other man in the universe. Furthermore, his word is the last word. What he says, goes.”
“Of course,” Thompson apologized. “I am overwrought . . . but to see our entire
world pulled down around us, our institutions, the work of centuries, destroyed, millions
of lives lost. . . all needlessly . . .”
“It won’t come to that, he says, if we all do our parts. And you, sir, are very much
in the picture.”
“I? How?”
“Are you familiar with what happened to Antigan IV?”
“Why, no. They had some trouble over there, I recall, but. . .”
“That’s it. That’s why this must go on. No planet cares particularly about what
happens to any other planet, but Kinnison cares about them all as a whole. If this
trouble is headed off now it will simply spread to other planets; if it is allowed to come to
a climax there’s a chance to put an end to the whole trouble, for good.”
“But what has that to do with me? What can I, personally, do?”
“Much. That last act at Antigan IV, the thing that made it a planet of maniacs,
was the kidnaping of Planetary President Renwood. Murdered, supposedly, since no
trace of him has been found.”
“Oh.” The older man’s hands clenched, then loosened. “I am willing . . . provided
. . . is Kinnison fairly certain that my death will enable him . . .”
“It won’t get that far, sir. He intends to stop it just before that. He and his
associates—I don’t know who they are— have been listing every enemy agent they can
find, and they will all be taken care of at once. He believes that Boskone will publish in
advance a definite time at which they will take you away from us. That was the way it
went at Antigan.”
“Even from the Patrol?”
“From the main base itself. Coordinator Kinnison is pretty sure they can do it,
except for something he can bring into play only at the last moment. Incidentally, that’s
why we’re having this meeting here, with this detector he gave me. He’s afraid this base
is porous.”
“In that case . . . what can he. . .” The president fell silent.
“All I know is that we’re to dress you in a certain suit of armor and have you in my
private office a few minutes before the time they set. We and the guards leave the office
at minus two minutes and walk down the corridor, just fast enough to be exactly in front
of Room Twenty-four at minus one. We’re to rehearse it until our timing is perfect. I don’t
know what will happen then, but something will.”
Time passed; the Boskonian infiltration progressed according to plan. It appeared
that Radelix was going in the same fashion in which Antigan IV had gone. Below the
surface, however, there was one great difference. Every ship reaching Radelix brought
at least one man who did not leave. Some of these visitors were tall and lithe, some
were short and fat. Some were old, some were young. Some were pale, some were
burned to the color of ancient leather by the fervent rays of space. They were alike only
in the “look of eagles” in their steady, quiet eyes. Each landed and went about his
ostensible business, interesting himself not at all in any of the others.
Again the Boskonians declared their contempt of the Patrol by setting the exact
time at which Planetary President Thompson was to be taken. Again the appointed hour
was midnight.
Lieutenant-admiral Lensman Gerrond was, as Kinnison had intimated frequently,
somewhat of a brass hat. He did not, he simply could not believe that his base was as
pregnable as the coordinator had assumed it to be. Kinnison, knowing that all ordinary
defenses would be useless, had not even mentioned them. Gerrond, unable to believe
that his hitherto invincible and invulnerable weapons and defenses were all of a sudden
useless, mustered them of his own volition.
All leaves had been cancelled. Every detector, every beam, every device of
defense and offense was fully manned. Every man was keyed up and alert. And
Gerrond, while apprehensive that something was about to happen which wasn’t in the
book, was pretty sure in his stout old war-dog’s soul that he and his men had stuff
enough.
At two minutes before midnight the armored president and his escorts left
Gerrond’s office. One minute later they were passing the door of the specified room. A
bomb exploded shatteringly behind them, armored men rushed yelling out of a branch
corridor in their rear. Everybody stopped and turned to look. So, the hidden Kinnison
assured himself, did an unseen observer in an invisible hovering, three-dimensional
hyper-circle.
Kinnison threw the door open, flashed an explanatory thought at the president,
yanked him into the room and into the midst of a corps of Lensmen armed with devices
not usually encountered even in Patrol bases. The door snapped shut and Kinnison
stood where Thompson had stood an instant before, clad in armor identical with that
which the president had worn. The exchange had required less than one second.
“QX, Gerrond and you fellows!” Kinnison drove the thought. “The president is
safe—I’m taking over. Double time straight ahead—hipe! Get clear—give us a chance to
use our stuff!”
The unarmored men broke into a run, and as they did so the door of Room
Twenty-four swung open and stayed open. Weapons erupted from other doors and from
more branch corridors. The hyper-circle, which was in fact the terminus of a hyper-
spatial tube, began to thicken toward visibility.
It did not, however, materialize. Only by the intensest effort of vision could it be
discerned as the sheerest wisp, more tenuous than fog. The men within the ship, if ship
it was, were visible only as striations in air are visible, and no more to be made out in
detail. Instead of a full materialization, the only thing that was or became solid was a
dead-black thing which reached purposefully outward and downward toward Kinnison, a
thing combined of tongs and coarse-meshed, heavy net.
” Kinnison’s DeLameters flamed at maximum intensity and minimum aperture.
Useless. The stuff was dureum; that unbelievably dense and ultimately refractory
synthetic which, saturated with pure force, is the only known substance which can exist
as an actuality both in normal space and in that pseudo-space which composes the
hyper-spatial tube. The Lensman flicked on his neutralizer and shot away inertialess;
but that maneuver, too, had been foreseen. The Boskonian engineers matched every
move he made, within a split second after he made it: the tong-net closed.
Semi-portables flamed then—heavy stuff—but they might just as well have
remained cold. Their beams could not cut the dureum linkages; they slid harmlessly
past—not through —the wraith-like, figmental invaders at whom they were aimed.
Kinnison was hauled aboard the Boskonian vessel; its structure and its furnishings and
its crew becoming ever firmer and more substantial to his senses as he went from
normal into pseudo space.
As the pseudo world became real, the reality of the base behind him thinned into
unreality. In seconds it disappeared utterly, and Kinnison knew that to the senses of his
fellow human beings he had simply vanished. This ship, though, was real enough. So
were his captors.
The net opened, dumping the Lensman ignominiously to the floor. Tractor beams
wrenched his blazing DeLameters out of his grasp—whether or not hands and arms
came with them was entirely his own look-out. Tractors and pressors jerked him upright,
slammed him against the steel wall of the room, held him motionless against it.
Furiously he launched his ultimately lethal weapon, the Worsel-designed,
Thorndyke-built, mind-controlled projector of thought-borne vibrations which
decomposed the molecules without which thought and life itself could not exist. Nothing
happened. He explored, finding that even his sense of perception was stopped a full
foot away from every part of every one of those humanoid bodies. He settled down then
and thought. A great light dawned; a shock struck sickeningly home.
No such elaborate and super-powered preparations would have been made for
the capture of any civilian. Presidents were old men, physically weak and with no
extraordinary powers of mind. No—this whole chain of events had been according to
plan—a high Boskonian’s plan. Ruining a planet was, of course, a highly desirable thing
in itself, but it could not have been the main feature.
Somebody with a real brain was out after the four Second-Stage Lensmen and
he wasn’t fooling. And if Nadreck, Worsel, Tregonsee and himself were all to disappear,
the Patrol would know that it had been nudged. But jet back— which of the four other
than himself would have taken that particular bait? Not one of them. Weren’t they out
after them, too? Sure they were—they must be. Oh, if he could only warn them—but
after all, what good would it do? They had all warned each other repeatedly to watch out