escaped practically unscratched—his armor was battered and dinged up, cut and torn,
but he had only a couple of superficial wounds. He had met the enemy where they
could come at him only one at a time; he was still the master of any weapon known to
space warfare; it had been at no time evident that any outside influence was interfering
with the normally rapid functioning of the Boskonians’ minds.
He was full of confidence, full of fight, and far from spent when he faced about to
consider what he should do about that control-room. There was plenty of stuff in there . .
. tougher stuff than he had met up with so far . . .
Kathryn in her speedster gritted her teeth and clenched her hands’ into hard fists.
This was bad—very, very bad— and it was going to get worse. -Closing up fast, she
uttered a bitter and exceedingly unladylike expletive.
Couldn’t he see—couldn’t the damn dumb darling sense —that he was apt to run
out of time almost any minute now?
She fairly writhed in an agony of indecision; and indecision, in a Third-Stage
Lensman, is a rare phenomenon indeed. She wanted intensely to take over, but if she
did, was there any way this side of Palain’s purple hells for her to cover up her tracks?
There was none . . . yet.
CHAPTER 8: BLACK LENSMEN
But Kinnison’s mind, while slower than his daughter’s and much less able, was
sure. The four Boskonians in the control-room were screened against his every mental
force and it was idle even to hope for another such lucky break as he had just had. They
were armored by this time and they had both machine rifles and semi-portable
projectors. They were entrenched; evidently intending to fight a delaying and defensive
battle, knowing that if they could hold him off until the tube had been traversed, the
Lensman would not have a chance. Armed with all they could use of the most powerful
mobile weapons aboard -and being four to one, they undoubtedly thought they could
win easily enough.
Kinnison thought otherwise. Since he could not use his mind against them he
would use whatever he could find, and this ship, having come upon such a mission,
would be carrying plenty of weapons—and those four men certainly hadn’t had time to
tamper with them all. He might even find some negative-matter bombs.
Setting up a spy-ray block, he proceeded to rummage. They couldn’t see him,
and if any one of them had a sense of perception and cut his screen for even a fraction
of a second to use it the battle would end right then. And if they decided to rush him, so
much the better. They remained, however, forted up, as he had thought they would, and
he rummaged in peace. Various death-dealing implements, invitingly set up, he ignored
after one cursory glance into their interiors. He knew weapons—these had been fixed.
He went on to the armory.
He did not find any negabombs, but he found plenty of untouched weapons like
those now emplaced in the control-room. The rifles were beauties; high-caliber, water-
cooled things, each with a heavy dureum shield-plate and a single-ply screen. Each had
a beam, too, but machine-rifle beams weren’t so hot. Conversely, the semi-portables
had lots of screen, but very little dureum. Kinnison lugged one rifle and two semi-
portables, by easy stages, into the room next to the control room; so placing them that
the control panels would be well out of the line of fire.
What gave Kinnison his chance was the fact that the enemies’ weapons were set
to cover the door. Apparently they had not considered the possibility that the Lensman
would attempt to flank them by blasting through an inch and a half of high-alloy steel.
Kinnison did not know whether he could do it fast enough to mow them down from the
side before they could reset their magnetic clamps, or not; but he’d give it the good old
college try. It was bound to be a mighty near thing, and the Lensman grinned wolfishly
behind the guard-plates of his helmet as he arranged his weapons to save every
possible fractional second of time.
Aiming one at a spot some three feet above the floor, the other a little lower,
Kinnison cut in the full power of his semis and left them on. He energized the rifle’s
beam— every little bit helped—set the defensive screens at “full”, and crouched down
into the saddle behind the dureum off, with the ship’s dureum cat-walk as close to the
floor of the corridor as the dimensions of the tube permitted, he reversed the controls
and poised himself for a running headlong dive. He could not feel Radeligian gravitation,
of course, but he was pretty sure that he could jump far enough to get through the
interface. He took a short run, jerked the line, and hurled himself through the space-
ship’s immaterial wall. The ship disappeared.
.Going through that interface was more of a shock than the Lensman had
anticipated. Even taken very slowly, as it customarily is, inter-dimensional acceleration
brings malaise to which no one has ever become accustomed, and taking it so rapidly
fairly turned Kinnison inside out. He was going to land with the rolling impact which
constitutes perfect technique in such armored maneuvering. As it was, he never did
know how he landed, except that he made a boiler-shop racket and brought up against
the far wall of the corridor with a climactic clang. Beyond the addition of a few more
bruises and contusions to his already abundant collection, however, he was not hurt.
As soon as he could collect himself he leaped to his feet and rapped out orders.
“Tractors—pressors—shears! Heavy stuff, to anchor, not to clamp! Hipe!” He knew what
he was up against now, and if they’d only come back he’d yank them out of that blank
tube so fast it’d break every blank blank one of their blank blank blank necks!
And Kathryn, still watching intently, smiled. Her dad was a pretty smart old duck,
but he wasn’t using his noggin now—he was cockeyed as Trenco’s ether in even
thinking they might come back. If anything at all erupted from that hyper-circle it would
be something against which everything he was mustering would be precisely as
effective as so much thin air. And she still had no concrete idea of what she so feared. It
wouldn’t be essentially physical, she was pretty sure. It would almost have to be mental.
But who or what could possibly put it across? And how? And above all, what could she
do about it if they did?
Eyes narrowed, brow furrowed in concentration, she thought as she had never
thought before; and the harder she thought the more clouded the picture became. For
the first time in her triumphant life she felt small—weak—impotent. It was in that hour
that Kathryn Kinnison really grew up.
The tube vanished; she heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. They, whoever they
were, having failed to bring Kinnison to them—this time—were not coming after
him—this time. Not an important enough game to play to the end? No, that wasn’t it.
Maybe they weren’t ready. But the next time . . .
Mentor the Arisian had told her bluntly, the last time she had seen him, to come
to him again when she realized that she didn’t know quite everything. Deep down, she
had not expected that day ever to come. Now, however, it had. This escape—if it had
been an escape—had taught her much.
“Mother!” She shot a call to distant Klovia. “I’m on Radelix. Everything’s on the
green. Dad has just knocked a flock of Boskonians into an outside loop and come
through QX. I’ve got to do a little flit, though, before I come home. Bye.”
Kinnison stood intermittent guard over the base for four days after the hyper-
spatial tube had disappeared before he gave up; before he did any very serious thinking
about what he should do next.
Could he and should he keep on as Sybly Whyte? He could and he should, he
decided. He hadn’t been gone long enough for Whyte’s absence to have been noticed;
nothing whatever connected Whyte with Kinnison. If he really knew what he was doing a
more specific alias might be better; but as long as he was merely smelling around,
Whyte’s was the best identity to use. He could go anywhere, do anything, ask anything
of anybody, and all with a perfectly good excuse.
And as Sybly Whyte, then, for days that stretched into weeks, he
roamed—finding, as he had feared, nothing whatever. It seemed as though all
Boskonian activity of the type in which he was most interested had ceased with his
return from the hyper-spatial tube. Just what that meant he did not know. It was
unthinkable that they had given up on him: much more probably they were hatching