Galactic Patrol

9: Breakdown

Kimball Kinnison sat at the controls, smoking a rare festive cigarette and smiling, at peace with the entire universe. For this new picture was in every element a different one from the old. Instead of being in a pitifully weak and defenseless lifeboat, skulking and hiding, he was in one of the most powerful battleships afloat, driving boldly at full blast almost directly toward home. While the Patrolmen were so terribly few in number that most of them had to work double shifts—Kinnison and Henderson had to do all the piloting and navigating—they had under them a full crew of alert and highly–trained Velantians. And the enemy, instead of being a close–knit group, keeping Helmuth informed moment by moment of the situation and instantly responsive to his orders, were now entirely out of communication with each other and with their headquarters, groping helplessly. Literally as well as figuratively the pirates were in the dark, the absolute blackness of interstellar space.

Thorndyke entered the room, frowning slightly. "You look like the fabled Cheshire cat, Kim. I hate to spoil such perfect bliss, but I'm here to tell you that we ain't out of the woods yet, by seven thousand rows of big, green, peppermint trees."

"Maybe not," the Lensman returned blithely, "but compared to the jam we were in a little while back we're not only sitting on top of the world, we're perched right on the exact apex of the universe. They can't send or receive reports or orders. and they can't communicate. Even their detectors are mighty lame—you know how far they can get on electromagnetics and visual apparatus. Furthermore, there isn't an identification number, symbol, or name on the outside of this buzz–buggy. If it ever had one the friction and attrition have worn it off, clear down to the armor. What can happen that we can't cope with?"

'These engines can happen," the technician responded, bluntly. "The Bergenholm is developing a meter–jump that I don't like a little bit."

"Does she knock? Or even tick?" demanded Kinnison.

"Not yet," Thorndyke confessed, reluctantly.

"How big a jump?"

"Pretty near two thousandths maximum. Average a thousandth and a half."

"That's hardly a wiggle on the recorder line. Drivers run for months with bigger jumps than that."

"Yeah—drivers. But of all the troubles anybody ever had with Bergenholms, a meter–kick was never one of them, and that's what's got me guessing as to the whichness of the why. I'm not trying to scare you—yet I'm just telling you."

The machine referred to was the neutralizer of inertia, the sine qua non of interstellar speed, and it was not to be, wondered at that the slightest irregularity in its performance was to the technician a matter of grave concern. Day after day passed, however, and the huge converter continued to function, taking in and sending out its wonted torrents of power. It developed not even a tick, and the meter–jump did not grow worse. And during those days they put an inconceivable distance behind them.

During all this time their visual instruments remained blank, to all optical apparatus space was empty save for the normal tenancy of celestial bodies. From time to time something invisible or beyond the range of vision registered upon one of the electromagnet detectors, but so slow were these instruments that nothing came of their signals. In fact, by the time the warnings were recorded, the objects causing the disturbance were probably far astern.

One day, however, the Bergenholm quit—cold. There was no laboring, no knocking, no heating up, no warning at all. One instant the ship was speeding along in free flight, the next she was lying inert in space. Practically motionless, for any possible velocity built up by inert acceleration is scarcely a crawl, as free space–speeds go.

Then the whole crew labored like mad. As soon as they had the massive covers off, Thorndyke scanned the interior of the machine and turned to Kinnison. "I think we can patch her up, but it'll take quite a while. Maybe you'd be of more use in the control room—this isn't quite as safe as church, is it, lying here inert?"

"Most of the stuff is on automatic trip, but maybe I'd better keep an eye on things, at that. Let me know occasionally how you're getting along," and the Lensman went back to his controls—none too soon.

For one pirate ship was already beaming him viciously. Only the fact that his defensive armament was upon its automatic trips had saved the stolen battleship from practically instantaneous destruction. And as the surprised Lensman began to check his other instruments another spaceship flashed into being upon his other side and also went to work.

As Kinnison had already remarked more than once, Helmuth was far from being a fool, and that new and amazingly effective blanketing of his every means of communication was a problem whose solution was of paramount importance. Almost every available ship had been for days upon the fringe of that interference, observing and reporting continuously. So rapidly was it moving, however, so peculiar was its apparent shape, and so contradictory were the directional readings obtained, that Helmuth's computers had been baffled.

Then Kinnison's Bergenholm failed and his ship went inert. In a space of minutes the location of one center of interference was known. Its coordinates were determined and half a dozen warships were ordered to rush that spot. The raider first to arrive had signaled, visually and audibly, then obtaining no response, had anchored with a tractor and had loosed his bolts. Nor would the result have been different had everyone aboard, instead of no one, been in the control room at the time of the signaling. Kinnison could have read the messages, but neither he nor anyone else then aboard the erstwhile pirate craft could have answered them in kind.

The two space–ships attacking the turncoat became three, and still the Lensman sat unworried at his board. His meters showed no dangerous overload, his noble craft was taking everything her sister–ships could send.

Then Thorndyke stepped into the room, no longer a natty officer of space. Instead, he was stripped to sweat–soaked undershirt and overalls, he was covered with grease and grime, and what of his thickly smeared face was visible was almost haggard with fatigue. lie opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it shut as his eye was caught by a flaring visiplate.

"Holy Mono's claws!" he exclaimed, "At us already? Why didn't you yell?"

"How much good would that have done?" Kinnison wanted to know. "Of course, if I had known that you were loafing on the job and could have snapped it up a little, I would have. But there's no particular hurry about this. It'll take at least four of them to break us down, and I was hoping you'd have us traveling before they overload us. What was on your mind?"

"I came up here—One, to tell you that we're ready to blast, Two, to suggest that you hit her easy at first, and Three, to ask if you know where there's any grease–soap. But you can cancel Two and Three. We don't want to play around with these boys much longer—they play too rough—and I ain't going to wash up until I see whether she holds together or not. Blast away—and won't those guys be surprised!"

"I'll say so—some of this stuff is NEW!"

The Lensman twirled a couple of knobs, then punched down hard upon three buttons. As he did so the flaring plates became dark, they were again alone in space. To the dumbfounded pirates it was as though their prey had slipped off into the fourth dimension. Their tractors gripped nothing whatever, their ravening beams bored unimpeded through the space occupied an instant before by resisting screens, tracers were useless. They did not know what had happened, or how, and they could neither report to nor be guided by the master mind of Boskone.

For minutes Thorndyke, vanBuskirk, and Kinnison waited tensely for they knew not what to happen, but nothing happened and then the tension gradually relaxed.

"What was the matter with it?" Kinnison asked, finally.

"Overloaded," was Thorndyke's terse reply.

"Overloaded—hooey!" snapped the Lensman. "How could they overload a Bergenholm? And, even if they could, why in all the nine hells of Valeria would they want to?"

"They could do it easily enough, in just the way they did do it, by banking accumulators onto it in series–parallel. As to why, I'll let you do the guessing. With no load on the Bergenholm you've got full inertia, with full load you've got zero inertia—you can't go any further. It looks just plain dumb to me. But then, I think all pirates are short a few lets somewhere—if they weren't they wouldn't be pirates."

"I don't know whether you're right or not. Hope so, but afraid not. Personally, I don't believe these folks are pirates at all, in the ordinary sense of the word."

"Hub? What are they, then?"

"Piracy implies similarity of cube, I would think," the Lensman said, thoughtfully. "Ordinary pirates are usually renegades, deficient somehow, as you suggested, rebelling against a constituted authority which they themselves have at one time acknowledged and of which they are still afraid. That pattern doesn't fit into this matrix at all, anywhere."

"So what? Now I say 'hooey' right back at you. Anyway, why worry about it?

"Not worrying about it exactly, but somebody has got to do something about it, or else…"

"I don't like to think, it makes my head ache," interrupted vanBuskirk. "Besides, we're getting away from the Bergenholm."

"You'll get a real headache there," laughed Ikon, "because I'll bet a good Tellurian beefsteak that the pirates were trying to set up a negative inertia when they overloaded the Bergenholm, and thinking about that state of matter is enough to make anybody's head ache!"

"I knew that some of the dippier Ph.D.'s in higher mechanics have been speculating about it," Thorndyke offered, "but it can't be done that way, can it?"

"Nor any other way that anybody has tried yet, and if such a thing is possible the results may prove really startling. But you two had better shove off, you're dead from the neck up. The Berg's spinning like a top—as smooth as that much green velvet. You'll find a can of soap in my locker, I think.

"Maybe she'll hold together long enough for us to get some sleep." The technician eyed a meter dubiously, although its needle was not wavering a hair's breadth from the green line. "But I'll tell the cockeyed Universe that we gave her a jury rigging if there ever was one. You can't depend on it for an hour until after it's been pulled and gone over, and that, you know as well as I do, takes a real shop, with plenty of equipment. If you take my advice you'll sit down somewhere while you can and as soon as you can. That Bergenholm is in bad shape, believe me. We can hold her together for a while by main strength and awkwardness, but before very long she's going out for keeps—and when she does you don't want to find yourself fifty years from a machine shop instead of fifty minutes."

"I'll say not," the Lensman agreed. "But on the other hand, we don't want those birds jumping us the minute we land, either. Let's see, where are we? And where are the bases? Um–m–m…Sector bases are white rings, you know, sub– sector bases red stars…" Three heads bent over charts.

"The nearest red–star marker seems to be in System 240.16–37 " Kinnison finally announced. "Don't know the name of the planet—never been there…

"Too far, interrupted Thorndyke. "We'll never make it—might as well try direct for Prime Base on Tellus. If you cant find a red closer than that, look for an orange or a yellow."

"Bases of any kind seem to be scarce around here," the Lensman commented. "You'd think they'd be thicker. Here's a violet triangle, but that wouldn't help us—just an outpost…How about this blue square? It's just about on our line to Tellus, and I can't see anything any better that we can possibly reach."

"That looks like our best bet," Thorndyke concurred, after a few minutes of study. "It's probably several breakdowns away, but maybe we can make it— sometime. Blues are pretty low–grade space–ports but they've got tools, anyway. What's the name of it, Kim—or is it only a number?"

"It's that very famous planet, Trenco," the Lensman announced, after looking up the reference numbers in the atlas.

"Trenco!" exclaimed Thorndyke in disgust. "The nuttiest dopiest wooziest planet in the galaxy—we would draw something like that to sit down. on for repairs, wouldn't we? Well, I'm on plus time for sleep. Call me if we go inert before I wake up, will you?"

"I sure will, and I'll try to figure out a way of getting down to ground without bringing all the pirates in space along with us."

Then Henderson came in to stand his watch, Kinnison slept, and the mighty Bergenholm continued to bold the vessel inertialess. In fact, all the men were thoroughly rested and refreshed before the expected breakdown came. And when it did come they were more or less prepared for it. The delay was not sufficiently long to enable the pirates to find them again, but from that point in space to the ill–famed planet which was their destination, progress was one long series of hops.

The sweating, grunting, swearing engineers made one seemingly impossible repair after another, by dint of what dodge, improvisation, and makeshift only the fertile brain of LaVerne Thorndyke ever did know. The Master Technician, one of the keenest and most highly trained engineers of the whole Solarian System, was not used to working with his hands. Although young in years, he was wont to use only his head, in directing the labors and the energies of others.

Nevertheless he was now working like a stevedore. He was permanently grimy and greasy—their one can of mechanics soap had been used up long since—his fingernails were black and broken his hands and face were burned, blistered, and cracked. His muscles ached and shrieked at the unaccustomed effort, until now they were on the build. But through it all he had stuck uncomplainingly, even buoyantly, to his task. One day, during an interlude of free flight, he strode into the control–room and glanced at the course–plotting goniometer, then started into the "tank."

"Still on the original course, I see. Have you got anything doped out yet?"

"Nothing very good, that's why I'm staying on this course until we reach the point closest to Trenco. I've figured until my alleged brain backfired on me and here's all I can get.

"I've been shrinking and expanding our interference zone, changing its shape as much as I could, and cutting it off entirely now and then, to cross up their, surveyors as much as I could. When we come to the jumping–off place we'll simply cut off everything that is sending out traceable vibrations. The Berg will have to run, of course, but it doesn't radiate much and we can ground out practically all of that. The drive is the bad feature—it looks as though we'll have to cut down to where we can ground out the radiation."

"How about the flare?" Thorndyke took the. inevitable slide–rule from a pocket of his overalls.

"I've already had the Velantians build us some baffles—we've got lots of spare tantalum, tungsten, carballoy, and refractory, you know—just in case we should want to use them."

"Radiation…detection…decrement…cosine squared theta…um…call it point zero zero three eight," the engineer mumbled, squinting at his "slip– stick." "Times half a million…about nineteen hundred lights will have to be tops. Mighty slow, but we would get there sometime—maybe. Now about the baffles," and he went into another bout of computation during which could be distinguished a few such words as "temperature…inert corpuscles… velocity…fusion–point…Weinberger's Constant…" Then.

"It figures that at about eighteen hundred lights your baffles go out," he announced. "Pretty close check with the radiation limit. QX, I guess—but I shudder to think of what we may have to do to that Bergenholm to hold it together that long."

"It's not so hot. I don't think much of the scheme myself," admitted Kinnison frankly. "Probably you can think up something better before…"

"Who, me? What with?" Thorndyke interrupted, with a laugh. "Looks to me like our best bet—anyway, ain't you the master mind of this outfit? Blast off!"

Thus it came about that long later, the Lensman cut off his interference, cut off his driving power, cut off every mechanism whose operation generated vibrations which would reveal to enemy detectors the location of his cruiser. Space–suited mechanics emerged from the stern lock and fitted over the still white–hot vents of the driving projectors the baffles they had previously built.

It is of course well known that all. ships of space are propelled by the. inert projection, by means of high–potential static fields, of nascent fourth– order particles or "corpuscles," which are formed, inert, inside the inertialess projector, by the conversion of some form of energy into matter. This conversion liberates some heat, and a vast amount of light. This light, or "flare," shining as it does directly upon and through the highly tenuous gas formed by the, projected corpuscles, makes of a speeding spaceship one of the most gorgeous spectacles known to man, and it was this very spectacular effect that Kinnison and his crew must do away with if their bold scheme were to have any chance at all of success.

The baffles were in place. Now, instead of shooting out in tell–tale luminescence, the light was shut in—but so, alas, was approximately three percent of the heat. And the generation of heat must be cut down to a point at which the radiation–equilibrium temperature of the baffles would be below the point of fusion of the refractories of which they were composed. This would cut down their speed tremendously, but on the other hand, they were practically safe from detection and would reach Trenco eventually—if the Bergenholm held out.

Of course there was still the chance of visual or electromagnetic detection, but that chance was vanishingly small. The proverbial task of finding a needle in a haystack would be an easy one indeed, compared to that of seeing in a telescope or upon visiplate or magneplate a dead–black, lightless bip in the infinity of space. No, the Bergenholm was their great, their only concern, and the engineers lavished upon that monstrous fabrication of metal a devotion to which could be likened only that of a corps of nurses attending the ailing baby of a multi–millionaire.

This concentration of attention did get results. The engineers still found it necessary to sweat and to grunt and to swear, but they did somehow keep the thing running—most of the time. Nor were they detected—then.

For the attention of the pirate high command was very much taken up with that fast–moving, that ever–expanding, that peculiarly–fluctuating volume of interference, utterly enigmatic as it was and impenetrable to their every instrument of communication. In that system was the Prime Base of the Galactic Patrol. Therefore it was the Lensman's work—undoubtedly the same Lensman who had conquered one of their super–ships and, after having learned its every secret, had escaped in a lifeboat through the fine–meshed net set to catch him! And, piling Ossa upon Pelion, this same Lensman had—must have—captured ship after unconquerable ship of their best and was even now sailing calmly home with them! It was intolerable, unbearable, an insult that could not and would not be borne.

Therefore, using as tools every pirate ship in that sector of space, Helmuth and his computers and navigators were slowly but grimly solving the equations of motion of that volume of interference. Smaller and smaller became the uncertainties. Then ship after ship bored into the subethereal murk, to match course and velocity with, and ultimately to come to grips with, each focus of disturbance as it was determined.

Thus in a sense and although Kinnison and his friends did not then know it, it was only the failure of the Bergenholm that was to save their lives, and with those lives our present Civilization.

Slowly, hatingly, and, for reasons already given, undetected, Kinnison made pitiful progress toward Trenco, cursing impatiently and impartially his ship, the crippled generator, its designer and its previous operators as he went. But at long last Trenco loomed large beneath them and the Lensman used his Lens.

"Lensman of Trenco space–port, or any other Lensman within call!" he sent out clearly. "Kinnison of Tellus–Sol III—calling. My Bergenholm is almost out and I must sit down at Trenco space–port for repairs. I have avoided the pirates so far, but they may be either behind me or ahead of me, or both. What is the situation there?"

"I fear that I can be of no help," came back a weak thought, without the customary identification. "I am out of control. However, Tregonsee is in the …."

Kinnison felt a poignant, unbearably agonizing mental impact that jarred him to the very core, a shock that, while of sledge–hammer force, was still of such a keenly penetrant timbre that it almost exploded every cell of his brain. It seemed as though some mighty fist, armed with yard–long needles, had slugged an actual blow into the most vitally sensitive nerve–center" of his being.

Communication ceased, and the Lensman knew, with a sick, shuddering certainty, that while in the very act of talking to him a Lensman had died.