Authors: E. E. Smith
"Going to land her free, huh?" vanBuskirk whistled. "What a chance!”
'It'd be a bigger one to take the time to sand her inert. Her power will hold -- I hope. We'll inert her and match intrinsics with her when we come back -- we'll have more time then."
The lifeboat stopped instantaneously, in a free landing, upon the uninhabited, desolate, rocky soil of the strange world. Without a word the two men leaped out, carrying fully packed knapsacks. A portable -projector was then dragged out and its fierce beam directed into the base of the hill beside which they had come to earth. A cavern was quickly made, and while its glassy walls were still smoking hot the lifeboat was driven within it. With their DeLameters the two wayfarers then undercut the hill, so that a great slide of soil and rock obliterated every sign of the visit. Kinnison and vanBuskirk could find their vessel again, from their accurately-taken bearings, but, they hoped, no one else could.
Then, still without a word, the two adventurers flashed upward. The atmosphere of the planet, tenuous and cold though it was, nevertheless so sorely impeded their progress that minutes of precious time were required for the driving projectors of their suits to force them through its thin layer. Eventually, however, they were in interplanetary space and were flying at quadruple the speed of light. Then vanBuskirk spoke.
"Landing the boat, hiding it, and this trip are the danger spots. Heard anything yet?"
"No, and I don't believe we will. I think probably we've lost them completely. Won't know definitely, though, until after they catch the ship, and that won't be for ten minutes yet. We'll be landed by then."
A world now loomed beneath them, a pleasant, Earthly-appearing world of scattered clouds, green forests, rolling plains, wooded and snow-capped mountain-ranges, and rolling oceans. Here and there were to be seen what looked like cities, but Kinnison gave them a wide berth, electing to land upon an open meadow in the shelter of a black and glassy cliff.
"Ah, just in time, they're beginning to talk," Kinnison announced. "Unimportant stuff yet, opening the ship and so on. I'll relay the talk as nearly verbatim as possible when it gets interesting." He fell silent, then went on in a singsong tone, as though he were reciting from memory, which in effect he was.
"'Captains of ships PQ263 and EQ69B47 calling Helmuth! We have stopped and have boarded the F47U596. Everything is in order and as deduced and reported by your observers. Everyone aboard is dead. They did. not all die at the same time, but they all died from the effects of the collision. There is no trace of outside interference and all the personnel are accounted for.'
"'Helmuth, speaking for Boskone. Your report is inconclusive. Search the ship minutely for tracks, prints, scratches. Note any missing supplies or misplaced items of equipment. Study carefully all mechanisms, particularly converters and communicators, for signs of tampering or dismantling.'
“Whew!” whistled Kinnison. "They'll find where you took that communicator apart, Bus, just as sure as hell's a mantrap I"
"No, they won't," declared vanBuskirk as positively. "I did it with rubber-nosed Pliers, and if I left a scratch or a scar or a print on it I'll eat it, tubes and all!"
A pause.
"'We have studied everything most carefully, Oh Helmuth, and find no trace of tampering or visit'
"Helmuth again. `Your report is still inconclusive. Whoever did what has been done is probably a Lensman, and certainly has brains. Give me the present recorded serial number of all port openings, and the exact number of times you have opened each port.'
"Ouch!” groaned Kinnison. "If that means what I think it does, all hell's out for noon. Did you see any numbering recorders on those ports? I didn't -- of course neither of us thought of such a thing. Hold it -- here comes some more stuff.
" `Port-opening recorder serial numbers are as follows' . . . don’t mean a thing to us . . . . . `we have opened the emergency inlet port once and the starboard main lock twice. No other port at all.'
"And here's Helmuth again. Àh, as I thought. The emergency port was opened once by outsiders, and the starboard cargo port twice. The Lensman came aboard, headed the ship toward Sol, took his lifeboat aboard, listened to us, and departed at his leisure. And this in the very midst of our fleet, the entire personnel of which was supposed to be looking for him! How supposedly intelligent spacemen could be guilty of such utter and indefensible stupidity . . . . ' He's tellin' 'em plenty, Bus, but there's no use repeating it. The tone can't be reproduced, and it's simply taking the hide right off their backs . . . . here's some more . . . . . 'General broadcast! Ship F47U596 in its supposedly derelict condition flew from the point of destruction of the Patrol ship, on course . . . . . ' No use quoting, Bus, he's simply giving directions for scouring our whole line of flight . . . . . Fading out -- they're going on, or back. This outfit, of course, is good for only the closest 'kind of close-up work."
"And we're out of the frying pan into the fire, huh?"
"Oh, no, we're a lot better off than we were. We're on a planet and not using any power they can trace. Also, they've got to cover so much territory that they can't comb it very fine, and that gives the rest of the fellows a break. Furthermore . . . . . .”
A crushing weight descended upon his back, and the Patrolmen found themselves fighting for their lives. From the bare, supposedly evidently safe rack face of the cliff there had emerged rope-tentacled monstrosities in a ravenously attacking swarm. In the savage blasts of DeLameters hundreds of the gargoyle horde vanished in vivid flares of radiance, but on they came, by thousands and, it seemed, by millions. Eventually the batteries energizing the projectors became exhausted. Then flailing coil met shearing steel, fierce-driven parrot beaks clanged against space-tempered armor, bulbous heads pulped under hard-swung axes, but not for the fractional second necessary for inertialess flight could the two win clear. Then Kinnison sent out his SOS.
"A Lensman calling help! A Lensman calling help!" he broadcast with the full power of mind and Lens, and Immediately a sharp, clear voice poured into his brain.
"Coming, wearer of the Lens! Coming at speed to the cliff of the Catlats. Hold until I come! I arrive in thirty. . . .”
Thirty what? What possible intelligible relative measure of that unknown and unknowable concept, Time, can be conveyed by thought alone?
"Keep slugging, Bus !” Kinnison panted. "Help is on the way. A local cop -- voice sounds like it could be a woman -- will be here in thirty somethings. Don't know whether it's thirty minutes or thirty days, but we'll still be there."
"Maybe so and maybe not," grunted the Dutchman. "Something's coming besides help. Look up and see if you see what I think I do."
Kinnison did so. Through the air from the top of the cliff there was hurtling downward toward them a veritable dragon, a nightmare's horror of hideously reptilian head, of leathern wings, of viciously fanged jaws, of frightfully taloned feet, of multiple knotty arms, of long, sinuous, heavily-scaled serpent's body. In fleeting glimpses through the writhing tentacles of his opponents Kinnison perceived little by little the full picture of that unbelievable Monstrosity, and, accustomed as he was to the outlandish denizens of worlds scarcely known to man, his very senses reeled.
Worsel to the Rescue
As the quasi-reptilian organism descended the cliff-dwellers went mad. Their attack upon the two Patrolmen, already vicious, became insanely frantic. Abandoning the gigantic Dutchman entirely, every Catlat within reach threw himself upon Kinnison and so enwrapped the Lensman's head, arms, and torso that he could scarcely move a muscle.
Then entwining captors and helpless man moved slowly toward the largest of the openings in the cliff's obsidian face.
Upon that slowly moving mass vanBuskirk hurled himself, deadly space-axe swinging. But, hew and smite as he would, he could neither free his chief from the grisly horde enveloping him nor impede measurably that horde's progress toward its goal.
However, he could and did cut away the comparatively few cables confining Kinnison's legs.
"Clamp a leg-lock around my waist, Kim," he directed, the flashing thought in no whit interfering with his prodigious axe-play, "and as soon as I get a chance, before the real tussle comes, I'll couple us together with all the beltsnaps I can reach -- wherever we're going we're going together! Wonder why they haven't ganged up on me, too, and what that lizard is doing? Been too busy to look, but thought he'd've been on my back before this."
"He won't be on your back. That's Worsel, 'the lad who answered my call. I told you his voice was funny? They can't talk or hear -- use telepathy, like the Manarkans.
He's cleaning them out in great shape. If you can hold me for three minutes he'll have the lot of them whipped."
"I can hold you for three minutes against all the vermin between here and Andromeda,' vanBuskirk declared. "There, I've got four snaps on you."
"Not too tight, Bus," Kinnison cautioned. "Leave enough slack so you can cut me loose if you have to. Remember that the spools are more important than any one of us.
Once inside that cliff we'll be all washed up -- even Worsel can't help us there -- so drop me rather than go in yourself."
"Um," grunted the Dutchman, non-committally. "There, I've tossed my spool out onto the ground. Tell Worsel that if they get us he's to pick it up and carry on. We'll go ahead with yours, inside the cliff if necessary."
"I said cut me loose if you can't hold me!” Kinnison snapped, and I meant it. That's an official order. Remember it !"
"Official order be damned!" snorted vanBuskirk, still plying his ponderous mace.
"Whey won't get you into that hole without breaking me in two, and that will be a job of breaking in anybody's language. Now shut your pan," he concluded grimly. "We're here, and I'm going to be too busy, even to think, very shortly."
He spoke truly. He had already selected his point of resistance, and as he reached it he thrust the head of his mace into the crack behind the open trap-door, jammed its shaft into the shoulder-socket of his armor, set blocky legs and Herculean arms against the cliffside, arched his mighty back, and held. And the surprised Catlats, now inside the gloomy fastness of their tunnel, thrust anchoring tentacles into crevices in the wall and pulled, harder, ever harder.
Under the terrific stress Kinnison's heavy armor creaked as its air-tight joints accommodated themselves to their new and unusual positions. That armor, or space-tempered alloy, of course would not give way -- but what of its anchor?
Well it was for Kimball Kinnison that day, and well for our present civilization, that the
Brittania's
quartermaster had selected Peter vanBuskirk for the Lensman's mate, for death, inevitable and horrible, resided within that cliff, and no human frame of Earthly growth, however armored, could have borne for even a fraction of a second the violence of the Catlats' pull.
But Peter vanBuskirk, although of Earthly-Dutch ancestry, had been born and reared upon the planet Valeria, and that massive planet's gravity -- over two and one half times Earth's -- had given him a physique and a strength almost inconceivable to us lifelong dwellers upon small, green Terra. His head, as has been said, towered seventyeight inches above the ground, but at that he appeared squatty because of his enormous spread of shoulder and his startling girth. His bones were elephantine -- they had to be, to furnish adequate support and leverage for the incredible masses of muscle overlaying and surrounding them. But even vanBuskirk's Valerian strength was now being taxed to the uttermost.
The anchoring chains hummed and snarled as the clamps bit into the rings.
Muscles writhed and knotted, tendons stretched and threatened to snap, sweat rolled down his mighty back. His jaws locked in agony and his eyes started from their sockets with the effort, but still vanBuskirk held.
"Cut me loose!” commanded Kinnison at last. "Even you can't take much more of that. No use letting them break your back . . . . . Cut,
I
tell you . . . . . I said CUT, you big, dumb, Valerian ape!”
But if vanBuskirk heard or felt the savagely-voiced commands of his chief he gave no heed. Straining to the very ultimate fiber of his being, exerting every iota of loyal mind and every atom of Brobdingnagian frame, grimly, tenaciously, stubbornly the gigantic Dutchman held.
Held while Worsel of Velantia, that grotesquely hideous, that fantastically reptilian ally, plowed toward the two Patrolmen through the horde of Catlats, a veritable tornado of rending fang and shearing talon, of beating wing and crushing snout of mailed hand and trenchant tail.
Held while that demon incarnate drove closer and closer, hurling entire Catlats and numberless dismembered fragments of Catlats to the four winds as he came.
Held until Worsel's snake-like body, a supple and sentient cable of living steel, tipped with its double-edged, razor-keen, scimitar-like sting, slipped into the tunnel beside Kinnison and wrought grisly havoc among the Catlats close-packed there!
As the terrific tension upon him was suddenly released vanBuskirk's own efforts hurled him away from the cliff. He fell to the ground, his overstrained muscles twitching uncontrollably, and on top of him fell the fettered Lensman. Kinnison, his hands now free, unfastened the clamps linking his armor to that of vanBuskirk and whirled to confront the foe -- but the fighting was over. The Catlats had had enough of Worsel of Velantia, and, screaming and shrieking in baffled rage, the last of them were disappearing into their caves.
VanBuskirk got shakily to his feet. "Thanks for the help, Worsel, we were just about to run out of time . . . . .' he began, only to be silenced by an insistent thought from the grotesquely monstrous stranger.
"Stop that radiating! Do not think at all if you cannot screen your minds !" came urgent mental commands. "These Catlats are a very minor pest of this planet Delgon.
There are others worse by far. Fortunately, your thoughts are upon a frequency never used here -- if I had not been so very close to you I would not have heard you at all -- but should the Overlords have a listener upon that band your unshielded thinking may already have done irreparable harm. Follow me. I will slow my speed to yours, but hurry all possible!”