To all of this Dorothy and Peggy Crane were no strangers; they had been themselves in such projections countless times. If they were more than usually silent, it was not because of the astonishing quality of the meeting that was taking place in the Seatons’ living room, but because of the subject of that meeting. Both Dorothy and Peg knew Marc DuQuesne well. Both of them had experienced his cold, impersonal deadliness.
Neither wanted to come close to it again.
Back in the living room, Seaton was saying: “If One gave DuQuesne all of the sixth-order force patterns, he can be anywhere and can do practically anything. So he probably didn’t. On the other hand if One didn’t give him any of it DuQuesne couldn’t get back here in forty lifetimes. So he probably gave him some of it. The drive and the projector, at least. Maybe as much as we have, to equalize us. Maybe One figured he owed the ape that mach. Whatever the truth may be, we’ve got to assume that DuQuesne knows as much as we do about sixth-order forces.” He paused, then corrected himself. “If we’re smart we’ll assume that he knows more than we do. So we’ll have to find somebody else who knows more than we do to learn from. Question how do we go about doing that? Not by just wandering around the galaxy at random, looking; that’s one certain damn sure thing.”
“It is indeed,” the moderator agreed. “Sacner Carfon, you have, I think, a contribution to make at this point?”
“I have?” The Dasorian was surprised at first, but caught on quickly. “Oh — perhaps I have, at that. By using Seaton’s power and that of the Brain on the Fodan-Carfon band of the sixth, it will undoubtedly be possible to broadcast a thought that would affect selected mentalities wherever situate in any galaxy of this universe.”
“But listen!” protested Seaton. “We don’t want to advertise how dumb we are all over space!”
“Of course not. The thought would be very carefully built and highly selective. It would tell who we are, what we have done, and what we intend and hope to do. It would state our abilities and — by inference, and only to those we seek — our lacks; and would invite all qualified persons and entities to get in touch with us.”
Seaton looked abstracted for a moment. He was thinking. The notion of sending out a beacon of thought was probably a good one — had to be a good one — after all, the Norlaminians and Sacner Carfon knew what they were doing. Yet he could see complications. The Fodan-Carfon band of the sixth order was still very new and very experimental. “Can you make it selective?” he demanded. “I don’t mind telling our prospective friends we need help — I don’t want to holler it to our enemies.”
The Dasorian’s deep voice chuckled. “It can not be made selective,” he said. “The message would of necessity be on such a carrier as to be receivable by any intelligent brain. Yet it can be hedged about with such safeguards, limitations and compulsions that no one could or would pay attention to it except those who possess at least some ability, overt or latent, to handle the Fodan-Carfon band.”
Seaton whistled through his teeth. “Wow! And just how are you going to clamp on such controls as those? I don’t see how anything but magic — sheer, unadulterated, pure black magic! — could swing that load.”
“Precisely. Or, rather, imprecisely. It is unfortunate that your term ‘magic’ is so inexcusably loose and carries so many and so deplorable connotations and implications. Shall we design and build the thought we wish to send out?”
The thought was designed and was built; and was launched into space with the inconceivable, the utterly immeasurable velocity of its order of being.
A red-haired stripper called Madlyn Mannis, strutting her stuff in Tampa in Peninsula Florida, felt it and almost got it; but, not being very strongly psychic, shrugged it off and went on about the business of removing the last sequin bedecked trifle of her costume.
And, as close to the dancer as plenteous baksheesh could arrange for, a husky, good-looking young petrochemical engineer named Charles K. van der Gleiss felt a thrill like nothing he had ever felt before — but ascribed it, naturally enough, to the fact that this was the first time he had ever seen Madlyn Mannis dance. And in Washington, D.C. one Doctor Stephanie de Marigny, a nuclear physicist, pricked up her ears, tightened the muscles of her scalp, and tried for two full minutes to think of something she ought to think of but couldn’t.
Out past the Green System the message sped, and past the dust and the incandescent gas that had once been the noisome planet of the Fenachrone. Past worlds where amphibians roared and bellowed; past planets of methane ice where crystalline life brooded sluggishly on its destiny.
In the same infinitesimal instant it reached and passed the Rim Worlds of our galaxy; touching many minds but really affecting none. Farther and farther out, with no decrease whatever in speed, it flew; past the inconceivably tiny, inconceivably fast-moving point that housed the seven greatest, most fearsome minds that the Macrocosmic All had ever spawned — minds that, knowing all about that thought already, ignored it completely.
Immensely farther out, it flashed through the galaxy in which was the solar system of Ray-See-Nee — where, for the first time, it made solid contact with a mind in a body human to the limit of classification. Kay-Lee Barlo, confidential secretary of Department Head Bay-Lay Boyn, stiffened so suddenly that she stuttered into her microphone and had to erase three words from a tape — and in that same instant her mother at home went into deep trance.
And still farther out, in a galaxy lying almost on the universe’s Arbitrary Rim, in the Realm of the Llurdi, the message found a much larger group of receivers. While none of the practically enslaved Jelmi could do much of anything about that weirdly peculiar and inexplicably guarded thought, many of them were very much interested in it; particularly Valkyrie-like Sennlloy, a native of the planet Allondax and the master biologist of all known space; ancient Tammon, the greatest genius of the entire Jelman race; and newlyweds Mergon and Luloy, the Mallidaxian savants.
None of the monstrous Llurdi — not even their most monstrous “director”, Klazmon the Fifteenth — being monstrous — could receive the message in any part. And how well that was! For if those tremendously able aliens could have received that message, could have understood it and acted upon it, how vastly different the history of all humanity would have been!
2. LLURDI AND JELMI
THE distance from Earth to the Realm of the Llurdi is such that it is worth while to take a moment to locate it in space.
It has been known for a long time that solar systems occur in lenticular aggregations galled galaxies; each galaxy consisting of one or more thousands of millions of solar systems. And for almost as long a time, since no definite or systematic arrangement of the galaxies could be demonstrated, the terms “Universe” and “Cosmic All” were interchangeable; each meaning the absolute totality of all matter and all space in existence anywhere and everywhere.
There had been speculations, of course, that galaxies were arranged in lenticular universes incomprehensibly vast in size, so that the term “Cosmic All” should be reserved for a plurality of universes and a hyper-space of more than three spatial dimensions.