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

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СКАЧАТЬ they were in the cavern itself—the sanctum sanctorum of the Overlords of Delgon. There was the hellish torture screen; now licked clean of life. There was the audience which had been so avid, now milling about in a mob frenzy of panic. There, upon a raised balcony, were the “big shots” of this nauseous clan; now doing their utmost to marshal some force able to cope effectively with this unheard-of violation of their ages-old immunity.

      A last wave of Delgonian slaves hurled themselves forward, futile projectors furiously aflame, only to disappear in the DeLameters’ fans of force. The Patrolmen hated to kill those mindless slaves, but it was a nasty job that had to be done. The slaves out of the way, those ravening beams bored on into the massed Overlords.

      And now Kinnison and vanBuskirk killed, if not joyously, at least relentlessly, mercilessly, and with neither sign nor sensation of compunction. For this unbelievably monstrous tribe needed killing, root and branch—not a scion or shoot of it should be allowed to survive, to continue to contaminate the civilization of the galaxy. Back and forth, to and fro, up and down swept the raging beams; playing on until in all the vast volume of that gruesome chamber nothing lived save the two grim figures in its portal.

      Assured of this fact, but with DeLameters still in hand, the two destroyers retraced their way to the tunnel’s mouth, where Worsel anxiously awaited them. Lines of communication again established, Kinnison informed the Velantian of all that had taken place and the latter gradually cut down the power of his thought-screen. Soon it was at zero strength and he reported jubilantly that for the first time in untold ages, the Overlords of Delgon were off the air!

      “But surely the danger isn’t over yet!” protested Kinnison. “We couldn’t have got them all in this one raid. Some of them must have escaped, and there must be other dens of them on this planet somewhere?”

      “Possibly, possibly;” the Velantian waved his tail airily—the first sign of joyousness he had shown. “But their power is broken, definitely and forever. With these new screens, and with the arms and armament which, thanks to you, we can now fabricate, the task of wiping them out completely will be comparatively simple. Now you will accompany me to Velantia; where, I assure you, the resources of the planet will be put solidly behind you in your own endeavors. I have already summoned a space-ship—in less than twelve days we will be back in Velantia and at work upon your projects. In the meantime .”

      “Twelve days! Noshabkeming the Radiant!” vanBuskirk exploded, and Kinnison put in:

      “Sure—you forget they haven’t got free drive. We’d better hop over and get our lifeboat, I think. It’s not so good, either way, but in our own boat we’ll be open to detection less than an hour, as against twelve days in the Velantians’. And the pirates may be here any minute. It’s as good as certain that their ship will be stopped and searched long before it gets back to Velantia, and if we were aboard it’d be just too bad.”

      “And, since the crew knows about us, the pirates soon will, and it’ll be just too bad, anyway,” vanBuskirk reasoned.

      “Not at all,” interposed Worsel. “The few of my people who know of you have been instructed to seal that knowledge. I must admit, however, that I am greatly disturbed by your conceptions of these pirates of space. You see, until I met you I knew nothing more of the pirates than I did of your Patrol.”

      “What a world!” vanBuskirk exclaimed. “No Patrol and no pirates! But at that, life might be simpler without both of them and without the free space-drive—more like it used to be in the good old airplane days that the novelists rave about.”

      “Of course I could not judge as to that.” The Velantian was very serious. “This in which we live seems to be an out-of-the-way section of the galaxy; or it may be that we have nothing the pirates want.”

      “More likely it’s simply that, like the Patrol, they haven’t got organized into this district yet,” suggested Kinnison. “There are so many thousands of millions of solar systems in the galaxy that it will probably be thousands of years yet before the Patrol gets into them all.”

      “But about these pirates,” Worsel went back to his point. “If they have such minds as those of the Overlords, they will be able to break the seals of our minds. However, I gather from your thoughts that their minds are not of that strength?”

      “Not so far as I know,” Kinnison replied. “You folks have the most powerful brains I ever heard of, short of the Arisians. And speaking of mental power, you can hear thoughts a lot farther than I can, even with my Lens or with this pirate receiver I’ve got. See if you can find out whether there are any pirates in space around here, will you?”

      While the Velantian was concentrating, vanBuskirk asked:

      “Why, if his mind is so strong, could the Overlords put him under so much easier than they could us ‘weak-minded’ human beings?”

      “You are confusing ‘mind’ with ‘will,’ I think. Ages of submission to the Overlords made the Velantians’ will-power zero, as far as the bosses were concerned. On the other hand, you and I could raise stubbornness to sell to most people. In fact, if the Overlords had succeeded in really breaking us down, back there, the chances are we’d have gone insane.”

      “Probably you’re right—we break, but don’t bend, huh?” and the Velantian was ready to report.

      “I have scanned space to the nearer stars—some eleven of your light-years—and have encountered no intruding entities,” he announced.

      “Eleven light-years—what a range!” Kinnison exclaimed. “However, that’s only a shade over two minutes for a pirate ship at full blast. But we’ve got to take a chance sometime, and the quicker we get started the sooner we’ll get back. We’ll pick you up here, Worsel. No use in you going back to your tent—we’ll be back here long before you could reach it. You’ll be safe enough, I think, especially with our spare DeLameters. Let’s get going, Bus!”

      Again they shot into the air, again they traversed the airless depths of interplanetary space. To locate the temporary tomb of their lifeboat required only a few minutes, to disinter her only a few more. Then again they braved detection in the void; Kinnison tense at his controls, vanBuskirk in strained attention listening to and staring at his unscramblers and detectors. But the ether was still blank as the lifeboat struck Delgon’s atmosphere; it remained blank while the lifeboat, inert, blasted frantically to match Worsel’s intrinsic velocity.

      “All right, Worsel, snap it up!” Kinnison called, and went on to vanBuskirk, “Now, you big, flat-footed Valerian spacehound, I hope that spaceman’s god of yours will see to it our luck holds good for just fourteen minutes more. We’ve had more luck already than we had any right to expect, but we can put a little more to most God-awful good use!”

      “Noshabkeming does bring spacemen luck,” insisted the giant, grimacing a peculiar salute toward a small, golden image set inside his helmet, “and the fact that you warty, runty, atheistic little space-fleas of Tellus haven’t got sense enough to know it—not even enough sense to really believe in your own gods, even Klono—doesn’t change matters at all.”

      “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 air-lock was again tight, and the little vessel shot away from Delgon toward far Velantia. 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 СКАЧАТЬ