Considerably more than the stipulated week passed before Kinnison was
done with the librarian and with the long-range communicator beam,
but eventually he succeeded in enlisting the aid of the fifty-three
most eminent scientists and thinkers of all the planets of Galactic
Civilization. From all over the Galaxy were they selected; from
Vandemar and Centralia and Alsakan; from Chickladoria and Radelix; from
the solar systems of Rigel and Sirius and Antares. Millions of planets
were not represented at all; and of the few which were, Tellus alone
had more than one delegate.
This was necessary, Kinnison explained carefully to each of the chosen.
Sir Austin Cardynge, the man whose phenomenal brain had developed a
new mathematics to handle the positron and the negative energy levels,
was the one who would do the work; he himself was present merely as
a co-ordinator and observer. The meeting place, even, was not upon
Tellus, but upon Medon, the newly acquired and hence entirely neutral
planet. For the Gray Lensman knew well the minds with which he would
have to deal.
They were all the geniuses of the highest rank, but in all too many
cases their stupendous mentalities merged altogether too closely upon
insanity for any degree of comfort. Even before the conclave assembled
it became evident that jealousy was to be rife and rampant; and after
the initial meeting, at which the problem itself was propounded, it
required all of Kinnison's ability, authority, and drive, and all of
Worsel's vast diplomacy and tact, to keep those mighty brains at work.
Time after time, some essential entity, his dignity outraged and his
touchy ego infuriated by some real or fancied insult, stalked off
in high dudgeon to return to his own planet; only to be coaxed or
bullied, or even mentally man-handled by Kinnison or Worsel, or both,
into returning to his task.
[Illustration: _Time after time some essential scientist stalked off in
high dudgeon, with Kinnison trailing, soothing ruffled ego._]
Nor were those insults all, or even mostly, imaginary. Quarreling and
bickering were incessant, violent flare-ups and passionate scenes of
denunciation and vituperation were of almost hourly occurrence. Each
of those minds had been accustomed to world-wide adulation, to the
unquestioned acceptance as gospel of his every idea or pronouncement,
and to have to submit his work to the scrutiny and to the unworshipful
criticisms of lesser minds--actually to have to give way, at times,
to those inferior mentalities--was a situation quite definitely
intolerable.
But at length most of them began to work together, as they appreciated
the fact that the problem before them was one which none of them singly
had been able even partially to solve; and Kinnison let the others, the
most fanatically non-co-operative, go home. The progress began--and
none too soon. The Gray Lensman had lost twenty-five pounds of weight,
and even the iron-thewed Worsel was a wreck. He could not fly, he
declared, because his wings buckled in the middle; he could not crawl,
because his belly-plate clashed against his backbone!
And finally the thing was done; reduced to a set of equations which
could be written upon a single sheet of paper. It is true that those
equations would have been meaningless to almost anyone then alive,
since they were based upon a system of mathematics which had been
brought into existence at that very meeting, but Kinnison had taken
care of that.
No Medonian had been allowed in the Conference--the admittance of one
to membership would have caused a massed exodus of the high-strung,
temperamental maniacs working so furiously there--but the Tellurian
Lensman had had recorded every act, almost every thought, of every
one of those geniuses. Those records had been studied for weeks, not
only by Wise of Medon and his staff, but also by a corps of the less
brilliant, but infinitely better balanced scientists of the Patrol
proper.
"Now you fellows can really get to work." Kinnison heaved a sigh of
profound relief as the last member of the Conference figuratively shook
the dust of Medon off his robe as he departed homeward. "I'm going to
sleep for a week. Call me, will you, when you get the model done?"
* * * * *
This was sheerest exaggeration, of course, for nothing could have
kept the Lensman from watching the construction of that first
apparatus. He watched the erection of a spherical shell of loosely
latticed truss-work some twenty feet in diameter. He watched the
installation, at its six cardinal points, of atomic exciters, each
capable of transforming ten thousand pounds per hour of substance into
pure energy. He knew that those exciters were driving their intake
screens at a ratio of at least twenty thousand to one; that energy
equivalent to the annihilation of at least six hundred thousand tons
per hour of material was being hurled into the center of that web from
the six small mechanisms which were in fact, super-Bergenholms. Nor
is that word adequate to describe them. They were engines at whose
power the late Dr. Bergenholm himself would have quailed; demons
whose fabrication would have been utterly impossible without Medonian
conductors and insulation.
He watched the construction of a conveyor and a chute and looked
on intently while a hundred thousand tons of refuse--rocks, sand,
concrete, scrap iron, loose metal, débris of all kinds--were dropped
into that innocuous-appearing sphere, only to vanish as though they had
never existed.
"But we ought to be able to see it by this time, I should think!"
Kinnison protested once.
"Not yet, Kim," Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke informed him. "Just
forming the vortex--microscopic yet. I haven't the faintest idea of
what is going on in there; but man, dear man, _am_ I glad that I'm here
to help make it go on!"
"But _when_?" demanded the Lensman. "How soon will you know whether
it's going to work or not? I want to do a flit."
"You can flit any time--now, if you like," the technician told him,
brutally. "We don't need _you_ any more--you've done your bit. It's
working now. If it wasn't, do you think we could pack all that stuff
into that little space? But we'll have it done long before you'll need
it."
"But I want to see it work, you big lug!" Kinnison retorted, only half
playfully.
"Come back in three-four days--maybe a week; but don't expect to see
anything but a hole."
"That's exactly what I want to see, a hole in space," and that was
precisely what, a few days later, the Lensman did see.
The spherical framework was unchanged, the machines were still carrying
easily their incredible working load. Material--any and all kinds of
stuff--was still disappearing; instantaneously, invisibly, quietly,
with no flash or fury to mark its passing.
But at the center of that massive sphere there now hung poised a--a
_something_. Or was it a nothing? Mathematically, it was a sphere, or
rather a negasphere, about the size of a baseball; but the eye, while
it could see something, could not perceive it analytically. Nor could
the mind envision it in three dimensions, for it was not essentially
three-dimensional in nature. Light sank into the thing, whatever it
was, and vanished. The peering eye could see nothing whatever of shape
or of texture; the mind behind the eye reeled away before infinite
vistas of nothingness.
Kinnison hurled his extrasensory perception into it and jerked
back, almost stunned. It was neither darkness nor blackness, he
decided, after he recovered enough poise to think coherently. It
was worse than that--worse than anything imaginable--an infinitely
vast and yet non-existent realm of the total absence of everything
whatever--_absolute negation_!
"That's it, I guess," the Lensman said then. "Might as well stop
feeding it now."
"We would have to stop soon, in any case," Wise replied, "for your
available waste material is becoming scarce. It will take the substance
of a fairly large planet to produce that which you require. You have,
perhaps, a planet in mind which is to be used for the purpose?"
"Better than that. I have in mind the material of just such a planet,
but already broken up into sizes convenient for handling."
"Oh, the asteroid belt!" Thorndyke exclaimed. "Fine! Kill two birds
with one stone, huh? Build this thing and at the same time clear out
the menaces to inert interplanetary navigation? But how about the
miners?"
"All covered. The ones actually in development will be let alone.
They're not menaces, anyway, as they all have broadcasters. The tramp
miners we send--at Patrol expense and grubstake--to some other system
to do their mining. But there's one more point before we flit. Are you
sure that you can shift to the second stage without an accident?"
"Positive. Build another one around it, mount new Bergs, exciters, and
screens on it, and let this one, machines and all, go in to feed the
kitty--whatever it is," the technician finished.
"QX. Let's go, fellows!"
* * * * *
Two huge Tellurian freighters were at hand; and, holding the small
framework between them in a net of tractors and pressors, they set off
blithely toward Sol. They took a couple of hours for the journey--and
there was no hurry, and in the handling of this particular freight
caution was decidedly of the essence.
Arrived at destination, the crews tackled with zest and zeal this new
game. Tractors lashed out, seizing chunks of iron--
"Pick out the little ones, men," cautioned Kinnison. "Nothing over
about ten feet in section-dimension will go into this frame. Better
wait for the second frame before you try to handle the big ones."
"We can cut 'em up," Thorndyke suggested. "What've we got these
shear-planes for?"
"QX if you like. Just so you keep the kitty fed."
"We'll feed her!" and the game went on.
Chunks of débris--some rock, but mostly solid meteoric
nickel-iron--shot toward the vessels and the ravening sphere, becoming
inertialess as they entered a wide-flung zone. Pressors seized them
avidly, pushing them through the interstices of the framework, holding
them against the voracious screen. As they touched the screen they
disappeared; no matter how fast they were driven the screen ate them
away, silently and unspectacularly, as fast as they could be thrown
against it. A weird spectacle indeed, to see a jagged fragment of solid
iron, having a mass of thousands of tons, drive against that screen
and disappear! For it vanished, utterly, along a geometrically perfect
spherical surface. From the opposite side the eye could see the mirror
sheen of the metal at the surface of disintegration! It was as though
the material were being shoved out of our familiar three-dimensional
space into another universe--which, as a matter of cold fact, may have
been the case.
For not even the men who were doing the work made any pretense of
understanding what was happening to that iron. Indeed, the only
entities who did have any comprehension of the phenomenon--the
forty-odd geniuses whose mathematical wizardry had made it
possible--thought of it and discussed it, not in the limited,
three-dimensional symbols of everyday existence, but only in the
language of high mathematics; a language in which few indeed, are able
to really and readily to think.
And while the crews became more and more expert at the new technique,
so that metal came in faster and faster--huge, hot-sliced bars of iron
ten feet square and a quarter of a mile long were being driven into
that enigmatic sphere of extinction--an outer framework a hundred and
fifty miles in diameter was being built. Nor, contrary to what might
be supposed, was a prohibitive amount of metal or of labor necessary
to fabricate that mammoth structure. Instead of six there were six
cubed--two hundred and sixteen--working stations, complete with
generators and super-Bergenholms and screen generators, each mounted
upon a massive platform; but, instead of being connected together and
supported by stupendous beams and trusses of metal, those platforms
were linked by infinitely stronger bonds of pure force. It took a lot
of ships to do the job, but the technicians of the Patrol had at call
enough floating machine shops and to spare.
When the sphere of negation grew to be about a foot in apparent
diameter it had been found necessary to surround it with a screen
opaque to all visible light, for to look into it long or steadily then
meant insanity. Now the opaque screen was sixteen feet in diameter,
nearing dangerously the sustaining framework, and the outer frame was
ready. It was time to change.
The Lensman held his breath, but the Medonians and the Tellurian
technicians did not turn a hair as they mounted their new stations and
tested their apparatus.
"Ready." "Ready." "Ready." Station after station reported:
then, as Thorndyke threw in the master switch, the primary
sphere--invisible now, through distance, to the eye, but plain upon the
visiplates--disappeared; a mere morsel to those new, gigantic forces.
"Swing into it, boys!" Thorndyke yelled into his transmitter. "We don't
have to feed her with a teaspoon any more. Let her have it!"
* * * * *
And "let her have it" they did. No more cutting up of the larger
meteorites; asteroids ten, fifteen, twenty miles in diameter, along
with hosts of smaller stuff, were literally hurled through the black
screen into the even lusher blackness of that which was inside it,
without complaint from the quietly humming motors.
"Satisfied, Kim?" Master Technician Thorndyke asked.
"Uh-_huh_!" the Lensman assented, vigorously. "Nice! Slick, in fact,"
he commended. "I'll buzz off now, I guess."
"Might as well--everything's on the green. Clear ether, spacehound!"
"Same to you, big fella. I'll be seeing you, or sending you a thought.
There's Tellus, right over there. Funny, isn't it, doing a flit to a
place you can actually see before you start?"
The trip to Earth was scarcely a hop, even in a supply-boat. To Prime
Base the Gray Lensman went, where he found that his new non-ferrous
speedster was done; and during the next few days he tested it out
thoroughly. It did not register at all, neither upon the regular,
long-range ultra-instruments nor upon the short-range emergency
electros. Nor could it be seen in space, even in a telescope at
point-blank range. True, it occulted an occasional star; but since
even the direct rays of a searchlight failed to reveal its shape to the
keenest eye--the Lensman chemists who had worked out that ninety-nine
point nine nine percent absolute black coating had done a wonderful
job--the chance of discovery through that occurrence was very slight.
"QX, Kim?" the Port Admiral asked. He was accompanying the Gray Lensman
on a last tour of inspection.
"Fine, chief. Couldn't be better--thanks a lot."
"Sure you're non-ferrous yourself?"
"Absolutely. Not even an iron nail in my shoes."
"What is it, then? You look worried. Want something expensive?"
"You hit the thumb, admiral, right on the nail. The trouble is not only
that it's expensive; I'm afraid that probably we'll never have any use
for it."
"Better build it, anyway. Then if you want it you'll have it, and if
you don't want it we can always use it for something. What is it?"
"A nutcracker. There are a lot of cold planets around, aren't there,
that aren't good for anything?"
"Thousands of them--perhaps millions."
"The Medonians put Bergenholms on their planet and flew it from
Lundmark's Nebula to here in a few weeks. Why wouldn't it be a sound
idea to have the planetographers pick out a couple of useless worlds
which, at some points in their orbits, have diametrically opposite
velocities, to within a degree or two?"
"You've got something there, my boy. It shall be done, and at once. A
thing like that is very much worth having, just for its own sake, if we
never have any use for it. Anything else?"
"Not a thing in the universe. Clear ether, chief!"
"Light landings, Kinnison!" and gracefully, effortlessly, the
dead-black sliver of semi-precious metal lifted herself away from
Earth.
* * * * *
Through Bominger, the Radeligian Big Shot, Kinnison had had a long and
eminently satisfactory interview with Prellin, the Regional Director
of all surviving Boskonian activities. Thus he knew where the latter
was, even to the address, and knew the name of the firm which was
his alias--Ethan D. Wembleson & Sons, Inc., 4627 Boulevard Dezalies,
Cominoche, Quadrant Eight, Bronseca. That name was Kim's first shock,
for that firm was one of the largest and most conservative houses
in galactic trade; one having an unquestioned AAA1 rating in every
mercantile index.
However, that was the way they worked, Kinnison reflected, as his
speedster reeled off the parsecs. It wasn't far to Bronseca--easy
Lens distance--he'd better call somebody there and start making
arrangements. He had heard about the planet, although he'd never been
there. Somewhat warmer than Tellus, but otherwise very Earthlike.
Millions of Tellurians lived there and liked it.
His approach to the planet Bronseca was characterized by all possible
caution, as was his visit to Cominoche, the capital city. He found
that 4627 Boulevard Dezalies was a structure covering an entire city
block and some eighty stories high, owned and occupied exclusively by
Wembleson's. No visitors were allowed except by appointment. His first
stroll past it showed him that an immense cylinder, comprising almost
the whole interior of the building, was shielded by thought-screens. He
rode up and down in the elevators of nearby buildings--no penetration.
He visited a dozen offices in the neighborhood upon various errands,
choosing his time with care so that he would have to wait in each an
hour or so in order to see his man.
These leisurely scrutinies of his objective failed to reveal a single
fact of value. Ethan D. Wembleson & Sons, Inc., did a tremendous
business, but every ounce of it was legitimate! That is, the files in
the outer offices covered only legitimate transactions, and the men
and women busily at work there were all legitimately employed. And the
inner offices--vastly more extensive than the outer, to judge by the
number of employees entering in the morning and leaving at the close of
business--were sealed against his prying, every second of every day.
He tapped in turn the minds of dozens of those clerks, but drew only
blanks. As far as they were concerned, there was nothing "queer" going
on anywhere in the organization. The "Old Man"--Howard Wembleson, a
grandnephew or something of Ethan--had developed a complex lately that
his life was in danger. Scarcely left the building--not that he had any
need to, as he had always had palatial quarters there--and then only
under heavy guard.
A good many thought-screened persons came and went, but a careful study
of them and their movements convinced the Gray Lensman that he was
wasting his time.
"No soap," he reported to a Lensman at Bronseca's Base. "Might as well
try to stick a pin quietly into a cateagle. He's been told that he's
the next link in the chain, and he's got the jitters right. I'll bet
he's got a dozen loose observers, instead of only one. I'll save time,
I think, by tracing another line. I have thought before that my best
bet is in the asteroid dens instead of on the planets. I let them talk
me out of it--it's a dirty job and I've got to establish an identity of
my own, which will be even dirtier--but it looks as though I'll have to
go back to it."
"But the others are warned, too," suggested the Bronsecan. "They'll
probably be just as bad. Let's blast it open and take a chance on
finding the data you want."
"No," Kinnison said, emphatically. "Not a chance in the universe that
there's anything there that would do me a bit of good on the big hunt.
The others are probably warned, yes, but since they aren't on my direct
line to the throne, they probably aren't taking it as seriously as this
Prellin--or Wembleson--is. Or if they are, they won't keep it up as
long. They can't, and get any joy out of life at all.
"And you can't say a word to Prellin about his screens, either," the
Tellurian went on in reply to a thought. "They're legal enough; just as
much so as spy-ray blocks. Every man has a right to privacy. Just one
question here, or just one suspicious move, is apt to blow everything
into a cocked hat. You fellows keep on working along the lines we laid
out and I'll try another line. If it works, I'll come back and we'll
open this can the way you want to. That way, we may be able to get the
low-down on about four hundred planetary organizations at one haul."
* * * * *
Thus it came about that Kinnison took his scarcely-used indetectable
speedster back to Prime Base; and that, in a solar system prodigiously
far removed from both Tellus and Bronseca, there appeared another tramp
meteor-miner.
Peculiar people, these toilers in the interplanetary voids; flotsam and
jetsam; for the most part the very scum of space. Some solar systems
contain vastly greater amounts of asteroidal and meteoric débris than
did ours of Sol; others somewhat less; but all have at least some.
In the main this material is either nickel-iron or rock, but some of
these fragments carry prodigious values in platinum, osmium, and other
noble metals, and occasionally there are discovered diamonds and other
gems of tremendous size and value. Hence, in the asteroid belts of
every solar system there are to be found those universally despised,
but nevertheless bold and hardy souls who, risking life and limb from
moment to moment though they are, yet live in hope that the next lump
of cosmic detritus will prove to be a bonanza.
Some of these men are the sheer misfits of life. Some are petty
criminals, fugitives from the justice of their own planets, but not of
sufficient importance to be upon the "wanted" lists of the Patrol. Some
are of those who for some reason or other--addiction to drugs, perhaps,
or the overwhelming urge occasionally to go on a spree--are unable or
unwilling to hold down the steady jobs of their more orthodox brethren.
Still others, and these are many, live that horridly adventurous life
because it is in their blood; like the lumberjacks who in ancient times
dwelt upon Tellus, they labor tremendously and unremittingly for weeks,
only and deliberately to "blow in" the fruits of their toil in a few
wild days and still wilder nights of hectic, sanguine, and lustful
debauchery in one or another of the spacemen's hells of which every
inhabited solar system has its quota.
But, whatever their class, they have much in common. They all live for
the moment only, from hand to mouth. They all are intrepid spacemen.
They have to be--all others die during their first venture. They all
live dangerously, violently. They are men of red and gusty passions,
and they have, if not an actual contempt, at least a loud-voiced
scorn of the law in its every phase and manifestation. "Law ends with
atmosphere" is the galaxy-wide creed of the clan, and it is a fact that
no law save that of the ray-gun is even yet really enforced in the
badlands of the asteroid belts.
Indeed, the meteor miners as a matter of course, take their innate
lawlessness with them into their revels in the crimson-lit resorts
already referred to. In general the nearby Planetary Police adopt
a laissez faire attitude, particularly since the asteroids are not
within their jurisdictions, but independent worlds, each with its own
world-government. If they kill a dozen or so of each other and of the
bloodsuckers who batten upon them, what of it? If everybody in those
hells could be killed at once, the Universe would be that much better
off!--and if the Galactic Patrol is compelled, by some unusually
outrageous performance, to intervene in the revelry, it comes in,
not as single policemen, but in platoons or in companies of armed,
full-armored infantry going to war!
Such, then, were those among whom Kinnison chose to cast his lot, in a
new effort to get in touch with the Galactic Director of the drug ring.