According to Sleemet’s exceedingly rigorous analysis, the time at which success would become virtually certain would not arrive for at least three hundred Fenachronian years.
From the day of Fenor’s accession to the throne Sleemet had been grimly certain that this Emperor Fenor — head-strong, basically ignorant, and inordinately prideful even for an absolute monarch of the Fenachrone — would set The Day during his own reign; centuries before its proper time.
Therefore, for over fifty years, Sleemet had been preparing for exactly the eventuality that came about, and:
Therefore, after listening to only a few phrases of the ultimatum given to Emperor Fenor by Sacner Carfon of Dasor, speaking for the Overlord Seaton and his Forces of Universal Peace, Sleemet sent out his signal and:
Therefore, even before Ravindau’s forces began to board their single vessel Sleemet’s fleet of seventeen superdreadnoughts was out in deep space, blasting at full-emergency fifth-order cosmic-energy drive away from the planet so surely doomed.
Surely doomed? Yes. Knowing vastly more about the sixth order than did any other of his race, he was the only one of his race who knew anything about the Overlord of the Central System; of who and what that Overlord was and of what that Overlord had done. He, Sleemet, did not want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton. Not then or ever.
Curse Fenor’s abysmal stupidity! Since a whole new Fenachrone planet would now have to be developed, the Conquest could not be begun for more than three hundred years!
While Sleemet knew much more about the sixth order than Ravindau did, he did not have the sixth-order drive and it took him and his scientists and engineers several months to develop and to perfect it. Thus their fleet was still inside the First Galaxy when they finally changed drives and began really to travel — on a course that, since it was laid out to reach the most distant galaxies of the First Universe, would of necessity lie within two and a quarter hundreds of thousands of light-years of the galaxy in which the Realm of the Llurdi lay.
As has been intimated, the Llurdi were literal folk. When any llanzlan issued a directive he meant it literally, and it was always as literally carried out.
Thus, when Llanzlan Klazmon ordered the construction of an installation of such a nature that “no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed” he meant precisely that — and that was precisely what was built. Nor, since the Llurdi had full command of the fourth and fifth orders, and some sixth-order apparatus as well, was the task overlong in the doing.
The entire one-hundred-six-mile circumference of Llurdias and a wide annulus outside the city proper were filled with tremendous fortresses; each of which was armed and powered against any contingency to which Computer Prime — almost half a cubic mile of miniaturization packed with the accumulated knowledges and happenings of some seventy thousand years — could assign a probability greater than point zero zero zero one.
Each of those fortresses covered five acres of ground; was low and flat. Each was built of super-hard, super-tough, super-refractory synthetic. Each had twenty-seven highrising, lightning-rodlike spikes of the same material. Fortress-shell and spikes through closely spaced cast-in tubes; and the entire periphery of each fortress, as well as dozens of interior relief-points, went deep into constantly water-soaked, heavily salted ground. Each fortress sprouted scores of antennae — parabolic, box, flat, and straight — and scores of heavily insulated projectors of shapes to be defined only by a professional mathematician of solid geometry.
And how the Llurdan detectors could now cover space! The Jelm Mergon, long before his abortive attempt to break jail, had developed a miniaturized monitor station that could detect, amplify, and retransmit on an aimed tight beam any fifth- or sixth-order signal from and to a distance of many kiloparsecs.
Hundreds of these “mergons” were already out in deep space. Now mergons were being manufactured in lots of a thousand, and in their thousands they were being hurled outward from Llurdiax, to cover — by relays en cascade not only the Llurdan galaxy and a great deal of intergalactic space, but also a good big chunk of inter-universal space as well.
The Fenachrone fleet bored on through inter-galactic space at its distance-devouring sixth-order pace. Its fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order detector webs fanned out far — “far” in the astronomical sense of the word — ahead of it. They were set to detect, not only the most tenuous cloud of gas, but also any manifestation whatever upon any of the known bands of any of those orders. Similar detectors reached out to an equal distance above and below and to the left of and to the right of the line of flight; so that the entire forward hemisphere was on continuous web of ultra-tenuous but ultra-sensitive detection.
And, as that fleet approached a galaxy lying well to “starboard” — the term was still in use aboard ship except for matters of record, since the direction of action of artificial gravity, whatever its actual direction, was always “down” — two sets of detectors tripped at once.
The squat and monstrous officer on watch reported this happening instantly, of course, to Sleemet himself; and of course Sleemet himself went instantly into action. He energized his flagship’s immense fifth-order projector.
Those detections could have only one meaning. There was at least one solar system in that galaxy peopled by entities advanced enough to work with forces of at least the fifth order. They should be destroyed — that is, he corrected himself warily, unless they were allied with or belonged to that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Overlord of the Central System of the First Galaxy… But no, at this immense distance the probability of that was vanishingly small.
They might, however, have weapons of the sixth. The fact that there were no such devices in operation at the moment did not preclude that possibility.
Very unlike the late unlamented Fenor he, First Scientist Sleemet, was not stupidly and arrogantly sure that the Fenachrone were in fact the ablest, most intelligent, and most powerful race of beings in existence. He would investigate, of course. But he would do it cautiously.
The working projections of the Fenachrone were tight patterns of force mounted on tight beams. Thus, until they began to perform exterior work, they were virtually indetectable except by direct interception and hard-driven specific taps. Sleemet knew this to be a fact; whether the projection was on, above, or below the target planet’s surface and even though that planet was so far away that it would take light hundreds of centuries to make the oneway trip.
The emanations of his vessels’ sixth-order cosmic-energy drive, however, were very distinctly something else. They could not be damped out or masked and they could be detected very easily by whoever or whatever it was that was out there… Yes, an exploration would not change matters at all…
As a matter of fact, the Fenachrone Fleet’s emanations had been detected a full two seconds since.
A far-outpost mergon had picked it up and passed it along to a second, which in turn had relayed it inward to its Number Three, which finally had delivered it to Computer Prime on incredibly distant Llurdiax.
There, in Hall Prime of Computation, a section supervisor had flicked the switch that had transferred the unusual bit of information to his immediate superior, Head Supervisor Klarton — who had at sight of it gone into a tizzy (for a Llurd) of worrying his left ear with the tip of his tail. He stared at the motionless bit of tape as though it were very apt indeed to bite him in the eye. What to do? Should he disturb the llanzlan with this or not?