With all their might of brain and skill of hand and with all the
resources of their fifth-order banks of forces, it was no small task
for the Norlaminians to build the sixth-order controlling system which
their ship must have if they were to traverse universal space in any
time short of millenia. But finally it was done.
A towering mechano-electrical brain almost filled the mid-section of
their enormous sky rover, the receptors and converters of the free
energy of space itself had been installed, and their intra-atomic
space-drive, capable of developing an acceleration of only five
light-veloci ties, had been replaced by Seaton's newly developed
sixth-order cosmic-energy drive which could impart to the ship and its
entire contents, without jolt, jar, or strain, any conceivable, almost
any calculable, acceleration.
For many days the Norlaminian vessel had been speeding through the void
at her frightful maximum of power toward the _Skylark of Valeron_,
which in turn was driving toward our Galaxy at the same mad pace.
Braking down now, since only a few thousand light-years of distance
separated the hurtling flyers, Seaton materialized his image at the
brain control of the smaller cruiser and thought into it for minutes.
"There, we're all set!" In the control room of the _Skylark_ Seaton
laid aside his helmet and wiped the perspiration from his forehead in
sheer relief. "The trap is baited and ready to spring--I've been scared
to death for a week that they'd tackle us before we were ready for
them."
"What difference would it have made?" asked Margaret curiously. "Since
we have our sixth-order screens out they couldn't hurt us, could they?"
"No, Peg; but keeping them from hurting us isn't enough--we've got to
capture 'em. And they'll have to be almost directly between Rovol's
ship and ours to make that capture possible. You see, we'll have to
send out from each vessel a hollow hemisphere of force and surround
them. If we had only one ship, or if they don't come between our two
ships, we can't bottle them up, because they have exactly the same
velocity of propagation that our own forces have.
"Also, you can see that our projector can't work direct on more than
a hemisphere without cutting its own beams, and that we can't work
through relay stations because, fast as relays are, the Intellectuals
would get away while the relays were cutting in. Any more questions?"
"Yes; I have one," put in Dorothy. "You told us that this artificial
brain of yours could do anything that your own brain could think of,
and here you've got it stuck already and have to have two of them. How
come?"
"Well, this is a highly exceptional case," Seaton replied. "What I said
would be true ordinarily, but now, as I explained to Peg, it's working
against something that can think and act just as quickly as it can."
"I know, dear, I was just putting you on the spot a little. What are
you using for bait?"
"Thoughts. We're broadcasting them from a point midway between the two
vessels. They're keen on investigating any sixth-order impulses they
feel, you know--that's why we've kept all our stuff on tight beams
heretofore, so that they probably couldn't detect it--so we're sending
out a highly peculiar type of thought, that we are pretty sure will
bring them in from wherever they are."
"Let me listen to it, just for a minute?" she pleaded.
"W-e-l-l--I don't know." He eyed her dubiously. "Not for a minute--no.
Being of a type that not even a pure intellectual can resist, they'd
burn out any human brain in mighty short order. Maybe you might for
about a tenth of a second, though."
He lowered a helmet over her expectant head and snatched it off again,
but that moment had been enough for Dorothy. Her violet eyes widened
terribly in an expression commingled of amazedly poignant horror and of
dreadfully ecstatic fascination.
[Illustration: _Her whole body trembled violently. "Oh, Dick, Dick!"
she gasped. "How horrible!"_]
"Dick--Dick!" she shrieked; then, recovering slowly: "How horrible--how
ghastly--how perfectly, exquisitely damnable! What is it? Why, I
actually heard babies begging to be born! And there were men who had
died and gone to heaven and hell; there were minds that had lost their
bodies and didn't know what to do--were simply shrieking out their
agony, despair, and utter, unreasoning terror for the whole universe
to hear! And there were joys, pleasures, raptures, so condensed as
to be almost as unbearable as the tortures. And there were other
things--awful, terrible, utterly indescribable and unimaginable things!
Oh, Dick, I was sure that I had gone stark, staring, raving crazy!"
"'Sall right, dear," Seaton reassured his overwrought wife. "All those
things are really there, and more. I told you it was bad medicine--that
it would tear your brain to pieces if you took much of it."
* * * * *
Seaton paused, weighing in his mind how best to describe the really
indescribable signal that was being broadcast by the Brain, then went
on, choosing his words with care:
"All the pangs and all the ecstasies, all the thoughts and all the
emotions of all evolution of all things, animate and inanimate, are
there; of all things that ever have existed from the unknowable
beginning of infinite time and of all things that ever shall exist
until time's unknowable end. It covers all animate life, from the first
stirring of that which was to vitalize the first uni-cell in the slime
of the first world ever to come into being in the cosmos, to the last
cognition of the ultimately last intelligent entity ever to be.
"Our present humanity was of course included, from before conception,
through birth, through all of life, through death, and through the
life beyond. It covers inanimate evolution from the ultimate particle
and wave, through the birth, life, death, and re-birth of any possible
manifestation of energy and of matter, up to and through the ultimate
universe.
"Neither Mart nor I could do it all. We carried everything as far as we
could, then the Brain went through with it to its logical conclusion,
which of course we could not reach. Then the Brain systematized all the
data and reduced it to a concentrated essence of pure thought. It is
that essence which is being broadcast and which will certainly attract
the Intellectuals. In the brief flash you got of it you probably could
understand at all only the human part--but maybe it's just as well."
"I'll say it's just as well!" Dorothy emphatically agreed. "I wouldn't
listen to that again, even for a millionth of a second, for a million
dollars--but I wouldn't have missed it for another million, either. I
don't know whether to beg you to listen to it, Peggy, or to implore you
not to."
"Don't bother," Margaret replied positively. "Anything that could throw
you into such a hysterical tantrum as that did, I don't want any of at
all. None at all, in fact, it would be altogether too much for--"
"Got them, folks--all done!" Seaton exclaimed. "You can put on your
headsets now."
A signal lamp had flashed brightly and he knew that those two gigantic
brains, working in perfect synchronism, had done instantaneously all
that they had been set to do.
"Are you dead sure that they got them all, Dick?"
"Absolutely, and they got them in less time than it took the filament
of the lamp to heat up. You can bank on it that all seven of them are
in the can. I go off half cocked and make mistakes, but those Brains
don't--they can't."
Seaton was right. Though far away, even as universal distances go, the
Intellectuals had felt that broadcast thought and had shot toward its
source at their highest possible speed. For in all their long lives
and throughout all their cosmic wanderings they had never encountered
thoughts of such wide scope, such clear cogency, such tremendous power.
The discarnate entities approached the amazing pattern of mental force
which was radiating so prodigally and addressed it; and in that instant
there were shot out curvingly from each of the mechano-electrical
brains a gigantic, hemispherical screen.
Developing outwardly from the two vessels as poles with the
unimaginable velocity possible only to sixth-order forces, the two
cups were barriers impenetrable to any sixth-order force, yet neither
affected nor were affected by the gross manifestations which human
senses can perceive. Thus Solar Systems, even the neutronium cores of
stars, did not hinder their instantaneous development.
Hundreds of light-years in diameter though they were, the open edges
of those semiglobes of force met in perfect alignment and fused
smoothly, effortlessly, instantaneously together to form a perfect,
thought-tight sphere. The violently radiating thought-pattern which had
so interested the Intellectuals disappeared, and at the same instant
the ultrasensitive organisms of the entities were assailed by the to
them deafening and blinding crash and flash of the welding together
along its equator of the far-flung hollow globe.
These simultaneous occurrences were the first intimations that
everything was not what it appeared, and the disembodied intelligences
flashed instantly into furious activity, too late by the smallest
possible instant of time. The trap was sprung, the sphere was
impervious at its every point, and, unless they could break through
that wall, the Intellectuals were incarcerated until Seaton should
release his screens.
* * * * *
Within the confines of the globe there were not a few suns and
thousands of cubic parsecs of space upon whose stores of energy the
Intellectuals could draw. Wherefore they launched a concerted attack
upon the wall, hurling against it all the force they could direct.
But they were not now contending against the power of any human,
organic, finite brain. For Seaton's mind, powerfully composite though
it was of the mightiest intellects of the First Galaxy, was only the
primary impulse which was being impressed upon the grids and was
being amplified to any desirable extent by the almost infinite power
of those two cubic miles of coldly emotionless, perfectly efficient,
mechano-electrical artificial Brains.
Thus against every frantic effort of the Intellectuals within it the
sphere was contracted inexorably, and as it shrank, reducing the volume
of space from which the prisoners could draw energy, their struggles
became weaker and weaker. When the ball of force was only a few
hundred miles in diameter and the two vessels were relatively at rest,
Seaton erected auxiliary stations around it and assumed full control.
Rapidly then the prisoning sphere, little larger now than a toy
balloon, was brought through the inoson wall of the _Skylark_ and
held motionless in the air above the Brain room. A complex structure
of force was built around it, about which in turn there appeared a
framework of inoson, supporting sixteen massive bars of uranium.
Seaton took off his helmet and sighed. "There, that'll hold them for a
while, I guess."
"What are you going to do with them?" asked Margaret.
"Darned if I know, Peg," he admitted ruefully. "That's been pulling
my cork ever since we figured out how to catch them. We can't kill
them and I'm afraid to let them go, because they're entirely too hot
to handle. So in the meantime, pending the hatching out of a feasible
method of getting rid of them permanently, I have simply put them in
jail."
"Why, Dick, how positively brutal!" Dorothy exclaimed.
"Yeah? There goes your soft heart again, Red-Top, instead of your hard
head. I suppose it would be positively O.K. to let them loose, so
that they can dematerialize all four of us? But it isn't as bad as it
sounds, because I've got a stasis of time around them. We can leave
them in there for seventeen thousand million years and even their
intellects won't know it, because for them no time at all shall have
lapsed."
"No-o-o--of course we can't let them go scot-free," Dorothy admitted,
"but we--I should--well, maybe couldn't you make a bargain with them to
give them their liberty if they will go away and let us alone? They're
such free spirits, surely they would rather do that than stay bottled
up there forever."
"Since they are purely intellectual and hence immortal, I doubt very
much if they'll dicker with us at all," Seaton replied. "Time doesn't
mean a thing to them, you know; but since you insist I'll check the
stasis and talk it over with them."
A tenuous projection, heterodyned upon waves far below the band upon
which the captives had their being, crept through the barrier screen
and Seaton addressed his thoughts to the entity known as "One."
"Being highly intelligent, you have already perceived that we are
vastly more powerful than you are. Living in the flesh possesses many
advantages over an immaterial existence. One of these is that it
permitted us to pass through the fourth dimension, which you cannot do
because your patterns are purely three-dimensional and inextensible.
While in hyperspace we learned many things. Particularly we learned
much of the really fundamental natures and relationships of time,
space, and matter, gaining thereby a basic knowledge of all nature
which is greater, we believe, than any that has ever before been
possessed by any three-dimensional being.
"Not only can we interchange matter and energy as you do in your
materializations and dematerializations, but we can go much farther
than you can, working in levels which you cannot reach. For instance, I
am projecting myself through this screen, which you cannot do because
the carrier wave is far below your lowest attainable level.
"With all my knowledge, however, I admit that I cannot destroy you,
since you can shrink as nearly to a mathematical point as I can
compress this zone, and its complete coalescence would of course
liberate you. Upon the other hand, you realize your helplessness inside
that sphere. You can do nothing about it since it cuts off your sources
of power.
"I can keep you imprisoned therein as long as I choose. I can
set upon it forces which will keep you imprisoned until this
two-hundred-kilogram ingot of uranium has dwindled down to a mass of
less than one milligram. Knowing that the half-life period of that
element is approximately five times ten to the ninth years, you can
calculate for yourself the length of time during which you shall remain
incarcerated.
"My wife, however, has a purely sentimental objection to confining
you thus, and wishes to make an agreement with you whereby we may set
you at liberty without endangering our own present existences. We are
willing to let you go if you will agree to leave this universe forever.
I realize, of course, that you are beyond either sentiment or passion
and are possessed of no emotions whatever. Realizing this, I give you a
choice, upon purely logical grounds, thus:
"Will you leave us and our universe alone, to work out our own
salvation or our own damnation, as the case may be, or shall I leave
you inside that sphere of force until its monitor bars are exhausted?
Think well before you reply; for, know you, we all prefer to exist
for a short time as flesh and blood rather than for all eternity as
fleshless and immaterial intelligences. Not only that--we intend so to
exist and we shall so exist!"
"We shall make no agreements, no promises," One replied. "Yours is
the most powerful mind I have encountered--almost the equal of one of
ours--and I shall take it."
"You just _think_ you will!" Seaton blazed. "You don't seem to get
the idea at all. I am going to surround you with an absolute stasis
of time, so that you will not even be conscious of imprisonment, to
say nothing of being able to figure a way out of it, until certain
more pressing matters have been taken care of. I shall then work out
a method of removing you from this universe in such a fashion and to
such a distance that if you should desire to come back here the time
required would be, as far as humanity is concerned, infinite. Therefore
it must be clear to you that you will not be able to get any of our
minds, in any circumstances."
"I had not supposed that a mind of such power as yours could think so
muddily," One reproved him. "In fact, you do not so think. You know as
well as I do that the time with which you threaten me is but a moment.
Your Galaxy is insignificant, your universe is but an ultramicroscopic
mote in the cosmic all. We are not interested in them and would have
left them before this had I not encountered your brain, the best I have
seen in substance. That mind is highly important and that mind I shall
have."
"But I have already explained that you can't get it, ever," protested
Seaton, exasperated. "I shall be dead long before you get out of that
cage."
"More of your purposely but uselessly confused thinking," retorted One.
"You know well that your mind shall never perish, nor shall it diminish
in vigor throughout all time to come. You have the key to knowledge,
which you will hand down through all your generations. Planets, Solar
Systems, Galaxies, will come and go, as they have since time first was;
but your descendants will be eternal, abandoning planets as they age to
take up their abodes upon younger, pleasanter worlds, in other systems
and in other Galaxies--perhaps even in other universes.
"And I do not believe that I shall lose as much time as you think. You
are bold indeed in assuming that your mind, able as it is, can imprison
mine for even the brief period we have been discussing. At any rate, do
as you please--we will make neither promises nor agreements."