Masters of Space

  VIII

  Hilton did not have to drive the peyondix-beam to the planet Strett; itwas already there. And there was the monstrous First Lord Thinker Zoyar.

  Into that mind his multi-mind flashed, its every member as responsive tohis will as his own fingers--almost infinitely more so, in fact, becauseof the tremendous lengths of time required to send messages alongnerves.

  That horrid mind was scanned cell by cell. Then, after what seemed likea few hours, when a shield began sluggishly to form, Hilton transferredhis probe to the mind of the Second Thinker, one Lord Ynos, and absorbedeverything she knew. Then, the minds of all the other Thinkers beingscreened, he studied the whole Strett planet, foot by foot, andeverything that was on it.

  Then, mission accomplished, Hilton snapped his attention back to hisoffice and the multi-mind fell apart. As he opened his eyes he heardTuly scream: "... Luck!"

  "Oh--you still here, Tuly? How long have we been gone?"

  "Approximately one and one-tenth seconds, sir."

  "WHAT!"

  Beverly Bell, in the haven of Franklin Poynter's arms, fainted quietly.Sandra shrieked piercingly. The four men stared, goggle-eyed. Templeand Teddy, as though by common thought, burrowed their faces into brawnyshoulders.

  Hilton recovered first. "So _that's_ what peyondix is."

  "Yes, sir--I mean no, sir. No, I mean yes, but ..." Tuly paused, lickingher lips in that peculiarly human-female gesture of uncertainty.

  "Well, what _do_ you mean? It either is or isn't. Or is that necessarilyso?"

  "Not exactly, sir. That is, it started as peyondix. But it became somethingelse. Not even the most powerful of the old Masters--nobody--ever did orever could _possibly_ generate such a force as that. Or handle it so fast."

  "Well, with seven of the best minds of Terra and a ..."

  "Chip-chop the chit-chat!" Karns said, harshly. "What I want to know iswhether I was having a nightmare. Can there _possibly_ be a race such asI thought I saw? So utterly savage--ruthless--merciless! So devoid ofevery human trace and so hell-bent determined on the extermination ofevery other race in the Galaxy? God damn it, it simply doesn't makesense!"

  * * * * *

  Eyes went from eyes to eyes to eyes.

  All had seen the same indescribably horrible, abysmally atrocious,things. Qualities and quantities and urges and drives that no words inany language could even begin to portray.

  "It doesn't seem to, but there it is." Teddy Blake shook her headhopelessly.

  Big Bill Karns, hands still shaking, lit a cigarette before he spokeagain. "Well, I've never been a proponent of genocide. But it's myconsidered opinion that the Stretts are one race the galaxy can getalong without."

  "A hell of a lot better without," Poynter said, and all agreed.

  "The point is, what can we do about it?" Kincaid asked. "The firstthing, I would say, is to see whether we can do this--whatever itis--without Tuly's help. Shall we try it? Although I, for one, don'tfeel like doing it right away."

  "Not I, either." Beverly Bell held up her right hand, which was shakinguncontrollably. "I feel as though I'd been bucking waves, wind and tidefor forty-eight straight hours without food, water or touch. Maybe inabout a week I'll be ready for another try at it. But today--not achance!"

  "Okay. Scat, all of you," Hilton ordered. "Take the rest of the day offand rest up. Put on your thought-screens and don't take them off for asecond from now on. Those Stretts are tough hombres."

  Sandra was the last to leave. "And you, boss?" she asked pointedly.

  "I've got some thinking to do."

  "I'll stay and help you think?"

  "Not yet." He shook his head, frowned and then grinned. "You see, chick,I don't even know yet what it is I'm going to have to think about."

  "A bit unclear, but I know what you mean--I think. Luck, chief."

  * * * * *

  In their subterranean sanctum turn on distant Strett, two of the deepestthinkers of that horribly unhuman race were in coldly intent conferencevia thought.

  "My mind has been plundered, Ynos," First Lord Thinker Zoyar radiated,harshly. "Despite the extremely high reactivity of my shield someinformation--I do not know how much--was taken. The operator was one ofthe humans of that ship."

  "I, too, felt a plucking at my mind. But those humans could notpeyondire, First Lord."

  "Be logical, fool! At that contact, in the matter of which you erred innot following up continuously, they succeeded in concealing their realabilities from you."

  "That could be the truth. Our ancestors erred, then, in recording thatall those weak and timid humans had been slain. These offenders areprobably their descendants, returning to reclaim their former world."

  "The probability must be evaluated and considered. Was it or was it notthrough human aid that the Omans destroyed most of our task-force?"

  "Highly probable, but impossible of evaluation with the data nowavailable."

  "Obtain more data at once. That point must be and shall be fullyevaluated and fully considered. This entire situation is intolerable. Itmust be abated."

  "True, First Lord. But every operator and operation is now tightlyscreened. Oh, if I could only go out there myself ..."

  "Hold, fool! Your thought is completely disloyal and un-Strettly."

  "True, oh First Lord Thinker Zoyar. I will forthwith remove my unworthyself from this plane of existence."

  "You will not! I hereby abolish that custom. Our numbers are too few byfar. Too many have failed to adapt. Also, as Second Thinker, your deathat this time would be slightly detrimental to certain matters now inwork. I will myself, however, slay the unfit. To that end repeat TheWords under my peyondiring."

  "I am a Strett. I will devote my every iota of mental and of physicalstrength to forwarding the Great Plan. I am, and will remain, a Strett."

  "You do believe in The Words."

  * * * * *

  "Of course I believe in them! I _know_ that in a few more hundreds ofthousands of years we will be rid of material bodies and will becomeinvincible and invulnerable. Then comes the Conquest of the Galaxy ...and then the Conquest of the Universe!"

  "No more, then, on your life, of this weak and cowardly repining! Now,what of your constructive thinking?"

  "Programming must be such as to obviate time-lag. We must evaluate thefactors already mentioned and many others, such as the reactivation ofthe spacecraft which was thought to have been destroyed so long ago.After having considered all these evaluations, I will construct a MinorPlan to destroy these Omans, whom we have permitted to exist onsufferance, and with them that shipload of despicably interlopinghumans."

  "That is well." Zoyar's mind seethed with a malevolent ferocity starklyimpossible for any human mind to grasp. "And to that end?"

  "To that end we must intensify still more our program of procuring data.We must revise our mechs in the light of our every technological advanceduring the many thousands of cycles since the last such revision wasmade. Our every instrument of power, of offense and of defense, must bebrought up to the theoretical ultimate of capability."

  "And as to the Great Brain?"

  "I have been able to think of nothing, First Lord, to add to theundertakings you have already set forth."

  "It was not expected that you would. Now: is it your final thought thatthese interlopers are in fact the descendants of those despised humansof so long ago?"

  "It is."

  "It is also mine. I return, then, to my work upon the Brain. You willtake whatever measures are necessary. Use every artifice of intellectand of ingenuity and our every resource. But abate this intolerablenuisance, and soon."

  "It shall be done, First Lord."

  * * * * *

  The Second Thinker issued orders. Frenzied, round-the-clock activityensued. Hundreds of mechs operated upon the brains of hundreds ofothers, who in turn operated upon the operators.
br />   Then, all those brains charged with the technological advances of manythousands of years, the combined hundreds went unrestingly to work.Thousands of work-mechs were built and put to work at the constructionof larger and more powerful space-craft.

  As has been implied, those battle-skeletons of the Stretts werecontrolled by their own built-in mechanical brains, which wereprogrammed for only the simplest of battle maneuvers. Anything at allout of the ordinary had to be handled by remote control, by thespecialist-mechs at their two-miles-long control board.

  This was now to be changed. Programming was to be made so complete thatalmost any situation could be handled by the warship or the missileitself--instantly.

  The Stretts _knew_ that they were the most powerful, the most highlyadvanced race in the universe. Their science was the highest in theuniverse. Hence, with every operating unit brought up to the fullpossibilities of that science, that would be more than enough. Period.

  This work, while it required much time, was very much simpler than thetask which the First Thinker had laid out for himself on the giantcomputer-plus which the Stretts called "The Great Brain." In stating hisproject, First Lord Zoyar had said:

  "Assignment: To construct a machine that will have the followingabilities: One, to contain and retain all knowledge and information fedinto it, however great the amount. Two, to feed itself additionalinformation by peyondiring all planets, wherever situate, bearingintelligent life. Three, to call up instantly any and all items ofinformation pertaining to any problem we may give it. Four, to combineand recombine any number of items required to form new concepts. Five,to formulate theories, test them and draw conclusions helpful to us inany matter in work."

  It will have been noticed that these specifications vary in oneimportant respect from those of the Eniacs and Univacs of Earth. Sincewe of Earth can not peyondire, we do not expect that ability from ourcomputers.

  The Stretts could, and did.

  * * * * *

  When Sandra came back into the office at five o'clock she found Hiltonstill sitting there, in almost exactly the same position.

  "Come out of it, Jarve!" She snapped a finger. "That much of _that_ isjust simply too damned much."

  "You're so right, child." He got up, stretched, and by main strengthshrugged off his foul mood. "But we're up against something that isreally a something, and I don't mean perchance."

  "How well I know it." She put an arm around him, gave him a quick, hardhug. "But after all, you don't have to solve it this evening, you know."

  "No, thank God."

  "So why don't you and Temple have supper with me? Or better yet, whydon't all eight of us have supper together in that bachelors' paradiseof yours and Bill's?"

  "That'd be fun."

  And it was.

  Nor did it take a week for Beverly Bell to recover from the Ordeal ofEight. On the following evening, she herself suggested that the teamshould take another shot at that utterly fantastic _terra incognita_ ofthe multiple mind, jolting though it had been.

  "But are you sure you can take it again so soon?" Hilton asked.

  "Sure. I'm like that famous gangster's moll, you know, who bruised easybut healed quick. And I want to know about it as much as anyone elsedoes."

  They could do it this time without any help from Tuly. The linkagefairly snapped together and shrank instantaneously to a point. Hiltonthought of Terra and there it was; full size, yet occupying only oneinfinitesimal section of a dimensionless point. The multi-mind visitedrelatives of all eight, but could not make intelligible contact. Ifasleep, it caused pleasant dreams; if awake, pleasant thoughts of theloved one so far away in space; but that was all. It visited mediums, intrance and otherwise--many of whom, not surprisingly now, weregenuine--with whom it held lucid conversations. Even in linkage,however, the multi-mind knew that none of the mediums would be believed,even if they all told, simultaneously, exactly the same story. Themulti-mind weakened suddenly and Hilton snapped it back to Ardry.

  Beverly was almost in collapse. The other girls were white, shaken andtrembling. Hilton himself, strong and rugged as he was, felt as thoughhe had done two weeks of hard labor on a rock-pile. He glancedquestioningly at Larry.

  "Point six three eight seconds, sir," the Omans said, holding up amillisecond timer.

  "How do you explain _that_?" Karns demanded.

  "I'm afraid it means that without Oman backing we're out of luck."

  * * * * *

  Hilton had other ideas, but he did not voice any of them until thefollowing day, when he was rested and had Larry alone.

  "So carbon-based brains can't take it. One second of that stuff wouldhave killed all eight of us. Why? The Masters had the same kind ofbrains we have."

  "I don't know, sir. It's something completely new. No Master, or groupof Masters, ever generated such a force as that. I can scarcely believesuch power possible, even though I have felt it twice. It may be thatover the generations your individual powers, never united or controlled,have developed so strength that no human can handle them in fusion."

  "And none of us ever knew anything about any of them. I've been doing alot of thinking. The Masters had qualities and abilities now unknown toany of us. How come? You Omans--and the Stretts, too--think we'redescendants of the Masters. Maybe we are. You think they came originallyfrom Arth--Earth or Terra--to Ardu. That'd account for our legends ofMu, Atlantis and so on. Since Ardu was within peyondix range of Strett,the Stretts attacked it. They killed all the Masters, they thought, andmade the planet uninhabitable for any kind of life, even their own. Butone shipload of Masters escaped and came here to Ardry--far beyondpeyondix range. They stayed here for a long time. Then, for some reasonor other--which may be someplace in their records--they left here, fullyintending to come back. Do any of you Omans know why they left? Or wherethey went?"

  "No, sir. We can read only the simplest of the Masters' records. Theyarranged our brains that way, sir."

  "I know. They're the type. However, I suspect now that your thinking isreversed. Let's turn it around. Say the Masters didn't come from Terra,but from some other planet. Say that they left here because they weredying out. They were, weren't they?"

  "Yes, sir. Their numbers became fewer and fewer each century."

  "I was sure of it. They were committing race suicide by letting youOmans do everything they themselves should have been doing. Finally theysaw the truth. In a desperate effort to save their race they pulled out,leaving you here. Probably they intended to come back when they had bredenough guts back into themselves to set you Omans down where youbelong...."

  "But _they_ were always the Masters, sir!"

  "They were not! They were hopelessly enslaved. Think it over. Anyway,say they went _to_ Terra from here. That still accounts for the legendsand so on. However, they were too far gone to make a recovery, and yetthey had enough fixity of purpose _not_ to manufacture any of you Omansthere. So their descendants went a long way down the scale before theybegan to work back up. Does that make sense to you?"

  * * * * *

  "It explains many things, sir. It can very well be the truth."

  "Okay. However it was, we're here, and facing a condition that isn'tfunny. While we were teamed up I learned a lot, but not nearly enough.Am I right in thinking that I now don't need the other seven atall--that my cells are fully charged and I can go it alone?"

  "Probably, sir, but ..."

  "I'm coming to that. Every time I do it--up to maximum performance, ofcourse--it comes easier and faster and hits harder. So next time, ormaybe the fourth or fifth time, it'll kill me. And the other seven, too,if they're along."

  "I'm not sure, sir, but I think so."

  "Nice. Very, _very_ nice." Hilton got up, shoved both hands into hispockets, and prowled about the room. "But can't the damned stuff becontrolled? Choked--throttled down--damped--muzzled, some way or other?"

  "We do not know of any way
, sir. The Masters were always working towardmore power, not less."

  "That makes sense. The more power the better, as long as you can handleit. But I can't handle this. And neither can the team. So how aboutorganizing another team, one that hasn't got quite so much whammo?Enough punch to do the job, but not enough to backfire that way?"

  "It is highly improbable that such a team is possible, sir." If an Omancould be acutely embarrassed, Larry was. "That is, sir ... I should tellyou, sir ..."

  "You certainly should. You've been stalling all along, and now you'restalled. Spill it."

  "Yes, sir. The Tuly begged me not to mention it, but I must. When itorganized your team it had no idea of what it was really going todo...."

  "Let's talk the same language, shall we? Say 'he' and 'she.' Not 'it.'"

  "She thought she was setting up the peyondix, the same as all of usOmans have. But after she formed in your mind the peyondix matrix, yourmind went on of itself to form a something else; a thing we can notunderstand. That was why she was so extremely ... I think 'frightened'might be your term."

  "I knew something was biting her. Why?"

  "Because it very nearly killed you. You perhaps have not considered theeffect upon us all if any Oman, however unintentionally, should kill aMaster?"

  "No, I hadn't ... I see. So she won't play with fire any more, and noneof the rest of you can?"

  "Yes, sir. Nothing could force her to. If she could be so coerced wewould destroy her brain before she could act. That brain, as you know,is imperfect, or she could not have done what she did. It should havebeen destroyed long since."

  "Don't _ever_ act on that assumption, Larry." Hilton thought forminutes. "Simple peyondix, such as yours, is not enough to read theMasters' records. If I'd had three brain cells working I'd've tried themthen. I wonder if I _could_ read them?"

  "You have all the old Masters' powers and more. But you must notassemble them again, sir. It would mean death."

  "But I've got to _know_.... I've _got_ to know! Anyway, a thousandth ofa second would be enough. I don't think that'd hurt me very much."

  * * * * *

  He concentrated--read a few feet of top-secret braided wire--and cameback to consciousness in the sickbay of the _Perseus_, with two doctorsworking on him; Hastings, the top Navy medico, and Flandres, thesurgeon.

  "What the hell happened to you?" Flandres demanded. "Were you trying tokill yourself?"

  "And if so, how?" Hastings wanted to know.

  "No, I was trying not to," Hilton said, weakly, "and I guess I didn'tmuch more than succeed."

  "That was just about the closest shave I ever saw a man come through.Whatever it was, don't do it again."

  "I won't," he promised, feelingly.

  When they let him out of the hospital, four days later, he called inLarry and Tuly.

  "The next time would be the last time. So there won't be any," he toldthem. "But just how sure are you that some other of our boys or girlsmay not have just enough of whatever it takes to do the job? Enoughoompa, but not too much?"

  "Since we, too, are on strange ground the probability is vanishinglysmall. We have been making inquiries, however, and scanning. You wereselected from all the minds of Terra as the one having the widestvision, the greatest scope, the most comprehensive grasp. The ablest atsynthesis and correlation and so on."

  "That's printing it in big letters, but that was more or less what theywere after."

  "Hence the probability approaches unity that any more such ignorantmeddling as this obnoxious Tuly did well result almost certainly infailure and death. Therefore we can not and will not meddle again."

  * * * * *

  "You've got a point there.... So what I am is some kind of a freak.Maybe a kind of super-Master and maybe something altogether different.Maybe duplicable in a less lethal fashion, and maybe not. Vereehelpful--I don't think. But I don't want to kill anybody, either ...especially if it wouldn't do any good. But we've got to do _something_!"Hilton scowled in thought for minutes. "But an Oman brain could take it.As you told us, Tuly, 'The brain of the Larry is very, very tough.'"

  "In a way, sir. Except that the Masters were very careful to make itphysically impossible for any Oman to go very far along that line. Itwas only their oversight of my one imperfect brain that enabled me,alone of us all, to do that wrong."

  "Stop thinking it was wrong, Tuly. I'm mighty glad you did. But I wasn'tthinking of any regular Oman brain...." Hilton's voice petered out.

  "I see, sir. Yes, we can, by using your brain as Guide, reproduce it inan Oman body. You would then have the powers and most of the qualitiesof both ..."

  "No, you don't see, because I've got my screen on. Which I will now takeoff--" he suited action to word--"since the whole planet's screened andI have nothing to hide from you. Teddy Blake and I both thought of that,but we'll consider it only as the ultimately last resort. We don't wantto live a million years. And we want our race to keep on developing. Butyou folks can replace carbon-based molecules with silicon-based onesjust as easily as, and a hell of a lot faster than, mineral waterpetrifies wood. What can you do along the line of rebuilding me thatway? And if you can do any such conversion, what would happen? Would Ilive at all? And if so, how long? How would I live? What would I liveon? All that kind of stuff."

  "Shortly before they left, two of the Masters did some work on that verything. Tuly and I converted them, sir."

  "Fine--or is it? How did it work out?"

  "Perfectly, sir ... except that they destroyed themselves. It wasthought that they wearied of existence."

  "I don't wonder. Well, if it comes to that, I can do the same. You _can_convert me, then."

  "Yes, sir. But before we do it we must do enough preliminary work to besure that you will not be harmed in any way. Also, there will be manymore changes involved than simple substitution."

  "Of course. I realize that. Just see what you can do, please, and let meknow."

  "We will, sir, and thank you very much."