive. He first sought out and destroyed the Chloran structure then in space—now an easy task, since zones of force, while impenetrable to any ether-borne phenomena, offer no resistance whatever to forces of the fifth order, propagated as they are in that inner medium, the sub-ether. Then, with the Quedrins standing by, to cut off the power in case he should be overpowered, he invaded the sanctum sanctorum of all Chlora—the private office of the Supreme Great One himself—and stared unabashed and unaffected into the enormous "eye" of the monstrous ruler of the planet.
There ensued a battle royal. Had mental forces been visible, it would have been a spectacular meeting indeed! Larger and larger grew the "eye" until it was transmitting all the terrific power generated by that frightful, visibly palpitating brain. But Seaton was not of Valeron, nor was he handicapped by the limitations of a fourth-order projector. He was now being projected upon a full beam of the fifth, by a mechanism able to do full justice to his stupendously composite brain.
The part of that brain he was now employing was largely the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of ancient Norlamin; and from it he was hurling along that beam the irresistible sum total of mental power accumulated by ten thousand generations of the most profound students of the mind that our Galaxy has ever known.
The creature, realizing that at long last it had met its mental master, must have emitted radiations of distress, for into the room came crowding hordes of the monstrosities, each of whom sought to add his own mind to those already opposing the intruder. In vain—all their power could not turn Seaton's penetrating glare aside, nor could it wrest from that glare's unbreakable grip the mind of the tortured Great One.
And now, mental waves failing, they resorted to the purely physical. Hand rays of highest power blasted at that figure uselessly; fiercely driven bars, spears, axes, and all other weapons rebounded from it without leaving a mark upon it, rebounded bent, broken, and twisted. For that figure was in no sense matter as we understand the term. It was pure force—force made palpable and coherent by the incomprehensible power of disintegrating matter; force against which any possible application of mechanical power would be precisely as effective as would wafted thistledown against Gibraltar.
Thus the struggle was brief. Paying no attention to anything, mental or physical, that the other monstrosities could bring to bear, Seaton compelled his victim to assume the shape of the heretofore-despised human being. Then, staring straight into that quivering brain through those hate-filled, flaming eyes, he spoke aloud, the better to drive home his thought:
"Learn, so-called Great One, once and for all, that when you attack any race of humanity anywhere, you attack not only that one race, but all the massed humanity of all the planets of all the Galaxies! As you have already observed, I am not of the planet Valeron, nor of this Solar System, nor even of this Galaxy; but I and my fellows have come to the aid of this race of humanity whom you were bold enough to attack.
"I have proved that we are your masters, mentally as well as scientifically and mechanically. Those of you who have been attacking Valeron have been destroyed, ships and crews alike. Those en route there have been destroyed in space. So also shall be destroyed any and all expeditions you may launch beyond the limits of your own foul atmosphere.
"Since even such a repellent civilization as yours must have its place in the great scheme of things, we do not intend to destroy your planet nor such of your people as remain upon it or near it, unless such destruction shall become necessary for the welfare of the human race. While we are considering what we shall do about you, I advise you to heed well this warning!”