“I’ll say so-some of this stuff is NEW!”
The Lensman twirled a couple of knobs, then punched down hard upon three buttons. As he did so the flaring plates became dark, they -were again alone in space.
To the dumbfounded pirates it was as though their prey had slipped off into the fourth dimension. Their tractors gripped nothing whatever, their ravening beams bored unimpeded through the space occupied an instant before by resisting screens, tracers were useless. They did not know what had happened, or how, and they could neither report to nor be guided by the master mind of Boskone.
For minutes Thorndyke, vanBuskirk, and Kinnison waited tensely for they knew not what to happen, but nothing happened and then the tension gradually relaxed.
“What was the matter with it?” Kinnison asked, finally.
“Overloaded,” was Thorndyke’s terse reply.
“Overloaded-hooey I” snapped the Lensman. “How could they overload a Bergenholm? And, even if they could, why in all the nine hells of Valeria would they want to?”
“They could do it easily enough, in just the way they did do it, by banking accumulators onto it in series-parallel. As to why, I’ll let you do the guessing. With no load on the Bergenholm you’ve got full inertia, with full load you’ve got zero inertia-you can’t go any further. It looks just plain dumb to me. But then, I think all pirates are short a few lets somewhere-if they weren’t they wouldn’t be pirates.”
“I don’t know whether you’re right or not. Hope so, but afraid not. Personally, I don’t believe these folks are pirates at all, in the ordinary sense of the word.”
“Hub? What are they, then?”
“Piracy implies similarity of cube, I would think,” the Lensman said, thoughtfully.
“Ordinary pirates are usually renegades, deficient somehow, as you suggested, rebelling against a constituted authority which they themselves have at one time acknowledged and of which they are still afraid. That pattern doesn’t fit into this matrix at all, anywhere.”
“So what? Now I say ‘hooey’ right back at you. Anyway, why worry about it?
“Not worrying about it exactly, but somebody has got to do something about it, or else . . . . . “
“I don’t like to think, it makes my head ache,” interrupted vanBuskirk. “Besides, we’re getting away from the Bergenholm.”
“You’ll get a real headache there,” laughed Ikon, “because I’ll bet a good Tellurian beefsteak that the pirates were trying to set up a negative inertia when they overloaded the Bergenholm, and thinking about that state of matter is enough to make anybody’s head ache!”
“I knew that some of the dippier Ph.D.’s in higher mechanics have been speculating about it,” Thorndyke offered, “but it can’t be done that way, can it?”
“Nor any other way that anybody has tried yet, and if such a thing is possible the results may prove really startling. But you two had better shove off, you’re dead from the neck up. The Berg’s spinning like a top-as smooth as that much green velvet. You’ll find a can of soap in my locker, I think.
“Maybe she’ll hold together long enough for us to get some sleep.” The technician eyed a meter dubiously, although its needle was not wavering a hair’s breadth from the green line. “But I’ll tell the cockeyed Universe that we gave her a jury rigging if there ever was one. You can’t depend on it for an hour until after it’s been pulled and gone over, and that, you know as well as I do, takes a real shop, with plenty of equipment. If you take my advice you’ll sit down somewhere while you can and as soon as you can. That Bergenholm is in bad shape, believe me. We can hold her together for a while by main strength and awkwardness, but before very long she’s going out for keeps – and when she does you don’t want to find yourself fifty years from a machine shop instead of fifty minutes.”
“I’ll say not,” the Lensman agreed. “But on the other hand, we don’t want those birds jumping us the minute we land, either. Let’s see, where are we? And where are the bases? Um . . . um . . . Sector bases are white rings, you know, sub-sector bases red stars . . . . . “ Three heads bent over charts.
“The nearest red-star marker seems to be in System 240.16-37 “ Kinnison finally announced. “Don’t know the name of the planet-never been there . . . . . .
“Too far, interrupted Thorndyke. “We’ll never make it – might as well try direct for Prime Base on Tellus. If you cant find a red closer than that, look for an orange or a yellow.”
“Bases of any kind seem to be scarce around here,” the Lensman commented.
“You’d think they’d be thicker. Here’s a violet triangle, but that wouldn’t help us-just an outpost . . . . . . How about this blue square? It’s just about on our line to Tellus, and I can’t see anything any better that we can possibly reach.”
“That looks like our best bet,” Thorndyke concurred, after a few minutes of study.
“It’s probably several breakdowns away, but maybe we can make it-sometime. Blues are pretty low-grade space-ports but they’ve got tools, anyway. What’s the name of it, Kim-or is it only a number?”
“It’s that very famous planet, Trenco,” the Lensman announced, after looking up the reference numbers in the atlas.
“Trenco!” exclaimed Thorndyke in disgust. “The nuttiest dopiest wooziest planet in the galaxy-we would draw something like that to sit down. on for repairs, wouldn’t we? Well, I’m on plus time for sleep. Call me if we go inert before I wake up, will you?”
“I sure will, and I’ll try to figure out a way of getting down to ground without bringing all the pirates in space along with us.”
Then Henderson came in to stand his watch, Kinnison slept, and the mighty Bergenholm continued to bold the vessel inertialess. In fact, all the men were thoroughly rested and refreshed before the expected breakdown came. And when it did come they were more or less prepared for it. The delay was not sufficiently long to enable the pirates to find them again, but from that point in space to the ill-famed planet which was their destination, progress was one long series of hops.
The sweating, grunting, swearing engineers made one seemingly impossible repair after another, by dint of what dodge, improvisation, and makeshift only the fertile brain of LaVerne Thorndyke ever did know. The Master Technician, one of the keenest and most highly trained engineers of the whole Solarian System, was not used to working with his hands. Although young in years, he was wont to use only his head, in directing the labors and the energies of others.
Nevertheless he was now working like a stevedore. He was permanently grimy and greasy-their one can of mechanics soap had been used up long since-his finger- nails were black and broken his hands and face were burned, blistered, and cracked.
His muscles ached and shrieked at the unaccustomed effort, until now they were on the build. But through it all he had stuck uncomplainingly, even buoyantly, to his task. One day, during an interlude of free flight, he strode into the control-room and glanced at the course-plotting goniometer, then started into the “tank.”
“Still on the original course, I see. Have you got anything doped out yet?”
“Nothing very good, that’s why I’m staying on this course until we reach the point closest to Trenco. I’ve figured until my alleged brain backfired on me and here’s all I can get.
“I’ve been shrinking and expanding our interference zone, changing its shape as much as I could, and cutting it off entirely now and then, to cross up their, surveyors as much as I could. When we come to the jumping-off place we’ll simply cut off everything that is sending out traceable vibrations. The Berg will have to run, of course, but it doesn’t radiate much and we can ground out practically all of that. The drive is the bad feature-it looks as though we’ll have to cut down to where we can ground out the radiation.”
“How about the flare?” Thorndyke took the. inevitable slide-rule from a pocket of his overalls.
“I’ve already had the Velantians build us some baffles—we’ve got lots of spare tantalum, tungsten, carballoy, and refractory, you know-just in case we should want to use them.”
“Radiation . . . . detection . . . . decrement . . . . cosine squared theta . . . um . . . call it point zero zero three eight,” the engineer mumbled, squinting at his “slip-stick.”
“Times half a million . . . . . . about nineteen hundred lights will have to be tops. Mighty slow, but we would get there sometime-maybe. Now about the baffles,” and he went into another bout -of computation during which could be distinguished a few such words as “temperature . . . inert corpuscles . . . velocity . . . fusion-point . . . Weinberger’s Constant . . . . “ Then.