"Don't come in any closer--I'm on my way out there to you. Have your
ship block every band except your personal frequency, which you and I
are now on, and caution all Lensmen aboard with you to stay off that
channel until further notice. Now as to you, personally, I don't like
to seem to be giving orders to the Admiral of the Fleet, but it may
be quite essential that you concentrate upon me, and think of nothing
else, for the next few minutes."
"Right! I don't mind taking orders from _you_."
"QX. Now we can take things a bit easier." Kinnison had so arranged
matters that no one except himself could think into that stronghold,
and he himself would not. He would not think into that tantalizing
enigma, nor toward it, nor even of it, until he was completely ready to
do so. And how many persons, I wonder, really realize just how much of
a feat that was? Realize the sort of mental training that required?
"How many gamma-zeta tracers can you put out, chief?" Kinnison asked
then, more conversationally.
A brief consultation; then, "Ten in regular use. By tuning in all our
spares we can put out sixty."
"At two diameters' distance forty-eight fields will surround this
planet at one-hundred-percent overlap. Please have that many set that
way. Of the other twelve, set three to go well outside the first
sphere--say at four diameters out--covering the line from this planet
to Lundmark's Nebula. Set the last nine to be thrown out as far as you
can read them accurately to only the first decimal on your screens,
centering on the same line. Not much overlap is necessary on these
backing fields--bare contact is enough. Release nothing, of course,
until I get there. And while the boys are setting things up, you might
go inert--it's safe enough now--so that I can match your intrinsic
velocity and come aboard."
* * * * *
There followed the maneuvering necessary for one inert body to approach
another in space, then Kinnison's incredible housing of steel was
hauled into the airlock by means of space lines attached to magnetic
clamps. The outer door of the lock closed behind him, the inner one
opened, and the Lensman entered the flagship.
First to the armory, where he clambered stiffly out of his small
battleship and gave orders concerning its storage. Then to the control
room, stretching and bending hugely as he went, in vast relief at his
freedom from the narrow and irksome confinement which he had endured so
long.
Of all the men in that control room, only two knew Kinnison personally.
All knew of him, however, and as the tall gray-clad figure entered
there was a loud, quick cheer.
"Hi, fellows--thanks." Kinnison waved a salute to the room as a
whole. "Hi, Port Admiral! Hi, Commandant!" He saluted Haynes and von
Hohendorff as perfunctorily, and greeted them as casually, as though he
had last seen them an hour, instead of ten weeks, before; as though the
intervening time had been spent in the veriest idleness, instead of in
the fashion in which it actually had been spent.
Old von Hohendorff greeted his erstwhile pupil cordially enough, but:
"Out with it!" Haynes demanded. "What did you do? How did you do it?
What does all this confounded rigmarole mean? Tell us all about it--all
you can, I mean," he added, hastily.
"There's no need of secrecy now, I think," and in flashing thoughts the
Gray Lensman went on to describe everything that had happened.
"So you see," he concluded, "I don't really _know_ anything. It's all
surmise, suspicion, and deduction. It may be that nothing at all will
happen: in which case these precautions, while they will have been
wasted effort, will have done us no harm. In case something _does_
happen, however--and I'll bet all the tea in China that something
will--we'll be ready for it."
"But if what you are beginning to suspect is really true, it means that
Boskonia is inter-Galactic in scope--wider spread even than the Patrol!"
"Probably, but not necessarily--it may mean only that they have bases
further outside. And remember that I'm arguing on a mighty slim thread
of evidence. That screen was hard and tight, and I couldn't touch the
external beam--if there was one--at all. I got just part of a thought,
here and there. However, the thought was 'that' galaxy; not just
'galaxy,' or 'this' or 'the' galaxy--and why think that way if the guy
was already in this galaxy?"
[Illustration: _"But that's not the end, sir," said Kinnison. "They
said not 'the' galaxy, or even 'this' galaxy--the thought was 'that'
galaxy!"_]
"But nobody has ever--But skip it for now--the boys are ready for you.
Take over!"
"QX. First we'll go free again. Don't think much, if any, of the
stuff can come out here, but no use taking chances. Cut your screens.
Now, all you gamma-zeta men, throw out your fields, and if any of you
get a puncture, or even a flash, measure its position. You recording
observers, step your scanners up to fifty thousand. QX?"
"QX!" the observers and recorders reported, almost as one, and the Gray
Lensman sat down at a plate.
* * * * *
His mind, free at last to make the investigation from which it had been
so long and so sternly barred, flew down into and through the dome, to
and into that cryptic globe so tantalizingly poised in the air of the
Center.
The reaction was practically instantaneous; so rapid that any ordinary
mind could have perceived nothing at all; so rapid that even Kinnison's
consciousness recorded only a confusedly blurred impression. But he
did see something: in that fleeting millionth of a second he sensed a
powerful, malignant mental force; a force backing multiplex scanners
and subethereal stress-fields interlocked in peculiarly unidentifiable
patterns.
For that ball was, as Kinnison had more than suspected, a potent agency
indeed. It was, as he had thought that it must be, a communicator; but
it was far more than that. Ordinarily harmless enough, it could be so
set as to become an infernal machine at the vibrations of any thought
not in a certain coded sequence; and Helmuth had so set it.
Therefore at the touch of the Patrolman's thought it exploded:
liberating instantaneously the unimaginable forces with which
it was charged. More, it sent out waves which, attuned to
detonating receivers, touched off strategically placed stores of
duodecaplylatomate. "Duodec," that concentrated essence of atomic
violence than which science has even yet failed to develop a more
devastating!
"Hell's--jingling--bells!" Port Admiral Haynes grunted in stunned
amazement, then subsided into silence, eyes riveted upon his plate;
for to the human eye dome, fortress, and planet had disappeared in one
cataclysmically incandescent sphere of flame.
But the observers of the Galactic Patrol did not depend upon eyesight
alone. Their scanners had been working at ultrafast speed; and, as
soon as it became clear that none of the ships of the Fleet had been
endangered, Kinnison asked that certain of the spools be run into a
visitank at normal tempo.
There, slowed to a speed at which the eye could clearly discern
sequences of events, the two old Lensmen and the young one studied with
care the three-dimensional pictures of what had happened; pictures
taken from points of projection close to and even within the doomed
structure itself.
Deliberately, the ball of force opened up, followed an inappreciable
instant later by the secondary centers of detonation; all expanding
magically into spherical volumes of blindingly brilliant annihilation.
There were as yet no flying fragments: no inert fragment _can_ fly
from duodec in the first few instants of its detonation. For the
detonation of duodec is propagated at the velocity of light, so that
the entire mass disintegrates in a period of time to be measured only
in fractional trillionths of a second. Its detonation pressure and
temperature have never been measured save indirectly, since nothing
will hold it except a Q-type helix of pure force. And even those
helices, which perforce must be practically open at both ends, have
to be designed and powered to withstand pressures and temperatures
obtaining only in the cores of suns.
Imagine, if you can, what would happen if some fifty thousand metric
tons of material from the innermost core of Sirius B were to be taken
to Grand Base, separated into twenty-five packages, each package placed
at a strategic point, and all restraint instantaneously removed. What
would have happened then, was what actually _was_ happening!
As has been said, for moments nothing moved except the ever-expanding
spheres of destruction. Nothing _could_ move--the inertia of matter
itself held it in place until it was too late--everything close to
those centers of action simply flared into turgid incandescence and
added its contribution to the already hellish whole.
As the spheres expanded, their temperatures and pressures decreased
and the action became somewhat less violent. Matter no longer simply
disappeared. Instead, plates and girders, even gigantic structural
members, bent, buckled, and crumbled. Walls blew outward and upward.
Huge chunks of metal and of masonry, many with fused and dripping
edges, began to fly in all directions.
And not only, or principally, upward was directed the force of those
inconceivable explosions. Downward the effect was, if possible, even
more catastrophic, since conditions there approximated closely the
oft-argued meeting between the irresistible force and the immovable
object. The planet was to all intents and purposes immovable, the
duodec to the same degree irresistible. The result was that the entire
planet was momentarily blown apart. A vast chasm was blasted deep into
its interior, and, gravity temporarily overcome, stupendous cracks and
fissures began to yawn. Then, as the pressure decreased, the core-stuff
of the planet became molten and began to wreak its volcanic havoc.
Gravity, once more master of the situation, took hold. The cracks and
chasms closed, extruding uncounted cubic miles of fiery lava and metal.
The entire world shivered and shuddered in a Gargantuan cosmic ague.
* * * * *
The explosion blew itself out. The hot gases and vapors cooled. The
steam condensed. The volcanic dust disappeared. There lay the planet;
but changed--hideously and awfully changed. Where Grand Base had been
there remained nothing whatever to indicate that anything wrought by
man had ever been there. Mountains were leveled, valleys were filled.
Continents and oceans had shifted, and were still shifting; visibly.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, and other seismic disturbances, instead of
decreasing, were increasing in violence, minute by minute.
Helmuth's planet was, and would for years remain, a barren and
uninhabitable world.
"Well!" Haynes, who had been holding his breath unconsciously,
released it in an almost explosive sigh. "That is inescapably and
incontrovertibly _that_. I was going to use that base, but it looks as
though we'll have to get along without it."
Without comment Kinnison turned to the gamma-zeta observers. "Any
traces?" he asked.
It developed that three of the fields had shown activity. Not merely
traces or flashes, but solid punctures showing the presence of a hard,
tight beam. And those three punctures were in the same line; a line
running straight out into inter-Galactic space.
Kinnison took careful readings on the line, then stood motionless.
Feet wide apart, hands jammed into pockets, head slightly bent, eyes
distant, he stood there unmoving; thinking with all the power of his
brain.
"I want to ask three questions," the old Commandant of Cadets
interrupted his cogitations finally. "Was Helmuth Boskone, or not? Have
we got them licked, or not? What do we do next, besides the mopping up
of those eighteen super-maulers?"
"To all three the answer is 'I don't know'." Kinnison's face was stern
and hard. "You know as much about the whole thing as I do--I haven't
held back a thing that I even suspect. I did not tell you that Helmuth
was Boskone; I said that everyone in any position to judge, including
myself, was as sure that he was as one could be about anything that
could not be proved. I firmly believed that he was. The presence of
this communicator line, and the other stuff I have told you about, has
destroyed that belief in my mind. However, we do not actually _know_
any more than we did before. It is no more certain now that Helmuth
was _not_ Boskone than it was before that he _was_ Boskone. The second
question ties in with the first, and so does the third--but I see that
the mopping up has started."
While von Hohendorff and Kinnison had been talking, Haynes had issued
orders and the Grand Fleet, divided roughly and with difficulty into
eighteen parts, went raggedly outward to surround the eighteen outlying
fortresses. But, and surprisingly enough to the Patrol forces, the
reduction of those hulking monsters was to prove no easy task.
The Boskonians had witnessed the destruction of Helmuth's Grand Base.
Their master plates were dead. Try as they would, they could get in
touch with no one with authority to give them orders, with no one to
whom they could report their present plight. Nor could they escape: the
slowest mauler in the Patrol Fleet could have caught any one of them in
space of minutes.
To surrender was not even thought of--better far to die a clean
death in the blazing holocaust of space battle than to be thrown
ignominiously into the lethal chambers of the Patrol. There was not,
there could not be, any question of pardon or of sentence to any mere
imprisonment, for the strife between Civilization and Boskonia in
no respect resembled the wars between two fundamentally similar and
friendly nations which small, green Terra knew so frequently of old.
It was a Galaxy-wide struggle for survival between two diametrically
opposed, mutually exclusive, and absolutely incompatible cultures;
a duel to the death in which quarter was neither asked nor given; a
conflict which, except for the single instance which Kinnison himself
had engineered, was, and of stern necessity had to be, one of ruthless,
complete, and utter extinction.
* * * * *
Die, then, the pirates knew they must; and, although adherents to a
scheme of existence monstrous indeed to our way of thinking, they
were in no sense cowards. Not like cornered rats did they conduct
themselves, but fought like what they were; courageous beings
hopelessly outnumbered and outpowered, unable either to escape or to
choose the field of operations, grimly resolved that in their passing
they would take full toll of the minions of that detested and despised
Galactic Civilization. Therefore, in suicidal glee, Boskonian engineers
rigged up a fantastically potent weapon of offense, tuned in their
defensive screens and hung poised in space, awaiting calmly the massed
attack so sure to come.
Up flashed the heavy cruisers of the Patrol, serenely confident.
Although of little offensive strength, these vessels mounted tractors
and pressors of prodigious power, as well as defensive screens
which--theoretically--no projector-driven beam of force could puncture.
They had engaged mauler after mauler of Boskonia's mightiest, and never
yet had one of those screens gone down. Theirs the task of immobilizing
the opponent; since, as is of course well known, it is under any
ordinary conditions impossible to wreak any hurt upon an object which
is both inertialess and at liberty to move in space. It simply darts
away from the touch of the harmful agent, whether it be immaterial beam
or material substance.
Formerly the attachment of two or three tractors was all that was
necessary to insure immobility, and thus vulnerability; but with the
Velantian development of a shear-plane to cut tractor beams, a new
technique became necessary. This was englobement, in which a dozen
or more vessels surrounded the proposed victim in space and held it
motionless at the center of a sphere by means of pressors, which could
not be cut or evaded. Serene, then, and confident, the heavy cruisers
rushed out to englobe the Boskonian fortress.
Flash! Flash! Flash! Three points of light, as unbearably brilliant
as atomic vortices, sprang into being upon the fortress' side. Three
needle rays of inconceivable energy lashed out, hurtling through the
cruisers' outer screens as though they had been so much inactive
webbing. Through the second and through the first. Through the wall
shield, even that ultrapowerful field scarcely flashing as it went
down. Through the armor, violating the prime tenet then held and
which has just been referred to, that no object free in space can be
damaged--in this case, so unthinkably vehement was the thrust, the
few atoms of substances in the space surrounding the doomed cruisers
afforded resistance enough. Through the ship itself, a ravening
cylinder of annihilation.
For perhaps a second--certainly no longer--those incredible, those
undreamed-of beams persisted before winking out into blackness; but
that second had been long enough. Three riddled hulks lay dead in
space, and as the three original projectors went black three more
flared out. Then three more. Nine of the mightiest of Civilization's
ships of war were riddled before the others could hurl themselves
backward out of range!
* * * * *
Most of the officers of the flagship were stunned into temporary
inactivity by that shocking development, but two reacted almost
instantly.
"Thorndyke!" the Admiral snapped. "What did they do, and how?"
And Kinnison, not speaking at all, leaped to a certain panel, to read
for himself the analysis of those incredible beams of force.
"They made superneedle rays out of their main projectors," Master
Technician Laverne Thorndyke reported, crisply. "They must have shorted
everything they've got onto them to burn them out that fast."
"Those beams were hot--plenty hot," Kinnison corroborated the findings.
"These recorders go to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten.
Even that wasn't anywhere nearly enough--everything in the recorder
circuits blew."
"But how could they handle them--" von Hohendorff began to ask.
"They didn't. They pointed them and died," Thorndyke explained,
grimly. "They traded one projector and its crew for one cruiser and
_its_ crew--a good trade from their viewpoint."
"There will be no more such trades," Haynes declared.
Nor were there. The Patrol had maulers enough to englobe the enemy
craft at a distance greater even than the effective range of those
suicidal beams, and it did so.
Shielding screens cut off the Boskonians' intake of cosmic power and
the relentless beaming of the bulldog maulers began. For hour after
hour it continued, the cordon ever tightening as the victims' power
lessened. And finally even the Gargantuan accumulators of the immense
fortresses were drained. Their screens went down under the hellish fury
of the maulers' incessant attack, and in a space of minutes thereafter
the structures and their contents ceased to exist save as atomic
detritus.
The Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol remade its formation after a
fashion and set off toward the Galaxy at touring blast.
And in the control room of the flagship three Lensmen brought a very
serious conference to a close.
"You saw what happened to Helmuth's planet," Kinnison's voice was
oddly hard, "and I gave you all I could get of the thought about the
destruction of all life upon Sol III. A big-enough duodec bomb in
the bottom of an ocean would do it. I don't really _know_ anything
except that we hadn't better let them catch us asleep at the switch
again--we've got to be up on our toes every second."
And the Gray Lensman, face set and stern, strode off to his quarters.