“Why me?” Jalte demanded. “If there exists a mind of power sufficient to break my screens and tracelessly to invade my mind, what of yours?”
“It is proven by the outcome.” The Boskonian’s statement was a calm summation of fact.
“The messenger sent against you succeeded; the one against us failed. The Patrol intends and is preparing: certainly to wipe out our remaining forces within the Tellurian Galaxy; probably to attack your stronghold; eventually to invade our own galaxy.”
“Let them come!” snarled the Kalonian. “We can and will hold this planet forever against anything they can bring through space!”
“I would not be too sure of that,” cautioned the superior. “In fact, if—as I am beginning to regard as a probability— the Patrol does make a concerted drive against any significant number of our planetary organizations, you should abandon your base there and return to Kalonia, after disbanding and so preserving for future use as many as possible of the planetary units.”
“Future use? In that case there will be no future.”
“There will so,” Eichmil replied, coldly vicious. “We are strengthening the defenses of Jarnevon to withstand any conceivable assault. If they do not attack us here of their own free will we shall compel them to do so. Then, after destroying their every mobile force, we shall again take over their galaxy. Anns for the purpose are even now in the building. Is the matter clear?”
“It is clear. We shall warn all our groups that such an order may issue, and we shall prepare to abandon this base should such a step become desirable.”
So it was planned; neither Eichmil nor Jalte even suspecting two startling truths: First, that when the Patrol was ready it would strike hard and without warning, and Second, that it would strike, not low, but high!
CHAPTER 23 – ANNIHILATION
Kinnison played, worked, rested, ate, and slept, he boxed, strenuously and viciously, with masters of the craft He practised with his DeLameters until he had regained his old-time speed and dead-center accuracy. He swam for hours at a time, he ran in cross-country races. He lolled, practically naked, in hot sunshine. And finally, when his muscles were writhing and rippling as of yore beneath the bronzed satin of his skin, Lacy answered his insistent demands by coming to see him.
The Gray Lensman met the flyer eagerly, but his face fell when he saw that the surgeon- marshal was alone.
“No, MacDougall didn’t come—she isn’t around any more,” he explained, guilefully.
“Huh?” came startled query. “How come?”
“Out in space—out Borova way somewhere. What do you care? After the way you acted you’ve got the crust of a rhinoceros to . . .”
“You’re crazy, Lacy. Why, we . . . she . . . it’s all fixed up.”
“Funny kind of fixing. Moping around Base, crying her red head off. Finally, though, she decided she had some Scotch pride left, and I let her go aboard again. If she isn’t all done with you, she ought to be.” This, Lacy figured, would be good for what ailed the big sap-head. “Come on, and IT! see whether you’re fit to go back to work or not.”
He was fit “QX, lad—flit!” Lacy discharged him informally with a slap upon the back.
“Get dressed and IT! take you back to Haynes—he’s been snapping at me like a turtle ever since you’ve been out here.”
At Prime Base Kinnison was welcomed enthusiastically by the admiral.
“Feel those ringers, Kim!” he exclaimed. “Perfect! Just like the originals!”
“Mine, too. They do feel good.”
“It’s a pity you got your new ones so quick. You’d appreciate ‘em much more after a few years without ‘em. But to get down to business. The fleets have been taking off for weeks—we’re to join up as the line passes. If you haven’t anything better to do I’d like to have you aboard the Z9M9Z.”
“I don’t know of any place I’d rather be, sir—thanks.”
“QX. Thanks should be the other way. You can make yourself mighty useful between now and zero time.” He eyed the younger man speculatively.
Haynes had a special job for him, Kinnison knew. As a Gray Lensman, he could not be given any military rank or post, and he could not conceive of the admiral of Grand Fleet wanting him around as an aide-de-camp.
“Spill it, chief,” he invited. “Not orders, of course—I understand that perfectly. Requests or—ah-hum—suggestions.”
“I will crown you with something yet, you whelp!” Haynes snorted, and Kinnison grinned. These two were very close, in spite of their disparity in years; and very much of a piece.
“As you get older you’ll realize that it’s good tactics to stick pretty close to Gen Regs. Yes, I have got a job for you, and a nasty one. Nobody has been able to handle it, not even two companies of Rigellians. Grand Fleet Operations.”
“Grand Fleet Operations!” Kinnison was aghast. “Holy—Klono’s—Indium—Intestines!
What makes you think I’ve got jets enough to swing that load?”
“I haven’t any idea whether you can or not. If you cant, though, nobody can; and in spite of all the work we’ve done on the thing we’ll have to operate as a mob, the way we did before; not as a fleet. If so, I shudder to think of the results.”
“QX. If you’ll send for Worsel well try it a fling or two. It’d be a shame to build a whole ship around an Operations tank and then not be able to use it. By the way, I haven’t seen my head nurse—Miss MacDougall, you know—around any place lately. Have you? I ought to tell her ‘thanks’ or something—maybe send her a flower.”
“Nurse? MacDougall? Oh, yes, the red-head. Let me see— did hear something about her the other day. Married? No . . . took a hospital ship somewhere. Alsakan? Vandemar? Didn’t pay any attention. She doesn’t need thanks—or flowers, either—getting paid for her work. Much more important, jdon’t you think, to get Operations straightened out?”
“Undoubtedly, sir,” Kinnison replied, stiffly; and as he Went out Lacy came in.
The two old conspirators greeted each other with knowing grins. Was Kinnison taking it big! He was falling, like ten thousand bricks down a well.
“Do him good to undermine his position a bit. Too cocky ‘altogether. But how they suffer!”
“Check!”
The Gray Lensman rode toward the flagship in a mood which even he could not have described. He had expected to see her, as a matter of course . . . he wanted to see her . . . confound it, he had to see her! Why did she have to do a flit now, of all the times on the calendar? She knew the fleet was shoving off, and that he’d have to go along . . . and nobody knew where she was. When he got back he’d find her if he had to chase her all over the galaxy.
He’d put and end to this. Duty was duty, of course . . . but Chris was CHRIS . . . and half a loaf was better than no bread!
He jerked back to reality as he entered the gigantic teardrop which was technically the Z9M9Z, socially the Directrix, and ordinarily GFHQ. She had been designed and built specifically to be Grand Fleet Headquarters, and nothing else. She bore no offensive armament, but since she had to protect the presiding geniuses of combat she had every possible defense.
Port Admiral Haynes had learned a bitter lesson during the expedition to Helmuth’s base.
Long before that relatively small fleet got there he was sick to the core, realizing that fifty thousand vessels simply could not be controlled or maneuvered as a group. If that base had been capable of an offensive or even of a real defense, or if Boskone could have put their fleets into that star-cluster in time, the Patrol would have been defeated ignominiously; and Haynes, wise old tactician that he was, knew it.
Therefore, immediately after the return from that “triumphant” venture, he gave orders to design and to build, at whatever cost, a flagship capable of directing efficiently a million combat units.
The “tank”—the minutely cubed model of the galaxy which is a necessary part of every pilot room—had grown and grown as it became evident that it must be the prime agency in Grand Fleet Operations. Finally, in this last rebuilding, the tank was seven hundred feet in diameter and eighty feet thick in the middle—over seventeen million cubic feet of space in which more than two million tiny lights crawled hither and thither in helpless confusion. For, after the technicians and designers had put that tank into actual service, they had discovered that it was useless. No available mind had been able either to perceive the situation as a whole or to identify with certainty any light or group of lights needing correction; and as for linking up any particular light with its individual, blanket-proof communicator in time to issue orders in space- combat. . . !