manufacture of an outrageous something whose like had never before been seen on
land or sea or in the depths of space.
These and many other things Worsel studied carefully. He’d head for the “Hell-
Hole in Space,” he decided. This planet, the Overlords he had just slain, were not the
Hell-Hole; could have had nothing to do with it—wrong location.
He knew now, though, what the Hell-Hole really was. It was a cavern of
Overlords—couldn’t be anything else—and in himself and his crew and his mighty
vessel he, the Overlord-slayer supreme of two galaxies, had everything it took to
extirpate any number of Overlords. That Hell-Hole was just as good as out, as of that
minute.
And just then a solid, diamond-clear thought came in.
“Worsel! Con calling. What goes on there, fellow old snake?”
CHAPTER 3: KINNISON WRITES A SPACE-OPERA
Each of the Second-Stage Lensmen had exactly the same facts, the same data,
upon which to theorize and from which to draw conclusions. Each bad shared his
experiences, his findings, and his deductions and inductions with all of the others. They
had discussed minutely, in wide-open four-ways, every phase of the Boskonian
problem. Nevertheless the approach of each to that problem and the point of attack
chosen by each was individual and characteristic.
Kimball Kinnison was by nature forthright; direct. As has been seen, he could use
the approach circuitous if necessary, but he much preferred and upon every possible
occasion employed the approach direct. He liked plain, unambiguous clues much better
than obscure ones; the more obvious and factual the clue was, the better he liked it.
He was now, therefore, heading for Antigan IV, the scene of the latest and
apparently the most outrageous of a long series of crimes of violence. He didn’t know
much about it; the request had come through regular channels, not via Lens, that he
visit Antigan and direct the investigation of the supposed murder of the Planetary
President.
As his speedster flashed through space the Gray Lensman mulled over in his
mind the broad aspects of this crime-wave. It was spreading far and wide, and the wider
it spread and the intenser it became the more vividly one salient fact struck out.
Selectivity—distribution. The solar systems of Thrale, Velantia, Tellus, Klovia, and
Palain had not been affected. Thrale, Tellus, and Klovia were full of Lensmen. Velantia,
Rigel, Palain, .and a good part of the time Klovia, were the working headquarters of
Second-Stage Lensmen. It seemed, then, that the trouble was roughly in inverse ratio to
the numbers or the abilities of the Lensmen in the neighborhood. Something, therefore,
that Lensmen—particularly Second-Stage Lensmen—were bad for. That was true, of
course, for all crime. Nevertheless, this seemed to be a special case.
And when he reached his destination he found out that it was. The planet was
seething. Its business and its everyday activities seemed to be almost paralyzed.
Martial law had been declared; the streets were practically deserted except for thick-
clustered groups of heavily-armed guards. What few people were abroad were furtive
and sly; slinking hastily along with their fear-filled eyes trying to look in all directions at
once.
“QX, Wainwright, go ahead,” Kinnison directed bruskly when, alone with the
escorting Patrol officers in a shielded car, he was being taken to the Capitol grounds.
“There’s been too much pussyfooting about the whole affair.”
“Very well, sir,” and Wainwright told his tale. Things had been happening for
months. Little things, but disturbing. Then murders and kidnappings and unexplained
disappearances had begun to increase. The police forces had been falling farther and
farther behind. The usual cries of incompetence and corruption had been raised, only
further to confuse the issue. Circulars—dodgers—handbills appeared all over the
planet; from where nobody knew. The keenest detectives could find no clue to paper-
makers, printers, or distributors. The usual inflammatory, subversive, propaganda
—”Down with the Patrol!” “Give us back our freedom!” and so on—but, because of the
high tension already prevailing, the stuff had been unusually effective in breaking down
the morale of the citizenry as a whole.
“Then this last thine. For two solid weeks the whole world was literally plastered
with the announcement that at midnight on the thirty-fourth of Dreel—you’re familiar with
our calendar, I think?—President Renwood would disappear. Two weeks
warning—daring us to do our damndest.” Wainwright got that far and stopped.
“Well, go on. He disappeared, I know. How? What did you fellows do to prevent
it? Why all the secrecy?”
“If you insist I’ll have to tell you, of course, but I’d rather not.” Wainwright flushed
uncomfortably. “You wouldn’t believe it. Nobody could. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I
hadn’t been there. I’d rather you’d wait, sir, and let the vice-president tell you, in the
presence of the treasurer and the others who were on duty that night.”
“Um . . . m . . . I see . . . maybe.” Kinnison’s mind raced. “That’s why nobody
would give me details? Afraid I wouldn’t believe it—that I’d think they’d been . . .” He
stopped. “Hypnotized” would have been the next word, but that would have been
jumping at conclusions. Even if true, there was no sense in airing that hypothesis—yet.
“Not afraid, sir. They knew you wouldn’t believe it.”
After entering Government Reservation they went, not to the president’s private
quarters, but into the Treasury and down into the sub-basement housing the most
massive, the most utterly impregnable vault of the planet. There the nation’s most
responsible officers told Kinnison, with their entire minds as well as their tongues, what
had happened.
Upon that black day business had been suspended. No visitors of any sort had
been permitted to enter the Reservation. No one had been allowed to approach
Renwood except old and trusted officers about whose loyalty there could be no
question. Air-ships and space-ships had filled the sky. Troops, armed with semi-
portables or manning fixed-mount heavy stuff, had covered the grounds. At five minutes
before midnight Renwood, accompanied by four secret-service men, had entered the
vault, which was thereupon locked by the treasurer. All the cabinet members saw them
go in, as did the attendant corps of specially-selected guards. Nevertheless, when the
treasurer opened the vault at five minutes after midnight, the five men were gone. No
trace of any one of them had been found from that time on.
“And that—every word of it—is TRUE!” the assembled minds yelled as one, all
unconsciously, into the mind of the Lensman.
During all this telling Kinnison had been searching mind after mind; inspecting
each minutely for the tell-tale marks of mental surgery. He found none. No hypnosis.
This thing had actually happened, exactly as they told it. Convinced of that fact, his eyes
clouded with foreboding, he sent out his sense of perception and studied the vault itself.
Millimeter by cubic millimeter he scanned the innermost details of its massive
structure—the concrete, the neocarballoy, the steel, the heat-conductors and the
closely-spaced gas cells. He traced the intricate wiring of the net-works of alarms.
Everything was sound. Everything functioned. Nothing had been disturbed.
The sun of this system, although rather on the small side, was intensely hot; this
planet, Four, was pretty far out. Well beyond Cardynge’s Limit. A tube, of course . . . for
all the tea in China it had to be a tube. Kinnison sagged; the indomitable Gray Lensman
showed his years and more.
“I know it happened.” His voice was grim, quiet, as he spoke to the still protesting
men. “I also know how it was done, but that’s all.”
“HOW?” they demanded, practically in one voice.
“A hyper-spatial tube,” and Kinnison went on to explain, as well as he could, the
functioning of a thing which was intrinsically beyond the grasp of any non-mathematical
three-dimensional mind.
“But what can we or anybody else do about it?” the treasurer asked, numbly.
“Nothing whatever.” Kinnison’s voice was flat. “When it’s gone, it’s gone. Where
does the light go when a lamp goes out? No more trace. Hundreds of millions of planets
in this galaxy, as many in the Second. Millions and millions of galaxies. All that in one
universe—our own universe.
And there are an infinite number—too many to be expressed, let alone to be
grasped—of universes, side by side, like pages in a book except thinner, in the hyper-
dimension. So you can figure out for yourselves the chances of ever finding either
President Renwood or the Boskonians who took him—so close to zero as to be
indistinguishable from zero absolute.”
The treasurer was crushed. “Do you mean to say that there’s no protection at all
from this thing? That they can keep on doing away with us just as they please? The
nation is going mad, sir, day by day—one more such occurrence and we will be a planet
of maniacs.”
“Oh, no—I didn’t say that.” The tension lightened. “Just that we can’t do anything
about the president and his aides. The tube can be detected while it’s in place, and