“Every man of that crew was killed by torture. Some were flayed alive, as Xylpic said; then they were carved up, slowly and piecemeal. Some were stretched, pulled apart by chains and hooks, on racks. Others twisted on frames. Boiled, little by little. Picked apart, bit by bit.
Gassed. Eaten away by corrosives, one molecule at a time. Pressed out flat, as though between two plates of glass. Whipped. Scourged. Beaten gradually to a pulp. Other methods, lots of them—indescribable. All slow, though, and extremely painful. Greenish-yellow light, showing the aura of each man as he died. Beams from somewhere—possibly invisible—consuming the auras. Check, Xylpic?”
“Yes, sir, it checks!” The Chickladorian exclaimed in profound relief; then added, carefully: “That is, that’s the way the torture was, exactly, sir, but there was something funny, a difference, about their fading away. I can’t describe what was funny about it, but it didn’t seem so much that they became invisible as that they went away, sir, even though they didn’t go any place.”
“That’s the way their system of invisibility works. Got to be—nothing else will fit into . .
.”
“The Overlords of Delgon!” Haynes rasped, sharply. “But if that’s a true picture how in all the hells of space did this Xylpic, alone of all the ship’s personnel, get away clean? Tell me that!”
“Simple!” the Gray Lensman snapped back sharply. “The rest were all Radeligians—he was the only Chickladorian aboard. The Overlords simply didn’t know he was there— didn’t feel him at all. Chickladorians think on a wave nobody else in the galaxy uses—you must have noticed that when you felt of him with your Lens. It took me half a minute to synchronize with him.
“As for his escape, that makes sense, too. The Overlords are slow workers and when they’re playing that game they really concentrate on it—they don’t pay any attention to anything else. By the time they got done and were ready to take over the ship, he could be almost anywhere.”
“But he says that there was no ship there—nothing at all!” Haynes protested.
“Invisibility isn’t hard to understand.” Kinnison countered. “We’ve almost got it ourselves—we undoubtedly could have it as good as that, with a little more work on it. There was a ship there, beyond question. Close. Hooked on with magnets, and with a space-tube, lock to lock.
“The only peculiar part of it, and the bad part, is something you haven’t mentioned yet.
What would the Overlords—if, as we must assume, some of them got away from Worsel and his crew—be doing with a ship? They never had any space-ships that I ever knew anything about, nor any other mechanical devices requiring any advanced engineering skill. Also, and most important, they never did and never could invent or develop such an invisibility apparatus as that.”
Kinnison fell silent; and while he frowned in thought Haynes dismissed the Chickladorian, with orders that his every want be supplied.
“What do you deduce from those facts?” the Port Admiral presently asked.
“Plenty,” the Gray Lensman said, darkly. “I smell a rat. In fact, it stinks to high Heaven.
Boskone.”
“You may be right,” Haynes conceded. It was hopeless, he knew, for him to try to keep up with this man’s mental processes. “But why, and above all, how?”
“ ‘Why’ is easy. They both owe us a lot, and want to pay us in full. Both hate us to hell and back. ‘How’ is immaterial. One found the other, some way. They’re together, just as sure as hell’s a man-trap, and that’s what matters. It’s bad. Very, very bad, believe me.”
“Orders?” asked Haynes. He was a big man; big enough to ask instructions from anyone who knew more than he did— big enough to make no bones of such asking.
“One does not give orders to the Port Admiral,” Kinnison mimicked him lightly, but meaningly. “One may request, perhaps, or suggest, but. . .”
“Skip it! I’ll take a club to you yet, you young hellion! You said you’d take orders from me. QX—I’ll take ‘em from you. What are they?”
“No orders yet, I don’t think . . .” Kinnison ruminated. “No . . . not until after we investigate. I’ll have to have Worsel and vanBuskirk; we’re the only three who have had experience. We’ll take the Dauntless, I think—it’ll be safe enough. Thought-screens will stop the Overlords cold, and a scrambler will take care of the invisibility business.”
“Safe enough, then, you think, to let traffic resume, if they’re all protected with screens?”
“I wouldn’t say so. They’ve got Boskonian superdreadnoughts now to use if they want to, and that’s something else to think about. Another week or so won’t hurt much— better wait until we see what we can see. I’ve been wrong once or twice before, too, and I may be again.”
He was. Although his words were conservative enough, he was certain in his own mind that he knew all the answers. But how wrong he was—how terribly, now tragically wrong! For even his mentality had not as yet envisaged the incredible actuality; his deductions and perceptions fell far, far short of the appalling truth!
CHAPTER 14 – EICH AND OVERLORD
The fashion in which the Overlords of Delgon had come under the aegis of Boskone, while obscure for a time, was in reality quite simple and logical; for upon distant Jarnevon the Eich had profited signally from Eichlan’s disastrous raid upon Arisia. Not exactly in the sense suggested by Eukonidor the Arisian Watchman, it is true, but profited nevertheless. They had learned that thought, hitherto considered only a valuable adjunct to achievement, was actually an achievement in itself; that it could be used as a weapon of surpassing power.
Eukonidor’s homily, as he more than suspected at the time, might as well never have been uttered, for all the effect it had upon the life or upon the purpose in life of any single, member of the race of the Eich. Eichmil, who had been Second of Boskone, was now First; the others were advanced correspondingly; and a new Eighth and Ninth had been chosen to complete the roster of the Council which was Boskone.
“The late Eichlan,” Eichmil stated harshly after calling the new Boskone to order—which event took place within a day after it became apparent that the two bold spirits had departed to a bourne from which there was to be no returning—“erred seriously, in fact fatally, in underestimating an opponent, even though he himself was prone to harp upon the danger of that very thing.
“We are agreed that our objectives remain unchanged; and also that greater circumspection must be used until we have succeeded in discovering the hitherto unsuspected potentialities of pure thought. We will now hear from one of our new members, the Ninth, also a psychologist, who most fortunately had been studying this situation even before the inception of the expedition which yesterday came to such a catastrophic end.”
“It is clear,” the Ninth of Boskone began, “that Arisia is at present out of the question.
Perceiving the possibility of some such denouement—an idea to which I repeatedly called the attention of my predecessor psychologist, the late Eighth—I have been long at work upon certain alternative measures.
“Consider, please, the matter of the thought-screens. Who developed them first is immaterial—whether Arisia stole them from Ploor, or vice versa, or whether each developed them independently. The pertinent facts are two: “First, that the Arisians can break such screens by the application of mental force, either of greater magnitude than they can withstand or of some new and as yet unknown composition or pattern.
“Second, that such screens were and probably still are used largely and commonly upon the planet Velantia. Therefore they must have been both necessary and adequate. The deduction is, I believe, defensible that they were used as a protection against entities who were, and who still may be, employing against the Velantians the weapons of pure thought which we wish to investigate and to acquire.
“I propose, therefore, that I and a few others of my selection continue this research, not upon Arisia, but upon Velantia and perhaps elsewhere.”
To this suggestion there was no demur and a vessel set out forthwith. The visit to Velantia was simple and created no disturbance whatever. In this connection it must be remembered that the natives of Velantia, then in the early ecstasies of discovery by the Galactic Patrol and the consequent acquisition of inertialess flight, were fairly reveling in visits to and from the widely-variant peoples of the planets of hundreds of other suns. It must be borne in mind that, since the Eich were physically more like the Velantians than were the men of Tellus, the presence of a group of such entities upon the planet would create less comment than that of a group of human beings. Therefore that fateful visit went unnoticed at the time, and it was only by long and arduous research, after Kinnison had deduced that some such visit must have been made, that it was shown to have been an actuality.