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 super-maulers 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. War-vessels of the enemy disappeared, each puffing out into a tiny but brilliant sparkle of light.
Then, before the beam could effect 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—and, in a heart-stopping 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, briskly. “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.
CHAPTER
3
Lyrane the Matriarchy
HEN 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 hook-up in multiple series-parallel, instead of in the straight en-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. The 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 a
lmost 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 on Tellus. As a matter of cold fact, he could not find a single person who had ever seen him or knew anything definite about him. 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 sat 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 Space-Port. 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.
Unfortunately, however, the Lensman was in mufti at the time, and was driving a rented flitter. His speedster—altogether too spectacular and obvious a conveyance to be using in a hush-hush investigation—was at Prime Base. He didn’t want the speedster, anyway, except inside the Dauntless. He’d go organized this time to chase the lug clear out of space, if he had to. He shot in a call for the big cruiser, and while it was coming he made luridly sulphurous inquiry.
Fruitless. His orders had been carried out to the letter, except in the one detail of not allowing any vessel to take off. This take-off absolutely could not be helped—it was just one of those things. The ship was a Patrol speedster from Deneb V, registry number so-and-so. Said he was coming in for servicing. Came in on the north beam, identified himself properly—Lieutenant Quirkenfal, of Deneb V, he said it was, and it checked.…
It would check, of course. The zwilnik that Kinnison had been chasing so long certainly would not be guilty of any such raw, crude work as a faulty identification. In fact, right then he probably looked just as much like Quirkenfal as the lieutenant himself did.
“He wasn’t in any hurry at all,” the information went on. “He waited around for his landing clearance, then slanted in on his assigned slide to the service pits. In the last hundred yards, though, he shot off to one side and sat down, plop, broadside on, clear over there in the far corner of the field. But he wasn’t down but a second, sir. Long before anybody could get to him—before the cruisers could put a beam on him, even—he blasted off as though the devil was on his tail. Then you came along, sir, but we did put a CRX tracer on him.…”
“I did that much, myself,” Kinnison stated, morosely. “He stopped just long enough to pick up a passenger—my zwilnik, of course—then flitted…and you fellows let him get away with it.”
“But we couldn’t help it, sir,” the official protested. “And anyway, he couldn’t possibly have…”
“He sure could. You’d be surprised no end at what that bimbo can do.”
Then the Dauntless flashed in; not asking but demanding instant right of way.
“Look around, fellows, if you like, but you won’t find a damned thing,” Kinnison’s uncheering conclusion came back as he sprinted toward the dock into which his battleship had settled. “The lug hasn’t left a loose end dangling yet.”
By the time the great Patrol ship had cleared the stratosphere Kinnison’s CRX, powerful and tenacious as it was, was just barely registering a line. But that was enough. Henry Henderson, Master Pilot, stuck the Dauntless’ needle nose into that line and shoved into the driving projectors every watt of that those Brobdingnagian creations would take.
They had been following the zwilnik for three days now, Kinnison reflected, and his CRX’s were none too strong yet. They were overhauling him mighty slowly; and the Dauntless was supposed to be the fastest thing in space. That bucket up ahead had plenty of legs—must have been souped up to the limit. This was apt to be a long chase, but he’d get that bozo if he had to chase him on a geodesic line along the hyper-dimensional curvature of space clear back to Tellus where he started from!
They did not have to circumnavigate total space, of course, but they did almost leave the galaxy before they could get the fugitive upon their plates. The stars were thinning out fast; but still, hazily before them in a vastness of distance, there stretched a milky band of opalescence.
“What’s coming up, Hen—a rift?” Kinnison asked.
“Uh-huh, Rift Ninety Four,” the pilot replied. “And if I remember right, that arm up ahead is Dunstan’s region and it has never been explored. I’ll have the chart-room check up on it.”
“Never mind; I’ll go check it myself—I’m curious about this whole thing.”
Unlike any smaller vessel, the Dauntless was large enough so that she could—and hence as a matter of course did—carry every space-chart issued by all the various Boards and Offices and Bureaus concerned with space, astronomy, astrogation, and planetography. She had to, for there were usually minds aboard which were apt at any time to become intensely and unpredictably interested in anything, anywhere. Hence it did not take Kinnison long to obtain what little information there was.
The vacancy they were approaching was Rift Ninety Four, a vast space, practically empty of stars, lying between the main body of the galaxy and a minor branch of one of its prodigious spiral arms. The opalescence ahead was the branch—Dunstan’s Region. Henderson was right; it had never been explored.
The Galactic Survey, which has not even yet mapped at all completely the whole of the First Galaxy proper, had of course done no systematic work upon such outlying sections as the spiral arms. Some such regions were well known and well mapped, it is true; either because its own population, independently developing means of space-flight, had come into contact with our Civilization upon its own initiative or because private exploration and investigation had opened up profitable lines of commerce. But Dunstan’s Region was bare. No people resident in it had ever made themselves known; no private prospecting, if there had ever been any such, had revealed anything worthy of exploitation or development. And, with so many perfectly good uninhabited planets so much nearer to Galactic Center, it was of course much too far out for colonization.
Through the rift, then, and into Dunstan’s Region the Dauntless bored at the unimaginable pace of her terrific full-blast drive. The tracers’ beams grew harder and more taut with every passing hour; the fleeing speedster itself grew large and clear upon the plates. The opalescence of the spiral arm became a firmament of stars. A sun detached itself from that firmament; a dwarf of Type G. Planets appeared.
One of these in particular, the second out, looked so much like Earth that it made some of the observers homesick. There were the familiar polar ice-caps, the atmosphere and stratosphere, the high-piled, billowy masses of clouds. There were vast blue oceans, there were huge, unfamiliar continents glowing with chlorophyllic green.
At the spectroscopes, at the bolometers, at the many other instruments men went rapidly and skillfully to work.
“Hope the ape’s heading for Two, and I think he is,” Kinnison remarked, as he studied the results. “People living on that planet would be human to ten places, for all the tea in China. No wonder he was so much at home on Tellus… Yup, it’s Two—there, he’s gone inert.”
“Whoever is piloting that can wen
t to school just one day in his life and that day it rained and the teacher didn’t come,” Henderson snorted. “And he’s trying to balance her down on her tail—look at her bounce and flop around! He’s just begging for a crack-up.”
“If he makes it it’ll be bad—plenty bad,” Kinnison mused. “He’ll gain a lot of time on us while we’re rounding the globe on our landing spiral.”
“Why spiral, Kim? Why not follow him down, huh? Our intrinsic is no worse than his—it’s the same one, in fact.”
“Get conscious, Hen. This is a superbattlewagon—just in case you didn’t know it before.”
“So what? I can certainly handle this super a damn sight better than that ground-gripper is handling that scrap-heap down there.” Henry Henderson, Master Pilot Number One of the Service, was not bragging. He was merely voicing what to him was the simple and obvious truth.
“Mass is what. Mass and volume and velocity and inertia and power. You never stunted this much mass before, did you?”
“No, but what of it? I took a course in piloting once, in my youth.” He was then a grand old man of twenty-eight or thereabouts. “I can line up the main rear center pipe onto any grain of sand you want to pick out on that field, and hold her there until she slags it down.”
“If you think you can spell ‘able’, hop to it!”
“QX, this is going to be fun.” Henderson gleefully accepted the challenge, then clicked on his general-alarm microphone. “Strap down, everybody, for inert maneuvering, Class Three, on the tail. Tail over to belly landing. Hipe!”
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