And during his real celebration at Strongheart’s, while he drank enough, he did not drink too much. He waxed exceedingly happy and frolicsome, as before. He was as profligate, as extravagant in tips. He had the same sudden flashes of hot anger. He fought enthusiastically and awkwardly, as Wild Bill Williams did, although only once or twice, that time; and he did not have to draw his DeLameter at all—he was so well known and so beloved! He sang as loudly and as raucously, and with the same fine taste in madrigals.
Therefore, when the infiltration of thought-screened men warned him that the meeting was about to be called Kinnison was ready. He was in fact cold sober when he began his tuneful, last-two-bottles trip up the street, and he was almost as sober when he returned to “Base,” empty of bottles and pockets, to make the usual attempt to obtain more money from Strongheart and to compromise by taking his farewell chew of bentlam instead.
Nor was he unduly put out by the fact that both Strong-heart and the zwilnik were now wearing screens. He had taken it for granted that they might be, and had planned accordingly. He seized the packet as avidly as before, chewed its contents as ecstatically, and slumped down as helplessly and as idiotically. That much of the show, at least, was real. Twenty four units of that drug will paralyze any human body, make it assume the unmistakable pose and stupefied mien of the bentlam eater. But Kinnison’s mind was not an ordinary one; the dose which would have rendered any bona-fide “miner’s brain as helpless as his body did not affect the Lensman’s new equipment at all. Alcohol and bentlam together were bad, but the Lensman was sober. Therefore, if anything, the drugging of his body only made it easier to dissociate his new mind from it.
Furthermore, he need not waste any thought in making it act There was only one way it could act, now, and Kinnison let his new senses roam abroad without even thinking of the body he was leaving behind him.
In view of the rigorous orders from higher up the conference room was heavily guarded by screened men; no one except old and trusted employees were allowed to enter it, and they were also protected. Nevertheless, Kinnison got in, by proxy.
A clever pick-pocket brushed against a screened waiter who was about to enter the sacred precincts, lightning fingers flicking a switch. The waiter began to protest—then forgot what he was going to say, even as the pick-pocket forgot completely the deed he had just done. The waiter in turn was a trifle clumsy in serving a certain Big Shot, but earned no rebuke thereby; for the latter forgot the offense almost instantly. Under Kinnison’s control the director fumbled at his screen-generator for a moment, loosening slightly a small but important resistor. That done, the Lensman withdrew delicately and the meeting was an open book.
“Before we do anything,” the director began, “Show me that all your screens are on.”
He bared his own—it would have taken an expert service man an hour to find that it was not functioning perfectly.
“Poppycock!” snorted the zwilnik. “Who in all the hells of space thinks that a Lensman would—or could—come to Euphrosyne?”
“Nobody can tell what this particular Lensman can or can’t do, and nobody knows what he’s doing until just before he dies. Hence the strictness. You’ve searched everybody here, of course?”
“Everybody,” Strongheart averred, “even the drunks and the dopes. The whole building is screened, besides the screens we’re wearing.”
“The dopes don’t count, of course, provided they’re really doped.” No one except the Gray Lensman himself could possibly conceive of a Lensman being—not seeming to be, but actually being—a drunken sot, to say nothing of being a confirmed addict of any drug. “By the way, who is this Wild Bill Williams we’ve been hearing about?”
Strongheart and his friend looked at each other and laughed. “I checked up on him early,” the zwilnik chuckled. “He isn’t the Lensman, of course, but I thought at first he might be an agent We frisked him and his ship thoroughly—no dice—and checked back on him as a miner, four solar systems back. He’s clean, anyway; this is his second bender here. He’s been guzzling everything in stock for a week, getting more pie-eyed every day, and Strongheart and I just put him to bed with twenty four units of benny. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Your own benny or his?” the director asked. “My own. That’s why I know he’s clean. All the other dopes are too. The drunks we gave the bum’s rush, like you told us to.”
“QX. I don’t think there’s any danger, myself—I think the hot-shot Lensman they’re afraid of is still working Bronseca—but these orders not to take any chances at all come from ‘way, ‘way up.”
“How about this new system they’re working on, that nobody knows his boss any more?
Hooey, I call it.”
“Not ready yet. They haven’t been able to invent an absolutely safe one that’ll handle the work. In the meantime, we’re using these books. Cumbersome, but absolutely safe, they say, unless and until the enemy gets onto the idea. Then one group will go into the lethal chambers of the Patrol and the rest of us will use something else. Some say this code can’t be cracked; others say any code can be read in time. Anyway here’s your orders. Pass them along. Give me your stuff and we’ll have supper and a few drinks.”
They ate. They drank. They enjoyed an evening and a night of high revelry and low dissipation, each to his taste; each secure in the knowledge that his thought-screen was one hundred percent effective against the one enemy he really feared. Indeed, the screens were that effective—then—since the Lensman, having learned from the director all he knew, had restored the generator to full efficiency in the instant of his relinquishment of control.
Although the heads of the zwilniks, and therefore their minds, were secure against Kinnison’s prying, the books of record were not. And, though his body was lying helpless, inert upon a drug-fiend’s cot, his sense of perception read those books; if not as readily as though they were in his hands and open, yet readily enough. And, far off in space, a power-brained Lensman yclept Worsel recorded upon imperishable metal a detailed account, including names, dates, facts, and figures, of all the doings of all the zwilniks of a solar system!
The information was coded, it is true; but, since Kinnison knew the key, it might just as well have been printed in English. To the later consternation of Narcotics, however, that tape was sent in under Lensman’s Seal—it could not be read until the Gray Lensman gave the word.
In twenty four hours Kinnison recovered from the effects of his debauch. He got his keys from Strongheart. He left the asteroid. He knew the mighty intellect with whom he had next to deal, he knew where that entity was to be found; but, sad to say, he had positively no idea at all as to what he was going to do or how he was going to do it.
Wherefore it was that a sense of relief tempered the natural apprehension he felt upon receiving, a few days later, an insistent call from Haynes. Truly this must be something really extraordinary, for while during the long months of his service Kinnison had called the Port Admiral several times, Haynes had never before Lensed him.
“Kinnison! Haynes calling!” the message beat into his consciousness.
“Kinnison acknowledging, sir!” the Gray Lensman thought back.
“Am I interrupting anything important?”
“Not at all. I’m just doing a little flit.”
“A situation has come up which we feel you should study, not only in person, but also without advance information or pre-conceived ideas. Can you come in to Prime Base immediately?”
“Yes, sir. In fact, a little time right now might do me good in two ways—let me mull a job over, and let a nut mellow down to a point where maybe I can crack it At your orders, sir!”
“Not orders, Kinnison!” the old man reprimanded him sharply. “No one gives Unattached Lensmen orders. We request or suggest, but you are the sole judge as to where your greatest usefulness lies.”
“Please believe, sir, that your requests are orders, to me,” Kinnison replied in all seriousness. Then, more lightly, “Your Calling me in suggests an emergency, and travelling in this miner’s scow of mine is just a trifle faster than going afoot How about sending out something with some legs to pick me up?”
“The Dauntless, for instance?”
“Oh—you’ve got her rebuilt already?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll bet she’s a sweet clipper! She was a mighty slick stepper before; now she must have more legs than a centipede!”
And so it came about that in a region of space entirely empty of all other vessels as far as ultra-powerful detectors could reach, the Dauntless met Kinnison’s tugboat. The two went inert and maneuvered briefly, then the immense warship engulfed her tiny companion and flashed away.