Children of the Lens

by Edward E Smith

  Day by day, week by week, the speedster circled the planet and its big, hot sun; and as it circled, the lone voyager studied. He analyzed more data more precisely; he drew deeper and deeper upon his store of knowledge to determine what steps next to take in the event that this attempt should end, as so many previous ones had ended, in failure.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The Abduction of a President

  INNISON THE AUTHOR TOILED manfully at his epic of space whenever he was under any sort of observation, and enough at other times to avert any suspicion. Indeed, he worked as much as Sybly Whyte, an advertisedly temperamental writer, had ever worked. Besides interviewing the high and the low, and taking notes everywhere, he attended authors’ teas, at which he cursed his characters fluently and bitterly for their failure to cooperate with him. With short-haired women and long-haired men he bemoaned the perversity of a public which compelled them to prostitute the real genius of which each was the unique possessor. He sympathized particularly with a fat woman writer of whodunits, whose extremely unrealistic yet amazingly popular Gray Lensman hero had lived through ten full-length novels and twenty million copies.

  Even though her real field was the drama, she wasn’t writing the kind of detective tripe that most of these crank-turners ground out, she confided to Kinnison. She had known lots of Gray Lensmen very intimately, and her stories were drawn from real life in every particular!

  Thus Kinnison remained in character; and thus he was enabled to work completely unnoticed at his real job of finding out what was going on, how the Boskonians were operating to ruin Radelix as they had ruined Antigan IV.

  His first care was to investigate the planet’s president. That took doing, but he did it. He examined that mind line by line and channel by channel, with no results whatever. No scars, no sign of tampering. Calling in assistance, he searched the president’s past. Still no soap. Everything checked. Boring from within, then, was out. His first hypothesis was wrong; this invasion and this sabotage were being done from without. How?

  Those first leaflets were followed by others, each batch more vitriolic in tone than the preceding one. Apparently they came from empty stratosphere; at least, no ships were to be detected in the neighborhood after any shower of the handbills had appeared. But that was not surprising. With its inertialess drive any space-ship could have been parsecs away before the papers touched atmosphere. Or they could have been bombed in from almost any distance. Or, as Kinnison thought most reasonable, they could have been simply dumped out of the mouth of a hyper-spatial tube. In any event the method was immaterial. The results only were important; and those results, the Lensman discovered, were entirely disproportionate to the ostensible causes. The subversive literature had some effect, of course, but essentially it must be a blind. No possible tonnage of anonymous printing could cause that much sheer demoralization.

  Crack-pot societies of all kinds sprang up everywhere, advocating everything from absolutism to anarchy. Queer cults arose, preaching free love, the imminent end of the world, and many other departures from the norm of thought. The Author’s League, of course, was affected more than any other organization of its size, because of its relatively large content of strong and intensely opinionated minds. Instead of becoming one radical group it split into a dozen.

  Kinnison joined one of those “Down with Everything!” groups, not as a leader, but as a follower. Not too sheep-like a follower, but just inconspicuous enough to retain his invisibly average status; and from his place of concealment in the middle of the front row he studied the minds of each of his fellow anarchists. He watched those minds change, he found out who was doing the changing. When Kinnison’s turn came he was all set for trouble. He expected to battle a powerful mentality. He would not have been overly surprised to encounter another mad Arisian, hiding behind a zone of hypnotic compulsion. He expected anything, in fact, except what he found—which was a very ordinary Radeligian therapist. The guy was a clever enough operator, of course, but he could not work against even the feeblest opposition. Hence the Gray Lensman had no trouble at all, either in learning everything the fellow knew, or, upon leaving him, in implanting within his mind the knowledge that Sybly Whyte was now exactly the type of worker desired.

  The trouble was that the therapist didn’t know a thing. This not entirely unexpected development posed Kinnison three questions. Did the high-ups ever communicate with such small fry, or did they just give them one set of orders and cut them loose? Should he stay in this Radeligian’s mind until he found out? If he was in control of the therapist when a big shot took over, did he have jets enough to keep from being found out? Risky business; better scout around first, anyway. He’d do a flit.

  He drove his black speedster a million miles. He covered Radelix like a blanket, around the equator and from pole to pole. Everywhere he found the same state of things. The planet was literally riddled with the agitators; he found so many that he was forced to a black conclusion. There could be no connection or communication between such numbers of saboteurs and any real authority. They must have been given one set of do-or-die instructions—whether they did or died was immaterial. Experimentally, Kinnison had a few of the leaders taken into custody. Nothing happened.

  Martial law was finally declared, but this measure succeeded only in driving the movement underground. What the subversive societies lost in numbers they more than made up in desperation and violence. Crime raged unchecked and uncheckable, murder became an every-day commonplace, insanity waxed rife. And Kinnison, knowing now that no channel to important prey would be opened until the climax, watched grimly while the rape of the planet went on.

  President Thompson and Lensman Gerrond sent message after message to Prime Base and to Klovia, imploring help. The replies to these pleas were all alike. The matter had been referred to the galactic council and to the coordinator. Everything that could be done was being done. Neither office could say anything else, except that, with the galaxy in such a disturbed condition, each planet must do its best to solve its own problems.

  The thing built up toward its atrocious finale. Gerrond invited the president to a conference in a down-town hotel room, and there, eyes glancing from moment to moment at the dials of a complete little test-kit held open upon his lap:

  “I have just had some startling news, Mr. Thompson,” Gerrond said, abruptly. “Kinnison has been here on Radelix for weeks.”

  “What? Kinnison? Where is he? Why didn’t he…?”

  “Yes, Kinnison. Kinnison of Klovia. The coordinator himself. I don’t know where he is, or was. I didn’t ask him.” The Lensman smiled fleetingly. “One doesn’t, you know. He discussed the situation with me at length. I’m still amazed…”

  “Why doesn’t he stop it, then?” the president demanded. “Or can’t he stop it?”

  “That’s what I’ve got to explain to you. He won’t be able to do a thing, he says, until the last minute…”

  “Why not? I tell you, if this thing can be stopped it’s got to be stopped, and no matter what has to be done—”

  “Just a minute!” Gerrond snapped. “I know you’re out of control—I don’t like to see Radelix torn apart any better than you do—but you ought to know by this time that Galactic Coordinator Kimball Kinnison is in a better position to know what to do than any other man in the universe. Furthermore, his word is the last word. What he says, goes.”

  “Of course,” Thompson apologized. “I am overwrought…but to see our entire world pulled down around us, our institutions, the work of centuries, destroyed, millions of lives lost…all needlessly…”

  “It won’t come to that, he says, if we all do our parts. And you, sir, are very much in the picture.”

  “I? How?”

  “Are you familiar with what happened to Antigan IV?”

  “Why, no. They had some trouble over there, I recall, but…”

  “That’s it. That’s why this must go on. No planet cares particularly about what happens to a
ny other planet, but Kinnison cares about them all as a whole. If this trouble is headed off now it will simply spread to other planets; if it is allowed to come to a climax there’s a chance to put an end to the whole trouble, for good.”

  “But what has that to do with me? What can I, personally, do?”

  “Much. That last act at Antigan IV, the thing that made it a planet of maniacs, was the kidnapping of Planetary President Renwood. Murdered, supposedly, since no trace of him has been found.”

  “Oh.” The older man’s hands clenched, then loosened. “I am willing…provided…is Kinnison fairly certain that my death will enable him…”

  “It won’t get that far, sir. He intends to stop it just before that. He and his associates—I don’t know who they are—have been listing every enemy agent they can find, and they will all be taken care of at once. He believes that Boskone will publish in advance a definite time at which they will take you away from us. That was the way it went at Antigan.”

  “Even from the Patrol?”

  “From the main base itself. Coordinator Kinnison is pretty sure they can do it, except for something he can bring into play only at the last moment. Incidentally, that’s why we’re having this meeting here, with this detector he gave me. He’s afraid this base is porous.”

  “In that case…what can he…” The president fell silent.

  “All I know is that we’re to dress you in a certain suit of armor and have you in my private office a few minutes before the time they set. We and the guards leave the office at minus two minutes and walk down the corridor, just fast enough to be exactly in front of Room Twenty-four at minus one. We’re to rehearse it until our timing is perfect. I don’t know what will happen then, but something will.”

  Time passed; the Boskonian infiltration progressed according to plan. It appeared that Radelix was going in the same fashion in which Antigan IV had gone. Below the surface, however, there was one great difference. Every ship reaching Radelix brought at least one man who did not leave. Some of these visitors were tall and lithe, some were short and fat. Some were old, some were young. Some were pale, some were burned to the color of ancient leather by the fervent rays of space. They were alike only in the “look of eagles” in their steady, quiet eyes. Each landed and went about his ostensible business, interesting himself not at all in any of the others.

  Again the Boskonians declared their contempt of the Patrol by setting the exact time at which Planetary President Thompson was to be taken. Again the appointed hour was midnight.

  Lieutenant-admiral Lensman Gerrond was, as Kinnison had intimated frequently, somewhat of a brass hat. He did not, he simply could not believe that his base was as pregnable as the coordinator had assumed it to be. Kinnison, knowing that all ordinary defenses would be useless, had not even mentioned them. Gerrond, unable to believe that his hitherto invincible and invulnerable weapons and defenses were all of a sudden useless, mustered them of his own volition.

  All leaves had been cancelled. Every detector, every beam, every device of defense and offense was fully manned. Every man was keyed up and alert. And Gerrond, while apprehensive that something was about to happen which wasn’t in the book, was pretty sure in his stout old war-dog’s soul that he and his men had stuff enough.

  At two minutes before midnight the armored president and his escorts left Gerrond’s office. One minute later they were passing the door of the specified room. A bomb exploded shatteringly behind them, armored men rushed yelling out of a branch corridor in their rear. Everybody stopped and turned to look. So, the hidden Kinnison assured himself, did an unseen observer in an invisible hovering, three-dimensional hyper-circle.

  Kinnison threw the door open, flashed an explanatory thought at the president, yanked him into the room and into the midst of a corps of Lensmen armed with devices not usually encountered even in Patrol bases. The door snapped shut and Kinnison stood where Thompson had stood an instant before, clad in armor identical with that which the president had worn. The exchange had required less than one second.

  “QX, Gerrond and you fellows!” Kinnison drove the thought. “The president is safe—I’m taking over. Double time straight ahead—hipe! Get clear—give us a chance to use our stuff!”

  The unarmored men broke into a run, and as they did so the door of Room Twenty-four swung open and stayed open. Weapons erupted from other doors and from more branch corridors. The hyper-circle, which was in fact the terminus of a hyper-spatial tube, began to thicken toward visibility.

  It did not, however, materialize. Only by the intensest effort of vision could it be discerned as the sheerest wisp, more tenuous than fog. The men within the ship, if ship it was, were visible only as striations in air are visible, and no more to be made out in detail. Instead of a full materialization, the only thing that was or became solid was a dead-black thing which reached purposefully outward and downward toward Kinnison, a thing combined of tongs and coarse-meshed, heavy net.

  Kinnison’s DeLameters flamed at maximum intensity and minimum aperture. Useless. The stuff was dureum; that unbelievably dense and ultimately refractory synthetic which, saturated with pure force, is the only known substance which can exist as an actuality both in normal space and in that pseudo-space which composes the hyper-spatial tube. The Lensman flicked on his neutralizer and shot away inertialess; but that maneuver, too, had been foreseen. The Boskonian engineers matched every move he made, within a split second after he made it: the tong-net closed.

  Semi-portables flamed then—heavy stuff—but they might just as well have remained cold. Their beams could not cut the dureum linkages; they slid harmlessly past—not through—the wraith-like, figmental invaders at whom they were aimed. Kinnison was hauled aboard the Boskonian vessel; its structure and its furnishings and its crew becoming ever firmer and more substantial to his senses as he went from normal into pseudo space.

  As the pseudo world became real, the reality of the base behind him thinned into unreality. In seconds it disappeared utterly, and Kinnison knew that to the senses of his fellow human beings he had simply vanished. This ship, though, was real enough. So were his captors.

  The net opened, dumping the Lensman ignominiously to the floor. Tractor beams wrenched his blazing DeLameters out of his grasp—whether or not hands and arms came with them was entirely his own look-out. Tractors and pressors jerked him upright, slammed him against the steel wall of the room, held him motionless against it.

  Furiously he launched his ultimately lethal weapon, the Worsel-designed, Thorndyke-built, mind-controlled projector of thought-borne vibrations which decomposed the molecules without which thought and life itself could not exist. Nothing happened. He explored, finding that even his sense of perception was stopped a full foot away from every part of every one of those humanoid bodies. He settled down then and thought. A great light dawned; a shock struck sickeningly home.

  No such elaborate and super-powered preparations would have been made for the capture of any civilian. Presidents were old men, physically weak and with no extraordinary powers of mind. No—this whole chain of events had been according to plan—a high Boskonian’s plan. Ruining a planet was, of course, a highly desirable thing in itself, but it could not have been the main feature.

  Somebody with a real brain was out after the four Second-Stage Lensmen and he wasn’t fooling. And if Nadreck, Worsel, Tregonsee and himself were all to disappear, the Patrol would know that it had been nudged. But jet back—which of the four other than himself would have taken that particular bait? Not one of them. Weren’t they out after them, too? Sure they were—they must be. Oh, if he could only warn them—but after all, what good would it do? They had all warned each other repeatedly to watch out for traps; all four had been constantly on guard. What possible foresight could have avoided a snare set so perfectly to match every detail of a man’s make-up?

  But he wasn’t licked yet. They had to know what he knew, how he had done what he had done, whether or not he had any superi
ors and who they were. Therefore they had had to take him alive, just as he had had to take various Boskonian chiefs. And they’d find out that as long as he was alive he’d be a dangerous buzz-saw to monkey with.

  The captain, or whoever was in charge, would send for him; that was a foregone conclusion. He’d have to find out what he had caught; he’d have to make a report of some kind. And somebody would slip. One hundred percent vigilance was impossible, and Kinnison would be on his toes to take advantage of that slip, however slight it might be.

  But the captors did not take Kinnison to the captain. Instead, accompanied by half a dozen unarmored men, that worthy came to Kinnison.

  “Start talking, fellow, and talk fast,” the Boskonian directed crisply in the lingua franca of deep space as the armored soldiers strode out. “I want to know who you are, what you are, what you’ve done, and everything about you and the Patrol. So talk—or do you want me to pull you apart with these tractors, armor and all?”

  Kinnison paid no attention, but drove at the commander with his every mental force and weapon. Blocked. This ape too had a full-body, full-coverage screen.

  There was a switch at the captain’s hip, handy for fingertip control. If he could only move! It would be so easy to flip that switch! Or if he could throw something—or make one of those other fellows brush against him just right—or if the guy happened to sit down a little too close to the arm of a chair—or if there were a pet animal of any kind around—or a spider or a worm or even a gnat…

  CHAPTER

  6

  Tregonsee, Camilla, and “x”

  ECOND-STAGE LENSMAN Tregonsee of Rigel IV did not rush madly out into space in quest of something or anything Boskonian in response to Kinnison’s call. To hurry was not Tregonsee’s way. He could move fast upon occasion, but before he would move at all he had to know exactly how, where, and why he should move.