filter through it—because a sheer, bare fact has to be driven into my brain with a
Valerian maul before I can grasp it—we’re sunk without a trace.”
“Wait a minute, Kim, we aren’t sunk yet,” the girl advised, shrewdly. “The fact
that, for the first time in history, an Arisian has taken the initiative in communicating with
a human being, means something big—really big. Mentor does not indulge in what he
calls ‘loose and muddy’ thinking. Every part of every thought he sent carries meaning—
plenty of meaning.”
“What do you mean?” As one, the three men asked substantially the same
question; Kinnison, by virtue of his faster reactions, being perhaps half a syllable in the
lead.
“I don’t know, exactly,” Clarrissa admitted. “I’ve got only an ordinary mind, and it’s
firing on half its jets or less right now. But I do know that his thought was ‘almost’
irreparable, and that he meant precisely that—nothing else. If it had been wholly
irreparable he not only would have expressed his thought that way, but he would have
stopped you before you destroyed Jarnevon. I know that. Apparently it would have
become wholly irreparable if we had got . . .” she faltered, blushing, then went on, “. . . if
we had kept on about our own personal affairs. That’s why he stopped us. We can win
out, he meant, if you keep on working. It’s your oyster, Kim . . . it’s up to you to open it.
You can do it, too—I just know you can.”
“But why didn’t he stop you before you fellows smashed Boskone?” Lacy
demanded, exasperated.
“I hope you’re right, Cris—it sounds reasonable,” Kinnison said, thoughtfully.
Then, to Lacy:
“That’s an easy one to answer, doctor. Because knowledge that comes the hard
way is knowledge that really sticks with you. If he had drawn me a diagram before, it
wouldn’t have helped, the next time I get into a jam. This way it will. I’ve got to learn how
to think, if it cracks my skull.
“Really think,” he went on, more to himself than to the other three. “To think so it
counts.”
“Well, what are we going to do about it?” Haynes was— he had to be, to get
where he was and to stay where he was—quick on the uptake. “Or, more specifically,
what are you going to do and what am I going to do?”
“What I am going to do will take a bit of mulling over,” Kinnison replied, slowly.
“Find some more leads and trace them up, is the best that occurs to me right now. Your
job and procedure are rather clearer. You remarked out in space that Boskone knew
that Tellus was very strongly held. That statement, of course, is no longer true.”
“Huh?” Haynes half-pulled himself up from the davenport, then sank back.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Because we used the negasphere—a negative-matter bomb of planetary anti-
mass—to wipe out Jalte’s planet, and because we smashed Jarnevon between two
colliding planets,” the Lensman explained, concisely. “Can the present defenses of
Tellus cope with either one of those offensives?”
“I’m afraid not . . . no,” the Port Admiral admitted. “But . . .”
“We can admit no ‘buts’, admiral,” Kinnison declared, with grim finality. “Having
used those weapons, we must assume that the Boskonian scientists—we’ll have to
keep on calling them ‘Boskonians’, I suppose, until we find a truer name—had recorders
on them and have now duplicated them. Tellus must be made safe against anything we
have ever used; against, as well, everything that, by the wildest stretch of the
imagination, we can conceive of the enemy using.”
“You’re right. . . I can see that,” Haynes nodded.
“We’ve been underestimating them right along,” Kinnison went on. “At first we
thought they were merely organized outlaws and pirates. Then, when it was forced upon
us that they could match us—overmatch us in some things—we still wouldn’t admit that
they must be as large and as wide-spread as we are—galactic in scope. We know now
that they were wider-spread than we are. Inter-galactic. They penetrated into our
galaxy, riddled it, before we knew that theirs was inhabited or inhabitable. Right?”
“To a hair, although I never thought of it in exactly that way before.”
“None of us have—mental cowardice. And they have the advantage,” Kinnison
continued, inexorably, “in knowing that our Prime Base is on Tellus; whereas, if
Jarnevon was not in fact theirs, we have no idea whatever where it is. And another
point. Was that fleet of theirs a planetary outfit?”
“Well, Jarnevon was a big planet, and the Eich were a mighty warlike race.”
“Quibbling a bit, aren’t you, chief?”
“Uh-huh,” Haynes admitted, somewhat sheepishly. “The probability is very great
that no one planet either built or maintained that fleet.”
“And that leads us to expect what?”
“Counter-attack. In force. Everything they can shove this way. However, they’ve
got to rebuild their fleet, besides designing and building the new stuff. We’ll have time
enough, probably, if we get started right now.”
“But, after all, Jarnevon may have been their vital spot,” Lacy submitted.
“Even if that were true, which it probably isn’t,” the now thoroughly convinced
Port Admiral sided in with Kinnison, “it doesn’t mean a thing, Sawbones. If they should
blow Tellus out of space it wouldn’t kill the Galactic Patrol. It would hurt it, of course, but
it wouldn’t cripple it seriously. The other planets of Civilization could, and certainly
would, go ahead with it.”
“My thought exactly,” from Kinnison. “I check you to the proverbial nineteen
decimals.”
“Well, there’s a lot to do and I’d better be getting at it.” Haynes and Lacy got up to
go. “See you in my office when convenient?”
“I’ll be there as soon as I tell Clarrissa goodbye.”
At about the same time that Haynes and Lacy went to Nurse MacDougall’s room,
Worsel the Velantian arrowed downward through the atmosphere toward a certain flat
roof. Leather wings shot out with a snap and in a blast of wind— Velantians can stand
eleven Tellurian gravities—he came in his customary appalling landing and dived
unconcernedly down a nearby shaft. Into a corridor, along which he wriggled blithely to
the office of his old friend, Master Technician La-Verne Thorndyke.
“Verne, I have been thinking,” he announced, as he coiled all but about six feet of
his sinuous length into a tight spiral upon the rug and thrust out half a dozen weirdly
stalked eyes.
“That’s nothing new,” Thorndyke countered. No human mind can sympathize with
or even remotely understand the Velantian passion for solid weeks of intense,
uninterrupted concentration upon a single thought. “What about this time? The
whichness of the why?”
“That is the trouble with you Tellurians,” Worsel grumbled. “Not only do you not
know how to think, but you . . .”
“Hold on!” Thorndyke interrupted, unimpressed. “If you’ve got anything to say, old
snake, why not say it? Why circumnavigate total space before you get to the point?”
“I have been thinking about thought. . .”
“So what?” the technician derided. “That’s even worse. That’s a logarithmic spiral
if there ever was one.”
“Thought—and Kinnison,” Worsel declared, with finality.
“Kinnison? Oh—that’s different. I’m interested—very much so. Go ahead.”
“And his weapons. His DeLameters, you know.”.
“No, I don’t know, and you know I don’t know. What about them?”
“They are so . . . so . . . so obvious.” The Velantian finally found the exact
thought he wanted. “So big, and so clumsy, and so obtrusive. So inefficient, so wasteful
of power. No subtlety—no finesse.”
“But that’s far and away the best hand-weapon that has ever been developed!”
Thorndyke protested.
“True. Nevertheless, a millionth of that power, properly applied, could be at least
a million times as deadly.”
“How?” The Tellurian, although shocked, was dubious.
“I have reasoned it out that thought, in any organic being, is and must be
connected with one definite organic compound —this one,” the Velantian explained
didactically, the while there appeared within the technician’s mind the space formula of
an incredibly complex molecule; a formula which seemed to fill not only his mind, but
the entire room as well. “You will note that it is a large molecule, one of very high
molecular weight. Thus it is comparatively unstable. A vibration at the resonant
frequency of any one of its component groups would break it down, and thought would
therefore cease.”
It took perhaps a minute for the full import of the ghastly thing to sink into
Thorndyke’s mind. Then, every fiber of him flinching from the idea, he began to protest.
“But he doesn’t need it, Worsel. He’s got a mind already that can . . .”
“It takes much mental force to kill,” Worsel broke in equably. “By that method one
can slay only a few at a time, and it is exhausting work. My proposed method would
require only a minute fraction of a watt of power and scarcely any mental force at all.”