given orders by Alcon to traverse a hyper-spatial tube, the terminus of which will appear
at coordinates 217-493-28 at hour eleven of the seventh Thralian day from the present.”
“Fine business! And you want to chase him, huh?” Kinnison jumped at the
conclusion. “Sure—go ahead. I’ll meet you there. I’ll fake up some kind of an excuse to
get away from here and we’ll run him ragged . . .”
“I do not,” Nadreck interrupted, decisively. “If I leave my work here it will all come
undone. Besides, it would be dangerous—foolhardy. Not knowing what lies at the other
end of that tube, we could make no plans and could have no assurance of safety, or
even of success. You should not go, either—that is unthinkable. I am reporting this
matter in view of the possibility that you may think it significant enough to warrant the
sending of some observer whose life is of little or no importance.”
“Oh . . . uh-huh . . . I see. Thanks, Nadreck.” Kinnison did not allow any trace of
his real thought to go out before he broke the line. Then:
“Funny ape, Nadreck,” he cogitated, as he called Haynes. “I don’t get his angle at
all—I simply can’t figure him out. . . Haynes? Kinnison,” and he reported in full.
“The Dauntless has all the necessary generators and equipment, and the place is
far enough out so that she can make the approach without any trouble,” the Lensman
concluded. “We’ll burn whatever is at the other end of that tube clear out of the ether.
Send along as many of the old gang as you can spare. Wish we had time to get
Cardynge— he’ll howl like a wolf at being left out—but we’ve got only a week . . .”
“Cardynge is here,” Haynes broke in. “He has been working out some stuff for
Thorndyke on the sunbeam. He is finished now, though, and will undoubtedly want to go
along.”
“Fine!” and explicit arrangements for the rendezvous were made.
It was not unduly difficult for Kinnison to make his absence from duty logical,
even necessary. Scouts and observers reported inexplicable interferences with certain
communications lines. With thoughts of THE Lensman suffusing the minds of the
higher-ups, and because of Gannel’s already-demonstrated prowess and keenness, he
scarcely had to signify a willingness to investigate the phenomena in order to be
directed to do so.
Nor did he pick a crew of his own sycophants. Instead, he chose the five highest-
ranking privates of the battalion to accompany him upon this supposedly extremely
dangerous mission; apparently entirely unaware that two of them belonged to the
colonel, two to the general, and one to the captain who had taken his place.
The colonel wished Major Gannel luck—verbally—even while hoping fervently
that THE Lensman would make cold meat of him in a hurry; and Kinnison gravely gave
his well-wisher thanks as he set out. He did not, however, go near any communications
lines; although his spying crew did not realize the fact. They did not realize anything;
they did not know even that they became unconscious within five minutes after leaving
Thrale.
They remained unconscious while the speedster in which they were was drawn
into the Dauntless’ capacious hold. In the Patrol ship’s sick-bay, under expert care, they
remained unconscious during the entire duration of their stay on board.
The Patrol pilots picked up Kandron’s flying vessel with little difficulty; and,
nullifiers full out, followed it easily. When the zwilnik ship slowed down to feel for the
vortex the Dauntless slowed also, and baffled her driving jets as she sneaked up to the
very edge of electro-detector range. When the objective disappeared from three-
dimensional space the point of vanishment was marked precisely, and up to that point
the Patrol ship flashed in seconds.
The regular driving blasts were cut off, the special generators were cut in. Then,
as the force-fields of the ship reacted against those of the Boskonian “shore” station,
the Patrolmen felt again in all their gruesome power the appallingly horrible sensations
of inter-dimensional acceleration. For that sensation is, literally, indescribable. A man in
good training can overcome sea-sickness, air-sickness, and space-sickness. He can
overcome the nausea and accustom himself to the queasily terrifying endless-fall
sensation of weightlessness. He can become inured to the physical and mental ills
accompanying inertialessness. No man ever has, however, been able to get used to
inter-dimensional acceleration.
It is best likened to a compression; not as a whole, but atom by atom. A man
feels as though he were being twisted —corkscrewed in some monstrously obscure
fashion which permits him neither to move from his place nor to remain where he is. It is
a painless but utterly revolting transformation, progressing in a series of waves; a re-
arrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion, an incomprehensibly impossible extrusion
of each ultimate particle of his substance in an unknowable, ordinarily non-existent
direction.
The period of acceleration over, the Dauntless began to travel at uniform velocity
along whatever course it was that the tube took. The men, although highly
uncomfortable and uneasy, could once more move about and work. Sir Austin
Cardynge in particular was actually happy and eager as he flitted from one to another of
the automatic recording instruments upon his special panel. He resembled more closely
than ever a lean, gray tomcat, Kinnison thought—he almost expected to see him begin
to lick his whiskers and purr.
“You see, my ignorant young friend,” the scientist almost did purr as one of the
recording pens swung wildly across the ruled paper, “it is as I told you—the lack of
exact data upon even one tiny factor of this extremely complex phenomenon is
calamitous. While my notes were apparently complete and were certainly accurate, our
experimental tubes did not function perfectly. The time factor was
irreconcilable—completely so, in every aspect, even that of departure from and return to
normal space—and it is unthinkable that time, one of the fundamental units, is or can be
intrinsically variable . . .”
“You think so?” Kinnison broke in. “Look at that,” pointing to the ultimate of
timepieces, Cardynge’s own triplex chronometer. “Number One says we’ve been in this
tube for an hour, Number Two says a little over nine minutes, and according to Number
Three we won’t be starting for twenty minutes yet—it must be running backwards—let’s
see you comb that out of your whiskers!”
“Oh-h . . . ah . . . a-hum.” But only momentarily was Sir Austin taken aback. “Ah, I
was right all the time!” he cackled gleefully. “I thought it was practically impossible for
me to commit an error or to overlook any possibilities, and I have now proved that I did
not Time, in this hyper-spatial region or condition, is intrinsically variable, and in major
degree!”
“And what does that get you?” Kinnison asked, pointedly.
“Much, my impetuous youngster, much,” Cardynge replied. “We observe, we
note facts. From the observations and facts we theorize and we deduce; thus arriving
very shortly at the true inwardness of time.”
“You hope,” the Lensman snorted, dubiously; and in his skepticism he was right
and Sir Austin was wrong. For the actual nature and mechanism of time remained, and
still constitute, a mystery, or at least an unsolved problem. The
Arisians—perhaps—understand time; no other race does.
To some of the men, then, and to some of the clocks and other time-measuring
devices, the time seemed—or actually was?—very long; to other “and similar beings
and mechanisms it seemed—or was—short. Short or long, however, the Dauntless did
not reach the Boskonian end of the hyper-spatial tube.
In mid-flight there came a crunching, twisting cloonk! and an abrupt reversal of
the inexplicably horrible inter-dimensional acceleration—a deceleration as sickeningly
disturbing, both physically and mentally, as the acceleration had been.
While within the confines of the hyper-spatial tube every eye of the Dauntless
had been blind. To every beam upon every frequency, visible or invisible, ether-borne or
carried upon the infinitely faster waves of the sub-ether, the murk was impenetrable.
Every plate showed the same mind-numbing blankness; a vague, eerily-shifting,’ quasi-
solid blanket of formless, textureless grayness. No lightness or darkness, no stars or
constellation or nebulae, no friendly, deep-space blackness—nothing.
Deceleration ceased; the men felt again the wonted homeliness and comfort of
normal pseudo-gravity. Simultaneously the gray smear of the visiplates faded away into
commonplace areas of jetty black, pierced by the brilliantly dimensionless vari-colored
points of light which were the familiar stars of their own familiar space.
But were they familiar? Was that our galaxy, or anything like it? They were not. It
was not. Kinnison stared into his plate, aghast.
He would not have been surprised to have emerged into three-dimensional
space anywhere within the Second Galaxy. In that case, he would have seen a Milky
Way; and from its shape, apparent size, and texture he could have oriented himself
fairly closely in a few minutes. But the Dauntless was not within any lenticular