Part 16
"Probably not. 'Rigel Four' would be an utterly meaningless thought to anyone ignorant of Rigel; and, except when making a conscious effort, as in directing strangers, I never think of its location in terms of galactic co-ordinates. I suppose that the location of a home planet is always taken for granted. That would seem to leave us just about where we were before in our search for 'X,' except for your implied ability to intercept another of his thoughts, almost at will. Explain, please."
"Not _my_ ability--ours." Camilla smiled, confidently. "I couldn't do it alone, neither could you, but between us I don't believe that it will be too difficult. You, with your utterly calm, utterly unshakable certainty, can drive a thought to any corner of the universe. You can fix and hold it steady on any indicated atom. I can't do that, or anything like it, but with my present ability to detect and to analyze, I am not afraid of missing 'X' if we can come within parsecs of him. So my idea is a sort of piggy-back hunting trip; you to take me for a ride, mentally, very much as Worsel takes Con, physically. That would work, don't you think?"
"Perfectly, I am sure." The stolid Rigellian was immensely pleased. "Link your mind with mine, then, and we will set out. If you have no better plan of action mapped out, I would suggest starting at the point where we lost him and working outward, covering an expanding sphere."
"You know best. I will stick to you wherever you go. I am ready."
* * * * *
Tregonsee launched his thought; a thought which, at a velocity not to be measured even in multiples of that of light, generated the surface of a continuously enlarging sphere of space. And with that thought, a very part of it, sped Camilla's incomprehensibly delicate, instantaneously reactive detector web. The Rigellian, with his unhuman perseverance, would have surveyed total space had it been necessary; and the now adult Camilla would have stayed with him. However, the patient pair did not have to comb all of space. In a matter of hours the girl's almost infinitely tenuous detector touched, with infinitesimal power and for an inappreciable instant of time, the exact thought-structure to which it had been so carefully attuned.
"Halt!" she flashed, and Tregonsee's mighty superdreadnought shot away along the indicated line at maximum blast.
"You are not now thinking at him, of course, but how sure are you that he did not feel your detector?" Tregonsee asked.
"Positive," the girl replied. "I couldn't even feel it myself until after a million-fold amplification. It was just a web, you know, not nearly solid enough for an analyzer or a recorder. I didn't touch his mind at all. However, when we get close enough to work efficiently, which will be in about five days, we will have to touch him. Assuming that he is as sensitive as we are, he will feel us; hence we will have to work fast and according to some definite plan. What are your ideas as to technique?"
"I may offer a suggestion or two, later, but I resign leadership to you. You already have made plans, have you not?"
"Only a framework, I could not go into detail without consulting you. Since we agree that it was my mind that he did not like, you will have to make the first contact."
"Of course. But since the action of thought is so nearly instantaneous, are you sure that you will be able to protect yourself in case he overcomes me at that first contact?" If the Rigellian gave any thought at all to his own fate in such a case, no trace of it was evident.
"My screens are good. I am fairly certain that I could protect both of us, but it might slow me down a trifle; and even an instant's delay might keep me from getting the information we want. It would be better, I think, to call Kit in. Or, better yet, Kay. She can stop a superatomic bomb. With Kay covering us both, we will be free to put our full power into the offense."
"And that offense is to be--?"
"I have no idea. We will work that out together."
Again they went into a union of minds; considering, weighing, analyzing, rejecting, and--a few times--accepting. And finally, well within the five-day time limit, they had drawn up a completely detailed plan of battle.
How uselessly that time was spent! For that battle, instead of progressing according to their carefully worked-out plan, was ended almost in the instant of its beginning.
* * * * *
According to plan, Tregonsee tuned his mind to "X's" pattern as soon as they had come within working range. He reached out as delicately as he could; and his best was very fine work indeed. He might just as well have struck with all his power, for at the first touch of the fringe, extremely light and entirely innocuous though it was, the stranger's barriers flared into being and there came back instantly a mental bolt of such vicious intensity that it would have gone through Tregonsee's hardest-held block as though no barrier had been there. But that bolt did not strike Tregonsee's shield; he did not even know, until much later, that it had been sent. Instead, it struck Karen Kinnison's, which has already been described.
It did not exactly bounce, nor did it cling, nor did it linger, even for a microsecond, to do battle as expected. It simply vanished; as though that minute interval of time had been sufficient for the enemy to have recovered from the shock of encountering a completely unexpected resistance, to have analyzed the texture of the shield, to have deduced from that analysis the full capabilities of its owner and operator, to have decided that he did not care to have any dealings with the entity so deduced, and finally, as he no doubt supposed, to have begun to retreat in good order.
His retreat, however, was not in good order. He did not escape, this time. This time, as she had declared that she would be, Camilla was ready for anything--literally anything. Everything she had--and she had plenty--was on the trips; tense, taut, and poised. Knowing that Karen, the Ultimate of Defense, was on guard, she was wholly free to hurl her every force in the instant of perceiving the enemy's poignant thrust. Scarcely had the leading element of her attack touched the stranger's screens, however, when those screens, "X" himself, his vessel and any others that might have been accompanying it, and everything tangible in nearby space, all disappeared at once in the inconceivably violent, the ultimately cataclysmic detonation of a superatomic bomb.
It may not, perhaps, be generally known that the "completely liberating" or "superatomic" bomb liberates one hundred percent of the total component energy of two or more subcritical masses of an unstable isotope, in a space of time estimated to be sixty-nine hundredths of one microsecond. Its violence and destructiveness thus differ, both in degree and in kind, from those of the earlier type, which liberated only the energy of nuclear fission, very much as the radiation of S-Doradus differs from that of Earth's moon. Its mass attains, and holds for an appreciable length of time, a temperature to be measured only in millions of Centigrade degrees; which fact accounts in large part for its utterly incredible vehemence.
Nothing inert in its entire sphere of primary action can even begin to move out of the way before being reduced to its subatomic constituents and thus contributing in some measure to the cataclysm. Nothing is or becomes visible until the secondary stage begins; until the frightful globe has expanded to a diameter of some hundreds of miles and by this expansion has cooled down to a point at which some of its radiation lies in the visible violet. And as for lethal radiation--there are radiations and they are lethal.
The battle with "X" had occupied approximately two milliseconds of actual time. The expansion had been progressing for a second or two when Karen lowered her shield.
"Well, that finishes that," she commented. "I'd better get back on the job. Did you find out what you want to know, Cam, or not?"
"I got a little in the moment before the explosion. Not much." Camilla was deep in study. "It is going to be quite a job of reconstruction. One thing of interest to you, though, is that this 'X' had quit sabotage temporarily and was on his way to Lyrane IX, where he had some kind of important--"
"Nine?" Karen asked, sharply. "Not Eight? I've been watching Eight, you know--I haven't even thought of Nine."
"Nine, definitely. The thought was clear. You might give it a scan once in a while. How is mother doing?"
"She's doing a grand job, and that Helen is quite an operator, too. I'm not doing much--just a touch here and there--I'll see what I can see on Nine. I'm not the scanner or detector that you are, though, you know--maybe you'd better come over here too, in person. Suppose?"
"I think so--don't you, Uncle Trig?" Tregonsee did. "We can do some exploring as we come, but since I have no definite patterns for web work, we may not be able to do much until we get close. Clear ether, Kay!"
* * * * *
"The fine structure is there, and I can resolve it and analyze it," Camilla informed Tregonsee, after a few hours of intense concentration. "There are quite a few clear extraneous sequences, instead of the blurred latent images we had before, but there is still no indication whatever of the location of his home planet. I can see his physical classification to ten places instead of four, more detail as to the sun's variation, the seasons, their habits, and so on. Things that seem mostly to be of very little importance, as far as we are concerned. I found one fact, though, that is new and important. According to my reconstruction, his business of Lyrane IX was the induction of Boskonian Lensmen--_Black_ Lensmen, Tregonsee, just as father suspected!"
"In that case, he must have been the Boskonian counterpart of an Arisian, and hence one of the highest echelon. I am very glad indeed that you and Karen relieved me of the necessity of trying to handle him myself. Kinnison will be very glad to know that we have at last and in fact reached the top--"
Camilla was paying attention to the Rigellian's cogitations with only a fraction of her mind; most of it being engaged in a private conversation with her brother.
"... so you see, Kit, he was under a subconscious compulsion. He _had_ to destroy himself, his ship, and everything in it, in the very instant of attack by any mind definitely superior to his own. Therefore he couldn't have been an Eddorian, possibly, but merely another intermediate, and I haven't been of much help."
"Sure you have, Cam! You got a lot of information, and some mighty good leads to Lyrane IX and what goes on there. I'm on my way to Eddore now; and by working down from there and up from Lyrane IX we can't go wrong. Clear ether, Sis!"
XIX.
Constance Kinnison did not waste much time in idle recriminations, even at herself. Realizing at last that she was still not fully competent, and being able to define exactly what she lacked, she went to Arisia for final treatment. She took that treatment and emerged from it, as her brother and sisters had emerged, a completely integrated personality.
She had something of everything the others had, of course, as did they all; but her dominants, the characteristics which had operated to make Worsel her favorite Second-Stage Lensman, were much like those of the Velantian. Her mind, like his, was quick and facile, yet of extraordinary power and range. She did not have much of her father's flat, driving urge or of his indomitable will to do; she was the least able of all the Five to exert long-sustained extreme effort. Her top, however, was vastly higher than theirs. Like Worsel's, her armament was almost entirely offensive--she was far and away the deadliest fighter of them all. She only of them all had more than a trace of pure killer instinct; and when roused to full fighting pitch her mental bolts were weapons of as starkly incomprehensible an effectiveness as the sphere of primary action of a superatomic bomb.
As soon as Constance had left the _Velan_, remarking that she was going to Arisia to take her medicine, Worsel called a staff meeting to discuss in detail the matter of the "Hell Hole in Space." That conference was neither long nor heated; it was unanimously agreed that that phenomenon was--_must_ be--simply another undiscovered cavern of Overlords.
In view of the fact that Worsel and his crew had been hunting down and killing Overlords for more than twenty years, the only logical course of action was for them to deal similarly with one more, perhaps the only remaining large group of their hereditary foes. Nor did any doubt of their ability to do so enter any one of the Velantians' minds.
How wrong they were!
They did not have to search for the "Hell Hole." Long since, to stop its dreadful toll, a spherical cordon of robot guard ships had been posted to warn all traffic away from the outer fringes of its influence. Since they merely warned against, but could not physically prohibit, entry into the dangerous space, Worsel did not pay any attention to the guard ships or to their signals as the _Velan_ went through the warning web. His plans were, he thought, well laid. His ship was free. Its speed, by Velantian standards, was very low. Each member of his crew wore a full-coverage thought-screen; a similar and vastly more powerful screen would surround the whole vessel if one of Worsel's minor members were either to tighten or to relax its grip upon a spring-mounted control. Worsel was, he thought, ready for anything.
But the "Hell Hole in Space" was not a cavern of Overlords. No sun, no planet, nothing material existed within that spherical volume of space. That _something_ was there, however, there was no doubt. Slow as was the _Velan's_ pace, it was still too fast by far; for in a matter of minutes, through the supposedly impervious thought-screens, there came an attack of utterly malignant ferocity; an assault which tore at Worsel's mind in a fashion he had never imagined possible; a poignant, rending, unbearably crescendo force whose violence seemed to double with every mile of advance.
The _Velan's_ all-encompassing screen snapped on--uselessly. Its tremendous power was as unopposed as were the lesser powers of the personal shields--that highly inimical thought was coming past, not through, the barriers. An Arisian, or one of the Children of the Lens, would have been able to perceive and to block that band; no one of lesser mental stature could.
Strong and fast as Worsel was, mentally and physically, he got his vessel turned around just barely in time. All his resistance and all his strength had to be called into play to maintain his mind's control over his body; to enable him to spin his ship end for end and to kick her drive up to maximum blast. To his surprise, his agony decreased with distance as rapidly as it had built up; disappearing entirely well before the _Velan_ reached the web she had crossed such a short time before.
Groggy, sick, and shaken, hanging slackly from his bars, the Velantian Lensman was roused to action by the mental and physical frenzy of his crew. Ten of them had died in the Hell Hole; six more were torn to bits before their commander could muster enough force to stop their insane rioting. Then Master Therapist Worsel went to work; and one by one he brought the survivors back. They remembered; but he made those memories bearable.
He then called Kinnison. "... but there didn't seem to be anything personal about it, as one would expect from an Overlord," he concluded his brief report. "It did not concentrate on us, reach for us, or follow us as we left. Its intensity seemed to vary only with distance ... perhaps inversely as distance squared--it might very well have been radiated from a center. While it was nothing like anything I ever felt before, I still think that it must be an Overlord--maybe a sort of Second-Stage Overlord, just as you and I are Second-Stage Lensmen. He is too strong for me now, just as they used to be too strong for us before we met you. By the same reasoning, however, I am pretty sure that if you can come over here, you and I together could figure out a way of taking him. How about it?"
"Mighty interesting, and I'd like to, but I'm right in the middle of a job," Kinnison replied, and went on to explain rapidly what he, as Bradlow Thyron, had done and what he still had to do. "As soon as I can get away I'll come over. In the meantime, fellow old snake, keep away from there. Do a flit--find something else to keep you amused until I can join you."
* * * * *
Worsel set out, and after a few days ... or weeks--idle time means practically nothing to a Velantian--a sharply-Lensed thought drove in.
"Help! A Lensman calling help! Line this thought and come at speed to System--" The message ended as sharply as it had begun; in a flare of agony which, Worsel knew, meant that that Lensman, whoever he was, had died.
Since the thought, although broadcast, had come in strong and clear, Worsel knew that its sender had been close by. While the time had been very short indeed, he had been able to get a line of sorts. Into that line he whirled the _Velan's_ sharp prow and along it she hurtled at the literally inconceivable pace of her absolute-maximum drive. As the Gray Lensman had often remarked, the Velantian superdreadnought had more legs than a centipede, and now she was using them all. In minutes, then, the scene of battle grew large upon her plates.
The Patrol ship, hopelessly out-classed, could last only seconds longer. Her screens were down; her very wall shield was dead. Red pockmarks sprang into being along her sides as the Boskonian needle-beamers wiped out her few remaining controls. Then, as the helplessly raging Worsel looked on, his brain seething with unutterable Velantian profanity, the enemy prepared to board--a course of action which, Worsel could see, was changed abruptly by the fact--and perhaps as well by the terrific velocity--of his own unswerving approach. The conquered Patrol cruiser disappeared in a blaze of detonating duodec; the conqueror devoted his every jet to the task of running away; strewing his path as he did so with sundry items of solid and explosive destruction. Such things, however, whether dirigible or not, whether inert or free, were old and simple stuff to the _Velan's_ war-wise crew. Their spotters and detectors were full out, as was also a practically solid forefan of annihilating and disintegrating beams.
Thus none of the Boskonian's missiles touched the _Velan_, nor, with all his speed, could he escape. Few indeed were the ships of space able to step it, parsec for parsec, with Worsel's mighty craft, and this luckless pirate vessel was not one of them. Up and up the pursuer rushed; second by second the intervening distance lessened. Tractors shot out, locked on, and pulled briefly with all the force of their stupendous generators.
Briefly, but long enough. As Worsel had anticipated, that savage yank had, in the fraction of a second required for the Boskonian commander to recognize and to cut the tractors, been enough to bring the two inertialess war craft practically screen to screen.
"Primaries! Blast!" Worsel hurled the thought even before his tractors snapped. He was in no mood for a long-drawn-out engagement. He _might_ be able to win with his secondaries, his needles, his tremendously powerful short-range stuff and his other ordinary offensive weapons, but he was taking no chances. Besides, the Boskonians might very well have primaries of their own by this time, and if they did his only chance was to use them first. His men knew what to do and would do it without further orders. A dozen or so of those hellishly irresistible projectors of sheer destruction lashed out as one.
One! Two! Three! The three courses of Boskonian defensive screen scarcely winked as each, locally overloaded, flared through the visible into the black and went down.
Crash! The stubborn fabric of the wall shield offered little more resistance before it, too, went down, exposing the bare metal of the Boskonian's hull--and, as is well known, any conceivable material substance simply vanishes, tracelessly, at the merest touch of such fields of force as those.
Driving projectors carved away and main batteries silenced, Worsel's needle-beamers proceeded systematically to riddle every control panel and every lifeboat, to make of the immense space rover a completely helpless hulk.
"Hold!" An observer flashed the thought. "Number Eight slip is empty--Number Eight lifeboat got away!"
"Damnation!" Worsel, at the head of his armed and armored storming party, as furiously eager as they to come to grips with the enemy, paused briefly. "Trace it--or can you?"
"I did. My tracers can hold it for fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty. No longer than twenty."
Worsel thought intensely. Which had first call, ship or lifeboat? The ship, he decided almost instantly. Its resources were vastly greater; most of its personnel were probably practically unharmed. Given any time at all, they might very well be able to jury-rig a primary, and that would be bad--very bad. Besides, there were more people here; and even if, as was distinctly possible, the Boskonian big shot had abandoned his vessel and his crew in an attempt to save his own life, Worsel had plenty of time.
"Hold that lifeboat," he instructed the observer. "Ten minutes is all we need here."
* * * * *
And it was. The Boskonians--barrel-bodied, blocky-limbed monstrosities resembling human beings about as much as they did the Velantians--wore armor, possessed hand-weapons of power, and fought viciously. They had even managed to rig a few semiportable projectors, but none of these were allowed a single blast. Spy-ray observers were alert, and needle-beam operators; hence the fighting was all at hand to hand, with hand-weapons only. For, while the Velantians to a man lusted to kill, they had had it drilled into them for twenty years that the search for information came first; the pleasure of killing, second.
Worsel himself went straight for the Boskonian captain, his pre-selected prey. That wight had a couple of guards with him, but they did not matter--needle-ray men took care of them. He also had a pair of heavy beam guns, which he held steadily on the Velantian. Worsel paused momentarily; then, finding that his screens were adequate, he slammed the control room door shut with a flick of his tail and launched himself, straight and level at his foe, with an acceleration of seven gravities. The captain tried to dodge but could not. The frightful impact did not kill him, but it hurt him, badly. Worsel, on the other hand, was scarcely jarred. Hard, tough, and durable, Velantians are accustomed from birth to knockings-about which would pulverize human bones.
Worsel batted the Boskonian's guns away with two terrific blows of an armored paw, noting as he did so that violent contact with a steel wall did not do their interior mechanisms a bit of good. Then, after cutting off both his enemy's screens and his own, he batted the Boskonian's helmet; at first experimentally, then with all his power. Unfortunately, however, it held. So did the thought-screen, and there were no external controls. That armor was good stuff!