Lyranian craft, high above it, they turned as one to match its course and slowed to
match its pace.
“Come to life, Kim—don’t let them have her!” Clarrissa exclaimed. Being en
rapport with them all, she knew that both unhuman Worsel and monstrous Nadreck
were perfectly willing to let the helpless Lyranian become a sacrifice; she knew that
neither Kinnison nor Tregonsee had as yet given that angle of the affair a single
thought. “Surely, Kim, you don’t have to let them kill her, do you? Isn’t showing you the
gate or whatever it is, enough? Can’t you rig up something to do something with when
she gets almost inside?”
“Why . . . uh . . . I s’pose so.” Kinnison wrenched his attention away from a plate.
“Oh, sure,. Cris. Hen! Drop us down a bit, and have the boys get ready to spear that
crate with a couple of tractors when I give the word.”
The plane held its course, directly toward a range of low, barren, precipitous hills.
As it approached them it dropped, as though to attempt a landing upon a steep and
rocky hillside.
“She can’t land there,” Kinnison breathed, “and Overlords would want her alive,
not dead . . . suppose I’ve been wrong all the time? Get ready, fellows!” he snapped.
“Take her at the very last possible instant—before—she—crashes—NOW!”
As he yelled the command the powerful beams leaped out, seizing the disaster-
bound vehicle in a gently unbreakable grip. Had they not done so, however, the
Lyranian would not have crashed; for in that last split second a section of the rugged
hillside fell inward. In the very mouth of that dread opening the little plane hung for an
instant, then:
“Grab the woman, quick!” Kinnison ordered, for the Lyranian was very evidently
going to jump. And, such was the awful measure of the Overlord’s compulsion, she did
jump; without a parachute, without knowing or caring what, if anything, was to break her
fall. But before she struck ground a tractor beam had seized her, and passive plane and
wildly struggling pilot were both borne rapidly aloft.
“Why, Kim, it’s Helen!” Clarrissa shrieked in surprise, then voice and manner
became transformed. “The poor, poor thing,” she crooned. “Bring her in at number six
lock. I’ll meet her there—you fellows keep clear. In the state she’s in a
shock—especially such a shock as seeing such a monstrous lot of males—would knock
her off the beam, sure.”
Helen of Lyrane ceased struggling in the instant of being drawn through the
thought-screen surrounding the Dauntless. She had not been unconscious at any time.
She had known exactly what she had been doing; she had wanted intensely—such was
the insidiously devastating power of the Delgonian mind—to do just that and nothing
else. The falseness of values, the indefensibility of motivation, simply could not register
in her thoroughly suffused, completely blanketed mind. When the screen cut off the
Overlord’s control, however, thus restoring her own, the shock of realization of what she
had done—what she had been forced to do—struck her like a physical blow. Worse
than a physical blow, for ordinary physical violence she could understand.
This mischance, however, she could not even begin to understand. It was utterly
incomprehensible. She knew what had happened; she knew that her mind had been
taken over by some monstrously alien, incredibly powerful mentality, for some purpose
so obscure as to be entirely beyond her ken. To her narrow philosophy of existence, to
her one-planet insularity of viewpoint and outlook, the very existence, anywhere, of such
a mind with such a purpose was in simple fact impossible. For it actually to exist upon
her own planet, Lyrane II, was sheerly, starkly unthinkable.
She did not recognize the Dauntless, of course. To her all space-ships were
alike. They were all invading warships, full of enemies. All things and all beings
originating elsewhere than upon Lyrane II were, perforce, enemies. Those outrageous
males, the Tellurian Lensman and his cohorts, had pretended not to be inimical, as had
the peculiar, white-swathed Tellurian near-person who had been worming itself into her
confidence in order to study the disappearances; but she did not trust even them.
She now knew the manner of, if not the reason for, the vanishment of her fellow
Lyranians. The tractors of the space-ship had saved her from whatever fate it was that
impended. She did not, however, feel any thrill of gratitude. One enemy or another,
what difference did it make? Therefore, as she went through the blocking screen and
recovered control of her mind, she set herself to fight; to fight with every iota of her
mighty mind and with every fiber of her lithe, hard-schooled, tigress’ body. The air-lock
doors opened and closed—she faced, not an armed and armored male all set to slay,
but the white-clad near-person whom she already knew better than she ever would
know any other non-Lyranian.
“Oh, Helen!” the girl half sobbed, throwing both arms around the still-braced
Chief Person. “I’m so glad that we got to you in time! And there will be no more
disappearances, dear—the boys will see to that!”
Helen did not know, really, what disinterested friendship meant. Since the nurse
had put her into a wide-open two-way, however, she knew beyond all possibility of
doubt that these Tellurians wished her and all her kind well, not ill; and the shock of that
knowledge, superimposed upon the other shocks which she had so recently undergone,
was more than she could bear. For the first and only time in her hard, busy, purposeful
life, Helen of Lyrane fainted; fainted dead away in the circle of the Earth-girl’s arms.
The nurse knew that this was nothing serious; in fact, she was professionally
quite in favor of it. Hence, instead of resuscitating the Lyranian, she swung the pliant
body into a carry—as has been previously intimated, Clarrissa MacDougall was no
more a weakling physically than she was mentally—and without waiting for orderlies
and stretcher she bore it easily away to her own quarters.
CHAPTER 13
In the Cavern
In the meantime the more warlike forces of the Dauntless had not been idle. In
die instant of the opening of the cavern’s doors the captain’s talker issued orders, and
as soon as the Lyranian was out of the line of fire keen-eyed needle-ray men saw to it
that those doors were in no mechanical condition to close. The Dauntless settled
downward; landed in front of the entrance to the cavern. The rocky, broken terrain
meant nothing to her; .the hardest, jaggedest boulders crumbled instantly to dust as her
enormous mass drove the file-hard, inflexible armor of her mid-zone deep into the
ground. Then, while alert beamers watched the entrance and while spy-ray experts
combed the interior for other openings which Kinnison and Worsel were already
practically certain did not exist, the forces of Civilization formed for the attack.
Worsel was fairly shivering with eagerness for the fray. His was, and with plenty
of reason, the bitterest by far of all the animosities there present against the Overlords.
For Delgon and his own native planet, Velantia, were neighboring worlds, circling about
the same sun. Since the beginning of Velantian space-flight the Overlords of Delgon
had preyed upon the Velantians; in fact, the Overlords had probably caused the first
Velantian space-ship to be built. They had called them, in a never-ending stream,
across the empty gulf of space. They had pinned them against their torture screens, had
flayed them and had tweaked them to bits, had done them to death in every one of the
numberless slow and hideous fashions which had been developed by a race of sadists
who had been specializing in the fine art of torture for thousands upon thousands of
years. Then, in the last minutes of the long-drawn-out agony of death, the Overlords
were wont to feed, with a passionate, greedy, ineradicably ingrained lust utterly
inexplicable to any civilized mind, upon the life-forces which the mangled bodies could
no longer contain.
This horrible parasitism went on for ages. The Velantians fought vainly: their
crude thought-screens were almost useless until after the coming of the Patrol. Then,
with screens that were of real use, and with ships of power and with weapons of might,
Worsel himself had taken the lead in the clean-up of Delgon. He was afraid, of course.
Any Velantian was and is frightened to the very center of his being by the mere thought
of an Overlord. He cannot help it; it is in his heredity, bred into the innermost chemistry
of his body; the cold grue of a thousand thousand fiendishly tortured ancestors simply
will not be denied or cast aside.
Many of the monsters had succeeded in fleeing Delgon, of course. Some
departed in the ships which had ferried their victims to the planet, some were removed
to other solar systems by the Eich. The rest were slain; and as the knowledge that a
Velantian could kill an Overlord gained headway, the emotions toward the oppressors