Like nothing much.
Like the twinge of a mild electric shock.
Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time.
Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes.
Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth
disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a
light-year or fifty light-years off.
At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set
ready and the familiar Solar System ticking around inside his head.
For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was,
subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was
loose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars,
where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind
and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read.
Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and
horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out
for inter-stellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept
the Dragons away.
* * * * *
Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there
was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammer
blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending
into their minds.
But to the telepaths, they were Dragons.
In the fraction of a second between the telepaths' awareness of a
hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and
the impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all living
things within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities something
like the Dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than
beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness
and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin tenuous matter
between the stars.
It took a surviving ship to bring back the news--a ship in which, by
sheer chance, a telepath had a light beam ready, turning it out at the
innocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the Dragon
dissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselves
non-telepathic, went about their way not realizing that their own
immediate deaths had been averted.
From then on, it was easy--almost.
* * * * *
Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had their
sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were
telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turn
were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did
it.
Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reform
three-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to
star.
The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to
sixty to forty in mankind's favor.
This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to become
ultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the Dragons in less than a
millisecond.
But it was found that the Dragons could move a million miles in just
under two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mind
to activate the light beams.
Attempts had been made to sheath the ships in light at all times.
This defense wore out.
As mankind learned about the Dragons, so too, apparently, the Dragons
learned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and came
in on extremely flat trajectories very quickly.
Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could be
provided only by light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence.
Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniature
photonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesium
isotope into pure visible radiance.
The odds kept coming down in mankind's favor, yet ships were being
lost.
It became so bad that people didn't even want to find the ships
because the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bring
back to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred or
three hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed,
and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their lives
were ended.
[Illustration]
Telepaths tried to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been
damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid
spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id
itself, the volcanic source of life.
Then came the Partners.
Man and Partner could do together what Man could not do alone. Men had
the intellect. Partners had the speed.
The Partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outside
the spaceships. They planoformed with the ships. They rode beside them
in their six-pound craft ready to attack.
The tiny ships of the Partners were swift. Each carried a dozen
pinlights, bombs no bigger than thimbles.
The pinlighters threw the Partners--quite literally threw--by means of
mind-to-firing relays direct at the Dragons.
What seemed to be Dragons to the human mind appeared in the form of
gigantic Rats in the minds of the Partners.
Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the Partners' minds
responded to an instinct as old as life. The Partners attacked,
striking with a speed faster than Man's, going from attack to attack
until the Rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time, it
was the Partners who won.
With the safety of the inter-stellar skip, skip, skip of the ships,
commerce increased immensely, the population of all the colonies went
up, and the demand for trained Partners increased.
Underhill and Woodley were a part of the third generation of
pinlighters and yet, to them, it seemed as though their craft had
endured forever.
[Illustration]
Gearing space into minds by means of the pin-set, adding the Partners
to those minds, keying up the mind for the tension of a fight on which
all depended--this was more than human synapses could stand for long.
Underhill needed his two months' rest after half an hour of fighting.
Woodley needed his retirement after ten years of service. They were
young. They were good. But they had limitations.
So much depended on the choice of Partners, so much on the sheer luck
of who drew whom.