to take her medicine, Worsel called a staff meeting to discuss in detail the matter of the
“Hell-Hole in Space”.
That conference was neither long nor heated; it was unanimously agreed that the
phenomenon was—must be—simply another undiscovered cavern of Overlords.
In view of the fact that Worsel and his crew had been hunting down and killing
Overlords for more than twenty years, the only logical course of action was for them to
deal similarly with one more, perhaps the only remaining large group of their hereditary
foes. Nor did any doubt of their ability to do so enter any one of the Velantian’s minds.
How wrong they were!
They did not have to search for the “Hell-Hole.” Long since, to stop its dreadful
toll, a spherical cordon of robot guard-ships had been posted to warn all traffic away
from the outer fringes of its influence. Since they merely warned against, but could not
physically prohibit, entry into the dangerous space, Worsel did not pay any attention to
the guard-ships or to their signals as the Velan went through the warning web. His plans
were, he thought, well laid. His ship was free. Its speed, by Velantian standards, was
very low. Each member of his crew wore a full-coverage thought-screen; a similar and
vastly more powerful screen would surround the whole vessel if one of Worsel’s minor
members were either to tighten or to relax its grip upon a spring-mounted control.
Worsel was, he thought, ready for anything.
But the “Hell-Hole in Space” was not a cavern of Overlords. No sun, no planet,
nothing material existed within that spherical volume of space. But something was
there. Slow as was the Velan’s pace, it was still too fast by far; for in a matter of
seconds, through the supposedly impervious thought-screens, there came an attack of
utterly malignant ferocity; an assault which tore at Worsel’s mind in a fashion he had
never imagined possible; a poignant, rending, unbearably crescendo force whose
violence seemed to double with every mile of distance.
The Velan’s all-encompassing screen snapped on—uselessly. Its tremendous
power was as unopposed as were the lesser powers of the personal shields; that highly
inimical thought was coming past, not through, the barriers. An Arisian, or one of the
Children of the Lens, would have been able to perceive and to block that band; no one
of lesser mental stature could.
Strong and fast as Worsel was, mentally and physically, he acted just barely in
time. All his resistance and all his strength had to be called into play to maintain his
mind’s control over his body; to enable him to spin his ship end for end and to kick her
drive up to maximum blast. To his surprise, his agony decreased with distance as
rapidly as it had built up; disappearing entirely as the Velan reached the web she had
crossed such a short time before.
Groggy, sick, and shaken, hanging slackly from his bars, the Velantian Lensman
was roused to action by the mental and physical frenzy of his crew. Ten of them had
died in the Hell-Hole; six more were torn to bits before their commander could muster
enough force to stop their insane rioting. Then Master Therapist Worsel went to work;
and one by one he brought the survivors back. They remembered; but he made those
memories bearable.
He then called Kinnison. “. . . but there didn’t seem to be anything personal about
it, as one would expect from an Overlord,” he concluded his brief report. “It did not
concentrate on us, reach for us, or follow us as we left. Its intensity seemed to vary only
with distance—perhaps inversely as distance squared; it might very well have been
radiated from a center. While it is nothing like anything I ever felt before, I still think it
must be an Overlord—maybe a sort of second-stage Overlord, just as you and I are
Second-Stage Lensmen. He’s too strong for me now, just as they used to be too strong
for us before we met you. By the same reasoning, however, I’m pretty sure that if you
can come over here, you and I together could figure out a way of taking him. How about
it?”
“Mighty interesting, and I’d like to, but I’m right in the middle of a job,” Kinnison
replied, and went on to explain rapidly what he, as Bradlow Thyron, had done and what
he still had to do. “As soon as I can get away I’ll come over. In the meantime, chum,
keep away from there. Do a flit—find something else to keep you amused until I can join
you.”
Worsel set out, and after a few day—or weeks? Idle time means practically
nothing to a Velantian—a sharply-Lensed thought drove in.
“Help! A Lensman calling help! Line this thought and come fast. . .” The message
ended as sharply as it had begun; in a flare of agony which, Worsel knew, meant that
that Lensman, whoever he was, had died.
Since the thought, although broadcast, had come in strong and clear, Worsel
knew that its sender had been close by. While the time had been very short indeed, he
had been able to get a line of sorts. Into that line he . .whirled the Velan’s sharp prow
and along it she hurtled at the literally inconceivable pace of her maximum drive. As the
Gray Lensman had often remarked, the Velantian super-dreadnought had more legs
than a centipede, and now she was using them all. In minutes, then, the scene of battle
grew large upon her plates.
The Patrol ship, hopelessly outclassed, could last only minutes longer. Her
screens were down; her very wall-shield was dead. Red pock-marks sprang into being
along her sides as the Boskonian needle-beamers wiped out her few remaining
controls. Then, as the helplessly raging Worsel looked on, his brain seething with
unutterable Velantian profanity, the enemy prepared to board; a course of action which,
Worsel could see, was changed abruptly by the fact—and perhaps as well by the terrific
velocity—of his own unswerving approach. The conquered Patrol cruiser disappeared in
a blaze of detonating duodec; the conqueror devoted his every jet to the task of running
away; strewing his path as he did so with sundry hems of solid and explosive
destruction. Such things, however, whether inert or free, were old and simple stuff to the
Velan’s war-wise crew. Their spotters and detectors were full out, as was also a forefan
of annihilating and disintegrating beams.
Thus none of the Boskonian’s missiles touched the Velan, nor, with all his speed,
could he escape. Few indeed were the ships of space able to step it, parsec for parsec,
with Worsel’s mighty craft, and this luckless pirate vessel was not one of them. Up and
up the Velan rushed; second by second the intervening distance lessened. Tractors
shot out, locked on, and pulled briefly with all the force of their stupendous generators.
Briefly, but long enough. As Worsel had anticipated, that savage yank had, in the
fraction of a second required for the Boskonian commander to recognize and to cut the
tractors, been enough to bring the two inertialess warcraft almost screen to screen.
“Primaries! Blast!” Worsel hurled the thought even before his tractors snapped.
He was in no mood for a long-drawn-out engagement. He might be able to win with his
secondaries, his needles, his tremendously powerful short-range stuff, and his other
ordinary offensive weapons; but he was taking no chances.
One! Two! Three! The three courses of Boskonian defensive screen scarcely
winked as each, locally overloaded, flared through the visible into the black and went
down.
Crash! The stubborn fabric of the wall-shield offered little more resistance before
it, too, went down, exposing the bare metal of the Boskonian hull—and, as is well
known, any conceivable material substance simply vanishes at the touch of such fields
of force as those.
Driving projectors carved away and main batteries silenced, Worsel’s needle-
beamers proceeded systematically to riddle every control panel and every lifeboat, to
make of the immense space-rover a completely helpless hulk.
“Hold!” An observer flashed the thought. “Number Eight slip is empty—Number
Eight lifeboat got away!” “Damnation!” Worsel, at the head of his armed and armored
storming party, as furiously eager as they to come to grips with the enemy, paused
briefly. “Trace it—or can you?”
“I did. My tracers can hold it for fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty. No longer than
twenty.”
Worsel thought intensely. Which had first call, ship or lifeboat? The ship, he
decided. Its resources were vastly greater; most of its personnel were probably
unharmed. Given any time at all, they might be able to jury-rig a primary, and that would
be bad—very bad. Besides, there were more people here; and even if, as was distinctly
possible, the Boskonian captain had abandoned his vessel and his crew in an attempt
to save his own life, there was plenty of time.
“Hold that lifeboat,” he instructed the observer. “Ten minutes is all we need here.”