narrow, mean, small-souled sort of way—and I advise him in all seriousness to do so.
Now get the hell out of here, before I burn the seat of your pants off.”
Khars got, gathering together visibly the shreds of his self-esteem as he did so;
the clerks staring the while in dumbfounded amazement. Then they huddled together,
eyeing the owner of the establishment with a brand-new respect—a subservient
respect, heavily laced with awe.
“Business as usual, boys,” he counseled them, cheerfully enough. “They won’t
blow up the place until after dark.”
The clerks resumed their places then and trade did go on, after a fashion; but
Cartiff’s force had not recovered its wonted blas6 aplomb even at closing time.
“Just a moment.” The proprietor called his employees together and, reaching into
his pocket, distributed among them a sheaf of currency. “In case you don’t find the shop
here in the morning, you may consider yourselves on vacation at full pay until I call you.”
They departed, and Kinnison went back to his office. His first care was to set up
a spy-ray block—a block which had been purchased upon Lonabar and which was
therefore certainly pervious to Bleeko’s instruments. Then he prowled about, apparently
in deep and anxious thought. But as he prowled, the eavesdroppers did not, could not
know that his weight set into operation certain devices of his own highly secret
installation, or that when he finally left the shop no really serious harm could be done to
it except by an explosion sufficiently violent to demolish the neighborhood for blocks
around. The front wall would go, of course. He wanted it to go; otherwise there would be
neither reason nor excuse for doing that which for days he had been ready to do.
Since Caitiff lived rigorously to schedule and did not have a spy-ray block in his
room, Bleeko’s methodical and efficient observers always turned off their beams when
the observee went to sleep. This night, however, Kinnison was not really asleep, and as
soon as the ray went off he acted. He threw on big clothes and sought the street, where
he took a taxi to a certain airport. There he climbed into a prop-and-rocket job already
hot and waiting.
Hanging from her screaming props the fantastically powerful little plane bulleted
upward in a vertical climb, and as she began to slow down from lack of air her rockets
took over. A tractor reached out, seizing her gently. Her wings retracted and she was
drawn into Cartiff’s great spaceship; which, a few minutes later, hung poised above one
of the largest, richest jewel-mines of Lonabar.
This mine was, among others, Menjo Bleeko’s personal property. Since over-
production would glut the market, it was being worked by only one shift of men; the day-
shift. It was now black night; the usual guards were the only men upon the premises.
The big black ship hung there and waited. “But suppose they don’t, Kim?” Watson
asked. “Then we’ll wait here every night until they do,” Kinnison replied, grimly. “But
they’ll do it tonight, for all the tea in China. They’ll have to, to save Bleeko’s face.”
And they did., In a couple of hours the observer at a high-powered plate reported
that Cartiff’s salon had just been blown to bits. Then the Patrolmen went into action.
Bleeko’s mobsmen hadn’t killed anybody at Cartiff’s, therefore the Tellurians
wouldn’t kill anybody here. Hence, while. ten immense beam-dirigible torpedoes were
being piloted carefully down shafts and along tunnels into the deepest bowels of the
workings, the guards were given warning that, if they got into their flyers fast enough,
they could be fifty miles away and probably safe by zero time. They hurried.
At zero time the torpedoes let go as one. The entire planet quivered under the
trip-hammer shock of detonating duodec. For those frightful, those appalling charges
had been placed, by computations checked and rechecked, precisely where they would
wreak the most havoc, the utmost possible measure of sheer destruction. Much of the
rock, however hard, around each one of those incredible centers of demolition was
simply blasted out of existence. That is the way duodec, in massive charges, works.
Matter simply cannot get out of its way in the first instants of its detonation; matter’s own
inherent inertia forbids.
Most of the rock between the bombs was pulverized the merest fraction of a
second later. Then, the distortedly-spherical explosion fronts merging, the total
incomprehensible pressure was exerted as almost pure lift. The field above the mine-
works lifted, then; practically as a mass at first. But it could not remain as such. It could
not move fast enough as a whole; nor did it possess even a minute fraction of the
tensile strength necessary to withstand the stresses being applied. Those stresses, the
forces of the explosions, were to all intents and purposes irresistible. The crust
disintegrated violently and almost instantaneously. Rock crushed grindingly against
rock; practically the whole mass reducing in the twinkling of an eye to an impalpable
powder.
Upward and outward, then, the ragingly compressed gases of detonation drove,
hurling everything before them. Chunks blew out sidewise, flying for miles: the mind-
staggeringly enormous volume of dust was hurled upward clear into the stratosphere.
Finally that awful dust-cloud was wafted aside, revealing through its thinning
haze a strangely and hideously altered terrain. No sign remained of the buildings or the
mechanisms of Bleeko’s richest mine. No vestige was left to show that anything built by
or pertaining to man had ever existed there. Where those works had been there now
yawned an absolutely featureless crater; a crater whose sheer geometrical perfection of
figure revealed with shocking clarity the magnitude of the cataclysmic forces which had
wrought there.
Kinnison, looking blackly down at that crater, did not feel the glow of satisfaction
which comes of a good deed well done. He detested it—it made him sick at” the
stomach. But, since he had had it to do, he had done it. Why in all the nine hells of
Valeria did he have to be a Lensman, anyway?
Back to Lonia. then, the Lensman made his resentful way, and back to bed.
And in the morning, early, workmen began the reconstruction of Cartiff’s place of
business.
CHAPTER 10
Bleeko and the Iceberg
Kinnison’s impenetrable shields of force had confined the damage to the store’s
front, it was not long before Cartiff’s reopened. Business was and remained brisk; not
only because of what had happened, but also because Cartiff’s top-lofty and arrogant
snobbishness had an irresistible appeal to the upper layers of Lonabar’s peculiarly
stratified humanity. The Lensman, however, paid little enough attention to business.
Outwardly, seated at his ornate desk in haughty grandeur, he was calmness itself, but
inwardly he was far from serene.
If he had figured things right, and he was pretty sure that he had, it was up to
Bleeko to make the next move, and it would pretty nearly have to be a peaceable one.
There was enough doubt about it, however, to make the Lensman a bit jittery inside.
Also, from the fact that everybody having any weight at all wore thought-screens, it was
almost a foregone conclusion that they had been warned against, and were on the
lookout for, THE Lensman—that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Lensman who had
already done so much hurt to the Boskonian cause. That they now thought that one to
be a well-hidden, unknown Director of Lensmen, and not an actual operative, was little
protection. If he made one slip they’d have him, cold.
He hadn’t slipped yet, they didn’t suspect him yet; he was sure of those points.
With these people to suspect was to act, and his world-circling ship, equipped with
every scanning, spying, and eavesdropping device known to science, would have
informed him instantly of any untoward development anywhere upon or near the planet.
And his fight with Bleeko was, after all, natural enough and very much in character. It
was of the very essence of Boskonian culture that king-snipes should do each other to
death with whatever weapons came readiest to hand. The underdog was always trying
to kill the upper, and if the latter was not strong enough to protect his loot, he deserved
everything he got. A callous philosophy, it is true, but one truly characteristic of
Civilization’s inveterate foes.
The higher-ups never interfered. Their own skins were the only ones in which
they were interested. They would, Kinnison reflected, probably check back on him, just
to insure their own safety, but they would not take sides in this brawl if they were
convinced that he was, as he appeared to be, a struggling young racketeer making his
way up the ladder of fame and fortune as best he could. Let them check—Cartiff’s past
had been fabricated especially to stand up under precisely that investigation, no matter
how rigid it were to be!
Hence Kinnison waited, as calmly as might be, for Bleeko to move. There was no