Part 8
"There! As soon as we get some time, Worsel, I'd like to work out these figures with some of your astronomers. They'll give me a right line through to Helmuth's headquarters--I hope. Some day, if I'm spared, I'll get another!"
"What kind of news did you get?" asked VanBuskirk.
"Good and bad both," replied the Lensman. "Good in that Helmuth doesn't believe that we stayed with his ship as long as we did. He's a suspicious devil, you know, and is pretty well convinced that we tried to run the same kind of a blazer on him that we did the other time. Since he hasn't got enough ships on the job to work the whole line, he's concentrating on the other end. That means that we've got plenty of days left. The bad part of it is that they've got four of our boats already and are bound to get more. Lord, how I wish I could call the rest of them! Some of them could certainly make it here before they got caught."
"Might I then offer a suggestion?" asked Worsel, suddenly diffident.
"Surely!" the Lensman replied in surprise. "Your ideas have never been any kind of poppycock. Why so bashful all at once?"
"Because this one is so--ah--so peculiarly personal, since you men regard so highly the privacy of your minds. Our two sciences, as you have already observed, are vastly different. You are far beyond us in mechanics, physics, chemistry, and the other applied sciences. We, on the other hand, have delved much deeper than have you into psychology and the other introspective studies. For that reason I know positively that the Lens you wear is capable of enormously greater things than you are at present able to perform. Of course, I cannot use your Lens directly, since it is attuned to your own ego. However, if the idea appeals to you, I could, with your consent, occupy your mind and use your Lens to put you _en rapport_ with your fellows. I have not volunteered the suggestion before because I know how averse your mind is to any foreign control."
"Not necessarily to foreign control," Kinnison corrected him. "Only to _enemy_ control. The idea of friendly control never occurred to me. That would be an entirely different breed of cats. Go to it!"
* * * * *
Kinnison relaxed his mind completely, and that of the Velantian came welling in, wave upon friendly, surging wave of benevolent power. And not only--or not precisely--power. It was more than power; it was a calm, cool, placid _certainty_, a depth and clarity of perception that Kinnison in his most cogent moments had never dreamed a possibility. The possessor of that mind knew things, cameo-clear in microscopic detail, which the keenest minds of Earth could perceive only as chaotically indistinct masses of mental light and shade, of no recognizable pattern whatever!
"Give me the thought pattern of him with whom you wish first to converse," came Worsel's thought, this time from deep within the Lensman's own brain.
Kinnison felt a subtle thrill of uneasiness at that new and ultra-strange dual personality, but thought back steadily, "Sorry--I can't."
"Excuse me, I should have known that you cannot think in our patterns. Think, then, of him as a person--an individual. That will give me, I believe, sufficient data."
Into the Earthman's mind there leaped a picture of Henderson, sharp and clear. He felt his Lens actually tingle and throb as a concentration of vital force such as he had never known poured through his whole being and into that almost-living creation of the Arisians, and immediately thereafter he was in full mental communication with the chief pilot of the ill-fated _Brittania_! And there, seated across the tiny mess table of their lifeboat, was Thorndyke, the master technician.
Henderson came to his feet with a yell as the telepathic message bombarded into his brain, and it required several seconds to convince him that he was not the victim of space insanity or suffering from any other form of hallucination. Once convinced, however, he acted. His lifeboat shot toward far Velantia at maximum blast.
Then: "Nelson! Allerdyce! Thompson! Jenkins! Uhlenhuth! Smith! Chatway----" Kinnison called the roll of the survivors.
Nelson, the _Brittania's_ communications officer, answered his captain's call. So did Allerdyce, the juggling quartermaster. So did Uhlenhuth, a technician. So did those in three other boats. Two of these three were apparently well within the danger zone, and might get nipped in their dash, but their crews elected without hesitation to take the chance. Four boats, it was already known, had been captured by the pirates. The remaining eight were either so distant as to be out of range of even the Worsel-driven Lens, or they had been taken by pirates who had not yet reported to Helmuth.
"Eight out of twenty," Kinnison mused. "Not so good, but it could have been a lot worse. They might very well have taken us all by this time."
Then he turned to the Velantian, who had withdrawn his mind as soon as its task was done. "Thanks, Worsel," he said simply. "Some of those lads coming in have got plenty of just what it takes, and _how_ we can use them!"
* * * * *
One by one the lifeboats of the _Brittania_ came into port, where their crews were welcomed briefly, but feelingly, before they were put to work. Nelson, the communications officer, among the last to arrive, was to the Lensman particularly welcome.
"Nels, we need you badly," Kinnison informed him as soon as greetings had been exchanged. "The pirates have a beam, carrying a peculiarly scrambled wave that they can receive and decode through any kind of ordinary blanketing interference, and you're the best man of us all to study their system. Some of these Velantian scientists can probably help you a lot on that--any race that can develop a screen against thought figures to know more than somewhat about vibration in general. We've got working models of the pirates' instruments, so that you can figure out their patterns and formulas. That ought to be simple.
"When you've done that, I want you and your Velantians to design something that will scramble all the pirates' communicator beams in space, from here to the near rim of the galaxy. If you can fix things so that they can't talk, any more than we can, it'll help a lot, believe me!"
"QX, chief, we'll give it the works." And the radio man called for tools, apparatus and electricians.
Then throughout the great space port the many Velantians and the handful of patrolmen labored mightily, side by side, and to very good effect indeed. Slowly, the port became ringed about by, and studded everywhere with, monstrous mechanisms. Everywhere there were projectors: refractory-throated demons ready to vomit forth every force known to the expert technicians of the patrol. There were absorbers, too, backed by their bleeder resistors, air gaps, ground rods, and racks for discharged accumulators. There, too, were receptors and converters for the cosmic energy which was to empower many of the devices. There were, of course, atomic motor generators by the score, and battery upon battery of gigantic accumulators. And Nelson's high-powered scrambler was ready to go to work.
These machines appeared crude, rough, unfinished; for neither time nor labor had been wasted upon nonessentials. But inside each one the moving parts fitted with micrometric accuracy and with hair-spring balance. All, without exception, functioned perfectly.
At Worsel's call, Kinnison climbed up out of a great beamproof pit, the top of whose wall was practically composed of tractor-beam projectors. Pausing only to make sure that a sticking switch on one of the screen-dome generators had been replaced, he hurried to the heavily armored control room, where his little force of fellow patrolmen awaited him.
"They're coming, boys," he announced. "You all know what to do. There are a lot more things that we could have done if we'd had more time, but as it is we'll just go to work on them with what we've got." And Kinnison, again all brisk captain, bent over his instruments.
In the ordinary course of events the pirate would have flashed up to the planet with spy rays out and issuing a peremptory demand for the planet to show a clean bill of health or to surrender instantly such fugitives as might lately have landed upon it. But Kinnison did not--could not--wait for that. The spy rays, he knew, would reveal the presence of his armament; and such armament most certainly did not belong to this planet. Therefore, the instant that the pirate ship came within range of his detectors he acted; and forthwith everything happened at once, with furious swiftness.
A tracer lashed out, the pilot ray of the rim battery of extraordinarily powerful tractors. Under the urge of those beams the inertialess ship flashed toward their center of action, which was the geometrical center of the space port's deep rayproof pit. At the same moment Nelson's scrambler burst into activity, a dome-screen against cosmic-energy intake, and a full circle of super-powered attacking rays.
* * * * *
All these things occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the vessel was being slowed down by the atmosphere of Velantia before her startled commander could even realize that he was being attacked. Only the presence of automatically reacting defensive screens saved that ship from instant destruction; but they did so save it and in seconds the pirates' every weapon was furiously ablaze.
In vain. The defenses of that pit could take it. They were driven by mechanisms easily able to absorb the output of any equipment mountable upon a mobile base, and to his consternation the pirate found that his cosmic-energy intake was at, and remained at, zero. He sent out call after call for help, but could not make contact with any other pirate station. Ether and subether alike were closed to him; his signals were blanketed completely. Nor could his drivers, even though operating at ruinous overload, move him from the geometrical center of that incandescently flaming pit, so inconceivably rigid were the tractors' clamps upon him.
And soon his power began to fail. His vessel, designed to operate upon cosmic-energy intake, carried only enough accumulators for stabilization of power flow, an amount ridiculously inadequate for a combat as profligate of energy as this. But, strangely enough, as his defense weakened, so lessened the power of the attack. It was no part of the Lensman's plan to destroy this superdreadnaught of the void.
"That was one good thing about the old _Brittania_," he gritted as he cut down, step by step, the power of his beams, "nobody could block her off from what power she had!"
Soon the stored-up energy of the battleship was exhausted and she lay there, quiescent. Then giant pressers went into action and she was lifted over the wall of the pit, to settle down in an open space beside it--open, but still under the domes of force.
Kinnison had no needle rays as yet, the time at his disposal having been sufficient only for the construction of the absolutely essential items of equipment. Now, while he was debating with his fellows as to what part of the vessel to destroy in order to wipe out its crew, the pirates themselves ended the debate. Ports yawned in the vessel's armored side and they came out fighting.
For they were not a breed to die like rats in a trap, and they knew that to remain inside their vessel was to die whenever and however their captors willed. They knew also that die they must if they could not conquer. Their surrender, even if it should be accepted, would mean only a somewhat later death in the lethal chambers of the law. In the open, they could at least take some of their foes with them.
Furthermore, not being men as we know men, they had nothing in common with either human beings or Velantians. Both of them were vermin, as they themselves were to the beings manning this surprisingly impregnable fortress here in this waste corner of the galaxy. Therefore, space-hardened veterans all, they fought, with the insane ferocity and desperation of the ultimately last stand; but they did not conquer. Instead, and to the last man, they died.
* * * * *
As soon as the battle was over, before the interference blanketing the pirates' communicators was cut off, Kinnison went through the captured vessel, destroying the headquarters visiplates and every automatic sender which could transmit any kind of a message to any pirate base.
Then the interference was stopped; the domes were released; the ship was removed from the field of operations. Then, while Thorndyke and his reptilian aides--themselves now radio experts of no mean attainments--busied themselves at installing a high-powered scrambler aboard her, Kinnison and Worsel scanned space in search of more prey. Soon they found it, more distant than the first one had been--two solar systems away--and in an entirely different direction. Tracers and tractors and interference and domes of force again became the order of the day. Projectors again raved out in their incandescent might, and soon another immense cruiser of the void lay beside her sister ship. Another and another; then, for a long time, space was blank.
The Lensman then energized his ultra-receiver, pointing his antenna carefully into the galactic line to Helmuth's base, as laid down for him by the Velantian astronomers. Again, so tight and hard was Helmuth's beam, he had to drive his apparatus so unmercifully that the tube noise almost drowned out the signals, but again he was rewarded by hearing faintly the voice of the pirate director of operations.
"--four vessels, all within or near one of those five solar systems, have ceased communicating; each cessation being accompanied by a period of blanketing interference of a pattern never before registered. You two vessels who are receiving these orders are instructed to investigate that region with the utmost care. Go with screens out and everything on the trips, and with automatic recorders set on me here.
"It is not believed that the patrol has anything to do with this, as ability has been shown transcending anything it has been known to possess. As a working hypothesis it is assumed that one of those solar systems, hitherto practically unexplored and unknown, is, in reality, the seat of a highly advanced race, which perhaps has taken offense at the attitude or conduct of our first ship to visit them. Therefore, proceed with extreme caution, with a thorough spy-ray search at extreme range before approaching at all. If you land, use tact and diplomacy instead of the customary tactics. Find out whether our ships and crews have been destroyed, or are only being held. And remember, automatic reporters on at all times. Helmuth, speaking for Boskone--off!"
For minutes Kinnison manipulated his micrometer in vain. He could not get another sound.
"What are you trying to get, Kim?" asked Thorndyke. "Wasn't that enough?" The message had been re-broadcast to the minds of the others by Worsel, as fast as it had entered the Lensman's ears.
"No, that's only half of it," Kinnison returned. "Helmuth's nobody's fool. He's certainly trying to plot the boundaries of our interference, and I want to see how he's coming out with it. But no dice. He's so far away and his beam's so hard that I can't work him unless he happens to be talking almost directly toward us. Well, it won't be long now until we'll give him some real interference to plot. Now we'll see what we can do about those two other ships that are heading this way. On your toes, everybody."
* * * * *
Carefully as those two ships investigated, and sedulously, as they sought to obey Helmuth's instructions, all their precautions amounted to exactly nothing. As ordered, they began a spy-ray survey at extreme range; but even at that range Kinnison's tracers were effective and those two ships also ceased communicating in a blaze of interference. Then recent history repeated itself. The details were changed somewhat, since there were two vessels instead of one; but the pit was of ample size to accommodate two ships, and the tractors could hold two as well and as rigidly as one. The conflict was a little longer, the beaming a little hotter and more coruscant, but the ending was the same. Scramblers were quickly installed and Kinnison addressed his men, already in the ships.
"Well, we're about ready to shove off again. Running away has worked twice so far, with very good results--once in the old _Brittania_, and once in the pirate's own ships. It should work again, if we can ring in enough variations on the theme to keep Helmuth guessing a while longer. Maybe, if the supply of pirate ships keeps up, we'll be able to make Helmuth furnish us transportation all the way back to base!
"Here's the idea. We've got six ships, and there's enough of us to drive them. Some of the younger Velantians have joined us, in spite of the fact that I've told them the chances are against them ever getting back. Enough of them, in fact, to make up almost full crews of us all. But six ships isn't enough of a squadron to fight through the fleets that Helmuth will have organized if we go in a body. So we'll spread out radially, covering thousands of parsecs before we get halfway to base, and broadcasting every watt of interference we can put out all along the way, in as many different shapes and powers as our apparatus will permit. We can't talk to each other, of course, but nothing else can talk anywhere in the same sector of the galaxy, either, and that will give us the edge. Each ship will be on its own, as we were before in the boats; the big difference being that we'll be in superdreadnaughts instead of lifeboats.
"Now, Worsel, if the pirates check up and follow the disturbance we are going to make sure they won't bother you folks at all. In fact, if they ever succeed in finding the center of that interference there will be nothing there except empty space. But if they don't follow us--and Helmuth is apt to insist upon a thorough study of this region before he does anything else--you folks are due for an inspection; and the next inspection will mean a real battle instead of a slaughter. The first spy ray will reveal this stuff here. But I don't suppose you want to hide it or destroy it?"
"We do not," the Velantian replied, positively. "Let them come, in whatever force they care to bring. The more that attack here, the less there will be to halt your progress. This armament represents the best of that possessed by both your patrol and the pirates, with improvements developed by your scientists and ours in full coöperation. We understand thoroughly its construction, operation, and maintenance. You may rest assured that the pirates will never levy tribute upon us, and that any pirate visiting this system will remain in it, permanently!"
"'At-a-snake, Worsel--long may you wiggle!" Kinnison exclaimed. Then, more seriously, "Maybe, after this is all over, I'll see you again sometime. If not, good-by. Good-by, all Velantia! All set, boys? Clear ether and light landings to you all! Blast off!"
Six ships, once pirate craft, now vessels of the Galactic Patrol, hurled themselves into and through Velantian air, into and through interplanetary space, out into the larger, wider, more unobstructed emptiness of the interstellar void. Six, each broadcasting with prodigious power and volume an all-inclusive interference through which no pirate communicator or visiray beam could possibly be driven!
IX.
Kimball Kinnison sat at his controls, smoking a rare, festive cigarette and smiling, at peace with the entire universe. For this new picture was in every element a different one from the old. Instead of being in a pitifully weak and defenseless lifeboat, skulking and hiding, he was in one of the most powerful battleships afloat, driving boldly at full blast almost directly toward home. Instead of only two, the patrolmen were now three in number, and LaVerne Thorndyke, master technician, was a telling addition to their force. Also, they had under them almost a normal crew of alert and highly trained Velantians.
Best of all, the enemy, instead of being a close-knit group, keeping Helmuth informed moment by moment of the situation and instantly responsive to his orders, were now entirely out of communication with each other and with their headquarters, groping helplessly. Literally, as well as figuratively, the pirates were in the dark--the absolute blackness of interstellar space. Then Thorndyke entered the room, frowning slightly.
"You look like the fabled Cheshire Cat, Kim," he remarked. "I hate to spoil such perfect bliss, but I'm here to tell you that we ain't out of the woods yet, by seven thousand rows of trees."
"Maybe not," the Lensman returned, blithely, "but compared to the jam we were in a while ago we're not only sitting on top of the world; we're perched right on the exact apex of the universe. They can't send or receive reports or orders, and they can't communicate. Even their detectors are mighty lame. You know how far they can get on electromagnetic detectors and visual apparatus. Furthermore, there isn't an identification number, symbol, or name on the outside of this buzz buggy. If it ever had one the friction and attrition have worn it off, clear down to the armor. What can happen that we can't cope with?"
"These engines can happen," the technician responded, bluntly. "The Bergenholm is developing a meter jump that I don't like a little bit."
"Does she knock? Or even tick?" demanded Kinnison.
"Not yet," Thorndyke confessed, reluctantly.
"How big a jump?"
"Pretty near two thousandths maximum. Average a thousandth and a half."
"That's hardly a wiggle on the recorder line. Drivers run for months with bigger jumps than that."
"Yeah--drivers. But of all the troubles anybody ever had with Bergenholms, a meter kick was never one of them, and that's what's got me guessing as to the whichness of the why. I'm not trying to scare you--yet. I'm just telling you."
The machine referred to was the neutralizer of inertia, the _sine qua non_ of interstellar speed, and it was not to be wondered at that the slightest irregularity in its performance was to the technician a matter of grave concern. Day after day passed, however, and the huge converter continued to function, taking in and sending out its wonted torrents of power. It developed not even a tick, and the meter jump did not grow worse. And during those days they put an inconceivable distance behind them.
During all this time their visual instruments remained blank; to all optical apparatus space was empty save for the normal tenancy of celestial bodies. From time to time something invisible or beyond the range of vision registered upon one of the electromagnetic detectors, but so slow were these instruments that nothing came of their signals. In fact, by the time the warnings were recorded, the objects causing the disturbances were probably far astern.
* * * * *
One day, however, the Bergenholm quit--cold. There was no laboring, no knocking, no heating up, no warning at all. One instant the ship was speeding along in free flight; the next she was lying inert in space. She was practically motionless, for any possible velocity built up by inert acceleration is scarcely a crawl, as free space speeds go!
Then the whole crew labored like mad. As soon as they had the massive covers off, Thorndyke scanned the interior of the machine and turned to Kinnison.
"I think we can patch her up, but it'll take quite a while. Maybe you'd be of more use in the control room--this ain't quite as safe as a church, is it, lying here inert?"