Children of the Lens

by Edward E Smith

  CHAPTER

  27

  Kinnison Trapped

  HE BOSKONIAN FLEETS defending Ploor were not all destroyed, of course. The vessels were inertialess. None of the phenomena accompanying the coming into being of the super-nova were propagated at a velocity above that of light; a speed which to any space-ship is scarcely a crawl.

  The survivors were, however, disorganized. They had lost their morale when Ploor was wiped out in such a spectacularly nerve-shattering fashion. Also, they had lost practically all of their high command; for the bosses, instead of riding the ether as did the Patrol commanders, remained in their supposedly secure headquarters and directed matters from afar. Mentor and his fellows had removed from this plane of existence the Eddorians who had been present in the flesh on Ploor. The Arisians had cut all communication between Eddore and the remnants of the Boskonian defensive force.

  Grand Fleet, then, moved in for the kill; and for a time the action near Arisia was repeated. Following definite flight-and-course orders from the Z9M9Z, ten or more Patrol fleets would make short hops. At the end of those assigned courses they would discover that they had englobed a task-force of the enemy. Bomb and beam!

  Over and over—flit, bomb, and beam!

  One Boskonian high officer, however, had both the time and the authority to act. A full thousand fleets massed together, their heaviest units outward, packed together screen to screen in a close-order globe of defense.

  “According to Haynes, that was good strategy in the old days,” Kinnison commented, “but it’s no good against loose planets and negaspheres.”

  Six loose planets were so placed and so released that their inert masses would crash together at the center of the Boskonian globe; then, a few minutes later, ten negaspheres of high anti-mass were similarly launched. After those sixteen missiles had done their work and the resultant had attained an equilibrium of sorts, there was very little mopping-up to do.

  The Boskonian observers were competent. The Boskonian commanders now knew that they had no chance whatever of success; that to stay was to be annihilated; that the only possibility of life lay in flight. Therefore each remaining Boskonian vice-admiral, after perhaps a moment of consultation with a few others, ordered his fleet to drive at maximum blast for his home planet.

  “No use chasing them individually, is there, Kit?” Kinnison asked, when it became clear in the tank that the real battle was over; that all resistance had ended. “They can’t do anything, and this kind of killing makes me sick at the stomach. Besides, I’ve got something else to do.”

  “No. Me, too. So have I.” Kit agreed with his father in full. As soon as the last Boskonian fleet was beyond detector range Grand Fleet broke up, its component fleets setting out for their respective worlds.

  “The Hell-Hole is still there, Kit,” the Gray Lensman said soberly. “If Ploor was the top—I’m beginning to think there is no top—it leads either to an automatic mechanism set up by the Ploorans or to Ploorans who are still alive somewhere. If Ploor wasn’t the top, this seems to be the only lead we have. In either case I’ve got to take it. Check?”

  “Well, I…” Kit tried to duck, but couldn’t “Yes, dad, I’m afraid it’s check.”

  Two big hands met and gripped: and Kinnison went to take leave of his wife.

  There is no need to go into detail as to what those two said or did. He knew that he was going into danger; that he might not return. That is, he knew empirically or academically, as a non-germane sort of fact, that he might die. He did not, however, really believe so. No man really believes, ever, that any given event will kill him.

  Kinnison expected to be captured, imprisoned, questioned, tortured. He could understand all of those things, and he did not like any one of them. That he was more than a trifle afraid and that he hated to leave her now more than he ever had before were both natural enough—he had nothing whatever to hide from her.

  She, on the other hand, knew starkly that he would never come back. She knew that he would die in that trap. She knew that she would have to live a lifetime of emptiness, alone. Hence she had much to conceal from him. She must be just as scared and as apprehensive as he was, but no more; just as anxious for their continued happiness as he was, but no more; just as intensely loving, but no more and in exactly the same sense. Here lay the test. She must kiss him goodbye as though he were going into mere danger. She must not give way to the almost irresistible urge to act in accordance with what she so starkly, chillingly knew to be the truth, that she would never…never… NEVER kiss her Kim again!

  She succeeded. It is a measure of the Red Lensman’s quality that she did not weaken, even when her husband approached the boundary of the Hell-Hole and sent what she knew would be his last message.

  “Here it is—about a second now. Don’t worry—I’ll be back shortly. Clear ether, Cris!”

  “Of course you will, dear. Clear ether, Kim!”

  His speedster did not mount any special generators, nor were any needed. He and his ship were sucked into that trap as though it had been a maelstrom.

  He felt again the commingled agonies of inter-dimensional acceleration. He perceived again the formless, textureless, spaceless void of blankly gray nothingness which was the three-dimensionally-impossible substance of the tube. A moment later, he felt a new and different acceleration—he was speeding up inside the tube! Then, very shortly, he felt nothing at all. Startled, he tried to jump up to investigate, and discovered that he could not move. Even by the utmost exertion of his will he could not stir a finger or an eyelid. He was completely immobilized. Nor could he feel. His body was as devoid of sensation as though it belonged to somebody else. Worse, for his heart was not beating. He was not breathing. He could not see. It was as though his every nerve, motor and sensory, voluntary and involuntary, had been separately anaesthetized. He could still think, but that was all. His sense of perception still worked.

  He wondered whether he was still accelerating or not, and tried to find out. He could not. He could not determine whether he was moving or stationary. There were no reference points. Every infinitesimal volume of that enigmatic grayness was like each and every other.

  Mathematically, perhaps, he was not moving at all; since he was in a continuum in which mass, length and time, and hence inertia and inertialessness, velocity and acceleration, are meaningless terms.

  He was outside of space and beyond time. Effectively, however, he was moving; moving with an acceleration which nothing material had ever before approached. He and his vessel were being driven along that tube by every watt of power generable by one entire Eddorian atomic power plant. His velocity, long since unthinkable, became incalculable.

  All things end: even Eddorian atomic power was not infinite. At the very peak of power and pace, then, all the force, all the momentum, all the kinetic energy of the speedster’s mass and velocity were concentrated in and applied to Kinnison’s physical body. He sensed something, and tried to flinch, but could not. In a fleeting instant of what he thought was time he went past, not through, his clothing and his Lens; past, not through, his armor; and past, not through, the hard beryllium-alloy structure of his vessel. He even went past but not through the N-dimensional interface of the hyper-spatial tube.

  This, although Kinnison did not know it, was the Eddorian’s climactic effort. He had taken his prisoner as far as he could possibly reach: then, assembling and concentrating all available power, he had given him a catapultic shove into the absolutely unknown and utterly unknowable. The Eddorian did not know any vector of the Lensman’s naked flight; he did not care where he went. He did not know and could not compute or even guess at his victim’s probable destination.

  In what his spacehound’s time sense told him was one second, Kinnison passed exactly two hundred million foreign spaces. He did not know how he knew the precise number, but he did. Hence, in the Patrol’s measured cadence, he began to count groups of spaces of one hundred-million each. After a few days, his velocity dec
reased to such a value that he could count groups of single millions. Then thousands—hundreds—tens—until finally he could perceive the salient features of each space before it was blotted out by the next.

  How could this be? He wondered, but not foggily; his mind was as clear and as strong as it had ever been. Spaces were coexistent, not spread out like this. In the fourth dimension they were flat together, like pages in a book, except thinner. This was all wrong. It was impossible. Since it could not happen, it was not happening. He had not been and could not be drugged. Therefore some Plooran must have him in a zone of compulsion. What a zone! What an operator the ape must be!

  It was, however, real—all of it. What Kinnison did not know, then or ever, was that he was actually outside the boundaries of space; actually beyond the confines of time. He was going past, not through, those spaces and those times.

  He was now in each space long enough to study it in some detail. He was an immense distance above this one; at such a distance that he could perceive many globular super-universes; each of which in turn was composed of billions of lenticular galaxies.

  Another one. Closer now. Galaxies only; the familiar random masses whose apparent lack of symmetrical grouping is due to the limitations of Civilization’s observers. He was still going too fast to stop.

  In the next space Kinnison found himself within the limits of a solar system and tried with all the force of his mind to get in touch with some intelligent entity upon one—any one—of its planets. Before he could succeed, that system vanished and he was dropping, from a height of a few thousand kilometers, toward the surface of a warm and verdant world, so much like Tellus that he thought for an instant he must have circumnavigated total space. The aspect, the ice-caps, the cloud-effects, were identical. The oceans, however, while similar, were different; as were the continents. The mountains were larger and rougher and harder.

  He was falling much too fast. A free fall from infinity wouldn’t give him this much speed!

  This whole affair was, as he had decided once before, absolutely impossible. It was simply preposterous to believe that a naked man, especially one without blood-circulation or breath, could still be alive after spending as many weeks in open space as he had just spent. He knew that he was alive. Therefore none of this was happening; even though, as surely as he knew that he was alive, he knew that he was falling.

  “Jet back, Lensman!” he thought viciously to himself; tried to shout it aloud.

  For this could be deadly stuff, if he let himself believe it. If he believed that he was falling from any such height he would die in the instant of landing. He would not actually crash; his body would not move from wherever it was that it was. Nevertheless the shock of that wholly imaginary crash would kill him just as dead and just as instantaneously as though all his flesh had been actually smashed into a crimson smear upon one of the neighboring mountain’s huge, flat rocks.

  “Pretty close, my bright young Plooran friend, but you didn’t quite ring the bell,” he thought savagely, trying with all the power of his mind to break through the zone of compulsion. “So I’m telling you something right now. If you want to kill me you’ll have to do it physically, and you haven’t got jets enough to swing the load. You might as well cut your zone, because this kind of stuff has been pulled on me by experts, and it hasn’t worked yet.”

  He was apparently failing, feet downward, toward an open, grassy mountain meadow, surrounded by forests, through which meandered a small stream. He was so close now that he could perceive the individual blades of grass in the meadow and the small fishes in the stream; and he was still apparently at terminal velocity.

  Without his years of spacehound’s training in inertialess maneuvering, he might have died even before he landed, but speed as speed did not affect him at all. He was used to instantaneous stops from light-speeds. The only thing that worried him was the matter of inertia. Was he inert or free?

  He declared to himself that he was free. Or, rather, that he had been, was, and would continue to be motionless. It was physically, mathematically, intrinsically impossible that any of this stuff had actually occurred. It was all compulsion, pure and simple, and he—Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman—would not let it get him down. He clenched his mental teeth upon that belief and held it doggedly. One bare foot struck the tip of a blade of grass and his entire body came to a shockless halt. He grinned in relief—this was what he had wanted, but had not quite dared wholly to expect. There followed immediately, however, other events which he had not expected at all.

  His halt was less than momentary; in the instant of its accomplishment he began to fall normally the remaining eight or ten inches to the ground. Automatically he sprung his space-trained knees, to take the otherwise disconcerting jar; automatically his left hand snapped up to the place where his controls should have been. Legs and arms worked!

  He could see with his eyes. He could feel with his skin. He was drawing a breath, the first time he had breathed since leaving normal space. Nor was it an unduly deep breath—he felt no lack of oxygen. His heart was beating as normally as though it had never missed a beat. He was not unusually hungry or thirsty. But all that stuff could wait—where was that damned Plooran?

  Kinnison had landed in complete readiness for strife. There were no rocks or clubs handy, but he had his fists, feet, and teeth; and they would do until he could find or make something better. But there was nothing to fight. Drive his sense of perception as he would, he could find nothing larger or more intelligent than a deer.

  The farther this thing went along the less sense it made. A compulsion, to be any good at all, ought to be logical and coherent. It should fit into every corner and cranny of the subject’s experience and knowledge. This one didn’t fit anything or anywhere. It didn’t even come close. Yet technically, it was a marvelous job. He couldn’t detect a trace of it. This grass looked and felt real. The pebbles hurt his tender feet enough to make him wince as he walked to the water’s edge. He drank deeply. The water, real or not, was cold, clear, and eminently satisfying.

  “Listen, you misguided ape!” he thought probingly. “You might as well open up now as later whatever you’ve got in mind. If this performance is supposed to be non-fiction, it’s a flat bust. If it’s supposed to be science-fiction, it isn’t much better. If it’s space-opera, even, you’re violating all the fundamentals. I’ve written better stuff—Qadgop and Cynthia were a lot more convincing.” He waited a moment, then went on:

  “Who ever heard of the intrepid hero of a space-opera as big as this one started out to be getting stranded on a completely Earth-like planet and then have nothing happen? No action at all? How about a couple of indescribable monsters of superhuman strength and agility, for me to tear apart with my steel-thewed fingers?”

  He glanced around expectantly. No monsters appeared.

  “Well, then, how about a damsel for me to rescue from a fate worse than death? Better make it two of them—safety in numbers, you know—a blonde and a brunette. No red-heads.”

  He waited again.

  “QX, sport, no women. Suits me perfectly. But I hope you haven’t forgotten about the tasty viands. I can eat fish if I have to, but if you want to keep your hero happy let’s see you lay down here, on a platter, a one-kilogram steak, three centimeters thick, medium rare, fried in Tellurian butter and smothered in Venerian superla mushrooms.”

  No steak appeared, and the Gray Lensman recalled and studied intensively every detail of what had apparently happened. It still could not have occurred. He could not have imagined it. It could not have been compulsion or hypnosis. None of it made any kind of sense.

  As a matter of plain fact, however, Kinnison’s first and most positive conclusion was wrong. His memories were factual records of actual events and things. He would eat well during his stay upon that nameless planet, but he would have to procure his own food. Nothing would attack him, or even annoy him. For the Eddorian’s binding—this is perhaps as good a word for it as any, s
ince “geas” implies a curse—was such that the Gray Lensman could return to space and time only under such conditions and to such an environment as would not do him any iota of physical harm. He must continue alive and in good health for at least fifty more of his years.

  * * * *

  And Clarrissa Kinnison, tense and strained, waited in her room for the instant of her husband’s death. They two were one, with a oneness no other man and woman had ever known. If one died, from any cause whatever, the other would feel it.

  She waited. Five minutes—ten—fifteen—half an hour—an hour. She began to relax. Her fists unclenched, her shallow breathing grew deeper.

  Two hours. Kim was still alive! A wave of happy, buoyant relief swept through her; her eyes flashed and sparkled. If they hadn’t been able to kill him in two hours they never could. Her Kim had plenty of jets.

  Even the top minds of Boskonia could not kill her Kim!

  CHAPTER

  28

  The Battle of Eddore

  HE ARISIANS AND THE Children of the Lens had known that Eddore must be attacked as soon as possible after the fall of Ploor. They were fairly certain that the interspatial use of planets as projectiles was new; but they were completely certain that the Eddorians would be able to deduce in a short time the principles and the concepts, the fundamental equations, and the essential operators involved in the process. They would find Nth space or one like it in one day; certainly not more than two. Their slaves would duplicate the weapon in approximately three weeks. Shortly thereafter both Ultra Prime and Prime Base, both Klovia and Tellus, would be blown out of the ether. So would Arisia—perhaps Arisia would go first. The Eddorians would probably not be able to aim such planets as accurately as the Arisians had, but they would keep on trying and they would learn fast.