Authors: E. E. Smith
"Helmuth, speaking for Boskone!” roared from the general-wave unscrambler.
"Commanders of all vessels, of every class and tonnage, upon whatever mission bound, attention! The vessel referred to in our previous message has been destroyed, but it is feared that some or all of her personnel were allowed to escape. Every unit of that personnel must be killed before he has opportunity to communicate with any Patrol base.
Therefore cancel your present orders, whatever they may be, and proceed at maximum blast to the region previously designated. Scour that entire volume of space. Beam out of existence every vessel whose papers do not account unquestionably for every intelligent being aboard. Investigate every possible avenue of escape. More detailed orders will be given each of you upon your nearer approach to the neighborhood under search."
Space-suited complete except for helmets, and with those ready to hand, Kinnison and vanBuskirk sat in the tiny control room of their lifeboat as it .drifted inert through interstellar apace. Kinnison was poring over charts taken from the
Brittania's
pilot room, the sergeant was gazing idly into a detector plate.
"No clear ether yet, I don't suppose," the captain remarked, as he rolled up a chart and tossed it aside.
"No let-up for a second, they're not taking any chances at all. Found out where we are? Alsakan ought to be hereabouts somewhere, hadn't it?"
"Yeah. Not close, though, even for a ship-out of the question for us. Nothing much inhabited around here, either, to say nothing of being civilized. Scarcely one to the block.
Don't think I've ever been out here before, have you?"
"0ff my beat entirely. How long do you figure it'll be before it's safe for us to blast off?"
"Can't start blasting until your plates are clear. Anything we can detect can detect us as soon as we start putting out power."
"We may be in for a spell of waiting, then . . . . . " VanBuskirk broke off suddenly and his tone changed to one of tense excitement. "Help, Noshabkeming, help! Look at that I"
"Blinding blue blazes!” Kinnison exclaimed, staring into the plate. "With all macro-universal space and all eternity to play around in, why in all space's hells did she have to come back here and now?"
For there, right in their laps, not a hundred miles away, lay the
Brittania
and her two pirate captors!
"Better go free,, hadn't we?" whispered vanBuskirk.
"Damn!” Kinnison grunted. "At this range they'd spot us in a split second. Acting like a hunk of loose metal's our only chance. We'll be able to dodge any flying chunks, I think . . . . . there she goes!”
From their coign of vantage the two Patrolmen saw their gallant ship's terrific end, saw the òne pirate vessel suffer collision with the flying fragment, saw the other escape inertialess, saw her disappear.
The inert pirate vessel had now almost exactly the same velocity as the lifeboat, both in speed and in direction, only very slowly were the large craft and the small approaching each other. Kinnison stood rigid, staring into his plate, his nervous hands grasping the switches whose closing, at the first sign of detection. would render them inertialess and would pour full blast into their driving projectors. But minute after minute passed and nothing happened.
"Why don't they do something?" he burst out, finally. "They know we're here --
there isn't a detector made that could be badly enough out of order to miss us at this distance. Why, they can see us from there, with no detectors at all !"
"Asleep, unconscious, or dead," vanBuskirk diagnosed, "and they're not asleep.
Believe me, Kim, that ship was nudged. She must've been hit hard enough to lay her whole crew out cold . .-. . . and say, she's got a standard emergency inlet port -- how about it, huh?"
Kinnison's mind leaped eagerly at the daring suggestion of his subordinate, but he did not reply at once. Their first, their
only
duty, concerned the safety of two spools of tape. But if the lifeboat lay there inert until the pirates regained control of their craft, detection and capture were certain.
The same fate was as certain should they attempt flight with all nearby space so full of enemy fliers. Therefore, hare-brained though it appeared at first glance, vanBuskirk's wild idea was actually the safest course!
"All right, Bus, well try it. We'll take a chance on going free and using a tenth of a dyne of drive for a hundredth of a second. Get into the lock with your magnets."
The lifeboat flashed against the pirate's armored side and the sergeant, by deftly manipulating his two small hand-magnets, worked it rapidly along the steel plating, toward the driving jets. There, in the conventional location just forward of the main driving projectors, was indeed the emergency inlet port, with its Galactic Standard controls.
In a few minutes the two warriors were inside, dashing toward the control room.
There Kinnison glanced at the board and heaved a sigh of relief.
"Fine! Same type as the one we studied. Same race, too," he went on, eyeing the motionless forms scattered about the floor. Seizing one of the bodies, he propped it against a panel thus obscuring a multiple lens.
"That's the eye overlooking the control room," he explained unnecessarily. "We can't cut their headquarters vial-beams without creating suspicion, but we don't want them looking around in here until after we've done a little stage-setting."
“But they’ll get suspicious anyway when we go free," vanBuskirk protested.
"Sure, but we'll arrange for that later. First thing we've got to do is to make sure that all the crew except possibly one or two in here, are really dead. Don't beam unless you have to, we want to make it look as though everybody got killed or fatally injured in the crash."
A complete tour of the vessel, with a grim and distasteful accompaniment, was made. Not all of the pirates were dead, or even disabled, but, unarmored as they were and taken completely by surprise, the survivors could offer but little resistance. A cargo port was opened and the
Brittania's
lifeboat was drawn inside. Then back to the control room, where Kinnison picked up another body and strode to the main panels.
'This fellow," he announced, 'was hurt badly, but managed to get to the board. He threw in the free switch, like this, and then full-blast drive, so. Then he pulled himself over to the steering globe and tried to lay course back toward headquarters but couldn't quite make it. He died with the course set right there. Not exactly toward Sol, you notice – that would be too much of a coincidence -- but close enough to help a lot. His bracelet got caught in the guard, like this. There is clear evidence as to exactly what happened. Now we'll get out of range of that eye, and let the body that's covering it float away naturally."
'Now what?' asked vanBuskirk, after the two had hidden themselves.
"Nothing whatever until we have to," was the reply. "Wish we could go on like this for a couple of weeks, but no chance. Headquarters will get curious pretty quick as to why we're shoving off."
Even as he spoke a furious burst of noise erupted from the communicator, a noise which meant.
"Vessel F47U5961 Where are you going, and why? Report!"
At that brusk command one of the still forms struggled weakly to its knees and tried to frame words, but fell back dead.
"Perfect!” Kinnison breathed into vanBuskirk's ear. "Couldn't have been better.
Now they'll probably take their time about rounding us up . . . . . maybe we can get back to somewhere near Tellus, after all . . . . . Listen, here comes some more." The communicator was again sending. "See if you can get a line on their transmitter."
"If there are any survivors able to report, do so at once!” Kinnison understood the dynamic cone to say. Then, the voice moderating as though the speaker had turned from his microphone to someone nearby, it went on, "No one answers, sir. This, you know, is the ship that was lying closest to the new Patrol ship when she exploded, so close that her navigator did not have time to go free before collision with the debris. The crew were apparently all killed or incapacitated by the shock."
"If any of the officers survive have them brought in for trial," a more distant voice commanded. savagely. Boskone has no use for bunglers except to serve as examples.
Have the ship seized and returned here as soon as possible."
"Could you trace it, Bus?" Kinnison demanded. "Even one line on their headquarters would be mighty useful."
"No, it came in scrambled -- couldn't separate it from the rest of the static out there. Now what?"
"Now we eat and sleep. Particularly and most emphatically, we sleep."
"Watches?"
"No need, I'll be awakened in plenty of time if anything happens. My Lens, you know."
They ate ravenously and slept prodigiously, then ate and slept again. Rested and refreshed, they studied charts, but vanBuskirk's mind was very evidently not upon the maps before them.
"You understand that jargon, and it doesn't even sound like a language to me," he pondered. "It's the Lens,. of course. Maybe it's something that shouldn't be talked about?"
"No secret -- not among us, at least," Kinnison assured him. 'The Lens receives as pure thought any pattern of force which represents, or is in any way connected with, thought. My brain receives this thought in English, since that is my native language. At the same time my ears are practically out of circuit, so that I actually hear the English language instead of whatever noise is being made. I do not hear the foreign sounds at all. Therefore I haven't the slightest idea what the pirates' language sounds like, since I have never heard any of it.
"Conversely, when I want to talk to someone who doesn't know any language I do, I simply think into the Lens and direct its force at him, and he thinks I am talking to him in his own mother tongue. Thus, you are hearing me now in perfect Valerian Dutch, even though you know that I can speak only a dozen or so words of it, and those with a vile American accent. Also, you are hearing it in my voice, even though you know I am actually not saying a word, since you can see that my mouth is wide open and that neither my lips, tongue, nor vocal cords are moving. If you were a Frenchman you would be hearing this in French, or, if you were a Manarkan and couldn't talk at all, you would be getting it as regular Manarkan telepathy."
"Oh . . . . I see . . . . I think," the astounded Dutchman gulped. "Then why couldn't you talk back to them through their phones?"
"Because the Lens, although a mighty fine and versatile thing, is not omnipotent,"
Kinnison replied, dryly. "It sends out only thought, and thought-waves, lying below the level of the ether, cannot affect a microphone. The microphone, not being itself intelligent, cannot receive thought. Of course I can broadcast a thought -- everybody does, more or less -- but without a Lens at the other end I can't reach very far. Power, they tell me, comes with practice – I'm not so good at it yet."
"You can receive a thought . . . . . everybody broadcasts . . . . . Then you can read minds?" vanBuskirk stated, rather than asked.
"When I want to, yes. That was what I was doing while we were mopping up. I demanded the location of their base from every one of them alive but none of them knew it. I got a lot of pictures and descriptions of the buildings, layout, arrangements and personnel of the base, but not a hint as to where it is in space. The navigators ,.were all dead, and not even the Arisians understand death. But that's getting pretty deep into philosophy and it's time to eat again. Lets go!”
Days passed uneventfully, but finally the communicator again began to talk. Two pirate ships were closing in upon the supposedly derelict vessel, discussing with each other the exact point of convergence of the three courses.
"I was hoping we'd be able to communicate with Prime Base before they caught up with us," Kinnison remarked. "But I guess it's no dice-I can't get anybody on my Lens and the ether's as full of interference as ever. They're a suspicious bunch, and they aren't going to let us get away with a single thing if they can help it. You've got that duplicate of their communications unscrambler built?"
'Yes -- that was it you just listened to. I built it out of our own stuff, and I've gone over the whole ship with a cleaner. There isn't a trace, not even a finger-print, to show that anybody except her own crew has ever been aboard."
"Good work! This course takes us right through a planetary system in a few minutes and well have to unload there. Let's see . . this chart marks planets two and three as inhabited, but with a red reference number, eleven twenty-seven. Um . . m . .
that means practically unexplored and unknown. No landing ever made . . . no patrol representation or connection . . . . no commerce . . . state of civilization unknown . . . .
scanned only once, in the Third Galactic Survey, and that was a hell of a long time ago.
Not so good, apparently -- but maybe all the better for us, at that. Anyway, it's a forced landing, so get ready to shove off."
They boarded their lifeboat, placed it in the cargo-lock, opened the outer port upon its automatic block, and waited. At their awful galactic speed the diameter of a solar system would be traversed in such a small fraction of a second that observation would be impossible, to say nothing of computation. They would have to act first and compute later.
They flashed into the strange system. A planet loomed terrifying close, at their frightful velocity almost invisible even upon their ultra-vision plates. The lifeboat shot out, becoming inert as it passed the screen. The cargo-port swung shut. Luck had been with them, the planet was scarcely a million miles away. While vanBuskirk drove toward it, Kinnison made hasty observations.
"Could have been better -- but could have been a lot worse," he reported. "This is planet four. Uninhabited, which is very good. Three, though, is clear over across the sun, and Two isn't any too close for a space-suit flight -- better than eighty million miles. Easy enough as far as distance goes -- we’ve all made longer hops in our suits -- but we'll be open to detection for about fifteen minutes. Can't be helped, though . . . . here we are I"