Kinnison did not walk far, nor reflect much, before he changed his mind
and retraced his steps; finding the messenger still in the restaurant.
"So you got wise to yourself and decided to crawl while the crawling's
good, eh?" he sneered, before the Lensman could say a word. "I don't
know whether the offer is still good or not."
"No--and I advise you to muffle your exhaust before somebody rams a ray
gun down your throat." Kinnison's voice was coldly level. "I came back
to tell you to tell your No. 1 that I'm calling his bluff. You know
Checuster?"
"Of course." The zwilnik was plainly discomfited.
"Come along, then, and listen, so you'll know that I'm not running a
blazer."
They sought a booth, wherein the native himself got Checuster on the
visiplate.
"Checuster, this is Cartiff." The start of surprise and the expression
of pleased interest revealed how well that name was known. "I'll be
down at your old warehouse day after tomorrow night about this time.
Pass the word around that if any of the boys have any stuff too hot
for them to handle conveniently, I'll buy it; paying for it in either
Patrol credits or bar platinum, whichever they like."
He then turned to the messenger. "Did you get that straight, Lizard
Puss?"
The man nodded.
"Relay it to No. 1," Kinnison ordered and strode off. This time he got
to his ship, which took off at once.
Cartiff had never made a habit of wearing visible arms, and his guards,
while undoubtedly fast gunmen, were apparently only that. Therefore
there was no reason for No. 1 to suppose that his mob would have any
noteworthy difficulty in cutting this upstart, Cartiff, down. He was,
however, surprised; for Cartiff did not come afoot or unarmed.
Instead, it was an armored car that brought the intruding fence through
the truck entrance into the old warehouse. Not a car, either; it was
more like a twenty-ton tank except for the fact that it ran upon
wheels, not treads. It was screened like a cruiser; it mounted a
battery of projectors whose energies, it was clear to any discerning
eye, nothing short of battle screen could handle. The thing rolled
quietly to a stop, a door swung open, and Kinnison emerged. He was
neither unarmed nor unarmored now. Instead, he wore a full suit of G-P
armor or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and carried a semiportable
projector.
"You will excuse the seeming discourtesy, men," he announced, "when I
tell you that a certain No. 1 has informed me that he will blast me
out of the ether before I swap a necklace on this planet. Stand clear,
please, until we see whether he meant business or was just warming up
his jets. Now, No. 1, if you're around, come and get it!"
Apparently the challenged party was not present, for no overt move was
made. Neither could Kinnison's sense of perception discover any sign of
unfriendly activity within its range. Of mind reading there was none,
for every man upon the floor was, as usual, both masked and screened.
Business was slack at first, for those present were not bold souls and
the Lensman's overwhelmingly superior armament gave them very seriously
to doubt his intentions. Many of them, in fact, had fled precipitately
at the first sight of the armored truck, and of these more than a
few--No. 1's thugs, no doubt--did not return. The others, however, came
filtering back as they perceived that there was to be no warfare and as
cupidity overcame their timorousness. And as it became evident to all
that the stranger's armament was for defense only, that he was there to
buy or to barter and not to kill and thus to steal, Cartiff trafficked
ever more and more briskly, as the evening wore on, in the hottest gems
of the planet.
Nor did he step out of character for a second. He was Cartiff the
fence, all the time. He drove hard bargains, but not too hard. He knew
jewels thoroughly by this time, he knew the code, and he followed it
rigorously. He would give a thousand Patrol credits, in currency good
upon any planet of Civilization or in bar platinum good anywhere, for
an article worth five thousand, but which was so badly wanted by the
law that its then possessor could not dispose of it at all. Or, in
barter, he would swap for that article another item, worth fifteen
hundred or so, but which was not hot--at least, not upon that planet.
Fair enough--so fair that it was almost morning before the silently
running truck slid into its storage inside the dead-black spaceship.
Then, in so far as No. 1, the Patrol, and Civilization were concerned,
Cartiff and his outfit simply vanished. The zwilnik subchief hunted him
viciously for a space, then bragged of how he had run him out of the
region. The Patrol, as usual, bided its time, watching alertly. The
general public forgot him completely in the next sensation to arise.
* * * * *
Fairly close although he then was to the rim of the Galaxy, Kinnison
did not take any chances at all of detection in a line toward that rim.
The spiral arm beyond Rift 85 was unexplored. It had been of so little
interest to Civilization that even its various regions were nameless
upon the charts, and the Lensman wanted it to remain that way, at
least for the time being. Therefore he left the Galaxy in as nearly
a straight nadir line as he could without coming within detection
distance of any trade route. Then, making a prodigious loop, so as to
enter the spiral arm from the nadir direction, he threw Nadreck's map
into the pilot tank and began the computations which would enable him
to place correctly in that three-dimensional chart the brilliant point
of light which represented his ship.
In this work he was ably assisted by his chief pilot. He did not have
Henderson now, but he did have Watson, who rated No. 2 only by the
hair-splitting of the supreme Board of Examiners. Such hair-splitting
was, of course, necessary: otherwise no difference at all could have
been found within the ranks of the first fifty of the Patrol's master
pilots, to say nothing of the first three or four. And the rest of the
crew did whatever they could.
For it was only in the newscasts that Cartiff's crew was one of
murderous and villainous pirates. They were, in fact, volunteers; and,
since everyone is familiar with what that means in the Patrol, that
statement is as efficient as a book would be.
The chart was sketchy and incomplete, of course; around the flying ship
were hundreds, yes, thousands, of stars which were not in the chart
at all; but Nadreck had furnished enough reference points so that the
pilots could compute their orientation. No need to fear detectors now,
in these wild, waste spaces; they set a right-line course for Lonabar
and followed it.
As soon as Kinnison could make out the continental outlines of the
planet upon the plates he took over control, as he alone of the crew
was upon familiar ground. He knew everything about Lonabar that Illona
had ever learned; and, although the girl was a total loss as an
astronaut, she did know her geography.
Kinnison docked his ship boldly at the spaceport of Lonia, the planet's
largest city and its capital. With equal boldness he registered as
"Cartiff," filling in some of the blank spaces in the spaceport's
routine registry form--not quite truthfully, perhaps--and blandly
ignoring others. The armored truck was hoisted out of the hold and made
its way to Lonia's largest bank, into which it disgorged a staggering
total of bar platinum, as well as sundry coffers of hard, gray steel.
These last items went directly into a private vault, under the watchful
eyes and ready weapons of Kinnison's own guards.
The truck rolled swiftly back to the spaceport and Cartiff's ship took
off--it did not need servicing at the time--ostensibly for another
planet unknown to the Patrol, actually to go, inert, into a closed
orbit around Lonabar and near enough to it to respond to a call in
seconds.
Immense wealth can command speed of construction and service. Hence, in
a matter of days, Cartiff was again in business. His salon was, upon a
larger and grander scale, a repetition of his Tellurian shop. It was
simple, and dignified, and blatantly expensive. Costly rugs covered the
floor, impeccable works of art adorned the walls, and three precisely
correct, flawlessly groomed clerks displayed, with the exactly right
air of condescending humility, Cartiff's wares before those who
wished to view them. Cartiff himself was visible, ensconced within a
magnificent plate-glass-and-gold office in the rear, but he did not
ordinarily have anything to do with customers. He waited; nor did he
wait long before there happened that which he expected.
* * * * *
One of the superperfect clerks coughed slightly into a microphone.
"A gentleman insists upon seeing you personally, sir," he announced.
"Very well, I will see him now. Show him in, please," and the visitor
was ceremoniously ushered into the Presence.
"This is a very nice place you have here, Mr. Cartiff, but did it ever
occur to you that--"
"It never did and it never will," Kinnison snapped. He still lolled at
ease in his chair, but his eyes were frosty and his voice carried an
icy sting. "I quit paying protection to little shots a good many years
ago. Or are you from Menjo Bleeko?"
The visitor's eyes widened. He gasped, as though even to utter that
dread name were sheer sacrilege. "No, but No.--"
"Save it, slob!" The cold venom of that crisp but quiet order set the
fellow back onto his heels. "I am thoroughly sick of this thing of
every half-baked tinhorn zwilnik in space calling himself No. 1 as
soon as he can steal enough small change to hire an ape to walk around
behind him packing a couple of ray guns. If that louse of a boss of
yours has a name, use it. If he hasn't, call him 'The Louse.' But
cancel that No. 1 stuff. In my book there is no No. 1 in the whole
damned Universe. Doesn't your mob know yet who and what Cartiff is?"
"What do we care?" The visitor gathered courage visibly. "A good big
bomb--"
"Clam it, you squint-eyed slime-lizard!" The Lensman's voice was still
low and level, but his tone bit deep and his words drilled in. "That
stuff?" he waved inclusively at the magnificent hall. "Sucker bait,
nothing more. The whole works cost only a hundred thousand. Chicken
feed. It wouldn't even nick the edge of the roll if you blew up ten
of them. Bomb it any time you feel the urge. But take notice that it
would make me sore--plenty sore--and that I would do things about it;
because I'm in a big game, not this petty-larceny racketeering and
chiseling that your mob is doing, and when a toad gets in my way I step
on it. So go back and tell that No. 1 of yours to case a job a lot more
thoroughly than he did this one before he starts throwing his weight
around. Now scram, before I feed your carcass to the other rats around
here!"
Kinnison grinned inwardly as the completely deflated gangster slunk
out. Good going. It wouldn't take long for _that_ blast to get
action. This little-shot No. 1 wouldn't dare to lift a hand, but Bleeko
would have to. That was axiomatic, from the very nature of things. It
was very definitely Bleeko's move next. The only moot point was as to
which his nibs would do first--talk or act. He would talk, the Lensman
thought. The prime reward of being a hot shot was to have people know
it and bend the knee. Therefore, although Cartiff's salon was at all
times in complete readiness for any form of violence, Kinnison was
practically certain that Menjo Bleeko would send an emissary before he
started the rough stuff.
He did, and shortly. A big, massive man was the messenger; a man
wearing consciously an aura of superiority, of boundless power and
force. He did not simply come into the shop--he made an entrance. All
three of the clerks literally cringed before him, and at his casually
matter-of-fact order they hazed the already uncomfortable customers
out of the shop and locked the doors. Then one of them escorted the
visitor, with a sickening servility he had never thought of showing
toward his employer and with no thought of consulting Cartiff's wishes
in the matter, into Cartiff's private sanctum. Kinnison knew at first
glance that this was Ghundrith Khars, Bleeko's right-hand man. Khars,
the notorious, who kneeled only to his supremacy, Menjo Bleeko himself;
and to whom everyone else upon Lonabar and its subsidiary planets
kneeled. The big shot waved a hand and the clerk fled in disorder.
* * * * *
"Stand up, worm, and give me that--" Khars began, loftily.
"Silence, fool! Attention!" Kinnison rasped, in such a drivingly
domineering tone that the stupefied messenger obeyed involuntarily.
The Lensman, psychologist par excellence that he was, knew that this
man, with a background of twenty years of blind, dumb obedience to his
every order, simply could not cope with a positive and self-confident
opposition. "You will not be here long enough to sit down, even if I
permitted it in my presence, which I very definitely do not. You came
here to give me certain instructions and orders. Instead, you are going
to listen merely; I will do all the talking.
"First. The only reason you did not die as you entered this place is
that neither you nor Menjo Bleeko knows any better. The next one of you
to approach me in this fashion dies in his tracks.
"Second. Knowing as I do the workings of that which your bloated leech
of a Menjo Bleeko calls his brain, I know that he has a spy-ray on us
now. I am not blocking it out, as I want him to receive ungarbled--and
I know that you would not have the courage to transmit it accurately to
his foulness--everything I have to say.
"Third. I have been searching for a long time for a planet that I like.
This is it. I fully intend to stay here as long as I please. There is
plenty of room here for both of us without crowding.
"Fourth. Being essentially a peaceable man, I came in peace and
I prefer a peaceable arrangement. However, let it be distinctly
understood that I truckle to no man or entity, dead, living, or yet to
be born.
"Fifth. Tell Bleeko from me to consider very carefully and very
thoroughly an iceberg; its every phase and aspect. That is all--you may
go."
"Bub-bub-but," the big man stammered. "An _iceberg_?"
"An iceberg, yes--just that," Kinnison assured him. "Don't bother to
try to think about it yourself, since you've got nothing to think
with. But his putrescence, Bleeko, even though he is a mental, moral,
and intellectual slime-lizard, can think--at least in a narrow, mean,
small-souled sort of way--and I advise him in all seriousness to do so.
Now get out of here, before I burn the seat of your pants off."
Khars got, gathering together visibly the shreds of his self-esteem as
he did so, the clerks staring the while in dumfounded amazement. Then
they huddled together, eying the owner of the establishment with a
brand-new respect--a subservient respect, heavily laced with awe.
"Business as usual, boys," he counseled them, cheerfully enough. "They
won't blow up the place until after dark."
The clerks resumed their places then and trade did go on, after a
fashion; but Cartiff's force had not recovered its wonted blasé aplomb
even at closing time.
"Just a moment." The proprietor called his employees together and,
reaching into his pocket, distributed among them a sheaf of currency.
"In case you don't find the shop here in the morning, you may consider
yourselves on vacation at full pay until I call you."
They departed, and Kinnison went back to his office. His first care
was to set up a spy-ray block--a block which had been purchased upon
Lonabar and which was, therefore, certainly pervious to Bleeko's
instruments. Then he prowled about, apparently in deep and anxious
thought. But as he prowled, the eavesdroppers did not, could not know
that his weight set into operation certain devices of his own highly
secret installation, or that when he finally left the shop no really
serious harm could be done to it except by an explosion sufficiently
violent to demolish the neighborhood for blocks around. The front wall
would go, of course. He wanted it to go; otherwise there would be
neither reason nor excuse for doing that which for days he had been
ready to do.
* * * * *
Since Cartiff lived rigorously to schedule and did not have a spy-ray
block in his room, Bleeko's methodical and efficient observers always
turned off their beams when the observee went to sleep. This night,
however, Kinnison was not really asleep, and as soon as the ray went
off he acted. He threw on his clothes and sought the street, where he
took a taxi to a certain airport. There he climbed into a rocketplane
which was already warmed up and waiting for him.
Hanging from her screaming props the fantastically powerful little
plane bulleted upward in a vertical climb, and as she began to slow
down from lack of air her projectors took over. A tractor reached
out, seizing her gently. Her wings retracted and she was drawn into
Cartiff's great spaceship; which, a few minutes later, hung poised
above one of the largest, richest jewel mines of Lonabar.
This mine was, among others, Menjo Bleeko's personal property. Since
overproduction would glut the market, it was being worked by only one
shift of men--the day shift. It was now black night; the usual guards
were the only men upon the premises. The big black ship hung there and
waited.
"But suppose they don't, Kim?" Watson asked.
"Then we'll wait here every night until they do," Kinnison replied,
grimly. "But they'll do it tonight, for all the tea in China. They'll
have to, to save Bleeko's face."
And they did. In a couple of hours the observer at a high-powered plate
reported that Cartiff's salon had just been blown to bits. Then the
Patrolmen went into action.
Bleeko's mobsmen hadn't killed anybody at Cartiff's, therefore the
Tellurians wouldn't kill anyone here. Hence, while ten immense
beam-dirigible torpedoes were being piloted carefully down shafts and
along tunnels into the deepest bowels of the workings, the guards were
given warning that, if they got into their fliers fast enough, they
could be fifty miles away and probably safe by zero time. They hurried.
At zero time the torpedoes let go as one. The entire planet quivered
under the trip-hammer shock of detonating duodec. For those frightful,
those appalling charges had been placed, by computations checked and
rechecked, precisely where they would wreak the most havoc, the utmost
possible measure of sheer destruction. Much of the rock, however hard,
around each one of those incredible centers of demolition was simply
blasted out of existence. That is the way duodec, in massive charges,
works. Matter simply cannot get out of its way in the first instants of
its detonation; matter's own inherent inertia forbids.
Most of the rock between the bombs was pulverized the merest fraction
of a second later. Then, the distortedly spherical explosion fronts
merging, the total incomprehensible pressure was exerted as almost pure
lift. The field above the mine works lifted, then; practically as a
mass at first. But it could not remain as such. It could not move fast
enough as a whole; nor did it possess even a minute fraction of the
tensile strength necessary to withstand the stresses being applied.
Those stresses, the forces of the explosions, were to all intents and
purposes irresistible. The crust disintegrated violently and almost
instantaneously. Rock crushed grindingly against rock, practically the
whole mass reducing in the twinkling of an eye to an impalpable powder.
Upward and outward, then, the ragingly compressed gases of detonation
drove, hurling everything before them. Chunks blew out sidewise, flying
for miles; the mind-staggeringly enormous volume of dust was hurled
upward clear into the stratosphere.
Finally that awful dust cloud was wafted aside, revealing through
its thinning haze a strangely and hideously altered terrain. No sign
remained of the buildings or the mechanisms of Bleeko's richest mine.
No vestige was left to show that anything built by or pertaining to man
had ever existed there. Where those works had been, there now yawned
an absolutely featureless crater; a crater whose sheer geometrical
perfection of figure revealed with shocking clarity the magnitude of
the cataclysmic forces which had wrought there.
Kinnison, looking blackly down at that crater, did not feel the glow of
satisfaction which comes of a good deed well done. He detested it--it
made him sick at the stomach. But, since he had had it to do, he had
done it. Why in all the nine hells of Valeria did he have to be a
Lensman, anyway?
Back to Lonia, then, the Lensman made his resentful way, and back to
bed.
And in the morning, early, workmen began the reconstruction of
Cartiff's place of business.