Communication was established and the pirate captain began to make his
report, and by using one hand on the ray and the other on the tracer, he managed to
get a partial line and to record scraps of the conversation. He missed, however, the
essential part of the entire episode, that part in which the base commander turned the
unsuccessful captain over to Helmuth himself. Therefore Kinnison was surprised indeed
at the disappearance of the beam he was so laboriously trying to trace, and to hear
Helmuth conclude his castigation of the unlucky captain with. .
. . . . . not entirely your fault, I will not punish you at all severely this time. Report
to our base on Aldebaran I, turn your vessel over to commander there, and do anything
he tells you to for .thirty of the days of that planet.”
Frantically Kinnison drew back his tracer and searched for Helmuth’s beam, but
before he could synchronize with it the message of the pirates’ high chief was finished
and his beam was gone. The Lensman sat back in thought.
Aldebaran I Practically next door to his own Solarian System, from which he had
come so far. How had they possibly managed to keep concealed, or to re-establish, a
base so close to Sol, through all the intensive searching that had been done? But they
had-that was the important thing. Anyway, he knew where he was going, and that
helped. One other thing he hadn’t thought of, and one that might have spoiled
everything, was the fact that he couldn’t stay awake indefinitely to follow that ship! He
had to sleep sometime, and while he was asleep his quarry was bound to escape. He of
course had a CRX tracer, which would hold a ship without attention as long as it was
anywhere within even extreme range, and it would have been a simple enough matter
to have had a photo-cell relay put in between the plate of the CRX and the automatic
controls of the spacer and driver-but he had not asked for it. Well, luckily, he now knew
where he was going, and the trip to Aldebaran would. be long enough for him to build a
dozen such controls. He had all the necessary parts and plenty of tools.
Therefore, following the pirate ship easily as it tore through space, Kinnison built
his automatic “chaser,” as he called it. During each of the first four or five “nights” he
lost the vessel he was pursuing, but found it without any great difficulty upon
awakening. Thereafter he held it continuously, improving day by day the performance of
his apparatus until it could do almost anything except talk. After that he devoted his
time to an intensive study of the general problem before him. His results were highly
unsatisfactory, for in order to solve any problem one must have enough data to set it
up, either in actual equations or in logical sequences, and Kinnison did not have
enough data.
He had altogether too many unknowns and not enough knowns.
The first specific problem was that of getting into the pirate base. Since the
searchers of the Patrol had not found it, that base must be very well hidden indeed. And
hiding anything as large as a base on Aldebaran I, as he remembered it, would be quite
a feat in itself. He had been in that system only once, but . . . . .
Alone in his ship, and in deep space although he was, he blushed painfully as he
remembered what had happened to him during that visit. He had chased a couple of
dope runners to Aldebaran II, and there he had encountered the most vividly, the most
flawlessly, the most remarkably and intriguingly beautiful girl. he had ever seen. He had
seen beautiful women, of course, before and in plenty. He had seen beauties amateur
and professional, social butterflies, dancers, actresses, models, and posturers, both in
the flesh and in Telenewscasts, but he bad never supposed that such an utterly
ravishing creature as she was could exist outside of a thionite dream. As a timidly
innocent damsel in distress she had been perfect, and if she had held that pose a little
longer Kinnison shuddered to think of what might have happened.
But, having known too many dope-runners and too few Patrolmen, she
misjudged entirely, not only the cadet’s sentiments, but also his reactions. For, even as
she came amorously into his arms, he had known that there was something screwy.
Women like that did not play that kind of game for nothing. She must be mixed up with
the two he had been chasing. He got away from her, with only a couple of scratches,
just in time to capture her confederates as they were making their escape-and he had
been afraid of beautiful women ever since. He’d like to see that Aldebaranian hell-cat
again-just once. He’d been just a kid then, but now . . . . .
But that line of thought was getting him nowhere, fast. It was Aldebaran I that he
had better be thinking of. Barren, lifeless, desolate, airless, waterless. Bare as his hand,
covered with extinct volcanoes, cratered, jagged, and torn. To hide a base on that
planet would take plenty of doing, and, conversely, it would be correspondingly difficult
to approach. If on the surface at all, which he doubted very strongly, it would be
covered. In any event, all its approaches would be thoroughly screened and equipped
with lookouts on the ultra-violet and on the infra-red, as well as on the visible. His
detector nullifier wouldn’t help him much there. Those screens and lookouts were bad-
very, very bad. Question-could anything get into that base without setting off an alarm?
His speedster could not even get close, that was certain. Could he, alone? He
would have to wear armor, of course, to hold his air, and it would radiate. Not
necessarily-he could land out of range and walk, without power, but there were still the
screens and the lookouts. If the pirates were on their toes it simply wasn’t in the cards,
and he had to assume that they would be alert.
What, then, could pass those barriers? Prolonged consideration of every fact of
the situation gave definite answer and marked out clearly the course he must take.
Something admitted by the. pirates themselves was the only thing that could get in. The
vessel ahead of his was going in. Therefore he must and would enter that base within
the pirate vessel itself. With that point derided there remained only the working out of a
method, which proved to be almost ridiculously simple.
Once inside the base, what should he-or rather, what could he-do? For days he
made and discarded plans, but finally he tossed them all out of his mind. So much
depended upon the location of the base, its personnel, its arrangement, and its routine,
that he could develop not even the rough draft of a working plan. He knew what he
wanted to do, but he had not even the remotest idea as to how he could go about doing
it. Of the openings that appeared, he would have to choose the most feasible and fit his
actions to whatever situation then and there obtained.
So deciding, he shot his spy-ray toward the planet and studied it with care. It was
indeed as he had remembered it, or worse. Bleakly, hotly arid, it had no soil whatever,
its entire surface being composed of igneous rock, lava, and pumice. Stupendous
ranges of mountains cries-crossed and intersected each other at random, each range a
succession of dead volcanic peaks and blown-off craters. Mountainside and rocky plain,
crater-wall and valley floor, alike and innumerably were pockmarked with sub-craters
and with immensely yawning shell-holes, as though the whole planet had been
throughout geologic ages the target of an incessant cosmic bombardment.
Over its surface and through and through its volume he drove his spy-ray, finding
nothing. He bored into its substance with his detectors and his tracers, with results
completely negative. Of course, closer up, his electromagnetics would report iron-plenty
of it – but that information would also be meaningless. Practically all planets had iron
cores. As far as his instruments could tell-and he had given Aldebaran I a more
thorough going-over by far than any ordinary surveying ship would have given it-there
was no base of any kind upon or within the planet. Yet he knew that a base was there.
So what? -maybe-Helmuth’s base might be inside the galaxy after all, protected from
detection in the same way, probably by solid miles of iron or of iron ore. A second line
upon that base had now become imperative. But they were approaching the system
fast, he had better get ready.
He belted on his personal equipment, including a nullifier, then inspected his
armor, checking its supplies and apparatus carefully before he hooked it ready to his