going in now and I’m going in alone. Pick that one out of your pearly teeth!”
That stopped Karen, cold—they all knew that even she would not endanger the
enterprise by staging a useless demonstration against Eddore’s defensive screens—but
there were other arguments. Later, he was to come to see that his sisters had some
right upon their side, but he could not see it then. None of their ideas would hold air, he
declared, and his temper wore thinner and thinner.
“No, Cam—NO! You know as well as I do that we can’t all be spared at once,
either now or at any time in the near-enough future. Kay’s full of pickles, and you all
know it Right now is the best time I’ll ever have . . .
“Seal it, Kat—you can’t be that dumb! Taking the Unit in would blow things wide
open. There isn’t a chance that I can get in, even alone, without touching something off.
I, alone, won’t be giving too much away, but the Unit would be a flare-lit tip-off and all
hell would be out for noon. Or are you actually nit-witted enough to think, all Arisia to the
contrary, that we’re ready for the grand show-down? . . .
“Hold it, all of you! Pipe down!” he snorted, finally. “Have I got to bash in your
skulls to make you understand that I can’t coordinate an attack against something
without even the foggiest idea of what it is? Use your brains, kids—please use your
brains!”
He finally won them over, even Karen; and while his speedster covered the last
leg of the flight he completed his analysis.
He had all the information he could get—in fact, all that was available—and it
was pitifully meager and confusingly contradictory in detail. He knew the Arisians, each
of them, personally; and had studied, jointly and severally, the Arisian visualizations of
the ultimate foe. He knew the Lyranian impression of the Plooran version of the story of
Eddore . . . Floor! Merely a name. A symbol which Mentor had always kept rigorously
apart from any Boskonian actuality . . . Floor must be the missing link between Kalonia
and Eddore . . . and he knew practically everything about it except the two really
important facts—whether or not it really was that link, and where, within eleven
thousand million parsecs, it was in space!
He and his sisters had done their best. So had many librarians; who had found,
not at all to his surprise, that no scrap of information or conjecture concerning Eddore or
the Eddorians was to be found in any library, however comprehensive or exclusive.
Thus he had guesses, hypotheses, theories, and visualizations galore; but none
of them agreed and not one of them was convincing. He had no real facts whatever.
Mentor had informed him, equably enough, that such a state of affairs was inevitable
because of the known power of the Eddorian mind. That state, however, did not make
Kit Kinnison any too happy as he approached dread and dreaded Eddore. He was in
altogether too much of a dither as to what, actually, to expect.
As he neared the boundary of the star-cluster within which Eddore lay, he cut his
velocity to a crawl. An outer screen, he knew, surrounded the whole cluster. How many
intermediate protective layers existed, where they were, or what they were like, “nobody
knew. That information was only a small part of what he had to have.
His far-flung detector web, at practically zero power, touched the barrier without
giving alarm and stopped. His speedster stopped. Everything stopped.
Christopher Kinnison, the matrix and the key element of the Unit, had tools and
equipment about which even Mentor of Arisia knew nothing in detail; about which, it was
hoped and believed, the Eddorians were completely in ignorance. He reached deep into
the storehouse-toolbox of his mind, arranged his selections in order, and went to work.
He built up his detector web, one infinitesimal increment at a time, until he could
just perceive the structure of the barrier. He made no attempt to analyze it, knowing that
any fabric or structure solid enough to perform such an operation would certainly touch
off an alarm. Analysis could come later, after he had found out whether the generator of
this outer screen was a machine or a living brain.
He felt his way along the barrier; slowly—carefully. He completely outlined one
section, studying the fashion in which the joints were made and how it must be
supported and operated. With the utmost nicety of which he was capable he
synchronized a probe with the almost impossibly complex structure of the thing and slid
it along a feederbeam into the generator station. A mechanism—they didn’t waste live
Eddorians, then, any more than the Arisians did, on outer defenses. QX.
A precisely-tuned blanket surrounded his speedster—& blanket which merged
imperceptibly into, and in effect became an integral part of, the barrier itself. The blanket
thinned over half of the speedster. The speedster crept forward. The
barrier—unchanged, unaffected—was behind the speedster. Man and vessel were
through!
Kit breathed deeply in relief and rested. This didn’t prove much, of course.
Nadreck had done practically the same thing in getting Kandron—except that the
Palainian would never be able to analyze or to synthesize such screens as these. The
real test would come later; but this had been mighty good practice.
The real test came with the fifth, the innermost screen. The others, while of ever-
increasing sensitivity, complexity, and power, were all generated mechanically, and
hence posed problems differing only in degree, and not in kind, from that of the first.
The fifth problem, however, involving a living and highly capable brain, differed in both
degree and kind from the others. The Eddorian would be sensitive to form and to shape,
as well as to interference. Bulges were out, unless he could do something about the
Eddorian—and the speedster couldn’t go through a screen without making a bulge.
Furthermore, this zone had visual and electromagnetic detectors, so spaced as
not to let a microbe through. There were fortresses, maulers, battleships, and their
attendant lesser craft. There were projectors, and mines, and automatic torpedoes with
super-atomic warheads, and other such things. Were these things completely
dependent upon the Eddorian guardian, or not?
They were not. The officers—Kalonians for the most part —would go into action
at the guardian’s signal, of course; but they could at need act without instructions. A
nice set-up—a mighty hard nut to crack! He would have to use zones of compulsion.
Nothing else would do.
Picking out the biggest fortress in the neighborhood, with its correspondingly
large field of coverage, he insinuated his mind into that of one observing officer after
another. When he left, a few minutes later, he knew that none of those officers would
initiate any action in response to the alarms which he would so soon set off. They were
alive, fully conscious, alert; and would have resented bitterly any suggestion that they
were not completely normal in every respect. Nevertheless, whatever colors the lights
flashed, whatever pictures the plates revealed, whatever noises blared from the
speakers, in their consciousnesses would be only blankness and silence. Nor would
recorder tapes reveal later what had occurred. An instrument cannot register
fluctuations when its movable member is controlled by a couple of steady fingers.
Then the Eddorian. To take over his whole mind was, Kit knew, beyond his
present power. A partial zone, though, could be set up—and young Kinnison’s mind had
been developed specifically to perform the theretofore impossible. Thus the guardian,
without suspecting it, suffered an attack of partial blindness which lasted for the fraction
of a second necessary for the speedster to flash through the screen. And there was no
recorder to worry about. Eddorians, never sleeping and never relaxing their vigilance,
had no doubt whatever of their own capabilities and needed no checks upon their own
performances.
Christopher Kinnison, Child of the Lens, was inside Eddore’s innermost defensive
sphere. For countless cycles of time the Arisians had been working toward and looking
forward to the chain of events of which this was the first link. Nor would he have much
time here: he would have known that even if Mentor had not so stressed the point. As
long as he did nothing he was safe; but as soon as he started sniffing around he would
be open to detection and some Eddorian would climb his frame in mighty short order.
Then blast and lock on—he might get something, or a lot, or nothing at all. Then—win,
lose, or draw—he had to get away. Strictly under his own power, against an unknown
number of the most powerful and the most ruthless entities ever to live. The Arisian
couldn’t get in here to help him, and neither could the kids. Nobody could. It was strictly
and solely up to him.
For more than a moment his spirit failed. The odds against him were far to long.