IV.
Only a few days were required for the completion of DuQuesne's Fenachrone education, since not many of the former officers of the battleship had added greatly to the already vast knowledge possessed by the Terrestrial scientists. Therefore the time soon came when he had nothing to occupy either his vigorous body or his voracious mind, and the self-imposed idleness irked his active spirit sorely.
"If nothing is going to happen out here we might as well get started back; this present situation is intolerable," he declared to Loring one morning, and proceeded to lay spy rays to various strategic points of the enormous shell of defense, and even to the sacred precincts of headquarters itself.
"They will probably catch me at this, and when they do it will blow the lid off; but since we are all ready for the break we don't care now how soon it comes. There's something gone sour somewhere, and it may do us some good to know something about it."
"Sour? Along what line?"
"The mobilization has slowed down. The first phase went off beautifully, you know, right on schedule; but lately things have slowed down. That doesn't seem just right, since their plans are all dynamic, not static. Of course general headquarters isn't advertising it to us outlying captains, but I think I can sense an undertone of uneasiness. That's why I am doing this little job of spying, to get the low-down—Ah, I thought so! Look here, Doll! See those gaps on the defense map? Over half of their big ships are not in position—look at those tracer reports—not a battleship that was out in space has come back, and a lot of them are more than a week overdue. I'll say that's something we ought to know about—"
"Observation Officer of the Z12Q, attention!" snapped from the tight-beam headquarters communicator. "Cut off those spy rays and report yourself under arrest for treason!"
"Not to-day," DuQuesne drawled. "Besides, I can't—I am in command here now."
"Open your visiplate to full aperture!" The staff officer's voice was choked with fury; never in his long life had he been so grossly insulted by a mere captain of the line.
DuQuesne opened the plate, remarking to Loring as he did so; "This is the blow-off, all right. No possible way of stalling him off now, even if I wanted to; and I really want to tell them a few things before we shove off."
"Where are the men who should be at stations?" the furious voice demanded.
"Dead," DuQuesne replied laconically.
"Dead! And you have reported nothing amiss?" He turned from his own microphone, but DuQuesne and Loring could hear his savage commands:
"X1427—Order the twelfth squadron to bring in the Z12Q!"
He spoke again to the rebellious and treasonable observer: "And you have made your helmet opaque to the rays of this plate, another violation of the code. Take it off!" The speaker fairly rattled under the bellowing voice of the outraged general. "If you live long enough to get here, you will pay the full penalty for treason, insubordination, and conduct unbecom—"
"Oh, shut up, you yapping nincompoop!" snapped DuQuesne.
Wrenching off his helmet, he thrust his blackly forbidding face directly before the visiplate; so that the raging officer stared, from a distance of only eighteen inches, not into the cowed and frightened face of a guiltily groveling subordinate, but into the proud and sneering visage of Marc C. DuQuesne, of Earth.
And DuQuesne's whole being radiated open and supreme contempt, the most gallingly nauseous dose possible to inflict upon any member of that race of self-styled supermen, the Fenachrone. As he stared at the Earthman the general's tirade broke off in the middle of a word and he fell back speechless—robbed, it seemed, almost of consciousness by the shock.
"You asked for it—you got it—now just what are you going to do with it or about it?" DuQuesne spoke aloud, to render even more trenchantly cutting the crackling mental comments as they leaped across space, each thought lashing the officer like the biting, tearing tip of a bull whip.
"Better men than you have been beaten by overconfidence," he went on, "and better plans than yours have come to nought through underestimating the resources in brain and power of the opposition. You are not the first race in the history of the universe to go down because of false pride, and you will not be the last. You thought that my comrade and I had been taken and killed. You thought so because I wanted you so to think. In reality we took that scout ship, and when we wanted it we took this battleship as easily.
"We have been here, in the very heart of your defense system, for ten days. We have obtained everything that we set out to get; we have learned everything that we set out to learn. If we wished to take it, your entire planet could offer us no more resistance than did these vessels, but we do not want it.
"Also, after due deliberation, we have decided that the universe would be much better off without any Fenachrone in it. Therefore your race will of course soon disappear; and since we do not want your planet, we will see to it that no one else will want it, at least for some few eons of time to come. Think that over, as long as you are able to think. Good-by!"
Duquesne cut off the visiray with a vicious twist and turned to Loring. "Pure boloney, of course!" he sneered. "But as long as they don't know that fact it'll probably hold them for a while."
"Better start drifting for home, hadn't we? They're coming out after us."
"We certainly had." DuQuesne strolled leisurely across the room toward the controls. "We hit them hard, in a mighty tender spot, and they will make it highly unpleasant for us if we linger around here much longer. But we are in no danger. There is no tracer ray on this ship—they use them only on long-distance cruises—so they'll have no idea where to look for us. Also, I don't believe that they'll even try to chase us, because I gave them a lot to think about for some time to come, even if it wasn't true."
But DuQuesne had spoken far more truly than he knew—his "boloney" was in fact a coldly precise statement of an awful truth even then about to be made manifest. For at that very moment Dunark of Osnome was reaching for the switch whose closing would send a detonating current through the thousands of tons of sensitized atomic copper already placed by Seaton in their deep-buried emplantments upon the noisome planet of the Fenachrone.
DuQuesne knew that the outlying vessels of the monsters had not returned to base, but he did not know that Seaton had destroyed them, one and all, in free space; he did not know that his arch-foe was the being who was responsible for the failure of the Fenachrone space ships to come back from their horrible voyages.
Upon the other hand, while Seaton knew that there were battleships afloat in the ether within the protecting screens of the planet, he had no inkling that one of those very battleships was manned by his two bitterest and most vindictive enemies, the official and completely circumstantial report of whose death by cremation he had witnessed such a few days before.
DuQuesne strolled across the floor of the control room, and in mid-step became weightless, floating freely in the air. The planet had exploded, and the outermost fringe of the wave-front of the atomic disintegration, propagated outwardly into spherical space with the velocity of light, had impinged upon the all-seeing and ever-watchful mechanical eye which DuQuesne had so carefully installed. But only that outermost fringe, composed solely of light and ultra-light, had touched that eye. The relay—an electronic beam—had been deflected instantaneously, demanding of the governors their terrific maximum of power, away from the doomed world. The governors had responded in a space of time to be measured only in fractional millionths of a second, and the vessel leaped effortlessly and almost instantaneously into an acceleration of five light-velocities, urged onward by the full power of the space-annihilating drive of the Fenachrone.
The eyes of DuQuesne and Loring had had time really to see nothing whatever. There was the barest perceptible flash of the intolerable brilliance of an exploding universe, succeeded in the very instant of its perception—yes, even before its real perception—by the utter blackness of the complete absence of all light whatever as the space drive automatically went into action and hurled the great vessel away from the all-destroying wave-front of the atomic explosion.
As has been said, there were many battleships within the screens of the distant planet, supporting a horde of scout ships according to Invasion Plan XB218; but of all these vessels and of all things Fenachrone, only two escaped the incredible violence of the holocaust. One was the immense space traveler of Ravindau the scientist which had for days been hurtling through space upon its way to a far-distant Galaxy; the other was the first-line battleship carrying DuQuesne and his killer aid, which had been snatched from the very teeth of that indescribable cosmic cataclysm only by the instantaneous operation of DuQuesne's automatic relays.
Everything on or near the planet had of course been destroyed instantly, and even the fastest battleship, farthest removed from the disintegrating world, was overwhelmed without the slightest possibility of escape. For to human eyes, staring however attentively into ordinary visiplates, these had practically no warning at all, since the wave-front of atomic disruption was propagated with the velocity of light and therefore followed very closely indeed behind the narrow fringe of visible light which heralded its coming.
Even if one of the dazed commanders had known the meaning of the coruscant blaze of brilliance which was the immediate forerunner of destruction, he would have been helpless to avert it, for no hands of flesh and blood, human or Fenachrone, could possibly have thrown switches rapidly enough to have escaped from the advancing wave-front of disruption; and at the touch of that frightful wave every atom of substance, alike of vessel, contents, and hellish crew, became resolved into its component electrons and added its contribution of energy to the stupendous cosmic catastrophe.
Even before his foot had left the floor in free motion, however, DuQuesne realized exactly what had happened. His keen eyes saw the flash of blinding incandescence announcing a world's ending and sent to his keen brain a picture; and in the instant of perception that brain had analyzed that picture and understood its every implication and connotation. Therefore he only grinned sardonically at the phenomena which left the slower-minded Loring dazed and breathless.
He continued to grin as the battleship hurtled onward through the void at a pace beside which that of any ether-borne wave, even that of such a Titanic disturbance as the atomic explosion of an entire planet, was the veriest crawl.
At last, however, Loring comprehended what had happened. "Oh, it exploded, huh?" he ejaculated.
"It most certainly did." The scientist's grin grew diabolical. "My statements to them came true, even though I did not have anything to do with their fruition. However, these events prove that caution is all right in its place—it pays big dividends at times. I'm very glad, of course, that the Fenachrone have been definitely taken out of the picture."
Utterly callous, DuQuesne neither felt nor expressed the slightest sign of pity for the race of beings so suddenly snuffed out of existence. "Their removal at this time will undoubtedly save me a lot of trouble later on," he added, "but the whole thing certainly gives me furiously to think, as the French say. It was done with a sensitized atomic copper bomb, of course; but I should like very much to know who did it, and why; and, above all, how they were able to make the approach."
"Personally, I still think it was Seaton," the baby-faced murderer put in calmly. "No reason for thinking so, except that whenever anything impossible has been pulled off anywhere that I ever heard of, he was the guy that did it. Call it a hunch, if you want to."
"It may have been Seaton, of course, even though I can't really think so." DuQuesne frowned blackly in concentration. "It may have been accidental—started by the explosion of an ammunition dump or something of the kind—but I believe that even less than I do the other. It couldn't have been any race of beings from any other planet of this system, since they are all bare of life, the Fenachrone having killed off all the other races ages ago and not caring to live on the other planets themselves. No; I still think that it was some enemy from outer space; although my belief that it could not have been Seaton is weakening.
"However, with this ship we can probably find out in short order who it was, whether it was Seaton or any possible outside race. We are far enough away now to be out of danger from that explosion, so we'll slow down, circle around, and find out whoever it was that touched it off."
He slowed the mad pace of the cruiser until the firmament behind them once more became visible, to see that the system of the Fenachrone was now illuminated by a splendid double sun. Sending out a full series of ultra-powered detector screens, DuQuesne scanned the instruments narrowly. Every meter remained dead, its needle upon zero; not a sign of radiation could be detected upon any of the known communicator or power bands; the ether was empty for millions upon untold millions of miles. He then put on power and cruised at higher and higher velocities, describing a series of enormous looping circles throughout the space surrounding that entire solar system.
Around and around the flaming double sun, rapidly becoming first a double star and then merely a faint point of light, DuQuesne urged the Fenachrone battleship, but his screens remained cold and unresponsive. No ship of the void was operating in all that vast volume of ether; no sign of man or of any of his works was to be found throughout it.
DuQuesne then extended his detectors to the terrific maximum of their unthinkable range, increased his already frightful acceleration to its absolute limit, and cruised madly onward in already vast and ever-widening spirals until a grim conclusion forced itself upon his consciousness. Unwilling though he was to believe it, he was forced finally to recognize an appalling fact. The enemy, whoever he might have been, must have been operating from a distance immeasurably greater than any that even DuQuesne's newfound knowledge could believe possible; abounding though it was in astounding data concerning superscientific weapons of destruction.
He again cut their acceleration down to a touring rate, adjusted his automatic alarms and signals, and turned to Loring, his face grim and hard.
"They must have been farther away than even any of the Fenachrone physicists would have believed possible," he stated flatly. "It looks more and more like Seaton—he probably found some more high-class help somewhere. Temporarily, at least, I am stumped—but I do not stay stumped long. I shall find him if I have to comb the Galaxy, star by star!"
Thus DuQuesne, not even dreaming what an incredibly inconceivable distance from this Galaxy Seaton was to attain; nor what depths of extradimensional space Seaton was to traverse before they were again to stand face to face—cold black eyes staring straight into hard and level eyes of gray.
