The Boskonian fleets defending Ploor were not all destroyed, of course.
The vessels were inertialess. None of the phenomena accompanying the
coming into being of the supernova were propagated at a velocity above
that of light; a speed which to any spaceship is scarcely a crawl.
The survivors were, however, disorganized. They had lost their morale
when Ploor was wiped out in such a spectacularly nerve-shattering
fashion. Also, they had lost practically all of their High Command; for
the Ploorans, instead of riding the ether as did Patrol commanders,
remained in their supposedly secure headquarters and directed matters
from afar. Mentor and his fellows had removed from this plane of
existence the Eddorians who had been present in the flesh on Ploor.
The Arisians had cut all communications between Eddore and the
remnants of the Boskonian defensive force.
Grand Fleet, then, moved in for the kill; and for a time the action
near Arisia was repeated. Following definite flight-and-course orders
from the _Z9M9Z_, ten or more Patrol fleets would make short hops.
At the end of those assigned courses they would discover that they had
englobed a task force of the enemy. Bomb and beam!
Over and over--flit, bomb, and beam!
One Boskonian high officer, however, had both the time and the
authority to act. A full thousand fleets massed together, their
heaviest units outward, packed together screen to screen in a
close-order globe of defense.
"According to Haynes, that was good strategy in the old days," Kinnison
commented, "but it's no good against loose planets and negaspheres."
Six loose planets were so placed and so released that their inert
masses would crash together at the center of the Boskonian globe; then,
a few minutes later, ten negaspheres of high antimass were similarly
launched. After those sixteen missiles had done their work and the
resultant had attained an equilibrium of sorts, very little mopping-up
was found necessary.
The Boskonian observers were competent. The Boskonian commanders now
knew that they had no chance whatever of success; that to stay was
to be annihilated; that the only possibility of life lay in flight.
Therefore each remaining Boskonian vice admiral, after perhaps a moment
of consultation with a few others, ordered his fleet to drive at
maximum blast for his home planet.
"No use chasing them individually, is there, Kit?" Kinnison asked, when
it became clear in the tank that the real battle was over; that all
resistance had ended. "They can't do anything, and this kind of killing
makes me sick at the stomach. Besides, I've got something else to do."
"No. Me, too. So have I." Kit agreed with his father in full.
As soon as the last Boskonian fleet was beyond detector range Grand
Fleet broke up, its component fleets setting out for their respective
worlds.
"The Hell Hole is still there, Kit," the Gray Lensman said, soberly.
"If Ploor was the top--I'm beginning to think there _is_ no
top--it leads either to an automatic mechanism set up by the Ploorans
or to Ploorans who are still alive somewhere. If Ploor was not the
top, this seems to be the only lead we have toward that top. In either
case I've got to take it. Check?"
"Well, I--" Kit tried to duck, but couldn't. "Yes, Dad, I'm afraid it's
check."
Two big hands met and gripped; and Kinnison went to take leave of his
wife.
There is no need to go into detail as to what those two strong souls
said or did. He knew that he was going into danger; that he might not
return. That is, he knew empirically or academically, as a nongermane
sort of fact, that he might die. He did not, however, really believe
that he would. No man who is not an arrant coward really believes,
ever, that any given event will or can kill him. In his own mind he
goes on living indefinitely.
Kinnison expected to be captured, imprisoned, questioned, and perhaps
tortured. He could understand all of those things, and he did not like
any one of them. That he was more than a trifle afraid and that he
hated to leave her now more than he ever had before were both natural
enough--he had nothing whatever to hide from her.
She, on the other hand, knew starkly that he would never come back.
She knew that he would die in that trap. She knew that she would
have to live a lifetime of emptiness, alone. Hence she had much to
conceal from him. She must be just as scared and as apprehensive as
he was, but no more; just as anxious for their continued happiness
as he was, but no more; just as intensely loving, but no more and in
exactly the same sense. Here lay the test. She must kiss him good-by
as though he were going into mere danger. She _must not_ give
way to the almost irresistible urge to act in accordance with what
she so starkly, chillingly knew to be the truth, that she would
never--_never_--NEVER kiss her Kim again!
She succeeded. It is a measure of the Red Lensman's quality that she
did not weaken, even when her husband approached the boundary of the
Hell Hole and sent what she knew would be his last message.
"Here it is--about a second now. Don't worry--I'll be back very
shortly. Clear ether, Chris!"
"Of _course_ you will, dear. Clear ether, Kim!"
* * * * *
His speedster did not mount any special generators. He had not thought
that they would be necessary. Nor were they. He and his ship were
sucked into that trap as though it had been a maelstrom.
He felt again the commingled agonies of interdimensional acceleration.
He perceived again the formless, textureless, spaceless void of
blankly gray nothingness which was the three-dimensionally-impossible
substance of the tube. A moment later, he felt a new and different
acceleration--he was speeding up _inside the tube_! Then, very
shortly, he felt nothing at all. Startled, he tried to jump up to
investigate, and discovered that he could not move. Even by the utmost
exertion of his will he could not stir a finger or an eyelid. He was
completely immobilized. Nor could he feel. His body was as devoid of
sensation as though it belonged to somebody else. Worse, for his heart
was not beating. He was not breathing. He could not see. It was as
though his every nerve, motor and sensory, voluntary and involuntary,
had been separately anaesthetized. He could still think, but that was
all. His sense of perception still worked.
He wondered whether he was still accelerating or not, and tried to find
out. He could not. He could not determine whether he was moving or
stationary. There were no reference points. Every infinitesimal volume
of that enigmatic grayness was like each and every other.
Mathematically, perhaps, he was not moving at all; since he was in
a continuum in which mass, length and time, and hence inertia and
inertialessness, velocity and acceleration, are meaningless terms. He
was outside of space and beyond time. Effectively, however, he was
moving; moving with an acceleration which nothing material had ever
before approached. He and his vessel were being driven along that tube
by every watt of power generable by one entire Eddorian atomic power
plant. His velocity, long since unthinkable, became incalculable.
All things end--even Eddorian atomic power was not infinite. At the
very peak of power and pace, then, all the force, all the momentum,
all the kinetic energy of the speedster's mass and velocity were
concentrated in and applied to Kinnison's physical body. He sensed
something, and tried to flinch, but could not. In a fleeting instant of
what he thought was time he went _past_, not through, his clothing
and his Lens; _past_, not through, his armor; and _past_, not
through, the hard beryllium-alloy structure of his vessel. He even went
past but not through the N-dimensional interface of the hyperspatial
tube.
This, although Kinnison did not know it, was the Eddorian's climactic
effort. He had taken his prisoner as far as he could possibly reach;
then, assembling and concentrating all available power, he had given
him a catapultic shove into the absolutely unknown and utterly
unknowable. The Eddorian did not know any vector of the Lensman's naked
flight; he did not care where he went. He did not know and could not
compute or even guess at his victim's probable destination.
* * * * *
In what his spacehound's time sense told him was one second,
Kinnison passed exactly two hundred million foreign spaces. He did
not know how he knew the precise number, but he did. Hence, in the
Patrol's measured cadence, he began to count groups of spaces of
one hundred million each. After a few days, his velocity decreased
to such a value that he could count groups of single millions. Then
thousands--hundreds--tens--until finally he could perceive the salient
features of each space before it was blotted out by the next.
How could this be? He wondered, but not foggily; his mind was as clear
and as strong as it had ever been. Spaces were coexistent, not spread
out like this. In the fourth dimension they were flat together, like
pages in a book, except thinner. This was all wrong. It was impossible.
Since it could not happen, it was not happening. He had not been and
could not be drugged. Therefore some Plooran must have him in a zone of
compulsion. _What_ a zone! _What_ an operator the ape must be!
It was, however, real--all of it. What Kinnison did not know, then
or ever, was that he was actually outside the boundaries of space;
actually beyond the confines of time. He was going past, not through,
those spaces and those times.
He was now in each space long enough to study it in some detail. He was
an immense distance above this one; at such a distance that he could
perceive many globular super-universes; each of which in turn was
composed of billions of lenticular galaxies.
Through it. Closer now. Galaxies only; the familiar random masses whose
apparent lack of symmetrical grouping is due to the limitations of
Civilization's observers. He was still going too fast to stop.
In the next space Kinnison found himself within the limits of a solar
system and tried with all the force of his mind to get in touch with
some intelligent entity upon one--any one--of its planets. Before he
could succeed, the system vanished and he was dropping, from a height
of a few thousand kilometers, toward the surface of a warm and verdant
world, so much like Tellus that he thought for an instant that he
must have circumnavigated total space. The aspect, the ice-caps, the
cloud-effects, were identical. The oceans, however, while similar,
were different; as were the continents. The mountains were larger and
rougher and harder.
He was falling much too fast. A free fall from infinity wouldn't give
him _this_ much speed!
This whole affair was, as he had decided once before, absolutely
impossible. It was simply preposterous to believe that a naked man,
especially one without blood circulation or breath, could still be
alive after spending as many weeks in open space as he had just spent.
He _knew_ that he was alive. Therefore none of this was happening;
even though, as surely as he knew that he was alive, he knew that he
was falling.
"Jet back, Lensman!" he thought viciously to himself; tried to shout
it aloud.
For this could be deadly stuff, if he let himself believe it. If he
believed that he was falling from any such height, he would die in
the instant of landing. He would not actually crash; his body would
not move from wherever it was that it was. Nevertheless the shock of
that wholly imaginary crash would kill him just as dead and just as
instantaneously as though all his flesh had been actually smashed into
a crimson smear upon one of the neighboring mountain's huge, flat rocks.
"Pretty close, my bright young Plooran friend, but you didn't quite
ring the bell," he thought savagely, trying with all the power of his
mind to break through the zone of compulsion. "I admit that you're
good, but I'm telling you that, if you want to kill me, you'll have to
do it physically, and I don't believe that you carry jets enough to
swing the job. You might as well cut your zone, because this kind of
stuff has been pulled on me by experts, and it hasn't worked yet."
He was apparently falling, feet downward, toward an open, grassy
mountain meadow, surrounded by forests, through which meandered a small
stream. He was so close now that he could perceive the individual
blades of grass in the meadow and the small fishes in the stream, and
he was still apparently at terminal velocity.
Without his years of spacehound's training in inertialess maneuvering,
he might have died even before he landed, but speed as speed did
not affect him at all. He was used to instantaneous stops from
light-speeds. The only thing that worried him was the matter of
inertia. Was he inert or free?
He declared to himself that he was free. Or, rather, that he had
been, was, and would continue to be motionless. It was physically,
mathematically, intrinsically impossible that any of this stuff
had actually occurred. It was all compulsion, pure and simple, and
he--Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman--would not let it get him down. He
clenched his mental teeth upon that belief and held it doggedly. One
bare foot struck the tip of a blade of grass and his entire body came
to a shockless halt. He grinned in relief--this was what he had wanted,
but had not quite dared wholly to expect. There followed immediately,
however, other events which he had not expected at all.
His halt was less than momentary; in the instant of its accomplishment
he began to fall normally the remaining eight or ten inches to the
ground. Automatically he sprung his space-trained knees, to take the
otherwise disconcerting jar; automatically his left hand snapped up
to the place where his controls should have been. _Legs and arms
worked!_
He could see with his eyes. He could feel with his skin. He was drawing
a breath, the first time he had breathed since leaving normal space.
Nor was it an unduly deep breath--he felt no lack of oxygen. His heart
was beating as normally as though it had never missed a beat. He was
not unusually hungry or thirsty. But all that stuff could wait--where
was that Plooran?
* * * * *
Kinnison had landed in complete readiness for strife. There were no
rocks or clubs handy, but he had his fists, feet, and teeth; and they
would do until he could find or make something better. But there was
nothing to fight. Drive his sense of perception as he would, he could
find nothing larger or more intelligent than a deer.
The farther this thing went along the less sense it made. A compulsion,
to be any good at all, ought to be logical and coherent. It should fit
into every corner and cranny of the subject's experience and knowledge.
This one did not fit anything or anywhere. It didn't even come close.
Yet, technically, it was a marvelous job. He couldn't detect a trace of
it. This grass looked and felt real. The pebbles hurt his tender feet
so much that he had to wince as he walked gingerly to the water's edge.
He drank deeply. The water, real or not, was cold, clear, and eminently
satisfying.
"Listen, you misguided what-is-it," he thought probingly, "you might
as well open up now as later whatever you've got in mind. If this
performance is supposed to be nonfiction, it's a flat bust. If it
is supposed to be science-fiction, it isn't much better. If it's a
space-opera, even, you're violating all the fundamentals. I've written
better stuff myself--Qadgop and Cynthia were a lot more convincing." He
waited a moment, then went on:
"Whoever heard of the intrepid hero of a space-opera as big as this one
started out to be getting stranded on a completely Earth-like planet
and then having nothing happen? No action at all? How about a couple of
indescribable monsters of superhuman strength and agility, for me to
tear apart with my steel-thewed fingers?"
He glanced around expectantly. No monster appeared.
"Well, then, how about a damsel in distress for me to rescue from a
fate worse than death? Better make it two of them--safety in numbers,
you know--a blonde and a brunette. No redheads. I'll play along with
you part way on that oldie--up to the point of falling for either of
them."
He waited again.
"QX, sport, no woman. Suits me perfectly. But I hope you haven't
forgotten about the tasty viands. I can eat fish if I have to, but if
you want to keep your hero happy, let's see you lay down here, on a
platter, a one-kilogram steak, three centimeters thick, medium rare,
fried in Tellurian butter and smothered in Venusian superla mushrooms."
No steak appeared, and the Gray Lensman recalled and studied
intensively every detail of what had apparently happened. It
_still_ could not have occurred. He could not have imagined it. It
could not have been compulsion or hypnosis. None of it made any kind of
sense.
As a matter of plain fact, however, Kinnison's first and most positive
conclusion was wrong. His memories were factual records of actual
events and things. He would eat well during his stay upon that nameless
planet, but he would have to procure his own food. Nothing would attack
him, or even annoy him. For the Eddorian's _binding_--this is
perhaps as good a word for it as any, since "geas" implies a curse--was
such that the Gray Lensman could return to space and time only under
such conditions and to such an environment as would not do him any iota
of physical harm. He must continue alive and in good health for at
least fifty more of his years.
* * * * *
And Clarrissa Kinnison, tense and strained, waited in her room for
the instant of her husband's death. They two were one, with a oneness
no other man and woman had ever known. If one died, from any cause
whatever, the other would feel it.
She waited. Five minutes--ten--fifteen--half an hour--an hour. She
began to relax. Her fists unclenched, her shallow breathing grew deeper.
Two hours. Kim was _still alive_! A wave of happy, buoyant relief
swept through her; her eyes flashed and sparkled. If they hadn't been
able to kill him in two hours, they never could. Her Kim had plenty of
jets.
Even the top minds of Boskonia could not kill her Kim!