The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ too tight, Bus,” Kinnison cautioned. “Leave enough slack so you can cut me loose if you have to. Remember that the spools are more important than any one of us. Once inside that cliff we’ll be all washed up—even Worsel can’t help us there—so drop me rather than go in yourself.”

      “Um,” grunted the Dutchman, non-committally. “There, I’ve tossed my spool out onto the ground. Tell Worsel that if they get us he’s to pick it up and carry on. We’ll go ahead with yours, inside the cliff if necessary.”

      “I said cut me loose if you can’t hold me!” Kinnison snapped, “and I meant it. That’s an official order. Remember it!”

      “Official order be damned!” snorted vanBuskirk, still plying his ponderous mace. “They won’t get you into that hole without breaking me in two, and that will be a job of breaking in anybody’s language. Now shut your pan,” he concluded grimly. “We’re here, and I’m going to be too busy, even to think, very shortly.”

      He spoke truly. He had already selected his point of resistance, and as he reached it he thrust the head of his mace into the crack behind the open trap-door, jammed its shaft into the shoulder-socket of his armor, set blocky legs and Herculean arms against the cliffside, arched his mighty back, and held. And the surprised Catlats, now inside the gloomy fastness of their tunnel, thrust anchoring tentacles into crevices in the wall and pulled; harder, ever harder.

      Under the terrific stress Kinnison’s heavy armor creaked as its air-tight joints accommodated themselves to their new and unusual positions. That armor, or space-tempered alloy, of course would not give way—but what of its anchor?

      Well it was for Kimball Kinnison that day, and well for our present civilization, that the Brittania’s quartermaster had selected Peter vanBuskirk for the Lensman’s mate; for death, inevitable and horrible, resided within that cliff, and no human frame of Earthly growth, however armored, could have borne for even a fraction of a second the violence of the Catlats’ pull.

      But Peter vanBuskirk, although of Earthly-Dutch ancestry, had been born and reared upon the planet Valeria, and that massive planet’s gravity—over two and one-half times Earth’s—had given him a physique and a strength almost inconceivable to us life-long dwellers upon small, green Terra. His head, as has been said, towered seventy-eight inches above the ground; but at that he appeared squatty because of his enormous spread of shoulder and his startling girth. His bones were elephantine—they had to be, to furnish adequate support and leverage for the incredible masses of muscle overlaying and surrounding them. But even vanBuskirk’s Valerian strength was now being taxed to the uttermost.

      The anchoring chains hummed and snarled as the clamps bit into the rings. Muscles writhed and knotted, tendons stretched and threatened to snap; sweat rolled down his mighty back. His jaws locked in agony and his eyes started from their sockets with the effort; but still vanBuskirk held.

      “Cut me loose!” commanded Kinnison at last. “Even you can’t take much more of that. No use letting them break your back . Cut, I tell you . I said CUT, you big, dumb, Valerian ape!”

      But if vanBuskirk heard or felt the savagely-voiced commands of his chief he gave no heed. Straining to the very ultimate fiber of his being, exerting every iota of loyal mind and every atom of Brobdingnagian frame: grimly, tenaciously, stubbornly the gigantic Dutchman held.

      Held while Worsel of Velantia, that grotesquely hideous, that fantastically reptilian ally, plowed toward the two Patrolmen through the horde of Catlats; a veritable tornado of rending fang and shearing talon, of beating wing and crushing snout, of mailed hand and trenchant tail:

      Held while that demon incarnate drove closer and closer, hurling entire Catlats and numberless dismembered fragments of Catlats to the four winds as he came:

      Held until Worsel’s snake-like body, a supple and sentient cable of living steel, tipped with its double-edged, razor-keen, scimitar-like sting, slipped into the tunnel beside Kinnison and wrought grisly havoc among the Catlats close-packed there!

      As the terrific tension upon him was suddenly released vanBuskirk’s own efforts hurled him away from the cliff. He fell to the ground, his overstrained muscles twitching uncontrollably, and on top of him fell the fettered Lensman. Kinnison, his hands now free, unfastened the clamps linking his armor to that of vanBuskirk and whirled to confront the foe—but the fighting was over. The Catlats had had enough of Worsel of Velantia; and, screaming and shrieking in baffled rage, the last of them were disappearing into their caves.

      VanBuskirk got shakily to his feet. “Thanks for the help, Worsel, we were just about to run out of time .” he began, only to be silenced by an insistent thought from the grotesquely monstrous stranger.

      “Stop that radiating! Do not think at all if you cannot screen your minds!” came urgent mental commands. “These Catlats are a very minor pest of this planet Delgon. There are others worse by far. Fortunately, your thoughts are upon a frequency never used here—if I had not been so very close to you I would not have heard you at all—but should the Overlords have a listener upon that band your unshielded thinking may already have done irreparable harm. Follow me. I will slow my speed to yours, but hurry all possible!”

      “You tell ’im, Chief,” vanBuskirk said, and fell silent; his mind as nearly a perfect blank as his iron will could make it.

      “This is a screened thought, through my Lens,” Kinnison took up the conversation. “You don’t need to slow down on our account—we can develop any speed you wish. Lead on!”

      The Velantian leaped into the air and flashed away in headlong flight. Much to his surprise the two human beings kept up with him effortlessly upon their inertialess drives, and after a moment Kinnison directed another thought.

      “If time is an object, Worsel, know that my companion and I can carry you anywhere you wish to go at a speed hundreds of times greater than this that we are using,” he vouchsafed.

      It developed that time was of the utmost possible importance and the three closed in. Mighty wings folded back, hands and talons gripped armor chains, and the group, inertialess all, shot away at a pace that Worsel of Velantia had never imagined even in his wildest dreams of speed. Their goal, a small, featureless tent of thin sheet metal, occupying a barren spot in a writhing, crawling expanse of lushly green jungle, was reached in a space of minutes. Once inside, Worsel sealed the opening and turned to his armored guests.

      “We can now think freely in open converse. This wall is the carrier of a screen through which no thought can make its way.”

      “This world you call by a name I have interpreted as Delgon,” Kinnison began, slowly. “You are a native of Velantia, a planet now beyond the sun. Therefore I assumed that you were taking us to your space-ship. Where is that ship?”

      “I have no ship,” the Velantian replied, composedly, “nor have I need of one. For the remainder of my life—which is now to be measured in a few of your hours—this tent is my only . . .”

      “No ship!” vanBuskirk broke in. “I hope we won’t have to stay on this Noshabkeming-forgotten planet forever—and I’m not very keen on going much further in that lifeboat, either.”

      “We may not have to do either of those things,” Kinnison reassured his sergeant. “Worsel comes of a long-lived tribe, and the fact that he thinks his enemies are going to get him in a few hours doesn’t make it true, by any means—there are three of us to reckon with now. Also, when we need a space-ship we’ll get one, if we have to build it. Now, let’s find СКАЧАТЬ