The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith
at the chief communications officer. “He’s the one! Now let’s see you start something, you rat-faced clunker! There’s one real man around here, and he won’t let you touch me—ya-a-a!” She gave him a resounding Bronx cheer, and her escort swelled visibly.
“Is—that—so?” Kinnison sneered. “Get this, glamor-puss, and get it straight. I marked you for mine as soon as I saw you, and mine you’re going to be, whether you like it or not and no matter what anybody says or does about it. As for you, captain, you’re too late—I saw her first. And now, you red-headed tomato, come over here where you belong.”
She snuggled closer into the commander’s embrace and the big man turned purple.
“What d’you mean, too late!” he roared. “You took her away from the ship’s captain, didn’t you? You said that superior officers get first choice, didn’t you? I’m the boss here and I’m taking her away from you, get me? You’ll stand for it, too, Blakeslee, and like it. One word out of you and I’ll have you spread-eagled across the mouth of number six projector!”
“Superior officers don’t always get first choice,” Kinnison replied; with bitter, cold ferocity, but choosing his words with care. “It depends entirely on who the two men are.”
Now was the time to strike. Kinnison knew that if the commander kept his head, the lives of those valiant women were forfeit, and his own whole plan seriously endangered. He himself could get away, of course—but he could not see himself doing it under these conditions. No, he must goad the commander to a frenzy. And without swearing would be better—the ape was used to invectives that would raise blisters on armor plate. Mac would help. In fact, and without his suggestion, she was even then hard at work fomenting trouble between the two men.
“You don’t have to take that kind of stuff off of anybody, big boy,” she was whispering, urgently. “Don’t call in a crew to spread-eagle him, either; beam him out yourself. You’re a better man than he is, any time. Blast him down—that’ll show him who’s who around here!”
“When the inferior is such a man as I am, and the superior such a louse as you are;” the biting, contemptuously sneering voice went on without a break, “Such a bloated swine; such a mangy, low-down cur; such a pussy-gutted tub of lard; such a brainless, filthy spawn of the lowest dregs of the rottenest scum of space; such an utterly incompetent, self-opinionated, misbegotten abortion as you are .”
The outraged pirate, bellowing profanity in wildly mounting rage, tried to break in; but Kinnison-Blakeslee’s voice, if no louder than his, was far more penetrant.
“. then, in that case, the inferior keeps the red-headed wench himself. Put that on a tape, you white-livered coward, and eat it!”
Still bellowing, the fat man had turned and was leaping toward the arms cabinet.
“Blast him! Blast him down!” the nurse had been shrieking; and, as the raging commander neared the cabinet, no one noticed that her latest and loudest scream was “Kim! Blast him down! Don’t wait any longer—beam him before he gets a gun!”
But the Lensman did not act—yet. Although almost every man of the pirate crew stared spell-bound, Kinnison’s enslaved observer had for many seconds been jamming the sub-ether with Helmuth’s personal and urgent call. It was of almost vital importance to his plan that Helmuth himself should see the climax of this scene. Therefore Blakeslee stood immobile while his profanely raving superior reached the cabinet and tore it open.
CHAPTER 21
The Second Line
Blakeslee was already armed—Kinnison had seen to that—and as the base commander wrenched open the arms cabinet Helmuth’s private look-out set began to draw current. Helmuth himself was now looking on and the enslaved observer had already begun to trace his beam. Therefore as the furious pirate whirled around with raised DeLameter he faced one already ablaze; and in a matter of seconds there was only a charred and smoking heap where he had stood.
Kinnison wondered that Helmuth’s cold voice was not already snapping from the speaker, but he was soon to discover the reason for that silence. Unobserved by the Lensman, one of the observers had recovered sufficiently from his shocked amazement to turn in a riot alarm to the guard-room. Five armed men answered that call on the double, stopped and glanced around.
“Guards! Blast Blakeslee down!” Helmuth’s unmistakable voice blared from his speaker.
Obediently and manfully enough the five guards tried; and, had it actually been Blakeslee confronting them so defiantly, they probably would have succeeded. It was the body of the communications officer, it is true. The mind operating the muscles of that body, however, was the mind of Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, the fastest man with a hand-gun old Tellus had ever produced; keyed up, expecting the move, and with two DeLameters out and poised at hip! This was the being whom Helmuth was so nonchalantly ordering his minions to slay! Faster than any watching eye could follow, five bolts of lightning flicked from Blakeslee’s DeLameters. The last guard went down, his head a shrivelled cinder, before a single pirate bolt could be loosed. Then:
“You see, Helmuth,” Kinnison spoke conversationally to the board, his voice dripping vitriol, “Playing it safe from a distance, and making other men pull your chestnuts out of the fire, is a very fine trick as long as it works. But when it fails to work, as now, it puts you exactly where I want you. I, for one, have been for a long time completely fed up with taking orders from a mere voice; especially from the voice of one whose entire method of operation proves him to be the prize coward of the galaxy.”
“Observer! You other at the board!” snarled Helmuth, paying no attention to Kinnison’s barbed shafts. “Sound the assembly—armed!”
“No use, Helmuth, he’s stone deaf,” Kinnison explained, voice smoothly venomous. “I’m the only man in this base you can talk to, and you won’t be able to do even that very much longer.”
“And you really think that you can get away with this mutiny—this barefaced insubordination—this defiance of my authority?”
“Sure I can—that’s what I’ve been telling you. If you were here in person, or ever had been; if any of the boys had ever seen you, or had ever known you as anything except a disembodied voice; maybe I couldn’t. But, since nobody has ever seen even your face, that gives me a chance .”
In his distant base Helmuth’s mind had flashed over every aspect of this unheard-of situation. He decided to play for time; therefore, even as his hands darted to buttons here and there, he spoke:
“Do you want to see my face?” he demanded. “If you do see it, no power in the galaxy .”
“Skip it, Chief,” sneered Kinnison. “Don’t try to kid me into believing you wouldn’t kill me now, under any conditions, if you possibly could. As for your face, it makes no difference to me whether I ever see your ugly pan or not.”
“Well, you shall!” and Helmuth’s visage appeared; concentrating upon the rebellious officer a glare of such fury and such power that any ordinary man must have quailed. But not Blakeslee-Kinnison!
“Well! Not so bad, at that—the guy looks almost human!” Kinnison exclaimed, in the tone most carefully designed to drive even more frantic the helpless and inwardly raging pirate leader. “But I’ve got things to do. You can guess at what goes on around here from now on,” and in the blaze of a DeLameter Helmuth’s plate, set, and “eye” disappeared. Kinnison had also been playing for time, and his observer had checked and rechecked this second and highly important line to Helmuth’s ultra-secret base.
Then, throughout the fortress, there blared out the urgent assembly call, to which the Lensman added, verbally:
“This is a one hundred percent callout, including crews of ships in dock, regular base personnel, and all prisoners.