“But Kandron has been hampering my activities for years, and, now that you also
have become interested in his operations, he has become a factor of which cognizance
should be taken,” Nadreck went imperturbably on. He could no more understand
Kinnison’s viewpoint than the Tellurian could understand his. “With your permission,
therefore, I shall find —and slay—this Kandron.”
“Go to it, little chum,” Kinnison sighed, bitingly—and uselessly. “Clear ether.”
While this conference was taking place, Kandron reclined in a bitterly cold,
completely unlighted room of his headquarters and indulged in a little gloating
concerning the predicament in which he was keeping Nadreck of Palain VII, who was, in
all probability, the once-dreaded Star A Star of the Galactic Patrol. It was true that the
Lensman was still alive. He would probably, Kandron mused quite pleasurably, remain
alive until he himself could find the time to attend to him in person. He was an able
operator, but one presenting no real menace, now that he was known and understood.
There were other things more pressing, just as there had been ever since the fall of
Thrale. The revised Plan was going nicely, and as soon as he had resolved that human
thing . . . The Ploorans had suggested . . . could it be possible, after all, that Nadreck of
Palain was not he who had been known so long only as Star A Star? That the human
factor was actually . . . ?
Through the operation of some unknowable sense Kandron knew that it was time
for his aide to be at hand to report upon those human affairs. He sent out a signal and
another Onlonian scuttled in.
“That unknown human element,” Kandron radiated harshly. “I assume that you
are not reporting that it has been resolved?”
“Sorry, Supremacy, but your assumption is correct,” the creature radiated back,
in no very “conciliatory fashion. “The trap at Antigan IV was set particularly for him;
specifically to match the man whose mentality you computed and diagramed for us.
Was it too obvious, think you, Supremacy? Or perhaps not quite obvious enough? Or,
the galaxy being large, is it perhaps that he simply did not learn of it in time? In the next
attempt, what degree of obviousness should I employ and what degree of repetition is
desirable?
“The technique of the Antigan affair was flawless,” Kandron decided. “He did not
learn of it, as you suggest, or we should have caught him. He is a master workman,
always concealed by his very obviousness until after he has done his work. Thus we
can never, save by merest chance, catch him before the act; we must make him come
to us. We must keep on trying until he does come to us. It is of no great moment, really,
whether we catch him now or five years hence. This work must be done in any event—it
is simply a fortunate coincidence that the necessary destruction of Civilization upon its
own planets presents such a fine opportunity of trapping him.
“As to repeating the Antigan technique, we should not repeat it exactly—or, hold!
It might be best to do just that. To repeat a process is of course the mark of an inferior
mind; but if that human can be made to believe that our minds are inferior, so much the
better. Keep on trying; report as instructed. Remember that he must be taken alive, so
that we can take from his living brain the secrets we have not yet been able to learn.
Forget, in the instant of leaving this room, everything about me and about any
connection between us until I force recollection upon you. Go.”
The minion went, and Kandron set out to do more of the things which he could
best do. He would have liked to take Nadreck’s trail himself; he could catch and he
could kill that evasive entity and the task would have been a pleasant one. He would
have liked to supervise the trapping of that enigmatic human Lensman who might—or
might not—be that frequently and copiously damned Star A Star. That, too, would be an
eminently pleasant chore. There were, however, other matters more pressing by far. If
the Great Plan were to succeed, and it absolutely must and would, every Boskonian
must perform his assigned duties. Nadreck and his putative accomplice were side
issues. Kandron’s task was to set up and to direct certain psychoses and disorders; a
ghastly train of mental ills of which he possessed such supreme mastery, and which
were surely and safely helping to destroy the foundation upon which Galactic Civilization
rested. That part was his, and he would do it to the best of his ability. The other things,
the personal and non-essential matters, could wait.
Kandron set out then, and traveled fast and far; and wherever he went there
spread still further abroad the already widespread blight. A disgusting, a horrible blight
with which no human physician or psychiatrist, apparently, could cope; one of, perhaps
the worst of, the corrosive blights which had been eating so long at Civilization’s vitals.
And L2 Nadreck, having decided to find and slay the ex-ruler of Onlo, went about
it in his usual unhurried but eminently thorough fashion. He made no effort to locate him
or to trace him personally. That would be bad—foolish. Worse, it would be inefficient.
Worst, it would probably be impossible. No, he would find out where Kandron would be
at some suitable future time, and wait for him there.
To that end Nadreck collected a vast mass of data concerning the occurrences
and phenomena which the Big Four had discussed so thoroughly. He analyzed each
item, sorting out those which bore the characteristic stamp of the arch-foe whom by now
he had come to know so well. The internal evidence of Kandron’s craftsmanship was
unmistakable; and, not now to his surprise, Nadreck discerned that the number of the
Onlonian’s dark deeds was legion.
There was the affair of the Prime Minister of DeSilva III, who at a cabinet meeting
shot and killed his sovereign and eleven chiefs of state before committing suicide. The
president* of Viridon; who, at his press conference, ran amuck with a scimitar snatched
from a wall, hewed unsuspecting reporters to gory bits until overpowered, and then
swallowed poison.
A variant of the theme, but still plainly Kandron’s doing, was the interesting
episode in which a Tellurian tycoon named Edmundson, while upon an ocean voyage,
threw fifteen women passengers overboard, then leaped after them dressed only in a
life-jacket stuffed with lead. Another out of the same whimsical mold was that of Dillway,
the highly respected operations chief of Central Spaceways. That potentate called his
secretaries one by one into his 60th floor office and unconcernedly tossed them, one by
one, out of the window. He danced a jig on the coping before diving after them to the
street.
A particularly juicy and entertaining bit, Nadreck thought, was the case of Narkor
Base Hospital, in which four of the planet’s most eminent surgeons decapitated every
other person in the place—patients, nurses, orderlies, and all, with a fine disregard of
age, sex, or condition—arranged the severed heads, each upright and each facing due
north, upon the tiled floor to spell the word “Revenge”, and then hacked each other to
death with scalpels.
These, and a thousand or more other events of similar technique, Nadreck
tabulated and ‘subjected to statistical analysis. Scattered so widely throughout such a
vast volume of space, they had created little or no general disturbance; indeed, they
had scarcely been noticed by Civilization as a whole. Collected, they made a truly
staggering, a revolting and appalling total. Nadreck, however, was inherently incapable
of being staggered, revolted, or appalled. That repulsive summation, a thing which in its
massed horror would have shaken to .the core any being possessing any shred of
sympathy or tenderness, was to Nadreck an interesting and not too difficult problem in
psychology and mathematics.
He placed each episode in space and in time, correlating each with all of its
fellows in a space-time matrix. He determined the locus of centers and derived the
equations of its most probable motion. He extended it by extrapolation in accordance
with that equation. Then, assuring himself that his margin of error was as small as he
could make it, he set out for a planet which Kandron would most probably visit at a time
far enough in the future to enable him to prepare to receive the Onlonian.
That planet, being inhabited by near-human beings, was warm, brightly sun-lit,
and had an atmosphere rich in oxygen. Nadreck detested it, since his ideal of a planet
was precisely the opposite. Fortunately, however, he would not have to land upon it until
after Kandron’s arrival—possibly not then—and the fact that his proposed quarry was,
like himself, a frigid-blooded poison-breather, made the task of detection a simple one.
Nadreck set his indetectable speedster into a circular orbit around the planet, far