Galactic Patrol

8: 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 he 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 pirate–ship 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 person—as 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 life–boat 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 highpowered 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 spy–rays 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 spy– rays, 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.

A tracer lashed out, the pilot–ray of the rim–battery of extraordinarily powerful tractors. Under their terrific pull the inertialess ship flashed toward their center of action. At the same moment there burst into activity Nelson's scrambler, a dome–screen against cosmic–energy intake, and a full circle of super–powered projectors.

All these things occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the vessel was being slowed down by the atmosphere of Velantia before her startled commander could even realize that he was being attacked. Only the automatically–reacting defensive screens saved that ship from instant destruction, but they did so save it and in seconds the pirates' every weapon was furiously ablaze.

In vain. The defenses of that pit could take it. They were driven by mechanisms easily able to absorb the output of any equipment mountable upon a mobile base, and to his consternation the pirate found that his cosmic–energy intake was at, and remained at, zero. He sent out call after call for help, but could not make contact with any other pirate station—ether and sub– ether alike were closed to him, his signals were blanketed completely. Nor could his drivers, even though operating at ruinous overload, move him from the geometrical center of that incandescently flaming pit, so inconceivably rigid were the tractors' clamps upon him.

And soon his power began to fail. His vessel, designed to operate upon cosmicenergy intake, carried only enough accumulators for stabilization of power–flow, an amount ridiculously inadequate for a combat as profligate of energy as this. But strangely enough, as his defenses weakened, so lessened the power of the attack. It was no part of the Lensman's plan to destroy this superdreadnaught of the void.

"That was one good thing about the old Brittania," he gritted, as he cut down step by step the power of his beams, "what power she had, nobody could block her off from!"

Soon the stored–up energy of the battleship was exhausted and she lay there, quiescent. Then giant pressors went into action and she was lifted over the wall of the pit, to settle down in an open space beside it—open, but still under the domes of force.

Kinnison had no needle–rays as yet, the time at his disposal having been sufficient only for the construction of the absolutely essential items of equipment. Now, while he debated with his fellows as to what part of the vessel to destroy in order to wipe out its crew, the pirates themselves ended the debate. Ports yawned in the vessel's side and they came out fighting.

For they were not a breed to die like rats in a trap, and they knew that to remain inside their vessel was to die whenever and however their captors willed. They knew also that die they must if they could not conquer. Their surrender, even if it should be accepted, would mean only a somewhat later death in the lethal chambers of the Law. In the open, they could at least take some of their foes with them.

Furthermore, not being men as we know men, they had nothing in common with either human beings or Velantians. Both to them were vermin, as they themselves were to the beings manning this surprisingly impregnable fortress here in this waste corner of the galaxy. Therefore, space–hardened veterans all, they fought, with the insane ferocity and desperation of the ultimately last stand, but they did not conquer. Instead, and to the last man, they died.

As soon as the battle was over, before the interference blanketing the pirates' communicators was cut off, Kinnison went through the captured vessel, destroying the headquarters visiplates and every automatic sender which could transmit any kind of a message to any pirate base. Then the interference was stopped, the domes were released, and the ship was removed from the field of operations. Then, while Thorndyke and his reptilian aides—themselves now radio experts of no mean attainments—busied themselves at installing a high–powered scrambler aboard her, Kinnison and Worsel scanned space in search of more prey. Soon they found it, more distant than the first one had been—two solar systems away—and in an entirely different direction. Tracers and tractors and interference and domes of force again became the order of the day. Projectors again raved out in their incandescent might, and soon another immense cruiser of the void lay beside her sister ship. Another, and another, then for a long time space was blank.

The Lensman then energized his ultra–receiver, pointing his antenna carefully into the galactic line to Helmet's base, as laid down for him by the Velantian astronomers. Again, so tight and hard was Helmuth's beam, he had to drive his apparatus so unmercifully that the tube–noise almost drowned out the signals, but again he was rewarded by hearing faintly the voice of the pirate Director of Operations…four vessels, all within or near one of those five solar systems, have ceased communicating, each cessation being accompanied by a period of blanketing interference of a pattern never before registered. You two vessels who are receiving these orders are instructed to investigate that region with the utmost care. Go with screens out and everything on the trips, and with automatic recorders set on me here. It is not believed that the Patrol has anything to do with this, as ability has been shown transcending anything it has been known to possess. As a working hypothesis it is assumed that one of the solar systems, hitherto practically unexplored and unknown is in reality the seat of a highly advanced race, which perhaps has taken offense at the attitude or conduct of our first ship to visit them. Therefore proceed with extreme caution, with a thorough spy–ray search at extreme range before approaching at all. If you land, use tact and diplomacy instead of the customary tactics. Find out whether our ships and crews have been destroyed, or are only being held, and remember, automatic reporters on ma at all times. Helmuth speaking for Boskone—off!"

For minutes Kinnison manipulated his controls in vain—he could not get another sound. "What are you trying to get, Kim?" asked Thorndyke. "Wasn't that enough?"

"No, that's only half of it," Kinnison returned. "Helmuth's nobody's fool. He's certainly trying to plot the boundaries of our interference, and I want to see how he's coming out with it. But no dice. He's so far away and his beam's so hard I can't work him unless he happens to be talking almost directly toward us. Well, it won't be long now until we'll give him some real interference to plot. Now let's see what we can do about those two other ships that are heading this way."

Carefully as those two ships investigated, and sedulously as they sought to obey Helmuth's instructions, all their precautions amounted to exactly nothing. As ordered, they began to spy–ray survey at extreme range, but even at that range Kinnison's tracers were effective and those pirates also ceased communicating in a blaze of interference. Then recent history repeated itself. The details were changed somewhat, since there were two vessels instead of one, but the pit was of ample size to accommodate two ships, and the tractors could hold two as well and as rigidly as one. The conflict was a little longer, the beaming a little hotter and more coruscate, but the ending was the same. Scramblers and other special apparatus were installed and Kinnison called his men together.

"We're about ready to shove off again. Running away has worked twice so far and should work once more, if we can ring in enough variations on the theme to keep Helmuth guessing a while longer. Maybe, if the supply of pirateships holds up, we can make Helmuth furnish us transportation clear back to Prime Base!

"Here's the idea. We've got six ships, and enough Velantians have volunteered to man them—in spite of the fact that they probably won't get back. Six ships, of course, isn't enough of a task force to fight its way through Helmuth's fleets, so we'll spread out, covering plenty of parsecs and broadcasting every watt of interference we can put out, in as many different shapes and sizes as our generators can figure. We won't be able to talk to each other, but nobody else can talk, either, anywhere near us, and that ought to give us a chance. Each ship will be on its own, like we were before, in the boats, the big difference being that we'll be in superdreadnaughts.

"Question—should we split up again or stick together? We'd better all go in one ship, I think—with spools aboard the others, of course. What do you think?" They agreed with him to a man and he directed a thought at the Velantian. "Now, Worsel, about you fellows here—you probably won't have it so easy, either.

Sooner or later—and sooner would be my guess—Helmuth's boys will be coming to see you. In force and cocked and primed and with blood in their eyes. It'll be a battle, not a slaughter."

"Let them come, in whatever force they care to bring. The more who attack here, the less there will be to halt your progress. This armament represents the best of that possessed by both your Patrol and the pirates, with improvements developed by your scientists and ours in full cooperation. We understand thoroughly its construction, operation, and maintenance. You may rest assured that the pirates will never levy tribute upon us, and that any pirate visiting this system will remain in it—permanently!"

"At–a–snake, Worsel—long may you wiggle!" Kinnison exclaimed. Then, more seriously, "Maybe, after this is all over, I'll see you again sometime. If not, goodbye. Goodbye, all Velantia. All set, everybody? Clear ether—blast off!" Six ships, one pirate craft, now vessels of the Galactic Patrol, hurled themselves into and through Velantian air, into and through interplanetary space, out into the larger, wider, opener emptiness of the interstellar void. Six ships, each broadcasting with prodigious power and volume an all–inclusive interference through which not even a CRX tracer could be driven.