impossibility for any ordinary mind either to perceive that seventeen million cubic feet of
space as a whole or to make any sense at all out of the stupendously bewildering maze
of multi-colored lights crawling and flashing therein.
Kinnison and Worsel had handled Grand Fleet Operations during the battle of
Jarnevon, but they had discovered that they could have used some help. Four Rigellian
Lensmen had been training for months for that all-important job, but they were not yet
ready. Therefore the two old masters and one new one now labored at GFO: three
tremendous minds, each supplying something that the others lacked. Kinnison of Tellus,
with his hard, flat driving urge, his unconquerable, unstoppable will to do. Worsel of
Velantia, with the prodigious reach and grasp which had enabled him, even without the
Lens, to scan mentally a solar system eleven light-years distant. Tregonsee of Rigel IV,
with the vast, calm certainty, the imperturbable poise peculiar to his long-lived, solemn
race. Second Stage Lensmen all, graduates of Arisian advanced training; minds linked,
basically, together into one mind by a wide-open three-way; superficially free, each to
do his assigned third of the gigantic task.
Smoothly, effortlessly, those three linked minds went to work at the admiral’s
signal. Orders shot out along tight beams of thought to the stolid hundreds of Rigellian
switchboard operators, and thence along communicator beams to the pilot rooms,
wherever stationed. Flotillas, squadrons, sub-fleets flashed smoothly toward their newly-
assigned positions. Super-maulers moved ponderously toward theirs. The survey ships,
their work done, vanished. They had no business anywhere near what was coming
next. Small they were, and defenseless; a speedster’s screens were as efficacious as
so much vacuum against the forces about to be unleashed. The power houses also
moved. Maintaining rigidly their cryptic mathematical relationships to each other and the
sun, they went as a whole into a new one with respect to the circling rings of tightly-
packed meteors and the invisible, non-existent mouth of the Boskonian vortex.
Then, before Haynes’ formation was nearly complete, the Boskonian fleet
materialized. Just that—one instant space was empty; the next it was full of warships. A
vast globe of battle-wagons, in perfect fighting formation. They were not free, but inert
and deadly.
Haynes swore viciously under his breath, the Lensmen pulled themselves
together more tensely; but no additional orders were given. Everything that could
possibly be done was already being done.
Whether the Boskonians expected to meet a perfectly-placed fleet or whether
they expected to emerge into empty space, to descend upon a defenseless Tellus, is
not known or knowable. It is certain, however, that they emerged in the best possible
formation to meet anything that could be brought to bear. It is also certain that, had the
enemy had a Z9M9Z and a Kinnison-Worsel-Tregonsee combination scanning its
Operations tank, the outcome might well have been otherwise than it was.
For that ordinarily insignificant delay, that few minutes of time necessary for the
Boskonians’ orientation, was exactly that required for those two hundred smoothly-
working Rigellians to get Civilization’s shock-globe into position.
A million beams, primaries raised to the hellish heights possible only to Medonian
conductors and insulation, lashed out almost as one. Screens stiffened to the urge of
every generable watt of defensive power. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck
and struck and struck again. Q-type helices bored, gouged, and searingly bit Rods and
cones, planes and shears of incredibly condensed pure force clawed, tore, and ground
in mad abandon. Torpedo after torpedo, charged to the very skin with duodec, loosed its
horribly detonant cargo against flinching wall-shields, in such numbers and with such
violence as to fill all circumambient space with an atmosphere of almost planetary
density.
Screen after screen, wall-shield after wall-shield, in their hundreds and their
thousands, went down. A full eighth of the Patrol’s entire count of battleships was
wrecked, riddled, blown apart, or blasted completely out of space in the paralyzingly
cataclysmic violence of the first, seconds-long, mind-shaking, space-wracking
encounter. Nor could it have been otherwise; for this encounter had not been at battle
range. Not even at point-blank range; the warring monsters of the void were packed
practically screen to screen.
But not a man died—upon Civilization’s side at least— even though practically all
of the myriad of ships composing the inner sphere, the shock-globe, was lost. For they
were automatics, manned by robots; what little superintendence was necessary had
been furnished by remote control. Indeed it is possible, although perhaps not entirely
probable, that the shock-globe of the foe was similarly manned.
That first frightful meeting gave time for the reserves of the Patrol to get there,
and it was then that the superior Operations control of the Z9M9Z made itself tellingly
felt. Ship for ship, beam for beam, screen for screen, the Boskonians were, perhaps
equal to the Patrol; but they did not have the perfection of control necessary for unified
action. The field was too immense, the number of contending units too enormously vast.
But the mind of each of the three Second-Stage Lensmen read aright the flashing lights
of his particular volume of the gigantic tank and spread their meaning truly in the
infinitely smaller space-model beside which Port Admiral Haynes, Master Tactician,
stood. Scanning the entire space of battle as a whole, he rapped out general orders
—orders applying, perhaps, to a hundred or to five hundred planetary fleets. Kinnison
and his fellows broke these orders down for the operators, who in turn told the admirals
and vice-admirals of the fleets what to do. They gave detailed orders to the units of their
commands, and the line officers, knowing exactly what to do and precisely how to do it,
did it with neatness and dispatch.
There was no doubt, no uncertainty, no indecision or wavering. The line officers,
even the admirals, knew nothing, could know nothing of the progress of the
engagement as a whole. But they had worked under the Z9M9Z before. They knew that
the maestro Haynes did know the battle as a whole. They knew that he was handling
them as carefully and as skillfully as a master at chess plays his pieces upon the
square-filled board. They knew that Kinnison or Worsel or Tregonsee was assigning no
task too difficult of accomplishment.
They knew that they could not be taken by surprise, attacked from some,
unexpected and unprotected direction; knew that, although in those hundreds of
thousands of cubic miles of space there were hundreds of thousands of highly inimical
and exceedingly powerful ships of war, none of them were or shortly could be in position
to do them serious harm. If there had been, they would have been pulled out of there,
beaucoup fast. They were as safe as anyone in a warship in such a war could expect,
or even hope, to be. Therefore they acted instantly; directly, whole-heartedly and
efficiently; and it was the Boskonians who were taken, repeatedly and by the thousands,
by surprise.
For the enemy, as has been said, did not have the Patrol’s smooth perfection of
control. Thus several of Civilization’s fleets, acting in full synchronization, could and
repeatedly did rush upon one unit of the foe; englobing it, blasting it out of existence,
and dashing back to stations; all before the nearest by fleets of Boskone knew even that
a threat was being made. Thus ended the second phase of the battle, the engagement
of the two Grand Fleets, with the few remaining thousands of Boskone’s battleships
taking refuge upon or near the phalanx of planets which had made up their center.
Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and
powered; with fixed-mount weapons impossible of mounting upon a lesser mobile base,
with fixed-mount intakes and generators which only planetary resources could excite or
feed. Galactic Civilization’s war-vessels fell back. Attacking a full-armed planet was no
part of their job. And as they fell back the super-maulers moved ponderously up and
went to work. This was their dish; for this they had been designed. Tubes, lances,
stillettoes of unthinkable energies raved against their mighty screens; bouncing off,
glancing away, dissipating themselves in space-torturing discharges as they hurled
themselves upon the nearest ground. In and in the monsters bored, inexorably taking up
their positions directly over the ultra-protected domes which, their commanders knew,
sheltered the vitally important Bergenholms and controls. They then loosed forces of
their own. Forces of such appalling magnitude as to burn out in a twinkling of an eye
projector-shells of a refractoriness to withstand for ten full seconds the maximum output
of a first-class battleship’s primary batteries!
The resultant beam was of very short duration, but of utterly intolerable
poignancy. No material substance could endure it even momentarily. It pierced instantly
the hardest, tightest wall-shield known to the scientists of the Patrol. It was the only
known thing which could cut or rupture the ultimately stubborn fabric of a Q-type helix.
Hence it is not to be wondered at that as those incredible needles of ravening energy