top, this seems to be the only lead we have. In either case I’ve got to take it. Check?”
“Well, I . . .” Kit tried to duck, but couldn’t “Yes, dad, I’m afraid it’s check.”
Two big hands met and gripped: and Kinnison went to take leave of his wife.
There is no need to go into detail as to what those two said or did. He knew that
he was going into danger; that he might not return. That is, he knew empirically or
academically, as a non-germane sort of fact, that he might die. He did not, however,
really believe so. .No man really believes, ever, that any given event will kill him.
Kinnison expected to be captured, imprisoned, questioned, tortured. He could
understand all of those things, and he did not like any one of them. That he was more
than a trifle afraid and that he hated to leave her now more than he ever had before
were both natural enough—he had nothing whatever to hide from her.
She, on the other hand, knew starkly that he would never come back. She knew
that he would die in that trap. She knew that she would have to live a lifetime of
emptiness, alone. Hence she had much to conceal from him. She must be just as
scared and as apprehensive as he was, but no more; just as anxious for their continued
happiness as he was, but no more; just as intensely loving, but no more and in exactly
the same sense. Here lay the test. She must kiss him goodbye as though he were going
into mere danger. She must not give way to the almost irresistible urge to act in
accordance with what she so starkly, chillingly knew to be the truth, that she would
never . . . never . . . NEVER kiss her Kim again!
She succeeded. It is a measure of the Red Lensman’s quality that she did not
weaken, even when her husband approached the boundary of the Hell-Hole and sent
what she knew would be his last message.
“Here it is—about a second now. Don’t worry—I’ll be back shortly. Clear ether,
Cris!”
“Of course you will, dear. Clear ether, Kim!”
His speedster did not mount any special generators, nor were any needed. He
and his ship were sucked into that trap as though it had been a maelstrom.
He felt again the commingled agonies of inter-dimensional acceleration. He
perceived again the formless, texture-less, spaceless void of blankly gray nothingness
which was the three-dimensionally-impossible substance of the tube. A moment later,
he felt a new and different acceleration—he was speeding up inside the tube! Then,
very shortly, he felt nothing at all. Startled, he tried to jump up to investigate, and
discovered that he could not move. Even by the utmost exertion of his will he could not
stir a finger or an eyelid. He was completely immobilized. Nor could he feel. His body
was as devoid of sensation as though it belonged to somebody else. Worse, for his
heart was not beating. He was not breathing. He could not see. It was as though his
every nerve, motor and sensory, voluntary and involuntary, had been separately
anaesthetized. He could still think, but that was all. His sense of perception still worked.
He wondered whether he was still accelerating or not, and tried to find out. He
could not. He could not determine whether he was moving or stationary. There were no
reference points. Every infinitesimal volume of that enigmatic grayness was like each
and every other.
Mathematically, perhaps, he was not moving at all; since he was in a continuum
in which mass, length and time, and hence inertia and inertialessness, velocity and
acceleration, are meaningless terms.
He was outside of space and beyond time. Effectively, however, he was moving;
moving with an acceleration which nothing material had ever before approached. He
and his vessel were being driven along that tube by every watt of power generable by
one entire Eddorian atomic power plant. His velocity, long since unthinkable, became
incalculable.
All things end: even Eddorian atomic power was not infinite. At the very peak of
power and pace, then, all the force, all the momentum, all the kinetic energy of the
speedster’s mass and velocity were concentrated in and applied to Kinnison’s physical
body. He sensed something, and tried to flinch, but could not. In a fleeting instant of
what he thought was time he went past, not through, his clothing and his Lens; past, not
through, his armor; and past, not through, the hard beryllium-alloy structure of his
vessel. He even went past but not through the N-dimensional interface of the hyper-
spatial tube.
This, although Kinnison did not know it, was the Eddorian’s climactic effort. He
had taken his prisoner as far as he could possibly reach: then, assembling and
concentrating all available power, he had given him a catapultic shove into the
absolutely unknown and utterly unknowable. The Eddorian did not know any vector of
the Lensman’s naked flight; he did not care where he went. He did not know and could
not compute or even guess at his victim’s probable destination.
In what his spacehound’s time sense told him was one second, Kinnison passed
exactly two hundred million foreign spaces. He did not know how he knew the precise
number, but he did. Hence, in the Patrol’s measured cadence, he began to count
groups of spaces of one hundred -million each. After a few days, his velocity decreased
to such a value that he could count groups of single millions. Then thousands—
hundreds—tens—until finally he could perceive the salient features of each space
before it was blotted out by the next.
How could this be? He wondered, but not foggily; his mind was as clear and as
strong as it had ever been. Spaces were coexistent, not spread out like this. In the
fourth dimension they were flat together, like pages in a book, except thinner. This was
all wrong. It was impossible. Since it could not happen, it was not happening. He had
not been and could not be drugged. Therefore some Plooran must have him in a zone
of compulsion. What a zone! What an operator the ape must be!
It was, however, real—all of it. What Kinnison did not know, then or ever, was
that he was actually outside the boundaries of space; actually beyond the confines of
time. He was going past, not through, those spaces and those times.
He was now in each space long enough to study it in some detail. He was an
immense distance above this one; at such a distance that he could perceive many
globular super-universes; each of which in turn was composed of billions of lenticular
galaxies.
Another one. Closer now. Galaxies only; the familiar random masses whose
apparent lack of symmetrical grouping is due to the limitations of Civilization’s
observers. He was still going too fast to stop.
In the next space Kinnison found himself within the limits of a solar system and
tried with all the force of his mind to get in touch with some intelligent entity upon
one—any one —of its planets. Before he could succeed, that system vanished and he
was dropping, from a height of a few thousand kilometers, toward the surface of a warm
and verdant world, so much like Tellus that he thought for an instant he must have
circumnavigated total space. The aspect, the ice-caps, the cloud-effects, were identical.
The oceans, however, while similar, were different; as were the continents. The
mountains were larger and rougher and harder.
He was falling much too fast. A free fall from infinity wouldn’t give him this much
speed!
This whole affair was, as he had decided once before, absolutely impossible. It
was simply preposterous to believe that a naked man, especially one without blood-
circulation or breath, could still be alive after spending as many weeks in open space as
he had just spent. He knew that he was alive. Therefore none of this was happening;
even though, as surely as he knew that he was alive, he knew that he was falling.
“Jet back, Lensman!” he thought viciously to himself; tried to shout it aloud.
For this could be deadly stuff, if he let himself believe it. If he believed that he
was falling from any such height he would die in the instant of landing. He would not
actually crash; his body would not move from wherever it was that it was. Nevertheless
the shock of that wholly imaginary crash would kill him just as dead and just as
instantaneously as though all his flesh had been actually smashed into a crimson smear
upon one of the neighboring mountain’s huge, fiat rocks.
“Pretty close, my bright young Plooran friend, but you didn’t quite ring the bell,”
he thought savagely, trying with all the power of his mind to break through the zone of
compulsion. “So I’m telling you something right now. If you want to kill me you’ll have to