Читать книгу Second Stage Lensmen (Unabridged) - E. E. Smith - Страница 4

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Port Admiral Haynes, newly chosen President of the Galactic Council and by virtue of his double office the most powerful entity of Civilization, set instantly into motion the vast machinery which would make Tellus safe against any possible attack. He first called together his Board of Strategy; the same keen-minded tacticians who had helped him plan the invasion of the Second Galaxy and the eminently successful attack upon Jarnevon. Should Grand Fleet, many of whose component fleets had not yet reached their home planets, be recalled? Not yet—lots of time for that. Let them go home for a while first. The enemy would have to rebuild before they could attack, and there were many more pressing matters.

Scouting was most important. The planets near the galactic rim could take care of that. In fact, they should concentrate upon it, to the exclusion of everything else of warfare’s activities. Every approach to the galaxy—yes, the space between the two galaxies and as far into the Second Galaxy as it was safe to penetrate—should be covered as with a blanket. That way, they could not be surprised.

Kinnison, when he heard that, became vaguely uneasy. He did not really have a thought; it was as though he should have had one, but didn’t. Deep down, far off, just barely above the threshold of perception an indefinite, formless something obtruded itself upon his consciousness. Tug and haul at it as he would, he could not get the drift. There was something he ought to be thinking of, but what in all the iridescent hells from Vandemar to Alsakan was it? So, instead of flitting about upon his declared business, he stuck around; helping the General Staff—and thinking.

And Defense Plan BBT went from the idea men to the draftsmen, then to the engineers. This was to be, primarily, a war of planets. Ships could battle ships, fleets fleets; but, postulating good tactics upon the other side, no fleet, however armed and powered, could stop a planet. That had been proved. A planet had a mass of the order of magnitude of one times ten to the twenty fifth kilograms, and an intrinsic velocity of somewhere around forty kilometers per second. A hundred probably, relative to Tellus, if the planet came from the Second Galaxy. Kinetic energy, roughly, about five times ten to the forty first ergs. No, that was nothing for any possible fleet to cope with.

Also, the attacking planets would of course be inertialess until the last strategic instant. Very well, they must be made inert prematurely, when the Patrol wanted them that way, not the enemy. How? HOW? The Bergenholms upon those planets would be guarded with everything the Boskonians had.

The answer to that question, as worked out by the engineers, was something they called a “super-mauler”. It was gigantic, cumbersome, and slow; but little faster, indeed, than a free planet. It was like Helmuth’s fortresses of space, only larger. It was like the special defense cruisers of the Patrol, except that its screens were vastly heavier. It was like a regular mauler, except that it had only one weapon. All of its incomprehensible mass was devoted to one thing—power! It could defend itself; and, if it could get close enough to its objective, it could do plenty of damage—its dreadful primary was the first weapon ever developed capable of cutting a Q-type helix squarely in two.

And in various solar systems, uninhabitable and worthless planets were converted into projectiles. Dozens of them, possessing widely varying masses and intrinsic velocities. One by one they flitted away from their parent suns and took up positions—not too far away from our Solar System, but not too near.

And finally Kinnison, worrying at his tantalizing thought as a dog worries a bone, crystallized it. Prosaically enough, it was an extremely short and flamboyantly waggling pink skirt which catalyzed the reaction; which acted as the seed of the crystallization. Pink—a Chickladorian—Xylpic the Navigator—Overlords of Delgon. Thus flashed the train of thought, culminating in:

“Oh, so that’s it!” he exclaimed, aloud. “A TUBE—just as sure as hell’s a mantrap!” He whistled raucously at a taxi, took the wheel himself, and broke—or at least bent—most of the city’s traffic ordinances in getting to Haynes’ office.

The Port Admiral was always busy, but he was never too busy to see Gray Lensman Kinnison; especially when the latter demanded the right of way in such terms as he used then.

“The whole defense set-up is screwy,” Kinnison declared. “I thought I was overlooking a bet, but I couldn’t locate it. Why should they fight their way through inter-galactic space and through sixty thousand parsecs of planet-infested galaxy when they don’t have to?” he demanded. “Think of the length of the supply line, with our bases placed to cut it in a hundred places, no matter how they route it. It doesn’t make sense. They’d have to out-weigh us in an almost impossibly high ratio, unless they have an improbably superior armament.”

“Check.” The old warrior was entirely unperturbed. “Surprised you didn’t see that long ago. We did. I’ll be very much surprised if they attack at all.”

“But you’re going ahead with all this just as though .”

“Certainly. Something may happen, and we can’t be caught off guard. Besides, it’s good training for the boys. Helps morale, no end.” Haynes’ nonchalant air disappeared and he studied the younger man keenly for moments. “But Mentor’s warning certainly meant something, and you said ‘when they don’t have to’. But even if they go clear around the galaxy to the other side—an impossibly long haul—we’re covered. Tellus is far enough in so they can’t possibly take us by surprise. So—spill it!”

“How about a hyper-spatial tube? They know exactly where we are, you know.”

“Um . m . m.” Haynes was taken aback. “Never thought of it . possible, distinctly a possibility. A duodec bomb, say, just far enough underground .”

“Nobody else thought of it, either, until just now,” Kinnison broke in. “However, I’m not afraid of duodec—don’t see how they could control it accurately enough at this three-dimensional distance. Too deep, it wouldn’t explode at all. What I don’t like to think of, though, is a negasphere. Or a planet, perhaps.”

“Ideas? Suggestions?” the admiral snapped.

“No—I don’t know anything about that stuff. How about putting our Lenses on Cardynge?”

“That’s a thought!” and in seconds they were in communication with Sir Austin Cardynge, Earth’s mightiest mathematical brain.

“Kinnison, how many times must I tell you that I am not to be interrupted?” the aged scientist’s thought was a crackle of fury. “How can I concentrate upon vital problems if every young whippersnapper in the System is to perpetrate such abominable, such outrageous intrusions .”

“Hold it, Sir Austin—hold everything!” Kinnison soothed. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have intruded if it hadn’t been a matter of life or death. But it would be worse intrusion, wouldn’t it, if the Boskonians sent a planet about the size of Jupiter—or a negasphere—through one of their extra-dimensional vortices into your study? That’s exactly what they’re figuring on doing.”

“What-what-what?” Cardynge snapped, like a string of firecrackers. He quieted down, then, and thought. And Sir Austin Cardynge could think, upon occasion and when he felt so inclined; could think in the abstruse symbology of pure mathematics with a cogency equaled by few minds in the universe. Both Lensmen perceived those thoughts, but neither could understand or follow them. No mind not a member of the Conference of Scientists could have done so.

“They can’t!” of a sudden the mathematician cackled, gleefully disdainful. “Impossible—quite definitely impossible. There are laws governing such things, Kinnison, my impetuous and ignorant young friend. The terminus of the necessary hyper-tube could not be established within such proximity to the mass of the sun. This is shown by .”

“Never mind the proof—the fact is enough,” Kinnison interposed, hastily. “How close to the sun could it be established?”

“I couldn’t say, off-hand,” came the cautiously scientific reply. “More than one astronomical unit, certainly, but the computation of the exact distance would require some little time. It would, however, be an interesting, if minor, problem. I will solve it for you, if you like, and advise you of the exact minimum distance.”

“Please do so—thanks a million,” and the Lensmen disconnected.

“The conceited old goat!” Haynes snorted. “I’d like to smack him down!”

“I’ve felt like it more than once, but it wouldn’t do any good. You’ve got to handle him with gloves—besides, you can afford to make concessions to a man with a brain like that.”

“I suppose so. But how about that infernal tube? Knowing that it can not be set up within or very near Tellus helps some, but not enough. We’ve got to know where it is—if it is. Can you detect it?”

“Yes. That is, I can’t, but the specialists can, I think. Wise of Medon would know more about that than anyone else. Why wouldn’t it be a thought to call him over here?”

“It would that,” and it was done.

Wise of Medon and his staff came, conferred, and departed.

Sir Austin Cardynge solved his minor problem, reporting that the minimum distance from the sun’s center to the postulated center of the terminus of the vortex—actually, the geometrical origin of the three-dimensional figure which was the hyper-plane of intersection—was one point two six four seven, approximately, astronomical units; the last figure being tentative and somewhat uncertain because of the rapidly-moving masses of Jupiter .

Haynes cut the tape—he had no time for an hour of mathematical dissertation—and called in his execs.

“Full-globe detection of hyper-spatial tubes,” he directed, crisply. “Kinnison will tell you exactly what he wants. Hipe!”

Shortly thereafter, five-man speedsters, plentifully equipped with new instruments, flashed at full drive along courses carefully calculated to give the greatest possible coverage in the shortest possible time.

Unobtrusively the loose planets closed in; close enough so that at least three or four of them could reach any designated point in one minute or less. The outlying units of Grand Fleet, too, were pulled in. That fleet was not actually mobilized—yet—but every vessel in it was kept in readiness for instant action.

“No trace,” came the report from the Medonian surveyors, and Haynes looked at Kinnison, quizzically.

“QX, chief—glad of it,” the Gray Lensman answered the unspoken query. “If it was up, that would mean they were on the way. Hope they don’t get a trace for two months yet. But I’m next-to-positive that that’s the way they’re coming and the longer they put it off the better—there’s a possible new projector that will take a bit of doping out. I’ve got to do a flit—can I have the Dauntless?”

“Sure—anything you want—she’s yours anyway.”

Kinnison went. And, wonder of wonders, he took Sir Austin Cardynge with him. From solar system to solar system, from planet to planet, the mighty Dauntless hurtled at the incomprehensible velocity of her full maximum blast; and every planet so visited was the home world of one of the most cooperative—or, more accurately, one of the least non-cooperative—members of the Conference of Scientists. For days brilliant but more or less unstable minds struggled with new and obdurate problems; struggled heatedly and with friction, as was their wont. Few if any of those mighty intellects would have really enjoyed a quietly studious session, even had such a thing been possible.

Then Kinnison returned his guests to their respective homes and shot his flying warship-laboratory back to Prime Base. And, even before the Dauntless landed, the first few hundreds of a fleet which was soon to be numbered in the millions of meteor-miners’ boats began working like beavers to build a new and exactly-designed system of asteroid belts of iron meteors.

And soon, as such things go, new structures began to appear here and there in the void. Comparatively small, these things were; tiny, in fact, compared to the Patrol’s maulers. Unarmed, too; carrying nothing except defensive screen. Each was, apparently, simply a power-house; stuffed skin full of atomic motors, exciters, intakes, and generators of highly peculiar design and pattern. Unnoticed except by gauntly haggard Thorndyke and his experts, who kept dashing from one of the strange craft to another, each took its place in a succession of precisely-determined relationships to the sun.

Between the orbits of Mars and of Jupiter, the new, sharply-defined rings of asteroids moved smoothly. Most of Grand Fleet formed an enormous hollow hemisphere. Throughout all nearby space the surveying speedsters and flitters rushed madly hither and yon. Uselessly, apparently, for not one needle of the vortex-detectors stirred from its zero-pin.

As nearly as possible at the Fleet’s center there floated the flagship. Technically the Z9M9Z, socially the Directrix, ordinarily simply GFHQ, that ship had been built specifically to control the operations of a million separate flotillas. At her million-plug board stood—they had no need, ever, to sit—two hundred blocky, tentacle-armed Rigellians. They were waiting, stolidly motionless.

Intergalactic space remained empty. Interstellar ditto, ditto. The flitters flitted, fruitlessly.

But if everything out there in the threatened volume of space seemed quiet and serene, things in the Z9M9Z were distinctly otherwise. Haynes and Kinnison, upon whom the heaviest responsibilities rested, were tensely ill at ease.

The admiral had his formation made, but he did not like it at all. It was too big, too loose, too cumbersome. The Boskonian fleet might appear anywhere, and it would take him far, far too long to get any kind of a fighting formation made, anywhere. So he worried. Minutes dragged—he wished that the pirates would hurry up and start something!

Kinnison was even less easy in his mind. He was not afraid of negaspheres, even if Boskonia should have them; but he was afraid of fortified, mobile planets. The super-maulers were big and powerful, of course, but they very definitely were not planets; and the big, new idea was mighty hard to jell. He didn’t like to bother Thorndyke by calling him—the master technician had troubles of his own—but the reports that were coming in were none too cheery. The excitation was wrong or the grid action was too unstable or the screen potentials were too high or too low or too something. Sometimes they got a concentration, but it was just as apt as not to be a spread flood instead of a tight beam. To Kinnison, therefore, the minutes fled like seconds—but every minute that space remained clear was one more precious minute gained.

Then, suddenly, it happened. A needle leaped into significant figures. Relays clicked, a bright red light flared into being, a gong clanged out its raucous warning. A fractional instant later ten thousand other gongs in ten thousand other ships came brazenly to life as the discovering speedster automatically sent out its number and position; and those other ships—surveyors all—flashed toward that position and dashed frantically about. Theirs the task to determine, in the least number of seconds possible, the approximate location of the center of emergence.

For Port Admiral Haynes, canny old tactician that he was, had planned his campaign long since. It was standing plain in his tactical tank—to englobe the entire space of emergence of the foe and to blast them out of existence before they could maneuver. If he could get into formation before the Boskonians appeared it would be a simple slaughter—if not, it might be otherwise. Hence seconds counted; and hence he had had high-speed computers working steadily for weeks at the computation of courses for every possible center of emergence.

“Get me that center—fast!” Haynes barked at the surveyors, already blasting at maximum.

It came in. The chief computer yelped a string of numbers. Selected loose-leaf binders were pulled down, yanked apart, and distributed on the double, leaf by leaf. And:

“Get it over there! Especially the shock-globe!” the Port Admiral yelled.

For he himself could direct the engagement only in broad; details must be left to others. To be big enough to hold in any significant relationship the millions of lights representing vessels, fleets, planets, structures, and objectives, the Operations tank of the Directrix had to be seven hundred feet in diameter; and it was a sheer physical impossibility for any ordinary mind either to perceive that seventeen million cubic feet of space as a whole or to make any sense at all out of the stupendously bewildering maze of multi-colored lights crawling and flashing therein.

Kinnison and Worsel had handled Grand Fleet Operations during the battle of Jarnevon, but they had discovered that they could have used some help. Four Rigellian Lensmen had been training for months for that all-important job, but they were not yet ready. Therefore the two old masters and one new one now labored at GFO: three tremendous minds, each supplying something that the others lacked. Kinnison of Tellus, with his hard, flat driving urge, his unconquerable, unstoppable will to do. Worsel of Velantia, with the prodigious reach and grasp which had enabled him, even without the Lens, to scan mentally a solar system eleven light-years distant Tregonsee of Rigel IV, with the vast, calm certainty, the imperturbable poise peculiar to his long-lived, solemn race. Second Stage Lensmen all, graduates of Arisian advanced training; minds linked, basically, together into one mind by a wide-open three-way; superficially free, each to do his assigned third of the gigantic task.

Smoothly, effortlessly, those three linked minds went to work at the admiral’s signal. Orders shot out along tight beams of thought to the stolid hundreds of Rigellian switchboard operators, and thence along communicator beams to the pilot rooms, wherever stationed. Flotillas, squadrons, sub-fleets flashed smoothly toward their newly-assigned positions. Super-maulers moved ponderously toward theirs. The survey ships, their work done, vanished. They had no business anywhere near what was coming next. Small they were, and defenseless; a speedster’s screens were as efficacious as so much vacuum against the forces about to be unleashed. The power houses also moved. Maintaining rigidly their cryptic mathematical relationships to each other and the sun, they went as a whole into a new one with respect to the circling rings of tightly-packed meteors and the invisible, non-existent mouth of the Boskonian vortex.

Then, before Haynes’ formation was nearly complete, the Boskonian fleet materialized. Just that—one instant space was empty; the next it was full of warships. A vast globe of battle-wagons, in perfect fighting formation. They were not free, but inert and deadly.

Haynes swore viciously under his breath, the Lensmen pulled themselves together more tensely; but no additional orders were given. Everything that could possibly be done was already being done.

Whether the Boskonians expected to meet a perfectly-placed fleet or whether they expected to emerge into empty space, to descend upon a defenseless Tellus, is not known or knowable. It is certain, however, that they emerged in the best possible formation to meet anything that could be brought to bear. It is also certain that, had the enemy had a Z9M9Z and a Kinnison-Worsel-Tregonsee combination scanning its Operations tank, the outcome might well have been otherwise than it was.

For that ordinarily insignificant delay, that few minutes of time necessary for the Boskonians’ orientation, was exactly that required for those two hundred smoothly-working Rigellians to get Civilization’s shock-globe into position.

A million beams, primaries raised to the hellish heights possible only to Medonian conductors and insulation, lashed out almost as one. Screens stiffened to the urge of every generable watt of defensive power. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck and struck and struck again. Q-type helices bored, gouged, and searingly bit. Rods and cones, planes and shears of incredibly condensed pure force clawed, tore, and ground in mad abandon. Torpedo after torpedo, charged to the very skin with duodec, loosed its horribly detonant cargo against flinching wall-shields, in such numbers and with such violence as to fill all circumambient space with an atmosphere of almost planetary density.

Screen after screen, wall-shield after wall-shield, in their hundreds and their thousands, went down. A full eighth of the Patrol’s entire count of battleships was wrecked, riddled, blown apart, or blasted completely out of space in the paralyzingly cataclysmic violence of the first, seconds-long, mind-shaking, space-wracking encounter. Nor could it have been otherwise; for this encounter had not been at battle range. Not even at point-blank range; the warring monsters of the void were packed practically screen to screen.

But not a man died—upon Civilization’s side at least—even though practically all of the myriad of ships composing the inner sphere, the shock-globe, was lost. For they were automatics, manned by robots; what little superintendence was necessary had been furnished by remote control. Indeed it is possible, although perhaps not entirely probable, that the shock-globe of the foe was similarly manned.

That first frightful meeting gave time for the reserves of the Patrol to get there, and it was then that the superior Operations control of the Z9M9Z made itself tellingly felt. Ship for ship, beam for beam, screen for screen, the Boskonians were, perhaps equal to the Patrol; but they did not have the perfection of control necessary for unified action. The field was too immense, the number of contending units too enormously vast. But the mind of each of the three Second-Stage Lensmen read aright the flashing lights of his particular volume of the gigantic tank and spread their meaning truly in the infinitely smaller space-model beside which Port Admiral Haynes, Master Tactician, stood. Scanning the entire space of battle as a whole, he rapped out general orders—orders applying, perhaps, to a hundred or to five hundred planetary fleets. Kinnison and his fellows broke these orders down for the operators, who in turn told the admirals and vice-admirals of the fleets what to do. They gave detailed orders to the units of their commands, and the line officers, knowing exactly what to do and precisely how to do it, did it with neatness and dispatch.

There was no doubt, no uncertainty, no indecision or wavering. The line officers, even the admirals, knew nothing, could know nothing of the progress of the engagement as a whole. But they had worked under the Z9M9Z before. They knew that the maestro Haynes did know the battle as a whole. They knew that he was handling them as carefully and as skillfully as a master at chess plays his pieces upon the square-filled board. They knew that Kinnison or Worsel or Tregonsee was assigning no task too difficult of accomplishment. They knew that they could not be taken by surprise, attacked from some unexpected and unprotected direction; knew that, although in those hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of space there were hundreds of thousands of highly inimical and exceedingly powerful ships of war, none of them were or shortly could be in position to do them serious harm. If there had been, they would have been pulled out of there, beaucoup fast. They were as safe as anyone in a warship in such a war could expect, or even hope, to be. Therefore they acted instantly; directly, whole-heartedly and efficiently; and it was the Boskonians who were taken, repeatedly and by the thousands, by surprise.

For the enemy, as has been said, did not have the Patrol’s smooth perfection of control. Thus several of Civilization’s fleets, acting in full synchronization, could and repeatedly did rush upon one unit of the foe; englobing it, blasting it out of existence, and dashing back to stations; all before the nearest-by fleets of Boskone knew even that a threat was being made. Thus ended the second phase of the battle, the engagement of the two Grand Fleets, with the few remaining thousands of Boskone’s battleships taking refuge upon or near the phalanx of planets which had made up their center.

Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered; with fixed-mount weapons impossible of mounting upon a lesser mobile base, with fixed-mount intakes and generators which only planetary resources could excite or feed. Galactic Civilization’s war-vessels fell back. Attacking a full-armed planet was no part of their job. And as they fell back the super-maulers moved ponderously up and went to work. This was their dish; for this they had been designed. Tubes, lances, stillettoes of unthinkable energies raved against their mighty screens; bouncing off, glancing away, dissipating themselves in space-torturing discharges as they hurled themselves upon the nearest ground. In and in the monsters bored, inexorably taking up their positions directly over the ultra-protected domes which, their commanders knew, sheltered the vitally important Bergenholms and controls. They then loosed forces of their own. Forces of such appalling magnitude as to burn out in a twinkling of an eye projector-shells of a refractoriness to withstand for ten full seconds the maximum output of a first-class battleship’s primary batteries!

The resultant beam was of very short duration, but of utterly intolerable poignancy. No material substance could endure it even momentarily. It pierced instantly the hardest, tightest wall-shield known to the scientists of the Patrol. It was the only known thing which could cut or rupture the ultimately stubborn fabric of a Q-type helix. Hence it is not to be wondered at that as those incredible needles of ravening energy stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again at Boskonian domes every man of the Patrol, even Kimball Kinnison, fully expected those domes to go down.

But those domes held. And those fixed-mount projectors hurled back against the super-maulers forces at the impact of which course after course of fierce-driven defensive screen flamed through the spectrum and went down.

“Back! Get them back!” Kinnison whispered, white-lipped, and the attacking structures sullenly, stubbornly gave way.

“Why?” gritted Haynes. “They’re all we’ve got.”

“You forget the new one, chief—give us a chance.”

“What makes you think it’ll work?” the old admiral flashed the searing thought. “It probably won’t—and if it doesn’t .”

“If it doesn’t,” the younger man shot back, “we’re no worse off than now to use the maulers. But we’ve got to use the sunbeam now while those planets are together and before they start toward Tellus.”

“QX,” the admiral assented; and, as soon as the Patrol’s maulers were out of the way:

“Verne?” Kinnison flashed a thought. “We can’t crack ’em. Looks like it’s up to you—what do you say?”

“Jury-rigged—don’t know whether she’ll light a cigarette or not—but here she comes!”

The sun, shining so brightly, darkened almost to the point of invisibility. War-vessels of the enemy disappeared, each puffing out into a tiny but brilliant sparkle of light.

Then, before the beam could effect the enormous masses of the planets, the engineers lost it. The sun flashed up—dulled—brightened—darkened—wavered. The beam waxed and waned irregularly; the planets began to move away under the urgings of their now thoroughly scared commanders.

Again, while millions upon millions of tensely straining Patrol officers stared into their plates, haggard Thorndyke and his sweating crews got the sunbeam under control—and, in a heart-stopping wavering fashion, held it together. It flared—sputtered—ballooned out—but very shortly, before they could get out of its way, the planets began to glow. Ice-caps melted, then boiled. Oceans boiled, their surfaces almost exploding into steam. Mountain ranges melted and flowed sluggishly down into valleys. The Boskonian domes of force went down and stayed down.

“QX, Kim—let be,” Haynes ordered. “No use overdoing it. Not bad-looking planets; maybe we can use them for something.”

The sun brightened to its wonted splendor, the planets began visibly to cool—even the Titanic forces then at work had heated those planetary masses only superficially.

The battle was over.

“What in all the purple hells of Palain did you do, Haynes, and how?” demanded the Z9M9Z’s captain.

“He used the whole damned solar system as a vacuum tube!” Haynes explained, gleefully. “Those power stations out there, with all their motors and intake screens, are simply the power leads. The asteroid belts, and maybe some of the planets, are the grids and plates. The sun is .”

“Hold on, chief!” Kinnison broke in. “That isn’t quite it. You see, the directive field set up by the .”

“Hold on yourself!” Haynes ordered, briskly. “You’re too damned scientific, just like Sawbones Lacy. What do Rex and I care about technical details that we can’t understand anyway? The net result is what counts—and that was to concentrate upon those planets practically the whole energy output of the sun. Wasn’t it?”

“Well, that’s the main idea,” Kinnison conceded. “The energy equivalent, roughly, of four million one hundred and fifty thousand tons per second of disintegrating matter.”

“Whew!” the captain whistled. “No wonder it frizzled ’em up.”

“I can say now, I think, with no fear of successful contradiction, that Tellus is strongly held,” Haynes stated, with conviction. “What now, Kim old son?”

“I think they’re done, for a while,” the Gray Lensman pondered. “Cardynge can’t communicate through the tube, so probably they can’t; but if they managed to slip an observer through they may know how almighty close they came to licking us. On the other hand, Verne says that he can get the bugs out of the sunbeam in a couple of weeks—and when he does, the next zwilnik he cuts loose at is going to get a surprise.”

“I’ll say so,” Haynes agreed. “We’ll keep the surveyors on the prowl, and some of the Fleet will always be close by. Not all of it, of course—we’ll adopt a schedule of reliefs—but enough of it to be useful. That ought to be enough, don’t you think?”

“I think so—yes,” Kinnison answered, thoughtfully. “I’m just about positive that they won’t be in shape to start anything here again for a long time. And I had better get busy, sir, on my own job—I’ve got to put out a few jets.”

“I suppose so,” Haynes admitted.

For Tellus was strongly held, now—so strongly held that Kinnison felt free to begin again the search upon whose successful conclusion depended, perhaps, the outcome of the struggle between Boskonia and Galactic Civilization.