over-almost. The pilot was still alive, unmoving and rigid at his controls.
Then he, too, moved, rapidly and purposefully. He cut in the Bergenholm, spun
the ship around, shoved her drivers up to maximum blast, and steadied her into an
exact course -and when Helmuth read that course even his iron nerves failed him
momentarily. For the ship was flying, not for its own home port, but directly toward
Grand Base, the jealously secret planet whose spatial coordinates neither that pilot nor
any other creature of the pirates’ rank and file had ever known!
Helmuth snapped out orders, to which the pilot gave no heed. His voice-for the
first time in his career-rose to a howl, but the pilot still paid no attention. Instead, eyes
bulging with horror and fingers curved tensely into veritable talons, he reared upright
upon his bench and leaped as though to clutch and to rend some unutterably appalling
foe. He leaped over his board into thin and empty air. He came down a-sprawl in a
maze of naked, high-potential busbars. His body vanished in a flash of searing flame
and a cloud of thick and greasy smoke.
The bus-bars cleared themselves of their gruesome `short” and the great ship,
manned now entirely by corpses, bored on .
“. . . . . stinking klebots, the lily-livered cowards!” the department head, who had
also been yelling orders, was still pounding his desk and yelling. “If they’re that afraid-go
crazy and kill each ether without being touched-I’ll have to go myself . . . .”
“No, Sansteed,” Helmuth interrupted curtly. “You will not have to go. There is,
after all, I think, something there -something that you may not be able to handle. You
see, you missed the one essential key fact.” He referred to the course, the setting of
which had shaken him to the very core.
“Let be,” he silenced the other’s flood of question and protest. “It would serve no
purpose to detail it to you now. Have the ship taken back to port.”
Helmuth knew now that it was not superstition that made spacemen shun Arisia.
He knew that, from his standpoint at least, there was something very seriously amiss.
But he had not the faintest conception of the real situation, nor of the real and terrible
power which the Arisians. could, and upon occasion would, wield.]
CHAPTER 12
Kinnison Brings Home the Bacon
Helmuth sat at his desk, thinking, thinking with all the coldly analytical precision of which
he was capable.
This Lensman was both powerful and tremendously resourceful. The cosmic-
energy drive, developed by the science of a world about which the Patrol knew nothing,
was Boskone’s one great item of superiority. If the Patrol could be kept in ignorance of
that drive the struggle would be over in a year, the culture of the iron hand would be
unchallenged throughout the galaxy. If, however, the Patrol should succeed in learning
Boskone’s top secret, the war between the two cultures might well be prolonged
indefinitely. This Lensman knew that secret and was still at large, of that he was all too
certain. Therefore the Lensman must be destroyed. And that brought up the Lens.
What was it? A peculiar bauble indeed, impossible of duplication because of
some subtlety of intra-atomic arrangement, and possessing peculiar and dire
potentialities. The old belief that no one except a Lensman could wear a Lens was true-
he had proved it. The Lens must account in some way for the outstanding ability of the
Lensman, and it must tie in, somehow, with both Arisia and the thought-screens. The
Lens was the one thing possessed by the Patrol which his own forces did not have. He
must and would have it, for it was undoubtedly a powerful arm. Not to be compared, of
course, with their own monopoly of cosmic energy.-but that monopoly was now
threatened, and seriously. That Lensman must be destroyed.
But how? It was easy to say “Comb Trenco, inch by Inch,” but doing it would
prove a Herculean task. Suppose that the Lensman should again escape, in that
volume of so fantastically distorted media? He had already escaped twice, in much
clearer ether than Trenco’s. However, if his information should never get back to Prime
Base little harm would be done and ships had been thrown around every solar system
the Lensman could reach. Not even a grain-of-dust meteorite could pass those screens
without detection. So much for the Lensman. Now about getting the secret of the Lens.
Again, how? There was something upon Arisia, something connected in some
way with the Lens and with thought-possibly also with those thought-screens . .
His mind Bashed back over the unorthodox manner of his acquirement of those
devices-unorthodox in that he had neither stolen them nor murdered their inventor. A
person had come to him with pass-words and credentials which could not be ignored,
had handed him a heavily-sealed container, which, he said, had come from a planet
named Ploor, had remarked casually -Thought-screen data-you’ll know when you need
’em”, and had gone.
Whatever the Arisian was it had mental power, of that fact there could be no
doubt. Out of the full sphere of space, what was the mathematical probability that the
pilot of that deathship would have set by accident his course so exactly upon Grand
Base? Vanishingly small. Treachery would not explain the facts-not only had the pilot
been completely insane when he laid the course, but also he did not know where Grand
Base was.
As an explanation mental force alone seemed fantastic, but no other as yet
presented itself as a possibility. Also, it was supported by the unbelievable, the
absolutely definite refusal of Gildersleeve’s normally fearless crew even to approach the
planet. It would take an unheard-of mental force so to affect such crime-hardened
veterans.
Helmuth was not one to underestimate an enemy. Was there a man beneath
that dome, save himself, of sufficient mental caliber to undertake the now necessary
mission to Arisia? There was not. He himself had the finest mind on the planet, else
that other had deposed him long since and had sat at the control desk himself. He was
sublimely confident that no outside thought could break down his definitely opposed
will-and besides, there were the thought screens, the secret of which he had not as yet
shared with anyone. The time had come to use those screens.
It has already been made clear that Helmuth was not a fool. No more was he a
coward. If he himself could best of all his force do a thing, that thing he did, with the
coldly ruthless efficiency that marked alike his every action and his every thought.
How should he go? Should he accept that challenge, and take Gildersleeve’s
rebellious crew of cutthroats to Arisia? No. In the event of an outcome short of complete
success, it would not do to lose face before that band of ruffians. Moreover, the idea of
such a crew going insane behind him was not one to be relished. He would go alone.
“Wolmark, come to the center,” he ordered. When that worthy appeared he went
on. “Be seated, as this is to be a serious conference. I have watched with admiration
and appreciation, as well as some mild amusement, the development of your lines of
information, especially those concerning affairs which are most distinctly not in your
department. They are, however, efficient-you already know exactly what has
happened.” A statement this, in no wise a question.
“Yes, sir,” quietly. Wolmark was somewhat taken aback, but not at all abashed.
“That is the reason you are here- now. I thoroughly approve of you. I am leaving
the planet for a few days, and you are the best man in the organization to take charge
in my absence.”
“I suspected that you would be leaving, sir.”
“I know you did, but I am now informing you, merely to make sure that you
develop no peculiar ideas in my absence, that there are at least a few things which you
do not suspect at all. That safe, for instance,” nodding toward a peculiarly shimmering
globe of force anchoring itself in air. “Even your highly efficient spy system has not
been able to learn a thing about that.”
“No, sir, we have not-yet,” he could not forbear adding.
Nor will you, with any skill or force known to man. But keep on trying, it amuses
me. I know, you see, of all your attempts. But to get on. I now say, and for your own
good I advise you to believe, that failure upon my part to return to this desk will prove
highly unfortunate for you.”
“I believe that, sir. Any man of intelligence would make such arrangement, if he
could. But sir, suppose that the Arisians . . . . .”
“If your ‘if he could’ implies a doubt, act upon it and learn wisdom,” Helmuth
advised him coldly. “You should know by this time that I neither gamble nor bluff. I have