"Notmyability—ours." Camilla smiled, confidently. "I couldn't do it alone, neither could you, but between us I don't believe that it will be too difficult. You, with your utterly calm, utterly unshakable certainty, can drive a thought to any corner of the universe. You can fix and hold it steady on any indicated atom. I can't do that, or anything like it, but with my present ability to detect and to analyze, I am not afraid of missing 'X' if we can come within parsecs of him. So my idea is a sort of piggy-back hunting trip; you to take me for a ride, mentally, very much as Worsel takes Con, physically. That would work, don't you think?"
"Perfectly, I am sure." The stolid Rigellian was immensely pleased. "Link your mind with mine, then, and we will set out. If you have no better plan of action mapped out, I would suggest starting at the point where we lost him and working outward, covering an expanding sphere."
"You know best. I will stick to you wherever you go. I am ready."
Tregonsee launched his thought; a thought which, at a velocity not to be measured even in multiples of that of light, generated the surface of a continuously enlarging sphere of space. And with that thought, a very part of it, sped Camilla's incomprehensibly delicate, instantaneously reactive detector web. The Rigellian, with his unhuman perseverance, would have surveyed total space had it been necessary; and the now adult Camilla would have stayed with him. However, the patient pair did not have to comb all of space. In a matter of hours the girl's almost infinitely tenuous detector touched, with infinitesimal power and for an inappreciable instant of time, the exact thought-structure to which it had been so carefully attuned.
"Halt!" she flashed, and Tregonsee's mighty superdreadnought shot away along the indicated line at maximum blast.
"You are not now thinking at him, of course, but how sure are you that he did not feel your detector?" Tregonsee asked.
"Positive," the girl replied. "I couldn't even feel it myself until after a million-fold amplification. It was just a web, you know, not nearly solid enough for an analyzer or a recorder. I didn't touch his mind at all. However, when we get close enough to work efficiently, which will be in about five days, we will have to touch him. Assuming that he is as sensitive as we are, he will feel us; hence we will have to work fast and according to some definite plan. What are your ideas as to technique?"
"I may offer a suggestion or two, later, but I resign leadership to you. You already have made plans, have you not?"
"Only a framework, I could not go into detail without consulting you. Since we agree that it was my mind that he did not like, you will have to make the first contact."
"Of course. But since the action of thought is so nearly instantaneous, are you sure that you will be able to protect yourself in case he overcomes me at that first contact?" If the Rigellian gave any thought at all to his own fate in such a case, no trace of it was evident.
"My screens are good. I am fairly certain that I could protect both of us, but it might slow me down a trifle; and even an instant's delay might keep me from getting the information we want. It would be better, I think, to call Kit in. Or, better yet, Kay. She can stop a superatomic bomb. With Kay covering us both, we will be free to put our full power into the offense."
"And that offense is to be—?"
"I have no idea. We will work that out together."
Again they went into a union of minds; considering, weighing, analyzing, rejecting, and—a few times—accepting. And finally, well within the five-day time limit, they had drawn up a completely detailed plan of battle.
How uselessly that time was spent! For that battle, instead of progressing according to their carefully worked-out plan, was ended almost in the instant of its beginning.
According to plan, Tregonsee tuned his mind to "X's" pattern as soon as they had come within working range. He reached out as delicately as he could; and his best was very fine work indeed. He might just as well have struck with all his power, for at the first touch of the fringe, extremely light and entirely innocuous though it was, the stranger's barriers flared into being and there came back instantly a mental bolt of such vicious intensity that it would have gone through Tregonsee's hardest-held block as though no barrier had been there. But that bolt did not strike Tregonsee's shield; he did not even know, until much later, that it had been sent. Instead, it struck Karen Kinnison's, which has already been described.
It did not exactly bounce, nor did it cling, nor did it linger, even for a microsecond, to do battle as expected. It simply vanished; as though that minute interval of time had been sufficient for the enemy to have recovered from the shock of encountering a completely unexpected resistance, to have analyzed the texture of the shield, to have deduced from that analysis the full capabilities of its owner and operator, to have decided that he did not care to have any dealings with the entity so deduced, and finally, as he no doubt supposed, to have begun to retreat in good order.
His retreat, however, was not in good order. He did not escape, this time. This time, as she had declared that she would be, Camilla was ready for anything—literally anything. Everything she had—and she had plenty—was on the trips; tense, taut, and poised. Knowing that Karen, the Ultimate of Defense, was on guard, she was wholly free to hurl her every force in the instant of perceiving the enemy's poignant thrust. Scarcely had the leading element of her attack touched the stranger's screens, however, when those screens, "X" himself, his vessel and any others that might have been accompanying it, and everything tangible in nearby space, all disappeared at once in the inconceivably violent, the ultimately cataclysmic detonation of a superatomic bomb.
It may not, perhaps, be generally known that the "completely liberating" or "superatomic" bomb liberates one hundred percent of the total component energy of two or more subcritical masses of an unstable isotope, in a space of time estimated to be sixty-nine hundredths of one microsecond. Its violence and destructiveness thus differ, both in degree and in kind, from those of the earlier type, which liberated only the energy of nuclear fission, very much as the radiation of S-Doradus differs from that of Earth's moon. Its mass attains, and holds for an appreciable length of time, a temperature to be measured only in millions of Centigrade degrees; which fact accounts in large part for its utterly incredible vehemence.
Nothing inert in its entire sphere of primary action can even begin to move out of the way before being reduced to its subatomic constituents and thus contributing in some measure to the cataclysm. Nothing is or becomes visible until the secondary stage begins; until the frightful globe has expanded to a diameter of some hundreds of miles and by this expansion has cooled down to a point at which some of its radiation lies in the visible violet. And as for lethal radiation—there are radiations and they are lethal.
The battle with "X" had occupied approximately two milliseconds of actual time. The expansion had been progressing for a second or two when Karen lowered her shield.
"Well, that finishes that," she commented. "I'd better get back on the job. Did you find out what you want to know, Cam, or not?"
"I got a little in the moment before the explosion. Not much." Camilla was deep in study. "It is going to be quite a job of reconstruction. One thing of interest to you, though, is that this 'X' had quit sabotage temporarily and was on his way to Lyrane IX, where he had some kind of important—"
"Nine?" Karen asked, sharply. "Not Eight? I've been watching Eight, you know—I haven't even thought of Nine."
"Nine, definitely. The thought was clear. You might give it a scan once in a while. How is mother doing?"
"She's doing a grand job, and that Helen is quite an operator, too. I'm not doing much—just a touch here and there—I'll see what I can see on Nine. I'm not the scanner or detector that you are, though, you know—maybe you'd better come over here too, in person. Suppose?"
"I think so—don't you, Uncle Trig?" Tregonsee did. "We can do some exploring as we come, but since I have no definite patterns for web work, we may not be able to do much until we get close. Clear ether, Kay!"
"The fine structure is there, and I can resolve it and analyze it," Camilla informed Tregonsee, after a few hours of intense concentration. "There are quite a few clear extraneous sequences, instead of the blurred latent images we had before, but there is still no indication whatever of the location of his home planet. I can see his physical classification to ten places instead of four, more detail as to the sun's variation, the seasons, their habits, and so on. Things that seem mostly to be of very little importance, as far as we are concerned. I found one fact, though, that is new and important. According to my reconstruction, his business of Lyrane IX was the induction of Boskonian Lensmen—BlackLensmen, Tregonsee, just as father suspected!"
"In that case, he must have been the Boskonian counterpart of an Arisian, and hence one of the highest echelon. I am very glad indeed that you and Karen relieved me of the necessity of trying to handle him myself. Kinnison will be very glad to know that we have at last and in fact reached the top—"
Camilla was paying attention to the Rigellian's cogitations with only a fraction of her mind; most of it being engaged in a private conversation with her brother.
"... so you see, Kit, he was under a subconscious compulsion. Hehadto destroy himself, his ship, and everything in it, in the very instant of attack by any mind definitely superior to his own. Therefore he couldn't have been an Eddorian, possibly, but merely another intermediate, and I haven't been of much help."
"Sure you have, Cam! You got a lot of information, and some mighty good leads to Lyrane IX and what goes on there. I'm on my way to Eddore now; and by working down from there and up from Lyrane IX we can't go wrong. Clear ether, Sis!"
XIX.
Constance Kinnison did not waste much time in idle recriminations, even at herself. Realizing at last that she was still not fully competent, and being able to define exactly what she lacked, she went to Arisia for final treatment. She took that treatment and emerged from it, as her brother and sisters had emerged, a completely integrated personality.
She had something of everything the others had, of course, as did they all; but her dominants, the characteristics which had operated to make Worsel her favorite Second-Stage Lensman, were much like those of the Velantian. Her mind, like his, was quick and facile, yet of extraordinary power and range. She did not have much of her father's flat, driving urge or of his indomitable will to do; she was the least able of all the Five to exert long-sustained extreme effort. Her top, however, was vastly higher than theirs. Like Worsel's, her armament was almost entirely offensive—she was far and away the deadliest fighter of them all. She only of them all had more than a trace of pure killer instinct; and when roused to full fighting pitch her mental bolts were weapons of as starkly incomprehensible an effectiveness as the sphere of primary action of a superatomic bomb.
As soon as Constance had left theVelan, remarking that she was going to Arisia to take her medicine, Worsel called a staff meeting to discuss in detail the matter of the "Hell Hole in Space." That conference was neither long nor heated; it was unanimously agreed that that phenomenon was—mustbe—simply another undiscovered cavern of Overlords.
In view of the fact that Worsel and his crew had been hunting down and killing Overlords for more than twenty years, the only logical course of action was for them to deal similarly with one more, perhaps the only remaining large group of their hereditary foes. Nor did any doubt of their ability to do so enter any one of the Velantians' minds.
How wrong they were!
They did not have to search for the "Hell Hole." Long since, to stop its dreadful toll, a spherical cordon of robot guard ships had been posted to warn all traffic away from the outer fringes of its influence. Since they merely warned against, but could not physically prohibit, entry into the dangerous space, Worsel did not pay any attention to the guard ships or to their signals as theVelanwent through the warning web. His plans were, he thought, well laid. His ship was free. Its speed, by Velantian standards, was very low. Each member of his crew wore a full-coverage thought-screen; a similar and vastly more powerful screen would surround the whole vessel if one of Worsel's minor members were either to tighten or to relax its grip upon a spring-mounted control. Worsel was, he thought, ready for anything.
But the "Hell Hole in Space" was not a cavern of Overlords. No sun, no planet, nothing material existed within that spherical volume of space. Thatsomethingwas there, however, there was no doubt. Slow as was theVelan'space, it was still too fast by far; for in a matter of minutes, through the supposedly impervious thought-screens, there came an attack of utterly malignant ferocity; an assault which tore at Worsel's mind in a fashion he had never imagined possible; a poignant, rending, unbearably crescendo force whose violence seemed to double with every mile of advance.
TheVelan'sall-encompassing screen snapped on—uselessly. Its tremendous power was as unopposed as were the lesser powers of the personal shields—that highly inimical thought was coming past, not through, the barriers. An Arisian, or one of the Children of the Lens, would have been able to perceive and to block that band; no one of lesser mental stature could.
Strong and fast as Worsel was, mentally and physically, he got his vessel turned around just barely in time. All his resistance and all his strength had to be called into play to maintain his mind's control over his body; to enable him to spin his ship end for end and to kick her drive up to maximum blast. To his surprise, his agony decreased with distance as rapidly as it had built up; disappearing entirely well before theVelanreached the web she had crossed such a short time before.
Groggy, sick, and shaken, hanging slackly from his bars, the Velantian Lensman was roused to action by the mental and physical frenzy of his crew. Ten of them had died in the Hell Hole; six more were torn to bits before their commander could muster enough force to stop their insane rioting. Then Master Therapist Worsel went to work; and one by one he brought the survivors back. They remembered; but he made those memories bearable.
He then called Kinnison. "... but there didn't seem to be anything personal about it, as one would expect from an Overlord," he concluded his brief report. "It did not concentrate on us, reach for us, or follow us as we left. Its intensity seemed to vary only with distance ... perhaps inversely as distance squared—it might very well have been radiated from a center. While it was nothing like anything I ever felt before, I still think that it must be an Overlord—maybe a sort of Second-Stage Overlord, just as you and I are Second-Stage Lensmen. He is too strong for me now, just as they used to be too strong for us before we met you. By the same reasoning, however, I am pretty sure that if you can come over here, you and I together could figure out a way of taking him. How about it?"
"Mighty interesting, and I'd like to, but I'm right in the middle of a job," Kinnison replied, and went on to explain rapidly what he, as Bradlow Thyron, had done and what he still had to do. "As soon as I can get away I'll come over. In the meantime, fellow old snake, keep away from there. Do a flit—find something else to keep you amused until I can join you."
Worsel set out, and after a few days ... or weeks—idle time means practically nothing to a Velantian—a sharply-Lensed thought drove in.
"Help! A Lensman calling help! Line this thought and come at speed to System—" The message ended as sharply as it had begun; in a flare of agony which, Worsel knew, meant that that Lensman, whoever he was, had died.
Since the thought, although broadcast, had come in strong and clear, Worsel knew that its sender had been close by. While the time had been very short indeed, he had been able to get a line of sorts. Into that line he whirled theVelan'ssharp prow and along it she hurtled at the literally inconceivable pace of her absolute-maximum drive. As the Gray Lensman had often remarked, the Velantian superdreadnought had more legs than a centipede, and now she was using them all. In minutes, then, the scene of battle grew large upon her plates.
The Patrol ship, hopelessly out-classed, could last only seconds longer. Her screens were down; her very wall shield was dead. Red pockmarks sprang into being along her sides as the Boskonian needle-beamers wiped out her few remaining controls. Then, as the helplessly raging Worsel looked on, his brain seething with unutterable Velantian profanity, the enemy prepared to board—a course of action which, Worsel could see, was changed abruptly by the fact—and perhaps as well by the terrific velocity—of his own unswerving approach. The conquered Patrol cruiser disappeared in a blaze of detonating duodec; the conqueror devoted his every jet to the task of running away; strewing his path as he did so with sundry items of solid and explosive destruction. Such things, however, whether dirigible or not, whether inert or free, were old and simple stuff to theVelan'swar-wise crew. Their spotters and detectors were full out, as was also a practically solid forefan of annihilating and disintegrating beams.
Thus none of the Boskonian's missiles touched theVelan, nor, with all his speed, could he escape. Few indeed were the ships of space able to step it, parsec for parsec, with Worsel's mighty craft, and this luckless pirate vessel was not one of them. Up and up the pursuer rushed; second by second the intervening distance lessened. Tractors shot out, locked on, and pulled briefly with all the force of their stupendous generators.
Briefly, but long enough. As Worsel had anticipated, that savage yank had, in the fraction of a second required for the Boskonian commander to recognize and to cut the tractors, been enough to bring the two inertialess war craft practically screen to screen.
"Primaries! Blast!" Worsel hurled the thought even before his tractors snapped. He was in no mood for a long-drawn-out engagement. Hemightbe able to win with his secondaries, his needles, his tremendously powerful short-range stuff and his other ordinary offensive weapons, but he was taking no chances. Besides, the Boskonians might very well have primaries of their own by this time, and if they did his only chance was to use them first. His men knew what to do and would do it without further orders. A dozen or so of those hellishly irresistible projectors of sheer destruction lashed out as one.
One! Two! Three! The three courses of Boskonian defensive screen scarcely winked as each, locally overloaded, flared through the visible into the black and went down.
Crash! The stubborn fabric of the wall shield offered little more resistance before it, too, went down, exposing the bare metal of the Boskonian's hull—and, as is well known, any conceivable material substance simply vanishes, tracelessly, at the merest touch of such fields of force as those.
Driving projectors carved away and main batteries silenced, Worsel's needle-beamers proceeded systematically to riddle every control panel and every lifeboat, to make of the immense space rover a completely helpless hulk.
"Hold!" An observer flashed the thought. "Number Eight slip is empty—Number Eight lifeboat got away!"
"Damnation!" Worsel, at the head of his armed and armored storming party, as furiously eager as they to come to grips with the enemy, paused briefly. "Trace it—or can you?"
"I did. My tracers can hold it for fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty. No longer than twenty."
Worsel thought intensely. Which had first call, ship or lifeboat? The ship, he decided almost instantly. Its resources were vastly greater; most of its personnel were probably practically unharmed. Given any time at all, they might very well be able to jury-rig a primary, and that would be bad—very bad. Besides, there were more people here; and even if, as was distinctly possible, the Boskonian big shot had abandoned his vessel and his crew in an attempt to save his own life, Worsel had plenty of time.
"Hold that lifeboat," he instructed the observer. "Ten minutes is all we need here."
And it was. The Boskonians—barrel-bodied, blocky-limbed monstrosities resembling human beings about as much as they did the Velantians—wore armor, possessed hand-weapons of power, and fought viciously. They had even managed to rig a few semiportable projectors, but none of these were allowed a single blast. Spy-ray observers were alert, and needle-beam operators; hence the fighting was all at hand to hand, with hand-weapons only. For, while the Velantians to a man lusted to kill, they had had it drilled into them for twenty years that the search for information came first; the pleasure of killing, second.
Worsel himself went straight for the Boskonian captain, his pre-selected prey. That wight had a couple of guards with him, but they did not matter—needle-ray men took care of them. He also had a pair of heavy beam guns, which he held steadily on the Velantian. Worsel paused momentarily; then, finding that his screens were adequate, he slammed the control room door shut with a flick of his tail and launched himself, straight and level at his foe, with an acceleration of seven gravities. The captain tried to dodge but could not. The frightful impact did not kill him, but it hurt him, badly. Worsel, on the other hand, was scarcely jarred. Hard, tough, and durable, Velantians are accustomed from birth to knockings-about which would pulverize human bones.
Worsel batted the Boskonian's guns away with two terrific blows of an armored paw, noting as he did so that violent contact with a steel wall did not do their interior mechanisms a bit of good. Then, after cutting off both his enemy's screens and his own, he batted the Boskonian's helmet; at first experimentally, then with all his power. Unfortunately, however, it held. So did the thought-screen, and there were no external controls. That armor was good stuff!
Leaping to the ceiling, he blasted his whole mass straight down upon the breastplate, striking it so hard this time that he hurt his head. Still no use. He wedged himself between two heavy braces, flipped a loop of tail around the Boskonian's feet, and heaved. The armored form flew across the room, struck the heavy steel wall, bounced, and dropped. The bulges of the armor were flattened by the force of the collision, the wall was dented—but the thought-screen still held!
Worsel was running out of time, fast. He couldn't treat the thing very much rougher without killing him, if he wasn't dead already. He couldn't take him aboard; hehadto cut that screen here and now! He could see how the armor was put together; but, armored as he was, he could not take it apart. And, since the whole ship was empty of air, he could not open his own.
Or could he? He could. He could breathe space long enough to do what had to be done. He cut off his air, loosened a plate enough to release four or five gnarled hands, and, paying no attention to his involuntarily laboring lungs, set furiously to work. He tore open the Boskonian's armor, snapped off his thought-screen. The creature was not quite dead yet—good! He didn't know a thing, though, nor did any member of his crew, except ... yes, one man—a big shot—had got away. Who or what, was he?
"Tell me!" Worsel demanded, with the full power of mind and Lens, even while he was exploring with all his skill and speed. "TELL ME!"
But the Boskonian was dying fast. The ungentle treatment, and now the lack of air, were taking toll. His patterns were disintegrating by the second, faster and faster. Meaningless blurs, which, under Worsel's vicious probing, condensed into something which seemed to be a Lens.
ALensman? Impossible—starkly unthinkable! But jet back—hadn't Kim intimated a while back that there might be such things as Black Lensmen?
But Worsel himself wasn't feeling so good. He was only half conscious. Red, black, and purple spots were dancing in front of every one of his eyes. He sealed his suit, turned on his air, gasped, and staggered. Two of the nearest Velantians, all of whom had, of course, beenen rapportwith him throughout, came rushing to his aid; arriving just as he recovered full control.
"Back to theVelan, everybody!" he ordered. "No time for any more fun—we've got to get that lifeboat!" Then, as soon as he had been obeyed: "Bomb that hulk ... good. Flit!"
Overtaking the lifeboat did not take long. Spearing it with a tractor and yanking it alongside required only seconds. For all his haste, Worsel found in it only something that looked as though it once might have been a Delgonian Lensman. It had blown itself apart with a grenade. Because of its reptilian tenacity of life, however, it was not quite dead; its Lens still showed an occasional flicker of light and its shattered mind was not yet entirely devoid of patterns. Worsel studied that mind until all trace of life had vanished, then again reported to the Co-ordinator.
"... so you see I guessed wrong. The Lens was too dim to read, but he must have been a Black Lensman. The only readable thought in his mind was an extremely fuzzy one of the planet Lyrane IX. I hate to have hashed the job up so—especially since I had one chance in two of guessing right."
"Well, no use in squawking now." Kinnison paused in thought. "Besides, he could have done it anyway, and would have. You haven't done so badly, at that. You found a Black Lensman who is not a Kalonian, and you've got confirmation of Boskonian interest in Lyrane IX. What more do you want? Stick around fairly close to the Hell Hole, Slim, and as soon as I can make it, I'll join you there."
XX.
"Boys, take her upstairs," Kinnison-Thyron ordered, and the tremendous raider—actually theDauntlessin disguise—floated serenely upward to a station immediately astern of the vice admiral's flagship. All three courses of multi-ply defensive screen were out, as were full-coverage spy-ray blocks and thought-screens.
As the fleet blasted in tight formation for Kalonia III, Vice Admiral Mendonai tested theDauntless'defenses thoroughly, and found them bottle-tight. No intrusion was possible. The only open channel was that one plate-to-plate, the other end of which was so villainously fogged that nothing could be seen except Bradlow Thyron's face. Convinced at last of that fact, Mendonai sat back and seethed quietly, his pervasive Kalonian blueness pointing up his grim and vicious mood.
He had never, in all his long life, been insulted so outrageously. Was there anything—anything!—he could do about it? There was not. Thyron, personally, he could not touch—yet—and the fact that the outlaw had so brazenly and so nonchalantly placed his vessel in the exact center of the Boskonian fleet made it pellucidly clear to any Boskonian mind that he had nothing whatever to fear from that fleet.
Wherefore the Kalonian seethed, and his minions stepped ever more softly and followed with ever-increasing punctilio the rigid Boskonian code. For the grapevine carries news swiftly; by this time the whole fleet knew that His Nibs had been taking a God-awful kicking around, and that the first guy who gave him an excuse to blow off steam would be lucky if he only got boiled in oil.
As the fleet spread out for inert maneuvering above the Kalonian stratosphere, Kinnison turned again to the young Lensman.
"One last word, Frank. I am as sure as I can be that I am fully covered—a lot of smart people worked on this problem. Nevertheless, something may happen, so I will send you the data as fast as I get it. Remember what I told you before—if I get the dope we need, I'm expendable and it'll be your job to get it back to Base. No heroics. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir." The young Lensman gulped. "I hope, though, that it doesn't—"
"So do I," Kinnison grinned as he climbed into his highly special dureum armor, "and the chances are a million to one that it won't. That's why I'm going down there."
In their respective speedsters Kinnison and Mendonai made the long drop to the ground, and side by side they went into the office of Black Lensman Melasnikov. That worthy, too, wore heavy armor; but he did not have a mechanical thought-screen. Arrogantly conscious of his tremendous power of mind, what did any Black Lensman need of mechanical shields? Thyron, of course, did; a fact of which Melasnikov became instantly aware.
"Release your screen," he directed, brusquely.
"Not yet, pal—don't be so hasty," Thyron advised. "There're some things about this here hookup that I don't exactly like. We got quite a bit of talking to do before I open up."
"No talk, worm. Talk, especially your talk, is entirely meaningless. From you I want, and will have, the truth, and not talk. CUT THOSE SCREENS!"
And lovely Kathryn, in her speedster not too far away, straightened up and sent out a call.
"Kit ... Kay ... Cam ... Con—are you free?" They were, for the moment. "Stand by, please, all of you. I'm pretty sure something is going to happen. Dad can handle this Melasnikov easily enough, if none of the higher-ups step in, but they probably will. Their Lensmen are probably important enough to rate protection. Check?"
"Check."
"So, as soon as Dad begins to get the best of the argument, the protector will step in," Kathryn continued, "and whether I can handle him alone or not depends on how high a higher-up they send in. So I'd like to have you all stand by for a minute or two, just in case."
How different was Kathryn's attitude now than it had been in the hyperspatial tube! And how well for Civilization that it was!
"Hold it, kids. I've got a thought," Kit suggested. "We've never done any teamwork since you became able to handle heavy stuff, and we'll have to get in some practice before the big blow-off. What say we link up now, on this?"
"Oh, yes!" "Let's do!" "Take over, Kit!" Three approvals came as one, and:
"QX," came Kathryn's less enthusiastic concurrence, a moment later. Naturally enough, she would rather do it alone if she could; but she had to admit that her brother's plan was the better.
Kit laid out the matrix and the four girls came in. There was a brief moment of snuggling and fitting; then each of the Five caught his breath in awe. This was new—brand new. Each had thought himself complete and full; each had supposed that much practice and at least some give-and-take would be necessary before they could work efficiently as a group. But this! This was the supposedly unattainable—perfection itself! This was UNITY—full; round; complete. No practice was or ever would be necessary. Not one micro-microsecond of doubt or of uncertainty would or ever could exist. This was the UNIT, a thing for which there are no words in any written or spoken language; a thing theretofore undreamed-of save as a purely theoretical concept in an unthinkably ancient, four-ply Arisian brain.
"U.m.n.g.n.k," Kit swallowed a lump as big as his fist before he could think. "This, kids, is really some—"
"Ah, children, you have done it." Mentor's thought rolled smoothly in. "You now understand why I could not attempt to describe the Unit to any one of you. This is the culminating moment of my life—of our lives, we may now say. For the first time in more years than you can understand, we are at last sure that our lives have not been lived in vain. But attend—that for which you are waiting will soon be here."
"What is it?" "Who?" "Tell us how to—"
"We cannot." Four separate Arisians smiled as one—a wash of ineffable blessing and benediction suffused the Five. "We, who made the Unit possible, are almost completely ignorant of the details of its higher functions. But that it will need no help from our lesser minds is certain; it is the most powerful and the most nearly perfect creation this Universe has ever seen."
The Arisians vanished; and, even before Kimball Kinnison had released his screen, a cryptic, utterly untraceable and all-pervasive foreign thought came in.
To aid the Black Lensman? To study this disturbing new element? Or merely to observe? Or what? The only certainty was that that thought was coldly, clearly, and highly inimical to all Civilization.
Again everything happened at once. Karen's impenetrable block flared into being—not instantly, but instantaneously. Constance assembled and hurled, in the same lack of time, a mental bolt of whose size and power she had never dreamed herself capable. Camilla, the detector-scanner, synchronized herself with the attacking thought and steered. And Kathryn and Kit, with all the force, all the will, and all the drive of human heredity, got behind it and pushed.
Nor was this, any of it, conscious individual effort. The children of the Lens were not now five, but one. This was the Unit at work; doing its first job. It is literally impossible to describe what happened; but each of the Five knew that one would-be Protector, wherever he had been in space or whenever in time, would never think again. Seconds passed. The Unit held tense, awaiting the riposte. No riposte came.
"Fine work, kids!" Kit broke the linkage and each girl felt hard, brotherly pats on her back. "That's all there is to this one, I guess—must have been only one guard on duty. You're good eggs, and I like you.Howwe can operate now!"
"But it was too easy, Kit!" Kathryn protested. "Too easy by far for it to have been an Eddorian. We aren't that good. Why, I could have handled him alone ... I think," she added, hastily, as she realized that she, although an essential part of the Unit, had as yet no real understanding of what that Unit really was.
"Youhope, you mean!" Constance jeered. "If that bolt was as big and as hot as I'm afraid it was, anything it hit would have looked easy. Why didn't you slow us down, Kit? You're supposed to be the Big Brain, you know. As it was, we haven't the faintest idea of what happened. Who was he, anyway?"
"Didn't have time," Kit grinned. "Everything got out of hand. All of us were sort of inebriated by the exuberance of our own enthusiasm, I guess. Now that we know what our speed is, though, we can slow down next time—if we want to. As for your last question, Con, you're asking the wrong guy. Was it an Eddorian, Cam, or not?"
"What difference does it make?" Karen asked.
"On the practical side, none. For the completion of the picture, maybe a lot. Come in, Cam."
"It was not an Eddorian," Camilla decided. "It was not of Arisian, or even near-Arisian, grade. Sorry to say it, Kit, but it was another member of that high-thinking race that you've already got down on Page One of your little black book."
"I thought it might be. The missing link between Kalonia and Eddore. Credits to millos it's that dopey planet Ploor that Mentor was yowling about."
"Let's link up and let the Unit find it," Constance suggested, brightly. "That'd be fun."
"Act your age, baby," Kit advised. "Ploor is taboo—you know that as well as I do. Mentor told us all not to try to investigate it—that we'd learn of it in time, so we probably will. I told him a while back that I was going to hunt it up myself, and he told me that if I did he'd tie both my legs around my neck in a lovers' knot, or words to that effect. Sometimes I'd like to half-brain the old buzzard, but everything he has said so far has dead-centered the beam. We'll just have to take it, and try to like it."
Kinnison was eminently willing to cut his thought-screen, since he could not work through it to do what had to be done here. Nor was he over-confident. He knew that he could handle the Black Lensman—anyBlack Lensman—but he also knew enough of mental phenomena in general and of Lensmanship in particular to realize that Melasnikov might very well have within call reserves about whom he, Kinnison, could know nothing. He knew that he had lied outrageously to young Frank in regard to the odds applicable to this enterprise; that instead of a million to one, the actuality was one to one, or even less.
Nevertheless, he was well content. He had neither lied nor exaggerated in saying that he himself was expendable. That was why Frank and theDauntlesswere upstairs now. Getting the dope and getting it back to Base were what mattered. Nothing else did.
He was coldly certain that he could get all the information that Melasnikov had, once he had engaged the Kalonian Lensman mind to mind. No Boskonian power or thing, he was convinced, could treat him rough enough to kill him fast enough to keep him from doing that. And he could and would shoot the stuff along to Frank as fast as he got it. And he stood an even—almost even, anyway—chance of getting away afterward. If he could, QX. If he couldn't ... well, that would have to be QX, too.
Kinnison flipped his switch and there ensued a conflict of wills that made the subether boil. The Kalonian was one of the strongest, hardest, and ablest individuals of his hellishly capable race; and the fact that he believed implicitly in his own complete invulnerability operated to double and to quadruple his naturally tremendous strength.
On the other hand, Kimball Kinnison was a Second-Stage Lensman of the Galactic Patrol.
Back and back, then, inch by inch and foot by foot, the Black Lensman's defensive zone was forced; back to and down into his own mind. And there, appallingly enough, Kinnison found almost nothing of value.
No knowledge of the higher reaches of the Boskonian organization; no hint that any real organization of Black Lensmen existed; only the peculiarly disturbing fact that he had picked up his Lens on Lyrane IX. And "picked up" was literal. He had not seen, nor heard, nor had any dealings of any kind with anyone while he was there.
Since both armored figures stood motionless, no sign of the tremendous actuality of their mental battle was evident. Thus the Boskonians were not surprised to hear their Black Lensman speak.
"Very well, Thyron, you have passed this preliminary examination. I know all that I now need to know. I will accompany you to your vessel, to complete my investigation there. Lead the way."
Kinnison did so, and as the speedster came to rest inside theDauntlessthe Black Lensman addressed Vice Admiral Mendonai via plate.
"I am taking Bradlow Thyron and his ship to the space yards on Four, where a really comprehensive study of it can be made. Return to and complete your original assignment."
"I abase myself, Your Supremacy, but ... but I ... Idiscoveredthat ship!" Mendonai protested.
"Granted," the Black Lensman sneered. "You will be given full credit in the report for what you have done. The fact of discovery, however, does not excuse your present conduct. Go—and consider yourself fortunate that, because of that service, I forbear from disciplining you for your intolerable insubordination."
"I abase myself, Your Supremacy. I go." He really did abase himself, this time, and the fleet disappeared.
Then, the mightyDauntlesssafely away from Kalonia and on her course to rendezvous with theVelan, Kinnison again went over his captive's mind; line by line and almost cell by cell. It was still the same. It was still Lyrane IX and it still didn't make any kind of sense. Since Boskonians were certainly not supermen, and hence could not possibly have developed their own Lenses, it followed that they must have obtained them from the Boskonian counterpart of Arisia. Hence, Lyrane IX must be IT—a conclusion which was certainly fallacious—ridiculous—preposterous—utterly untenable. Lyrane IX never had been, was not, and never would be the home of any Boskonian super-race. Nevertheless, it was a definite fact that Melasnikov had got his Lens there. Also, if he had ever had any special training, such as any Lensman must have had, he didn't have any memory of it. Nor did he carry any scars of surgery. What a hash! How couldanybodymake any sense out of such a mess as that?
Ever-watchful Kathryn, eyes narrowed now in concentration, could have told him, but she did not. Her visualization was beginning to clear up. Lyrane was out. So was Ploor. The Lenses originated on Eddore; that was certain. The fact that their training was subconscious weakened the Black Lensmen in precisely the characteristics requisite for ultimate strength—although probably neither the Eddorians nor the Ploorans, with their warped, Boskonian sense of values, realized it. The Black Lensmen would never constitute a serious problem. QX.
The time of rendezvous approached. Kinnison, having attended to the unpleasant but necessary job of resolving Melasnikov into his component atoms, turned to his Lensman-aide.
"Hold everything, Frank, until I get back. This won't take long."
Nor did it, although the outcome was not at all what the Gray Lensman had expected.
Kinnison and Worsel, in an inert speedster, crossed the Hell Hole's barrier web at a speed of only miles per hour, and then slowed down. The ship was backing in on her brakes, with everything set to hurl her forward under full drive should either Lensman flick a finger. Kinnison could feel nothing, even though, beingen rapportwith Worsel, he knew that his friend was soon suffering intensely.
"Let's flit," the Gray Lensman suggested, and threw on the drive. "I probed my limit, and couldn't touch or feel a thing. Had enough, didn't you?"
"More than enough—I couldn't have taken much more."
Each boarded his ship; and as theDauntlessand theVelantore through space toward far Lyrane, Kinnison paced his room, scowling in black abstraction. Nor would a mind reader have found his thoughts either cogent or informative.
"Lyrane IX ... LYRANE IX ... Lyrane IX ... LYRANE IX ... and something that I can't even feel or perceive, but that kills anybody and everybody else ... KLONO'S tungsten TEETH and CURVING CARBALLOY CLAWS!!!"
XXI.
Helen's story was short and bitter. Human or near-human Boskonians came to Lyrane II and spread insidious propaganda all over the planet. Lyranian matriarchy should abandon its policy of isolationism. Matriarchs were the highest type of life. Matriarchy was the most perfect of all existing forms of government—why keep on confining it to one small planet, when it should by right be ruling the entire Galaxy? The way things were, there was only one Elder Person; all other Lyranians, even though better qualified than the then incumbent, were nothing—and so on. Whereas, if things were as they should be, each individual Lyranian person could be and would be the Elder Person of a planet at least, and perhaps of an entire solar system—and so on. And the visitors, who, they insisted, were no more males than the Lyranian persons were females, would teach them. They would be amazed at how easily, under Boskonian guidance, this program could be put into effect.
Helen fought the intruders with every jet she had. She despised the males of her own race; she detested those of all others. Believing that hers was the only existing matriarchal race, especially since neither Kinnison nor the Boskonians seemed to know of any other, she was sure that any prolonged contact with other cultures would result, not in the triumph of matriarchy, but in its fall. She not only voiced these beliefs as she held them—violently—but also acted upon them in the same fashion.
Because of the ingrained matriarchally conservative habit of Lyranian thought, particularly among the older persons, Helen found it comparatively easy to stamp out the visible manifestations; and, being in no sense a sophisticate, she thought that the whole matter was settled. Instead, she merely drove the movement underground, where it grew tremendously. The young, of course, rebellious as always against the hide-bound, mossbacked, and reactionary older generation, joined the subterranean New Deal in droves. Nor was the older generation solid. In fact, it was riddled by the defection of many thousands who could not expect to attain any outstanding place in the world as it was and who believed that the Boskonians' glittering forecasts would come true.
Disaffection spread, then, rapidly and unobserved; culminating in the carefully-planned uprising which made Helen an Ex-Chief Person and put her into the tower room to await a farcical trial and death.
"I see." Clarrissa caught her lower lip between her teeth. "Very unfunny. I noticed that you didn't mention or think of any of your persons as ringleaders ... peculiar that you couldn't catch them, with your telepathy ... no, natural enough, at that ... but there's one I want very much to get hold of. Don't know whether she was really a leader, or not, but she was mixed up in some way with a Boskonian Lensman. I never did know her name. She was the wom ... the person who managed your airport here when Kim and I were—"
"Cleonie? Why, I never thought ... but it might have, at that ... yes, as I look back—"
"Yes, hindsightisa lot more accurate than foresight," the Red Lensman grinned. "I've noticed that myself, lots of times."
"Itdid! Itwasa leader!" Helen declared, furiously. "I shall have its life, too, the jealous cat—the blood-sucking, back-bitinglouse!"
"She's all of that, in more ways than you know," Clarrissa agreed, grimly, and spread in the Lyranian's mind the story of Eddie the derelict. "So you see that Cleonie has got to be our starting-point. Have you any idea of where we can find her?"
"I haven't seen or heard anything of Cleonie lately." Helen paused in thought. "If, though, as I am now practically certain, it was one of the prime movers behind this brainless brat Ladora, it wouldn't dare leave the planet for very long at a time. As to how to find it, I don't quite know. Anybody would be apt to shoot me on sight. Would you dare fly this funny plane of yours down close to a few of our cities?"
"Certainly. I don't know of anything around here that my screens and fields can't stop. Why?"
"Because I know of several places where Cleonie might be, and if I can get fairly close to them, I can find it in spite of anything it can do to hide itself from me. But I don't want to get you into too much trouble, and I don't want to get killed myself, either, now that you have rescued me—at least, until after I have killed Cleonie and Ladora."
"QX. What are we waiting for? Which way, Helen?"
"Back to the city first, for several reasons. Cleonie probably is not there, but we must make sure. Also, I want my guns—"
"Guns? No. DeLameters are better. I have several spares." In one fleeting mental contact Clarrissa taught the Lyranian all there was to know about DeLameters. And that feat impressed Helen even more than did the nature and power of the weapon.
"What a mind!" she exclaimed. "You didn't have any such equipment as that, the last time I saw you. Or were you ... no, you weren't hiding it."
"You're right; I have developed considerably since then. But about guns—what do you want of one?"
"To kill that nitwit Ladora on sight, and that snake Cleonie, too, as soon as you get done with it."
"But why guns? Why not the mental force you always used?"
"Except by surprise, I couldn't," Helen admitted, frankly. "All adult persons are of practically equal mental strength. But speaking of strength, I marvel that a craft as small as this should be able to ward off the attack of one of those tremendous Boskonian ships of space."
"But shecan't! What made you think she could?"
"Your own statement—or were you thinking of purely Lyranian dangers, not realizing that Ladora, of course, called Cleonie as soon as you showed your teeth, and that Cleonie as surely called the Lensman or some other Boskonian? And that they must have ships of war not too far away?"
"Heavens, no! It never occurred to me!"
Clarrissa thought briefly. It wouldn't do any good to call Kim. Both theDauntlessand theVelanwere coming, as fast as they could come, but it would be a day or so yet before they arrived. Besides, he would tell her to lay off, which was exactly what she was not going to do. She turned her thought back to the matriarch.
"Two of our best ships are coming, and I hope they get here first. In the meantime, we'll just have to work fast and keep our detectors full out. Anyway, Cleonie won't know that I'm looking for her—I haven't even mentioned her to anyone except you."
"No?" pessimistically. "Cleonie knows thatIam looking for it, and since it knows by now that I am with you, it would think that both of us were hunting it even if we weren't. But we are nearly close enough now; I must concentrate. Fly around quite low over the city, please."
"QX. I'll tune in with you, too. 'Two heads,' you know." Clarrissa learned Cleonie's pattern, tuned to it, and combed the city while Helen was getting ready.
"She isn't here, unless she's behind one of those thought-screens," the Red Lensman remarked. "Can you tell?"
"Thought-screens! The Boskonians had a few of them, but none of us ever did. How can you find them? Where are they?"
"One there—two over there. They stick out like big black spots on a white screen. Can't you see them? I supposed that your scanners were the same as mine, but apparently they aren't. Take a quick peek at them with the spy—you work it like so. If they've got spy-ray blocks up, too, we'll have to go down there and blast."
"Politicians only," Helen reported, after a moment's manipulation of the suddenly familiar instrument. "They need killing, of course, on general principles, but perhaps we shouldn't take time for that now. The next place to look is a few degrees east of north of here."
Cleonie was not, however, in that city. Nor in the next, nor the next. But the speedster's detector screens remained blank and the two allies, so much alike physically, so different mentally, continued their hunt. There was opposition, of course—all that the planet afforded—but Clarrissa's second-stage mind took care of the few items of offense which her speedster's defenses could not handle.
Finally two things happened almost at once. Clarrissa found Cleonie, and Helen saw a dim and fuzzy white spot upon the lower left-hand corner of the detector plate.
"Can't be ours," the Red Lensman decided instantly. "Almost exactly the wrong direction. Boskonians. Ten minutes—twelve at most—before we have to flit. Time enough—I hope—if we work fast."
She shot downward, going inert and matching intrinsics at a lack of altitude which would have been suicidal for any ordinary pilot. She rammed her beryllium-bronze torpedo through the first-floor wall of a forbidding, almost windowless building—its many stories of massive construction, she knew, would help no end against the heavy stuff so sure to come. Then, while every hitherto-hidden offensive arm of the Boskone-coached Lyranians converged, screaming through the air and crashing and clanking along the city's streets, Clarrissa probed and probed and probed. Cleonie had locked herself into a veritable dungeon cell in the deepest subbasement of the structure. She was wearing a thought-screen, too, but she had been releasing it, for an instant at a time, to see what was going on. One of those instants was enough—that screen would never work again. She had been prepared to kill herself at need; but her full-charged weapons emptied themselves futilely against a massive lock and she threw her vial of poison across the corridor and into an empty cell.
So far, so good; but how to get her out of there? Physical approach was out of the question. There must be somebody around, somewhere, with keys, or hacksaws, or sledge-hammers, or something. Ha—oxyacetylene torches! Very much against their wills, two Lyranian mechanics trundled a dolly along a corridor, into an elevator. The elevator went down four levels. The artisans began to burn away a barrier of thick steel bars.
By this time the whole building was rocking to the detonation of high explosives. Much more of that kind of stuff and she would be trapped by the sheer mass of the rubble. She was handling six jackass-stubborn people already and that Boskonian warship was coming fast; she did not quite know whether she was going to get away with this or not.
But somehow, from the unplumbed and unplumbable depths which made her what she so uniquely was, the Red Lensman drew more and ever more power. Kinnison, who had once made heavy going of handling two-and-a-fraction Lensmen, guessed, but never did learn from her, what his beloved wife really did that day.
Even Helen, only a few feet away, could not understand what was happening. Left parsecs behind long since, the Lyranian could not help in any particular, but could only stand and wonder. She knew that this queerly powerful Lens-bearing Earth-person—white-faced, sweating, strung to the very snapping-point as she sat motionless at her board—was exerting some terrible, some tremendous force. She knew that the heaviest of the circling bombers sheered away and crashed. She knew that certain mobile projectors, a few blocks away, did not come any closer. She knew that Cleonie, against every iota of her mulish Lyranian will, was coming toward the speedster. She knew that many persons, who wished intensely to bar Cleonie's progress or to shoot her down, were physically unable to act. She had no faint idea, however, of how such work could possibly be done.
Cleonie came aboard and Clarrissa snapped out of her trance. The speedster nudged and blasted its way out of the wrecked stronghold, then tore a hole through protesting air into open space. Clarrissa shook her head, wiped her face, studied a tiny double dot in the corner of the plate opposite the one now showing clearly the Boskonian warship, and set her controls.
"We'll make it—I think," she announced. "Even though we're indetectable, they, of course, know our line, and they're so much faster that they'll be able to find us, even on their visuals, before long. On the other hand, they must be detecting our ships now, and my guess is that they won't dare follow us long enough to do us any harm. Keep an eye on things, Helen, while I find out what Cleonie really knows. And while I think of it, what's your real name? It isn't polite to keep on calling you by a name that you never even heard of until you met us."
"Helen," the Lyranian made surprising answer. "I liked it, so I adopted it—officially."
"Oh. That's a compliment, really, to both Kim and me. Thanks."
The Red Lensman then turned her attention to her captive, and as mind fitted itself precisely to mind her eyes began to gleam in gratified delight. Cleonie was a real find; this seemingly unimportant Lyranian knew a lot—an immense lot—about things that no adherent of the Patrol had ever heard before. And she, Clarrissa Kinnison, would be the first of all the Gray Lensmen to learn of them! Therefore, taking her time now, she allowed every detail of the queer but fascinating picture-story to imprint itself upon her mind.
And Karen and Camilla, together in Tregonsee's ship, glanced at each other and exchanged flashing thoughts. Should they interfere? They hadn't had to so far, but it began to look as though they would have to, now—it would wreck their mother's mind, if she could understand. She probably could not understand it, any more than Cleonie could—but even if she could, she had so much more inherent stability, even than Dad, that she might be able to take it, at that. Nor would she ever leak, even to Dad—and Dad, bless his tremendous boots, was not the type to pry. Maybe, though, just to be on the safe side, it would be better to screen the stuff, and to edit, if necessary, anything about Eddore. The two girls synchronized their minds all imperceptibly with their mother's and Helen's, and learned.
The time was in the unthinkably distant past; the location was unthinkably remote in space. A huge planet circled slowly about a cooling sun. Its atmosphere was not air; its liquid was not water. Both were noxious; composed in large part of compounds even yet unknown to man.
Yet life was there; a race which was even then ancient. Not sexual, this race. Not androgynous, nor hermaphroditic, but absolutely sexless. Except for the many who died by physical or by mental violence, its members lived endlessly. After many hundreds of thousands of years each being, having reached his capacity to live and to learn, divided into two individuals; each of which, although possessingin totothe parents' memories, knowledges, skills, and powers, had also a renewed and increased capacity.
And, since life was, there had been competition. Competition for power. Knowledge was desirable only insofar as it contributed to power. Power for the individual—the group—the city. Wars raged—whatwars!—and internecine strifes which lasted while planets came into being, grew old, and died. And finally, to the few survivors, there came peace. Since they could not kill each other, they combined their powers and hurled them outward—together they would dominate and rule solar systems—regions—the Galaxy itself—the entire macrocosmic Universe.
Amorphous, amoeboid, each could assume at will any imaginable form, could call into being members to handle any possible tool. Nevertheless, as time went on they used their bodies less and less. More and more they used their minds, to bring across gulfs of space and to enslave other races, to labor under their direction. By nature and by choice they were bound to their own planet; few indeed were the planets upon which their race could possibly live. Also, it was easier to rejuvenate their own world, or to move it to a younger sun, than to enforce and to supervise the myriads of man-hours of slave labor necessary to rebuild any planet to their needs. Thus, then, they lived and ruled by proxy an ever-increasing number of worlds.
Although they had long since learned that their asexuality was practically unique, that bisexual life dominated the universe, this knowledge served only to stiffen their determination to rule, and finally to change to their own better standards, that universe. They were still seeking a better proxy race; the more nearly asexual a race, the better. One race, the denizens of a planet of a variable sun, approached that idea closely. So did the Kalonians, whose women had only one function in life—the production of men.
Now these creatures had learned of the matriarchs of Lyrane. That they were physically females meant nothing; to the Eddorians one sex was just as good—or as bad—as the other. The Lyranians were strong; not tainted by the weaknesses which seemed to characterize all races believing in even near-equality of the sexes. Lyranian science had been trying for centuries to do away with the necessity for males; in a few more generations, with some help, that goal could be achieved and the perfect proxy race would have been developed.
It is not to be supposed that this story was obtained in such straight-forward fashion as it is presented here. It was dim, murky, confused. Cleonie never had understood it. Clarrissa understood it better, but less accurately; for in the version the Red Lensman received, one minor change was made—in it the Ploorans and the Eddorians were one and the same race! She understood, however, that that actually unnamed and to her unknown race was the highest of Boskone, and the place of the Kalonians in the Boskonian scheme was plain enough.
"I am giving you this story," the Kalonian Lensman told Cleonie coldly, "not of my own free will but because I must. I hate you as much as you hate me. What I would like to do to you, you may imagine. Nevertheless, so that your race may have its chance, I am to take you on a trip and, if possible, make a Lensman out of you. Come with me." And, urged by her jealousy of Helen, her seething ambition, and probably, if the truth were to be known, by an Eddorian mind, Cleonie went.
There is no need to dwell at length upon the horrors, the atrocities, of that trip; of which the matter of Eddie the meteor miner was only a very minor episode. It will suffice to say that Cleonie was very good Boskonian material; that she learned fast and passed all tests successfully.
"That's all," the Black Lensman informed her then, "and I'm glad to see the last of you. You'll get a message when to hop over to Nine and pick up your Lens. Flit—and I hope that the first Gray Lensman you meet will ram his Lens down your throat and turn you inside out."
"The same to you, brother, and many of them," Cleonie sneered. "Or, better, when my race supplants yours as Proxies of Power, I shall give myself the pleasure of doing just that to you."
"Clarrissa! Clarrissa! Pay attention, please!" The Red Lensman came to herself with a start—Helen had been thinking at her, with increasing power, for seconds. TheVelan'sblunt nose filled half the plate.
In minutes, then Clarrissa and her party were in Kinnison's private quarters in theDauntless. There had been warm mental greetings; physical demonstrations would come later. Worsel broke in.
"Excuse it, Kim, but seconds count. Better we split, don't you think? You find out what the score around here is, from Clarrissa, and take steps, and I'll chase that Boskonian. He's flitting—fast."
"QX, Slim," and theVelandisappeared.
"You remember Helen, of course, Kim." Kinnison bent his head, flipping a quick grin at his wife, who had spoken aloud. The Lyranian, trying to unbend, half-offered her hand, but when he did not take it she withdrew it as enthusiastically as she had twenty years before. "And this is Cleonie, the ... the wench I've been telling you about. You knew her before."
"Yeah. She hasn't changed much—still as unbarbered a mess as ever. If you've got what you want, Chris, we'd better—"
"Kimball Kinnison, I demand Cleonie's life!" came Helen's vibrant thought. She had snatched one of Clarrissa's DeLameters and was swinging it into line when she was caught and held as though in a vise.
"Sorry, Toots," the Gray Lensman's thought was more than a little grim. "Nice little girls don't play so rough. 'Scuse me, Chris, for dipping into your dish. Take over."
"Do you really mean that, Kim?"
"Yes. It's your meat—slice it as thick or as thin as you please."
"Even to letting her go?"
"Check. What else could you do? In a lifeboat—I'll even show the jade how to run it."
"Oh, Kim—"
"Quartermaster! Kinnison. Please check Number Twelve lifeboat and break it out. I am loaning it to Cleonie of Lyrane II."
XXII.
Kit had decided long since that it was his job to scout the planet Eddore. His alone. He had told several people that he was en route there, and in a sense he had been, but he was not hurrying. Once he startedthatjob, he knew that he would have to see it through with absolutely undisturbed attention, and there had been altogether too many other things popping up. Now, however, his visualization showed a couple of weeks of free time, and that would be enough. He wasn't sure whether he was grown-up enough yet to do a man's job of work or not, and Mentor wouldn't tell him. This was the best way to find out. If so, QX. If not, he would back off, wait, and try again later.
The kids had wanted to go along, of course.
"Come on, Kit, don't be a pig!" Constance started what developed into the last violent argument of their long lives. "Let's gang up on it—think what a grand work-out that would be for the Unit!"
"Uh-uh, Con. Sorry, but it isn't in the cards, any more than it was the last time we discussed it," he began, reasonably enough.
"We didn't agree to it then," Kay cut in, stormily, "and I for one am not going to agree to it now. You don't have to do it today. In fact, later on would be better. Anyway, Kit, I'm telling you right now that if you go in, we all go, as individuals if not as the Unit."
"Act your age, Kay," he advised. "Get conscious. This is one of the two places in the Universe that can't be worked from a distance, and by the time you could get here I'll have the job done. So what difference does it make whether you agree or not? I'm going in now and I'm going in alone. Pickthatone out of your pearly teeth!"
That stopped Karen, cold—they all knew that even she would not endanger the enterprise by staging a useless demonstration against Eddore's defensive screens—but there were other arguments. Later, he was to come to see that his sisters had some right upon their side, but he could not see it then. None of their ideas would hold air, he declared, and his temper wore thinner and thinner.
"No, Cam—NO! You know as well as I do that we can't all be spared at once, either now or at any time in the near-enough future. Kay's full of pickles, and you all know it. Right now is the best time I'll ever have.
"Seal it, Kat—youcan'tbe that dumb! Taking the Unit in would blow things wide open. There isn't a chance that I can get in, even alone, without touchingsomethingoff. I, alone, won't be giving too much away, but the Unit would be a flare-lit tip-off and all hell would be out for noon. Or are you actually nitwitted enough to think that, all Arisia to the contrary, we are ready for the grand showdown?
"Hold it, all of you! Pipe down!" he snorted, finally. "Have I got to bash in your skulls to make you understand that I can't co-ordinate an attack against something without even the foggiest idea of what its actual physical setup is? Use your brains, kids—pleaseuse your brains!"
He finally won them over, even Karen; and while his speedster covered the last leg of the flight he completed his analysis.
He had all the information he could get—in fact, all that was available—and it was pitifully meager and confusingly contradictory in detail. He knew the Arisians, each of them, personally; and had studied, jointly and severally, the Arisian visualizations of the ultimate foe. He knew the Lyranian impression of the Plooran version of the story of Eddore. Ploor! Merely a name. A symbol which Mentor had always kept rigorously apart from any Boskonian actuality. Ploormustbe the missing link between Kalonia and Eddore. And he knew practically everything about it except the two really important facts—whether or not it really was that link, and where, within eleven thousand million parsecs, it was in space!
He and his sisters had done their best. So had many librarians; who had found, not at all to his surprise, that no scrap of information or conjecture concerning Eddore or the Eddorians was to be found in any library, however comprehensive or exclusive.
Thus he had guesses, hypotheses, theories, and visualizations galore; but none of them agreed and not one of them was convincing. He had no real facts whatever. Mentor had informed him, equably enough, that such a state of affairs was inevitable because of the known power of the Eddorian mind. That state, however, did not make Kit Kinnison any too happy as he approached dread and dreaded Eddore. He was in altogether too much of a dither as to what, actually, to expect.
As he neared the boundary of the star-cluster within which Eddore lay, he cut his velocity to a crawl. An outer screen, he knew, surrounded the whole cluster. How many intermediate protective layers existed, where they were, or what they were like, nobody knew. That information was only a small part of what he had to have.
His far-flung detector web, at practically zero power, touched the barrier without giving alarm and stopped. His speedster stopped. Everything stopped.
Christopher Kinnison, the matrix and the key element of the Unit, had tools and equipment about which even Mentor of Arisia knew nothing in detail; about which, it was hoped and believed, the Eddorians were completely in ignorance. He reached deep into the storehouse toolbox of his mind, arranged his selections in order, and went to work.
He built up his detector web, one infinitesimal increment at a time, until he could just perceive the structure of the barrier. He made no attempt to analyze it, knowing that any fabric or structure solid enough to perform such an operation would certainly touch off an alarm. Analysis could come later, after he had found out whether the generator of this outer screen was a machine or a living brain.
He felt his way along the barrier—slowly—carefully. He completely outlined one section, studying the fashion in which the joints were made and how it must be supported and operated. With the utmost nicety of which he was capable he synchronized a probe with the almost impossibly complex structure of the thing and slid it along a feeder beam into the generator station. A mechanism—they didn't waste live Eddorians, then, any more than the Arisians did, on outer defenses. QX.
A precisely-tuned blanket surrounded his speedster—a blanket which merged imperceptibly into, and in effect became an integral part of, the barrier itself. The blanket thinned over half of the speedster. The speedster crept forward. The barrier—unchanged, unaffected—wasbehindthe speedster. Man and vessel were through!