As soon as Kinnison could make out the continental outlines of the planet he took over control, as he alone of the crew was upon familiar ground. He knew everything about Lonabar that Illona had ever learned; and, although the girl was a total loss as an astronaut, she did know her geography.
Kinnison docked his ship boldly at the spaceport of Lonia, the planet’s largest city and its capital. With equal boldness he registered as “Cartiff”; filling in some of the blank spaces in the space-port’s routine registry form—not quite truthfully, perhaps—and blandly ignoring others. The armored truck was hoisted out of the hold and made its way to Lonia’s largest bank, into which it disgorged a staggering total of bar platinum, as well as sundry coffers of hard, gray steel. These last items went directly into a private vault, under the watchful eyes and ready weapons of Kinnison’s own guards.
The truck rolled swiftly back to the space-port and Cartiff’s ship took off—it did not need servicing at the time—ostensibly for another planet unknown to the Patrol, actually to go, inert, into a closed orbit around Lonabar and near enough to it to respond to a call in seconds.
Immense wealth can command speed of construction and service. Hence, in a matter of days, Cartiff was again in business. His salon was, upon a larger and grander scale, a repetition of his Tellurian shop. It was simple, and dignified, and blatantly expensive. Costly rugs covered the floor, impeccable works of art adorned the walls, and three precisely correct, flawlessly groomed clerks displayed, with the exactly right air of condescending humility, Cartiff’s wares before those who wished to view them. Cartiff himself was visible, ensconced within a magnificent plate-glass-and-gold office in the rear, but he did not ordinarily have anything to do with customers. He waited; nor did he wait long before there happened that which he expected.
One of the super-perfect clerks coughed slightly into a microphone.
“A gentleman insists upon seeing you personally, sir,” he announced.
“Very well, I will see him now. Show him in, please,” and the visitor was ceremoniously ushered into the Presence.
“This is a very nice place you have here, Mr. Cartiff, but did it ever occur to you that…”
“It never did and it never will,” Kinnison snapped. He still lolled at ease in his chair, but his eyes were frosty and his voice carried an icy sting. “I quit paying protection to little shots a good many years ago. Or are you from Menjo Bleeko?”
The visitor’s eyes widened. He gasped, as though even to utter that dread name was sheer sacrilege. “No, but Number…”
“Save it, slob!” The cold venom of that crisp but quiet order set the fellow back onto his heels. “I am thoroughly sick of this thing of every half-baked tin-horn zwilnik in space calling himself Number One as soon as he can steal enough small change to hire an ape to walk around behind him packing a couple of blasters. If that louse of a boss of yours has a name, use it. If he hasn’t call him ‘The Louse’. But cancel that Number One stuff. In my book there is no Number One in the whole damned universe. Doesn’t your mob know yet who and what Cartiff is?”
“What do we care?” the visitor gathered courage visibly. “A good big bomb…”
“Clam it, you squint-eyed slime-lizard!” The Lensman’s voice was still low and level, but his tone bit deep and his words drilled in. “That stuff?” he waved inclusively at the magnificent hall. “Sucker-bait, nothing more. The whole works cost only a hundred thousand. Chicken feed. It wouldn’t even nick the edge of the roll if you blew up ten of them. Bomb it any time you feel the urge. But take notice that it would make me sore—plenty sore—and that I would do things about it; because I’m in a big game, not this petty-larceny racketeering and chiseling your mob is doing, and when a toad gets in my way I step on it. So go back and tell that”—sulphurously and copiously qualified—”Number One of yours to case a job a lot more thoroughly than he did this one before he starts throwing his weight around. Now scram, before I feed your carcass to the other rats around here!”
Kinnison grinned inwardly as the completely deflated gangster slunk out. Good going. It wouldn’t take long for that blast to get action. This little-shot Number One wouldn’t dare to lift a hand, but Bleeko would have to. That was axiomatic, from the very nature of things. It was very definitely Bleeko’s move next. The only moot point was as to which His Nibs, would do first—talk or act. He would talk, the Lensman thought. The prime reward of being a hot-shot was to have people know it and bend the knee. Therefore, although Cartiff’s salon was at all times in complete readiness for any form of violence, Kinnison was practically certain that Menjo Bleeko would send an emissary before he started the rough stuff.
He did, and shortly. A big, massive man was the messenger; a man wearing consciously an aura of superiority, of boundless power and force. He did not simply come into the shop—he made an entrance. All three of the clerks literally cringed before him, and at his casually matter-of-fact order they hazed the already uncomfortable customers out of the shop and locked the doors. Then one of them escorted the visitor, with a sickening servility he had never thought of showing toward his employer and with no thought of consulting Cartiff’s wishes in the matter, into Cartiff’s private sanctum. Kinnison knew at first glance that this was Ghundrith Khars, Bleeko’s right-hand man. Khars, the notorious, who knelt only to His Supremacy, Menjo Bleeko himself; and to whom everyone else upon Lonabar and its subsidiary planets kneeled. The Visitor waved a hand and the clerk fled in disorder.
“Stand up, worm, and give me that…” Khars began, loftily.
“Silence, fool! Attention!” Kinnison rasped, in such a drivingly domineering tone that the stupefied messenger obeyed involuntarily. The Lensman, psychologist par excellence that he was, knew that this man, with a background of twenty years of blind, dumb obedience to Bleeko’s every order, simply could not cope with a positive and self-confident opposition. “You will not be here long enough to sit down, even if I permitted it in my presence, which I definitely do not. You came here to give me certain instructions and orders. Instead, you are going to listen merely; I will do all the talking.”
“First. The only reason you did not die as you entered this place is that neither you nor Menjo Bleeko knows any better. The next one of you to approach me in this fashion dies in his tracks.”
“Second. Knowing as I do the workings of that which your bloated leech of a Menjo Bleeko calls his brain, I know that he has a spy-ray on us now. I am not blocking it out as I want him to receive ungarbled—and I know that you would not have the courage to transmit it accurately to His Foulness—everything I have to say.”
“Third. I have been searching for a long time for a planet that I like. This is it. I fully intend to stay here as long as I please. There is plenty of room here for both of us without crowding.”
“Fourth. Being essentially a peaceable man, I came in peace and I prefer a peaceable arrangement. However, let it be distinctly understood that I truckle to no man or entity; dead, living, or yet to be born.”
“Fifth. Tell Bleeko from me to consider very carefully and very thoroughly an iceberg; its every phase and aspect. That is all—you may go.”
“Bub-bub-but,” the big man stammered. “An iceberg?”
“An iceberg, yes—just that,” Kinnison assured him. “Don’t bother to try to think about it yourself, since you’ve got nothing to think with. But His Putrescence Bleeko, even though he is a mental, moral, and intellectual slime-lizard, can think—at least in a narrow, mean, small-souled sort of way—and I advise him in all seriousness to do so. Now get the hell out of here, before I burn the seat of your pants off.”
Khars got, gathering together visibly the shreds of his self-esteem as he did so; the clerks staring the while in dumbfounded amazement. Then they huddled together, eyeing the owner of the establishment with a brand-new respect—a subservient respect, heavily laced with awe.
“Business as usual, boys,” he counseled them, cheerfully enough. “They won’t blow u
p the place until after dark.”
The clerks resumed their places then and trade did go on, after a fashion; but Cartiff’s force had not recovered its wonted blasé aplomb even at closing time.
“Just a moment.” The proprietor called his employees together and, reaching into his pocket, distributed among them a sheaf of currency. “In case you don’t find the shop here in the morning, you may consider yourselves on vacation at full pay until I call you.”
They departed, and Kinnison went back to his office. His first care was to set up a spy-ray block—a block which had been purchased upon Lonabar and which was therefore certainly pervious to Bleeko’s instruments. Then he prowled about, apparently in deep and anxious thought. But as he prowled, the eavesdroppers did not, could not know that his weight set into operation certain devices of his own highly secret installation, or that when he finally left the shop no really serious harm could be done to it except by an explosion sufficiently violent to demolish the neighborhood for blocks around. The front wall would go, of course. He wanted it to go; otherwise there would be neither reason nor excuse for doing that which for days he had been ready to do.
Since Cartiff lived rigorously to schedule and did not have a spy-ray block in his room, Bleeko’s methodical and efficient observers always turned off their beams when the observee went to sleep. This night, however, Kinnison was not really asleep, and as soon as the ray went off he acted. He threw on his clothes and sought the street, where he took a taxi to a certain airport. There he climbed into a prop-and-rocket job already hot and waiting.
Hanging from her screaming props the fantastically powerful little plane bulleted upward in a vertical climb, and as she began to slow down from lack of air her rockets took over. A tractor reached out, seizing her gently. Her wings retracted and she was drawn into Cartiff’s great spaceship; which, a few minutes later, hung poised above one of the largest, richest jewel-mines of Lonabar.
This mine was, among others, Menjo Bleeko’s personal property. Since over-production would glut the market, it was being worked by only one shift of men; the day-shift. It was now black night; the usual guards were the only men upon the premises. The big black ship hung there and waited.
“But suppose they don’t, Kim?” Watson asked.
“Then we’ll wait here every night until they do,” Kinnison replied, grimly. “But they’ll do it tonight, for all the tea in China. They’ll have to, to save Bleeko’s face.”
And they did. In a couple of hours the observer at a high-powered plate reported that Cartiff’s salon had just been blown to bits. Then the Patrolmen went into action.
Bleeko’s mobsmen hadn’t killed anybody at Cartiff’s, therefore the Tellurians wouldn’t kill anybody here. Hence, while ten immense beam-dirigible torpedoes were being piloted carefully down shafts and along tunnels into the deepest bowels of the workings, the guards were given warning that, if they got into their flyers fast enough, they could be fifty miles away and probably safe by zero time. They hurried.
At zero time the torpedoes let go as one. The entire planet quivered under the trip-hammer shock of detonating duodec. For those frightful, those appalling charges had been placed, by computations checked and rechecked, precisely where they would wreak the most havoc, the utmost possible measure of sheer destruction. Much of the rock, however hard, around each one of those incredible centers of demolition was simply blasted out of existence. That is the way duodec, in massive charges, works. Matter simply cannot get out of its way in the first instants of its detonation; matter’s own inherent inertia forbids.
Most of the rock between the bombs was pulverized the merest fraction of a second later. Then, the distortedly-spherical explosion fronts merging, the total incomprehensible pressure was exerted as almost pure lift. The field above the mine-works lifted, then; practically as a mass at first. But it could not remain as such. It could not move fast enough as a whole; nor did it possess even a minute fraction of the tensile strength necessary to withstand the stresses being applied. Those stresses, the forces of the explosions, were to all intents and purposes irresistible. The crust disintegrated violently and almost instantaneously. Rock crushed grindingly against rock; practically the whole mass reducing in the twinkling of an eye to an impalpable powder.
Upward and outward, then, the ragingly compressed gases of detonation drove, hurling everything before them. Chunks blew out sidewise, flying for miles: the mind-staggeringly enormous volume of dust was hurled upward clear into the stratosphere.
Finally that awful dust-cloud was wafted aside, revealing through its thinning haze a strangely and hideously altered terrain. No sign remained of the buildings or the mechanisms of Bleeko’s richest mine. No vestige was left to show that anything built by or pertaining to man had ever existed there. Where those works had been there now yawned an absolutely featureless crater; a crater whose sheer geometrical perfection of figure revealed with shocking clarity the magnitude of the cataclysmic forces which had wrought there.
Kinnison, looking blackly down at that crater, did not feel the glow of satisfaction which comes of a good deed well done. He detested it—it made him sick at the stomach. But, since he had had it to do, he had done it. Why in all the nine hells of Valeria did he have to be a Lensman, anyway?
Back to Lonia. then, the Lensman made his resentful way, and back to bed.
And in the morning, early, workmen began the reconstruction of Cartiff’s place of business.
CHAPTER
10
Bleeko and the Iceberg
INCE KINNISON’S IMPENETRABLE shields of force had confined the damage to the store’s front, it was not long before Cartiff’s reopened. Business was and remained brisk; not only because of what had happened, but also because Cartiff’s top-lofty and arrogant snobbishness had an irresistible appeal to the upper layers of Lonabar’s peculiarly stratified humanity. The Lensman, however, paid little enough attention to business. Outwardly, seated at his ornate desk in haughty grandeur, he was calmness itself, but inwardly he was far from serene.
If he had figured things right, and he was pretty sure that he had, it was up to Bleeko to make the next move, and it would pretty nearly have to be a peaceable one. There was enough doubt about it, however, to make the Lensman a bit jittery inside. Also, from the fact that everybody having any weight at all wore thought-screens, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they had been warned against, and were on the lookout for, THE Lensman—that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Lensman who had already done so much hurt to the Boskonian cause. That they now thought that one to be a well-hidden, unknown Director of Lensmen, and not an actual operative, was little protection. If he made one slip they’d have him, cold.
He hadn’t slipped yet, they didn’t suspect him yet; he was sure of those points. With these people to suspect was to act, and his world-circling ship, equipped with every scanning, spying, and eavesdropping device known to science, would have informed him instantly of any untoward development anywhere upon or near the planet. And his fight with Bleeko was, after all, natural enough and very much in character. It was of the very essence of Boskonian culture that king-snipes should do each other to death with whatever weapons came readiest to hand. The underdog was always trying to kill the upper, and if the latter was not strong enough to protect his loot, he deserved everything he got. A callous philosophy, it is true, but one truly characteristic of Civilization’s inveterate foes.
The higher-ups never interfered. Their own skins were the only ones in which they were interested. They would, Kinnison reflected, probably check back on him, just to insure their own safety, but they would not take sides in this brawl if they were convinced that he was, as he appeared to be, a struggling young racketeer making his way up the ladder of fame and fortune as best he could. Let them check—Cartiff’s past had been fabricated especially to stand up under precisely that investigation, no matter how rigid it were to be!
Hence Kinnison waited, as calmly as might be, for B
leeko to move. There was no particular hurry, especially since Cris was finding heavy going and thick ether at her end of the line, too. They had been in communication at least once every day, usually oftener; and Clarrissa had reported seethingly, in near-masculine, almost-deep-space verbiage, that that damned red-headed hussy of a Helen was a hard nut to crack.
Kinnison grinned sourly every time he thought of Lyrane II. Those matriarchs certainly were a rum lot. They were a pig-headed, self-centered, mulishly stubborn bunch of cock-eyed knotheads, he decided. Non-galaxy-minded; as shortsightedly anti-social as a flock of mad Radeligian cateagles. He’d better…no, he hadn’t better, either—he’d have to lay off. If Cris, with all her potency and charm, with all her drive and force of will, with all her sheer power of mind and of Lens, couldn’t pierce their armor, what chance did any other entity of Civilization have of doing it? Particularly any male creature? He’d like to half-wring their beautiful necks, all of them; but that wouldn’t get him to the first check-station, either. He’d just have to wait until she broke through the matriarchs’ crust—she’d do it, too, by Klono’s prehensile tail!—and then they’d really ride the beam.
So Kinnison waited…and waited…and waited. When he got tired of waiting he gave a few more lessons in snobbishness and in the gentle art of self-preservation to the promising young Lonabarian thug whom he had selected to inherit the business, lock, stock, and barrel—including goodwill, if any—if, as, and when he was done with it. Then he waited some more; waited, in fact, until Bleeko was forced, by his silent pressure, to act.
It was not an overt act, nor an unfriendly—he simply called him up on the visiphone.
“What do you think you’re trying to do?” Bleeko demanded, his darkly handsome face darker than ever with wrath.
Second Stage Lensmen Page 14
