and practically bounced. He threw up his head; it was all he could do to keep his
barriers down. It was general, he knew, not aimed specifically at him—to fight the
hypnotist would be to call attention to himself as the only man able either to detect his
work or to resist him; would give the whole show away. Therefore he let the thing take
hold—with reservations—of his mind. He studied it. He analyzed it. Sight only, eh?
QX—he’d let Alcon have superficial control, and he wouldn’t put too much faith in
anything he saw.
He entered the room; and, during the preliminaries, he reached out delicately, to
touch imperceptibly mind after mind. All the ordinary officers were on the level; now he’d
see about the prime minister. He’d heard a lot about this Fossten, but had never met
him before—he’d see what the guy really had on the ball.
He did not find out, however. He did not even touch his mind, for that worthy also
had an automatic block; a block as effective as Alcon’s or as Kinnison’s own.
Sight was unreliable; how about the sense of perception? He tried it, very daintily
and gingerly, upon Alcon’s feet, legs, arms, and torso. Alcon was real, and present in
the flesh. Then the premier—and he yanked his sense back, cancelled it, appalled.
Perception was blocked, at exactly what his eyes told him was the fellow’s skin!
That tore it—that busted it wide open. What in all nine prime iridescent hells did
that mean? He didn’t know of anything except a thought-screen that could stop a sense
of perception. He thought intensely. Alcon’s mind was bad enough. It had been treated,
certainly; mine-shields like that didn’t grow naturally on human or near-human beings.
Maybe the Eich, or the race of super-Eich to which Kandron belonged, could give
mental treatments of that kind. Fossten, though, was worse.
Alcon’s boss! Probably not a man at all. It was he, it was clear, and not Alcon,
who was putting out the zone of compulsion. An Eich, maybe? No, he was a warm-
blooded oxygen-breather; a frigid-blooded super-big-shot would make Alcon come to
him. A monster, almost certainly, though; possibly of a type Kinnison had never seen
before. Working by remote control? Possibly; but not necessarily. He could be—
probably was—right here, inside the dummy or figment or whatever it was that
everybody thought was die prime minister—that was it, for all the tea in China . . .
“And what do you think, Major Gannel?” the prime minister asked, smoothly,
insinuating his mind into Kinnison’s as he spoke.
Kinnison, who knew that they had been discussing an invasion of the First
Galaxy, hesitated as though in thought. He was thinking, too, and ultra-carefully. If that
ape was out to do a job of digging he’d never dig again—QX, he was just checking
Gannel’s real thoughts against what he was going to say.
“Since I am such a newcomer to this Council I do not feel as though my opinions
should be given too much weight,” Kinnison said—and thought—slowly, with the exactly
correct amount of obsequiousness. “However, I have a very decided opinion upon the
matter. I believe very firmly that it would be better tactics to consolidate our position
here in our own galaxy first.”
“You advise, then, against any immediate action against Tellus?” the prime
minister asked. “Why?”
“I do, definitely. It seems to me that short-sighted, half-prepared measures,
based upon careless haste, were the underlying causes of our recent reverses. Time is
not an important factor—the Great Plan was worked out, not in terms of days or of
years, but of centuries and millenia—and it seems to me self-evident that we should
make ourselves impregnably secure, then expand slowly; seeing-to it that we can hold,
against everything that the Patrol can bring to bear, every planet that we take.”
“Do you realize that you are criticizing the chiefs of staff who are in complete
charge of military operations?” Alcon asked, venomously.
“Fully,” the Lensman replied, coldly. “I ventured this opinion because I was asked
specifically for it. The chiefs of staff failed, did they not? If they had succeeded, criticism
would have been neither appropriate nor forthcoming. As it is, I do not believe that mere
criticism of their conduct, abilities, and tactics is sufficient. They should be disciplined
and demoted. New chiefs should be chosen; persons abler and more efficient than the
present incumbents.”
This was a bomb-shell. Dissentions waxed rife and raucous, but amidst the
turmoil the Lensman received from the prime minister a flash of coldly congratulatory
approval.
And as Major Traska Gannel made his way back to his quarters two things were
starkly plain:
First, he would have to cut Alcon down and himself become the Tyrant of Thrale.
It was unthinkable to attack or to destroy this planet. It had too many too promising
leads— there were too many things that didn’t make sense—above all, there were the
stupendous files of information which no one mind could scan in a lifetime.
Second, if he wanted to keep on living he would have to keep his detectors
shoved out to maximum—this prime minister was just about as touchy and just about as
safe to play with as a hundred kilograms of dry nitrogen iodide!
CHAPTER 19
Gannel, Tyrant of Thrale
Adreck, the Palainian Lensman, had not exaggerated in saying that he could not
leave his job, that his work would come undone if he did.
As has been intimated, Nadreck was cowardly and lazy and characterized
otherwise by traits not usually regarded by humankind as being noble. He was,
however, efficient; and he was now engaged in one of the most colossal tasks ever
attempted by any one Lensman. Characteristically, he had told no one, not even
Haynes or Kinnison, what it was that he was trying to do—he never talked about a job
until after it was done, and his talking then was usually limited to a taped, Lensman’s-
sealed, tersely factual report. He was “investigating” Onlo; that was all that anybody
knew.
Onlo was at that time perhaps the most heavily fortified planet in the universe.
Compared to its massed might Jarnevon was weak; Tellus, except for its sunbeams and
its other open-space safeguards, a joke. Onlo’s defenses were all, or nearly all,
planetary; Kandron’s strategy, unlike Haynes”, was to let any attacking force get almost
down to the ground and then blast it out of existence.
Thus Onlo was in effect one tremendously armed, titanically powered fortress;
not one cubic foot of its poisonous atmosphere was out of range of projectors
theoretically capable of puncturing any defensive screen possible of mounting upon a
mobile base.
And Nadreck, the cowardly, the self-effacing, the apologetic, had tackled
Onlo—alone!
Using the technique which has already been described in connection with his
highly successful raid upon the Eich stronghold of Lyrane VIII, he made his way through
the Onlonian defensive screens and settled down comfortably near one of the gigantic
domes. Then, as though time were of no consequence whatever, he proceeded to get
acquainted with the personnel. He learned the identifying pattern of each entity and
analyzed every one psychologically, mentally, intellectually, and emotionally. He
tabulated his results upon the Palainian equivalent of index cards, then very carefully
arranged the cards into groups.
In the same fashion he visited and took the census of dome after dome. No one
knew that he had been near, apparently he had done nothing; but in each dome as he
left it there had been sown seeds of discord and of strife which, at a carefully calculated
future time, would yield bitter fruit indeed.
For every mind has some weakness, each intellect some trait of which it does not
care to boast, each Achilles his heel. That is true even of Gray Lensmen—and the
Onlonians, with their heredity and environment of Boskonianism, were in no sense
material from which Lensmen could be made.
Subtly, then, and coldly and callously, Nadreck worked upon the basest
passions, the most ignoble traits of that far-from-noble race. Jealousy, suspicion, fear,
greed, revenge— quality by quality he grouped them, and to each group he sent series
after series of horridly stimulating thoughts.
Jealousy, always rife, assumed fantastic proportions. Molehills became
mountains overnight. A passing word became a studied insult. No one aired his
grievances, however, for always and everywhere there was fear—fear of discipline, fear
of reprisal, fear of betrayal, fear of the double cross. Each monster brooded, sullenly
intense. Each became bitterly, gallingly, hatingly aware of an unwarranted and
intolerable persecution. Not much of a spark would be necessary to touch off such
explosive material as that!
Nadreck left the headquarters dome until the last. In one sense it was the hardest
of all; in another the easiest. It was hard in that the entities there had stronger minds
than those of lower station; minds better disciplined, minds more accustomed to straight
thinking and to logical reasoning. It was easy, however, in that those minds were