Part 7

His first care was to blast the communicator panels with his DeLameters. That would delay the mustering of reinforcements. The control room couldn't guess, at least for a time, that one man was setting out to capture their ship single-handed. His second, ignoring the beams of hand-weapons splashing refulgently from his screens, was to weld the steel door solidly to the jamb. Then, sheathing his projectors, he swung up his ax and went grimly to work. He thought fleetingly of how nice it would be to have VanBuskirk, that dean of all ax-men, at his back; but he wasn't too old or too fat to swing a pretty mean ax himself. And, fortunately, these Boskonians, here in their quarters, didn't have axes. They were heavy, clumsy, and for emergency use only; they were not a part of the regular uniform, as upon Valeria.

The space-ax! Formerly that weapon had been forged from the hardest and toughest of alloy steels. For years, however, it had been made universally from dureum. A deceptive little thing, truly! A dainty-looking affair a little larger than a broad-hatchet. Unlike a hatchet, however, it had a mass of some twenty pounds and was equipped with a yard-long, double-gripped shaft. A sharply tapered spear-end for thrusting, gouging, and stabbing; a wickedly curved, needle-pointed beak for rending and tearing; a flatly rounded, razor-sharp blade capable of shearing through neo-carballoy as cleanly as a scalpel through butter.

The first foe swung up his DeLameter involuntarily as Kinnison's ax swept down. When the curved blade, driven as viciously as the Lensman's strength could drive it, struck the ray-gun it did not even pause. Through it it sliced, the severed halves falling to the floor.

The dureum inlay of the glove held, and glove and ax smashed together against the helmet. The Boskonian went down with a crash; but, beyond a broken arm or some such trifle, he wasn't hurt much. And no armor that a man had to carry around could be made of solid dureum. Hence, Kinnison reversed his weapon and swung again, aiming carefully at a point between the inlay strips. The ax's wicked beak tore through steel and skull and brain, stopping only with the sharply ringing impact of dureum shaft against dureum stripping.

They were coming at him now, not only with DeLameters, but with whatever of steel bars and spanners and bludgeons they could find. QX--his armor could take oodles of that. They might dent it, but they couldn't possibly get through. Planting one boot solidly upon his victim's helmet, he wrenched his ax out through flesh and bone and metal--no fear of breakage; not even a Valerian's full savage strength could break that small, fragile-looking tool--and struck again. And struck--and struck.

He fought his way to the door--two of the survivors were trying to unseal it and to get away. They failed; and, in failing, died. A couple of the remaining enemies shrieked and ran in blind panic, and tried to hide; the others battled desperately on. But whether they ran or fought there was only one possible end, if the Patrolman were to survive. No enemy must or could be left alive behind him, to bring to bear upon his back some semiportable weapon with whose energies his armor's screens could not cope.

When the grisly business was over Kinnison, panting, rested briefly. This was the first real brawl he had been in for twenty years; and for a veteran--a white-collar man, a Co-ordinator to boot--he hadn't done so bad, he thought. That was hard work and, while he was maybe a hair short on wind, he hadn't weakened a particle. To here, QX.

* * * * *

And lovely Kathryn, far enough back but not too far and reading imperceptibly his every thought, agreed with him enthusiastically. She did not have a father complex, but in common with her sisters she knew exactly what her father was. With equal exactitude she knew what other men were. Knowing them, and knowing however imperfectly herself, each of the Kinnison girls knew that it would be a physical and psychological impossibility for her to become even mildly interested in any man not at least her father's equal. They each had dreamed of a man who would be her own equal, physically and mentally, but it had not yet occurred to any of them that one such man already existed.

Kinnison cut the door away and again sent out his sense of perception. With it fanning out ahead of him he retraced his previous path. The apes in the control room had done something; he didn't know just what. Two of them were tinkering with a communicator panel; probably the one to the ward room. They probably thought that the trouble was at their end. Or did they? Why hadn't they reconnoitered? He dismissed that problem as being of no pressing importance. The other two were doing something at another panel. What? He couldn't make head or tail of it--hang those full-coverage screens! And Nadreck's fancy drill, even if he had had one along, wouldn't work unless the screen were absolutely steady. Well, it didn't make much, if any, difference. They had called the men back from up forward, and here they came. He'd rather meet them in the corridor than in an open room, anyway, he could handle them a lot easier.

But tensely watching Kathryn gnawed her lip. Should she tell him, or control him, or not? No. She wouldn't--she couldn't--yet. Dad could figure out that pilot room trap without her help--and she herself, with all her power of brain, could not visualize with any degree of clarity the menace which was--which _must_ be--at the tube's end or even now rushing along it to meet that Boskonian ship.

Kinnison met the oncoming six and vanquished them. By no means as easily as he had conquered the others, since they had been warned and since they also now bore space-axes, but just as finally. Kinnison did not consider it remarkable that he escaped practically unscathed--his armor was battered and dinged up, cut and torn, but he had only a couple of superficial wounds. He had met the enemy where they could come at him only one at a time; he was still the master of any weapon known to space warfare; it had been at no time evident that any outside influence was interfering with the normally rapid functioning of the Boskonians' minds.

He was full of confidence, full of fight, and far from spent when he faced about to consider what he should do about that control room. There was plenty of stuff in there--tougher stuff than he had met up with so far.

Kathryn in her speedster gritted her strong white teeth and clenched her shapely hands into hard little fists. This was bad--very, _very_ bad--and it was going to get worse. Closing up fast, she uttered a bitter and exceedingly unladylike expletive.

Couldn't Dad _see_--couldn't the dumb darling _sense_--that he was apt to run out of time almost any minute now?

She fairly writhed in an agony of indecision; and indecision, in a Third-Stage Lensman, is a rare phenomenon indeed. She wanted intensely to take over, but if she did, was there any way this side of Palain's purple hells that she could cover up her tracks?

There was none--yet.

VIII.

But Kinnison's mind, while slower than his daughter's and in many respects less able, was sure. The four Boskonians in the control room were screened against his every mental force and it was idle even to hope for another such lucky break as he had just had. One was QX and to be received thankfully, but coincidences simply did not happen. They were armored by this time and they had both machine rifles and semiportable projectors. They were entrenched; evidently intending to fight a delaying and defensive battle, knowing that if they could keep the aggressor at bay until the pseudospace of the tube had been traversed, the Lensman would not have a chance. Armed with all they could use of the most powerful mobile weapons aboard and being four to one, they undoubtedly thought that they could win easily enough.

Kinnison thought otherwise. Since he could not use his mind against them he would use whatever he could find, and this ship, having come upon such a mission, would be carrying plenty of weapons--and those four men certainly hadn't had time to tamper with them all. He might even find some negative-matter bombs.

Setting up a spy-ray block, he proceeded to rummage. They couldn't see him, and, if any one of them had a sense of perception and cut his screen for even a fraction of a second to use it, the battle would end then and there. And, if they decided to rush him, so much the better. They remained, however, forted up, as he had thought that they would, and he rummaged in peace. Various death-dealing implements, invitingly set up, he ignored after one cursory glance into their interiors. He knew weapons--these had been fixed. He went on to the armory.

He did not find any negabombs, but he found plenty of untouched weapons like those now emplaced in the control room. The rifles were beauties, high-caliber, water-cooled things, each with a heavy dureum shield-plate and a single-ply screen. Each had also a beam, but machine-rifle beams weren't so hot. Conversely, the semiportables had lots of screen, but very little dureum. Kinnison lugged one rifle and two semiportables, by easy stages, into the room next to the control room; so placing them that the control panels would be well out of the line of fire.

What gave Kinnison his chance was the fact that the enemies' weapons were set to cover the door. Apparently they had not considered the possibility that the Lensman would attempt to flank them by blasting through an inch and a half of alloy. Kinnison did not know whether he could do it fast enough to mow them down from the side before they could reset their magnetic clamps, or not; but he'd give it the good old college try. It was bound to be a mighty near thing, and the Lensman grinned wolfishly behind the guard plates of his helmet as he arranged his weapons to save every possible fractional second of time.

Aiming one at a spot some three feet above the floor, the other a little lower, Kinnison cut in the full power of his semiportables and left them on. He energized the rifle's beam--every little bit helped--set the defensive screens at "full", and crouched down into the saddle behind the dureum shield. He had checked the feeds long since; he had plenty of rounds.

Two large spots and a small one smoked briefly, grew red. They turned bright red, then yellow, merged into one blinding spot. Metal melted, sluggishly at first, then thinly, then flaring, blowing out in raging coruscations of sparks as the fiercely-driven beams ate in. Through!

The first small opening appeared directly in line between the muzzle of Kinnison's rifle and one of the guns of the enemy, and in the moment of its appearance the Patrolman's weapon began its stuttering, shattering roar. The Boskonians had seen the hot spot upon the wall, had known instantly what it meant, and were working frantically to swing their gun mounts around so as to interpose their dureum shields and to bring their own rifles to bear. They had almost succeeded. Kinnison caught just the bulge of one suit of armor in his sights, but that was enough. The kinetic energy of the stream of metal tore him out of the saddle; he was literally riddled while still in air. Two savage bursts took care of the semiportables and their operators--as has been intimated, the shields of the semis were not designed to withstand the type of artillery Kinnison was using.

That made it cannon to cannon, one to one; and the Lensman knew that those two identical rifles could hammer at each other's defenses for an hour without doing any serious damage. He had, however, one big advantage. Being closer to the bulkhead he could depress his line of fire more than could the Boskonian. He did so, aiming at the clamps, which were not built to take very much of that sort of punishment. One front clamp let go, then the other, and the Lensman knew what to do about the rear pair, which he could not reach. He directed his fire against the upper edge of the dureum plate. Under the awful thrust of that terrific storm of steel the useless front clamps lifted from the floor. The gun mount, restrained from sliding by the unbreakable grip of the rear clamps, reared up. Over it went, straight backward, exposing the gunner to the full blast of Kinnison's fire. That, definitely, was that.

* * * * *

Kathryn heaved a sigh of relief; as far as she could "see", the tube was still empty. "That's my Pop!" she applauded inaudibly to herself. "Now," she breathed, "if the darling has just got jets enough to figure out what may be coming at him down this tube--and sense enough to run back home before it can catch him!"

Kinnison had no suspicion at all that any danger to himself might lie within the tube. He had no desire, however, to land alone in a strange and possibly half-crippled enemy ship in the exact center of an enemy base, and no intention whatever of doing so. Moreover, he had once come altogether too close to permanent immolation in a foreign space because of the discontinuance of a hyperspatial tube while he was in it, and once was once too many. Also, he had just got done leading with his chin, and once of that, too, was once too many. Therefore, his sole thought was to get back into his own space as fast as he could get there, so as soon as the opposition was silenced he hurried into the control room and reversed the vessel's drive.

Behind him, Kathryn flipped her speedster end for end and led the retreat. She left the tube before--"before" is an extremely loose and inaccurate word in this connection, but it conveys the idea better than any other ordinary term--she got back to Base. She caused an officer to broadcast an "evacuation" warning, then hung poised high above Base, watching intently. She knew that Kinnison could not leave the tube except at its terminus, hence would have to materialize inside Base itself. She had heard of what happened when two dense, hard solids attempted to occupy the same three-dimensional space at the same time; but to view that occurrence was not her purpose in lingering. She did not actually know whether there was anything in the tube or not; but she did know that if there were, and if it or they should follow her father out into normal space, even she would have need of every jet she could muster.

Kinnison, maneuvering his Boskonian cruiser to a halt just at the barest perceptible threshold of normal space, in the intermediate zone in which nothing except dureum was solid in either space or pseudospace, had already given a great deal of thought to the problem of disembarkation. The ship was small, as spaceships go, but even so it was a lot bigger than any corridor of Base. Those corridor walls and floors were thick and contained a lot of steel; the ship's walls were solid alloy. He had never seen metal materialize within metal and, frankly, he didn't want to be around, even inside D-armor, when it happened. Also, there were a lot of explosives aboard, and atomic power plants, and the chance of touching off a loose atomic vortex in the very middle of Base and within a few feet of himself was not one to be taken lightly.

He had already rigged a line to a master switch. Power off, with the ship's dureum catwalk as close to the floor of the corridor as the dimensions of the tube permitted, he reversed the controls and poised himself for the running headlong dive. He could not feel Radeligian gravitation, of course, but he was pretty sure that he could leap far enough to get through the interface. He took a short run, jerked the line, and hurled himself through the spaceship's immaterial wall. The ship disappeared.

Going through that interface was more of a shock than the Lensman had anticipated. Even taken very slowly, as it customarily is, interdimensional acceleration brings malaise to which no one has ever become accustomed, and taking it so rapidly fairly turned Kinnison inside out. He was going to land with the rolling impact which constitutes perfect technique in such armored maneuvering. As it was, he never did know how he landed, except that he made a boiler-shop racket and that he brought up against the far wall of the corridor with a climactic clang. Beyond the addition of a few more bruises and contusions to his already abundant collection, however, he was not harmed.

As soon as he could collect himself he leaped to his feet and rapped out orders. "Tractors--pressors--shears! Heavy stuff, to anchor, not to clamp! Hipe!" He knew what he was up against now, and, if they'd just come back, he'd yank them out of that tube so fast it'd break their neck!

* * * * *

And Kathryn, still watching intently, smiled. Her Dad was a pretty smart old duck, but he wasn't using his noggin now--he was cockeyed as Trenco's ether in thinking that they might come back. If anything at all erupted from that hypercircle, it would be something against which the stuff he was mustering would be precisely as effective as so much thin air. And she _still_ had no concrete idea of what she so feared. It would not be essentially physical, she was pretty sure. It would almost have to be mental. But who or what could possibly put it across? And how? And above all, what could she do about it if they did?

Eyes narrowed, brow furrowed in concentration, she thought as she had never thought before; and the harder she thought the more clouded the picture became. For the first time in her triumphant life she felt small--weak--impotent. It was in that hour that Kathryn Kinnison really grew up.

The tube vanished; she heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. They, whoever they were, having failed to bring Kinnison to them--this time--were not coming after him--this time. Not an important enough game to play to the end? No, that wasn't it. Maybe they weren't ready. But the next time--

Mentor the Arisian had told her bluntly, the last time she had seen him, to come to him again when she had found out that she did not know everything there was to be known. Deep down, she had believed that that day would never come. Now, however, it had. This escape--if it had been an escape--had taught her much.

"Mother!" She shot a call to distant Klovia. "I'm on Radelix. Everything's on the green. Dad has just knocked a flock of Boskonians into an outside loop and come through QX. I've got to do a little flit, though, before I come home. 'Bye."

* * * * *

Kinnison stood intermittent guard over Base for four days after the hyperspatial tube had disappeared before he gave up; before he did any very serious thinking upon what he should do next.

Could he and should he keep on as Sybly Whyte? He could and he should, he decided. He hadn't been gone long enough for Whyte's absence to have been noticed; nothing whatever connected Whyte with Kinnison. If he really knew what he was doing, a more specific alias might be better; but as long as he was merely smelling around, Whyte's was the best identity to use. He could go anywhere, do anything, ask anything of anybody, and all with a perfectly good excuse.

And as Sybly Whyte, then, for days that stretched into weeks, he roamed--finding, as he had been afraid that he would find, nothing whatever. It seemed as though all Boskonian activity of the type in which he was most interested had ceased with his return from the hyperspatial tube. Just what that meant he did not know. It was unthinkable that they had given up on him--much more probably they were hatching something brand new. And the frustration of inaction and the trying to figure out what was coming next was driving him not-so-slowly nuts.

Then, striking through the doldrums, came a call from Maitland.

"Kim? You told me to Lens you immediately about any off-color work. Don't know whether this is or not. The guy may be--probably is--crazy. Conklin, who reported him, couldn't decide--neither can I, from Conklin's report. Do you want to send somebody special, take over yourself, or what?"

"I'll take over," Kinnison decided instantly. If neither Conklin nor the Vice Co-ordinator, Gray Lensmen both, could decide, there was no point in sending anyone else. "Where and who?"

"Planet, Meneas II, not too far from where you are now. City, Meneateles; 116-3-29, 45-22-17. Place, Jack's Haven, a meteor miner's hangout at the corner of Gold and Sapphire Streets. Person, a man called 'Eddie'."

"Thanks. I'll check." Maitland did not send, and Kinnison did not want, any additional information. Both knew that since the Co-ordinator was going to investigate this thing himself, he should get his facts, and particularly his impressions, unprejudiced and at first hand.

To Meneas II, then, and to Jack's Haven, Sybly Whyte went, notebook very much in evidence. An ordinary enough space-dive Jack's turned out to be--higher-toned than that Radeligian space-dock saloon of Bominger's; much less flamboyant than notorious Miners' Rest on far Euphrosyne.

"I wish to interview a person named Eddie," he announced, as he bought a bottle of wine. "I have been informed that he has had deep-space adventures worthy of incorporation into one of my novels."

"Eddie? Haw!" The barkeeper laughed raucously. "That space-louse? Somebody's been kidding you, mister. He's nothing but a broken-down meteor miner--you know what a space-louse is, don't you?--that we let clean cuspidors and do such-like odd jobs for his keep. We don't throw him out, like we do the others, because he's kind of funny in one way. Every hour or so he throws a fit, and that amuses people."

Whyte's eager-beaver attitude did not change; his face reflected nothing of what Kinnison thought of this callous speech. For Kinnison did know exactly what a space-louse was. More, he knew exactly what turned a man into one. Ex-meteor miner himself, he knew what the awesome depths of space, the ever-present dangers, the privations, the solitude, the frustrations, did to any mind not adequately integrated. He knew that only the strong survived; that the many weak succumbed. From sickening memory he knew just what pitiful wrecks those many became. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the information was not necessary:

"Where is this Eddie now?"

"That's him, over there in the corner. By the way he's acting, he'll have another fit pretty quick now."

The shambling travesty of a man accepted avidly the invitation to table and downed at a gulp the proffered drink. Then, as though the mild potion had been a trigger, his wracked body tensed and his features began to writhe.

"Cateagles!" he screamed; eyes rolling, breath coming in hard, frantic gasps. "Gangs of cateagles! Thousands! They're clawing me to bits! And the Lensman! He's sicking them on! OW!! Yow!!!" He burst into unintelligible screams and threw himself to the floor. There, rolling convulsively over and over, he tried the impossible feat of covering simultaneously with his two clawlike hands his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and throat.

Ignoring the crowding spectators, Kinnison invaded the helpless mind before him. He winced mentally as he photographed upon his own brain the whole atrocious enormity of what was there. Then, while Whyte busily scribbled notes, he shot a thought to distant Klovia.

* * * * *

"Cliff! I'm here in Jack's Haven, and I've got Eddie's data. What did you and Conklin make of it? You agree, of course, that the Lensman is the crux."

"Definitely. Everything else is hop-happy space-drift. The fact that there are not--there _can't_ be--any such Lensman as Eddie imagined, makes him space-drift, too, in our opinion. We called you in on the millionth chance--sorry that we sent you out on a false alarm, but you said we had to be sure."