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
started _that_ job, 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. Pick _that_ one 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--you _can't_ be that dumb! Taking the Unit in would
blow things wide open. There isn't a chance that I can get in, even
alone, without touching _something_ off. 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--_please_ use 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. Ploor
_must_ be 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--was
_behind_ the speedster. Man and vessel were through!
Kit breathed deeply in relief and rested. This didn't prove much,
of course. Nadreck had done practically the same thing in getting
Kandron--except that the Palainian would never be able to analyze or to
synthesize such screens as these. The real test would come later; but
this had been mighty good practice.
* * * * *
The real test came with the fifth, the innermost screen. The others,
while of ever-increasing sensitivity, complexity, and power, were all
generated mechanically, and hence posed problems differing only in
degree, and not in kind, from that of the first. The fifth problem,
however, involving a living and highly capable brain, differed in both
degree and kind from all the others. The Eddorian would be sensitive to
form and to shape, as well as to interference. Bulges were out, unless
he could do something about the Eddorian--and the speedster couldn't go
through a screen without making a bulge.
Furthermore, this zone had visual and electromagnetic detectors, so
spaced as not to let a microbe through. There were fortresses, maulers,
battleships, and their attendant lesser craft. There were projectors,
and mines, and automatic torpedoes with atomic warheads, and other
such things. Were these things completely dependent upon the Eddorian
guardian, or not?
They were not. The officers--Kalonians for the most part--would go into
action at the guardian's signal, of course; but they would at need act
without instructions. A nice setup--a mighty hard nut to crack! He
would have to use zones of compulsion. Nothing else would do.
Picking out the biggest fortress in the neighborhood, with its
correspondingly large field of coverage, he insinuated his mind into
that of one observing officer after another. When he left, a few
minutes later, he knew that none of those officers would initiate any
action in response to the alarms which he would so soon set off. They
were alive, fully conscious, alert, and would have resented bitterly
any suggestion that they were not completely normal in every respect.
Nevertheless, whatever colors the lights flashed, whatever pictures the
plates revealed, whatever noises blared from the speakers, in their
consciousnesses would be only blankness and silence. Nor would recorder
tapes reveal later what had occurred. An instrument cannot register
fluctuations when its movable member is controlled by a couple of
steady fingers.
Then the Eddorian. To take over his whole mind was, Kit knew, beyond
his present power. A partial zone, though, could be set up--and
young Kinnison's mind had been developed specifically to perform the
theretofore impossible. Thus the guardian, without suspecting it,
suffered an attack of partial blindness which lasted for the fraction
of a second necessary for the speedster to flash through the screen.
And there was no recorder to worry about. Eddorians, never sleeping and
never relaxing their vigilance, had no doubt whatever of their own
capabilities and needed no checks upon their own performances.
Christopher Kinnison, Child of the Lens, was inside Eddore's innermost
defensive sphere. For countless cycles of time the Arisians had been
working toward and looking forward to the chain of events of which this
was the first link. Nor would he have much time here: he would have
known that even if Mentor had not so stressed the point. As long as he
did nothing he was safe; but as soon as he started sniffing around he
would be open to detection and some Eddorian would climb his frame in
mighty short order. Then blast and lock on--he might get something,
or a lot, or nothing at all. Then--win, lose, or draw--he had to get
away. Strictly under his own power, against an unknown number of the
most powerful and the most ruthless entities ever to live. The Arisian
couldn't get in here to help him, and neither could the kids. Nobody
could. It was strictly and solely up to him.
For more than a moment his spirit failed. The odds against him were far
too long. The load was too heavy; he didn't have half enough jets to
swing it. Just how did a guy as smart as Mentor figure it that he, a
dumb, green kid, stood a chance against all Eddore?
He was scared; scared to the core of his being; scared as he had never
been before and never would be again. His mouth felt dry, his tongue
cottony. His fingers shook, even as he doubled them into fists to
steady them. To the very end of his long life he remembered the fabric
and the texture of that fear; remembered how it made him decide to turn
back, before it was too late to retrace his way as unobserved as he had
come.
Well, why not? Who would care, and what matter? The Arisians? Nuts!
It was all their fault, sending him in half-ready. His parents? They
wouldn't know what the score was and wouldn't care. They would be on
his side, anyway, no matter what happened. The kids? The _kids_!
Klono's Holy Claws!
They had tried to talk him out of coming in alone. They had fought
like wildcats to make him take them along. He had refused. Now, if
he sneaked back with his tail between his legs, how would they take
it? What would they do? What would they _think_? Then, later,
after he had loused up the big job and let the Arisians and the Patrol
and all Civilization get knocked out--then what? The kids would know
exactly how and why it had happened. He couldn't defend himself,
even if he tried, and he wouldn't try. Did he have any idea how much
sheer, vitriolic, corrosive contempt those four red-headed hellions
could generate? Or, even if they didn't--or as a follow-up--their
condescending, sisterly pity would be a thousand million times worse.
And what would he think of himself? No soap. It was out. Definitely.
The Eddorians could kill him only once. QX.
* * * * *
He drove straight downward, noting as he did so that his senses were
clear, his hands steady, his tongue normally moist. He was still
scared, but he was no longer paralyzed.
Low enough, he let his every perceptive sense roam abroad--and became
instantly too busy to worry about anything. There was an immense amount
of new stuff here--if he only could be granted time enough to get it
all!
He wasn't. In a second or so, it seemed, his interference was detected
and an Eddorian came in to investigate. Kit threw everything he had,
and in the brief moment before the completely surprised denizen died,
the young Klovian learned more of the real truth of Eddore and of
the whole Boskonian Empire than all the Arisians had ever found out.
In that one flash of ultimately intimate fusion, he _knew_
Eddorian history, practically _in toto_. He knew the enemies'
culture; he knew how they behaved, and why. He knew their ideals and
their ideologies. He knew a great deal about their organization; their
systems of offense and of defense. He knew their strengths and, more
important, their weaknesses. He knew exactly how, if Civilization were
to triumph at all, its victory must be achieved.
This seems--or rather, it is--incredible. It is, however, simple truth.
Under such stresses as those, an Eddorian mind can yield, and the mind
of such a one as Christopher Kinnison can absorb, an incredible amount
of knowledge in an incredibly brief interval of time.
Kit, already seated at his controls, cut in his every course of
thought-screen. They would help a little in what was coming, but not
much--no mechanical screen then known to Civilization could block
third-level thought. He kicked in full drive toward the one small area
in which he and his speedster would not encounter either beams or
bombs--the fortress whose observers would not perceive that anything
was amiss. He did not fear physical pursuit, since his speedster was
the fastest thing in space.
For a second or so it was not so bad. Another Eddorian came in,
suspicious and on guard. Kit blasted him down--learning still more in
the process--but he could not prevent him from radiating a frantic and
highly revealing call for help. And although the other Eddorians could
scarcely realize that such an astonishing thing as a physical invasion
had actually happened, that fact neither slowed them down nor made
their anger less violent.
When Kit flashed past his friendly fortress he was taking about all
that he could handle, and more and more Eddorians were piling on.
At the fourth screen it was worse; at the third he reached what he
was sure was his absolute ceiling. Nevertheless, from some hitherto
unsuspected profundity of his being, he managed to draw enough reserve
force to endure that hellish punishment for a little while longer.
Hang on, Kit, hang on! Only two more screens to go. Maybe only one.
Maybe less. Living Eddorian brains, and not mechanical generators, are
now handling all the screens, of course; but if Mentor's visualization
is worth a tinker's damn, he must have that first screen knocked down
by this time and must be working on the second. Hang on, Kit, and keep
on slugging!
And grimly--doggedly--toward the end sheerly desperately--Christopher
Kinnison, eldest Child of the Lens, hung on and slugged.