Since Wolmark believed implicitly his statement that it would be poor technique to oppose his return, the planet’s screens went down at Helmuth’s signal. His first act was to call all the department heads to the center, for an extremely important council of war. There he told them everything that had happened, calmly and concisely, concluding:
“They are aloof, disinterested, unpartisan to a degree I find it impossible to understand. They disapprove of us on purely philosophical grounds, but they will take no active part against us as long as we stay away from their solar system. Therefore we cannot obtain knowledge of the Lens by direct action, but there are other methods which shall be worked out in due course.”
“The Arisians do approve of the Patrol, and have helped them to the extent of giving them the Lens. There, however, they stop. If the Lensmen do not know how to use their Lenses efficiently—and I gather that they do not—we ‘shall be allowed to conquer and to flourish for a time.’ We will conquer, and we will see to it that the time of our flourishing, will be a long one indeed.”
“The whole situation, then, boils down to this: our cosmic energy against the Lens of the Patrol. Ours is the much more powerful arm, but our only hope of immediate success lies in keeping the Patrol in ignorance of our cosmic-energy receptors and converters. One Lensman already has that knowledge. Therefore, gentlemen, it is very clear that the death of that Lensman has now become absolutely imperative. We must find him, if it means the abandonment of our every other enterprise throughout this galaxy. Give me a full report upon the screening of the planets upon which the Lensman may try to land.”
“It is done, sir,” came quick reply. “They are completely blockaded. Ships are spaced so closely that even the electromagnetic detectors have a five hundred percent overlap. Visual detectors have at least two hundred fifty percent overlap. Nothing as large as one millimeter in any dimension can get through without detection and observation.”
“And how about the search of Trenco?”
“Results are still negative. One of our ships, with papers all in order, visited Trenco space-port openly. No one was there except the regular force of Rigellians. Our captain was in no position to be too inquisitive, but the missing ship was certainly not in the port and he gathered that he was the first visitor they had had in a month. We learned on Rigel IV that Tregonsee, the Lensman on duty on Trenco, has been there for a month and will not be relieved for another month. He was the only Lensman there. We are of course carrying on the search of the rest of the planet. About half the personnel of each vessel to land has been lost, but they started with double crews and replacements are being sent.”
“The Lensman Tregonsee’s story may or may not be true,” Helmuth mused. “it makes little difference. It would be impossible to hide that ship in Trenco space-port from even a casual inspection, and if the ship is not there the Lensman is not. He may be in hiding elsewhere on the planet, but I doubt it. Continue to search nevertheless. There are many things he may have done… I will have to consider them, one by one.”
But Helmuth had very little time to consider what Kinnison might have done, for the Lensman had left Trenco long since. Because of the flare-baffles upon his driving projectors his pace was slow; but to compensate for this condition the distance to be covered was not too long. Therefore, even as Helmuth was cogitating upon what next to do, the Lensman and his crew were approaching the far-flung screen of Boskonian war-vessels investing the entire Solarian System.
To approach that screen undetected was a physical impossibility, and before Kinnison realized that he was in a danger zone six tractors had flicked out, had seized his ship, and had jerked it up to combat range. But the Lensman was ready for anything, and again everything happened at once.
Warnings screamed into the distant pirate base and Helmuth, tense at his desk, took personal charge of his mighty fleet. On the field of action Kinnison’s screens flamed out in stubborn defense, tractors snapped under his slashing shears, the baffles disappeared in an incandescent flare as he shot maximum blast into his drive, and space again became suffused with the output of his now ultra-powered multiplex scramblers.
And through that murk the Lensman directed a thought, with the full power of mind and Lens.
“Port Admiral Haynes—Prime Base! Port Admiral Haynes—Prime Base! Urgent! Kinnison calling from the direction of Sirius—urgent!” he sent out the fiercely-driven message.
It so happened that at Prime Base it was deep night, and Port Admiral Haynes was sound asleep, but, trigger-nerved old space-cat that he was, he came instantly and fully awake. Scarcely had an eye flicked open than his answer had been hurled back.
“Haynes acknowledging—send it, Kinnison!”
“Coming in, in a pirate ship. All the pirates in space are on our necks, but we’re coming in, in spite of hell and high water! Don’t send up any ships to help us down—they could blast you out of space in a second, but they can’t stop us. Get ready—it won’t be long now!”
Then, after the Port Admiral had sounded the emergency alarm, Kinnison went on.
“Our ship carries no markings, but there’s only one of us and you’ll know which one it is—we’ll be doing the dodging. They’d be crazy to follow us down into atmosphere, with all the stuff you’ve got, but they act crazy enough to do almost anything. If they do follow us down, get ready to give ’em hell—here we are!”
Pursued and pursuers had touched the outermost fringe of the stratosphere; and, slowed down to optical visibility by even that highly rarified atmosphere, the battle raged in incandescent splendor. One ship was spinning, twisting, looping, gyrating, jumping and darting hither and thither—performing every weird maneuver that the fertile and agile minds of the Patrolmen could improvise—to shake off the horde of attackers.
The pirates, on the other hand, were desperately determined that, whatever the cost, the Lensman should not land. Tractors would not hold and the inertialess ship could not be rammed. Therefore their strategy was that which had worked so successfully four times before in similar case—to englobe the ship completely and thus beam her down. And while attempting this englobement they so massed their forces as to drive the Lensman’s vessel as far as possible away from the grim and tremendously powerful fortifications of Prime Base, almost directly below them.
But the four ships which the pirates had recaptured had been manned by Velantians, whereas in this one Kinnison the Lensman and Henderson the Master Pilot were calling upon their every resource of instantaneous nervous reaction of brilliant brain and of lightning hand to avoid that fatal trap. And avoid it they did, by series after series of fantastic maneuvers never set down in any manual of space combat.
Powerful as were the weapons of Prime Base, in that thick atmosphere their effective range was less than fifty miles. Therefore the gunners, idle at their controls, and the officers of the superdreadnaughts, chained by definite orders to the ground, fumed and swore as, powerless to help their battling fellows, they stood by and watched in their plates the furious engagement so high overhead.
But slowly, so slowly, Kinnison won his way downward, keeping as close over Base as he could without being englobed, and finally he managed to get within range of the gigantic projectors of the Patrol. Only the heaviest of the fixed-mount guns could reach that mad whirlpool of ships, but each one of them raved out against the same spot at precisely the same instant. In the inferno which that spot instantly became, not even a full-driven wall-shield could endure, and a vast hole yawned where pirate ships had been. The beams flicked off, and, timed by his Lens, Kinnison shot his ship through that hole before it could be closed and arrowed downward at maximum blast.
Ship after ship of the pirate horde followed him down in madly suicidal last attempts to blast him out of the ether, down toward the terrific armament of the base. Prime Base itself, the most dreaded, the most heavily armed, the most impregnable fortress of the Galactic Patrol! Nothing afloat could even threaten that citadel—the overbold a
ttackers simply disappeared in brief flashes of coruscant vapor.
Kinnison, even before inerting his ship preparatory to landing, called his commander.
“Did any of the other boys beat us in, Sir?” he asked.
“No, sir,” came the curt response. Congratulations, felicitations, and celebration would come later; Haynes was now the Port Admiral receiving an official report.
“Then, sir, I have the honor to report that the expedition has succeeded,” and he could not help adding informally, youthfully exultant at the success of his first real mission, “We’ve brought home the bacon!”
CHAPTER
13
Maulers Afloat
POWERFUL FLEET HAD BEEN sent to rescue those of the Brittania’s crew who might have managed to stay out of the clutches of the pirates. The wildly enthusiastic celebration inside Prime Base was over. Outside the force-walls of the Reservation, however, it was just beginning. The specialists and the Velantians were in the thick of it. No one on Earth knew anything about Velantia, and those highly intelligent reptilian beings knew just as little of Tellus. Nevertheless, simply because they had aided the Patrolmen, the visitors were practically given the keys to the planet, and they were enjoying the experience tremendously.
“We want Kinnison—we want Kinnison!” the festive crowd, led by Universal Telenews men, had been yelling; and finally the Lensman came out. But after one pose before a lens and a few words into a microphone, he pleaded, “There’s my call, now—urgent!” and fled back inside Reservation. Then the milling tide of celebrants rolled back toward the city, taking with it every Patrolman who could get leave.
Engineers and designers were swarming through and over the pirate ship Kinnison had driven home, each armed with a sheaf of blue-prints already prepared from the long-cherished data-spool, each directing a corps of mechanics in dismantling some mechanism of the great space-rover. To this hive of bustling activity it was that Kinnison had been called. He stood there, answering as best he could the multitude of questions being fired at him from all sides, until he was rescued by no less a personage than Port Admiral Haynes.
“You gentlemen can get your information from the data sheets better than you can from Kinnison,” he remarked with a smile, “and I want to take his report without any more delay.”
Hand under arm, the old Lensman led the young one away, but once inside his private office he summoned neither secretary nor recorder. Instead, he pushed the buttons which set up a complete-coverage shield and spoke.
“Now, son, open up. Out with it—everything that you have been holding back ever since you landed. I got your signal.”
“Well, yes, I have been holding back,” Kinnison admitted. “I haven’t got enough jets to be sticking my neck out in fast company, even if it were something to be discussed in public, which it isn’t. I’m glad you could give me this time so quick. I want to go over an idea with you, and with no one else. It may be as cockeyed as Trenco’s ether—you’re to be the sole judge of that—but you’ll know I mean well, no matter how goofy it is.”
“That certainly is not an overstatement,” Haynes replied, dryly. “Go ahead.”
“The great peculiarity of space combat is that we fly free, but fight inert,” Kinnison began, apparently irrelevantly, but choosing his phraseology with care. To force an engagement one ship locks to the other first with tracers, then with tractors, and goes inert. Thus, relative speed determines the ability to force or to avoid engagement, but it is relative power that determines the outcome. Heretofore the pirates—
“And by the way, we are belittling our opponents and building up a disastrous overconfidence in ourselves by calling them pirates. They are not—they can’t be. Boskonia must be more than a race or a system—it is very probably a galaxy-wide culture. It is an absolute despotism, holding its authority by means of a rigid system of rewards and punishments. In our eyes it is fundamentally wrong, but it works—how it works! It is organized just as we are, and is apparently as strong in bases, vessels, and personnel.
“Boskonia has had the better of us, both in speed—except for the Brittania’s momentary advantage—and in power. That advantage is now lost to them. We will have, then, two immense powers, each galactic in scope, each tremendously powerful in arms, equipment, and personnel; each having exactly the same weapons and defenses, and each determined to wipe out the other. A stalemate is inevitable; an absolute deadlock; a sheerly destructive war of attrition which will go on for centuries and which must end in the annihilation of both Boskonia and civilization.”
“But our new projectors and screens!” protested the older man. “They give us an overwhelming advantage. We can force or avoid engagement, as we please. You know the plan to crush them—you helped to develop it.”
“Yes, I know the plan. I also know that we will not crush them. So do you. We both know that our advantage will be only temporary.” The young Lensman, unimpressed, was in deadly earnest.
The Admiral did not reply for a time. Deep down, he himself had felt the doubt; but neither he nor any other of his school had ever mentioned the thing that Kinnison had now so baldly put into words. He knew that whatever one side had, of weapon or armor or equipment, would sooner or later become the property of the other; as was witnessed by the desperate venture which Kinnison himself had so recently and so successfully concluded. He knew that the devices installed in the vessels captured upon Velantia had been destroyed before falling into the hands of the enemy, but he also knew that with entire fleets so equipped the new arms could not be kept secret indefinitely. Therefore he finally replied:
“That may be true.” He paused, then went on like the indomitable veteran that he was. “But we have the advantage now and we’ll drive it while we’ve got it. After all, we may be able to hold it long enough.”
“I’ve just thought of one more thing that would help—communication,” Kinnison did not argue the previous point, but went ahead. “It seems to be impossible to drive any kind of a communicator beam through the double interference…”
“Seems to be!” barked Haynes. “It is impossible! Nothing but a thought…”
“That’s it exactly—thought!” interrupted Kinnison in turn. “The Velantians can do things with a Lens that nobody would believe possible. Why not examine some of them for Lensmen? I’m sure that Worsel could pass, and probably many others. They can drive thoughts through anything except their own thought-screens—and what communicators they would make!”
“That idea has distinct possibilities and will be followed up. However, it is not what you wanted to discuss. Go ahead.”
“QX.” Kinnison went into Lens-to-Lens communication. “I want some kind of a shield or screen that will neutralize or nullify a detector. I asked Hotchkiss, the communications expert, about it—under seal. He said it had never been investigated, even as an academic problem in research, but that it was theoretically possible.”
“His room is shielded, you know.” Haynes was surprised at the use of the Lenses. “Is it that important?”
“I don’t know. As I said before, I may be cockeyed; but if my idea is any good at all that nullifier is the most important thing in the universe, and if word of it gets out it may be useless. You see, sir, over the long route, the only really permanent advantage that we have over Boskonia, the one thing they can’t get, is the Lens. There must be some way to use it. If that nullifier is possible, and if we can keep it secret for a while, I believe I’ve found it. At least, I want to try something. It may not work—probably it won’t, it’s a mighty slim chalice—but if it does, we may be able to wipe out Boskonia in a few months instead of carrying on forever a war of attrition. First, I want to go…”
“Hold on!” Haynes snapped. “I’ve been thinking, too. I can’t see any possible relation between such a device and any real military weapon, or the Lens, either. If I can’t, not many others can, and that’s a point in your favor. If there’s anything at all in your idea, it’s too big to sh
are with anyone even me. Keep it to yourself.”
“But it’s a peculiar hook-up, and may not be any good at all,” protested Kinnison. “You might want to cancel it!”
“No danger of that,” came the positive statement. “You know more about the pirates—pardon me, about Boskonia—than any other Patrolman. You believe that your idea has some slight chance of success. Very well—that fact is enough to put every resource of the Patrol back of you. Put your idea on a tape under Lensman’s Seal, so that it will not be lost in case of your death. Then go ahead. If it is possible to develop that nullifier you shall have it. Hotchkiss will take charge of it, and have any other Lensmen he wants. No one except Lensmen will work on it or know anything about it. No records will be kept. It will not even exist until you yourself release it to us.”
“Thanks, sir,” and Kinnison left the room.
Then for weeks Prime Base was the scene of an activity furious indeed. New apparatus was designed and tested—new shears, new generators, new scramblers, and many other new things. Each item was designed and tested, redesigned and retested, until even the most skeptical of the Patrol’s engineers could no longer find in it anything to criticize. Then throughout the galaxy the ships of the Patrol were recalled to their sector bases to be rebuilt.
There were to be two great classes of vessels. Those of the first—special scouting cruisers—were to have speed and defense—nothing else. They were to be the fastest things in space, and able to defend themselves against attack—that was all. Vessels of the second class had to be built from the keel upward, since nothing even remotely like them had theretofore been conceived. They were to be huge, ungainly, slow—simply storehouses of incomprehensibly vast powers of offense. They carried projectors of a size and power never before set upon movable foundations, nor were they dependent upon cosmic energy. They carried their own, in bank upon bank of stupendous accumulators. In fact, each of these monstrous floating fortresses was to be able to generate screens of such design and power that no vessel anywhere near them could receive cosmic energy!
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