Galactic Patrol (25 page)

They were still going too fast, Kinnison thought, but the pirate pilot knew what he was doing. Five miles the vessel dropped, straight down that Titanic shaft, before the bottom was reached. The shaft's wall was studded with windows, in front of the craft loomed the outer gate of a gigantic airlock. It opened, the ship was trundled inside, landing-cradle and all, and the massive gate closed behind it. This was the pirates' base, and Kinnison was inside it!

"Men, attention!" The pirate commander snapped then. "The air is deadly poison, so put on your armor and be sure your tanks are full. They have rooms for us, having good air, but don't open your suits a crack until I tell you to. Assemble! All of you that are not here in this Control room in five minutes will stay on board and take your own chances !"

Kinnison decided instantly to assemble with the crew. He could do nothing in the ship, and it would be inspected, of course. He had plenty of air, but space-armor all looked alike, and his Lens would warn him in time of any unfriendly or suspicious thought.

He had better go. If they called a roll . . . . but he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

No roll was called, in fact, the captain paid no attention at all to his men. They would come along or not, just as they pleased. But since to stay in the ship meant death, every man was prompt. At the expiration of the five minutes the captain strode away, followed by the crowd. Through a doorway, left turn, and the captain was met by a creature whose shape Kinnison could not make out. A pause, a straggling forward, then a right turn.

Kinnison decided that he would not take that turn. He would stay here, close to the shaft, where he could blast his way out if' necessary, until he had studied the whole base thoroughly enough to map out a plan of campaign. He soon found an empty and apparently unused room, and assured himself that through its heavy, crystal-clear window he could indeed look out into the vastly cylindrical emptiness of a volcanic shaft.

Then with his spy-ray he watched the pirates as they were escorted to the quarters prepared for them. Those might have been rooms of state, but it looked to Kinnison very much as though his former shipmates were being jailed ignominiously, and he was glad that he had taken leave of them. Shooting his ray here and there throughout the structure, he finally found what he was looking for, the communicator room. That room was fairly well lighted, and at what he saw there his jaw dropped in sheerest amazement.

He had expected to see men, since Aldebaran II, the only inhabited planet in the system, had been colonized from Tellus and its people were as truly human and Caucasian as those of Chicago or of Paris. But there . . . these things . . . he had been around quite a bit, but he had never seen nor heard of their like. They were wheels, really. When they went anywhere they rolled. Heads where hubs ought to be . . . . eyes .

. . . arms, dozens of them, and very capable-looking hands . . . . .

"Vogenar!” a crisp thought flashed from one of the peculiar entities to another, impinging also upon Kinnison 's Lens. "Someone-some outsider-is looking at me. Relieve me while I abate this intolerable nuisance.”

"One of those creatures from Tellus? We will teach them very shortly that such intrusion is not to be borne."

"No, it is not one of them. The touch is similar, but the tone is entirely different.

Nor could it be one of them, for not one of them is equipped with the instrument which is such a clumsy substitute for inherent power of mind. There, I will now . . . . "

Kinnison snapped on his thought-screen, but the damage had already been done.

In the violated Communications Room the angry observer went on.

" . . . . attune myself and trace the origin of that prying look. It has disappeared now, but its sender cannot be distant, since our walls are shielded and screened . . . .

Ah, there is a blank space, which I cannot penetrate, in the seventh room of the fourth corridor. In all probability it is one of our guests, hiding now behind a thought screen.'

Then his orders boomed out to a corps of guards. `Take him and put him with the others

!"

Kinnison had not heard the order, but he was ready for anything, and those who came to take him found that it was much easier to issue such orders than to carry them out.

"Halt!” snapped the Lensman, his Lens carrying the crackling command deep into the Wheelmen's minds. "I do not wish to harm you, but come no closer!”

"You? Harm us?" came a cold, clear thought, and the creatures vanished. But not for long. They or others like them were back in moments, this time armed and armored for strife.

Again Kinnison found that DeLameters were useless. The armor of the foe mounted generators as capable as his own, and, although the air in the room soon became one intolerably glaring field of force, in which the very walls themselves began to crumble and to vaporize, neither he nor his attackers were harmed. Again, then, the Lensman had recourse to his mediaeval weapon, sheathing his DeLameter and wading in with his axe. Although not a vanBuskirk, he was, for an Earthman, of unusual strength, skill, and speed, and to those opposing him he was a very Hercules.

Therefore, as he struck and struck and struck again, the cell became a gorily reeking slaughter-pen, its every corner high-piled with the shattered corpses of the Wheelmen and its floor running with blood and slime. The last few of the attackers, unwilling to face longer that irresistible steel, wheeled away, and Kinnison thought flashingly of what he should do next.

This trip was a bust so far. He couldn't do himself a bit of good here now, and he'd better flit while he was still in one piece. How? The door? No. Couldn't make it-he'd run out of time quick that way. His screens would stop small-arms projectiles, but they knew that as well as he did. They'd use a young cannon-or, more probably, a semiportable. Better take out the wall. That would give them something else to think about, too, while he was doing his flit.

Only a fraction of a second was taken up by these thoughts, then Kinnison was at the wall. He set his DeLamater to minimum aperture and at maximum blast, to throw an irresistible cutting pencil. Through the wall that pencil pierced, up, over, and around.

But, fast as the Lensman had acted, he was still too late. There came trundling into the room behind him a low, four-wheeled truck, bearing a complex and monstrous mechanism. Kinnison whirled to face it. As he turned the section of the wall upon which he had been at work blew outward with a crash. The ensuing rush of escaping atmosphere swept the Lensman up and whisked him out through the opening and into the shaft. In the meantime the mechanism upon the truck had begun a staccato, grinding roar, and as it roared Kinnison felt slugs ripping through his armor and tearing through his flesh, each as crushing, crunching, paralyzing a blow as though it had been inflicted by vanBuskirk's space axe.

This was the first time Kinnison had ever been really badly wounded, and it made him sick. But. sick and numb, senses reeling at the shock of his slug-torn body, his right hand flashed to the external controller of his neutralizer. For he was falling inert. Only ten or fifteen meters to the bottom, as remembered it-he had mightily little time to waste if he were not to land inert. He snapped the controller. Nothing happened. Something had been shot away. His driver, too, was dead. Snapping the sleeve of his armor into its clamp he began to withdraw his arm in order to operate the internal controls, but he ran out of tine. He crashed, on the top of a subsiding pile of masonry which had preceded him, but which had not yet attained a state of equilibrium, underneath a shower of similar material which rebounded from his armor in a boiler-shop clangor of noise.

Well it was that that heap of masonry had not yet had time to settle into form, for in some slight measure it acted as a cushion to break the Lensman's fall. But an inert fall of forty feet, even cushioned by sliding rocks, is in no sense a light one. Kinnison crashed. It seemed as though a thousand pile-drivers struck him at once. Surges of almost unbearable agony swept over him as bones snapped and bruised flesh gave way, and he knew dimly that a merciful tide of oblivion was reaching up to engulf his shrieking, suffering mind.

But, foggily at first in the stunned confusion of his entire being, something stirred, that unknown and -unknowable something, that indefinable ultimate quality that had made him what he was. He lived, and while a Lensman lived he did not quit. To quit was to die then and there, since he was losing sir fast. He had plastic in his kit, of course, and the holes were small. He must plug those leaks, and plug them quick. His left arm, he found, he could not move at all. It must be smashed pretty badly. Every shallow breath was a

'searing pain-that meant a rib or two gone out. Luckily, however, he was not breathing blood, therefore his lungs must still be intact. He could move his right arm, although it seemed like a lump of clay or a limb belonging to someone else. But, mustering all his power of will, he made it move. He dragged it out of the armor's clamped sleeve, and forced the leaden hand to slide through the welter of blood that seemed almost to fill the bulge of his armor. He found his kit-box, and, after an eternity of pain-wracked time, he compelled his sluggish hand to open it and to take out the plastic.

Then, in a continuously crescendo throbbing of agony, he forced his maimed, crushed, and broken body to writhe and to wriggle about, so that his one sound hand could find and stop the holes through which his precious air was whistling out and away.

Find them he did, and quickly, and seal them tight, but when he had plugged the last one he slumped down, spent and exhausted. He did not hurt so much, now, his suffering had mounted to such terrific heights of intolerable keenness that the nerves themselves, in outraged protest at carrying such a load, had blocked it off.

There was much more to do, but he simply could not do it without a rest. Even his iron will could not drive his tortured muscles to any further effort until they had been allowed to recuperate a little from what they had gone through.

How much air did he have left, if any, he wondered, foggily and with an entirely detached. and disinterested impersonality. Maybe his tanks were empty. Of course it couldn't have taken him so long to plug those leaks as it had seemed to, or he wouldn't have had any air left at all, in tanks or suit. He couldn't, however, have much left. He would look at his gauges and see.

But now he found that he could not move even his eyeballs, so deep was the coma that was enveloping him. Away off somewhere there was a billowy expanse of blackness, utterly heavenly in its deep, softly-cushioned comfort, and from that sea of peace and surcease there came reaching to embrace him huge, soft, tender arms. Why suffer, something crooned at him. It was so much easier to let go!

Nothing Serious at All

Kinnison did not lose consciousness-quite. There was too much to do, too much that
had
to be done. He
had
to get out of here. He
had
to get back to his speedster. He
had,
by hook or by crook, to get back to Prime Basel Therefore, grimly, doggedly, teeth tight-locked in the enhancing agony of every movement, he drew again upon those hidden, those deeply buried resources which even he had no idea he possessed. His code was simple, the code of the Lens. While a Lensman lived he did not quit. Kinnison was a Lensman. Kinnison lived. Kinnison did not quit.

He fought back that engulfing tide of blackness, wave by wave as it came. He beat down by sheer force of will those tenderly beckoning, those sweetly seducing arms of oblivion. He forced the mass of protesting putty that was his body to do what
had
to be done. He thrust styptic gauze into the most copiously bleeding of his wounds. He was burned, too, he discovered then-they must have had a high-powered needle-beam on that truck, as well as the rifle-but he could do nothing about burns. There simply wasn't time.

He found the power lead that had been severed by a bullet. Stripping the insulation was an almost impossible job, but it was finally accomplished, after a fashion.

Bridging the gap proved to be even a worse one. Since there was no slack, the ends could not be twisted together, but had to be joined by a short piece of spare wire, which in turn had to be stripped and then twisted with each end of the severed lead. That task, too, he finally finished, working purely by feel although he was, and half-conscious withal in a wracking haze of pain.

Soldering those joints was of course out of the question. He was afraid even to try to insulate them with tape, lest the loosely-twined strands should fall apart in the attempt.

He did have some dry handkerchiefs, however, if he could reach them. He could, and did, and wrapped one carefully about the wires' bare joints. Then, apprehensively, he tried his neutralizer. Wonder of wonder, it worked! So did his driver!

In moments then he was rocketing up the shaft, and as he passed the opening out of which he had been blown he realized with amazement that what had seemed to him like hours must have been minutes only, and few even of them. For the frantic Wheelmen were just then lifting into place the temporary shield which was to stem the mighty outrush of their atmosphere. Wonderingly, Kinnison looked at his air-gauges. He had enough-if he hurried.

And hurry he did. He
could
hurry, since there was practically no atmosphere to impede his flight. Up the five-miles-deep shaft he shot and out into space. His chronometer, built to withstand even severer shocks than that of his fall, told him where his speedster was to be found, and in a matter of minutes he found her. He forced his rebellious right arm into the sleeve of his armor and fumbled at the lock. It yielded. The port swung open. He was inside his own ship again.

Again the encroaching universe of blackness threatened, but again he fought it off.

He
could not
pass out-yet! Dragging himself to the board, he laid his course upon Sol., too distant by far to permit of the selection of such a tiny objective as its planet Earth. He connected the automatic controls.