The Gray Lensman went back to his mining with a will and with
unimpaired vigor, for his distress aboard the ship he had rescued had
been sheerest acting. One small bottle of good brandy was scarcely a
cocktail to the physique that had stood up under quart after quart of
the crudest, wickedest, fieriest beverage known to space; that tiny
morsel of bentlam--scarcely half a unit--affected him no more than a
lozenge of licorice.
Three weeks. Twenty-one days, each of twenty-four G-P hours. At the
end of that time, he had learned from the mind of the zwilnik that
the Boskonian director of this, the Borovan solar system, would visit
Miners' Rest, to attend some kind of a meeting. His informant did not
know what the meeting was to be about, and he was not unduly curious
about it. Kinnison, however, did and was.
The Lensman knew, or at least very shrewdly suspected, that that
meeting was to be a regional conference of big-shot zwilniks; he was
intensely curious to know all about everything that was to take place;
and he was determined to be present.
Three weeks was lots of time. In fact, he should be able to complete
his quota of heavy metal in two, or less. It was there, there was no
question of that. Right out there were the meteors, unaccountable
thousands of millions of them, and a certain proportion of them carried
values. The more and the harder he worked, the more of these worthwhile
wanderers of the void he would find. Therefore he labored long, hard,
and rapidly, and his store of high-test meteors grew apace.
To such good purpose did he use beam and Spalding drill that he was
ready more than a week ahead of time. That was QX--he'd much rather be
early than late. Something might have happened to hold him up--things
did happen, too often--and he had to be at that meeting!
Thus it came about that, a few days before the all-important date,
Kinnison's battered treasure-hunter blasted herself down to her second
landing at Strongheart's dock. This time the miner was welcomed, not as
a stranger, but as a friend of long standing.
"Hi, Wild Bill!" Strongheart yelled at sight of the big spacehound.
"Right on time, I see--glad to see you! Luck, too, I hope--lots of
luck, and all good, I bet me--ain't it?"
"Ho, Strongheart!" the Lensman roared in return, pommeling the
divekeeper affectionately. "Had a good trip, yeah--a fine trip. Struck
a rich sector--twice as much as I got last time. Told you I'd be back
in five or six weeks, and made it in five weeks and four days."
"Keeping tab on the days, huh?"
"I'll say I do. With a thirst like mine a guy can't do nothing else--I
tell you all my guts're dryer than any desert on the whole of Mars.
Well, what're we waiting for? Check this plunder of mine in and let me
get to going places and doing things!"
The business end of the visit was settled with neatness and dispatch.
Dealer and miner understood each other thoroughly, each knew what could
and what could not be done to the other. The meteors were tested and
weighed. Supplies for the ensuing trip were bought. The guarantee and
twenty-four units of benny--QX. No argument. No hysterics. No bickering
or quarreling or swearing. Everything on the green, all the way.
Gentlemen and friends. Kinnison turned over his keys, accepted a thick
sheaf of currency, and, after the first formal drink with his host,
set out upon the self-imposed, superstitious tour of the other hot
spots which would bring him favor--or at least would avert the active
disfavor--of Klono, his spaceman's deity.
* * * * *
This time, however, that tour took longer. Upon his first ceremonial
round he had entered each saloon in turn, had bought one drink of
whatever was nearest, had tossed it down, and had gone on to the next
place; unobserved and inconspicuous. Now, how different it all was!
Wherever he went he was the center of attention.
Men who had met him before flung themselves upon him with whoops of
welcome; men who had never seen him clamored to drink with him; women,
whether or not they knew him, fawned upon him and brought into play
their every lure and wile. For not only was this man a hero and a
celebrity of sorts; he was a lucky--or a skillful--miner whose every
trip resulted in wads of money big enough to clog the under jets of a
Valerian freighter! Moreover, when he was lit up he threw it around
regardless, and he was getting stewed as fast as he could swallow.
Let's keep him here--or, if we can't do that, let's go along, wherever
he goes!
This, too, was strictly according to the Lensman's expectations.
Everybody knew that he did not do any serious drinking glass by glass
at the bar, but bottle by bottle; that he did not buy individual drinks
for his friends, but let them drink as deeply as they would from
whatever container chanced then to be in hand; and his vast popularity
gave him a sound excuse to begin his bottle-buying at the start instead
of waiting until he got back to Strongheart's. He bought, then, several
or many bottles and tins in each place, instead of a single drink. And,
since everybody knew for a fact that he was a practically bottomless
drinker, who was even to suspect that he barely moistened his gullet
while the hangers-on were really emptying the bottles, flasks, and
flagons?
And during his real celebration at Strongheart's, while he drank
enough, he did not drink too much. He waxed exceedingly happy and
frolicsome, as before. He was as profligate, as extravagant in tips. He
had the same sudden flashes of hot anger. He fought enthusiastically
and awkwardly, as Wild Bill Williams did, although only once or twice,
that time; and he did not have to draw his DeLameters at all--he was so
well known and so beloved! He sang as loudly and as raucously, and with
the same good taste in madrigals.
Therefore, when the infiltration of thought-screened men warned him
that the meeting was about to be called Kinnison was ready. He was in
fact cold sober when he began his tuneful, last-two-bottles trip up
the street, and he was almost as sober when he returned to "Base,"
empty of bottles and pockets, to make the usual attempt to obtain more
money from Strongheart and to compromise by taking his farewell chew of
bentlam instead.
[Illustration: _As any man should under that mighty dose of bentlam,
Kim passed out--physically. But his mind reached out, even while the
attendants carried his dulled body out--_]
Nor was he unduly put out by the fact that both Strongheart and the
zwilnik were now wearing screens. He had taken it for granted that
they might be, and had planned accordingly. He seized the packet as
avidly as before, chewed its contents as ecstatically, and slumped down
as helplessly and as idiotically. That much of the show, at least,
was real. Twenty-four units of that drug will paralyze _any_ human
body, make it assume the unmistakable pose and stupefied mien of the
bentlam-eater. But Kinnison's mind was not an ordinary one; the dose
which would have rendered any bona-fide miner's brain as helpless as
his body did not affect the Lensman's new equipment at all. Alcohol and
bentlam together were bad, but the Lensman was sober. Therefore, if
anything, the drugging of his body only made it easier to dissociate
his new mind from it. Furthermore, he need not waste any thought in
making it act. There was only one way it could act, now, and Kinnison
let his new senses roam abroad without even thinking of the body he was
leaving behind him.
* * * * *
In view of the rigorous orders from higher-up the conference room
was heavily guarded by screened men; no one except old and trusted
employees were allowed to enter it, and they were also protected.
Nevertheless, Kinnison got in, by proxy.
A clever pickpocket brushed against a screened waiter who was about to
enter the sacred precincts, lightning fingers flicking a switch. The
waiter began to protest--then forgot what he was going to say, even as
the pickpocket forgot completely the deed he had just done. The waiter
in turn was a trifle clumsy in serving a certain big shot, but earned
no rebuke thereby; for the latter forgot the offense almost instantly.
Under Kinnison's control the director fumbled at his screen-generator
for a moment, loosening slightly a small but important resister. That
done, the Lensman withdrew delicately and the meeting was an open book.
"Before we do anything," the director began, "show me that all your
screens are on." He bared his own--it would have taken an expert
service man an hour to find that it was not functioning perfectly.
"Poppycock!" snorted the zwilnik. "Who in all the hells of space thinks
that a Lensman would--or _could_--come to Euphrosyne?"
"No one can tell what this particular Lensman can or can't do, and
nobody knows what he is doing until just before he dies. Hence the
strictness. You've searched everybody here, of course?"
"Everybody," Strongheart averred, "even the drunks and dopes. The whole
building is screened, besides the screens we're wearing."
"The dopes don't count, of course, provided they're really doped." No
one, except the Gray Lensman himself, could possibly conceive of a
Lensman being--not seeming to be, but actually _being_--a drunken sot,
to say nothing of being a confirmed addict of any drug. "By the way,
who is this Wild Bill Williams that I've been hearing about?"
Strongheart and his friend looked at each other and laughed.
"I checked up on him early," the zwilnik chuckled. "He isn't the
Lensman, of course, but I thought at first he might be an agent. We
frisked him and his ship thoroughly--no dice--and checked back on him
as a miner, four solar systems back. He's clean, anyway; this is his
second bender here. He's been guzzling everything in stock for a week,
getting more pie-eyed every day, and Strongheart and I just put him to
bed with twenty-four units of benny. You know what _that_ means, don't
you?"
"Your own benny or his?" the director asked.
"My own. That's why I know he's clean. All the other dopes are, too.
The drunks we gave the bum's rush, like you told us to."
"QX. I don't think there's any danger, myself--I think that the
hot-shot Lensman they're afraid of is still working Bronseca--but these
orders not to take any chances at all come from 'way, 'way up."
"How about this new system they're working on, that nobody knows his
boss any more?" asked the zwilnik. "Hooey, I call it."
"Not ready yet," the director answered. "They haven't been able to
invent one that is safe enough for them and yet will handle the volume
of work that has to be done. In the meantime, we're using these books.
Cumbersome, but absolutely safe, they say, unless and until the enemy
gets onto the idea. Then one group will go into the lethal chambers of
the Patrol and the rest of us will use something else. Some say that
this code can't be cracked without the key; others say any code can be
read in time. Anyway here's your orders. Pass them along. Give me your
stuff and we'll have supper and a few drinks."
They ate. They drank. They enjoyed an evening and a night of high
revelry and low dissipation, each to his taste; each secure in the
knowledge that his thought-screen was one-hundred-percent effective
against the one enemy he really feared. Indeed, the screens were that
effective--then. The Lensman, having learned from the director all that
he knew, had restored the generator to full efficiency in the instant
of his relinquishment of control.
Although the heads of the zwilniks, and therefore their minds, were
secure against Kinnison's prying, the books of record were not. And,
though his body was lying helpless, inert upon a drug-fiend's cot, his
sense of perception read those books; if not as readily as though they
were in his hands and open, yet readily enough. And, far off in space,
a power-brained Lensman yclept Worsel, recorded upon imperishable
metal a detailed account, including names, dates, facts, and figures,
of all the doings of all the zwilniks of a solar system!
The information was coded, it is true; but, since Kinnison knew the
key, it might just as well have been printed in English. To the later
consternation of Narcotics, however, that tape was sent in under
Lensman's seal--the spool could not be opened until the Gray Lensman
gave the word.
* * * * *
In twenty-four hours Kinnison recovered from the effects of his
debauch. He got his keys from Strongheart. He left the asteroid. He
knew the mighty intellect with whom he had next to deal, he knew where
that entity was to be found; but, sad to say, he had positively no idea
at all as to what he was going to do or how he was going to do it.
Wherefore it was that a sense of relief tempered, with no small degree,
the natural apprehension he felt upon receiving an insistent call from
Port Admiral Haynes. Truly this must be something really extraordinary,
for while during the long months of his service Kinnison had called the
chief of staff scores of times, Haynes had never before lensed him.
"Kinnison! Haynes calling!" the message beat into his consciousness.
"Kinnison acknowledging Haynes, sir!" the Gray Lensman thought back.
"Am I interrupting anything important?"
"No, sir, not at all. I'm just doing a little flit."
"A situation has come up which we feel you should study, not only in
person, but also without advance information or preconceived ideas. Is
it at all possible for you to come into Prime Base immediately?"
"Yes, sir, eminently so. In fact, a little time right now might do me
good in two ways--let me mull a job over, and let a nut mellow down to
a point where maybe I can crack it. At your orders, sir!"
"Not orders, Kinnison!" the old man reprimanded him sharply. "No one
gives unattached Lensmen orders. We request or suggest, but you are the
sole judge as to where your greatest usefulness lies."
"Please believe, sir, that your requests are orders, to me," Kinnison
replied in all seriousness. Then, more lightly, "Your calling me in
suggests an emergency, and traveling in this miner's scow of mine is
just a trifle faster than going afoot. How about sending out something
with some legs to pick me up?"
"The _Dauntless_, for instance?"
"Oh--you've got her rebuilt already?"
"Yes."
"I'll bet she's a sweet clipper! She was a mighty slick stepper before;
now she must have more legs than a centipede!"
And so it came about that in a region of space entirely empty of all
other vessels as far as ultrapowerful detectors could reach, the
_Dauntless_ met Kinnison's tugboat. The two went inert and maneuvered
briefly, then the immense warship engulfed her tiny companion and
flashed away.
"Hi, Kim, you old son-of-a-space-flea!" A general yell arose at sight
of him, and irrepressible youth rioted, regardless of Regs, in this
reunion of old comrades-in-arms who were yet scarcely more than boys in
years.
"His Nibs says for you to call 'im, Kim, when we're about an hour
out from Prime Base," Commander Maitland informed his classmate
irreverently, as the _Dauntless_ neared the Solarian System.
"Plate or Lens?"
"Didn't say--as you like, I suppose."
"Plate then, I guess--don't want to butt in."
In a few moments chief of staff and Gray Lensman were in image
face-to-face.
"How are you making out, Kinnison?" The Port Admiral studied the young
man's face intently, gravely, line by line. Then, upon his Lens, "We
heard about the shows you put on, clear over here on Tellus. A man
can't drink and dope the way you did without suffering consequences.
I've been wondering if even you can fight it off. How about it? How do
you feel now?"
"Some craving, of course," Kinnison replied, shrugging his shoulders.
"That can't be helped--you can't make an omelette without breaking
eggs. However, I can assure you as a fact that it's nothing I can't
lick. I've got it pretty well boiled out of my system already."
"Mighty glad to hear that, son. Only Ellison and I know who Wild
Bill Williams really is. You had us scared stiff for a while." Then,
speaking aloud:
"I would like to have you come to my office as soon as is convenient
after you land."
"I'll be there, chief, two minutes after we hit the bumpers," and he
was.
"Right of way, Norma?" he asked, waving an airy salute at the
attractive young woman in Haynes' outer office.
"Go right in, Lensman Kinnison, he's waiting for you," and opening the
door for him, she stood aside as he strode into the sanctum.
* * * * *
The Port Admiral returned the younger man's punctilious salute, then
the two shook hands warmly before Haynes referred to the third man in
the room.
"Navigator Xylpic, this is Lensman Kinnison, unattached. Sit down,
please; this may take some time. Now, Kinnison, I want to tell you that
ships have been disappearing, right and left, disappearing without
sending out an alarm or leaving a trace. Convoying makes no difference,
as the escorts also disappear--"
"Any with the new projectors?" Kinnison flashed the question via
Lens--this was nothing to talk about aloud.
"No," came the reassuring thought in reply. "Every one bottled up tight
until we find out what it's all about. Sending out the _Dauntless_
after you was the only exception."
"Fine. You shouldn't have taken even that much chance." This interplay
of thought took but an instant; Haynes went on with scarcely a break in
his voice:
"--with no more warning or report than the freighters and liners they
are supposed to be protecting. Automatic reporting also fails--the
instruments simply stop sending. The first and only sign of light--if
it _is_ such a sign; which, frankly, I doubt--came shortly before I
called you in, when Xylpic here came to me with a tall story."
Kinnison looked then at the stranger. Pink. Unmistakably a
Chickladorian--pink all over. Bushy hair, triangular eyes, teeth,
skin; all that same peculiar color. Not the flush of red blood showing
through translucent skin, but opaque pigment; the brick-reddish pink so
characteristic of the near-humanity of that planet.
"We have investigated this Xylpic thoroughly." Haynes went on,
discussing the Chickladorian as impersonally as though he were upon his
home planet instead of there in the room, listening. "The worse of it
is that the man is absolutely honest--or at least, he himself believes
that he is--in telling this yarn. Also, except for this one thing--this
obsession, fixed idea, hallucination, call it what you like; it seems
incredible that it _can_ be a fact--he not only seems to be, but
actually _is_, absolutely sane.
"Now, Xylpic, tell Kinnison what you have told the rest of us. And
Kinnison, I hope that you can make sense of it--none of the rest of us
can."
"QX. Go ahead, I'm listening." But Kinnison did far more than listen.
As the fellow began to talk the Gray Lensman insinuated his mind
into that of the Chickladorian. He groped for moments, seeking the
wave-length; then he, Kimball Kinnison, was actually reliving with the
pink man an experience which harrowed his very soul.
"The Second Navigator of a Radeligian vessel died in space, and when
it landed on Chickladoria I took the berth. About a week out, the
whole crew went mad, all at once. The first I knew of it was when the
pilot on duty beside me left his board, picked up a stool, and smashed
the automatic recorder. Then he went inert and neutralized all the
controls.
"I yelled at him, but he didn't answer me, and all the men in the
control room acted funny. They just milled around like men in a trance.
I buzzed the captain, but he didn't acknowledge either. Then the men
around me left the control room and went down the companionway toward
the main lock. I was scared--my skin prickled and the hair on the
back of my neck stood straight up--but I followed along, quite a ways
behind, to see what they were going to do. The captain, all the rest
of the officers, and the whole crew joined them in the lock. Everybody
was acting kind of crazy, and as if they were in an awful hurry to get
somewhere.
"I didn't go any nearer--I wasn't going to go out into space without a
suit on. I went back into the control room to get at a spy ray, then
changed my mind. That was the first place they would come to if they
boarded us, as they probably would--other ships had disappeared in
space, plenty of them. Instead, I went over to a lifeboat and used its
spy. And I tell you, sirs, there was nothing there--nothing at all!"
The stranger's voice rose almost to a shriek, his mind quivered in an
ecstasy of horror.
"Steady, Xylpic, steady," the Gray Lensman said, quietingly.
"Everything you've said so far makes sense. It all fits right into the
matrix. Nothing to go off the beam about, at all."
"What! You believe me!" the Chickladorian stared at Kinnison in
amazement, an emotion very evidently shared by the Port Admiral.
"Yes," the man in gray leather asserted. "Not only that, but I have a
very fair idea of what's coming next. G. A."
* * * * *
"The men walked out into space." The pink man offered this information
diffidently, although positively--an oft-repeated but starkly
incredible statement. "They did not float outward, sirs, they _walked_;
and they acted as if they were breathing air, not space. And as they
walked they sort of faded out; became thin, mistylike. This sounds
crazy, sir"--to Kinnison alone--"I thought then maybe I was cuckoo, and
everybody around here thinks I am now, too. Maybe I _am_ nuts, sir--I
don't know."
[Illustration: _"I saw them walk out of the ship into space--but as
though they walked on something, something invisible. And they walked
into that ghost-ship, the hell-ship from nowhere--"_]
"I do. You aren't," Kinnison said, calmly.
"Well, and here comes the worst of it, they walked around just as
though they were in a ship, growing fainter all the time. Then some
of them lay down and something began to _skin_ one of them--skin him
alive, sir--but there was nothing there at all. I ran, then. I got into
the fastest lifeboat on the far side and gave her all the oof she'd
take. That's all, sir."
"Not quite all, Xylpic, unless I'm badly mistaken. Why didn't you tell
the rest of it while you were at it?"
"I didn't dare to, sir. If I'd told any more they would have _known_ I
was crazy instead of just thinking so--" He broke sharply, his voice
altering strangely as he went on: "What makes you think there was
anything more, sir? Do you--" The question trailed off into silence.
"I do. If what I think happened really did happen, there was
more--quite a lot more--and worse. Wasn't there?"
"I'll say there was!" The navigator almost exploded in relief. "Or
rather, I think now that there was. But I can't describe any of it very
well--everything was getting fainter all the time, and I thought that I
must be imagining most of it."
"You weren't imagining a thing--" the Lensman began, only to be
interrupted by Haynes.
"Hell's jingling bells!" that worthy almost shouted. "If you know what
it was, tell me!"
"Think I know, but not quite sure yet--got to check it. Can't get
it from him--he's told everything he really knows. He didn't really
see anything, it was practically invisible. Even if he had tried to
describe the whole performance you wouldn't have recognized it. Nobody
could have, except Worsel and I, and possibly Van Buskirk. I'll tell
you the rest of what actually happened and Xylpic can tell us if it
checks." His features grew taut, his voice became hard and chill. "I
saw it done, once. Worse, I heard it. Saw it and heard it, clear and
plain. Also, I knew what it was all about, so I can describe it a lot
better than Xylpic possibly can.
"Every man of that crew was killed by torture. Some were flayed alive,
as Xylpic said; then they were carved up, slowly and piecemeal. Some
were stretched, pulled apart by chains and hooks, on racks. Others
twisted on frames. Boiled, little by little. Picked apart, bit by bit.
Gassed. Eaten away by corrosives, one molecule at a time. Pressed out
flat, as though between two plates of glass. Whipped. Scourged.
Beaten gradually to a pulp. Other methods, lots of them--indescribable.
All slow, though, and extremely painful. Greenish-yellow light, showing
the aura of each man as he died. Beams from somewhere--possibly
invisible--consuming the auras. Check, Xylpic?"
"Yes, sir, it checks!" The Chickladorian exclaimed in profound relief;
then added, carefully: "That is, that's the way the torture was,
exactly, sir, but there was something funny, a difference, about their
fading away. I can't describe what was funny about it, but it didn't
seem so much that they became invisible as that they went away, sir,
even though they didn't go any place."
"That's due to the way that system of invisibility works. Got to
be--nothing else will fit into--"
"The Overlords of Delgon!" Haynes rasped, sharply. "But if that's a
true picture, how in all the hells of space did this Xylpic, alone of
all the ship's personnel, get away clean? Tell me that!"
"Simple!" the Gray Lensman snapped back as sharply. "The rest were
all Radeligians--he was the only Chickladorian aboard. The Overlords
simply didn't know that he was there. They didn't feel him at all.
Chickladorians think on a wave nobody else in the Galaxy uses--you must
have noticed that when you felt of him with your Lens. It took me half
a minute to synchronize with him.
"As for his escape, that makes sense, too. The Overlords are slow
workers and when they're playing that game they really concentrate on
it--they don't pay any attention to anything else. By the time they got
done and were ready to take over the ship, he could be almost anywhere."
"But he says that there was no ship there--nothing at all!" Haynes
protested.
"Invisibility isn't hard to understand," Kinnison countered. "We've
almost got it ourselves--we undoubtedly could have it as good as that,
with a little more work on it. There was a ship there, beyond question.
Close. Hooked on with magnets, and with a spacetube, lock to lock.
"The only peculiar part of it, and the bad part, is something you
haven't mentioned yet. What would the Overlords--if, as we must assume,
some of them got away from Worsel and his crew--be doing with a ship?
They never had any spaceships that I ever knew anything about, nor any
other mechanical devices requiring any advanced engineering skill.
Also, and most important, they never did and never could invent or
develop such an invisibility apparatus as that."
* * * * *
Kinnison fell silent, and while he frowned in thought Haynes dismissed
the Chickladorian, with orders that his every want be supplied.
"What do you deduce from those facts?" the Port Admiral presently asked.
"Plenty," the Gray Lensman said, darkly. "I smell a rat. In fact, it
stinks to high Heaven. Boskone."
"You may be right," the chief of staff conceded. It was hopeless, he
knew, for him to try to keep up with this man's mental processes. "But
why, and above all, how?"
"'Why' is easy. They both owe us a lot, and want to pay us in full.
Both hate us all to pieces. 'How' is immaterial. One found the other,
some way. They're together, just as sure as hell's a mantrap, and
that's what matters. It's bad. Very, _very_ bad, believe me."
"Orders?" asked Haynes. He was a big man; big enough to ask
instructions from anyone who knew more than he did--big enough to make
no bones of such asking.
"One does not give orders to the Port Admiral," Kinnison mimicked him
lightly, but meaningly. "One may request, perhaps, or suggest, but--"
"Skip it! I'll take a club to you yet, you young hellion! You said
you'd take orders from me. QX--I'll take 'em from you. What are they?"
"No orders yet, I don't think--" Kinnison ruminated. "No ... not until
after we investigate. I'll have to have Worsel and Van Buskirk; we're
the only three who have had experience. We'll take the _Dauntless_, I
think--it'll be safe enough. Thought-screens will stop the Overlords
cold, and a scrambler will take care of the invisibility business if
they use the same principle we do, and they very probably do."
"Safe enough, then, you think, to let traffic resume, if they're
protected with screens?"
"I wouldn't say so. They've got Boskonian superdreadnoughts now to use
if they want to, and that's something else to think about. Another week
or so won't hurt much--better wait until we see what we can see. I've
been wrong once or twice before, too, and I may be again."
He was. Although his words were conservative enough, he was practically
certain in his own mind that he knew all the answers. But how wrong
he was--how terribly, how tragically wrong! For even his mentality
had not as yet envisaged the incredible actuality; his deductions and
perceptions fell far, far short of the appalling truth!