"You're so right. Actually, we owe her a vote of thanks for what she's done for us."

"We certainly do. I'd tell her so myself, too, if it wouldn't... but say... s'pose she's reading us right now?"

The man stiffened momentarily, then said, "We haven't said a word I wouldn't want her to hear. If you are on us, Bobby, I say this-thanks; and you can put it down in your book that we're both with you until the last clang of the gong. Check, Cecily?"

"How I check!" She kissed him fervently. "You were right; I should have talked to you before. I didn't have a leg to stand on."

"That allegation I deny." He laughed, put his right hand on her well-exposed left leg, and squeezed. "This, in case n.o.body ever told you before-I thought I had-is one of the only perfect pair of such ever produced."

She put her hand over his, pressed it even tighter against her leg, and grinned up at him; and for a time action took place of words. Then she pulled her mouth away from his and leaned back far enough to ask, "You don't suppose she's watching us now, do you?"

"No. Definitely not. She's no Peeping Thomasina. But even if she were-now that you're you again, my redheaded bundle of joy, we have unfinished business on the agenda. And anyway, you're not exactly a shrinking violet."

"Why, I am too!" She widened her eyes at him in outraged innocence. "That's a vile and base canard, sir. I'm just as much of a Timid Soul as you are, you Fraidy Freddie, you-why, I'm absodamlutely the shrinkingest little violet you ever laid your cotton-pickin' eyes on!"

"Okay, Little Vi, let's jet." He got up and helped her to her feet; then, arms tightly around each other and savoring each moment, they moved slowly toward a closed door.

The cold-war stalemate that had begun sometime early in the twentieth century had become a way of life. Contrary to the belief of each side over the years, the other had not collapsed. Dictatorship and so-called democracy still coexisted; both were vastly stronger than they had ever been before. Each had enough superpowerful weapons to destroy all life on Earth, but neither wanted a lifeless and barren world; each wanted to rule the Earth as it was. Therefore the Big Bangs had not been launched; each side was doing its subtle best to outwit, to undermine, and/or to overthrow the other.

WestHem was expanding into s.p.a.ce; EastHem, as far as WestHem's Intelligence could find out, was waiting, with characteristic Oriental patience, for the capitalistic and imperialistic government of the West to fall apart because of its own innate weaknesses.

This situation existed when the Galactic Federation was formed; specifically to give all the peoples of all the planets a unified, honest, and just government;, when Secretary of Labor Deissner, acting through Antonio Grimes, called all the milk-truck drivers of Metropolitan New York out on strike.

At three forty five of the designated morning all the milk-delivery trucks of Depot Eight-taking one station for example; the same thing was happening at all were in the garage and the heavy steel doors were closed and locked. The gates of the yard were locked and barricaded. The eight-man-deep picket line was composed one-tenth of drivers, nine-tenths of heavily-armed, heavy-muscled hoodlums and plug-uglies. They were ready, they thought, for anything.

At three fifty a fleet of armored half-tracks lumbered up and began to disgorge armored men. Their armor, while somewhat reminiscent of that worn by the chivalry of old, was not at all like it in detail. Built of leybyrdite, it was somewhat lighter, immensely stronger, and very much more efficient. Its wide-angle visors, for instance, were made of bullet-proof, crack-proof, scratch-proof neo-gla.s.s. Formation was made and from one of the trucks an eighty-decibel voice roared out: "Strikers, attention! We are coming through; the regular deliveries are going to be made. We don't want to kill any more of you than we have to, so those of you with only clubs, bra.s.s knucks, knives, lead pipes, and such stuff, we'll try to only knock out as cold as frozen beef. You guys with the guns, every one of you who lets go one burst will get shot. Non-fatally, we hope, but we can't guarantee it. Now, you d.a.m.n fool bystanders" -it is remarkable how quickly a New York crowd can gather, even at four o'clock in the morning= keep right on crowding up, as close as you can get. Anybody G.o.d d.a.m.ned fool enough to stand gawking in the line of fire of fifty machine guns ought to get killed-so just keep on standing there and save some other fool-killer the trouble of sending you to the morgue in baskets. Okay, men, give 'em h.e.l.l!"

To give credit to the crowd's intelligence, most of it did depart-and at speed-before the shooting began. New Yorkers were used to being chivvied away from scenes of interest; they were not used to being invited, in such a loud tone of such savage contempt, to stay and be slaughtered. Of the few who stayed, the still fewer survivors wished fervently, later, that they had taken off as fast as they could run.

Armored men strode forward, swinging alloy-sheathed fists, and men by the dozens went down flat. Then guns went into action and the armored warriors fell down and rolled hap-hazardly on the pavement; for no man, however strong, can stand up against the kinetic energy of a stream of heavy bullets. Except for a few bruises, however, they were not injured. They were not even deafened by the boiler-shop clangor within their horribly resounding sh.e.l.ls of metal-highly efficient earplugs had seen to that.

Those steel-jacketed bullets, instead of penetrating that armor, ricocheted off in all directions-and it was only then that the obdurately persistent bystanders-those of them that could, that is-ran away.

The machine-gun phase of the battle didn't last very long, either. In the a.s.sault-proof half-tracks expert riflemen peered through telescopic sights and .30-caliber rifles barked viciously. The strikers' guns went silent.

Leybyrdite-shielded mobile torchers clanked forward and the ma.s.sed pickets fled: no man in his right mind is ever going to face willingly the sixty-three-hundred degree heat of the oxy-acetylene flame. The gates vanished. The barriers disappeared. The locked doors opened. Then, with an armored driver aboard, each delivery truck was loaded as usual and went calmly away along its usual route; while ambulances and meat-wagons brought stretchers and baskets and carried away the wounded and the dead.

Nor were those trucks attacked, or even interfered with. It had been made abundantly clear that it would be the attackers who would suffer.

But what of the source of New York's milk? The s.p.a.ceport and Way Nineteen? Pickets went there, too, of course; but what they saw there stopped them in their tracks. Just inside the entrance, one on each side of the Way, sat those two tremendous, invulnerable, enigmatic super-tanks. They did not do anything. Nothing at all. They merely sat there; but that was enough. No one there knew what those things could or would do; and no one there wanted to find out. Not, that is, the hard way.

Nor did the Metropolitan Police do anything. There was nothing they could do. This was, most definitely, not their dish. This was war. War between the Galaxians on one side and Labor, backed by WestHem's servile government, on the other. The government's armed forces, however, did not take part in the action. At the first move of the day, Maynard had taken care of that.

"Get the army in on this if you like," he had told Deissner, flatly. "Anything and everything you care to, up to and including the heaviest nuclear devices you have.

We are three long subs.p.a.ce jumps ahead of anything you can do, and the rougher you want to play it the more of a shambles New York will be when it's over."

Therefore, after that one brief but vicious battle, everything remained-on the surface-peaceful and serene. Milk-deliveries were regular and punctual, undisturbed by any overt incident. The only difference-on the surface-was that the milk-truck drivers wore leybyrdite instead of white duck.

Beneath that untroubled surface, however, everything seethed and boiled. Grimes and his lieutenants raved and swore. Deissner gritted his teeth in quiet, futile desperation. The Nameless One of EastHem, completely unaccustomed to frustration and highly allergic to it, went almost mad. He now knew that the Galaxians had the most powerful planet in the galaxy and he could not find it.

This situation was, of course, much too unstable to endure, and Nameless was the first to crack. He probably went completely mad. At any rate, his first move was to liquidate both Secretary of Labor Deissner and Chief Mediator Wilson. Nor was there anything of finesse about these a.s.sa.s.sinations. Two multi-ton blockbusters were detonated, one in each of two apartment hotels, and the fact that over three thousand persons died meant nothing to EastHem's tyrant. His second move was to make Antonio Grimes the boss of all WestHem. Whereupon Grimes called a general strike; every union man of the Western Hemisphere walked out; and all h.e.l.l was out for noon.

The union people, however, were not the only ones who walked out. Executives, supervisors, engineers, and top bracket technicians did too, in droves, and disappeared from Earth; and they did not go empty-handed. For instance, the top technical experts of Communications Incorporated (a wholly-owned subsidiary of InStell) worked for an hour or so apiece in the recesses of their switch-banks and packed big carrying-cases before they left.

Grimes knew and counted upon the fact that WestHem's economy, half automated though it was, could not function without his union men and women at work. He must also have known the obverse; that it could not function, either, without the brains that had brought automation into being in the first place and that kept it running-the only brains that understood what those piled-up ma.s.ses of electronic gear were doing. He must also have known that in any fight to the finish Labor would suffer with the rest; hence he did not expect a finish fight. He was superbly confident that Capital, this time as always before, would surrender. He was wrong.

When Grimes found every one of his own communications channels dead, he tried frantically to restore enough service to handle Labor's campaign, but there was nothing he or his union operators could do. (They were still called "operators", although there were no longer any routine manual operations to be performed).

These operators, although highly skilled in the techniques of keeping the millions of calls flowing smoothly through the fantastically complex mazes of their central exchanges, were limited by their own unions' rules to their own extremely narrow field of work. An operator reported trouble, but she must not, under any conditions, try to fix it. Nor could if she tried. No operator knew even the instrumentation necessary to locate any particular failure, to say nothing of being able to interpret the esoteric signals of that instrumentation.

There were independent experts, of course, and Grimes found them and put them to work. These experts, however, could find nothing with which to work. The key codes, the master diagrams, and the all-important frequency manuals had vanished. They could not even find out what, or how much, of sabotage had been done. It would be quicker, they reported, to jury-rig a few channels for Labor's own use. They could do that in a day or so; in just a little longer than it would take to fly technicians to the various cities he wanted in his network. Grimes told them to go ahead; but before the Labor leaders could accomplish much of anything, EastHem launched every intercontinental ballistic missile it had.

WestHem's warning systems and defenses were very good indeed. The Department of Defense had its own communications system, which of course was not affected by the strike. In seconds, then, after the first Eastern missile left the ground, the retaliatory monsters of the West began to climb their ladders.

And in minutes the Nameless One and hundreds of the hard core of the Party died; and thousands of his lesser minions were in vehicles hurtling toward subs.p.a.cers which had for many months been ready to go and fully programmed for flight.

Chapter 15 THE UNIVERSITY OF PSIONICS.

EARTH As such did not have a s.p.a.ce navy; there was no danger of attack from s.p.a.ce and, as far as Earth was concerned, the outplanets could take care of themselves. Nor did either WestHem or EastHem; with their ICBM's they did not need or want any subs.p.a.ce-going battleships. Nor did any of the planets. Newmars and Galmetia were heavily armed, but their armament was strictly defensive.

Thus InStell had been forced, over the years, to develop a navy of its own, to protect its far-flung network of merchant traffic lines against piracy; which had of course moved into s.p.a.ce along with the richly-laden merchantmen. As traffic increased, piracy increased; so protection had to increase, too. Thus, over the years and gradually, there came about a very peculiar situation: The only real navy in all the reaches of explored s.p.a.ce-the only law-enforcement agency of all that s.p.a.ce -was a private police force not responsible to any government!

It hunted down and destroyed pirate ships in s.p.a.ce. It sought out and destroyed pirate bases. Since no planetary court had jurisdiction, InStell set up a s.p.a.ce-court, in which such few marauders as were captured alive were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. For over a century there had been bitter criticism of these "highhanded tactics," particularly on Earth. However, InStell didn't like it, either-it was expensive. Wherefore, for the same hundred years or so, InStell had been trying to get rid of it; but no planet-particularly Earth-or no Planetary League or whatever-would take it over. Every- body wanted to run it, but n.o.body would pick up the tab. So InStell kept on being the only Law in s.p.a.ce.

This navy was small, numbering only a hundred capital ships; but each of those ships was an up-to-the-minute and terribly efficient engine of destruction, bristling with the most modem, most powerful weapons known to man.

High above Earth's surface, precisely s.p.a.ced both vertically and horizontally, hung poised the weirdest, the motleyest fleet ever a.s.sembled. InStell's entire navy was there, clear down to tenders, scouts, and gigs; but they were scarcely a drop in the proverbial bucket. InStell's every liner, freighter, lofter, and shuttle that could be there was there; MetEnge's every ore-boat, tanker, scout and scow that could possibly be spared; all the Galaxians every available vessel of every type and kind, from Hatfield's palatial subs.p.a.ce-going private yacht down to Maynard's grandsons' four-boy flit about. More, every s.p.a.ceyard of the planets had been combed; every clunker, and every junker not yet cut completely up, was taken over. Drives and controls had been repaired or re- placed. Hulls had been made air-tight. Many of these derelicts, however, were in such bad shape that they could not be depended upon to stay air-tight; hence many of those skeleton crews worked, ate, and slept in s.p.a.cesuits complete except for helmets-and with those helmets at belts at the ready.

But each unit of that vast and ridiculously nondescript fleet could carry men, missile-killers, computer-coupled! locators, and launchers, and that was all that was necessary. Since there was so much area to cover, it was the number of control stations that was important, not their size or quality. The Galaxians had had to use every craft whose absence from its usual place would not point too directly at Maynard's plan.

The fleet was not evenly distributed, of course. Admiral Dann knew the location of every missile-launching base on Earth, and his coverage varied accordingly. Having made formation, he waited. His flagship covered EastHem's main base; he personally saw EastHem's first Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile streak upward. "This is it, boys, go to work," he said quietly into his microphone, and the counter-action began. A computer whirred briefly and a leybyrdite missile-killer erupted from a launcher. Erupted, and flashed away on collision course at an acceleration so appallingly high that it could not be tracked effectively even by the radar of that age. That acceleration can be stated in Tellurian gravities; but the figure, by itself, would be completely meaningless to the mind. Everyone knows all about one Earthly gravity. Everyone has seen a full-color tri-di of hard trained men undergoing ten and fifteen gees; has seen what it does to them. But ten thousand gravs? Or a hundred thousand? Or two hundred thousand? Such figures are entirely meaningless.

Consider instead the bullet in the barrel of a magnum rifle at, and immediately after, the instant of ignition of the propellant charge. This concept is much more informative. Starting from rest, in a time of a little over one millisecond and in a distance of less than three feet, that bullet attains a velocity of more than four thousand feet per second. Those missile-killers moved like that, except more so and continuously. They were the highest acceleration things ever put into production by man.

The first killer struck its target and both killer and target vanished into nothingness; a nothingness so inconceivably hot that the first thing to become visible was a fire-ball some ten miles in diameter. But there was nothing of fission about that frightfulness; GalFed's warheads operated on the utterly incomprehensible heat generated by dead-shorted Chaytor engines during the fractional microsecond each engine lasted before being whiffed into subatomic vapor by the stark ferocity of its own performance.

Missiles by the hundreds were launched; from EastHem, from WestHem, from the poles and from the oceans and from the air; and in their hundreds they were blown into submolecular and subatomic vapor. Thus it made no difference what kind of a warhead any missile had carried. Fission, fusion, chemical, or biological; all one: no a.n.a.lysis, however precise and thorough, could ever reveal what any of those cargoes had originally been. Nor did any missile reach its destination. Admiral Dann had ships enough, and missile-killers in thousands to spare.

Meanwhile hundreds of small, highly-specialized vessels had been flying hither and yon above certain areas of the various oceans. They were hunting, with ultrasensitive instrumentation, all Earth's missile-carrying submarines. They didn't bother about the missiles launched by the subs-the boys and girls upstairs would take care of them-they were after the pig-boats themselves. Their torpedoes were hunters, too. Once a torpedo's finders locked on, the sub had no chance whatever of escape. There was a world-jarring concussion where each submarine had been, and a huge column of water and vapor drove upward into and through the stratosphere.

This furious first phase of the "police action" lasted except for the sub-hunt-only minutes. Then every missile-launching site on Earth was blasted out of existence. So also were a few subs.p.a.cers attempting to leave EastHem-all Earth had been warned once and had been told that the warning would not be given twice.

Then the immense fleet re-formed, held position, and waited a few hours; after which time Dann ordered all civilian ships to return to their various ports. The navy stayed on 'in its entirety. It would continue to destroy all ships attempting to leave Earth.

Twelve hours after Earth's last missile had been destroyed, two-hundred-odd persons met in the main lounge of the flagship of the fleet. Maynard, his face haggard and drawn, called the meeting to order. After the preliminaries were over, he said: "One part of the operation, the prevention of damage to any important part of Earth, was one hundred percent successful. Second, the replacement of EastHem's dictatorship by a board of directors was also successful at least, the first objectives were attained. Third, our attempt to replace WestHem's government by a board of directors which, together with that of EastHem, would form a unified and properly-motivated government of all Earth, was a failure. The Westerners did not try to leave Earth, but decided to stay and fight it out. For that reason many key men changed their minds at the last minute and remained loyal to WestHem's government instead of supporting us. Thus, while we succeeded in evacuating most of our personnel, we lost one hundred four very good men.

"The fault, of course, was mine. I erred in several highly important matters. I underestimated the power of nationalism and patriotism; of loyalty to a government even though that government is notoriously inefficient, unjust, and corrupt. I underestimated the depth and strength of the anti-Galaxian prejudice that has been cultivated so a.s.siduously throughout the great majority of Earth's people; I failed to realize how rigidly, in the collective mind of that vast group, Galaxianism is identified with Capitalism. I overestimated the intelligence of that group; its ability to reason from cause to effect and its willingness to act for its own good. I thought that, when the issue was squarely joined, those people would abandon their att.i.tude of Let George do it' and take some interest in their own affairs.

"Because of these errors in judgment I hereby tender my resignation, effective as of now, from the position of Chairman of this Board. I turn this meeting over to Vice-Chairman Bryce for the election of my successor."

He left the room; but was recalled in five minutes. "Mr. Maynard, your tendered resignation has been rejected by an almost unanimous vote," Bryce told him. "It is the concensus that no one else of us all could have done as well. You will therefore resume your place and the meeting will proceed."

Maynard sat down and said, "I thank you, fellow Galaxians, for your vote of confidence; which, however little deserved, I am constrained to accept. Mr. Eldon Smith will now speak."

The meeting went on for hours. Discussion was thorough and heated; at times acrimonious. Eventually, however, the main areas of discord were hammered out to substantial agreement. The Board of Directors of the Galactic Federation concluded its first really important meeting.

Earth's communications systems were restored to normal operating conditions and Maynard, after ample advance notice, spoke to every inhabitant of Earth who cared to listen. He covered the situation as it then was; what had brought it about, and why such drastic action had been necessary. Then he said: "At present there are ninety five planets in the Galactic Federation. Earth will be admitted to the Federation if and when it adopts a planetary government acceptable to the Federation's Board of Directors. We care nothing about the form of that government; but we insist that its prime concern must be the welfare of the human race as a whole. Earth now has two directors on our board, Li Hing Wong and Feodr Ilyowicz. Earth is ent.i.tled to three more directors, to represent the regions now being so erroneously called the Western Hemisphere. They must be chosen by an honest, stable, and responsible authority, not by your present government of corrupt, greedy, and self-serving gangsters and plunderers.

"We will allow enough freighters to land on WestHem's s.p.a.ceports to supply WestHem's people with its usual supply of food and of certain other necessities, but that is all. Our milk-truck drivers have been recalled and we will do nothing whatever about the general strike. If you wish to let an organized minority starve you to death, that is your right. You got yourselves into this mess; you can get yourselves out of it or not, as you please.

"We will not broadcast again until three qualified representatives of WestHem have been accepted by us as members of the Board of Directors of the Galactic Federation. Until then, do exactly as you please. That is all."

There is no need to go into what happened then throughout the nations of WestHem; the many nations whose only common denominator had been their opposition to the East. Too much able work has been done, from too many different viewpoints, to make any real summary justifiable. It suffices to say here that the adjustment was not as simple as Maynard's statement indicated that it should be, nor as easy as he really thought it would be. The strife was long, bitter, and violent; and, as will be seen later, certain entirely unexpected events occurred.

In fact, many thousand persons died and the Galaxians themselves had to straighten WestHem out before its three directors were seated on the Board.

There is no agreement as to whether or not the course that was followed was the right course or the best course. Many able scholars hold that the Directorate was just as much of a dictatorship, and just as intolerant of and just as inimical to real liberty and freedom, as was any dictatorship of old.

It is the chronicler's considered opinion, however, that what was done was actually the best thing-for humanity as a whole-that could have been done; considering what the ordinary human being intrinsically is. By "ordinary" is meant, of course, the person to whom the entire field of psionics is a sealed realm; the person in whose tightly closed and rigidly conventional mind no supra-normal phenomenon can possibly occur or exist. And the present state of galactic civilization seems to show that if what was done was not the best that could have been done it was a very close approximation indeed thereto.

At what exact point does liberty become license? What is Freedom? Is Ethics an absolute? Can any system of ethics ever become an absolute? The conclusion seems unavoidable that until human beings have progressed much farther than they have at present-until supra-normal abilities have become normal-the "liberties" and the "freedoms" of many will have to be abridged if the good of all is to be served.

Newmars was the first planet to be colonized and it was designed from the first to become completely independent of Earth in as short a time as possible. Thus, as well as being longer-established than the other planets, it grew faster in population. Therefore Newmars had a population of about a billion, whereas the next most populous planet, Galmetia, had scarcely half that many people and all the rest of the colonized planets together did not have many more people than did Earth alone.

Geographically, Newmars had somewhat more land than Earth and somewhat less water, but the land ma.s.ses were arranged in an entirely different pattern. There was one tremendous continent, Warneria; which, roughly rectangular in shape and lying athwart the equator, covered on the average about ninety degrees of lat.i.tude and about one hundred fifty of longitude. There were half a dozen other, much smaller continents, and many hundreds of thousands of islands ranging in size from coral atolls up to near-continents as large as Australia.

Most of Nevmars' people lived on "The Continent," and some seven millions of them lived in and around the coastal city of Warnton, the planet's only real business center and the capital city of both the Continent and the whole Warner-owned world.

In establishing the University of Psionics, then, Adams did not have to think twice to decide where to put it. Earth, even though it would furnish most of the students, was out of the question; the U of Psi would have to be in Warnton, Newmars.

Within a day of landing, however, Adams realized that the business of starting such a project as that was not his dish. He simply could not spend important money. He had never bought even an expensive scientific instrument; he had always requistioned them from some purchasing department or other. He had never in his life written a check for more than a few hundred bucks; he had no knowledge whatever of the use of money as a tool. Wherefore the Explorer landed at Warnton s.p.a.ceport and Barbara Deston took over. It had been Adams' idea to buy-or preferably to rent-a small apartment house to start with, but Barbara put her foot down hard on that.

She bought outright a brand-new forty-story hotel that covered half of a square block, saying, "We don't want large cla.s.s-rooms-the smaller the better, since it will be small-group work-so this will suit us well enough until the architects get our real university built. Then we can either sell it or form an operating company and merge it into the hotel chain."

When the project was running smoothly, and after the eight had developed a nucleus of some fifty psiontists, the Destons took the Explorer to Earth and the Joneses and the Trains, in two Warner-owned subs.p.a.cers, started out to cover the other planets, in descending order of population.

The Destons took up residence in their suite in the Hotel Warner and went to work. They scanned colleges and universities, whether or not any such inst.i.tution of learning had ever shown any interest in psionics. They scanned Inst.i.tutes of this and that, including several of Psychic Research. They scanned science fiction fan clubs and flying-saucer societies and crackpot groups and cults of all kinds and psychic mediums and fortune-tellers. They attended-unfelt-meetings of the learned societies. They scanned the trades and the professions, from aardvark keepers and aerialists through electricians and jewelers and ophthalmologists and s.p.a.cemen to zymurgists. Detecting a psionic latent, however weak, was now easy enough. There was an aura, if not an actual radiation, that was perceptible to the triggered mind at almost any distance. Any mind possessing that unique and unmistakable characteristic could and did feel and respond to the touch of a directed thought. Or, more exactly perhaps, a focused or tuned thought. Any such mind could and did (under such expert tutelage as theirs now was) learned telepathy in seconds; and, with very few exceptions, all persons with such minds became Galaxians and went to Newmars.

Since the operators knew what to do and exactly how to do it, the work went fast; and, very shortly after its beginning, a definite pattern began to form. Every possessor of a strong latent talent was at or near the top of his or her heap. If a performer, he or she had top billing. If a milliner, she got a hundred dollars per copy for her hats. If a mechanic, he was the best mechanic in town.

It need scarcely be said that Maynard, Lansing, Dann, Smith, Phelps, DuPuy, Hatfield, Spehn, Miss Champion, the seven leaders of the Planetsmen and their a.s.sistants and hundreds of others of the Galaxians were found to be very strong latents. Or that, even though most of them were too busy to go to Newmars to study, each was given everything that he could then take that his teachers could then give.

On the other hand, not even the Adamses could at that time get into touch with a non-psionic mind. It was not that that mind refused contact or blocked the exploring feelers of thought; it was as though there was nothing there to feel. It was like probing with sentient fingers throughout the reaches of an unbounded, undefined, completely empty and utterly dark s.p.a.ce.

And the conservative ("Hidebound", according to Deston), greedy capitalists of Earth were non-psionic to a man.

The response to this psionic survey was so tremendous that the hotel building, immense as it was, was jammed to overflowing before the first real University building was ready for use.

As Barbara had foreseen, the psionics cla.s.ses were small, but there were plenty of teachers; people whose former t.i.tles ranged from Instructress-In-Kindergarten to Professor Emeritus of Advanced Nucleonics. And these cla.s.ses were being driven. They wanted to be driven. Each person there had been-more or less unconsciously -unhappy, discontented, frustrated. The few who had known that they had psionic power had been hiding it or disguising it; the others had known, either definitely or vaguely, that they wanted something out of life that they were not getting. Thus, when their minds were opened to the incredible vistas of psionics, they wanted to be driven hard and they drove themselves hard. They graduated fast, and either went right to work or formed advanced-study groups-and in either case they kept on driving hard.

When the Explorer emerged near Newmars, Barbara did not wait for the slow maneuvering of landing at the s.p.a.ceport and then taking the monorail into town, but 'ported herself directly into the main office of the University. Five minutes later she drove a thought to her husband. "Babe, come here, quick! Here's something you're simply got to sec!"

He appeared beside her and she went on, "I knew they were working fast, but I certainly didn't expect anything like that so soon." Her mind took his up into a small room on the thirtieth floor. "Just look at that!"

Deston "looked" at the indicated group of four; who, heads almost touching, were seated at a small square table. One was a gangling, coltish, teen-age girl in sweater, slacks, and loafers, with braces on her teeth and her hair in a ponytail. The second was an old friend of Deston's-a big, taut, trim s.p.a.ce-officer in a uniform sporting the insignia of a full captain. The third was a lithe and lissome brunette made up to the gills; the fourth was a bald and paunchy ex-banker of seventy.

"And that combination picked itself out?" Deston marveled.

"Uh-huh," she said, gleefully, pressing his arm tightly against her side. "All out of their own little pointed heads and Stella says they're the prize group of the whole University. Dig in. Look. Just see what they're actually doing."

"Uh-uh. I don't want to derail their tram of thought." You won't. Maybe if you grabbed 'em by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and slammed 'em against the wall a few times you could, but nothing any gentler than that."

"They're that solid?" He went in and looked, and his whole body stiffened. He stayed in for five long minutes before he came back to Barbara and whistled through his teeth. "Wow and wow and WOW!" he said then. "All of us Big Wheels are going to have to look a little bit out-we're going to have compet.i.tion. We may have to demonstrate our fitness to lead-if any."

"That's what I mean, and isn't it just wonderful? The University doesn't need us any more, so we can start doing whatever it is that we're going to do right now instead of waiting so long, like we thought we'd have to."

"They've done a grand job, that's sure. Let's do some long-distance checking-see how Spehn and Dann are making out."

They were making out all right. Since both were now psiontists, Intelligence and Navy were barreling right along. Graduates from the University of Psionics had been pouring into both services for weeks. Both services were expanding rapidly, in both numbers and quality; and, since the opposition was practically non-psionic, the Galaxians' advantage (Spehn and Dann agreed) was increasing all the time. Also, the opposition was not really united and could never be united except superficially because its factions were, by their very natures, immiscible. How effective could such opposition be?

Unfortunately, Spehn and Dann were wrong; and so were the Destons. It is a sad but true fact that a college graduate at graduation knows more than he ever did before or ever will again; and so it was with these young new psiontists. They thought they knew it all, but they didn't. They had a long way to go.

Chapter 16 STRATEGIC WITHDRAWAL.

Since the Galactic Federation claimed authority over all explored off-planet s.p.a.ce, and since InStell still wanted to get rid of the job of policing all that s.p.a.ce, GaIFed took the navy over. (It had a tremendous war-chest, and the financial details of the transaction are of no importance here.) What had been the Interstellar Patrol was now the Grand Fleet of the Galactic Federation.

Fleet Admiral Guerdon Dann, being a psiontist, could understand and could work in subs.p.a.ce. Therefore he could perceive subs.p.a.ce-going vessels before they emerged into normal s.p.a.ce, a feat no non-psionic observer could perform. Thus he perceived a very large number of vessels so maneuvering in subs.p.a.ce as to emerge in a roughly globular formation well outside his own globe of warships. He perceived that they were warcraft and really big stuff-super-dreadnougbts very much like his own-and that there were four or five hundred of them. That wasn't good; but, since their purpose was pellucidly clear, he'd have to do something. What could he do? His mind raced.

He wasn't a war admiral-pirates didn't fight in fleets. He didn't know any more about fleet action in s.p.a.ce than a pig did about Sunday. There'd never been any. Missile-killers were new and had extreme range, and no repulsor except a planet-based super-giant could stop one after fifteen seconds of flight at 175,000 gravities. However, they carried no screen, so they'd be duck soup for beams, especially lasers-if they could spot them soon enough, and he'd have to a.s.sume that they could.

Torps had plenty of screen, but they were slow; hence they were duck soup for repulsors. What he ought to have, dammit, was something with the legs of a killer and the screens of a torp, and there was nothing like that even on the drawing boards. Before leybyrdite nothing like that had been possible.

Beams, then? Uh-uh! They'd englobe shipwise, four or five to one. His ships could then immerge-if they were fast enough-or get whiffed out.

He got into telepathic touch with his officers. "I don't know whether we can do anything to those boys or not. Probably not. We certainly can't if we let them get close to us-they'll englobe us four or five to one if we make like heroes, so we won't. Be ready to immerse when I give the word. Try killers at fifteen seconds range as they emerge and send out some torps on general principles, but that's all. We're going to execute a strategic withdrawal-in other words, run like h.e.l.l."