Then an attack in waves of his own men! The Overlords knew what was toward. They commanded their slaves to abate the nuisance, and the Gray Lensman was buried under an avalanche of furious, although unarmed, humanity.
“Chase ‘em off me, will you, Worsel?” Kinnison pleaded. “You’re husky enough to handle ‘em all—I’m not. Hold ‘em off while Bus and I polish off this crowd, huh?” And Worsel did so.
VanBuskirk, scorning Kinnison’s advice, had seized the biggest thing in sight, only to relinquish it sheepishly—he might as well have attempted to wield a bridge-girder! He finally selected a tiny bar, only half an inch in diameter and scarcely six feet long; but he found that even this sliver was more of a bludgeon than any space-axe he had ever swung.
Then the armed pair went joyously to war, the Tellurian with his knife, the Valerian with his magic wand. When the Overlords saw that a fight to the finish was inevitable they also seized weapons and fought with the desperation of the cornered rats they were. This, however, freed Worsel from guard duty, since the monsters were fully occupied in defending themselves.
He seized a length of chain, wrapped six feet of tail in an unbreakable anchorage around a torture rack, and set viciously to work.
Thus again the intrepid three, the only minions of Civilization theretofore to have escaped alive from the clutches of the Overlords of Delgon, fought side by side. VanBuskirk particularly was in his element. He was used to a gravity almost three times Earth’s, he was accustomed to enormously heavy, almost viscous air. This stuff, thick as it was, tasted infinitely better than the vacuum that Tellurians liked to breathe. It let a man use his strength; and the gigantic Dutchman waded in happily, swinging his frightfully massive weapon with devastating effect. Crunch! Splash! THWUCK! When that bar struck it did not stop. It went through; blood, brains, smashed heads and dismembered limbs flying in all directions. And Worsel’s lethal chain, driven irresistibly at the end of the twenty-five-foot lever of his free length of body, clanked, hummed, and snarled its way through reptilian flesh. And, while Kinnison was puny indeed in comparison with his two brothers-in-arms, he had selected a weapon which would make his skill count; and his wicked knife stabbed, sheared, and trenchantly bit.
And thus, instead of dealing out death, the Overlords died.
CHAPTER 16 – OUT OF THE VORTEX
The carnage over, Kinnison made his way to the control-board, which was more or less standard in type. There were, however, some instruments new to him; and these he examined with care, tracing their leads throughout their lengths with his sense of perception before he touched a switch. Then he pulled out three plungers, one after the other.
There was a jarring “thunk”! and a reversal of the inexplicable, sickening sensations he had experienced previously. They ceased; the ships, solid now and still locked side by side, lay again in open, familiar space.
“Back to the Dauntless,” Kinnison directed, tersely, and they went; taking with them the bodies of the slain Patrolmen. The ten who had been tortured were dead; twelve more had perished under the mental forces or the physical blows of the Overlords. Nothing could be done for any of them save to take their remains back to Tellus.
“What do we do with this ship—let’s burn her out, huh?” asked vanBuskirk.
“Not on Tuesdays—the College of Science would fry me to a crisp in my own lard if I did,” Kinnison retorted. “We take her in, as is. Where are we, Worsel? Have you and the navigator found out yet?”
“ ‘Way, ‘way out—almost out of the galaxy,” Worsel replied, and one of the computers recited a string of numbers, then added, “I don’t see how we could have come so far in that short a time.”
“How much time was it—got any idea?” Kinnison asked, pointedly.
“Why, by the chronometers . . . Oh . . .” the man’s Voice trailed off.
“You’re getting the idea. Wouldn’t have surprised me much if we’d been clear out of the known Universe. Hyper-space is funny that way, they say. Don’t know a thing about it myself, except that we were in it for a while, but that’s enough for me.”
Back to Tellus they drove at the highest practicable speed, and at Prime Base scientists swarmed over and throughout the Boskonian vessel. They tore down, rebuilt, measured, analyzed, tested, and conferred.
“They got some of it, but they say you missed a lot,” Thorndyke reported to his friend Kinnison one day. “Old Cardynge is mad as a cateagle about your report on that vortex or tunnel or whatever it was. He says your lack of appreciation of the simplest fundamentals is something pitiful, or words to that effect. He’s going to blast you to a cinder as soon as he can get hold of you.”
“Vell, ve can’t all be first violiners in der orchestra, some of us got to push vind t’rough der trombone,” Kinnison quoted, philosophically. “I done my damndest—how’s a guy going to report accurately on something he can’t hear, see, feel, taste, smell, or sense? But I heard that they’ve solved that thing of the interpenetrability of the two kinds of matter. What’s the low- down on that?”
“Cardynge says it’s simple. Maybe it is, but I’m a technician myself, not a mathematician.
As near as I can get it, the Overlords and their stuff were treated or conditioned with an oscillatory of some kind, so that under the combined action of the fields generated by the ship and the shore station all their substance was rotated almost out of space. Not out of space, exactly, either, more like, say, very nearly one hundred eighty degrees out of phase; so that two bodies—one untreated, our stuff—could occupy the same place at the same time without perceptible interference. The failure of either force, such as your cutting the ship’s generators, would relieve the strain.”
“It did more than that—it destroyed the vortex . . . but it might, at that,” the Lensman went on, thoughtfully. “It could very well be that only that one special force, exerted in the right place relative to the home-station generator, could bring the vortex into being. But how about that heavy stuff, common to both planes, or phases, of matter?”
“Synthetic, they say. They’re working on it now.”
“Thanks for the dope. I’ve got to flit—got a date with Haynes. I’ll see Cardynge later and let him get it off his chest,” and the Lensman strode away toward the Port Admiral’s office.
* * * Haynes greeted him cordially; then, at sight of the storm signals flying in the younger man’s eyes, he sobered.
“QX,” he said, wearily. “If we have to go over this again, unload it, Kim.”
“Twenty two good men,” Kinnison said, harshly. “I murdered them. Just as surely, if not quite as directly, as though I brained them with a space-axe.”
“In one way, if you look at it fanatically enough, yes,” the older man admitted, much to Kinnison’s surprise. “I’m not asking you to look at it in a broader sense, because you probably can’t—yet. Some things you can do alone; some things you can do even better alone than with help. I have never objected, nor shall I ever object to your going alone on such missions, however dangerous they may be. That is, and will be, your job. What you are forgetting in the luxury of giving way to your emotions is that the Patrol comes first. The Patrol is of vastly greater importance than the lives of any man or group of men in it.”
“But I know that, sir,” protested Kinnison. “I. . .”
“You have a peculiar way of showing it, then,” the admiral broke in. “You say that you killed twenty two men. Admitting it for the moment, which would you say was better for the Patrol—to lose those twenty two good men in a successful and productive operation, or to lose the life of one Unattached Lensman without gaining any information or any other benefit whatever thereby?”
“Why . . . I . . . If you look at it that way, sir . . .” Kinnison still knew that he was right, but in that form the question answered itself.
“That is the only way it can be looked at,” the old man returned, flatly. “No heroics on your part, no maudlin sentimentality. Now, as a Lensman, is it your considered judgment that it is best for the Patrol that you traverse that hyperspatial vortex alone, or with all the resources of the Dauntless at your command?”
Kinnison’s face was white and strained. He could not lie to the Port Admiral. Nor could he tell the truth, for the dying agonies of those fiendishly tortured boys still racked him to the core.
“But I can’t order men into any such death as that,” he broke out, finally.