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 the _Velan_, 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--_must_ be--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 the _Velan_
went 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.
That _something_ was there, however, there was no doubt. Slow as
was the _Velan's_ pace, 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.
The _Velan's_ all-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 the _Velan_ reached 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 the _Velan's_ sharp 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 the _Velan's_
war-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 the _Velan_, 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.
He _might_ be 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; he _had_ to 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.
A _Lensman_? 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, been _en
rapport_ with him throughout, came rushing to his aid; arriving just
as he recovered full control.
"Back to the _Velan_, 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."