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.