“I admit that you’re a good picker.” Kinnison’s voice was now venomously soft, his intonation distinct with thinly veiled sarcasm “Unfortunately, however, your taste agrees too well with mine. You see, captain, I’m going to need a nurse myself. I think I’m coming down with something. And, since I’ve got to have a nurse, I’ll take that red-headed one. I had a nurse once with hair just that color, who insisted on feeding me tea and toast and a soft-boiled egg when I wanted beefsteak; and I’m going to take my grudge out on this one here for all the red-headed nurses that ever lived. I trust that you will pardon the length of this speech, but I want to give you my reasons in full for cautioning you that that particular nurse is my own particular personal property. Mark her for me, and see to it that she gets here—exactly as she is now.”
The captain had been afraid to interrupt his superior, but now he erupted.
“But see here, Blakeslee!” he stormed. “She’s mine, by every right. I captured her, I saw her first, I’ve got her here…”
“Enough of that back-talk, captain!” Kinnison sneered elaborately. “You know, of course, that you are violating every rule by taking booty for yourself before division at base, and that you can get shot for doing it.”
“But everybody does it!” protested the captain.
“Except when a superior officer catches him at it. Superiors get first pick, you know,” the Lensman reminded him suavely.
“But I protest, sir! I’ll take it up with…”
“Shut up!” Kinnison snarled, with cold finality. “Take it up with whom you please, but remember this, my last warning. Bring her in to me as she is and you live. Touch her and you die! Now, you nurses, come over here to the board!”
Nurse MacDougall had been whispering furtively to the others and now, she led the way, head high and eyes blazing defiance. She was an actress, as well as a nurse.
“Take a good, long look at this button, right here, marked ‘Relay 46,’” came curt instructions. “If anybody aboard this ship touches any one of you, or even looks at you as though he wants to, press this button and I’ll do the rest. Now, you big, red-headed dumb-bell, look at me. Don’t start begging—yet. I just want to be sure you’ll know me when you see me.”
“I’ll know you, never fear, you…you brat!” she flared, thus informing the Lensman that she had received his message. “I’ll not only know you—I’ll scratch your eyes out on sight!”
“That’ll be a good trick if you can do it,” Kinnison sneered, and cut off.
“What’s it all about, Mac? What has got into you?” demanded one of the nurses, as soon as the women were alone.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Watch out, they may have spy-rays on us. I don’t know anything, really, and the whole thing is too wildly impossible, too utterly fantastic to make sense. But pass the word along to all the girls to ride this out, because my Gray Lensman is in on it, somewhere and somehow. I don’t see how he can be, possibly, but I just know he is.”
For, at the first mention of tea and toast, before she perceived even an inkling of the true situation, her mind had flashed back instantly to Kinnison, the most stubborn and rebellious patient she had ever had. More, the only man she had ever known who had treated her precisely as though she were a part of the hospital’s very furniture. As is the way of women—particularly of beautiful women—she had orated of women’s rights and of women’s status in the scheme of things. She had decried all special privileges, and had stated, often and with heat, that she asked no odds of any man living or yet to be born. Nevertheless, and also beautiful-womanlike, the thought had bitten deep that here was a man who had never even realized that she was a woman, to say nothing of realizing that she was an extraordinarily beautiful one! And deep within her and sternly suppressed the thought had still rankled.
At the mention of beefsteak she had all but screamed, gripping her knees with frantic hands to keep her emotion down. For she had had no real hope; she was simply fighting with everything she had until the hopeless end, which she had known could not long be delayed. Now she gathered herself together and began to act.
When the word “dumb-bell” boomed from the speaker she knew, beyond doubt or peradventure, that it was Kinnison, the Gray Lensman, who was really doing that talking. It was crazy—it didn’t make any kind of sense at all—but it was, it must be, true. And, again womanlike, she knew with a calm certainty that as long as that Gray Lensman were alive and conscious, he would be complete master of any situation in which he might find himself. Therefore she passed along her illogical but cheering thought, and the nurses, being also women, accepted it without question as the actual and accomplished fact.
They carried on, and when the captured hospital ship had docked at base, Kinnison was completely ready to force matters to a conclusion. In addition to the chief communications officer, he now had under his control a highly capable observer. To handle two such minds was child’s play to the intellect which had directed, against their full fighting wills, the minds of two and three quarters alert, powerful, and fully warned officers of the Galactic Patrol!
“Good girl, Mac” he put his mind en rapport with hers and sent his message. “Glad you got the idea. You did a good job of acting, and if you can do some more as good we’ll be all set. Can do?”
“I’ll say I can!” she assented fervently. “I don’t know what you are doing, how you can possibly do it or where you are, but that can wait. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it!”
“Make passes at the base commander,” he instructed her. “Hate me—the ape I’m working through, you know; Blakeslee, his name is—like poison. Go into it big—all jets wide open. You maybe could love him, but if I get you you’ll blow out your brains—if any. You know the line—play up to him with everything you can bring to bear, and hate me to hell and back. Help all you can to start a fight between us. If he falls for you hard enough the blow-off comes then and there. If not, he’ll be able to do us all plenty of dirt. I can kill a lot of them, but not enough of them quick enough.”
“He’ll fall,” she promised him gleefully, “like ten thousand bricks falling down a well. Just watch my jets!”
And fall he did. He had not even seen a woman for months, and he expected nothing except bitter-end resistance and suicide from any of these women of the Patrol. Therefore he was rocked to the heels—set back upon his very haunches—when the most beautiful woman he had ever seen came of her own volition into his arms, seeking in them sanctuary from his own chief communications officer.
“I hate him!” she sobbed, nestling against the huge bulk of the commander’s body and turning upon him the full blast of the high powered projectors which were her eyes. “You wouldn’t be so mean to me, I just know you wouldn’t!” and her subtly perfumed head sank upon his shoulder. The outlaw was just so much soft wax.
“I’ll say I wouldn’t be mean to you” his voice dropped to a gentle bellow. “Why, you little sweetheart, I’ll marry you. I will so, by all the gods of space!”
It thus came about that nurse and base commander entered the control room together, arms about each other.
“There he is!” she shrieked, pointing at the chief communications officer. “He’s the one! Now let’s see you start something, you rat-faced clunker! There’s one real man around here, and he won’t let you touch me—ya-a-a!” She gave him a resounding Bronx cheer, and her escort swelled visibly.
“Is—that—so?” Kinnison sneered. “Get this, glamor-puss, and get it straight. I marked you for mine as soon as I saw you, and mine you’re going to be, whether you like it or not and no matter what anybody says or does about it. As for you, captain, you’re too late—I saw her first. And now, you red-headed tomato, come over here where you belong.”
She snuggled closer into the commander’s embrace and the big man turned purple.
“What d’you mean, too late!” he roared. “You took her away from the ship’s captain, didn’t you? You said that superior officers get fi
rst choice, didn’t you? I’m the boss here and I’m taking her away from you, get me? You’ll stand for it, too, Blakeslee, and like it. One word out of you and I’ll have you spread-eagled across the mouth of number six projector!”
“Superior officers don’t always get first choice,” Kinnison replied, with bitter, cold ferocity, but choosing his words with care. “It depends entirely on who the two men are.”
Now was the time to strike. Kinnison knew that if the commander kept his head, the lives of those valiant women were forfeit, and his own whole plan seriously endangered. He himself could get away, of course—but he could not see himself doing it under these conditions. No, he must goad the commander to a frenzy. And without swearing would be better—the ape was used to invectives that would raise blisters on armor plate. Mac would help. In fact, and without his suggestion, she was even then hard at work fomenting trouble between the two men.
“You don’t have to take that kind of stuff off of anybody, big boy,” she was whispering, urgently. “Don’t call in a crew to spread-eagle him, either; beam him out yourself. You’re a better man than he is, any time. Blast him down—that’ll show him who’s who around here!”
“When the inferior is such a man as I am, and the superior such a louse as you are;” the biting, contemptuously sneering voice went on without a break, “Such a bloated swine; such a mangy, low-down cur; such a pussy-gutted tub of lard; such a brainless, filthy spawn of the lowest dregs of the rottenest scum of space; such an utterly incompetent, self-opinionated, misbegotten abortion as you are…”
The outraged pirate, bellowing profanity in wildly mounting rage, tried to break in; but Kinnison-Blakeslee’s voice, if no louder than his, was far more penetrant.
“…then, in that case, the inferior keeps the red-headed wench himself. Put that on a tape, you white-livered coward, and eat it!”
Still bellowing, the fat man had turned and was leaping toward the arms cabinet.
“Blast him! Blast him down!” the nurse had been shrieking, and, as the raging commander neared the cabinet, no one noticed that her latest and loudest scream was “Kim! Blast him down! Don’t wait any longer—beam him before he gets a gun!”
But the Lensman did not act—yet. Although almost every man of the pirate crew stared spell-bound, Kinnison’s enslaved observer had for many seconds been jamming the sub-ether with Helmuth’s personal and urgent call. It was of almost vital importance to his plan that Helmuth himself should see the climax of this scene. Therefore Blakeslee stood immobile while his profanely raving superior reached the cabinet and tore it open.
CHAPTER
21
The Second Line
LAKESLEE WAS ALREADY armed—Kinnison had seen to that—and as the base commander wrenched open the arms cabinet Helmuth’s private look-out set began to draw current. Helmuth himself was now looking on and the enslaved observer had already begun to trace his beam. Therefore as the furious pirate whirled around with raised DeLameter he faced one already ablaze; and in a matter of seconds there was only a charred and smoking heap where he had stood.
Kinnison wondered that Helmuth’s cold voice was not already snapping from the speaker, but he was soon to discover the reason for that silence. Unobserved by the Lensman, one of the observers had recovered sufficiently from his shocked amazement to turn in a riot alarm to the guard-room. Five armed men answered that call on the double, stopped and glanced around.
“Guards! Blast Blakeslee down!” Helmuth’s unmistakable voice blared from his speaker.
Obediently and manfully enough the five guards tried; and, had it actually been Blakeslee confronting them so defiantly, they probably would have succeeded. It was the body of the communications officer, it is true. The mind operating the muscles of that body, however, was the mind of Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, the fastest man with a hand-gun old Tellus had ever produced; keyed up, expecting the move, and with two DeLameters out and poised at hip! This was the being whom Helmuth was so nonchalantly ordering his minions to slay! Faster than any watching eye could follow, five bolts of lightning flicked from Blakeslee’s DeLameters. The last guard went down, his head a shriveled cinder, before a single pirate bolt could be loosed. Then:
“You see, Helmuth,” Kinnison spoke conversationally to the board, his voice dripping vitriol, “playing it safe from a distance and making other men pull your chestnuts out of the fire, is a very fine trick as long as it works. But when it fails to work, as now, it puts you exactly where I want you. I, for one, have been for a long time completely fed up with taking orders from a mere voice; especially from the voice of one whose entire method of operation proves him to be the prize coward of the galaxy.”
“Observer! You other at the board!” snarled Helmuth, paying no attention to Kinnison’s barbed shafts. “Sound the assembly—armed!”
“No use, Helmuth, he’s stone deaf,” Kinnison explained, voice smoothly venomous. “I’m the only man in this base you can talk to, and you won’t be able to do even that very much longer.”
“And you really think that you can get away with this mutiny—this barefaced insubordination—this defiance of my authority?”
“Sure I can—that’s what I’ve been telling you. If you were here in person, or ever had been; if any of the boys had ever seen you, or had ever known you as anything except a disembodied voice; maybe I couldn’t. But, since nobody has ever seen even your face, that gives me a chance…”
In his distant base Helmuth’s mind had flashed over every aspect of this unheard-of situation. He decided to play for time, therefore, even as his hands darted to buttons here and there, he spoke:
“Do you want to see my face?” he demanded. “If you do see it, no power in the galaxy…”
“Skip it, Chief,” sneered Kinnison, “Don’t try to kid me into believing you wouldn’t kill me now, under any conditions, if you possibly could. As for your face, it makes no difference to me whether I ever see your ugly pan or not.”
“Well, you shall!” and Helmuth’s visage appeared, concentrating upon the rebellious officer a glare of such fury and such power that any ordinary man must have quailed. But not Blakeslee-Kinnison!
“Well! Not so bad, at that—the guy looks almost human!” Kinnison exclaimed, in the tone most carefully designed to drive even more frantic the helpless and inwardly raging pirate leader. “But I’ve got things to do. You can guess at what goes on around here from now on,” and in the blaze of a DeLameter Helmuth’s plate, set, and “eye” disappeared. Kinnison had also been playing for time, and his observer had checked and rechecked this second and highly important line to Helmuth’s ultra-secret base.
Then, throughout the fortress, there blared out the urgent assembly call, to which the Lensman added, verbally:
“This is a one hundred percent callout, including crews of ships in dock, regular base personnel, and all prisoners. Come as you are and come fast—the doors of the auditorium will be locked in five minutes and any man outside those doors will be given ample reason to wish that he had been inside.”
The auditorium was immediately off the control room, and was so arranged that when a partition was rolled back the control room became its stage. All Boskonian bases were arranged thus, in order that the supervising officers at Grand Base could oversee through their instruments upon the main panel just such assemblies as this one was supposed to be. Every man hearing that call assumed that it came from Grand Base, and every man hurried to obey it.
Kinnison rolled back the partition between the two rooms and watched for weapons as the men came streaming into the auditorium. Ordinarily only the guards went armed, but possibly a few of the ships’ officers would be wearing their DeLameters…four—five—six. The captain and the pilot of the battleship that had taken the hospital ship, Vice-Commander Krimsky of the base, and three guards. Knives, billies, and such did not count.
“Time’s up. Lock the doors. Bring the keys and the nurses up here,” he ordered the six armed men, cal
ling each by name. “You women take these chairs over here, you men sit there.”
Then, when all were seated, Kinnison touched a button and the steel partition slid smoothly into place.
“What’s coming off here?” demanded one of the officers. “Where’s the commander? How about Grand Base? Look at that board!”
“Sit tight.” Kinnison directed. “Hands on knees—I’ll burn any or all of you that make a move. I have already burned the old man and five guards, and have put Grand Base out of the picture. Now I want to find out just how us seven stand.” The Lensman already knew, but he was not tipping his hand.
“Why us seven?”
“Because we are the only ones who happened to be wearing side-arms. Everyone else of the entire personnel is unarmed and is now locked in the auditorium. You know how apt they are to get out until one of us lets them out.”
“But Helmuth—he’ll have you blasted for this!”
“Hardly—my plans were not made yesterday. How many of you fellows are with me?”
“What’s your scheme?”
“To take these nurses to some Patrol base and surrender. I’m sick of this whole game; and, since none of them have been hurt, I figure they’re good for a pardon and a fresh start—a light sentence at least.”
“Oh, so that’s the reason…” growled the captain.
“Exactly—but I don’t want anyone with me whose only thought would be to burn me down at the first opportunity.”
“Count me in,” declared the pilot. “I’ve got a strong stomach, but enough of these jobbies is altogether too much. If you wangle anything short of a life sentence for me I’ll go along, but I bloody well won’t help you against…”
“Sure not. Not until after we’re out in space. I don’t need any help here.”
Galactic Patrol Page 24