Galactic Patrol (12 page)

"That's tellin'em, Bus !” Kinnison applauded. "But if it helps charge your batteries, go to it . . . . Ready to blast! Lift!”

The Velantian had come aboard, the tiny airlock was again tight, and the little vessel shot away from Delgon toward far Velanda. And still the ether remained empty as far as the detectors could reach. Nor was this fact surprising, in spite of the Lensman's fears to the contrary, for the Patrolmen had given the pirates such an extremely long line to cover that many days must yet elapse before the minions of Boskone would get around to visit that unimportant, unexplored, and almost unknown solar system. En route to his home planet Worsel got in touch with the crew of the Velantian vessel already in space, ordering them to return to port post-haste and instructing them in detail what to think and how to act should they be stopped and searched by one of Boskone's raiders.

By the time these instructions had been given, Velantia loomed large beneath the flying midget. Then, with Worsel as guide, Kinnison drove over a mighty ocean upon whose opposite shore lay the great city in which Worsel lived.

"But I would like to have them welcome you as befits what you have done, and have you go to the Dome!” mourned the Velantian. "Think of it! You have done a thing which for ages the massed power of the planet has been trying vainly to accomplish, and yet you insist that I alone take credit for it!”

'I don't insist on any such thing," argued Kinnison, "even though it's practically all yours, anyway. I insist only on your keeping us and the Patrol out of it, and you know as well as I do why you've got to do that. Tell them anything else you want to. Say that a couple of pink-haired Chickladorians helped you and then beat it back home.
That
planet's far enough away so that if the pirates chase them they'll get a real run for their money. After this blows over you can tell the truth-but
not until then.

"And as for us going to the Dome for a grand hocus-Pocus, that is completely and definitely OUT. We're not going anywhere except to 'the biggest airport you've got.

You're not going to give us anything except a lot of material and a lot of highly-trained help that can keep their thoughts sealed.

"We've got to build a lot of heavy stuff fast, and we've got to get started on it just as quick as Klono and Noshabkeming will let us !”

The Quarry Strikes Back

Worsel knew his council of scientists, as well as might, since it developed that he himself ranked high in that select circle. True to his promise, the largest airport of the planet was immediately emptied of its customary personnel, which was replaced the following morning by an entirely new group of workmen.

Nor were these replacements ordinarily laborers. They were young, keen, and highly trained, taken to a man from behind the thought-screens of the Scientists. It is true that they had no inkling of what they were to do, since none of them had ever dreamed of the possibility of such engines as they were to be called upon to construct.

But, on the other hand, they were well versed in the fundamental theories and operations of mathematics, and from pure mathematics to applied mechanics is but a step. Furthermore, they had
brains,
knew how to think logically, coherently, and effectively, and needed neither driving nor supervision-only instruction. And best of all, practically every one of the required mechanisms already existed, in miniature, within the
Brittania's
lifeboat, ready at hand for their dissection, analysis, and enlargement. It was not lack of understanding which was to slow up the work, it was simply that the planet did not boast machine tools and equipment large enough or strong enough to handle the necessarily huge and heavy parts and members required.

While the construction of this heavy machinery was being rushed through, Kinnison and vanBuskirk devoted their efforts to the fabrication of an ultra-sensitive receiver, tunable to the pirates' scrambled wave-bands. With their exactly detailed knowledge, and with the cleverest technicians and the choicest equipment of Velantia at their disposal, the set was soon completed.

Kinnison was giving its exceedingly delicate coils their final alignment when Worsel wriggled blithely into the radio laboratory.

"Hi, Kimball Kinnison! of the Lens!” he called gaily. Throwing a few yards of his serpent's body in lightning loops about a convenient pillar, he made a horizontal bar of the rest of himself and dropped one wing-tip to the floor. Then, nonchalantly upside down, he thrust out three or four eyes and curled their stalks over the Lensman's shoulder, the better to inspect the results of the mechanics' efforts. Gone was the morose, pessimistic, death-haunted Worsel entirely, gay, happy, carefree, and actually frolicsome-if you can imagine a thirty-foot-long, crocodile headed, leather-winged python as being frolicsome!

"Hi, your royal snakeship!” Kinnison retorted in kind. "Still here, huh? Thought you'd be back on Delgon by this time, cleaning up the rest of that mess."

"The equipment is not ready, but there's no hurry about that," the playful reptile unwrapped ten or twelve feet of tail from the pillar and waved it airily about. "Their power is broken, their race is done. You are about to try out the new receiver?"

"Yes-going out after them right now," and Kinnison began deftly to manipulate the micrometric vernier of his dials.

Eyes fixed upon meters and gauges, he listened . listened. Increased his power and listened again. More and more power &e applied to his apparatus, listening continually. Suddenly he stiffened, his hands becoming rock-still. He listened, if possible even more intently than before, and as he listened his face grew grim and granite-hard.

Then the micrometers began again crawlingly to move, as though he were tracing a beam.

"Bus! Hook on the focusing beam-antenna!" he snapped. "It's going to take every milliwatt of power we've got in this hookup to tap his beam, but I think I've got Helmuth direct instead of through a pirateship relay!”

Again and again he checked the readings of his dials and of the directors of his antenna, each time noting the exact time of the Velantian day.

"There! As soon as we get some time, Worsel, I'd like to work out these figures with some of your astronomers. They'll give me a right line through Helmuth's headquarters -I hope. Some day, if I'm spared, I’ll get another!”

"What kind of news did you get, chief?" asked vanBuskirk.

"Good and bad both," replied the Lensman. "Good in that Helmuth doesn't believe that we stayed with his ship as long as we did. He's a suspicious devil, you know, and is pretty well convinced that we tried to run the same kind of a blazer on him that we did the other time. Since he hasn't got .enough ships on the job to work the whole line, he's concentrating on the other end. That means that we've got plenty of days left yet. The bad part of it is that they've got four of our boats already and are bound to get more.

Lord, how I wish I could call the rest of them! Some of them could certainly make it here before they got caught."

"Might I then offer a suggestion?" asked Worsel, of a sudden diffident.

"Surely!" the Lensman replied in surprise. "Your ideas have never been any kind of poppycock. Why so bashful all at once?"

"Because this one is so . . . ah . . so peculiarly personal, since you men regard so highly the privacy of your minds. Our two sciences, as you have already observed, are vastly different. You are far beyond us in mechanics, physics, chemistry, and the other applied sciences. We, on the other hand, have delved much deeper than you have into psychology and the other introspective studies. For that reason I know positively that the Lens you wear is capable of enormously greater things than you are at present able to make it perform. Of course I cannot use your Lens directly, since it is attuned to your own ego. However, if the idea appeals to you, I could, with your consent, occupy your mind and use your Lens to put you en rapport with your fellows. I have not volunteered the suggestion before because I know how averse your mind is to any foreign control."

"Not necessarily to foreign control," Kinnison corrected him. "Only to
enemy
control. The idea of friendly control never even occurred to me. That would be an entirely different breed of cats. Go to it!”

Kinnison relaxed his mind completely,- and that of the Velantian came welling in, wave upon friendly, surging wave of benevolent power. And not only-or not precisely-power. It was more than power, it was a dynamic poignancy, a vibrant penetrance, a depth and clarity of perception that Kinnison in his most cogent moments had never dreamed a possibility. The possessor of that mind knew things, cameo-clear in microscopic detail, which the keenest minds of Earth could perceive only as chaotically indistinct masses of mental light and shade, of no recognizable pattern whatever!

"Give me the thought-pattern of him with whom you wish first to converse," came Worsel's thought, this time from deep within the Lensman's own brain.

Kinnison felt a subtle thrill of uneasiness at that new and ultra-strange dual personality, but thought back steadily. "Sorry-I can't."

"Excuse me, I should have known that you cannot think in our patterns. Think, then, of him as a personas an individual. That will give me, I believe, sufficient data."

Into the Earthman's mind there leaped a picture of Henderson, sharp and clear.

He felt his Lens actually tingle and throb as a concentration of vital force such as he -had never known poured through his whole being and into that almost-living creation of the Arisians, and immediately thereafter he was in full mental communication with the Master Pilot! And there, seated across the tiny mess-table of their lifeboat, was LaVerne Thorndyke, the Master Technician.

Henderson came to his feet with a yell as the telepathic message bombshelled into his brain, and it required several seconds to convince him that he was not the victim of space-insanity or suffering from any other form of hallucination. Once convinced, however, he acted – his lifeboat shot toward far Velantia at maximum blast.

Then, "Nelson ! Allerdyce ! Thompson ! Jenkins ! Uhlenhuth! Smith! Chatway! . . . .

. “ Kinnison called the roll.

Nelson, the specialist in communications, answered his captain's call. So did Allerdyce, the juggling quartermaster. So did Uhlenhuth, a technician. So did those in three other boats. Two of these three were apparently well within the danger zone and might get nipped in their dash, but their crews elected without hesitation to take the chance. Four boats, it was already known, had been captured by the pirates. The others

. . . .

"Only eight boats," Kinnison mused. "Not so good--but it could have been a lot worse-they might have got us all by this tune-and maybe some of them are just out of our reach." Then, turning to the Velantian, who had withdrawn his mind as soon as the job was. done.

`Thanks, Worsel," he said simply. "Some of those lads coming in have got plenty of just what it takes, and how we can use them !"

One by one the lifeboats made port, where their crews were welcomed briefly but feelingly before they were put to work. Nelson, one of the last pair to arrive, was particularly welcome.

"Nels, we need you badly," Kinnison informed him as soon as greetings had been exchanged. "The pirates have a beam, carrying a peculiarly scrambled signal, that they can receive and decode through any ordinary kind of blanketing interference, and you're the best man we've got to study their system. Some of these Velantian scientists can probably help you a lot on that-any race that can develop a screen against thought figures ought to know more than somewhat about vibration in general. We've got working models of the pirates' instruments, so you can figure out their patterns and formulas.

When you've done that, I want you .and your Velantians to design something that will scramble all the pirates' communicator beams in space, as far as you can reach. If you can fix things so they can't talk any more than we can it'll help a lot, believe me!”

"QX, Chief, we'll give if the works," and the radio man called for tools, apparatus, and electricians.

Then throughout the great airport the many Velantians and the handful of Patrolmen labored mightily, side by side, and to very good effect indeed. Slowly the port became ringed about by, and studded everywhere with, monstrous mechanisms.

Everywhere there were projectors, refractory throated demons ready to vomit forth every force known to the expert technicians of the Patrol. There were absorbers, too, backed by their bleeder resistors, air-gaps, ground-rods, and racks for discharged accumulators. There, too, were receptors and converters for the cosmic energy which was to empower many of the devices. There were, of course, atomic motor-generators by the score, and battery upon battery of gigantic accumulators. And Nelson's high-powered scrambler was ready to go to work.

These machines appeared crude, rough, unfinished, for neither time nor labor had been wasted upon non-essentials. But inside each one the moving parts fitted with micrometric accuracy and with hair-spring balance. All, without exception, functioned perfectly.

At Worsel's call, Kinnison climbed up out of a great beam-proof pit, the top of whose wall was practically composed of tractor-beam projectors. Pausing only to make sure that a sticking switch on one of the screen-dome generators had been replaced, he hurried to the heavily armored control room, where his little force of fellow Patrolmen awaited him.

"They're coming, boys," he announced. "You all know what to do. There are a lot more things we could have done if we'd had more time, but as it is we'll just go to work on them with what we've got," and Kinnison, again all brisk Captain, bent over his instruments.

In the ordinary course of events the pirate would have flashed up to the planet with spyrays out and issuing a peremptory demand for the planet to show a clean bill of health or to surrender instantly such fugitives as might lately have landed upon it. But Kinnison did not-could not-wait for that. The spyrays, he knew, would reveal the presence of his armament, and such armament most certainly did not belong to this planet. Therefore he acted first, and everything happened practically at once.