E. E. SMITH Boxed Set. E. E. Smith
them, not consciously, but buried deep in the subconscious; specters which seldom or never rise above the threshold of perception. Every sentient being has, if not such specters as these, at least a few active or latent dislikes, dreads, or outright fears. This is true, no matter how quiet and peaceful a life the being has led.
These pirates, however, were the scum of space. They were beings of hard and criminal lives and of violent and lawless passions. Their hates and conscience-searing deeds had been legion, their count of crimes long, black, and hideous. Therefore, slight indeed was the effort required to locate in their conscious minds—to say nothing of the noxious depths of their subconscious ones—visions of horror fit to blast stronger intellects than theirs. And that is exactly what the Arisian Watchman did. From each pirate’s total mind, a veritable charnel pit, he extracted the foulest, most unspeakable dregs, the deeply hidden things of which the subject was in the greatest fear. Of these things he formed a whole of horror incomprehensible and incredible, and this ghastly whole he made incarnate and visible to the pirate who was its unwilling parent; as visible as though it were composed of flesh and blood, of copper and steel. Is it any wonder that each member of that outlaw crew, seeing such an abhorrent materialization, went instantly mad?
It is of no use to go into the horribly monstrous shapes of the things, even were it possible; for each of them was visible to only one man, and none of them was visible to those who looked on from the safety of the distant base. To them the entire crew simply abandoned their posts and attacked each other, senselessly and in insane frenzy, with whatever weapons came first to hand. Indeed, many of them fought bare-handed, weapons hanging unused in their belts, gouging, beating, clawing, biting until life had been rived horribly away. In other parts of the ship DeLameters flamed briefly, bars crashed crunchingly, knives and axes sheared and trenchantly bit. And soon it was over—almost. The pilot was still alive, unmoving and rigid at his controls.
Then he, too, moved; rapidly and purposefully. He cut in the Bergenholm, spun the ship around, shoved her drivers up to maximum blast, and steadied her into an exact course—and when Helmuth read that course even his iron nerves failed him momentarily. For the ship was flying, not for its own home port, but directly toward Grand Base, the jealously secret planet whose spatial coordinates neither that pilot nor any other creature of the pirates’ rank and file had ever known!
Helmuth snapped out orders, to which the pilot gave no heed. His voice—for the first time in his career—rose to a howl, but the pilot still paid no attention. Instead, eyes bulging with horror and fingers curved tensely into veritable talons, he reared upright upon his bench and leaped as though to clutch and to rend some unutterably appalling foe. He leaped over his board into thin and empty air. He came down a-sprawl in a maze of naked, high-potential bus-bars. His body vanished in a flash of searing flame and a cloud of thick and greasy smoke.
The bus-bars cleared themselves of their gruesome “short” and the great ship, manned now entirely by corpses, bored on.
“. stinking klebots, the lily-livered cowards!” the department head, who had also been yelling orders, was still pounding his desk and yelling. “If they’re that afraid—go crazy and kill each other without being touched—I’ll have to go myself .”
“No, Sansteed,” Helmuth interrupted curtly. “You will not have to go. There is, after all, I think, something there—something that you may not be able to handle. You see, you missed the one essential key fact.” He referred to the course, the setting of which had shaken him to the very core.
“Let be,” he silenced the other’s flood of question and protest. “It would serve no purpose to detail it to you now. Have the ship taken back to port.”
Helmuth knew now that it was not superstition that made spacemen shun Arisia. He knew that, from his standpoint at least, there was something very seriously amiss. But he had not the faintest conception of the real situation, nor of the real and terrible power which the Arisians could, and upon occasion would, wield.
CHAPTER 12
Kinnison Brings Home the Bacon
Helmuth sat at his desk, thinking; thinking with all the coldly analytical precision of which he was capable.
This Lensman was both powerful and tremendously resourceful. The cosmic-energy drive, developed by the science of a world about which the Patrol knew nothing, was Boskone’s one great item of superiority. If the Patrol could be kept in ignorance of that drive the struggle would be over in a year; the culture of the iron hand would be unchallenged throughout the galaxy. If, however, the Patrol should succeed in learning Boskone’s top secret, the war between the two cultures might well be prolonged indefinitely. This Lensman knew that secret and was still at large, of that he was all too certain. Therefore the Lensman must be destroyed. And that brought up the Lens.
What was it? A peculiar bauble indeed; impossible of duplication because of some subtlety of intra-atomic arrangement, and possessing peculiar and dire potentialities. The old belief that no one except a Lensman could wear a Lens was true—he had proved it. The Lens must account in some way for the outstanding ability of the Lensman, and it must tie in, somehow, with both Arisia and the thought-screens. The Lens was the one thing possessed by the Patrol which his own forces did not have. He must and would have it, for it was undoubtedly a powerful arm. Not to be compared, of course, with their own monopoly of cosmic energy—but that monopoly was now threatened, and seriously. That Lensman must be destroyed.
But how? It was easy to say “Comb Trenco, inch by inch,” but doing it would prove a Herculean task. Suppose that the Lensman should again escape, in that volume of so fantastically distorted media? He had already escaped twice, in much clearer ether than Trenco’s. However, if his information should never get back to Prime Base little harm would be done, and ships had been thrown around every solar system the Lensman could reach. Not even a grain-of-dust meteorite could pass those screens without detection. So much for the Lensman. Now about getting the secret of the Lens.
Again, how? There was something upon Arisia; something connected in some way with the Lens and with thought—possibly also with those thought-screens .
His mind flashed back over the unorthodox manner of his acquirement of those devices—unorthodox in that he had neither stolen them nor murdered their inventor. A person had come to him with pass-words and credentials which could not be ignored; had handed him a heavily-sealed container, which, he said, had come from a planet named Ploor; had remarked casually “Thought-screen data—you’ll know when you need ’em”; and had gone.
Whatever the Arisian was, it had mental power; of that fact there could be no doubt. Out of the full sphere of space, what was the mathematical probability that the pilot of that deathship would have set by accident his course so exactly upon Grand Base? Vanishingly small. Treachery would not explain the facts—not only had the pilot been completely insane when he laid the course, but also he did not know where Grand Base was.
As an explanation mental force alone seemed fantastic, but no other as yet presented itself as a possibility. Also, it was supported by the unbelievable, the absolutely definite refusal of Gildersleeve’s normally fearless crew even to approach the planet. It would take an unheard-of mental force so to affect such crime-hardened veterans.
Helmuth was not one to underestimate an enemy. Was there a man beneath that dome, save himself, of sufficient mental caliber to undertake the now necessary mission to Arisia? There was not. He himself had the finest mind on the planet; else that other had deposed him long since and had sat at the control desk himself. He was sublimely confident that no outside thought could break down his definitely opposed will—and besides, there were the thought-screens, the secret of which he had not as yet shared with anyone. The time had come to use those screens.
It has already been made clear that Helmuth was not a fool. No more was he a coward. If he himself could best of all his force do a thing, that thing he did; with the coldly ruthless efficiency that marked alike his every action and his every thought.