The Chairman of the Board again mounted his invisible rostrum. "Do you mean to intimate that we are to falsify the record?" he declaimed. "To try to make liars out of hundreds of eyewitnesses? You ask us to distort the truth, to connive at ..."
"We aren"t asking you to do _anything_!" Hilton snapped. "We don"t give a d.a.m.n what you do. Just study that record, with all that it implies.
Read between the lines. As for those on the _Perseus_, no two of them will tell the same story and not one of them has even the remotest idea of what the real story is. I, personally, not only did not want to become a monster, but would have given everything I had to stay human.
My wife felt the same way. Neither of us would have converted if there"d been any other way in G.o.d"s universe of getting the uranexite and doing some other things that simply _must_ be done."
"What other things?" Gordon demanded.
"You"ll never know," Hilton answered, quietly. "Things no Terran ever will know. We hope. Things that would drive any Terran stark mad. Some of them are hinted at--as much as we dared--between the lines of the report."
The report had not mentioned the Stretts. Nor were they to be mentioned now. If the Ardans could stop them, no Terran need ever know anything about them.
If not, no Terran should know anything about them except what he would learn for himself just before the end. For Terra would never be able to do anything to defend herself against the Stretts.
"Nothing whatever can drive _me_ mad," Gordon declared, "and I want to know all about it--right now!"
"You can do one of two things, Gordon," Sawtelle said in disgust. His sneer was plainly visible through the six-ply, plastic-backed lead gla.s.s of his face-plate. "Either shut up or accept my personal invitation to come to Ardvor and try to go through the wringer. That"s an invitation to your own funeral." Five-Jet Admiral Gordon, torn inwardly to ribbons, made no reply.
"I repeat," Hilton went on, "we are not asking you to do anything whatever. We are offering to give you; free of charge but under certain conditions, all the power your humanity can possibly use. We set no limitation whatever as to quant.i.ty and with no foreseeable limit as to time. The only point at issue is whether or not you accept the conditions. If you do not accept them we"ll leave now--and the offer will not be repeated."
"And you would, I presume, take the _UC-1_ back with you?"
"Of course not, sir. Terra needs power too badly. You are perfectly welcome to that one load of uranexite, no matter what is decided here."
"That"s one way of putting it," Gordon sneered. "But the truth is that you know d.a.m.ned well I"ll blow both of your ships out of s.p.a.ce if you so much as ..."
"Oh, chip-chop the jaw-flapping, Gordon!" Hilton snapped. Then, as the admiral began to bellow orders into his microphone, he went on: "You want it the hard way, eh? Watch what happens, all of you!"
The _UC-1_ shot vertically into the air. Through its shallow dense layer and into and through the stratosphere. Earth"s fleet, already on full alert and poised to strike, rushed to the attack. But the carrier had reached the _Orion_ and both Ardvorian ships had been waiting, motionless, for a good half minute before the Terran warships arrived and began to blast with everything they had.
"Flashlights and firecrackers," Sawtelle said, calmly. "You aren"t even warming up our screens. As soon as you quit making a d.a.m.ned fool of yourself by wasting energy that way, we"ll set the _UC-1_ back down where she was and get on with our business here."
"You will order a cease-fire at once, Admiral," the chairman said, "or the rest of us will, as of now, remove you from the Board." Gordon gritted his teeth in rage, but gave the order.
"If he hasn"t had enough yet to convince him," Hilton suggested, "he might send up a drone. We don"t want to kill anybody, you know. One with the heaviest screening he"s got--just to see what happens to it."
"He"s had enough. The rest of us have had more than enough. That exhibition was not only uncalled-for and disgusting--it was outrageous!"
The meeting settled down, then, from argument to constructive discussion, and many topics were gone over. Certain matters were, however, so self-evident that they were not even mentioned.
Thus, it was a self-evident fact that no Terran could ever visit Ardvor; for the instrument-readings agreed with the report"s statements as to the violence of the Ardvorian environment, and no Terran could possibly walk around in two tons of lead. Conversely, it was self-apparent to the Terrans that no Ardan could ever visit Earth without being recognized instantly for what he was. Wearing such armor made its necessity starkly plain. No one from the _Perseus_ could say that any Ardan, after having lived on the furiously radiant surface of Ardvor, would not be as furiously radioactive as the laboratory"s calibrated instruments had shown Hilton and Sawtelle actually to be.
Wherefore the conference went on, quietly and cooperatively, to its planned end.
One minute after the Terran battleship _Perseus_ emerged into normal s.p.a.ce, the _Orion_ went into sub-s.p.a.ce for her long trip back to Ardvor.
The last two days of that seven-day trip were the longest-seeming that either Hilton or Sawtelle had ever known. The sub-s.p.a.ce radio was on continuously and Kedy-One reported to Sawtelle every five minutes. Even though Hilton knew that the Oman commander-in-chief was exactly as good at perceiving as he himself was, he found himself scanning the thoroughly screened Strett world forty or fifty times an hour.
However, in spite of worry and apprehension, time wore eventlessly on.
The _Orion_ emerged, went to Ardvor and landed on Ardane Field.
Hilton, after greeting properly and reporting to his wife, went to his office. There he found that Sandra had everything well in hand except for a few tapes that only he could handle. Sawtelle and his officers went to the new Command Central, where everything was rolling smoothly and very much faster than Sawtelle had dared hope.
The Terran immigrants had to live in the _Orion_, of course, until conversion into Ardans. Almost equally of course--since the Bryant infant was the only young baby in the lot--Doris and her Sammy Small were, by popular acclaim, in the first batch to be converted. For little Sammy had taken the entire feminine contingent by storm. No Oman female had a chance to act as nurse as long as any of the girls were around.
Which was practically all the time. Especially the platinum-blonde twins; for several months, now, Bernadine Braden and Hermione Felger.
"And you said they were so hard-boiled," Doris said accusingly to Sam, nodding at the twins. On hands and knees on the floor, head to head with Sammy Small between them, they were growling deep-throated at each other and nuzzling at the baby, who was having the time of his young life.
"You couldn"t have been any wronger, my sweet, if you"d had the whole Octagon helping you go astray. They"re just as nice as they can be, both of them."
Sam shrugged and grinned. His wife strode purposefully across the room to the playful pair and lifted their pretended prey out from between them.
"Quit it, you two," she directed, swinging the baby up and depositing him a-straddle her left hip. "You"re just simply spoiling him rotten."
"You think so, Dolly? Uh-uh, far be it from such." Bernadine came lithely to her feet. She glanced at her own taut, trim abdomen; upon which a micrometrically-precise topographical mapping job might have revealed an otherwise imperceptible bulge. "Just you wait until Junior arrives and I"ll show you how to _really_ spoil a baby. Besides, what"s the hurry?"
"He needs his supper. Vitamins and minerals and hard radiations and things, and then he"s going to bed. I don"t approve of this no-sleep business. So run along, both of you, until tomorrow."
XII
As has been said, the Stretts were working, with all the intensity of their monstrous but tremendously capable minds, upon their Great Plan; which was, basically, to conquer and either enslave or destroy every other intelligent race throughout all the length, breadth, and thickness of total s.p.a.ce. To that end each individual Strett had to become invulnerable and immortal.
Wherefore, in the inconceivably remote past, there had been put into effect a program of selective breeding and of carefully-calculated treatments. It was mathematically certain that this program would result in a race of beings of pure force--beings having no material const.i.tuents remaining whatever.
Under those h.e.l.lish treatments billions upon billions of Stretts had died. But the few remaining thousands had almost reached their sublime goal. In a few more hundreds of thousands of years perfection would be reached. The few surviving hundreds of perfect beings could and would multiply to any desired number in practically no time at all.
Hilton and his seven fellow-workers had perceived all this in their one and only study of the planet Strett, and every other Ardan had been completely informed.
A dozen or so Strett Lords of Thought, male and female, were floating about in the atmosphere--which was not air--of their a.s.sembly Hall. Their heads were globes of ball lightning. Inside them could be seen quite plainly the intricate convolutions of immense, less-than-half-material brains, shot through and through with rods and pencils and shapes of pure, scintillating force.
And the bodies! Or, rather, each horrendous brain had a few partially material appendages and appurtenances recognizable as bodily organs.
There were no mouths, no ears, no eyes, no noses or nostrils, no lungs, no legs or arms. There were, however, hearts. Some partially material ichor flowed through those living-fire-outlined tubes. There were starkly functional organs of reproduction with which, by no stretch of the imagination, could any thought of tenderness or of love be connected.
It was a good thing for the race, Hilton had thought at first perception of the things, that the Stretts had bred out of themselves every iota of the finer, higher attributes of life. If they had not done so, the impotence of sheer disgust would have supervened so long since that the race would have been extinct for ages.
"Thirty-eight periods ago the Great Brain was charged with the sum total of Strettsian knowledge," First Lord Thinker Zoyar radiated to the a.s.sembled Stretts. "For those thirty-eight periods it has been scanning, peyondiring, ama.s.sing data and formulating hypotheses, theories, and conclusions. It has just informed me that it is now ready to make a preliminary report. Great Brain, how much of the total universe have you studied?"
"This Galaxy only," the Brain radiated, in a texture of thought as hard and as harsh as Zoyar"s own.
"Why not more?"