XIX.

"Before you go anywhere; or, rather, whether you go anywhere or not, we

want to knock down that Bronsecan base of Prellin's," Haynes declared

to Kinnison in no uncertain voice. "It's a Galactic scandal, the way

we've been letting them thumb their noses at us. Everybody in space

thinks that the Patrol has gone soft all of a sudden. When are you

going to let us smack them down? Do you know what they've done now?"

"No. What?"

"Gone out of business. We've been watching then so closely that

they couldn't do any queer business--goods, letters, messages, or

anything--so they closed up the Bronseca branch entirely. 'Unfavorable

conditions,' they said. Locked up tight--telephones disconnected,

communicators cut, everything."

"Hm-m-m. In that case we'd better take 'em, I guess. No harm done,

anyway, now--maybe all the better. Let Boskone think that our strategy

failed and we had to fall back on brute force."

"You say it easy. You think that it'll be a push-over, don't you?"

"Sure--why not?"

"You noticed the shape of their screens?"

"Roughly cylindrical"--in surprise. "They're hiding a lot of stuff, of

course, but they can't possibly--"

"I'm afraid that they can, and will. I've been checking up on the

building. Ten years old. Plans and permits QX except for the fact that

nobody knows whether or not the inside of the building resembles the

plans in any particular."

"Klono's whiskers!" Kinnison was aghast, his mind racing. "How could

that be, chief? Inspectors--builders--contractors--workmen?"

"The city inspector who had the job came into money later, retired,

and nobody has seen him since. Nobody can locate a single builder or

workman who saw it constructed. No competent inspector has been in

it since. Cominoche is lax--all cities are, for that matter--with an

outfit as big as Wembleson's, that carries its own insurance, does its

own inspecting, and won't allow outside interference. Wembleson's isn't

alone in that attitude--they're not all zwilniks, either."

"You think that it's really fortified, then?"

"Sure of it. That's why we ordered a gradual, but complete, evacuation

of the city, beginning a couple of months ago."

"How could you?" Kinnison was growing more surprised by the minute.

"The businesses--the houses--the expense!"

"Martial law--the Patrol takes over in emergencies, you know.

Businesses moved, and mostly carrying on very well. People ditto--very

nice temporary camps, lake and river cottages, and so on. As for

expense, the Patrol pays damages. We'll pay for rebuilding the whole

city if we have to--much rather that than leave that Boskonian base

standing there untouched."

"What a mess! Never thought of it that way, but you're right, as usual.

They wouldn't be there at all unless they thought--but they must know,

chief, that they can't hold off the stuff that you can bring to bear."

"Probably betting that we won't destroy our own city to get them--if

so, they're wrong. Or possibly they hung on a few days too long."

"How about the observers?" Kinnison asked. "They have four auxiliaries

there, you know."

"That's strictly up to you." Haynes was unconcerned. "Smearing that

base is the only thing I insist on. We'll wipe out the observers or let

them observe and report, whichever you say; but that base goes--it has

been there far too long already."

"Be nicer to let them alone," Kinnison decided. "We're not supposed to

know anything about them. You won't have to use the primaries, will

you?"

"No. It's a fairly large building, as business blocks go, but it lacks

a lot of being big enough to be a first-class base. We can burn the

ground out from under all its foundations with our secondaries."

He called an adjutant. "Get me Sector 19." Then, as the seamed, scarred

face of an old Lensman appeared upon a plate:

"You can go to work on Cominoche now, Parker. Twelve maulers. Twenty

heavy caterpillars and about fifty units of Q-type screen, remote

control. Supplies and service. Have them muster all available

fire-fighting apparatus. If desirable, import some--we want to save as

much of the place as we can. I'll come over in the _Dauntless_."

He glanced at Kinnison, one eye-brow raised quizzically.

"I feel as though I rate a little vacation; I think I'll go and watch

this," he commented. "Got time to come along?"

"I think so. It's more or less on my way to Lundmark's Nebula."

* * * * *

Upon Bronseca, then, as the _Dauntless_ ripped her way through

protesting space, there converged structures of the void from a dozen

nearby systems; each ship emblazoned with the device of ray-emitting

intertwined spirals which is the emblem of the Galactic Patrol. There

came maulers; huge, ungainly flying fortresses of stupendous might.

There came transports, bearing the commissariat and the service units.

Vast freighters, under whose unimaginable mass the Gargantuanly braced

and latticed and trussed docks yielded visibly and groaningly, crushed

to a standstill and disgorged their varied cargoes.

What Haynes had so matter-of-factly referred to as "heavy" caterpillars

were all of that; and the mobile screens were even heavier. Clanking

and rumbling, but with their weight so evenly distributed over huge,

flat treads that they sank only a foot or so into even ordinary ground,

they made their ponderous way along Cominoche's deserted streets.

What thoughts seethed within the minds of the Boskonians can only be

imagined. They knew that the Patrol had landed in force, but what could

they do about it? At first, when the Lensmen began to infest the place,

they could have fled in safety; but at that time they were too certain

of their immunity to abandon their richly established position. Even

now, they would not abandon it until that course became absolutely

necessary.

They could have destroyed the city, true; but it was not until after

the non-combatant inhabitants had unobtrusively moved out that that

course suggested itself as a desirability. Now the destruction of

property would be a gesture worse than meaningless; it would be a waste

of energy which would all too certainly be needed--badly and soon.

Hence, as the Patrol's land forces ground clangorously into position

the enemy made no demonstration. The mobile screens were in place,

surrounding the doomed section with a wall of force to protect the rest

of the city from the hellish energies so soon to be unleashed. The

heavy caterpillars, mounting projectors quite comparable in size and

power with the warships' own--weapons similar in purpose and function

to the railway-carriage coast-defense guns of an earlier day--were

likewise ready. Far back of the line, but still too close, as they

were to discover later, heavily armored men crouched at their remote

controls behind their shields; barriers both of hard-driven, immaterial

fields of force and of solid, grounded, ultrarefrigerated walls of the

most refractory materials possible of fabrication. In the sky hung the

maulers, poised stolidly upon the towering pillars of flame erupting

from their under jets.

Cominoche, Bronseca's capital city, witnessed then what no one there

present had ever expected to see; the warfare designed for the

illimitable reaches of empty space being waged in the very heart of its

business district!

For Port Admiral Haynes had directed the investment of this minor

stronghold almost as though it were a regulation base, and with good

reason. He knew that from their coigns of vantage afar four separate

Boskonian observers were looking on, charged with the responsibility

of recording and reporting everything that transpired, and he wanted

that report to be complete and conclusive. He wanted Boskone, whoever

and wherever he might be, to know that when the Galactic Patrol started

a thing, that thing it finished; that the mailed fist of civilization

would not spare an enemy base simply because it was so located within

one of humanity's cities that its destruction must inevitably result

in severe property damage. Indeed, the chief of staff had massed there

thrice the force necessary; specifically and purposely to drive that

message home.

At the word of command there flamed out, almost as one, a thousand

lances of energy intolerable. Masonry, brickwork, steel, glass, and

chromium trim disappeared; flaring away in sparkling, hissing vapor

or cascading away in brilliantly mobile streams of fiery, corrosive

liquid. Disappeared, revealing the unbearably incandescent surface of

the Boskonian defensive screen.

Full-driven, that barrier held, even against the titanic thrusts of the

maulers above and of the heavy defense guns below. Energy rebounded

in scintillating torrents, shot off in blinding streamers, released

itself in bolts of lightning hurling themselves frantically to ground.

[Illustration: _The fury of the beams rebounded in scintillating

torrents, shot off in blinding streamers_--]

Nor was that superbly disguised citadel designed for defense alone.

Knowing now that the last faint hope of continuing in business upon

Bronseca was gone, and grimly determined to take full toll of the hated

Patrol, the defenders in turn loosed their beams. Five of them shot

out simultaneously, and five of the panels of mobile screen flamed

instantly into eye-tearing violet. Then black. These were not the

comparatively feeble, antiquated rays which Haynes had expected, but

were the output of up-to-the-minute, first-line space artillery!

Defenses down, it took but a blink of time to lick up the caterpillars.

On, then, the destroying beams tore, each in a direct line for a

remote-control station. Through tremendous edifices of masonry and

steel they drove, the upper floors collapsing into the cylinders of

annihilation only to be consumed almost as fast as they could fall.

"All screen-control stations, back, fast!" Haynes directed crisply.

"Back, dodging! Put your screens on automatic block until you get back

beyond effective range. Spy-ray men! See if you can locate the enemy

observers directing fire!"

But no matter how far back they went, Boskonian beams still sought

them out in grimly persistent attempts to slay. Their shielding fields

blazed white, their refractories wavered in the high blue as the

overdriven refrigerators strove mightily to cope with the terrific

load. The operators, stifling, almost roasting in their armor of

proof, shook sweat from the eyes they could not reach as they drove

themselves and their mechanisms on to even greater efforts; cursing

luridly, fulminantly the while at carrying on a space war in the hotly

reeking, the hellishly reflecting and heat-retaining environment of a

metropolis!

And all around the embattled structure, within the Patrol's now

partially open wall of screen, spread holocaust supreme; holocaust

spreading wider and wider during each fractional split second. In an

instant, it seemed, nearby buildings burst into flame. The fact that

they were fireproof meant nothing whatever. The air inside them, heated

in moments to a point far above the ignition temperature of organic

material, fed furiously upon furniture, rugs, drapes, and whatever

else had been left in place. Even without such adventitious aids the

air itself, expanding tremendously, irresistibly, drove outward before

it the glass of windows and the solid brickwork of walls. And as they

fell, glass and brick ceased to exist as such. Falling, they fused;

coalescing and again splashing apart as they descended through the

inferno of annihilatory vibrations in an appalling rain which might

very well have been sprinkled from the hottest middle of the central

core of hell itself. And in this fantastically potent, this incredibly

corrosive flood the ground itself, the metaled pavement, the sturdily

immovable foundations of skyscrapers, dissolved as do lumps of sugar

in boiling coffee. Dissolved, slumped down, flowed away in blindingly

turbulent streams. Super-structures toppled into disintegration, each

discrete particle contributing as it fell to the utterly indescribable

fervency of the whole.

More and more panels of mobile screen went down. They were not designed

to stand up under such heavy projectors as "Wemblesons" mounted, and

the Boskonians blasted them down in order to get at the remote-control

operators back of them. Swath after swath of flaming ruin was cut

through the Bronsecan capital as the enemy gunners tried to follow the

dodging caterpillar tractors.

"Drop down, maulers!" the commander-in-chief ordered. "Low enough so

that your screens touch ground. Never mind damage--they'll blast the

whole city if we don't stop those beams. Surround him!"

Down the maulers came, ringwise; mighty protective envelopes

overlapping; down until the screens bit ground. Now the caterpillar and

mobile-screen crews were safe; powerful as Prellin's weapons were, they

could not break through those maulers' screens.

Now holocaust waxed doubly infernal. The wall was tight, the only

avenue of escape of all that fiercely radiant energy straight upward;

and adding to the furor were the flaring under jets--themselves

destructive agents by no means to be despised!

Inside the screens, then, raged pure frenzy. At the line raved the

maulers' prodigious lifting blasts. Out and away, down every avenue

of escape, swept torrents of superheated air at whose touch anything

and everything combustible burst into flame. But there could be no

fire-fighting--yet. Outlying fires, along the lines of destruction

previously cut, yes; but personal armor has never been designed to

enable life to exist in such an environment as that near those screens

then was.

"Burn out the ground under them!" came the order. "Tip them over--slag

them down!"

Sharply downward angled twoscore of the beams which had been expending

their energies upon Boskone's radiant defenses. Downward into the

lake of lava which had once been pavement. That lake had already

been seething and bubbling; emitting momently bursts of lambent

flame. Now it leaped into a frenzy of its own; a transcendent fury of

volatilization. High-explosive shells by the hundred dropped also into

the incandescent mess, hurling the fiery stuff afar; deepening and

broadening the sulphurous moat.

"Deep enough," Haynes spoke into his microphone. "Tractors and

pressors as assigned--tip him over."

The intensity of the bombardment did not slacken, but from the maulers

to the north there reached out pressors, from those upon the south came

tractors; each a beam of terrific power, each backed by all the mass

and all the driving force of a veritable flying fortress.

Slowly that which had been a building leaned from the perpendicular,

its inner defensive screen still intact.

"Chief?" From his post as observer, Kinnison flashed a thought to

Haynes. "Are you beginning to think any funny thoughts about that ape

down there?"

"No. Are you? What?" asked the port admiral, surprised.

"Maybe I'm nuts, but it wouldn't surprise me if he'd start doing a flit

pretty quick. I've got a CRX tracer on him, just in case, and it might

be smart to caution Henderson to keep up on his toes."

"Your diagnosis--'nuts'--is correct, I think," came the answering

thought; but the port admiral followed the suggestion, nevertheless.

* * * * *

And none too soon. Deliberately, grandly, the Colossus was leaning

over, bowing in stately fashion toward the awful lake in which it

stood. But only so far. Then there was a flash, visible even in the

inferno of energies already there at war, and the already coruscant

lava was hurled to all points of the compass as the full-blast drive of

a superdreadnought was cut loose beneath its surface!

To the eye the thing simply and instantly disappeared; but not to the

ultra-vision of the observers' plates, and especially not to the CRX

tracers attached by Kinnison and by Henderson. They held, and the chief

pilot, already warned, was on the trail as fast as he could punch his

keys.

Through atmosphere, through stratosphere, into interplanetary space

flew pursued and pursuer at ever-increasing speed. The _Dauntless_

overtook her proposed victim fairly easily. The Boskonian was fast, but

the Patrol's new flier was the fastest thing in space. But tractors

would not hold against the now universal standard equipment of shears,

and the heavy secondaries served only to push the fleeing vessel along

all the faster. And the dreadful primary beams could not be used--yet.

"Not yet," cautioned the admiral. "Don't get too close--wait until

there's nothing detectable in space."

Finally an absolutely empty region was entered, the word to close up

was given, and Prellin drank of the bitter cup which so many commanders

of vessels of the Patrol had had to drain--the gallingly fatal

necessity of engaging a ship which was both faster and more powerful

than his own. The Boskonian tried, of course. His beams raged out at

full power against the screens of the larger ship, but without effect.

Three primaries lashed out as one. The fleeing vessel, structure and

contents, ceased to be. The _Dauntless_ returned to the torn and

ravaged city.

The maulers had gone. The lumbering caterpillars--what were left

of them--were clanking away; reeking, smoking hot in every plate

and member. Only the firemen were left, working like Trojans with

explosives, rays, water, carbon-dioxide snow, clinging and smothering

chemicals; anything and everything which would isolate, absorb, or

dissipate any portion of the almost incalculable heat energy so

recently and so profligately released.

Fire apparatus from four planets was at work. There were pumpers,

ladder trucks, hose and chemical trucks. There were men in heavily

insulated armor. Vehicles and men alike were screened against the

specific wave lengths of heat; and under the direction of a fire

marshal in his red speedster high in air they fought methodically and

efficiently the conflagration which was the aftermath of battle. They

fought, and they were winning.

And then it rained. As though the heavens themselves had been outraged

by what had been done, they opened and rain sluiced down in level

sheets. It struck hissingly the nearby structures, but it did not touch

the central area at all. Instead, it turned to steam in mid-air, and,

rising or being blown aside by the tempestuous wind, it concealed the

redly glaring, raw wound beneath a blanket of crimson fog.

"Well, that is that," the port admiral said slowly. His face was grim

and stern. "A good job of clean-up--expensive, but worth the price. So

be it to every pirate base and every zwilnik hide-out in the Galaxy!

Henderson, land us at Cominoche Spaceport."

* * * * *

And from four other cities of the planet four Boskonian observers,

each unknown to all the others, took off in four spaceships for four

different destinations. Each had reported fully and accurately to Jalte

everything that had transpired until the two fliers had faded into

the distance. Then, highly elated--and probably, if the truth could

be known, no little surprised as well--at the fact that he was still

alive, each had left Bronseca at maximum blast.

The Galactic director had done all that he could, which was little

enough. At the Patrol's first warlike move he had ordered a squadron

of Boskone's ablest fighting craft to Prellin's aid. It was almost

certainly a useless gesture, he knew as he did it. Gone were the days

when pirate bases dotted the Tellurian Galaxy; only by a miracle could

those ships reach the Bronsecan's line of flight in time to be of

service.

Nor could they. The howl of interfering vibrations which was smothering

Prellin's communicator beam snapped off into silence while the would-be

rescuers were many hours away. For minutes, then, Jalte sat immersed

in thought at his great desk in the Center, his normally bluish face

turning a sickly green, before he called the planet Jarnevon to report

to Eichmil, his chief.

"There is, however, a bright side to the affair," he concluded.

"Prellin's records were destroyed with him. Also, there are two

facts--that the Patrol had to use such force as practically to

destroy the city of Cominoche, and that our four observers escaped

unmolested--which furnish conclusive proof that the vaunted Lensman

failed completely to penetrate with his mental powers the defenses we

have been using against him."

"Not conclusive proof," Eichmil rebuked him harshly. "Not proof at all,

in any sense--scarcely a probability. Indeed, the display of force may

very well mean that he has already attained his objective. He may have

allowed the observers to escape, to lull our suspicions. You yourself

are probably the next in line. How certain are you that your own base

has not already been invaded?"

"Absolutely certain, sir." Jalte's face, however, turned a shade

greener at the thought.

"You use the term 'absolutely' very loosely--but I hope that you are

right. Use all the men and all the equipment we have sent you to make

sure that it remains impenetrable."