San Francisco and in Shanghai. The guy sat down finally in New York, but still the Gray
Lensman could not connect—it was always the wrong street, or the wrong house, or the
wrong time, or something.
Then Kinnison set a snare which should have caught a microbe—and almost
caught his zwilnik. He missed him by one mere second when he blasted off from New
York Space-Port. He was so close that he saw his flare, so close that he could slap onto
the fleeing vessel the beam of the CRX tracer which he always carried with him.
Unfortunately, however, the Lensman was in mufti at the time, and was driving a
rented flitter. His speedster—altogether too spectacular and obvious a conveyance to
be using in a hush-hush investigation—was at Prime Base. He didn’t want the
speedster, anyway, except inside the Dauntless. He’d go organized this time to chase
the lug clear out of space, if he had to. He shot in a call for the big cruiser, and while it
was coming he made luridly sulphurous inquiry.
Fruitless. His orders had been carried out to the letter, except in the one detail of
not allowing any vessel to take off. This take-off absolutely could not be helped—it was
just one of those things. The ship was a Patrol speedster from Deneb V, registry
number so-and-so. Said he was coming in for servicing. Came in on the north beam,
identified himself properly—Lieutenant Quirkenfal, of Deneb V, he said it was, and it
checked. . . .
It would check, of course. The zwilnik that Kinnison had been chasing so long
certainly would not be guilty of any such raw, crude work as a faulty identification. In
fact, right then he probably looked just as much like Quirkenfal as the lieutenant himself
did.
“He wasn’t in any hurry at all,” the information went on. “He waited around for his
landing clearance, then slanted in on his assigned slide to the service pits. In the last
hundred yards, though, he shot off to one side and sat down, plop, broadside on, clear
over there in the far corner of the field. But he wasn’t down but a second, sir. Long
before anybody could get to him—before the cruisers could put a beam on him,
even—he blasted off as though the devil was on his tail. Then you came along, sir, but
we did put a CRX tracer on him. . . .”
“I did that much, myself,” Kinnison stated, morosely. “He stopped just long
enough to pick up a passenger—my zwilnik, of course—then flitted . . . and you fellows
let him get away with it.”
“But we couldn’t help it, sir,” the official protested. “And anyway, he couldn’t
possibly have . . .”
“He sure could. You’d be surprised no end at what that bimbo can do.”
Then the Dauntless flashed in; not asking but demanding instant right of way.
“Look around, fellows, if you like, but you won’t find a damned thing,” Kinnison’s
uncheering conclusion came back as he sprinted toward the dock into which his
battleship had settled. “The lug hasn’t left a loose end dangling yet.”
By the time the great Patrol ship had cleared the stratosphere Kinnison’s CRX,
powerful and tenacious as it was, was just barely registering a line. But that was
enough. Henry Henderson, Master Pilot, stuck the Dauntless’ needle nose into that line
and shoved into the driving projectors every watt of that those Brobdingnagian creations
would take.
They had been following the zwilnik for three days now, Kinnison reflected, and
his CRX’s were none too strong yet. They were overhauling him mighty slowly; and the
Dauntless was supposed to be the fastest thing in space. That bucket up ahead had
plenty of legs—must have been souped up to the limit. This was apt to be a long chase,
but he’d get that bozo if he had to chase him on a geodesic line along the hyper-
dimensional curvature of space clear back to Tellus where he started from!
They did not have to circumnavigate total space, of course, but they did almost
leave the galaxy before they could get the fugitive upon their plates. The stars were
thinning out fast; but still, hazily before them in a vastness of distance, there stretched a
milky band of opalescence.
“What’s coming up, Hen— a rift?” Kinnison asked.
“Uh-huh, Rift Ninety Four,” the pilot replied. “And if I remember right, that arm up
ahead is Dunstan’s region and it has never been explored. I’ll have the chart-room
check up on it.”
“Never mind; I’ll go check it myself—I’m curious about this whole thing.”
Unlike any smaller vessel, the Dauntless was large enough so that she
could—and hence as a matter of course did—carry every space-chart issued by all the
various Boards and Offices and Bureaus concerned with space, astronomy, astrogation,
and planetography. She had to, for there were usually minds aboard which were apt at
any time to become intensely and unpredictably interested in anything, anywhere.
Hence it did not take Kinnison long to obtain what little information there was.
The vacancy they were approaching was Rift Ninety Four, a vast space,
practically empty of stars, lying between the main body of the galaxy and a minor
branch of one of its prodigious spiral arms. The opalescence ahead was the branch
—Dunstan’s Region. Henderson was right; it had never been explored.
The Galactic Survey, which has not even yet mapped at all completely the whole
of the First Galaxy proper, had of course done no systematic work upon such outlying
sections as the spiral arms. Some such regions were well known and well mapped, it is
true; either because its own population, independently developing means of space-
flight, had come into contact with our Civilization upon its own initiative or because
private exploration and investigation had opened up profitable lines of commerce. But
Dunstan’s Region was bare. No people resident in it had ever made themselves known;
no private prospecting, if there had ever been any such, had revealed anything worthy
of exploitation or development. And, with so many perfectly good uninhabited planets so
much nearer to Galactic Center, it was of course much too far out for colonization.
Through the rift, then, and into Dunstan’s Region the Dauntless bored at the
unimaginable pace of her terrific full-blast drive. The tracers’ beams grew harder and
more taut with every passing hour; the fleeing speedster itself grew large and clear
upon the plates. The opalescence of the spiral arm became a firmament of stars. A sun
detached itself from that firmament; a dwarf of Type G. Planets appeared.
One of these in particular, the second out, looked so much like Earth that it made
some of the observers homesick. There were the familiar polar ice-caps, the
atmosphere and stratosphere, the high-piled, billowy masses of clouds. There were vast
blue oceans, there were huge, unfamiliar continents glowing with chlorophyllic green.
At the spectroscopes, at the bolometers, at the many other instruments men
went rapidly and skillfully to work.
“Hope the ape’s heading for Two, and I think he is,” Kinnison remarked, as he
studied the results. “People living on that planet would be human to ten places, for all
the tea in China. No wonder he was so much at home on Tellus . . . Yup, it’s
Two—there, he’s gone inert.”
“Whoever is piloting that can went to school just one day in his life and that day it
rained and the teacher didn’t come,” Henderson snorted. “And he’s trying to balance her
down on her tail—look at her bounce and flop around! He’s just begging for a crack-up.”
“If he makes it it’ll be bad—plenty bad,” Kinnison mused. “He’ll gain a lot of time
on us while we’re rounding the globe on our landing spiral.”
“Why spiral, Kim? Why not follow him down, huh? Our intrinsic is no worse than
his—it’s the same one, in fact.”
“Get conscious, Hen. This is a superbattlewagon—just in case you didn’t know it
before.”
“So what? I can certainly handle this super a damn sight better than that ground-
gripper is handling that scrap-heap down there.” Henry Henderson, Master Pilot
Number One of the Service, was not bragging. He was merely voicing what to him was
the simple and obvious truth.
“Mass is what. Mass and volume and velocity and inertia and power. You never
stunted this much mass before, did you?”
“No, but what of it? I took a course in piloting once, in my youth.” He was then a
grand old man of twenty-eight or thereabouts. “I can line up the main rear center pipe
onto any grain of sand you want to pick out on that field, and hold her there until she
slags it down.”
“If you think you can spell ‘able’, hop to it!”
“QX, this is going to be fun.” Henderson gleefully accepted the challenge, then
clicked on his general-alarm microphone. “Strap down, everybody, for inert