He knew well enough what had happened. In one titanic jolt, the control platform’s gravity field had received the full flow of the projector’s energies. It had burned out almost instantaneously under that incalculable overload—but not quite fast enough to save him.
And now U-1’s mind came driving in, probing for the extent of his enemy’s helplessness, then coldly eager for the kill. At contact range, it would be only a matter of seconds to burn through that massive but no longer dangerous armor and blast out the life that lingered within.
Dimly, Iliff felt him rise and start forward. He felt the probing thoughts flick about him again, cautious still, and then the mind-shields relaxing and opening out triumphantly as the spacer approached. He dropped his own shields, and struck.
Never before had he dared risk the sustained concentration of destructive energy he hurled into U-1’s mind—for, in its way, it was an overload as unstable as that which had wrecked the gravity field. Instantly, the flaring lights before his face-piece spun into blackness. The hot taste of gushing blood in his mouth, the last sensation of straining lungs and pain-rocked twitching nerves vanished together. Blocked suddenly and completely from every outward awareness, he had become a bodiless force bulleting with deadly resolution upon another.
The attack must have shaken even U-1’s battle-hardened soul to its core. Physically, it stopped him in mid-stride, held him rigid and immobilized with nearly the effect of a paralysis gun. But after the first near-fatal moment of shock, while he attempted automatically and unsuccessfully to restore his shields before that rush of destruction, he was fighting back—and not with a similar suicidal fury but with a grim cold weight of vast mental power which yielded further ground only slowly if at all.
With that, the struggle became so nearly a stalemate that it still meant certain victory for the spacer. Both knew the last trace of physical life would drain out of Iliff in minutes, though perhaps only Iliff realized that his mind must destroy itself even more swiftly.
Something tore through his consciousness then like jagged bolts of lightning. He thought it was death. But it came again and again—until a slow, tremendous surprise welled up in him:
It was the other mind which was being torn! Dissolving now, crumbling into flashing thought-convulsions like tortured shrieks, though it still struggled on against him—and against something else, something which was by then completely beyond Iliff’s comprehension.
The surprise dimmed out, together with his last awareness of himself—still driving relentlessly in upon a hated foe who would not die.
* * *
The voice paused briefly, then added: “Get that part to Lab. They’ll be happy to know they hit it pretty close, for once.”
It stopped again. After a moment the bright-looking young man in the Jeltad Headquarters office inquired, not too deferentially:
“Is there anything else, sir?”
He’d glanced up curiously once or twice at the vision tank of the extreme-range communicator before him, while he deftly distributed Iliff’s after-mission report through the multiple-recorders. However, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a Zone Agent check in from the Emergency Treatment Chamber of his ship, completely enclosed in a block of semisolid protective gel, through which he was being molded, rayed, dosed, drenched, shocked, nourished and psychoed back to health and sanity.
With the irreverence of youth, the headquarters man considered that these near-legendary heroes of the Department bore on such occasions, when their robots even took care of heartbeat and breathing for them, a striking resemblance to damaged and bad-tempered embryos. He hoped suddenly no one happened to be reading his mind.
“Connect me,” Iliff’s voice said, though the lips of the figure in the vision tank did not move, “with Three for a personal report.”
“I’ve been listening,” came the deep, pleasantly modulated reply from an invisible source. “Switch off, Lallebeth—you’ve got all you need. All clear now, Iliff—and once more, congratulations!” And the picture of the tall, gray-haired, leanfaced man, who was the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan Confederacy, grew slowly through the telepath transmitter into the mind of the small, wiry shape—half restored and covered with irregular patches of new pink skin—in the ship’s Emergency Treatment Chamber.
“Back in the tank again, eh?” the Co-ordinator observed critically. “For the second day after a mission, you don’t look too bad.” He paused, considering Iliff closely. “Gravity?” he inquired.
“Gravity!” admitted the embryo.
“That will mess a fellow up!” The Co-ordinator was nodding sympathetically, but it seemed to Iliff that his superior’s mind was on other matters, and more pleasing ones.
“Lab’s just going to have to design me a suit,” Three ran on with his usual chattiness, “which will be nonreactive to any type of synthetigravs, including tractors. Theoretically impossible, they say, of course! But I’m sure the right approach—”
He interrupted himself:
“I imagine you’ll want to know what happened after she got you back to your ship and contacted the destroyers?”
“She left word she was going to get in touch with you on her way back to Jeltad,” Iliff said.
“Well, she did that. A remarkably energetic sort of person in a quiet way, Iliff. Fully aware, too, as I discovered, of the political possibilities in the situation. I persuaded her, of course, to take official credit for the death of U-1, and the termination of that part of the Ceetal menace—and, incidentally, for saving the life of one of our Department Agents.”
“That wasn’t so incidental,” Iliff remarked.
“Only in comparison with the other, of course. She really did it then?”
“Oh, she did it all right! I was on my way out fast when she burned him down. Must have been a bad shock to U-1. I understand he hadn’t released her mind for more than three or four seconds before she was reaching for his projector.”
The Co-ordinator nodded. “The mental resiliency of these highly developed telepathic races must be really extraordinary! Any human being would have remained paralyzed for minutes after such pressures—perhaps for hours. Well, he wasn’t omniscient, after all. He thought he could just let her lie there until he was finished with you.”
“How long had he been pouring it on her?”
“About four hours! Practically ever since they hit space, coming out from Gull.”
“She didn’t crack at all?” Iliff asked curiously.
“No, but she thinks she couldn’t have lasted more than another hour. However, she seemed to have had no doubt that you would arrive and get her out of the mess in time. Rather flattering, eh?”
The agent considered. “No,” he said then. “Not necessarily.”
His superior chuckled. “At any rate, she was reluctant to take credit for U-1. She thought if she accepted, you might feel she didn’t fully appreciate your plunging in to the rescue.”
“Well, you seem to have reassured her. And now, just what are the political results going to be?”
“It’s too early to say definitely, but even without any help from us they’d be pretty satisfactory. The Ceetal business isn’t for public consumption, of course—the boys made a clean sweep of that bunch a few hours back, by the way—but there’ve always been plenty of idiots building U-1 up into a glamorous figure. The Mysterious Great Bandit of the Spaceways and that sickening kind of stuff. They’ll whoop it up just as happily now for the Champion of Vegan Justice who sent the old monster on his way, to wit—the Lannai Pagadan! It won’t hurt either that she’s really beautiful.
“And through her, of course, the glamor reflects back on her people, our nonhuman allies.”
Iliff said thoughtfully: “Think they’ll stay fashionable long enough to cinch the alliance?”
The Co-ordinator looked rather smug. “I believe that part of it can be safely left to me! Especially,” he added deliberately, “since most of the organized resistance to said alliance has already collapsed.”
Iliff waited and made no comment, because when the old boy got as confidential as all that, he was certainly leading up to something. And he did not usually bother to lead up to things without some good reason—which almost always spelled a lot of trouble for somebody else.
There was nobody else around at all, except Iliff.
* * *
“I had an unexpected visit three days ago,” the Co-ordinator continued, “from my colleague, the Sixteenth Co-ordinator, Department of Cultures. He’d been conducting, he said, a personal investigation of Lannai culture and psychology—and had found himself forced to the conclusion there was no reasonable objection to having them join us as full members of the Confederacy. `A people of extraordinary refinement . . . high moral standards—’ Hinted we’d have no further trouble with the Traditionalists either. Remarkable change of heart, eh?”
“Remarkable!” Iliff agreed, watchfully.
“But can you imagine,” inquired the Co-ordinator, “what brought Sixteen—between us, mind you, Iliff, as pig-headed and hidebound an obstructionist as the Council has been hampered by in centuries—to this state of uncharacteristic enlightenment?”