This was Kinnison’s device for taking the job himself. He was, he knew, the fastest man aboard, and he proved it. He negotiated the distance in seven seconds flat, over half a second faster than any other member of the crew. Then: “Well, if you small, slow runts are done playing creepie-mousie, get out of the way and let folks run that really can,” vanBuskirk boomed. “Come on, Worsel, I see where you and I are going to get ourselves a job.”
“But see here, you can’t!” Kinnison protested, aghast “I said members of the crew.”
“No, you didn’t,” the Valerian contradicted. “You said ‘two of our personnel,’ and if Worsel and I ain’t personnel, what are we? We’ll leave it to Sir Austin.”
“Indubitably ‘personnel,’” the arbiter decided, taking a moment from the apparatus he was setting up. “Your statement that speed is a prime requisite is also binding.”
Whereupon the winged Velantian flew and wriggled the distance in two seconds, and the giant Dutch-Valerian ran it in three!
“You big, knot-headed Valerian ape!” Kinnison hissed a malevolent thought; not as the expedition’s commander to a subordinate, but as an outraged friend speaking plainly to friend.
“You knew I wanted that job myself, you clunker— damn your thick, hard crust!”
“Well, so did I, you poor, spindly little Tellurian wart, and so did Worsel,” vanBuskirk shot back in kind. “Besides, it’s for the good of the Patrol—you said so yourself! Comb that out of your whiskers, half-portion!” he added, with a wide and toothy grin, as he swaggered away, lightly brandishing his ponderous mace.
The run to the point in space where the vortex had been was made on schedule. Switches drove home, most of the fabric of the enemy vessel went out of phase, the voyagers experienced the weirdly uncomfortable acceleration along an impossible vector, and the familiar firmament disappeared into an impalpable but impenetrable murk of featureless, textureless gray.
Sir Austin was in his element. Indeed, he was in a seventh heaven of rapture as he observed, recorded, and calculated. He chuckled over his interferometers, he clucked over his meters, now and again he emitted shrill whoops of triumph as a particularly abstruse bit of knowledge was torn from its lair. He strutted, he gloated, he practically purred as he recorded upon the tape still another momentous conclusion or a gravid equation, each couched in terms of such incomprehensibly formidable mathematics that no one not a member of the Conference of Scientists could even dimly perceive its meaning.
Cardynge finished his work; and, after doing everything that could be done to insure the safe return to Science of his priceless records, he simply preened himself. He wasn’t like an old hen, after all, Kinnison decided. More like a lean, gray tomcat One that has just eaten the canary and, contemplatively smoothing his whiskers, is full of pleasant, if somewhat sanguine visions of what he is going to do to those other felines at that next meeting.
Time wore on. A long time? Or a short? Who could tell? What possible measure of that unknown and intrinsically unknowable concept exists or can exist in that fantastic region of—hyper-space? Inter-space? Pseudo-space? Call it what you like.
Time, as has been said, wore on. The ships arrived at the enemy base, the landing signal was given. Worsel, on duty at the time, recognized it for what it was—with his brain that was a foregone conclusion. He threw the switches, then flew and wriggled as even he had never done before, hurling a thought as he came.
And as the Velantian, himself in the throes of weird deceleration, tore through the thinning atmosphere, the queasy Gray Lensman watched the development about them of a forbiddingly inimical scene.
They were materializing upon a landing field of sorts, a smooth and level expanse of black igneous rock. Two suns, one hot and close, one pale and distant, cast the impenetrable shadows so characteristic of an airless world. Dwarfed by distance, but still massively, craggily tremendous, there loomed the encircling rampart of the volcanic crater upon whose floor the fortress lay. And what a fortress; New—raw—crude . . . but fanged with armament of might.
There was the typically Boskonian dome of control, there were powerful ships of war in their cradles, there beside the Dauntless was very evidently the power-plant in which was generated the cryptic force which made inter-dimensional transit an actuality. But, and here was the saving factor which the Lensman had dared only half hope to find, those ultra-powerful defensive mechanisms were mounted to resist attack from without, not from within. It had not occurred to the foe, even as a possibility, that the Patrol might come upon them in panoply of war through their own hyper-spatial tube!
Kinnison knew that it was useless to assault that dome. He could, perhaps, crack its screens with his primaries, but he did not have enough stuff to reduce the whole establishment and therefore could not use the primaries at all. Since the enemy had been taken completely by surprise, however, he had a lot of time—at least a minute, perhaps a trifle more —and in that time the old Dauntless could do a lot of damage. The power-plant came first; that was what they had come out here to get.
“All secondaries fire at will!” Kinnison barked into his microphone. He was already at his conning board; every man of the crew was at his station. “All of you who can reach twenty- seven three-oh-eight, hit it—hard. The rest of you do as you please.”
Every beam which could be brought to bear upon the power-house, and there were plenty of them, flamed out practically as one. The building stood for an instant, starkly outlined in a raging inferno of incandescence, then slumped down flabbily; its upper, nearer parts flaring away in clouds of sparklingly luminous vapor even as its lower members flowed sluggishly together in streams of molten metal. Deeper and deeper bore the frightful beams; foundations, sub-cellars, structural members and gargantuan mechanisms uniting with the obsidian of the crater’s floor to form a lake of bubbling, frothing lava.
“QX—that’s good!” Kinnison snapped. “Scatter your stuff, fellows—hit ‘em!” He then spoke to Henderson, his chief pilot “Lift us up a bit, Hen, to give the boys a better sight. Be ready to flit, fast; all hell’s going to be out for noon any second now!”
The time of the Dauntless was short, but she was working fast. Her guns were not being tripped. Instead, every firing lever was jammed down into its last notch and was locked there.
Into the plates stared hard-faced young firing officers, keen eyes glued to crossed hair-lines, grimly steady right and left hands spinning controller-rheostats by touch alone, tensely crouched as though by sheer driving force of will they could energize to even higher levels the ravening beams which were weaving beneath and around the Patrol’s super-dreadnought a writhing, flaming pattern of death and destruction.
Ships—warships of Boskone’s mightiest—caught cold. Some crewless; some half- manned; none ready for the stunning surprise attack of the Patrolmen. Through and through them the ruthless beams tore; leaving, not ships, but nondescript masses of half-fused metal. Hangars, machine-shops, supply depots suffered the same fate; a good third of the establishment became a smoking, smouldering heap of junk.
Then, one by one, the fixed-mount weapons of the enemy, by dint of what Herculean efforts can only be surmised, were brought to bear upon the bold invader. Brighter and brighter flamed her prodigiously powerful defensive screens. Number One faded out; crushed flat by the hellish energies of Boskone’s projectors. Number Two flared into even more spectacular pyrotechnics, until soon even its tremendous resources of power became inadequate—blotchily, in discrete areas, clinging to existence with all the might of its Medonian generators and transmitters, it, too, began to fail.
“Better we flit, Hen, while we’re all in one piece—right now,” Kinnison advised the pilot then. “And I don’t mean loaf, either—let’s see you burn a hole in the ether.”
Henderson’s fingers swept over his board, depressing to maximum and locking down key after key. From her jets flared blast after blast of energies whose intensity paled the brilliance of the madly warring screens, and to Boskone’s Observers the immense Patrol raider vanished from all ken.
At that drive, the Dauntless” incomprehensible maximum, there was little danger of pursuit: for, as well as being the biggest and the most powerfully armed, she was also the fastest thing in space.
Out in open inter-galactic space—safe—discipline went by the board as though on signal and all hands joined in a release of pent-up emotion. Kinnison threw off his armor and, seizing the scandalized and highly outraged Cardynge, spun him around in dizzying, though effortless circles.
“Didn’t lose a man—NOT A MAN!” he yelled, exuberantly.
He plucked the now idle Henderson from his board and wrestled with him, only to drift lightly away, ahead of a tremendous slap aimed at his back by vanBuskirk. Inertia-lessness takes most of the edge off of rough-housing, but the performance did relieve the tension and soon the ebullient youths quieted down.