Part 11

"When did it become necessary to draw diagrams and make blue prints for you?" demanded Helmuth, harshly. "We have ships manned by Rigellians and other races having the sense of perception. Find out where they are and get them there at full blast!" He flipped over two double-throw switches, thus replacing the image upon his plate by another.

"It has now become of paramount importance that we complete our knowledge of the Lens of the patrol," he began, without salutation or preamble. "Have you traced its origin yet?"

"I believe so, but I do not certainly know. It has proved to be a task of such difficulty----"

"If it had been an easy one I would not have made a special assignment of it to you. Go on!"

"Everything seems to point to a planet named Arisia, but of that planet I can learn nothing definite whatever except that----"

"Just a moment!" Helmuth punched more buttons and listened. "Unexplored--unknown--shunned by all spacemen----"

"Superstition, eh?" he snapped. "Another of those haunted planets?"

"Something more than ordinary spacemen's superstition, sir, but just what I have not been able to discover. By combing my department I managed to make up a crew of those who either were not afraid of it or have never heard of it. That crew is now _en route_ there."

"Whom have we in that sector of space? I find it desirable to check your findings."

The department head reeled off a list of names and numbers, which Helmuth considered at length.

"Gildersleeve, the Valerian," he announced finally. "He is a good man, coming along fast. Aside from a firm belief in his own peculiar gods, he has shown no signs of weakness. You considered him?"

"Certainly." The henchman, as cold as his icy chief, knew that explanations would not satisfy Helmuth, therefore he offered none. "He is raiding at the moment, but I will put you on him if you like."

"Do so." And upon Helmuth's plate there appeared a deep-space scene of rapine and pillage.

* * * * *

The convoying patrol ships, two of them, had already been blasted out of existence; only a few idly drifting masses of débris remaining to show that they had ever been. Needle rays were at work, and soon the merchantman hung inert and helpless. The pirates, scorning to use the emergency inlet port, simply blasted away the entire entrance panel. Then they boarded, an armored swarm, flaming DeLameters spreading death and destruction before them.

The sailors, outnumbered as they were and overarmed, fought heroically--but uselessly. In groups and singly they fell; those who were not already dead being callously tossed out into space in slitted space suits and with smashed motors. Only the younger women--the stewardesses, the nurses, the one or two such among the few passengers--were taken as booty; all others shared the fate of the crew.

Then the ship plundered from nose to after jets and every article or thing of value trans-shipped, the raider drew off, bathed in the blue-white glare of the atomic bombs that were destroying every trace of the merchant ship's existence. Then and only then did Helmuth reveal himself to Gildersleeve.

"A good, clean job of work, captain," he commended. "Now, how would you like to visit Arisia for me--for _me_, direct?"

A pallor overspread the normally ruddy face of the Valerian and an uncontrollable tremor shook his giant frame. But as he considered the implications resident in Helmuth's concluding phrase he licked his lips and spoke.

"I hate to say no, sir, if you order me to and if there was any way of making my crew do it. But we were near there once, sir, and we--I--they--it----Well, sir, I _saw_ things, sir, and I was--was _warned_, sir!"

"Saw what? And was warned of what?"

"I can't describe what I saw, sir. I can't even think of it in thoughts that mean anything. As for the warning, though, it was very definite, sir. I was told very plainly that if I ever go near that planet again I will die a worse death than any I have dealt out to any other living being."

"But you will go there again?"

"I tell you, sir, that the crew will not do it," Gildersleeve replied, doggedly. "Even if I were anxious to go, every man aboard will mutiny if I tried it."

"Call them in right now and tell them that you have been ordered to Arisia!"

* * * * *

The captain did so. But he had scarcely started to talk when he was stopped in no uncertain fashion by his first officer--also, of course, a Valerian--who pulled his DeLameter and spoke savagely: "Cut it, chief! We are not going to Arisia, nor anywhere near there. I was with you before, you know. Point course within a quadrant of that accursed planet and I flash you where you sit!"

"Helmuth, speaking for Boskone!" ripped from the headquarters' speaker. "This is rankest mutiny. You know the penalty, do you not?"

"Certainly I do. What of it?" the first officer snapped back.

"Suppose that I _tell_ you to go to Arisia?" Helmuth's voice was now soft and silky, but instinct with deadly menace.

"In that case _I_ tell _you_ to go to hell--or to Arisia, a million times worse!" snapped the officer.

"What? You dare speak thus to _me_?" demanded the archpirate, sheer amazement at the fellow's audacity blanketing his rising anger.

"I so dare," declared the rebel, brazen defiance and unalterable resolve in every line of his hard body and in every lineament of his hard face. "All you can do is kill us. You can order out enough ships to blast us out of the ether, but that's all you _can_ do. That would be a clean, quick death and we would have the fun of taking a lot of the boys along with us. If we go to Arisia, though, it would be different--very, very different, believe me. No, Helmuth, and I say this to your face: If I ever go near Arisia again it will be in a ship in which you, Helmuth, in person, are sitting at the controls. If you think this is an empty dare and don't like it, you don't have to take it. Send on your dogs!"

"That will do! Report yourselves to Base D under----" Then Helmuth's flare of anger passed and his cold reason took charge. Here was something utterly unprecedented: an entire crew of the hardest-bitten marauders in space offering open and barefaced mutiny--no, not mutiny, but actual rebellion--to him, Helmuth, in his very teeth. And not a typical, skulking, carefully planned uprising, but the immovably brazen desperation of men making an ultimately last-ditch stand.

Truly, it must be a powerful superstition, indeed, to make that crew of hard-boiled hellions choose certain death rather than face again the imaginary--they _must_ be imaginary--perils of a planet unknown to and unexplored by Boskone's planetographers. But they were, after all, ordinary spacemen, of little mental force and of small real ability. Even so, it was clearly indicated that in this case precipitate action was to be avoided. Therefore, he went on calmly and almost without a break. "Cancel all this that has been spoken and that has taken place. Continue with your original orders pending further investigation." Helmuth switched his plate back to the department head.

"I have checked your conclusions and have found them correct," he announced, as though nothing at all out of the way had transpired. "You did well in sending a ship to investigate. No matter where I am or what I am doing, notify me instantly at the first sign of irregularity in the behavior of any member of that ship's personnel."

* * * * *

Nor was that call long in coming. The carefully selected crew--selected for complete lack of knowledge of the dread planet which was their objective--sailed along in blissful ignorance, both of the real meaning of their mission and of what was to be its ghastly end. Soon after Helmuth's unsatisfactory interview with Gildersleeve and his mate, the luckless exploring vessel reached the barrier which the Arisians had set around their system and through which no uninvited stranger was allowed to pass.

The free-flying ship struck that frail barrier and stopped. In the instant of contact a wave of mental force flooded the mind of the captain, who, gibbering with sheer, stark, panic terror, flashed his vessel away from that horror-impregnated barrier and hurled call after frantic call along his beam, back to headquarters. His first call, in the instant of reception, was relayed to Helmuth at his central desk.

"Steady, man; report intelligently!" that worthy snapped, and his eyes, large now upon the cowering captain's plate, bored steadily, hypnotically into those of the expedition's leader. "Pull yourself together and tell me exactly what happened. Everything!"

"Well, sir, when we struck something--a screen of some sort--and stopped, something came aboard. It was----Oh--ay-ay-e-e!" his voice rose to a shriek. But under Helmuth's dominating glare he subsided quickly and went on. "A monster, sir, if there ever was one. A fire-breathing demon, sir, with teeth and claws and cruelly barbed tail. He spoke to me in my own Crevenian language. He said----"

"Never mind what he said. I did not hear it, but I can guess what it was. He threatened you with death in some horrible fashion, did he not?"

The coldly ironical tones did more to restore the shaking man's equilibrium than reams of remonstrance could have done. "Well, yes, that was about the size of it, sir," he admitted.

"And does that sound reasonable to you, the commander of a first-class battleship of Boskone's fleet?" sneered Helmuth.

"Well, sir, put in that way, it does seem a bit far-fetched," the captain replied, sheepishly.

"It _is_ far-fetched." The director, in the safety of his dome, could afford to be positive. "We do not know exactly what caused that hallucination, apparition, or whatever it was. You were the only one who could see it, apparently; it certainly was not visible on our master plates here at base. It was probably some form of suggestion or hypnotism; and you know as well as we do that any suggestion can be thrown off by a definitely opposed will. But you did not oppose it, did you?"

"No, sir, I didn't have time."

"Nor did you have your screens out, nor automatic recorders on the trip. Not much of anything, in fact. I think that you had better report back here, at full blast."

"Oh, no, sir--please!" He knew what rewards were granted to failures, and Helmuth's carefully chosen words had already produced the effect desired by their speaker. "They took me by surprise then, but I'll go through this next time."

"Very well. We will give you one more chance. When you get close to the barrier, or whatever it is, go inert and put out all your screens. Man your plates and weapons, for whatever can hypnotize can be killed. Go ahead at full blast, with all the acceleration you can get. Crash through anything that opposes you, and beam anything that you can detect or see. Can you think of anything else?"

"That should be sufficient, sir." The captain's equanimity was completely restored, now that the warlike preparations were making more and more nebulous the sudden, but single, thought wave of the Arisian.

"Proceed!"

* * * * *

The plan was carried out to the letter. This time the pirate craft struck the frail barrier inert, and its slight force offered no tangible bar to the prodigious mass of metal. But this time, since the barrier was actually passed, there was no mental warning and no possibility of retreat.

Many men have skeletons in their closets. Many have phobias, things of which they are consciously afraid. Many others have them, not consciously, but buried deep in the subconscious, specters which seldom or never rise above the threshold of perception. Every sentient being has, if not such specters as these, at least a few active or latent dislikes, dreads, or outright fears. This is true, no matter how quiet and peaceful a life the being has led.

These particular pirates, however, were the scum of space. They were beings of hard and criminal lives and of violent and lawless passions. Their hates and conscience-searing deeds had been legion, their count of crimes long, black, and hideous. Therefore, slight indeed was the effort required to locate in their conscious minds--to say nothing of the noxious depths of their subconscious ones--visions of horror fit to blast stronger intellects than theirs.

And that is exactly what the Arisian guardsman did. From each pirate's total mind, a veritable charnel pit, he extracted the foulest, most unspeakable dregs, the deeply hidden things of which the subject was in the greatest fear. Of these things he formed a whole of horror incomprehensible and incredible, and this ghastly whole he made incarnate and visible to the pirate who was its unwilling parent; as visible as though it were composed of flesh and blood, of copper and steel. Is it any wonder that each member of that outlaw crew, seeing such an abhorrent materialization, went instantly mad?

It is of no use to go into the horribly monstrous shapes of the things, even were it possible; for each of them was visible to only one man, and none of them was visible to those who looked on from the safety of the distant base. To them the entire crew simply abandoned their posts and attacked each other, senselessly and in insane frenzy, with whatever weapons came first to hand. Indeed, many of them fought barehanded, weapons hanging unused in their belts, gouging, beating, clawing, biting until life had been rived horribly away. In other parts of the ship DeLameters flamed briefly; bars crashed crunchingly; knives and axes sheared and trenchantly bit. And soon it was over--almost. The pilot was still alive, unmoving and rigid at his controls.

Then he, too, moved, slowly, haltingly, as though in a trance. Without touching the controls of the Bergenholm, he nursed his driving projectors up to maximum, spun his ship and steadied her on course; and when Helmuth read that course even his iron nerves failed him momentarily. For the ship, still inert, was pointed, not for its own home port, but directly toward Grand Base, the jealously secret planet whose spatial coördinates neither that pilot nor any other creature of the pirates' rank and file had ever known!

* * * * *

Helmuth snapped out orders, to which the pilot gave no heed. His voice--for the first time in his career--rose almost to a howl. But the pilot still paid no attention. Instead, eyes bulging with horror and fingers curved tensely into veritable talons, he reared upright upon his bench and leaped as though to clutch and to rend some unutterably appalling foe. He leaped over his board into thin and empty air. He came down a-sprawl in a maze of naked, high-potential busbars. His body vanished in a flash of searing flame and a cloud of thick and greasy smoke.

The busbars cleared themselves of their gruesome "short" and the great ship, manned now entirely by corpses, bored on.

"--stinking klebots, the lily-livered cowards!" the department head, who had also been yelling orders, was still pounding his desk and cursing. "If they're _that_ afraid--go mad and kill each other without being touched--I'll have to go myself----"

"No, Sansteed," Helmuth interrupted, curtly. "You will not have to go. There is, after all, I think, something there--something that you may not be able to handle. You see, you missed the one essential key fact." He referred to the course, the setting of which had shaken him to the very core.

"Let be," he silenced the other's flood of question and protest. "It would serve no purpose to detail it to you now. Have the ship taken back to port."

Helmuth knew now that it was not superstition that made spacemen shun Arisia. He knew that, from his standpoint at least, there was something very seriously amiss.

XII.

Helmuth sat at his desk, thinking--thinking with all the coldly analytical precision of which he was capable.

This Lensman was, in truth, a foeman worthy of his steel. The cosmic-energy drive, developed by the science of a world which the patrol did not know existed, was Boskone's one great item of superiority. If the patrol could be kept in ignorance of that drive the struggle would be over in a year; the culture of the iron hand would be unchallenged throughout the galaxy. If, however, the patrol did manage to learn the secret of power, to all intents and purposes unlimited, the war between the two cultures might well be prolonged indefinitely. This Lensman knew that secret and was still at large, of that he was all too certain. Therefore, the Lensman must be destroyed. And that brought up the Lens.

What was it? A peculiar bauble indeed, simple of ultimate quantitative analysis, but actually impossible of duplication because of some subtlety of intra-atomic arrangement. Also, it was of peculiar and dire potentiality. Not a man of his force could even wear one; he had watched several of them die horribly in attempting to do so. It must account in some way for the outstanding ability of the Lensmen, and it must tie in, somehow, both with Arisia and with the thought-screens. This Lens was the one thing possessed by the patrol which his own forces did not have. He must and would have it, for it was undoubtedly a powerful arm. Not to be compared, of course, with their own monopoly of cosmic energy--but that monopoly was now threatened, and seriously. That Lensman _must be destroyed_.

But how? It was easy to say "Comb Trenco, inch by inch," but doing it would prove a Herculean task. Suppose that the Lensman should again escape, in that volume of so fantastically distorted media? He had already escaped twice, in much clearer ether than Trenco's. However, if this information should never get back to Prime Base, little harm would be done. Ships could and would be thrown around the solarian system in such numbers that not even a grain-of-dust meteorite could pass that screen without detection. Nothing--nothing whatever--would be allowed to enter that system until this whole affair had been settled. There were other patrol bases, of course, but with the Prime Base isolated, nothing really serious could happen. So much for the Lensman. Now about getting the secret of the Lens.

Again, how? There was something upon Arisia, and that something was connected in some way with the Lens and with thought--possibly also with the new thought-screens. Whatever it was, it had mental power, of that there was no doubt. Out of the full sphere of space, what was the mathematical probability that the pilot of that death ship would have set, by accident, his course so exactly upon this planet? Vanishingly small. Treachery would not explain the facts. The pilot had been insane when he had laid the course. As an explanation, mental force alone seemed fantastic, but none other as yet presented itself as a possibility. Also, it was supported by the unbelievable, the absolutely definite refusal of Gildersleeve's normally fearless crew even to approach the planet. It would take an unheard-of mental force so to affect such crime-hardened veterans.

Helmuth was not one to underestimate an enemy. Was there a man beneath that dome, save himself, of sufficient mental caliber to undertake the now necessary mission to Arisia? There was not. He himself had the finest mind on the planet; else that other had deposed him long since and had sat at the control desk himself. He was sublimely confident that no outside thought could break down _his_ definitely opposed will--and besides, there were the thought-screens, his own personal property as yet. Of no other will could he say the same; no other would he trust with those screens. Of all his force, he was the only one whom he could be _sure_ of. Therefore, he would go himself.

It has already been made clear that Helmuth was not a fool. No more was he a coward. If he himself could best of all his force do a thing, that thing he did, with the coldly ruthless efficiency that marked alike his every action and his every thought.

* * * * *

How should he go? Should he accept that challenge, and take Gildersleeve's rebellious crew of cutthroats to Arisia? No. In the event of an outcome short of complete success, it would not do to lose face before that band of ruffians. Moreover, the idea of such a crew going insane behind him was not one to be relished. He would go alone.

"Wolmark, come to the center," he ordered. When that worthy appeared, he went on, "Be seated, as this is a serious conference. I have watched with admiration and appreciation, as well as some mild amusement, the development of your lines of information, particularly those covering affairs which are most distinctly not in your department. They are, however, efficient. You already know exactly what has happened." A definite statement this, is no wise a question.

"Yes, sir," Wolmark said quietly. He was somewhat taken aback, but not at all abashed.

"That is the reason you are here now. I thoroughly approve of you. I am leaving the planet for approximately twenty days, and you are the best man in the organization to take charge in my absence."

"I suspected that you would be leaving, sir."

"I know you did. But I am now informing you, merely to make sure that you develop no peculiar ideas in my absence, that there are at least a few things which you do not suspect at all. That safe, for instance," Helmuth said, nodding toward a peculiarly shimmering globe of force anchoring itself in air. "Even your highly efficient spy system has not been able to learn a thing about that."

"No, sir, we have not--yet," he could not forbear adding.

"Nor will you, with any skill or force known to man. But keep on trying; it amuses me. I know, you see, of all your attempts. But to get on. I now say, and for your own good I advise you to believe, that failure upon my part to return to this desk will prove highly unfortunate for you."

"I believe that, sir. Any man of intelligence would make some such arrangement, if he could. But sir, suppose that the Arisians----"

"If your 'if he could' implies a doubt, act upon it and learn wisdom," Helmuth advised him coldly. "You should know by this time that I neither gamble nor bluff. I have made arrangements to protect myself, both from enemies, such as the Arisians and the patrol, and from friends, such as ambitious youngsters who are making arrangements to supplant me. If I were not entirely confident of getting back here safely, my dear Wolmark, I would not go."

"You misunderstood me, sir. Really, I have no idea of supplanting you."

"Not until you get a good opportunity, you mean. I understand you thoroughly; and, as I have said before, I approve of you. Go ahead with all your plans. I have kept at least one lap ahead of you so far, and if the time should ever come when I can no longer do so, I shall no longer be fit to speak for Boskone. You understand, of course, that the most important matter now in work is the search for the Lensman, of which the combing of Trenco and the screening of the solarian system are only two phases."

"Yes, sir."

"Very well. I can, I think, leave matters in your hands. If anything really serious comes up, such as a development in the Lensman case, let me know at once. Otherwise do not call me. Take the desk." Helmuth strode away.

He was whisked to the space port, where his special speedster awaited him.

* * * * *

For him the trip to Arisia was neither long nor tedious. The little racer was fully automatic, and as it tore through space he worked as coolly and efficiently as he was wont to do at his desk. Indeed, more so, for here he could concentrate without interruption. Many were the matters he planned and the decisions he made, the while his portfolio of notes grew thicker and thicker.