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

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СКАЧАТЬ Magnetic clamps locked and held. Two steel-clad, warring figures rolled into the line of fire of the ravening automatic rifle. Kinnison’s armor, designed and tested to withstand even heavier stuff, held; wherefore he came through that storm of metal unscathed. Helmuth’s, however, even though stronger far than the ordinary personal armor of space, failed; and thus the Boskonian died.

      Blasting himself upright, the Patrolman shot across the inner dome to the control panel and paused, momentarily baffled. He could not throw the switches controlling the defensive screens of the gigantic outer dome! His armor, designed for the ultimate of defensive strength, could not and did not bear any of the small and delicate external mechanisms so characteristic of the ordinary space-suit. To leave his personal tank at that time and in that environment was unthinkable; yet he was fast running out of time. A scant fifteen seconds was all that remained before zero, the moment at which the hellish output of every watt generable by the massed fleet of the Galactic Patrol would be hurled against those screens in their furiously, ragingly destructive might. To release the screens after that zero moment would mean his own death, instantaneous and inevitable.

      Nevertheless he could open those circuits—the conservation of Boskonian property meant nothing to him. He flipped on his own projector and flashed its beam briefly across the banked panels in front of him. Insulation burst into flame, fairly exploding in its haste to disintegrate; copper and silver ran in brilliant streams or puffed away in clouds of sparkling vapor: high-tension arcs ripped, crashed, and crackled among the writhing, dripping, flaring bus-bars. The shorts burned themselves clear or blew their fuses, every circuit opened, every Boskonian defense came down; and then, and only then, could Kinnison get into communication with his friends.

      “Haynes!” he thought crisply into his Lens. “Kinnison calling!”

      “Haynes acknowledging!” a thought instantly snapped back. “Congrat .”

      “Hold it! We’re not done yet! Have every ship in the Fleet go free at once. Have them all, except yours, put out full-coverage screens, so that they can’t look at this base—that’s to keep ’em from thinking into it.”

      A moment passed. “Done!”

      “Don’t come in any closer—I’m on my way out to you. Now as to you personally—I don’t like to seem to be giving orders to the Port Admiral, but it may be quite essential that you concentrate on me, and think of nothing else, for the next few minutes.”

      “Right! I don’t mind taking orders from you.”

      “QX—now we can take things a bit easier.” Kinnison had so arranged matters that no one except himself could think into that stronghold, and he himself would not. He would not think into that tantalizing enigma, nor toward it, nor even of it, until he was completely ready to do so. And how many persons, I wonder, really realize just how much of a feat that was? Realize the sort of mental training required for its successful performance?

      “How many gamma-zeta tracers can you put out, chief?” Kinnison asked then, more conversationally.

      A brief consultation, then “Ten in regular use. By tuning in all our spares we can put out sixty.”

      “At two diameters’ distance forty-eight fields will surround this planet at one hundred percent overlap. Please have that many set that way. Of the other twelve, set three to go well outside the first sphere—say at four diameters out—covering the line from this planet to Lundmark’s Nebula. Set the last nine to be thrown out about half a detet—as far as you can read them accurately to one decimal—centering on the same line. Not much overlap is necessary on these backing fields—just contact. Release nothing, of course, until I get there. And while the boys are setting things up, you might go inert—it’s safe enough now—so I can match your intrinsic velocity and come aboard.”

      There followed the maneuvering necessary for one inert body to approach another in space, then Kinnison’s incredible housing of steel was hauled into the airlock by means of space-lines attached to magnetic clamps. The outer door of the lock closed behind him, the inner one opened, and the Lensman entered the flagship.

      First to the armory, where he clambered stiffly out of his small battleship and gave orders concerning its storage. Then to the control room, stretching and bending hugely as he went, in vast relief at his freedom from the narrow and irksome confinement which he had endured so long. He wanted a shower badly—in fact, he needed one—but business came first.

      Of all the men in that control room, only two knew Kinnison personally. All knew of him, however, and as the tall, gray-clad figure entered there was a loud, quick cheer.

      “Hi, fellows—thanks.” Kinnison waved a salute to the room as a whole. “Hi, Port Admiral! Hi, Commandant!” He saluted Haynes and von Hohendorff as perfunctorily, and greeted them as casually, as though he had last seen them an hour, instead of ten weeks, before; as though the intervening time had been spent in the veriest idleness, instead of in the fashion in which it actually had been spent.

      Old von Hohendorff greeted his erstwhile pupil cordially enough, but:

      “Out with it!” Haynes demanded. “What did you do? How did you do it? What does all this confounded rigmarole mean? Tell us all about it—all you can, I mean,” he added, hastily.

      “There’s no need for secrecy now, I don’t think,” and in flashing thoughts the Gray Lensman went on to describe everything that had happened.

      “So you see,” he concluded, “I don’t really know anything. It’s all surmise, suspicion, and deduction. Maybe nothing at all will happen; in which case these precautions, while they will have been wasted effort, will have done us no harm. In case something does happen, however—and something will, for all the tea in China—we’ll be ready for it.”

      “But if what you are beginning to suspect is really true, it means that Boskonia is inter-galactic in scope—wider-spread even than the Patrol!”

      “Probably, but not necessarily—it may mean only that they have bases farther outside. And remember I’m arguing on a mighty slim thread of evidence. That screen was hard and tight, and I couldn’t touch the external beam—if there was one—at all. I got just part of a thought, here and there. However, the thought was ‘that’ galaxy; not just ‘galaxy,’ or ‘this’ or ‘the’ galaxy—and why think that way if the guy was already in this galaxy?”

      “But nobody has ever . but skip it for now—the boys are ready for you. Take over!”

      “QX. First we’ll go free again. Don’t think much, if any, of the stuff can come out here, but no use taking chances. Cut your screens. Now, all you gamma-zeta men, throw out your fields, and if any of you get a puncture, or even a flash, measure its position. You recording observers, step your scanners up to fifty thousand. QX?”

      “QX!” the observers and recorders reported, almost as one, and the Gray Lensman sat down at a plate.

      His mind, free at last to make the investigation from which it had been so long and so sternly barred, flew down into and through the dome, to and into that cryptic globe so tantalizingly poised in the air of the Center.

      The reaction was practically instantaneous; so rapid that any ordinary mind could have perceived nothing at all; so rapid that even Kinnison’s consciousness recorded only a confusedly blurred impression. But he did see something: in that fleeting millionth of a second he sensed a powerful, malignant mental force; a force backing multiplex scanners and sub-ethereal stress-fields interlocked in peculiarly unidentifiable patterns.

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