“To all three the answer is ‘I don’t know.’ “ Kinnison’s face was stern and hard. “You know as much about the whole thing as I do—I haven’t held back anything I even suspect. I didn’t tell you that Helmuth was Boskone; I said that everyone in any position to judge, including myself, was as sure of it as one could be about anything that couldn’t be proved. The presence of this communicator line, and the other stuff I’ve told you about, makes me think he wasn’t.
However, we don’t actually know any more than we did before. It is no more certain now that Helmuth was not Boskone than it was before that he was. The second question ties in with the first, and so does the third—but I see they’ve started to mop up.”
While von Hohendorff and Kinnison had been talking, Haynes had issued orders and the Grand Fleet, divided roughly and with difficulty into eighteen parts, went raggedly outward to surround the eighteen outlying fortresses. But, and surprisingly enough to the Patrol forces, the reduction of those hulking monsters was to prove no easy task.
The Boskonians had witnessed the destruction of Helmuth’s Grand Base. Their master plates were dead. Try as they would, they could get in touch with no one with authority to give them orders, with no one to whom they could report their present plight. Nor could they escape: the slowest mauler in the Patrol Fleet could have caught any one of them in five minutes.
To surrender was not even thought of—better far to die a clean death in the blazing holocaust of space-battle than to be thrown ignominiously into the lethal chambers of the Patrol.
There was not, there could not be, any question of pardon or of sentence to any mere imprisonment, for the strife between Civilization and Boskonia in no respect resembled the wars between two fundamentally similar and friendly nations which small, green Terra knew so frequently of old. It was a galaxy-wide struggle for survival between two diametrically opposed, mutually exclusive, and absolutely incompatible cultures; a duel to the death in which quarter was neither asked nor given; a conflict which, except for the single instance which Kinnison himself had engineered, was and of stern necessity had to be one of ruthless, complete, and utter extinction.
Die, then, the pirates must; and, although adherents to a scheme of existence monstrous indeed to our way of thinking, they were in no sense cowards. Not like cornered rats did they conduct themselves, but fought like what they were; courageous beings hopelessly outnumbered and outpowered, unable either to escape or to choose the field of operations, grimly resolved that in their passing they would take full toll of the minions of that detested and despised Galactic Civilization. Therefore, in suicidal glee, Boskonian engineers rigged up a fantastically potent weapon of offense, tuned in their defensive screens, and hung poised in space, awaiting calmly the massed attack so sure to come.
Up flashed the heavy cruisers of the Patrol, serenely confident. Although of little offensive strength, these vessels mounted tractors and pressors of prodigious power, as well as defensive screens which—theoretically—no projector-driven beam of force could puncture.
They had engaged mauler after mauler of Boskonia’s mightiest, and never yet had one of those screens gone down. Theirs the task of immobilizing the opponent; since, as is of course well known, it is under any ordinary conditions impossible to wreak any hurt upon an object which is both inertialess and at liberty to move in space. It simply darts away from the touch of the harmful agent, whether it be immaterial beam or material substance.
Formerly the attachment of two or three tractors was all that was necessary to insure immobility, and thus vulnerability; but with the Velantian development of a shear-plane to cut tractor beams, a new technique became necessary. This was englobement, in which a dozen or more vessels surrounded the proposed victim in space and held it motionless at the center of a sphere by means of pressors, which could not be cut or evaded. Serene, then, and confident, the heavy cruisers rushed out to englobe the Boskonian fortress.
Flash! Flash! Flash! Three points of light, as unbearably brilliant as atomic vortices, sprang into being upon the fortress’ side. Three needle-rays of inconceivable energy lashed out, hurtling through the cruisers’ outer screens as though they had been so much inactive webbing.
Through the second and through the first. Through the wall-shield, even that ultra-powerful field scarcely flashing as it went down. Through the armor, violating the prime tenet then held and which has just been referred to, that no object free in space can be damaged—in this case, so unthinkably vehement was the thrust, the few atoms of substance in the space surrounding the doomed cruisers afforded resistance enough. Through the ship itself, a ravening cylinder of annihilation.
For perhaps a second—certainly no longer—those incredible, those undreamed-of beams persisted before winking out into blackness; but that second had been long enough. Three riddled hulks lay dead in space, and as the three original projectors went black three more flared out.
Then three more. Nine of the mightiest of Civilization’s ships of war were riddled before the others could hurl themselves backward out of range!
Most of the officers of the flagship were stunned into temporary inactivity by that shocking development, but two reacted almost instantly.
“Thorndyke!” the admiral snapped. “What did they do, and how?”
And Kinnison, not speaking at all, leaped to a certain panel, to read for himself the analysis of those incredible beams of force.
“They made super-needle-rays out of their main projectors,” Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke reported, crisply. “They must have shorted everything they’ve got onto them to burn them out that fast.”
“Those beams were hot—plenty hot,” Kinnison corroborated the findings. “These recorders go to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten. Even that wasn’t anywhere nearly enough—everything in the recorder circuits blew.”
“But how could they handle them . . .” von Hohendorff began to ask.
“They didn’t—they pointed them and died,” Thorndyke explained, grimly. “They traded one projector and its crew for one cruiser and its crew—a good trade from their viewpoint.”
“There will be no more such trades,” Haynes declared.
Nor were there. The Patrol had maulers enough to en-globe the enemy craft at a distance greater even than the effective range of those suicidal beams, and it did so.
Shielding screens cut off the Boskonians’ intake of cosmic power and the relentless beaming of the bull-dog maulers began. For hour after hour it continued, the cordon ever tightening as the victims’ power lessened. And finally even the gigantic accumulators of the immense fortresses were drained. Their screens went down under the hellish fury of the maulers’ incessant attack, and in a space of minutes thereafter the structures and their contents ceased to exist save as cosmically atomic detritus.
The Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol remade its formation after a fashion and set off toward the galaxy at touring blast.
And in the control room of the flagship three Lensmen brought a very serious conference to a close.
“You saw what happened to Helmuth’s planet,” Kinnison’s voice was oddly hard, “and I gave you all I could get of the thought about the destruction of all life on Sol III. A big enough duodec bomb in the bottom of an ocean would do it. I don’t really know anything except that we hadn’t better let them catch us asleep at the switch again—we’ve got to be on our toes every second.”
And the Gray Lensman, face set and stern, strode off to his quarters.
CHAPTER 2 – WIDE-OPEN TWO-WAY
During practically all of the long trip back to earth Kinnison kept pretty much to his cabin, thinking deeply, blackly, and, he admitted ruefully to himself, to very little purpose. And at Prime Base, through week after week of its feverish activity, he continued to think. Finally, however, he was snatched out of his dark abstraction by no less a personage than Surgeon- Marshal Lacy.
“Snap out of it, lad,” that worthy advised, smilingly. “When you concentrate on one thing too long, you know, the vortices of thought occupy narrower and narrower loci, until finally the effective volume becomes infinitesimal. Or, mathematically, the then range of cogitation, integrated between the limits of plus and minus infinity, approaches zero as a limit. . .”
“Huh? What are you talking about?” the Lensman demanded.
“Poor mathematics, perhaps, but sound psychology,” Lacy grinned. “It got your undivided attention, didn’t it? That was what I was after. In plain English, if you keep on thinking around in circles you’ll soon be biting yourself in the small of the back. Come on, you and I are going places.”
“Where?”
“To the Grand Ball in honor of the Grand Fleet, my boy— old Doctor Lacy prescribes it for you as a complete and radical change of atmosphere. Let’s go!”