Part 3
And soon, as such things go, new structures began to appear here and there in the void. Comparatively small, these things were; tiny, in fact, compared to the Patrol's maulers. Unarmed, too; carrying nothing except defensive screen. Each was, apparently, simply a powerhouse; stuffed skin full of atomic motors, exciters, intakes and generators of highly peculiar design and pattern. Unnoticed except by gauntly haggard Thorndyke and his experts, who kept dashing from one of the strange craft to another, each took its place in a succession of precisely determined relationships to the Sun.
Between the orbits of Mars and of Jupiter, the new, sharply defined rings of asteroids moved smoothly. Grand Fleet formed an enormous hollow globe, six astronomical units in diameter. Outside that globe the surveying speedsters and flitters rushed madly hither and yon. Uselessly, apparently, for not one needle of the vortex detectors stirred from its zero pin.
And as nearly as possible at the center of that globe, circling the Sun well inside the orbit of Venus, there floated the flagship. Technically the _Z9M9Z_, socially the _Directrix_, ordinarily simply _GFHQ_, that ship had been built specifically to control the operations of a million separate flotillas. At her million-plug board stood--they had no need, ever, to sit--two hundred blocky, tentacle-armed Rigellians. They were waiting, stolidly motionless.
Intergalactic space remained empty. Interstellar ditto, ditto. The flitters flitted, fruitlessly.
But if everything out there in the threatened volume of space seemed quiet and serene, things in the _Z9M9Z_ were distinctly otherwise. Haynes and Kinnison, upon whom the heaviest responsibilities rested, were tensely ill at ease.
The admiral had his formation made, but he did not like it at all. It was too big, too loose, too cumbersome. The Boskonian fleet might appear anywhere outside that thin globe of Patrol ships, and it would take him far, far too long to get any kind of a fighting formation made, anywhere. So he worried. Minutes dragged--he wished that the pirates would hurry up and start something!
Kinnison was even less easy in his mind. He was not afraid of negaspheres, even if Boskonia should have them; but he was afraid of fortified, mobile planets. The supermaulers were big and powerful, of course, but they very definitely were not planets; and the big, new idea was mighty hard to jell. He did not like to bother Thorndyke by calling him--the master technician had troubles of his own--but the reports that were coming in were none too cheery. The excitation was wrong or the grid action was too unstable or the screen potentials were too high or too low or something. Sometimes they got a concentration, but it was just as apt as not to be a spread flood instead of a tight beam. To Kinnison, therefore, the minutes fled like seconds--but every minute that space remained clear was one more precious minute gained.
* * * * *
Then, suddenly, it happened. A needle leaped into significant figures. Relays clicked, a bright red light flared into being, a gong clanged out its raucous warning. A fractional instant later ten thousand other gongs in ten thousand other ships came brazenly to life as the discovering speedster automatically sent out its number and position; and those other ships--surveyors all--flashed toward that position and dashed frantically about. Theirs the task to determine, in the least number of seconds possible, the approximate location of the center of emergence.
For Port Admiral Haynes, canny old tactician that he was, had planned his campaign long since. It was standing plain in his tactical tank--to inglobe the entire space of emergence of the foe and to blast them out of existence before they could maneuver. If he could get into formation before the Boskonians appeared, it would be a simple slaughter--if not, it might be otherwise. Hence seconds counted; and hence he had had high-speed computers working steadily for weeks at the computation of courses for every possible center of emergence.
"Get me that center--fast!" Haynes barked at the surveyors, already blasting at maximum.
It came in. The chief computer yelped a string of numbers. Selected loose-leaf binders were pulled down, yanked apart, and distributed on the double, leaf by leaf. And:
"Get it over there! Especially the shock globe!" the port admiral yelled.
For he himself could direct the engagement only in broad; details must be left to others. To be big enough to hold in any significant relationship the millions of lights representing vessels, fleets, planets, structures and objectives, the Operations tank of the _Directrix_ had to be seven hundred feet in diameter; and it was a sheer physical impossibility for any ordinary mind either to perceive that seventeen million cubic feet of space as a whole or to make any sense at all out of the stupendously bewildering maze of multicolored lights crawling and flashing therein.
Kinnison and Worsel had handled Grand Fleet Operations during the Battle of Jarnevon, but they had discovered that they could have used some help. Four Rigellian Lensmen had been training for months for that all-important job, but they were not yet ready. Therefore the two old masters and one new one now labored at GFO: three tremendous minds, each supplying something that the others lacked. Kinnison of Tellus, with his hard, flat driving urge, his unconquerable, unstoppable will to do. Worsel of Velantia, with the prodigious reach and grasp which had enabled him, even without the Lens, to scan mentally a solar system eleven light-years distant. Tregonsee of Rigel IV, with the vast, calm certainty, the imperturbable poise peculiar to his long-lived, solemn race. Unattached Lensmen all; minds linked, basically, together into one mind by a wide-open three-way, superficially free, each to do his assigned third of the gigantic task.
Smoothly, effortlessly, those three linked minds went to work at the admiral's signal. Orders shot out along tight beams of thought to the stolid hundreds of Rigellian switchboard operators, and thence along communicator beams to the pilot rooms, wherever stationed. Flotillas, squadrons, subfleets flashed smoothly toward their newly assigned positions. Supermaulers moved ponderously toward theirs. The survey ships, their work done, vanished. They had no business anywhere near what was coming next. Small they were, and defenseless; a speedster's screens were as efficacious as so much vacuum against the forces about to be unleashed. The powerhouses also moved. Maintaining rigidly their cryptic mathematical relationships to each other and the Sun, they went as a whole into a new one with respect to the circling rings of tightly packed meteors and the invisible, nonexistent mouth of the Boskonian vortex.
Then, before Haynes' formation was nearly complete, the Boskonian fleet materialized. Just that--one instant space was empty; the next it was full of warships. A vast globe of battle wagons, in perfect fighting formation. They were not free, but inert and deadly.
Haynes swore viciously under his breath, the Lensmen pulled themselves together more tensely; but no additional orders were given. Everything that could possibly be done was already being done.
* * * * *
Whether the Boskonians expected to meet a perfectly placed fleet or whether they expected to emerge into empty space, to descend upon a defenseless Tellus, is not known or knowable. It is certain, however, that they emerged in the best possible formation to meet anything that could be brought to bear. It is also certain that, had the enemy had a _Z9M9Z_ and a Kinnison-Worsel-Tregonsee combination scanning its Operations tank, the outcome might well have been otherwise than it was.
For that ordinarily insignificant delay, that few minutes of time necessary for the Boskonians' orientation, was exactly that required for these two hundred smoothly working Rigellians to get Civilization's shock globe into position.
A million beams, primaries raised to the hellish heights possible only to Medonian conductors and insulation, lashed out almost as one. Screens stiffened to the urge of every generable watt of defensive power. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck and struck and struck again. Q-type helices bored, gouged and searingly hit. Rods and cones, planes and shears of incredibly condensed pure force clawed, tore and ground in mad abandon. Torpedo after torpedo, charged to the very skin with duodec, loosed its horribly detonant cargo against flinching wall shields, in such numbers and with such violence as to fill all circumambient space with an atmosphere of almost planetary density.
Screen after screen, wall shield after wall shield, in their hundreds and their thousands, went down. A full eighth of the Patrol's entire count of battleships were wrecked, riddled, blown apart or blasted completely out of space in the paralyzingly cataclysmic violence of that first, seconds-long, mind-shaking, space-racking encounter. Nor could it have been otherwise; for this encounter had not been at battle range. Not even at point-blank range; the warring monsters of the void were packed practically screen to screen.
But not a man died--upon Civilization's side at least--even though practically all of the myriad of ships composing the inner sphere, the shock globe, was lost. For they were automatic; manned by robots; what little superintendence was necessary had been furnished by remote control. Indeed it is possible, although perhaps not entirely probable, that the shock globe of the foe was similarly manned.
That first frightful meeting gave time for the reserves of the Patrol to get there, and it was then that the superior Operations control of the _Z9M9Z_ made itself tellingly felt. Ship for ship, beam for beam, screen for screen, the Boskonians were, perhaps, equal to the Patrol; but they did not have the perfection of control necessary for unified action. The field was too immense, the number of contending units too enormously vast. But the mind of each of the three Unattached Lensmen read aright the flashing lights of his particular volume of the gigantic tank and spread their meaning truly in the infinitely smaller space model beside which Admiral Haynes, master tactician, stood. Scanning the entire space of battle as a whole, he rapped out general orders--orders applying, perhaps, to a hundred or to five hundred planetary fleets. Kinnison and his fellows broke these orders down for the operators, who in turn told the vice admirals and rear admirals of the fleets what to do. They gave detailed orders to the units of their commands, and the line officers, knowing exactly what to do and precisely how to do it, did it with neatness and dispatch.
There was no doubt, no uncertainty, no indecision or wavering. The line officers, even the rear and vice admirals, knew nothing, could know nothing whatever of the progress of the engagement as a whole. But they had worked under the _Z9M9Z_ before. They knew that the maestro Haynes did know the battle as a whole. They knew that he was handling them as carefully and as skillfully as a master at chess plays his pieces upon the square-filled board. They knew that Kinnison or Worsel or Tregonsee was assigning no task too difficult of accomplishment. They knew that they could not be taken by surprise, attacked from some unexpected and unprotected direction; knew that, although in those hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of space there were hundreds of thousands of highly inimical and exceedingly powerful ships of war, none of them were, or shortly could be, in position to do them serious harm. If there had been, they would have been pulled out of there, _beaucoup_ fast. They were as safe as anyone in a warship in such a war could expect, or even hope, to be. Therefore they acted instantly; directly, whole-heartedly and efficiently; and it was the Boskonians who were taken, repeatedly and by the thousands, by surprise.
For the enemy, as has been said, did not have the Patrol's smooth perfection of control. Thus several of Civilization's fleets, acting in full synchronizing, could and repeatedly did rush upon one unit of the foe; inglobing it, blasting it out of existence, and dashing back to stations; all before the nearest-by fleets of Boskone knew even that a threat was being made. Thus ended the second phase of the battle, the engagement of the two Grand Fleets, with the few remaining thousands of Boskone's battleships taking refuge upon or near the phalanx of planets which had made up their center.
* * * * *
Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered; with fixed-mount weapons impossible of mounting upon any lesser mobile base, with fixed-mount intakes and generators which only planetary resources could excite or feed. Galactic Civilization's war vessels fell back. Attacking a full-armed planet was no part of their job. And as they fell back, the supermaulers moved ponderously up and went to work. This was their dish; for this they had been designed. Tubes, lances, stilettos of unthinkable energies raved against their mighty screens; bouncing off, glancing away, dissipating themselves in space-torturing discharges as they hurled themselves upon the nearest ground. In and in the monsters bored, inexorably taking up their positions directly over the ultra-protected domes which, their commanders knew, sheltered the vitally important Bergenholms and controls. Then they loosed forces of their own. Forces of such appalling magnitude as to burn out in the twinkling of an eye projector shells of a refractoriness to withstand for ten full seconds the maximum output of a first-class battleship's primary batteries!
The resultant beam was of very short duration, but of utterly intolerable poignancy. No material substance could endure it even momentarily. It pierced instantly the hardest, tightest wall shield known to the scientists of the Patrol. It was the only known thing which could cut or rupture the ultimately stubborn fabric of a Q-type helix. Hence it is not to be wondered at that as those incredible needles of ravening energy stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again at Boskonian domes every man of the Patrol, even Kimball Kinnison, fully expected those domes to go down.
But those domes held. And those fixed-mount projectors hurled back against the supermaulers forces at the impact of which course after course of fierce-driven defensive screen flamed through the spectrum and went down.
"Back! Get them back!" Kinnison whispered, white-lipped, and the attacking structures sullenly, stubbornly gave way.
"Why?" gritted Haynes. "They're all we've got."
"You forget the new one, chief--give us a chance."
"What makes you think it'll work?" the old admiral flashed the searing thought. "It probably won't--and if it doesn't--"
"If it doesn't," the younger man shot back, "we're no worse off than now to use the maulers. But we've got to use the sunbeam _now_ while those planets are together and before they start toward Tellus."
"QX," the admiral assented; and, as soon as the Patrol's maulers were out of the way:
"Verne?" Kinnison flashed a thought. "We can't crack 'em. Looks like it's up to you--what do you say?"
"Jury-rigged--don't know whether she'll light a cigarette or not--but here she comes!"
* * * * *
The sun, shining so brightly, darkened almost to the point of invisibility. The war vessels of the enemy disappeared, each puffing out into a tiny, but brilliant, sparkle of light.
Then, before the beam could affect the enormous masses of the planets, the engineers lost it. The sun flashed up--dulled--brightened--darkened--wavered. The beam waxed and waned irregularly; the planets began to move away under the urgings of their now thoroughly scared commanders.
Again, while millions upon millions of tensely straining Patrol officers stared into their plates, haggard Thorndyke and his sweating crews got the sunbeam under control again--and, in a heart-stoppingly wavering fashion, held it together. It flared--sputtered--ballooned out--but very shortly, before they could get out of its way, the planets began to glow. Ice caps melted, then boiled. Oceans boiled, their surfaces almost exploding into steam. Mountain ranges melted and flowed sluggishly down into valleys. The Boskonian domes of force went down and stayed down.
"QX, Kim--let be," Haynes ordered. "No use overdoing it. Not bad-looking planets; maybe we can use them for something."
The sun brightened to its wonted splendor, the planets began visibly to cool--even the Titanic forces then at work had heated those planetary masses only superficially.
The battle was over.
"What in all the purple hells of Palain did you do, Haynes, and how?" demanded the _Z9M9Z's_ captain.
"He used the whole damned solar system as a vacuum tube!" Haynes explained, gleefully. "Those power stations out there, with all their motors and intake screens, are simply the power leads. The asteroid belts, and maybe some of the planets, are the grids and plates. The sun is--"
"Hold on, chief!" Kinnison broke in. "That isn't quite it. You see, the directive field set up by the--"
"Hold on yourself!" Haynes ordered, brusquely. "You're too damned scientific, just like Sawbones Lacy. What do Rex and I care about technical details that we can't understand, anyway? The net result is what counts--and that was to concentrate upon those planets practically the whole energy output of the Sun. Wasn't it?"
"Well, that's the main idea," Kinnison conceded. "The energy equivalent, roughly, of four million one hundred and fifty thousand tons per second of disintegrating matter."
"_Whew!_" the captain whistled. "No wonder it frizzled 'em up."
"I can say now, I think, with no fear of successful contradiction, that Tellus _is_ strongly held," Haynes stated, with conviction. "What now, Kim, old son?"
"I think they're done, for a while," the Gray Lensman pondered. "Cardynge can't communicate through the tube, so probably they can't; but if they managed to slip an observer through, they may know how almighty close they came to licking us. On the other hand, Verne says that he can get the bugs out of the sunbeam in a couple of weeks--and when he does, the next zwilnik he cuts loose at is going to get a surprise."
"I'll say so," Haynes agreed. "We'll keep the surveyors on the prowl, and some of the Fleet will always be close by. Not all of it, of course--we'll adopt a schedule of reliefs--but enough of it to be useful. That ought to be enough, don't you think?"
"I think so--yes," Kinnison answered, thoughtfully. "I'm just about positive that they won't be in shape to start anything here again for a long time. And I had better get busy, sir, on my own job--I've got to put out a few jets."
"I suppose so," Haynes admitted.
For Tellus _was_ strongly held, now--so strongly held that Kinnison felt free to begin again the search upon whose successful conclusion depended, perhaps, the outcome of the struggle between Boskonia and Galactic Civilization.
III.
When the forces of the Galactic Patrol blasted Helmuth's Grand Base out of existence and hunted down and destroyed his secondary bases throughout this galaxy, Boskone's military grasp upon Civilization was definitely broken. Some minor bases may have escaped destruction, of course. Indeed, it is practically certain that some of them did so, for there are comparatively large volumes of our Island Universe which have not been mapped, even yet, by the planetographers of the Patrol. It is equally certain, however, that they were relatively few and of no real importance. For warships, being large, cannot be carried around or concealed in a vest pocket--a war fleet must of necessity be based upon a celestial object not smaller than a very large asteroid. Such a base, lying close enough to any one of Civilization's planets to be of any use, could not be hidden successfully from the detectors of the Patrol.
Reasoning from analogy, Kinnison quite justifiably concluded that the back of the drug syndicate had been broken in similar fashion when he had worked upward through Bominger and Strongheart and Crowninshield and Jalte to the dread council of Boskone itself. He was, however, wrong.
For, unlike the battleship, thionite is a vest-pocket commodity. Unlike the space-fleet base, a drug baron's headquarters can be, and frequently is, small, compact and highly mobile. Also, the Galaxy is huge, the number of planets in it immense, the total count of drug addicts utterly incomprehensible. Therefore it had been found more efficient to arrange the drug hookup in multiple series-parallel, instead of in the straight cascade sequence which Kinnison thought that he had followed up.
He thought so at first, that is, but he did not think so long. He had thought, and he had told Haynes, as well as Gerrond of Radelix, that the situation was entirely under control; that with the zwilnik headquarters blasted out of existence and with all of the regional heads and many of the planetary chiefs dead or under arrest, all that the Enforcement men would have to cope with would be the normal bootleg trickle. In that, too, he was wrong. Gerrond and the other lawmen of Narcotics had had a brief respite, it is true; but in a few days or weeks, upon almost as many planets as before, the illicit traffic was again in full swing.
After the Battle of Tellus, then, it did not take the Gray Lensman long to discover the above facts. Indeed, they were pressed upon him. He was, however, more relieved than disappointed at the tidings, for he knew that he would have material upon which to work. If his original opinion had been right, if all lines of communication with the now completely unknown ultimate authorities of the zwilniks had been destroyed, his task would have been an almost hopeless one.
It would serve no good purpose here to go into details covering his early efforts, since they embodied, in principle, the same tactics as those which he had previously employed. He studied, he analyzed, he investigated. He snooped and he spied. He fought; upon occasion he killed. And in due course--and not too long a course--he cut into the sign of what he thought must be a key zwilnik. Not upon Bronseca or Radelix or Chickladoria, or any other distant planet, but right upon Tellus!
But he could not locate him. He never saw him upon Tellus. As a matter of cold fact, he could not find a single person who had ever seen him or who knew anything definite about him except a number. These facts, of course, only whetted Kinnison's keenness to come to grips with the fellow. He might not be a very big shot, but the fact that he was covering himself up so thoroughly and so successfully made it abundantly evident that he was a fish well worth landing.
This wight, however, proved to be as elusive as the proverbial flea. He was never there when Kinnison pounced. In London he was a few minutes late. In Berlin he was a minute or so too early--and the ape didn't show up at all. He missed him in Paris and in San Francisco and in Shanghai. The guy settled down finally in New York, but still the Gray Lensman could not connect--it was always the wrong street, or the wrong house, or the wrong time, or something.
* * * * *
Then Kinnison set a snare which should have caught a microbe--and _almost_ caught his zwilnik. He missed him by one mere second when he blasted off from New York Spaceport. He was so close that he saw his flare, so close that he could slap onto the fleeing vessel the beam of the CRX tracer which he always carried with him.