quarter of an inch thick. Kinnison was not walking in it; he was merely the engineer of a
battery of two-thousand-horsepower motors. Unaided, he could not have lifted one leg
of that armor off the ground.
As he had expected, everyone he encountered wore a thought-screen; nor was
he surprised at being halted by a blaring loud-speaker in the hall, since the zwilnik’s
search-beams were being stopped four feet away from his armor.
“Halt! Cut your screens or we’ll blast you where you stand!”
“Yeah? Act your age, Harkleroy. I told you I had something up my sleeve besides
my arm, and I meant it. Either I come as I am or I flit somewhere else, to do business
with somebody who wants this stuff bad enough to act like half a man. ‘Smatter—afraid
you ain’t got blasters enough in there to handle me?”
This taunt bit deep, and the visitor was allowed to proceed. As he entered the
private office, however, he saw that Harkleroy’s hand was poised near a switch, whose
closing would signal a score or more of concealed gunners to burn him down. They
supposed that the stuff was either on his person or in his speedster just outside. Time
was short.
“I abase myself—that’s the formula you insist on, ain’t it?” Kinnison sneered,
without bending his head a millimeter.
Harkleroy’s finger touched the stud.
“Dauntless! Come down!” Kinnison snapped out the order.
Hand, stud, and a part of the desk disappeared in the flare of Kinnison’s beam.
Wall-ports opened; projectors and machine rifles erupted vibratory and solid destruction.
Kinnison leaped toward the desk; the attack slowing down and stopping as he neared
and seized the Boskonian. One fierce, short blast reduced the thought-screen generator
to blobs of fused metal. Harkleroy screamed to his gunners to resume fire, but before
bullet or beam took the zwilnik’s life, Kinnison learned what he most wanted to know.
The ape did know something about Black Lensmen. He didn’t know where the
Lenses came from, but he did know how the men were chosen. More, he knew a
Lensman personally—one Melasnikov, who had his office in Cadsil, on Kalonia III itself.
Kinnison turned and ran—the alarm had been given and they were bringing up
stuff too heavy for even his armor to handle. But the Dauntless was landing already;
smashing to rubble five city blocks in the process. She settled; and as the dureum-clad
Gray Lensman began to fight his way out of Harkleroy’s fortress, Major Peter
vanBuskirk and a full battalion of Valerians, armed with space-axes and semi-portables,
began to hew and to blast their way in.
CHAPTER 15: THYRON FOLLOWS A LEAD
Inch by inch, foot by foot, Kinnison fought his way back along the corpse-littered
corridor. Under the ravening force of the attackers’ beams his defensive screens flared
into pyrotechnic splendor, but they did not go down. Fierce-driven metallic slugs
spanged and whanged against the unyielding dureum of his armor; but that, too, held.
Dureum is incredibly massive, unbelievably tough, unimaginably hard— against these
qualities and against the thousands of horsepower driving that veritable tank and
energizing its screens the zwilniks might just as well have been shining flashlights at
him and throwing confetti. His immediate opponents could not touch him, but the
Boskonians were bringing up reserves that he didn’t like a little bit; mobile projectors
with whose energies even those screens could not cope.
He had, however, one great advantage over his enemies. He had the sense of
perception; they did not. He could see them, but they could not see him. All he had to
do was to keep at least one opaque wall between them until he was securely behind the
mobile screens, powered by the stupendous generators of the Dauntless, which
vanBuskirk and his Valerians were so earnestly urging toward him. If a door was handy
in the moment of need, he used it. If not he went through a wall.
The Valerians were fighting furiously and were coming fast. Those two words,
when applied to members of that race, mean something starkly incredible to anyone
who has never seen Valerians in action. They average something less than seven feet
in height;- something over four hundred pounds in weight; and are muscled, boned, and
sinewed against a normal gravitational force of almost three times that of Earth.
VanBuskirk’s weakest warrior could do, in full armor, a standing high jump of fourteen
feet against one Tellurian gravity; he could handle himself and the thirty-pound
monstrosity which was his space-axe with a blinding speed and a devastating efficiency
literally appalling to contemplate. They are the deadliest hand-to-hand fighters ever
known; and, unbelievable as it may seem to any really highly advanced intelligence,
they did and still do fairly revel in that form of combat.
The Valerian tide reached the battling Gray Lensman; closed around him.
“Hi . . . you little . . . Tellurian . . . wart!” Major Peter vanBuskirk boomed this
friendly thought, a yell of pure joy, in cadence with the blows of his utterly irresistible
weapon. His rhythm broke—his frightful axe was stuck. Not even dureum-inlaid armor
could bar the inward course of those furiously-driven beaks; but sometimes it made it
fairly difficult to get them out. The giant pulled, twisted—put one red-splashed boot on a
battered breastplate—bent his mighty back—heaved viciously. The weapon came free
with a snap that would have broken any ordinary man’s arms, but the Valerian’s thought
rolled smoothly on: “Ain’t we got fun?”
“Ho, Bus, you big Valerian baboon!” Kinnison thought back in kind. “Thought
maybe we’d need you and your gang—thanks a million. But back now,, and fast!”
Although the Valerians did not like to retreat, after even a successful operation,
they knew how to do it. Hence in a matter of minutes all the survivors—and the losses
had been surprisingly small—were back inside the Dauntless.
“You picked up my speedster, Frank.” It was a statement, not a question,
directed at the young Lensman sitting at the “big board.”
“Of course, sir. They’re massing fast, but without any hostile demonstration, as
you said they would.” He nodded unconcernedly at a plate, which showed the sky
dotted with warlike shapes.
“No maulers?”
“None detectable as yet, sir.”
“QX. Original orders stand. At detection of one mauler, execute Operation Able.
Tell everybody that while the announcement of Operation Able will put me out of control
instantly and automatically, until such announcement I will give instructions. What they’ll
be like I haven’t the foggiest notion. It depends on what his nibs upstairs decides to
do— it’s his move next.”
As though the last phrase were a cue, a burst of noise rattled from the
speaker—of which only the words “Bradlow Thyron” were intelligible to the un-Lensed
members of the crew. That name, however, explained why they were not being
attacked—yet. Kalonia had heard much of that intransigent and obdurate pirate and of
the fabulous prowess of his ship; and Kinnison was pretty sure that they were much
more interested in his ship than in him.
“I can’t understand you!” The Gray Lensman barked, in the polyglot language he
had so lately learned. “Talk pidgin!”
“Very well. I see that you are indeed Bradlow Thyron, as we were informed. What
do you mean by this outrageous attack? Surrender! Disarm your men, take off their
armor, and march them out of your vessel, or we will blast you as you lie there—Vice-
Admiral Mendonai speaking!”
“I abase myself.” Kinnison-Thyron did not sneer—exactly—and he did incline his
stubborn head perhaps the sixteenth part of an inch; but he made no move to comply
with the orders so summarily issued. Instead:
“What the hell kind of planet is this, anyway?” he demanded, hotly. “I come here
to see this louse Harkleroy because a friend of mine tells me he’s a big shot and
interested enough in my line so we can do a lot of business. I give the lug fair warning,
too—tell him plain I’ve been around plenty and if he tries to give me the works I’ll rub
him out like a pencil mark. So what happens? In spite of what I just tell him he tries dirty
work and I knock hell out of him, which he certainly has got coming to him. Then you
and your flock of little tin boats come barging in like I’d busted a law or something. Who
do you think you are, anyway? What license you got to stick your beak into private
business?”
“Ah, I had not heard that version.” Vision came on; the face upon the plate was
typically Kalonian—blue, cold, cruel, and keen. “Harkleroy was warned, you say?
Definitely?”
“Plenty definitely. Ask any of the zwilniks in that private office of his. They’re
mostly alive and they all must of heard it.”
The plate fogged, the speaker again gave out gibberish. The Lensman knew,
however, that the commander of the forces above them was indeed questioning the
dead zwilnik’s guards. They knew that Kinnison’s story was being corroborated in full.