"Suicide? Or did you--" Gerrond paused, delicately. Winstead, the
Lensman of Narcotics, said nothing, but looked on intently.
"Neither," Kinnison replied, still studying. "I would have had to, but
she beat me to it."
"What d'you mean, 'neither'? She's dead, isn't she? How did it happen?"
"Not yet, and unless I'm more cockeyed even than usual, she won't be.
She isn't the type to rub herself out--ever, under any conditions. As
to 'how,' that was easy. A hollow false tooth. Simple, but new--and
clever. But why? WHY?" Kinnison was thinking to himself more than
addressing his companions. "If they had killed her, yes. As it is, it
doesn't make any kind of sense--any of it."
"But the girl's dying!" protested Gerrond. "What're you going to _do_?"
"I wish to Klono I knew." The Tellurian was puzzled, groping. "No
hurry doing anything about her--what was done to her has been done,
and no one this side of Hades can undo it--unless I can fit these
pieces together into some kind of a pattern I'll never know what it's
all about--none of it makes sense--" He shook himself and went on:
"One thing is plain. She won't die. If they had intended to kill her,
she would have died almost instantly. They figure she's worth saving;
in which I agree with them. At the same time, they certainly are not
planning on letting me tap her knowledge. They may be planning on
taking her away from us. Therefore, as long as she stays alive--or even
not dead, the way she is now--guard her so heavily that an army can't
get her. If she should happen to die, don't leave her body unguarded
for a second until she's been autopsied, and you know she'll _stay_
dead. The minute she recovers, day or night, call me. Might as well
take her to the hospital now, I guess."
The call came soon that the patient had indeed recovered.
"She's talking, but I haven't answered her," Gerrond reported. "There's
something strange here, Kinnison."
"There would be--bound to be. Hold everything until I get there," and
he hurried to the hospital.
"Good morning, Dessa," he greeted her in Aldebaranian. "You are feeling
better, I hope?"
Her reaction was surprising. "You really know me?" she almost shrieked,
and flung herself into the Lensman's arms. Not deliberately; not with
her wonted, highly effective technique of bringing into play the s.a.
equipment with which she was so overpoweringly armed. No; this was the
utterly innocent, the wholly unselfconscious abandon of a very badly
frightened young girl. "What happened?" she sobbed, frantically, "Where
am I? Why are all these strangers here?"
Her wide, childlike, tear-filled eyes sought his; and as he probed
them, deeper and deeper into the brain behind them; his face grew set
and hard. Mentally, she now _was_ a young and innocent girl! Nowhere
in her mind, not even in the deepest recesses of her subconscious,
was there the slightest inkling that she had even existed since her
fifteenth year. It was staggering; it was unheard of; but it was
indubitably a fact. For her, now, the intervening time had lapsed
instantaneously--five or six years of her life had disappeared so
utterly as never to have been!
"You have been very ill, Dessa," he told her gravely, "and you are
no longer a child." He led her into another room and up to a triple
mirror. "See for yourself."
"But that isn't I?" she protested. "It can't be! Why, she's beautiful!"
"You're all of that," the Lensman agreed, casually. "You've had a bad
shock. Your memory will return shortly, I think. Now you must go back
to bed."
She did so, but not to sleep. Instead, she went into a trance; and so,
almost, did Kinnison. For over an hour he lay intensely asprawl in an
easy-chair, the while he engraved, day by day, a memory of missing
years into that bare storehouse of knowledge. And finally the task was
done.
"Sleep, Dessa," he told her then. "Sleep. Waken in eight hours; whole."
"Lensman, you're a _man_!" Gerrond realized vaguely what had been done.
"You didn't give her the truth, of course?"
"Far from it. Only that she was married and is a widow. The rest of it
is highly fictitious--just enough like the real thing so that she can
square herself with herself, if she meets old acquaintances. Plenty of
lapses, of course, but they're covered by shock."
"But the husband?" queried the curious Radeligian.
"That's her business," Kinnison countered, callously. "She'll tell you,
if she ever feels like it. One thing I did do, though--they'll never
use her again. The next man that tries to hypnotize her will be lucky
if he gets away alive."
* * * * *
The advent of Dessa Desplaines, however, and his curious adventure with
her, had altered markedly the Lensman's situation. No one else in the
throng had worn a screen, but there might have been agents--anyway, the
observed facts would enable the higher-ups to link Fordyce up with what
had happened--they would know, of course, that the real Fordyce hadn't
done it--he could be Fordyce no longer.
Wherefore the real Chester Q. Fordyce took over and a strange
Unattached Lensman appeared. A Posenian, supposedly, since against
the air of Radelix he wore that planet's unmistakable armor. No other
race of even approximately human shape could "see" through a helmet of
solid, opaque metal.
And in this guise Kinnison continued his investigations. That place and
that man must be on this planet somewhere; the sending outfit worn by
the Desplaines woman could not possibly reach any other. He had a good
picture of the room and a fair picture--several pictures, in fact--of
the man. The room was an actuality; all he had had to do was to fill
in the details which definitely, by unmistakable internal evidence,
belonged there. The man was different. How much of the original picture
was real, and how much of it was the girl's impression?
She was, he knew, physically fastidious almost to an extreme. He knew
that no possible hypnotism could nullify completely the basic, the
fundamental characteristics of the subconscious. The intrinsic ego
could not be changed. Was the man really such a monster, or was the
picture in the girl's mind partially or largely the product of her
physical revulsion?
For hours he had sat at a recording machine, covering yard after yard
of tape with every possible picture of the man he wanted. Pictures
ranging from a man almost of normal build up to a thing duplicating in
every detail the woman's mental image.
Now he ran the tape again, time after time. The two extremes, he
concluded, were highly improbable. Somewhere in between--the man _was_
fat, he guessed. Fat, and had a mean pair of eyes. And, no matter how
Kinnison changed the man's physical shape he had found it impossible to
eradicate a personality that was definitely bad.
"The guy's a louse," Kinnison decided, finally. "Needs killing. Glad
of that--if I have to keep on fighting women much longer I'll go
completely nuts. Got enough dope to identify him now, I think."
And again the Tellurian Lensman set out to comb the planet, city
by city. Since he was not now dealing with Lensmen, every move he
made had to be carefully planned and as carefully concealed. It was
heartbreaking; but at long last he found a bartender who had once seen
his quarry. He _was_ fat, Kinnison discovered, and he was a bad egg.
From that point on, progress was rapid. He went to the indicated city,
which was, ironically enough, the very Ardith from which he had set
out; and, from a bit of information here and a bit there, he tracked
down his man. He found the room first, and then the man. The girl
wasn't so far wrong, at that. Her aversion was somewhat worse than the
actuality, but not too much.
Now what to do? The technique he had used so successfully upon Boyssia
II and in other bases could not succeed here; there were thousands of
people instead of dozens, and someone would certainly catch him at it.
Nor could he work at a distance. He was no Arisian, he had to be right
beside his job. He would have to turn dock-walloper.
Therefore a dock-walloper he became. Not like one, but actually one.
He labored prodigiously, his fine hands and his entire being becoming
coarse and hardened. He ate prodigiously, and drank likewise. But,
wherever he drank, his liquor was poured from the bartender's own
bottle or from one of similarly innocuous contents; for then, as
now, bartenders did not themselves imbibe the corrosively potent
distillates in which they dealt. Nevertheless, Kinnison became
intoxicated--boisterously, flagrantly, and pugnaciously so, as did his
fellows.
He lived scrupulously within his dock-walloper's wages. Eight credits
per week went to the company, in advance, for room and board; the
rest he spent over the fat man's bar or gambled away at the fat man's
crooked games--for Bominger, although engaged in vaster commerce
far, nevertheless, allowed no scruple to interfere with his esurient
rapacity. Money was money, whatever its amount or source or however
despicable its means of acquirement.
The Lensman knew that the games were crooked, certainly. He could see,
however they were concealed, the crooked mechanisms of the wheels.
He could see the crooked workings of the dealers' minds as they
manipulated their crooked decks. He could read as plainly as his own
the cards his crooked opponents held. But to win or to protest would
have set him apart, hence he was always destitute before pay day. Then,
like his fellows, he spent his spare time loafing in the same saloon,
vaguely hoping for a free drink or for a stake at cards, until one of
the bouncers threw him out.
* * * * *
But in his every waking hour, working, gambling, or loafing, he
studied Bominger and Bominger's various enterprises. The Lensman
could not pierce the fat man's thought-screen, and he could never
catch him without it. However, he could and did learn much. He read
volume after volume of locked account books, page by page. He read
secret documents, hidden in the deepest recesses of massive vault. He
listened in on conference after conference; for a thought-screen of
course, does not interfere with either sight or sound. The Big Shot did
not own--legally--the saloon, nor the ornate, almost palatial back
room which was his office. Nor did he own the dance hall and boudoirs
upstairs, nor the narrow, cell-like rooms in which addicts of twice a
score of different noxious drugs gave themselves over libidinously to
their addictions. Nevertheless, they were his; and they were only a
part of that which was his.
Kinnison detected, traced, and identified agent after agent. With his
sense of perception he followed passages, leading to other scenes,
utterly indescribable here. One comparatively short gallery, however,
terminated in a different setting altogether; for there, as here and
perhaps everywhere, ostentation and squalor lie almost back to back.
Nalizok's Café, the high-life hot-spot of Radelix! Downstairs was
innocuous enough; nothing rough--that is, too rough--was ever pulled
there. Most of the robbery there was open and above-board, plainly
written upon the checks. But there were upstairs rooms, and cellar
rooms, and back rooms. And there were addicts, differing only from
those others in wearing finer raiment and being of a self-styled higher
stratum. Basically they were the same.
Men, women, girls ever were there, in the rigid muscle-lock of
thionite. Teeth hard-set, every muscle tense and staring, eyes jammed
closed, fists clenched, faces white as though carved from marble,
immobile in the frenzied emotion which characterized the ultimately
passionate fulfillment of every suppressed desire; in the release of
their every inhibition crowding perilously close to the dividing line
beyond which lay death from sheer ecstasy. That was the technique of
the thionite-sniffer--to take every microgram that he could stand, to
come to, shaken and too weak even to walk; to swear that he would never
so degrade himself again; to come back after more as soon as he had
recovered strength to do so; and finally, with an irresistible craving
for stronger and ever stronger thrills, to take a larger dose than his
rapidly-weakening body could endure, and so to cross the fatal line.
There also were the idiotically smiling faces of the hadive smokers,
the twitching members of those who preferred the Centralian
nitrolabe-needle, the helplessly stupefied eaters of bentlam--but why
go on? Suffice it to say that in that one city block could be found
every vice and every drug enjoyed by Radeligians and the usual run
of visitors; and if perchance you were an unusual visitor, desiring
something unusual, Bominger could get it for you--at a price.
Kinnison studied, perceived, and analyzed. Also, he reported, via Lens,
daily and copiously, to Narcotics, under Lensman's Seal.
"But Kinnison!" Winstead protested one day. "How much longer are you
going to make us wait?"
"Until I get what I came after or until they get onto me," Kinnison
replied, flatly. For weeks his Lens had been hidden in the side of
his shoe, in a flat sheath of highly charged metal, proof against any
except the most minutely searching spy-ray inspection; but this new
location did not in any way interfere with its functioning.
"Any danger of that?" the Narcotics head asked, anxiously.
"Plenty--and getting worse every day. More actors in the drama. Some
day I'll make a slip--I can't keep this up forever."
"Let us go, then," Winstead urged. "We've got enough now to blow this
ring out of existence, all over the planet."
"Not yet. You're making good progress, aren't you?"
"Yes, but considering--"
"Don't consider it yet. Your present progress is normal for your
increased force. Any more would touch off an alarm. You could take this
planet's drug personnel, yes, but that isn't what I'm after. I want big
game, not small fry. So sit tight until I give you the g.a. QX?"
"Got to be QX if you say so, Kinnison. Be careful!"
"I am. Won't be long now, I'm sure. Bound to break very shortly, one
way or the other. If possible, I'll give you and Gerrond warning."
* * * * *
Kinnison had everything lined up except the one thing he had come
after. This was, in fact, the headquarters of the drug syndicate for
the entire planet of Radelix. He knew where the stuff came in, and
when, and how. He knew who received it, and the principal distributors
of it. He knew almost all of the secret agents of the ring, and not a
few even of the small-fry peddlers. He knew where the remittances went,
and how much, and what for. But every lead had stopped at Bominger.
Apparently the fat man was the absolute head of the drug syndicate;
and that appearance didn't make sense--it _had_ to be false. Bominger
and the other planetary lieutenants--themselves only small fry if the
Lensman's ideas were only half right--_must_ get orders from, and send
reports and, in probability, payments to some Boskonian authority; of
that Kinnison felt certain, but he had not been able to get even the
slightest trace of that higher-up.
That the communication would be established upon a thought-beam the
Tellurian was equally certain. The Boskonian would not trust any
ordinary, tappable communicator beam, and he certainly would not be
such a fool as to send any written or taped or otherwise permanently
recorded message, however coded. No, that message, when it came, would
come as thought, and to receive it the fat man would have to release
his screen. Then, and not until then, could Kinnison act. Action at
that time might not prove simple--judging from the precautions Bominger
was taking already, he would not release his screen without taking
plenty more--but until then the Lensman could do nothing.
That screen had not yet been released, Kinnison could swear to that.
True, he had had to sleep at times, but he had slept in a very
hair-trigger, with his subconscious and his Lens set to guard that
screen and to give the alarm at its first sign of weakening.
As the Lensman had foretold, the break came soon. Not in the middle of
the night, as he had half-thought that it would come; nor yet in the
quiet of the daylight hours. Instead, it came well before midnight,
while revelry was at its height. It did not come suddenly, but was
heralded by a long period of gradually increasing tension, of a mental
stress very apparent to the mind of the watcher.
Agents of the drug baron came in, singly and in groups, to an
altogether unprecedented number. Some of them were their usual
viciously self-contained selves, others were slightly but definitely
ill at ease. Kinnison, seated alone at a small table, playing a game
of Radeligian solitaire, divided his attention between the big room as
a whole and the office of Bominger; in neither of which was anything
definite happening.
Then a wave of excitement swept over the agents as five men wearing
thought-screens entered the room and, sitting down at a reserved table,
called for cards and drinks; and Kinnison thought it time to send his
warning.
"Gerrond! Winstead! Three-way! It's going to break soon, now,
I think--tonight. Agents all over the place--five men with
thought-screens here on the floor. Nervous tension high. Lots more
agents outside, for blocks. General precaution, I think, not specific.
Not suspicious of me, at least not exactly. Afraid of spies with a
sense of perception--Rigellians or Posenians or such. Just killed an
Ordovik on general principles, over on the next block. Get your gangs
ready, but don't come too close--just close enough so that you can be
here in thirty seconds after I call you."
"What do you mean 'not exactly suspicious'? What have you done?"
"Nothing that I know of--any one of a million possible small slips I
may have made. Nothing serious, though, or they wouldn't have let me
hang around this long."
"You're in danger. No armor, no DeLameter, no anything. Better come out
while you can."
"And miss what I've spent all this time building up? Not a chance; I'll
be able to take care of myself, I think--Here comes one of the boys in
a screen, to talk to me. I'll leave my Lens open, so that you can sort
of look on."
* * * * *
Just then Bominger's screen went down and Kinnison invaded his mind;
taking complete possession of it. Under his domination the fat man
reported to the Boskonian, reported truly and fully. In turn, he
received orders and instructions. Had any inquisitive stranger been
around, or anyone on the planet using any kind of a mind-ray machine
since that quadruply-accursed Lensman had held that trial? (Oh, that
was what had touched them off! Kinnison was glad to know it.) No,
nothing unusual at all--
And just at that critical moment, when the Lensman's mind was so busy
with its task, the stranger came up to his table and stared down at him
dubiously, questioningly.
"Well, what's on _your_ mind?" Kinnison growled. He could not spare
much of his mind just then, but it did not take much of it to play his
part as a dock-walloper. "You another of these smoking house-numbers,
snooping around to see if I'm trying to run a blazer on myself? By the
devil and his imps, if I hadn't lost so much money here already I'd
tear up this deck and go over to Croleo's and _never_ come near this
crummy joint again--his rotgut can't be any worse than yours is."
"Don't burn out a jet, pal." The agent, apparently reassured, adopted a
conciliatory tone.
"Who in hell ever said you was a pal of mine, you Radelig-gig-gigian
pimp?" The supposedly three quarters drunken, certainly three quarters
naked, Lensman got up, wobbled a little, and sat down again, heavily.
"Don't 'pal' me, ape--I'm partic-hic-hicular about who I pal with."
"That's all right, big fellow; no offense intended," soothed the other.
"Come on, I'll buy you a drink."
"Don't want no drink until after I've finished this game," Kinnison
grumbled, and took an instant to flash a thought via Lens. "All set,
boys? Thing's moving fast. If I have to take this drink--it's doped, of
course--I'll bust this bird wide open. When I yell, shake the lead out
of your pants!"
"Of course you want a drink!" the pirate urged. "Come and get it--it's
on me, you know."
"And who are you to be buying me, a Tellurian gentleman, a drink?" the
Lensman roared, flaring into one of the sudden, senseless rages of the
character he had cultivated so assiduously. "Did I ask you for a drink?
I'm educated, I am, and I've got money, I have. I'll buy myself a drink
when I want one." His rage mounted higher and higher, visibly. "Did I
_ever_ ask you for a drink, you--" (unprintable here for the space of
two long breaths).
This was the blow-off. If the fellow was even half honest, there would
be a fight, which Kinnison could make as long as necessary. If he did
not start slugging after what Kinnison had just called him, he was not
what he seemed and the Lensman was surely suspected; for the Earthman
had dredged out the noisomest depths of the foulest vocabularies in
space for the terms he had just employed.
"If you weren't drunk I'd break every bone in your laxlo-soaked
carcass." The other man's anger was sternly suppressed, but he looked
at the dock-walloper with no friendship in his eyes. "I don't ask lousy
spaceport bums to drink with me every day, and when I do, they do--or
else. Do you want to take that drink now or do you want a couple of the
boys to work you over first? Barkeep! Bring two glasses of laxlo over
here!"
Now the time was short, indeed, but Kinnison would not--could not--act
yet. Bominger's conference was still on; the Lensman didn't know enough
yet. The fellow wasn't very suspicious, certainly, or he would have
made a pass at him before this. Bloodshed meant less than nothing to
these gentry; the stranger did not want to incur Bominger's wrath by
killing a steady customer. The fellow probably thought the whole mind
ray story was hocus-pocus, anyway--not a chance in a million of it
being true. Besides, he needed a machine, and Kinnison couldn't hide
a thing, let alone anything as big as that mind-ray machine had been,
because he didn't have clothes enough on to flag a handcar with. But
that free drink was certainly doped--Oh, they wanted to question him.
It would be a truth-dope in the laxlo, then--he certainly couldn't take
_that_ drink!
Then came the all-important second; just as the bartender set the
glasses down Bominger's interview ended. At the signing off, Kinnison
got additional data, just as he had thought that he would; and in that
instant, before the drugmaster could restore his screen, the fat man
died--his brain literally blasted. And in that same instant Kinnison's
Lens fairly throbbed with the power of the call he sent out to his
allies.
But not even Kinnison could hurl such a mental bolt without some
outward sign. His face stiffened, perhaps, or his eyes may have lost
their drunken, vacant stare, to take on momentarily the keen, cold
ruthlessness that was for the moment his. At any rate, the enemy agent
was now definitely suspicious.
"Drink that, bum, and drink it quick--or burn!" he snapped, DeLameter
out and poised.
[Illustration: _Kinnison looked up at the stranger blearily. "Drink
that, bum, and drink it quick--or burn!" the gunman snapped._]
The Tellurian's hand reached out for the glass, but his mind also
reached out, and faster by a second, to the brains of two nearby
agents. Those worthies drew their own weapons and, with wild yells,
began firing. Seemingly indiscriminately, yet in those blasts two of
the thought-screened minions died. For a fraction of a second even the
hard-schooled mind of Kinnison's opponent was distracted, and that was
long enough for the Gray Lensman's instantaneous nervous reactions and
his mighty muscles.
* * * * *
A quick flick of the wrist sent the potent liquor into the Boskonian's
eyes; a lightning thrust of the knee sent the little table hurtling
against his gun-hand, flinging the weapon afar. Simultaneously, the
Lensman's hamlike fist, urged by all the strength and all the speed
of his two hundred and sixteen pounds of rawhide and whalebone, drove
forward. Not for the jaw. Not for the head or the face. Lensmen know
better than to mash bare hands, break fingers and knuckles, against
bone. For the solar plexus. The big Patrolman's fist sank forearm-deep.
The stricken zwilnik uttered one shrieking grunt, doubled up, and
collapsed; never to rise again. Kinnison leaped for the fellow's
DeLameter--too late, he was already hemmed in.
One--two--three--four of the nearest men died without having received a
physical blow; again and again Kinnison's heavy fists and far heavier
feet crashed deep into vital spots. One thought-screened enemy dived
at him bodily in a Tomingan donganeur, to fall with a broken neck as
the Lensman opposed instantly the only possible parry--a savage chop,
edge-handed, just below the base of the skull; the while he disarmed
the surviving thought-screened stranger with an accurately-hurled
chair. The latter, feinting a swing, launched a vicious French kick.
The Lensman, expecting anything, perceived the foot coming. His big
hands shot out like striking snakes, closing and twisting savagely in
the one fleeting instant, then jerking upward and backward. A hard and
heavy dock-walloper's boot crashed thuddingly to a mark. A shriek rent
the air and that foeman, too, was done.
Not fair fighting, no; nor cluvvy. Lensmen did not and do not fight
according to the tenets of the late Marquis of Queensberry. They use
the weapons provided by Mother Nature only when they must; but they
can, and do use them with telling effect indeed, when body-to-body
brawling becomes necessary. For they are skilled in the art--every
Lensman has a completely detailed knowledge of all the lethal tricks of
foul combat known to all the dirty fighters of ten thousand planets for
twice ten thousand years.
And then the doors and windows crashed in, admitting those whom
no other bifurcate race has ever faced willingly in hand-to-hand
combat--full-armed Valerians, swinging their space-axes!
The gangsters broke then, and fled in panic disorder; but escape from
Narcotics' fine-meshed net was impossible. They were cut down to a man.
"QX, Kinnison?" came two hard, sharp thoughts. The Lensmen did not see
the Tellurian, but Lieutenant Peter van Buskirk did. That is, he saw
him, but did not look at him.
"Hi, Kim, you little Tellurian wart!" That worthy's thought was a yell.
"Ain't we got fun?"
"QX fellows--thanks," to Gerrond and to Winstead, and--
"Ho, Bus! Thanks, you big, Valerian ape!" to the gigantic
Dutch-Valerian with whom he had shared so many experiences in the past.
"A good clean-up, fellows?"
"One hundred per cent, thanks to you. We'll put you--"
"Don't, please. You will probably clog my jets if you do. I don't
appear in this anywhere--it's just one of your good, routine jobs of
mopping up. Clear ether, fellows, I've got to do a flit."
"Where?" all three wanted to ask, but they didn't--the Gray Lensman was
gone.