Part 3

The Overlords had, however, learned. This cavern, as well as being hidden, was defended by physical, as well as mental, means. There were inner barriers of metal and of force, there were armed and armored defenders who, dominated completely by the monsters, fought with the callous fury of the robots which in effect they were. Nevertheless, against all opposition, the attackers bored relentlessly in. Heavy semiportables blazed, hand-to-hand combat raged in the narrow confines of that noisome tunnel. In the wavering, glaring light of the contending beams and screens, through the hot and rankly stinking steam billowing away from the reeking walls, the invaders fought their way. One by one and group by group the defenders died where they stood and the Velantians drove onward over their burned and dismembered bodies.

Into the cavern at last. To the Overlords. Overlords! They, who for ages had preyed upon generation after generation of helpless Velantians, torturing their bodies to the point of death and then devouring ghoulishly the life-forces which their mangled bodies could no longer retain!

Worsel and his crew threw away their DeLameters. Only when it is absolutely necessary does any Velantian use any artificial weapon against any Overlord of Delgon. He is too furious, too berserk, to do so. He is scared to the core of his being; the cold grue of a thousand fiendishly eaten ancestors has bred that fear into the innermost atoms of his chemistry. But against that fear, negating and surmounting it, is a hatred of such depth and violence as no human being has ever known; a starkly savage hatred which can be even partially assuaged only by the ultimate of violences--by rending his foe apart member by member; by actually feeling the Delgonian's life depart under gripping hands and tearing talons and constricting body and shearing tail.

It is best, then, not to go into too fine detail as to this conflict. Since there were almost a hundred of the Delgonians--insensately vicious fighters when cornered--and since their physical make-up was very similar to the Velantians' own, many of Worsel's troopers died. But since the _Velan_ carried over fifteen hundred and since less than half of her personnel could even get into the cavern, there were plenty of them left to operate and to fight the spaceship.

* * * * *

Worsel took great care that the opposing commander was not killed with his minions. The fighting over, the Velantians chained this sole survivor into one of his own racks and stretched him out into immobility. Then, restraining by main strength the terrific urge to put the machine then and there to its fullest ghastly use, Worsel cut his screen, threw a couple of turns of tail around a convenient anchorage, and faced the Boskonian almost nose to nose. Eight weirdly stalked eyes curled out as he drove a probing thought-beam against the monster's shield.

"I could use this--or this--or this," Worsel gloated. As he touched various wheels and levers the chains hummed slightly, sparks flashed, the rigid body twitched. "I am not going to, however--yet. While you are still sane I want to take and I shall take your total knowledge."

And face to face, eye to eye, brain to brain, that silently and motionlessly cataclysmic battle was joined.

As has been said, Worsel had hunted down and had destroyed many Overlords. He had hunted them, however, like vermin. He had destroyed them with duodec bombs and with primary or secondary beams; or, at closest hand, with talons, teeth, and tail. He had not engaged an Overlord mind to mind for over twenty Tellurian years; not since he and Nadreck of Palain VII had captured alive the leaders of those who had been preying upon Helen's matriarchs and warring upon Civilization from their cavern upon Lyrane II. Nor had he ever dueled one mentally to death without powerful support; Kinnison or some other Lensman had always been near by.

But Worsel would need no help. He was not shivering in eagerness now. His body was as still as the solid rock upon which most of it lay; every chamber and every faculty of his mind was concentrated upon battering down or cutting through the Overlords' stubbornly-held shields.

Brighter and brighter glowed the Velantian's Lens, flooding the gloomy cave with pulsating polychromatic light. Alert for any possible trickery, guarding intently against any possibility of riposte or of counterthrust, Worsel leveled bolt after bolt of mental force. He surrounded the monster's mind with a searing, constricting field. He squeezed; relentlessly and with appalling power.

The Overlord was beaten. He, who had never before encountered a foreign mind or a vital force stronger than his own, knew that he was beaten. He knew that at long last he had met that half-fabulous Velantian Lensman with whom not one of his monstrous race could cope. He knew starkly, with the chilling, numbing terror possible only to such a being in such a position, that he was doomed to die the same hideous and long-drawn-out death which he had dealt out to so many others. He did not read into the mind of the bitterly vengeful, the implacably ferocious Velantian any more mercy or any more compunction than was actually there. He knew perfectly that of either there was no slightest trace. Knowing these things with the blackly appalling certainty that was his, he quailed.

There is an old but cogent saying that the brave man dies only once, the coward a thousand times. That Overlord, during that lethal combat, died more times than it is pleasant to contemplate. Nevertheless, he fought. A cornered rat will fight, and the Delgonian was not a rat--not exactly, that is, an ordinary rat. His mind was competent, keen, powerful, and utterly unscrupulous; and he brought to the defense of his beleaguered ego every resource of skill and of trickery and of sheer power at his command--in vain. Deeper and deeper, in spite of everything he could do, the relentless Lensman squeezed and smashed and cut and pried and bored; little by little the Overlord gave mental ground.

"This station is here ... this staff is here ... _I_ am here, then ... to wreak damage ... all possible damage ... to the commerce ... and to the personnel of ... the Galactic Patrol ... and Civilization in every aspect--" the Overlord admitted haltingly as Worsel's pressure became intolerable; but such admissions, however unwillingly made or however revealing in substance, were not enough.

Worsel wanted, and would be satisfied with nothing less than, his enemy's total knowledge. Hence he maintained his assault until, unable longer to withstand the frightful battering, the Overlord's barriers went completely down; until every convolution of his brain and every track of his mind lay open, helplessly exposed to Worsel's poignant scrutiny. Then, scarcely taking time to gloat over his victim, Worsel did scrutinize.

Period.

* * * * *

Hurtling through space, toward a definite objective now, Worsel studied and analyzed some of the things which he had just learned. Worsel was not surprised that this Overlord had not known any of his superior officers in things or enterprises Boskonian; that he did not consciously know even that he had been obeying orders or that he had superiors. That technique, by this time, was familiar enough. The Boskonian psychologists were able operators; to attempt to unravel the unknowable complexities of their subconscious compulsions would be a sheer waste of time.

What the Overlords had been doing, however, was clear enough. That outpost had indeed been wreaking havoc with Civilization's commerce. Ship after ship had been lured from its course; had been compelled to land upon this barren planet. Some of those vessels had been destroyed; some of them had been stripped and rifled as though by pirates of old; some of them had been set upon new courses with hulls, mechanical equipment, and cargoes untouched. No crewman or passenger, however, escaped unscathed; even though only ten percent of them died in the Overlordish fashion which Worsel knew so well.

The Overlord himself had wondered why they had not been able to kill them all. He knew that such forbearance was unnatural, was against all instinct and training. He knew that they wanted, intensely enough, to kill every one of their victims; that their greedy lust for life-force simply could not be sated as long as life-force was to be had. He knew only that something, none of them knew what, limited their actual killing to ten percent of the bag.

Worsel grinned wolfishly at that thought, even while he was admiring the quality of the psychology which could impress such a compulsion as that upon such rapacious hellions as those. That was the work of the Boskonian higher-ups, who knew that ten percent was the limit above which the deaths would have been too revealing to the statisticians of the Galactic Patrol.

The other ninety percent, however, the Delgonians had "played with"--a procedure which, although less satisfying to the Overlords than the ultimate treatment, was not very different in so far as the victims' egos were concerned. For none of them emerged from the ordeal with any memory of what had happened, or of what or who he had ever been. They were not all completely mad; some were only partially so. All had, however, been--altered. Changed; shockingly transformed. No two were alike. Each Overlord, it appeared, had striven with all of his ultra-hellish ingenuity to excel his fellows in the manufacture of an outrageous something whose like had never been seen in or upon any land or sea or air or throughout any reach of space.

These and many other facts and items Worsel had studied carefully. He was now heading for the region in which the Patrol's computers had figured that the "Hell Hole in Space" must lie. The planet he had just left, the Overlords he had just slain, were not the original Hell Hole; could have had nothing to do with it. Too far apart--they were not in the same possible volume of space.

Worsel knew now, though, what the Hell Hole in Space really was. It was a cavern of Overlords. It simply couldn't be anything else. And, in himself and his crew and his mighty _Velan_ he, Worsel of Velantia, Overlord-slayer par excellence of two galaxies, had in ample measure everything it took to extirpate any number of Overlords. With what he had just learned and with what he was so calmly certain he could do, the Hell Hole in Space would take no more toll. Wherefore Worsel, coiled loosely around his hard bars, relaxed in happily planful thought. And in a couple of hours a solid, clear-cut thought impinged upon his Lens.

"Worsel! Con calling. What goes on there, fellow old snake? You've stuck that sharp tail of yours into some of my business--I hope!"

III.

Each of the Second-Stage Lensmen had exactly the same facts, the same data, upon which to theorize and from which to draw conclusions. Each had shared his experiences, his findings, and his deductions and inductions with all of the others. They had discussed minutely, in wide-open four-ways, every phase of the Boskonian problem. Nevertheless the approach of each to that problem and the point of attack chosen by each was individual and characteristic.

Kimball Kinnison was by nature forthright; direct. As has been seen, he could use the approach circuitous if necessary, but he much preferred and upon every possible occasion employed the approach direct. He liked plain, unambiguous clues much better than obscure ones; the more obvious and factual the clue was, the better he liked it.

He was now, therefore, heading for Antigan IV, the scene of the latest and apparently the most outrageous of a long series of crimes of violence. He didn't know much about it; the request had come in through regular channels, not via Lens, that he visit Antigan and take personal charge of the investigation of the supposed murder of the Planetary President.

As his speedster flashed through space the Gray Lensman mulled over in his mind the broad aspects of this crime wave. It was spreading far and wide, and the wider it spread and the intenser it became the more vividly one salient fact stuck out. Selectivity--distribution. The solar systems of Thrale, Velantia, Tellus, Klovia, and Palain had not been affected. Thrale, Tellus, and Klovia were full of Lensmen. Velantia, Rigel, Palain, and a good part of the time Klovia, were the working headquarters of Second-Stage Lensmen. It seemed, then, that the trouble was roughly in inverse ratio to the numbers or the abilities of the Lensmen in the neighborhood. Something, therefore, that Lensmen--particularly Second-Stage Lensmen--were bad for. That was true, of course, for all crime. Nevertheless, this seemed to be a special case.

And when he reached his destination he found out that it was. The planet was seething. Its business and its everyday activities seemed to be almost paralyzed. Martial law had been declared; the streets were practically deserted except for thick-clustered groups of heavily-armed guards. What few people were abroad were furtive and sly; slinking hastily along with their fear-filled eyes trying to look in all directions at once.

"QX, Wainwright, go ahead," Kinnison directed brusquely when, alone with the escorting Patrol officers in a shielded car, he was being taken to the Capitol grounds. "There's been too much secrecy--pussyfooting--about the whole affair. Spill it, please."

"Very well, sir," and Wainwright told his tale. Things had been happening for months. Little things, but disturbing. Then murders and kidnapings and unexplained disappearances had begun to increase. The police forces had been falling farther and farther behind. The usual cries of incompetence and corruption had been raised, only further to confuse the issue. Circulars--dodgers--hand-bills appeared all over the planet; from where nobody knew. The keenest detectives could find no clue to papermakers, printers, or distributors. The usual inflammatory, subversive propaganda--"Down with the Patrol!" "Give us back our freedom!" and so on--but, because of the high tension already prevailing, the stuff had been unusually effective in breaking down the morale of the citizenry as a whole.

"Then this last thing. For two solid weeks the whole world was literally plastered with the announcement that at midnight on the thirty-fourth of Dreel--you're familiar with our calendar, I think?--President Renwood would disappear. Two weeks warning--daring us." Wainwright got that far and stopped.

"Well, go on. He disappeared, I know. How? What did you fellows do to prevent it? Why all the secrecy?"

"If you insist, I'll have to tell you, of course, but I'd rather not." Wainwright flushed uncomfortably. "You wouldn't believe it. Nobody could. I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't been there. I'd rather you'd wait, sir, and let the Vice President tell you, in the presence of the Treasurer and the others who were on duty that night."

"Um-m-m ... I see ... maybe." Kinnison's mind raced. "That's why nobody would give me details? Afraid I wouldn't believe it ... that I'd think they'd been--" He stopped. "Hypnotized" would have been the next word, but that would have been jumping at conclusions. Even if true, there was no sense in airing that hypothesis--yet.

"Not afraid, sir. They _knew_ that you wouldn't believe it."

* * * * *

After entering Government Reservation they went, not to the president's private quarters, but into the Treasury and down into the subbasement housing the most massive, the most utterly impregnable vault of the planet. There the nation's most responsible officers told Kinnison, with their entire minds as well as their tongues, what had happened.

Upon that black day business had been suspended. No visitors of any sort had been permitted to enter the Reservation. No one had been allowed to approach the president except old and trusted officers about whose loyalty there could be no question. Airships and spaceships had filled the sky. Troops, armed with semiportables or manning fixed-mount heavy stuff, had covered the grounds. At five minutes before midnight Renwood, accompanied by four secret service men, had entered the vault, which was thereupon locked by the treasurer. All the cabinet members saw them go in, as did the attendant corps of specially-selected guards. Nevertheless, when the treasurer opened the vault at five minutes after midnight, the five men were gone. No trace of any one of them had been found from that time on.

"And that--every word of it--is TRUE!" the assembled minds yelled as one, all unconsciously, into the mind of the Lensman.

During all this telling Kinnison had been searching mind after mind; inspecting each minutely for the telltale marks of mental surgery. He found none. No hypnosis. This thing had happened, exactly as they told it. Now, convinced of that fact, his eyes clouded with foreboding, he sent out his sense of perception and studied the vault itself. Millimeter by cubic millimeter he scanned the innermost details of its massive structure--the concrete, the neo-carballoy, the steel, the heat-conductors and the closely-spaced gas cells. He traced the intricate wiring of the networks of alarms. Everything was sound. Everything functioned. Nothing had been disturbed.

The sun of this system, although rather on the small side, was intensely hot; this planet, Four, was a long way out. Pretty close to Cardynge's limit ... or the Boskonians had improved their technique--tightened up their controls. A tube, of course ... for all the tea in China it had to be a tube. Kinnison sagged; for the first time in his life the indomitable Gray Lensman showed his years and more.

"I know that it happened." His voice was grim, quiet, as he spoke to the still protesting men. "I also know how it was done, but that's all."

"HOW?" they demanded, practically in one voice.

"A hyperspatial tube," and Kinnison went on to explain, as well as he could, the functioning of a thing which could not be grasped intrinsically by any nonmathematical three-dimensional mind.

"But what can we or you or anybody else _do_ about it?" the treasurer asked, numbly.

"Nothing whatever." Kinnison's voice was flat. "When it's gone, it's gone. Where does the light go when a lamp goes out? No more trace. No more way--no way whatever--of tracing it. Hundreds of millions of planets in this galaxy, as many in the Second. Millions and millions of galaxies. All that in one Universe--our own universe. And there are an infinite number--too many to be expressed, let alone to be grasped--of universes, side by side, like pages in a book except thinner, in the hyperdimension. So you can figure out for yourselves the chances of ever finding either President Renwood or the Boskonians who took him--so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from zero absolute."

The treasurer was crushed. "Do you mean to say that there is no protection at all from this thing? That they can keep on doing away with us just as they please? The nation is going mad, sir, day by day--one more such occurrence and we will be a planet of maniacs."

"Oh, no--I didn't say that." The tension lightened. "Just that we can't do anything about the president and his aides. The tube can be detected while it is in place, and anyone coming through it can be shot as soon as he can be seen. What you need is a couple of Rigellian Lensmen, or Ordoviks. I'll see to it that you get them. I don't think, with them here, that they will even try to repeat." He did not add what he knew somberly to be a fact, that the enemy would go elsewhere, to some other planet not protected by a Lensman able to perceive the intangible structure of a sphere of pure force.

* * * * *

Frustrated, the Lensman again took to space. It was terrible, this thing of having everything happening where he wasn't, and when he got there having nothing left to work on. Hit-and-run--stab-in-the-back--how could a man fight something that he couldn't see or sense or feel or find? But this chewing his fingernails to the elbow wasn't getting him anywhere, either; he'd have to find something that he _could_ stick a tooth into. What?

All former avenues of approach were blocked; he was sure of that. The Boskonians, who were now in charge of things, could really think. No underling would know anything about any one of them except at such times and places as the directors chose, and those conferences would be as nearly detection-proof as they could be made. What to do?

Easy. Catch a big operator in the act. He grinned wryly to himself. Easy to say, but not--However, it wasn't impossible. The Boskonians were not supermen--they didn't have any more jets than he did. Put himself in the other fellow's place--what would he do if he were a Boskonian big shot? He had had quite a lot of experience in the role. Were there any specific groups of crimes which revealed techniques similar to those which he himself would use in like case?

He, personally, preferred to work direct and to attack in force. At need, however, he had done a smooth job of boring from within. In the face of the Patrol's overwhelming superiority of armament, especially in the First Galaxy, they would have to bore from within. How? By what means? He was a Lensman; they were not. Jet back! Or were they, perhaps? How did he know that they weren't? Maybe they were, by this time. Fossten the renegade Arisian--No use kidding himself; Fossten might have known as much about the Lens as Mentor himself, and might have developed an organization that even Mentor didn't know anything about. Or Mentor might be figuring that it would be good for what ailed a certain fat-headed Gray Lensman to have to dope this out for himself. QX.

He shot a call to Vice Co-ordinator Maitland, who was now in complete charge of the office which Kinnison had temporarily abandoned.

"Cliff? Kim. Just gave birth to an idea." He explained rapidly what the idea was. "Maybe nothing to it, but we'd better get up on our toes and find out. You might suggest to the boys that they check up here and there, particularly around the rough spots. If any of them find any trace anywhere of off-color, sour, or even slightly rancid Lensmanship, with or without a Lens appearing in the picture, burn a hole in space getting it to me. QX?... Thanks."

Viewed in this new perspective, Renwood of Antigan IV might have been neither a patriot nor a victim, but a saboteur. The tube could have been a prop, used deliberately to cap the mysterious climax. The four honest and devoted guards were the real casualties. Renwood--or whoever he was--having accomplished his object of undermining and destroying the whole planet's morale, might simply have gone elsewhere to continue his nefarious activities. It was fiendishly clever. That spectacularly theatrical finale was certainly one for the book. The whole thing, though, was very much of a piece in quality of workmanship with what he had done in becoming the Tyrant of Thrale. Farfetched? No. He had already denied in his thoughts that the Boskonian operators were supermen. Conversely, he wasn't, either. He would have to admit that they might very well be as good as he was; to deny them the ability to do anything which he himself could do would be sheer stupidity.

Where did that put him? On Radelix, by Klono's golden gills! A good-sized planet. Important enough, but not too much so. People human. Comparatively little hell being raised there--yet. Very few Lensmen, and Gerrond the top. Hm-m-m. Gerrond. Not too bright, as Lensmen went, and inclined to be a bit brass-hattish. To Radelix, by all means, next.

* * * * *