“I have set up a thought-screen about the room. I do not wish to share this tid-bit with any of my fellows, as there is not enough to divide,” the monster explained, parenthetically. “Have you any suggestion as to how my plan may be improved?”
“No. You have shown that you understand torture better than we do.”
“I should, since we Overlords have practiced it as a fine art since our beginnings as a race. Do you wish .the pleasure of breaking his bones now?”
“I do not break bones for pleasure. Since you do, you may carry out the procedure as outlined. All I want is the assurance that he will be an object-lesson and a warning to Star A Star of the Patrol.”
“I can assure you definitely that it will be both. More, I will show you the results when I have finished my work. Or, if you like, I would be glad to have you stay and look on—you will find the spectacle interesting, entertaining, and highly instructive.”
“No, thanks.” Eichmil left the room and the Delgonian turned his attention to the bound and helpless Lensman.
It is best, perhaps, to draw a kindly veil over the events of the next two hours. Kinnison himself refuses positively to discuss it, except to say: “I knew how to set up a nerve-block then, so I cant say that any of it really hurt me. I wouldn’t let myself feel it. But all the time I knew what he was doing to me and it made me sick.
Did you ever watch a surgeon while he was taking out your appendix? Like that, only worse. It wasn’t funny. I didn’t like it a bit. Your readers wouldn’t like it, either, so you’d better lay off that stuff entirely.”
The mere fact that the Overlord had established coverage was of course sufficient to set up in the Lensman’s mind a compulsion to knock it down. He had to break that screen! But there were no birds here; no spiders. Was there any life at all? There was. That torture room had been used fully and often; the muck in its drains was rich pasture for the Jarnevonian equivalent of worms.
Selecting a big one, long and thick, Kinnison tuned down to its mental level and probed.
This took time—much, much too much time. The creature did not have nearly the intelligence of a spider, but it did have a dim consciousness of being, and therefore an ego of a sort. Also, when Kinnison finally got in touch with that ego, it reacted very favorably to his suggestion of food.
“Hurry, worm! Snap it up!” and the little thing really did hurry. Scrambling, squirming, almost leaping along the floor it hurried, in a very grotesquerie of haste.
The Delgonian’s leisurely preliminary work was done. The feast was ready. The worm reached the generator while the Overlord was warming up the tubes of the apparatus which was to rive away that which made the man Kinnison everything that he was.
Curling one end of its sinuous shape around a convenient anchorage, Kinnison’s small proxy reached up and looped the other about the handle of the switch. Then, visions of choice viands suffusing its barely existent consciousness, it contracted convulsively. There was a snap and the mental barrier went out of existence.
At the tiny sound the Delgonian whirled—and stopped. Worsel’s gigantic mentality had been beating ceaselessly against that screen ever since its erection, and in the instant of its fall Kinnison again became the Gray Lensman of old. And in the next instant both those prodigious minds—the two most powerful then known to Civilization—had hurled themselves against that of the Delgonian. Bitter though the ensuing struggle was, it was brief. Nothing short of an Arisian mind could have withstood the venomous fury, the Berserk power, of that concerted and synchronized attack.
Brain half burned out, the Overlord wilted; and, docility itself, he energized the communicator.
“Eichmil? The work is done. Thoroughly done and well. Do you wish to inspect it before I put what is left of the Lensman into his ship?”
“No.” Eichmil, as a high executive, was accustomed to delegating far more important matters than that to competent underlings. “If you are satisfied, I am.”
Weirdly enough to any casual observer, the Overlord’s first act was to deposit the worm, carefully and tenderly, in a spot in which the muck was particularly rich and toothsome. Then, picking up the hideously mangled thing that was Kinnison’s body, he encased it in its armor and, donning his own, wriggled boldly away with his burden.
“Clear the way for me, please,” he requested of Eichmil. “I go to place this residuum within its ship and to return it to Star A Star.”
“You will be able to find the speedster?”
“Certainly. He was to find it. Whatever he could have done I, working through the cells of his brain, can likewise do.”
“Can you handle him alone, Kinnison?” Worsel asked presently. “Can you hold out to the speedster?”
“Yes to both. I can handle him—we whittled him down to a nub. I’ll last—I’ll make myself last long enough.”
“I go, then, lest they be observing with spy-rays.”
To the black flyer, then, the completely subservient Delgonian carried his physically disabled master, and carefully he put him aboard. Worsel helped openly there, for he had screened the speedster against all forms of intrusion. The vessel took off and the Overlord wriggled blithely back toward the dome. He was full of the consciousness of a good job well done. He even felt the sensation of repletion concomitant with having consumed practically all of Kinnison’s life force! “I hate to let him go!” Worsel’s thought was a growl of baffled hatred.
“It gripes me to let him think that he did everything he set out to do, even though I know it had to be that way. I wanted—I still want—to tear him apart for what he has done to you, my friend.”
“Thanks, old snake.” Kinnison’s thought came faintly. “Just temporary. He’s living on borrowed time. He’ll get his. You’ve got everything under control, haven’t you?”
“On the green. Why?”
“Because I can’t hold this nerve-block any longer . . . It hurts . . . I’m sick. I think I’m going to . . .”
He fainted. More, he plunged parsecs deep into the blackest depths of oblivion as outraged Nature took the toll she had been so long denied.
Worsel hurled a call to Earth, then turned to his maimed and horribly broken companion.
He-applied splints to the shattered limbs, he dressed and bandaged the hideous wounds and the raw sockets which had once held eyes, he ministered to the raging, burning thirst. Whenever Kinnison’s mind wearied he held for him the nerve-block; the priceless anodyne without which the Gray Lensman must have died from sheerest agony.
“Why not allow me, friend, to relieve you of all consciousness until help arrives?” the Velantian asked, pityingly.
“Can you do it without killing me?”
“If you so allow, yes. If you offer any resistance, I do not believe that any mind in the universe could.”
“I won’t resist. Come in,” and Kinnison’s suffering ended.
But kindly Worsel could do nothing about the fantastically atrocious growth which were transforming the Earthman’s legs and arms into monstrosities out of nightmare.
He could only wait—wait for the skilled assistance which he knew must be so long in coming.
CHAPTER 21 – AMPUTATION
When worsel’s hard-driven call impinged upon the Port Admiral’s Lens he dropped everything to take the report himself. Characteristically Worsel sent first and Haynes first recorded a complete statement of the successful mission to Jarnevon. Last came personalities, the tale of Kinnison’s ordeal and his present plight “Are they following you in force, or cant you tell?”
“Nothing detectable, and at the time of our departure there had been no suggestion of any such action,” Worsel replied, carefully.
“Well come in force, anyway, and fast. Keep him alive until we meet you,” Haynes urged, and disconnected.
It was an unheard-of occurrence for the Port Admiral to turn over his very busy and extremely important desk to a subordinate without notice and without giving him instructions, but Haynes did it now.
“Take charge of everything, Southworth!” he snapped. “I’m called away—emergency.
Kinnison found Boskone— got away—hurt—I’m going after him in the Dauntless. Taking the new flotilla with me. Indefinite time—probably a few weeks.”
He strode toward the communicator desk. Hie Dauntless was, as. always, completely serviced and ready for any emergency. Where was that fleet of her sister-ships, on its shakedown cruise? He’d shake them down! They had with them the new hospital-ship, too—the only Red Cross ship in space that could leg it, parsec for parsec, with the Dauntless.
“Get me Navigations . . . Figure best point of rendezvous for Dauntless and Flotilla ZKD, both at full blast, en route to Lundmark’s Nebula. Fifteen minutes departure. Figure approximate time of meeting with speedster, also at full blast, leaving that nebula hour nine fourteen today.