This taunt bit deep, and the visitor was allowed to proceed. As he entered the private office, however, he saw that Harkleroy’s hand was poised near a switch, whose closing would signal a score or more of concealed gunners to burn him down. They supposed that the stuff was either on his person or in his speedster just outside. Time was short.
“I abase myself—that’s the formula you insist on, ain’t it?” Kinnison sneered, without bending his head a millimeter.
Harkleroy’s finger touched the stud.
“Dauntless! Come down!” Kinnison snapped out the order.
Hand, stud, and a part of the desk disappeared in the flare of Kinnison’s beam. Wall-ports opened; projectors and machine rifles erupted vibratory and solid destruction. Kinnison leaped toward the desk; the attack slowing down and stopping as he neared and seized the Boskonian. One fierce, short blast reduced the thought-screen generator to blobs of fused metal. Harkleroy screamed to his gunners to resume fire, but before bullet or beam took the zwilnik’s life, Kinnison learned what he most wanted to know.
The ape did know something about Black Lensmen. He didn’t know where the Lenses came from, but he did know how the men were chosen. More, he knew a Lensman personally—one Melasnikov, who had his office in Cadsil, on Kalonia III itself.
Kinnison turned and ran—the alarm had been given and they were bringing up stuff too heavy for even his armor to handle. But the Dauntless was landing already; smashing to rubble five city blocks in the process. She settled; and as the dureum-clad Gray Lensman began to fight his way out of Harkleroy’s fortress, Major Peter vanBuskirk and a full battalion of Valerians, armed with space-axes and semi-portables, began to hew and to blast their way in.
CHAPTER
15
Thyron Follows a Lead
NCH BY INCH, FOOT BY FOOT, Kinnison fought his way back along the corpse-littered corridor. Under the ravening force of the attackers’ beams his defensive screens flared into pyrotechnic splendor, but they did not go down. Fierce-driven metallic slugs spanged and whanged against the unyielding dureum of his armor; but that, too, held. Dureum is incredibly massive, unbelievably tough, unimaginably hard—against these qualities and against the thousands of horsepower driving that veritable tank and energizing its screens the zwilniks might just as well have been shining flashlights at him and throwing confetti. His immediate opponents could not touch him, but the Boskonians were bringing up reserves that he didn’t like a little bit; mobile projectors with whose energies even those screens could not cope.
He had, however, one great advantage over his enemies. He had the sense of perception; they did not. He could see them, but they could not see him. All he had to do was to keep at least one opaque wall between them until he was securely behind the mobile screens, powered by the stupendous generators of the Dauntless, which vanBuskirk and his Valerians were so earnestly urging toward him. If a door was handy in the moment of need, he used it. If not he went through a wall.
The Valerians were fighting furiously and were coming fast. Those two words, when applied to members of that race, mean something starkly incredible to anyone who has never seen Valerians in action. They average something less than seven feet in height; something over four hundred pounds in weight; and are muscled, boned, and sinewed against a normal gravitational force of almost three times that of Earth. VanBuskirk’s weakest warrior could do, in full armor, a standing high jump of fourteen feet against one Tellurian gravity; he could handle himself and the thirty-pound monstrosity which was his space-axe with a blinding speed and a devastating efficiency literally appalling to contemplate. They are the deadliest hand-to-hand fighters ever known; and, unbelievable as it may seem to any really highly advanced intelligence, they did and still do fairly revel in that form of combat.
The Valerian tide reached the battling Gray Lensman; closed around him.
“Hi…you little… Tellurian…wart!” Major Peter vanBuskirk boomed this friendly thought, a yell of pure joy, in cadence with the blows of his utterly irresistible weapon. His rhythm broke—his frightful axe was stuck. Not even dureum-inlaid armor could bar the inward course of those furiously-driven beaks; but sometimes it made it fairly difficult to get them out. The giant pulled, twisted—put one red-splashed boot on a battered breastplate—bent his mighty back—heaved viciously. The weapon came free with a snap that would have broken any ordinary man’s arms, but the Valerian’s thought rolled smoothly on: “Ain’t we got fun?”
“Ho, Bus, you big Valerian baboon!” Kinnison thought back in kind. “Thought maybe we’d need you and your gang—thanks a million. But back now, and fast!”
Although the Valerians did not like to retreat, after even a successful operation, they knew how to do it. Hence in a matter of minutes all the survivors—and the losses had been surprisingly small—were back inside the Dauntless.
“You picked up my speedster, Frank.” It was a statement, not a question, directed at the young Lensman sitting at the “big board.”
“Of course, sir. They’re massing fast, but without any hostile demonstration, as you said they would.” He nodded unconcernedly at a plate, which showed the sky dotted with warlike shapes.
“No maulers?”
“None detectable as yet, sir.”
“QX. Original orders stand. At detection of one mauler, execute Operation Able. Tell everybody that while the announcement of Operation Able will put me out of control instantly and automatically, until such announcement I will give instructions. What they’ll be like I haven’t the foggiest notion. It depends on what his nibs upstairs decides to do—it’s his move next.”
As though the last phrase were a cue, a burst of noise rattled from the speaker—of which only the words “Bradlow Thyron” were intelligible to the un-Lensed members of the crew. That name, however, explained why they were not being attacked—yet. Kalonia had heard much of that intransigent and obdurate pirate and of the fabulous prowess of his ship; and Kinnison was pretty sure that they were much more interested in his ship than in him.
“I can’t understand you!” The Gray Lensman barked, in the polyglot language he had so lately learned. “Talk pidgin!”
“Very well. I see that you are indeed Bradlow Thyron, as we were informed. What do you mean by this outrageous attack? Surrender! Disarm your men, take off their armor, and march them out of your vessel, or we will blast you as you lie there—Vice-Admiral Mendonai speaking!”
“I abase myself.” Kinnison-Thyron did not sneer—exactly—and he did incline his stubborn head perhaps the sixteenth part of an inch; but he made no move to comply with the orders so summarily issued. Instead:
“What the hell kind of planet is this, anyway?” he demanded, hotly. “I come here to see this louse Harkleroy because a friend of mine tells me he’s a big shot and interested enough in my line so we can do a lot of business. I give the lug fair warning, too—tell him plain I’ve been around plenty and if he tries to give me the works I’ll rub him out like a pencil mark. So what happens? In spite of what I just tell him he tries dirty work and I knock hell out of him, which he certainly has got coming to him. Then you and your flock of little tin boats come barging in like I’d busted a law or something. Who do you think you are, anyway? What license you got to stick your beak into private business?”
“Ah, I had not heard that version.” Vision came on; the face upon the plate was typically Kalonian—blue, cold, cruel, and keen. “Harkleroy was warned, you say? Definitely?”
“Plenty definitely. Ask any of the zwilniks in that private office of his. They’re mostly alive and they all must of heard it.”
The plate fogged, the speaker again gave out gibberish. The Lensman knew, however, that the commander of the forces above them was indeed questioning the dead zwilnik’s guards. They knew that Kinnison’s story was being corroborated in full.
“You interest me.” The Boskonian’s language again became intelligible to the group at large. “We will forget Harkleroy—stupidity brings
its own reward and the property damage is of no present concern. From what I have been able to learn of you, you have never belonged to that so-called Civilization. I know for a fact that you are not, and never have been, one of us. How have you been able to survive? And why do you work alone?”
“‘How’ is easy enough—by keeping one jump ahead of the other guy, like I did with your pal here, and by being smart enough to have good engineers put into my ship everything that any other one ever had and everything they could dream up besides. As to ‘why’, that’s simple, too. I don’t trust nobody. If nobody knows what I’m going to do, nobody’s going to stick a knife into me when I ain’t looking—see? So far, it’s paid off big. I’m still around and still healthy. Them that trusted other guys ain’t.”
“I see. Crude, but graphic. The more I study you, the more convinced I become that you make a worth-while addition to our force…”
“No deal, Mendonai,” Kinnison interrupted, shaking his unkempt head positively. “I never yet took no orders from no damn boss, and I ain’t going to.”
“You misunderstand me, Thyron.” The zwilnik was queerly patient and much too forbearing. Kinnison’s insulting omission of his title should have touched him off like a rocket. “I was not thinking of you in any minor capacity, but as an ally. An entirely independent ally, working with us in certain mutually advantageous undertakings.”
“Such as?” Kinnison allowed himself to betray his first sign of interest. “You may be talking sense now, brother, but what’s in it for me? Believe me, there’s got to be plenty.”
“There will be plenty. With the ability you have already shown, and with our vast resources back of you, you will take more every week than you have been taking in a year.”
“Yeah? People like you just love to do things like that for people like me. What do you figure on getting out of it?” Kinnison wondered, and Lensed a sharp thought to his junior at the board.
“On your toes, Frank. He’s stalling for something, and I’m betting it’s maulers.”
“None detectable yet, sir.”
“We stand to gain, of course,” the pirate admitted, smoothly. “For instance, there are certain features of your vessel which might—just possibly, you will observe, and speaking only to mention an example—be of interest to our naval designers. Also, we have heard that you have an unusually hot battery of primary beams. You might tell me about some of those things now; or at least re-focus your plate so that I can see something besides your not unattractive face.”
“I might not, too. What I’ve got here is my own business, and stays mine.”
“Is that what we are to expect from you in the way of cooperation?” The commander’s voice was still low and level, but now bore a chill of deadly menace.
“Cooperation, hell!” The cutthroat chief was unimpressed. “I’ll maybe tell you a thing or two—eat out of your dish—after I get good and sold on your proposition, whatever it is, but not one damn second sooner!”
The commander glared. “I weary of this. You probably are not worth the trouble, after all. I might as well blast you out now as later. You know that I can, of course, as well as I do.”
“Do I?” Kinnison did sneer, this time. “Act your age, pal. As I told that fool Harkleroy, this ain’t the first planet I ever sat down on, and it won’t be the last. And don’t call no maulers,” as the Boskonian officer’s hand moved almost imperceptibly toward a row of buttons. “If you do, I start blasting as soon as we spot one on our plates, and they’re full out right now.”
“You would start blasting?” The zwilnik’s surprise was plain, but the hand stopped its motion.
“Yeah—me. Them heaps you got up there don’t bother me a bit, but maulers I can’t handle, and I ain’t afraid to tell you so because you probably know it already. I can’t stop you from calling ’em, if you want to, but bend both ears to this—I can out-run ’em and I’ll guarantee that you personally won’t be alive to see me run. Why? Because your ship will be the first one I’ll whiff on the way out. And if the rest of your junkers stick around long enough to try to stop me I’ll whiff twenty-five or thirty more before your maulers get close enough so I’ll have to do a flit. Now, if your brains are made out of the same kind of thick, blue mud as Harkleroy’s, start something!”
This was an impasse. Kinnison knew what he wanted the other to do, but he could not give him a suggestion, or even a hint, without tipping his hand. The officer, quite evidently, was in a quandary. He did not want to open fire upon this tremendous, this fabulous ship. Even if he could destroy it, such a course would be unthinkable—unless, indeed, the very act of destruction would brand as false rumor the tales of invincibility and invulnerability which had heralded its coming, and thus would operate in his favor at the court-martial so sure to be called. He was very much afraid, however, that those rumors were not false—a view which was supported very strongly both by Thyron’s undisguised contempt for the Boskonian warships threatening him and by his equally frank declaration of his intention to avoid engagement with any craft of really superior force. Finally, however, the Boskonian perceived one thing that did not quite fit.
“If you are as good as you claim to be, why aren’t you blasting right now?” he asked, skeptically.
“Because I don’t want to, that’s why. Use your head, pal.” This was better. Mendonai had shifted the conversation into a line upon which the Lensman could do a bit of steering. “I had to leave the First Galaxy because it got too hot for me, and I got no connections at all, yet, here in the Second. You folks need certain kinds of stuff that I’ve got and I need other kinds, that you’ve got. So we could do a nice business, if you wanted to. Like I told you, that’s why I come to see Harkleroy. I’d like to do business with some of you people, but I just got bit pretty bad, and I’ve got to have some kind of solid guarantee that you mean business, and no monkey business, before I take a chance again. See?”
“I see. The idea is good, but the execution may prove difficult. I could give you my word, which I assure you has never been broken.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Kinnison snorted. “Would you take mine?”
“The case is different. I would not. Your point, however, is well taken. How about the protection of a high court of law? I will bring you an unalterable writ from any court you say.”
“Uh-uh,” the Gray Lensman dissented. “There never was no court yet that didn’t take orders from the big shots who keep the fat cats fat, and lawyers are the crookedest damn crooks in the universe. You’ll have to do better than that, pal.”
“Well, then, how about a Lensman? You know about Lensmen, don’t you?”
“A Lensman!” Kinnison gasped. He shook his head violently. “Are you completely nuts, or do you think I am? I do know Lensmen, cully—a Lensman chased me from Alsakan to Vandemar once, and if I hadn’t had a dose of hell’s own luck he’d of got me. Lensmen chased me out of the First Galaxy—why the hell else do you think I’m here? Use your brain, mister; use your brain!”
“You’re thinking of Civilization’s Lensmen; particularly of Gray Lensmen.” Mendonai was enjoying Thyron’s passion. “Ours are different—entirely different. They have as much power, or more, but don’t use it the same way. They work with us right along. In fact, they’ve been bumping Gray Lensmen off right and left lately.”
“You mean he could open up, for instance, your mind and mine, so we could see the other guy wasn’t figuring on running in no stacked decks? And he’d sort of referee this business we got on the fire? Do you know one yourself, personally?”
“He could, and would, do all that. Yes, I know one personally. His name is Melasnikov, and his office is on Three, just a short flit from here. He may not be there at the moment, but he’ll come in if I call. How about it—shall I call him now?”
“Don’t work up a sweat. Sounds like it might work, if we can figure the approach. I don’t suppose you and him would come out to me in space?”
“Hardly. You w
ouldn’t expect us to, would you?”
“It wouldn’t be very bright of you to. And since I want to do business, I guess I got to meet you part way. How’d this be? You pull your ships out of range. My ship takes station right over your Lensman’s office. I go down in my speedster, like I did here, and go inside to meet him and you. I wear my armor—and when I say it’s real armor I ain’t just snapping my choppers, neither.”
“I can see only one slight flaw.” The Boskonian was really trying to work out a mutually satisfactory solution. “The Lensman will open our minds to you in proof, however, that we will have no intention of bringing up our maulers or other heavy stuff while we’re in conference.”
“Right then you’ll find out you hadn’t better, too.” Kinnison grinned wolfishly.
“What do you mean?” Mendonai demanded.
“I’ve got enough super-atomic bombs aboard to blow this planet to hellangone and the boys’ll drop ’em all the second you make a queer move. I’ve got to take a little chance to start doing business, but it’s a damn small one, ’cause if I go you go too, pal. You and your Lensman and your fleet and everything alive on your whole damn planet. And your bosses still won’t get any dope on what makes this ship of mine tick the way she does. So I’m betting you won’t make that kind of a swap.”
“I certainly would not.” Hard as he was, Mendonai was shaken. “Your suggested method of procedure is satisfactory.”
“QX. Are you ready to flit?”
“We are ready.”
“Call your Lensman, then, and lead the way. Boys, take her upstairs!”
CHAPTER
16
Red Lensman in Gray
AREN KINNISON WAS WORRIED. She, who had always been so sure of herself, had for weeks been conscious of a gradually increasing—what was it, anyway? Not exactly a loss of control…a change…a something that manifested itself in increasingly numerous fits of senseless—sheerly idiotic—stubbornness. And always and only it was directed at—of all the people in the universe!—her brother. She got along with her sisters perfectly, their tiny tiffs barely rippled the surface of any of their minds. But any time her path of action crossed Kit’s, it seemed, the profoundest depths of her being flared into opposition like exploding duodec. Worse than senseless and idiotic, it was inexplicable, for the feeling which the Five had for each other was much deeper than that felt by ordinary brothers and sisters.
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