“Pag? Do you hear me? This is Hallerock. Pag?”
“Go ahead, chum!” she invited. “I was off beam for a moment there. The planet still look all right?”
“No worse than it ever did,” said Hallerock. “But this is about your Fleet operation. The six destroyers are spread out behind you in interception positions by now, and the cruiser should be coming into detection dead ahead at any moment. You still want them to communicate with you through the Observation Ship here?”
“Better keep it that way,” Pagadan ordered. “The Bjantas might spot Fleet signals, as close to me as they are, but it’s a cinch they can’t tap this beam! I won’t slip up again. Anything from the Department?”
“Correlation is sending some new stuff out on the Ulphi business, but nothing important. At any rate, they didn’t want to break into your maneuver with the Bjantas. I told them to home it here to the O-Ship. Right?”
“Right,” Pagadan approved. “You’ll make a Zone Agent yet, my friend! In time.”
“I doubt it,” Hallerock grunted. “There’s no real future in it anyway. Here’s the cruiser calling again, Pag! I’ll be standing by—”
Pagadan pursed her lips thoughtfully as a barely audible click indicated her aide had gone off communication. She’d been a full-fledged Zone Agent of the Vegan Confederacy for exactly four months now—the first member of any nonhuman race to attain that rank in the super-secretive Department of Galactic Zones. Hallerock, human, was an advanced Trainee. Just how advanced was a question she’d have to decide, and very soon.
The surface reflections vanished from her mind at the Viper’s sub-vocal warning:
“Cruiser—dead ahead!”
“The disk on your left!” Pagadan snapped. “Cut it off from the others as soon as they begin to turn. Give it a good start then—and be sure you’re crowding the last bit of speed out of it before you even think of closing in. We may not be able to get what we’re after—probably won’t—but Lab can use every scrap of information we collect on those babies!”
“We’ll get what we’re after, too,” the Viper almost purred. And, a bare instant later:
“They’ve spotted the cruiser. Now!”
* * *
In the vision tank, the fleeing disk grew and grew. During the first few minutes, it had appeared there only as a comet-tailed spark, a dozen radiant streamers of different colors fanning out behind it—not an image of the disk itself but the tank’s visual representation of any remote moving object on which the ship’s detectors were held. The shifting lengths and brightness of the streamers announced at a glance to those trained to read them the object’s distance, direction, comparative and absolute speeds and other matters of interest to a curious observer.
But as the Viper began to reduce the headstart the Bjanta had been permitted to get, at the exact rate calculated to incite it to the most intensive efforts to hold that lead, a shadowy outline of the disk’s true shape began to grow about the spark. A bare quarter million miles away finally, the disk itself appeared to be moving at a visual range of two hundred yards ahead of the ship, while the spark still flickered its varied information from the center of the image.
Pagadan’s hands, meanwhile, played continuously over the control desk’s panels, racing the ship’s recording instruments through every sequence of descriptive analysis of which they were capable.
“We’re still getting nothing really new, I’m afraid,” she said at last, matter-of-factly. She had never been within sight of a Bjanta before; but Vega’s Department of Galactic Zones had copies of every available record ever made of them, and she had studied the records. The information was largely repetitious and not conclusive enough to have ever permitted a really decisive thrust against the marauders. Bjantas no longer constituted a major threat to civilization, but they had never stopped being a dangerous nuisance along its fringes—space-vermin of a particularly elusive and obnoxious sort.
“They’ve made no attempt to change direction at all?” she inquired.
“Not since they first broke out of their escape-curve,” the Viper replied. “Shall I close in now?”
“Might as well, I suppose.” Pagadan was still gazing, almost wistfully, into the tank. The disk was tilted slightly sideways, dipping and quivering in the familiar motion-pattern of Bjanta vessels; a faint glimmer of radiation ran and vanished and ran again continuously around its yard-thick edge. The Bjantas were conservatives; the first known recordings made of them in the early centuries of the First Empire had shown space-machines of virtually the same appearance as the one now racing ahead of the Viper.
“The cruiser seems satisfied we check with its own line on the Mother Disk,” she went on. She sighed, tapping the tank anxiously. “Well, nudge them a bit—and be ready to jump!”
* * *
The Viper’s nudging was on the emphatic side. A greenish, transparent halo appeared instantly about the disk; a rainbow-hued one flashed into visibility just beyond it immediately after. Then the disk’s dual barrier vanished again; and the disk itself veered crazily off its course, flipping over and over like a crippled bat, showing at every turn the deep, white-hot gash the Viper’s touch had seared across its top.
It was on the fifth turn, some four-tenths of a second later, that it split halfway around its rim. Out of that yawning mouth a few score minute duplicates of itself were spewed into space and flashed away in all directions—individual Bjantas in their equivalent of a combined spacesuit and lifeboat. As they dispersed the stricken scout gaped wider; a blinding glare burst out of it; and the disk had vanished in the traditional Bjanta style of self-destruction when trapped by superior force.
Fast as the reaction had been, the Viper’s forward surge at full acceleration following her first jabbing beam was barely slower. She stopped close enough to the explosion to feel its radiations activate her own barriers; and even before she stopped, every one of her grappling devices was fully extended and combing space about her.
Within another two seconds, therefore, each of the fleeing Bjantas was caught—and at the instant of contact, all but two had followed the scout into explosive and practically traceless suicide. Those two, however, were wrenched open by paired tractors which gripped and simultaneously twisted as they gripped—an innovation with which the Viper had been outfitted for this specific job.
Pagadan, taut and watching, went white and was on her feet with a shriek of inarticulate triumph.
“You did it, you sweetheart!” she yelped then. “First ones picked up intact in five hundred years!”
“They’re not intact,” the Viper corrected, less excitedly. “But I have all the pieces, I think!”
“The bodies are hardly damaged,” gloated Pagadan, staring into the tank. “It doesn’t matter much about the shells. Just bring it all in easy now! The lovely things! Wait till Lab hears we got them.”
She hovered around nervously while the flat, brown, soft-shelled—and really not badly dented—bodies of the two Bjantas were being drawn in through one of the Viper’s locks and deposited gently in a preservative tank, where they floated against the top, their twenty-two angular legs folded up tightly against their undersides. Most of the bunched neural extensions that made them a unit with the mechanisms of their detachable space-shells had been sheared off, of course; but the Viper had saved everything.
* * *
“Nice work, Pag!” Hallerock’s voice came from the communicator as she returned exultantly to the control room. “No chance of any life being left in those things, I suppose?”
“Not after that treatment!” Pagadan said regretfully. “But I’m really not complaining. You heard me then?”
“I did,” acknowledged Hallerock. “Paralyzing sort of war whoop you’ve got! Want to see the recording the cruiser shot back to me on the Mother Disk? That run just went off, too, as per schedule.”
“Put it on!” Pagadan said, curling herself comfortably and happily into her desk chair. “So they found Mommy, eh
? Never had such fun before I started slumming around with humans. What were the destructive results?”
“They did all right. An estimated forty-five percent of the scouts right on the strike—and they figure it will be over eighty before the survivors get out of pursuit range. One of the destroyers and a couple of the cruiser’s strike-ships were slightly damaged when the core blew up. Nothing serious.”
The visual recording appeared on the communication screen a moment later. It was very brief, as seen from the cruiser—following its hornet-swarm of released strike-ships in on the great, flat, scaly-looking pancake bulk of the Mother Disk, while a trio of destroyers closed down on either side. As a fight, Pagadan decided critically, it was also the worst flop she’d seen in years, considering that the trapped quarry was actually a layered composite of several thousand well-armed scouts! For a brief instant, the barriers of every charging Vegan ship blazed a warning white; then the screen filled momentarily with a rainbow-hued sparkle of scouts scattering under the lethal fire of the attackers—and the brighter flashing of those that failed.
As both darkened out and the hunters swirled off in pursuit of the fugitive swarms, an ellipsoid crystalline core, several hundred yards in diameter, appeared where the Disk had lain in space. The Bjanta breeding center. It seemed to expand slightly.
An instant later, it was a miniature nova.
* * *
Pagadan blinked and nodded approvingly as the screen went blank.
“Tidy habit! Saves us a lot of trouble. But we made the only real haul of the day, Viper, old girl!” She grimaced. “So now we’ve still got to worry about that sleepwalking silly little planet of Ulphi, and the one guy on it who isn’t . . . isn’t sleepwalking, anyway. And a couple of other—” She straightened up suddenly. “Who’s that working your communicators now?”
“That’s the robot-tracker you put on the Department of Cultures investigator on Ulphi,” the Viper informed her. “He wants to come in to tell you the lady’s got herself into some kind of jam with the population down there. Shall I switch him to the O-Ship and have the Agent-Trainee check and take over, if necessary?”
“Hold it!” Pagadan’s hands flew out towards the section of instrument panel controlling the communicators. “Not if it’s the D.C. girl! That would mess up all my plans. The tracker’s ready and equipped to see nothing happens to her before I get there. Just put that line through to me, fast!”
Some while later, she summoned Hallerock to the O-Ship’s communicator.
“. . . So I’m picking you up in a few minutes and taking you on board the Viper. Central Lab wants a set of structural recordings of these pickled Bjantas right away—and you’ll have to do it, because I won’t have the time.”
“What happened?” her aide inquired, startled.
“Nothing very serious,” Pagadan said soothingly. “But it’s likely to keep me busy for the next few hours. Our D.C. investigator on Ulphi may have got an accidental whiff of what’s rancid on the planet—anyway, somebody’s trying to get her under mental control right now! I’ve got her covered by a tracker, of course, so she’s in no real danger; but I’ll take the Viper’s skiff and go on down as soon as I get you on board. By the way, how soon can you have the hospital ship prepared for its job?”
Hallerock hesitated a moment. “I suppose it’s ready to start any time. I finished treating the last of the personnel four hours ago.”
“Good boy,” Pagadan applauded. “I’ve got something in mind—not sure yet whether it will work. But that attack on the D.C. might make it possible for us to wind up the whole Ulphi operation inside the next twenty-four hours!”
* * *
It had started out, three weeks before, looking like such a nice little mission. Since it was her fifth assignment in four months, and since there had been nothing even remotely nice about any of the others, Pagadan could appreciate that.
Nothing much to do for about three or four weeks now, she’d thought gratefully as she hauled out her skiff for a brief first survey of the planet of Ulphi. She had landed as an ostensible passenger on a Vegan destroyer, the skiff tucked away in one of the destroyer’s gun locks, while the Viper went on orbit at a safe distance overhead. That gleaming deep-space machine looked a trifle too impressive to be a suitable vehicle for Pelial, the minor official of Galactic Zones, which was Pagadan’s local alias. And as Ulphi’s entire population was planet-bound by congenital space-fear, the skiff would provide any required amount of transportation, while serving principally as living quarters and a work-office.
But there would be really nothing to do. Except, of course, to keep a casual eye on the safety of the other Vegans newly arrived on the planet and cooperate with the Fleet in its unhurried preparations to receive the Bjantas, who were due to appear in about a month for the ninth of their series of raids on Ulphi. Those obliging creatures conducted their operations in cycles of such unvarying regularity that it was a pleasure to go to work on them, once you’d detected their traces and could muster superior force to intercept their next return.
On Ulphi Bjantas had been reaping their harvest of life and what they could use of civilization’s treasures and tools at periods which lay just a fraction over three standard years apart. It had done no very significant damage as yet, since it had taken eight such raids to frighten the population into revealing its plight by applying for membership in the far-off Confederacy of Vega and the protection that would bring them. The same cosmic clockwork which first set the great Disk on this course would be returning it now, predictably, to the trap Vega had prepared.
Nothing for Pagadan to worry about. Nobody, actually, seemed to have much confidence that the new shell-cracker beams installed on the Viper to pick up a couple of Bjantas in an unexploded condition would work as they should, but that problem was Lab’s and not hers. And, feeling no doubt that she’d earned a little vacation, they were presenting her meanwhile with these next three weeks on Ulphi. The reports of the officials of other Confederacy government branches who had preceded Pagadan here had described it as a uniquely charming little backwater world of humanity, cut off by the development of planetary space-fear from the major streams of civilization for nearly four hundred years. Left to itself in its amiable climate, Ulphi had flowered gradually into a state of quaint and leisurely prettiness.
So went the reports!
Jauntily, then, Pagadan set forth in her skiff to make an aerial survey of this miniature jewel of civilization and pick out a few of the very best spots for some solid, drowsy loafing.
Two days later, her silver hair curled flat to her skull with outraged shock, she came back on board the Viper. The activated telepath transmitter hummed with the ship’s full power, as it hurled her wrathful message to G.Z. Headquarters Central on the planet of Jeltad—in Vega’s system, eight thousand light-years away.
* * *
At Central on Jeltad, a headquarters clerk, on his way out to lunch, paused presently behind the desk of another. His manner was nervous.
“What’s the Pyramid Effect?” he inquired.
“You ought to know,” his friend replied. “If you don’t, go punch it from Restricted Psych-Library under that heading. I’ve got a final mission report coming through.” He glanced around. “How come the sudden urge for knowledge, Linky?”
Linky jerked a thumb back towards his desk transmitter. “I got that new Lannai Z.A. on just before the end of my stretch. She was blowing her silver top about things in general—had me lining up interviews with everybody from Snoops to the Old Man for her! The Pyramid Effect seems to be part of it.”
The other clerk snickered. “She’s just diving into a mission then. I had her on a few times while she was in Zonal Training. She’ll swear like a Terran till she hits her stride. After that, the rougher things get the sweeter she grows. You want to wait a little? If I get this beam through, I’ll turn it over to a recorder and join you for lunch.”
“All right.” Linky hesitated a moment and th
en drifted back towards his desk. At a point well outside the vision range of its transmitter screen, he stopped and listened.
“. . . Well, why didn’t anybody know?” Pagadan’s voice came, muted but crackling. “That Department of Cultures investigator has been on Ulphi for over a month now, and others just as long! You get copies of their reports, don’t you? You couldn’t put any two of them together without seeing that another Telep-Two thinks he’s invented the Pyramid Effect out here—there isn’t a thing on the crummy little planet that doesn’t show it! And I’ll be the daughter of a C-Class human,” she added bitterly, “if it isn’t a type-case in full flower, with all the trimmings! Including immortalization and the Siva Psychosis. No, I do not want Lab to home any of their findings out to me! Tell them I’m staying right here on telepath till they’ve sorted out what I gave them. Where’s Snoops, that evil little man? Or can somebody locate that fuddle-headed, skinny, blond clerk I had on a few minutes—”
Linky tiptoed gently back out of hearing.
“She’s talking to Correlation now,” he reported to his friend. “Not at the sweetness stage yet. I think I’ll put in a little time checking the Library at that.”
The other clerk nodded without looking up. “You could use the Head’s information cabinet. He just went out.”
“Pyramid Effect,” Psych-Library Information instructed Linky gently a minute later. “Restricted, Galactic Zones. Result of the use of an expanding series of psychimpulse-multipliers, organic or otherwise, by Telepaths of the Orders Two to Four, for the transference of directional patterns, compulsions, illusions, et cetera, to large numbers of subjects.
“The significant feature of the Pyramid Effect is its elimination of excessive drain on the directing mentality, achieved by utilizing the neural or neural-type energies of the multipliers themselves in transferring the directed impulses from one stage to the next.
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