More and more panels of mobile screen went down. They were not designed to stand up under such heavy projectors as “Wembleson’s” mounted, and the Boskonians blasted them down in order to get at the remote-control operators back of them. Swath after swath of flaming ruin was cut through the Bronsecan metropolis as the enemy gunners followed the dodging caterpillar tractors.
“Drop down, maulers!” Haynes ordered. “Low enough so that your screens touch ground.
Never mind damage—they’ll blast the whole city if we don’t stop those beams. Surround him!”
Down the maulers came, ringwise; mighty protective envelopes overlapping, down^until the screens bit ground. Now the caterpillar and mobile-screen crews were safe; powerful as Prellin’s weapons were, they could not break through those maulers’ screens.
Now holocaust waxed doubly infernal. The wall was tight, the only avenue of escape of all that fiercely radiant energy was straight upward; adding to the furor were the flaring underlets—themselves destructive agents by no means to be despised!
Inside the screens, then, raged pure frenzy. At the line raved the maulers’ prodigious lifting blasts. Out and away, down every avenue of escape, swept torrents of superheated air at whose touch anything and everything combustible burst into flame. But there could be no fire- fighting—yet. Outlying fires, along the line of destruction previously cut, yes; but personal armor has never been designed to enable life to exist in such an environment as that near those screens then was.
“Burn out the -ground under them!” came the order. ‘Tip them over—slag them down!”
Sharply downward angled two-score of the beams which had been expending their energies upon Boskone’s radiant defenses. Downward into the lake of lava which had once been pavement. That lake had already been seething and bubbling; from moment to moment emitting bursts of lambent flame. Now it leaped into a frenzy of its own, a transcendent fury of volatilization. High-explosive shells by the hundred dropped also into the incandescent mess, hurling the fiery stuff afar; deepening, broadening the sulphurous moat .
“Deep enough,” Haynes spoke calmly into his microphone. “Tractors and pressors as assigned—tip him over.”
The intensity of the bombardment did not slacken, but from the maulers to the north there reached out pressors, from those upon the south came tractors: each a beam of terrific power, each backed by all the mass and all the driving force of a veritable flying fortress.
Slowly that which had been a building leaned from the perpendicular, its inner defensive screen still intact.
“Chief?” From his post as observer Kinnison flashed a thought to Haynes. “Are you beginning to think any funny thoughts about that ape down there?”
“No. Are you? What?” asked the Port Admiral in surprise.
“Maybe I’m nuts, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d start doing a flit pretty quick. I’ve got a CRX tracer on him, just in case, and it might be smart to caution Henderson to be on his toes.”
“Your diagnosis—‘nuts’—is correct, I think,” came the answering thought; but the Port Admiral followed the suggestion, nevertheless.
And none too soon. Deliberately, grandly the Colossus was leaning over, bowing in stately fashion toward the awful lake in which it stood. But only so far. Then there was a flash, visible even in the inferno of energies already there at war, and the already coruscant lava was hurled to all points of the compass as the full-blast drive of a superdreadnought was cut loose beneath its surface!
To the eye the thing simply and instantly disappeared; but not to the ultra-vision of the observers’ plates, and especially not to the CRX tracers solidly attached by Kinnison and by Henderson. They held, and the chief pilot, already warned, was on the trail as fast as he could punch his keys.
Through atmosphere, through stratosphere, into interplanetary space flew pursued and pursuer at ever-increasing speed. The Dauntless overtook her proposed victim fairly easily. The Boskonian was fast, but the Patrol’s new flyer was the fastest thing in space. But tractors would not hold against the now universal standard equipment of shears, and the heavy secondaries served only to push the fleeing vessel along all the faster. And the dreadful primaries could not be used—yet “Not yet,” cautioned the admiral. “Don’t get too close—wait until there’s nothing detectable in space.”
Finally an absolutely empty region was entered, the word to close up was given and Prellin drank of the bitter cup which so many commanders of vessels of the Patrol had had to drain—the gallingly fatal necessity of engaging a ship which was both faster and more powerful than his own. The Boskonian tried, of course. His beams raged out at full power against the screens of the larger ship, but without effect. Three primaries lashed out as one. The fleeing vessel, structure and contents, ceased to be. The Dauntless returned to the torn and ravaged city.
The maulers had gone. The lumbering caterpillars—what were left of them—were clanking away; reeking, smoking hot in every plate and member. Only the firemen were left, working like Trojans now with explosives, rays, water, carbon-dioxide snow, clinging and smothering chemicals; anything and everything which would isolate, absorb, or dissipate any portion of the almost incalculable heat energy so recently and so profligately released.
Fire apparatus from four planets was at work. There were pumpers, ladder-trucks, hose- and chemical-trucks. There were men in heavily-insulated armor. Vehicles and men alike were screened against the specific wave-lengths of heat; and under the direction of a fire-marshal in his red speedster high in air they fought methodically and efficiently the conflagration which was the aftermath of battle. They fought, and they were winning.
And then it rained. As though the heavens themselves had been outraged by what had been done they opened and rain sluiced down in level sheets. It struck hissingly the nearby structures, but it did not touch the central area at all. Instead it turned to steam in midair, and, rising or being blown aside by the tempestuous wind, it concealed the redly glaring, raw wound beneath a blanket of crimson fog.
“Well, that’s that,” the Port Admiral said, slowly. His face was grim and stern. “A good job of clean-up . . . expensive, in men and money, but well worth the price . . . so be it to every pirate base and every zwilnik hideout in the galaxy . . . Henderson, land us at Cominoche Space- Port.”
And from four other cities of the planet four Boskonian observers, each unknown to all the others, took off in four spaceships for four different destinations. Each had reported fully and accurately to Jalte everything that had transpired until the two flyers faded into the distance.
Then, highly elated— and probably, if the truth could be known, no little surprised as well—at the fact-that he was still alive, each had left Bronseca at maximum blast.
The galactic director had done all that he could, which was little enough. At the Patrol’s first warlike move he had ordered a squadron of Boskone’s ablest fighting ships to Prellin’s aid.
It was almost certainly a useless gesture, he knew as he did it. Gone were the days when pirate bases dotted the Tellurian Galaxy; only by a miracle could those ships reach the Bronsecan’s line of flight in time to be of service.
Nor could they. The howl of interfering vibrations which was smothering Prelin’s communicator beam snapped off into silence while the would-be rescuers were many hours away. For minutes then Jalte sat immersed in thought, his normally bluish face turning a sickly green, before he called the planet Jarnevon to report to Eichmil, his chief.
“There is, however, a bright side to the affair,” he concluded. “Prellin’s records were destroyed with him. Also there are two facts—that the Patrol had to use such force as practically to destroy the city of Cominoche, and that our four observers escaped unmolested—which furnish conclusive proof that the vaunted Lensman failed completely to penetrate with his mental powers the defenses we have been using against him.”
“Not conclusive proof,” Eichmil rebuked him harshly.
“Not proof at all, in any sense—scarcely a probability. Indeed, the display of force may very well mean that he has already attained his objective. He may have allowed the observers to escape, purposely, to lull our suspicions. You yourself are probably the next in line. How certain are you that your own base has not already been invaded?”
“Absolutely certain, sir.” Jalte’s face, however, turned a shade greener at the thought.
“You use the term ‘absolutely’ very loosely—but I hope that you are right. Use all the men and all the equipment we have sent you to make sure that it remains impenetrable.”
CHAPTER 20 – DISASTER
In their non-magnetic, practically invisible speedster Kinnison and Worsel entered the terra incognita of the Second Galaxy and approached the solar system of the Eich, slowing down to a crawl as they did so. They knew as much concerning dread Jarnevon, the planet which was their goal, as did Jalte, from whom die knowledge had been acquired; but that was all too little.