couple of pink-haired Chickladorians helped you and then beat it back home. That
planet’s far enough away so that if the pirates chase them they’ll get a real run for their
money. After this blows over you can tell the truth-but not until then.
“And as for us going to the Dome for a grand hocus-Pocus, that is completely
and definitely OUT. We’re not going anywhere except to ‘the biggest airport you’ve got.
You’re not going to give us anything except a lot of material and a lot of highly-trained
help that can keep their thoughts sealed.
“We’ve got to build a lot of heavy stuff fast, and we’ve got to get started on it just
as quick as Klono and Noshabkeming will let us !”
CHAPTER 8
The Quarry Strikes Back
Worsel knew his council of scientists, as well as might, since it developed that he
himself ranked high in that select circle. True to his promise, the largest airport of the
planet was immediately emptied of its customary personnel, which was replaced the
following morning by an entirely new group of workmen.
Nor were these replacements ordinarily laborers. They were young, keen, and
highly trained, taken to a man from behind the thought-screens of the Scientists. It is
true that they had no inkling of what they were to do, since none of them had ever
dreamed of the possibility of such engines as they were to be called upon to construct.
But, on the other hand, they were well versed in the fundamental theories and
operations of mathematics, and from pure mathematics to applied mechanics is but a
step. Furthermore, they had brains, knew how to think logically, coherently, and
effectively, and needed neither driving nor supervision-only instruction. And best of all,
practically every one of the required mechanisms already existed, in miniature, within
the Brittania’s lifeboat, ready at hand for their dissection, analysis, and enlargement. It
was not lack of understanding which was to slow up the work, it was simply that the
planet did not boast machine tools and equipment large enough or strong enough to
handle the necessarily huge and heavy parts and members required.
While the construction of this heavy machinery was being rushed through,
Kinnison and vanBuskirk devoted their efforts to the fabrication of an ultra-sensitive
receiver, tunable to the pirates’ scrambled wave-bands. With their exactly detailed
knowledge, and with the cleverest technicians and the choicest equipment of Velantia
at their disposal, the set was soon completed.
Kinnison was giving its exceedingly delicate coils their final alignment when
Worsel wriggled blithely into the radio laboratory.
“Hi, Kimball Kinnison! of the Lens!” he called gaily. Throwing a few yards of his
serpent’s body in lightning loops about a convenient pillar, he made a horizontal bar of
the rest of himself and dropped one wing-tip to the floor. Then, nonchalantly upside
down, he thrust out three or four eyes and curled their stalks over the Lensman’s
shoulder, the better to inspect the results of the mechanics’ efforts. Gone was the
morose, pessimistic, death-haunted Worsel entirely, gay, happy, carefree, and actually
frolicsome-if you can imagine a thirty-foot-long, crocodile headed, leather-winged
python as being frolicsome!
“Hi, your royal snakeship!” Kinnison retorted in kind. “Still here, huh? Thought
you’d be back on Delgon by this time, cleaning up the rest of that mess.”
“The equipment is not ready, but there’s no hurry about that,” the playful reptile
unwrapped ten or twelve feet of tail from the pillar and waved it airily about. “Their
power is broken, their race is done. You are about to try out the new receiver?”
“Yes-going out after them right now,” and Kinnison began deftly to manipulate
the micrometric vernier of his dials.
Eyes fixed upon meters and gauges, he listened . listened. Increased his power
and listened again. More and more power &e applied to his apparatus, listening
continually. Suddenly he stiffened, his hands becoming rock-still. He listened, if
possible even more intently than before, and as he listened his face grew grim and
granite-hard. Then the micrometers began again crawlingly to move, as though he were
tracing a beam.
“Bus! Hook on the focusing beam-antenna!” he snapped. “It’s going to take every
milliwatt of power we’ve got in this hookup to tap his beam, but I think I’ve got Helmuth
direct instead of through a pirate-ship relay!”
Again and again he checked the readings of his dials and of the directors of his
antenna, each time noting the exact time of the Velantian day.
“There! As soon as we get some time, Worsel, I’d like to work out these figures
with some of your astronomers. They’ll give me a right line through Helmuth’s
headquarters -I hope. Some day, if I’m spared, I’ll get another!”
“What kind of news did you get, chief?” asked vanBuskirk.
“Good and bad both,” replied the Lensman. “Good in that Helmuth doesn’t
believe that we stayed with his ship as long as we did. He’s a suspicious devil, you
know, and is pretty well convinced that we tried to run the same kind of a blazer on him
that we did the other time. Since he hasn’t got .enough ships on the job to work the
whole line, he’s concentrating on the other end. That means that we’ve got plenty of
days left yet. The bad part of it is that they’ve got four of our boats already and are
bound to get more. Lord, how I wish I could call the rest of them! Some of them could
certainly make it here before they got caught.”
“Might I then offer a suggestion?” asked Worsel, of a sudden diffident.
“Surely!” the Lensman replied in surprise. “Your ideas have never been any kind
of poppycock. Why so bashful all at once?”
“Because this one is so . . . ah . . so peculiarly personal, since you men regard
so highly the privacy of your minds. Our two sciences, as you have already observed,
are vastly different. You are far beyond us in mechanics, physics, chemistry, and the
other applied sciences. We, on the other hand, have delved much deeper than you
have into psychology and the other introspective studies. For that reason I know
positively that the Lens you wear is capable of enormously greater things than you are
at present able to make it perform. Of course I cannot use your Lens directly, since it is
attuned to your own ego. However, if the idea appeals to you, I could, with your
consent, occupy your mind and use your Lens to put you en rapport with your fellows. I
have not volunteered the suggestion before because I know how averse your mind is to
any foreign control.”
“Not necessarily to foreign control,” Kinnison corrected him. “Only to enemy
control. The idea of friendly control never even occurred to me. That would be an
entirely different breed of cats. Go to it!”
Kinnison relaxed his mind completely,- and that of the Velantian came welling in,
wave upon friendly, surging wave of benevolent power. And not only-or not precisely-
power. It was more than power, it was a dynamic poignancy, a vibrant penetrance, a
depth and clarity of perception that Kinnison in his most cogent moments had never
dreamed a possibility. The possessor of that mind knew things, cameo-clear in
microscopic detail, which the keenest minds of Earth could perceive only as chaotically
indistinct masses of mental light and shade, of no recognizable pattern whatever!
“Give me the thought-pattern of him with whom you wish first to converse,” came
Worsel’s thought, this time from deep within the Lensman’s own brain.
Kinnison felt a subtle thrill of uneasiness at that new and ultra-strange dual
personality, but thought back steadily. “Sorry-I can’t.”
“Excuse me, I should have known that you cannot think in our patterns. Think,
then, of him as a person-as an individual. That will give me, I believe, sufficient data.”
Into the Earthman’s mind there leaped a picture of Henderson, sharp and clear.
He felt his Lens actually tingle and throb as a concentration of vital force such as he –
had never known poured through his whole being and into that almost-living creation of
the Arisians, and immediately thereafter he was in full mental communication with the
Master Pilot! And there, seated across the tiny mess-table of their lifeboat, was
LaVerne Thorndyke, the Master Technician.
Henderson came to his feet with a yell as the telepathic message bombshelled
into his brain, and it required several seconds to convince him that he was not the
victim of space-insanity or suffering from any other form of hallucination. Once
convinced, however, he acted – his life-boat shot toward far Velantia at maximum blast.
Then, “Nelson ! Allerdyce ! Thompson ! Jenkins ! Uhlenhuth! Smith! Chatway! . .
. . . ” Kinnison called the roll.
Nelson, the specialist in communications, answered his captain’s call. So did
Allerdyce, the juggling quartermaster. So did Uhlenhuth, a technician. So did those in
three other boats. Two of these three were apparently well within the danger zone and