These matters required only a fraction of a second. Well indeed it was that they did not take longer, for the ever-mounting fury of the prime minister’s attack soon necessitated more—much more—than an automatic block, however capable. But Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, Lensman of Lensmen had more—ever so much more—than that!
He whirled, lips thinned over tight-set teeth in a savage fighting grin. Now he’d see what this zwilnik was and what he had. No fear, no doubt of the outcome, entered his mind. He had suffered such punishment as few minds have ever endured in learning to ward off everything that Mentor, one of the mightiest intellects of this or of any other universe, could send; but through that suffering he had learned. This unknown entity was an able operator, of course, but he certainly had a thick, hard crust to think that he could rub him out!
So thinking, the Lensman hurled a bolt of his own, a blast of power sufficient to have slain a dozen men—and, amazedly, saw it rebound harmlessly from the premier’s hard-held block.
Which of the two combatants was the more surprised it would be hard to say; each had considered his own mind impregnable and invincible. Now, as the Prime Minister perceived how astoundingly capable a foe he faced, he drove a thought toward Eddore and the All-Highest.
Blocked!
Star A Star and the Arisian, then, were not two, but one!
He ordered the officers on duty to blast their Tyrant down. In vain. For, even so early in that ultimately lethal struggle, he could not spare enough of his mind to control effectively any outsider; and in a matter of seconds there were no minds left throughout that entire room in any condition to be controlled.
For the first reverberations, the ricochets, the spent forces of the monster’s attack against Kinnison’s shield had wrought grievously among the mentalities of all bystanders. Those forces were deadly—deadly beyond telling—so inimical to and destructive of intelligence that even their transformation products affected tremendously the nervous systems of all within range.
Then, instants later, the spectacle of the detested and searingly feared Lens scintillating balefully upon the wrist of their own ruler was an utterly inexpressible shock. Some of the officers tried then to go for their blasters, but it was already too late; their shaking, trembling, almost paralyzed muscles could not be forced to function.
An even worse shock followed almost instantly, for the prime minister, under the incredibly mounting intensity of the Lensman’s poignant thrusts, found it necessary to concentrate his every iota of power upon his opponent. Fossten’s form of flesh dissolved, revealing to all beholders except Kinnison what their prime minister actually was—and he had not been very much wrong in saying that that sight would drive any human being mad. Most of the Boskonians did go mad, then and there; but they did not rush about nor scream. They could not move purposefully, but only twitched and writhed horribly as they lay grotesquely a-sprawl. They could not scream or shriek, but only mouthed and mumbled meaningless burblings.
And ever higher, ever more brilliant flamed the Lens as Kinnison threw all of his prodigious will-power, all of his tremendous, indomitable drive, through it and against the incredibly resistant thing to which he was opposed. This was the supreme, the climactic battle of his life thus far. Ether and sub-ether seethed and boiled invisibly under the frightful violence of the forces there unleashed. The men in the control room lay still; all life rived away. Now death spread throughout the confines of the vast space-ship.
Indomitably, relentlessly, the Gray Lensman held his offense upon that unimaginably high level; his Lens flooding the room with intensely coruscant polychromatic light. He did not know, then or ever, how he did it. He never did suspect that he was not alone. It seemed as though his Lens, of its own volition in this time of ultimate need, reached out into unguessable continua and drew therefrom an added, an extra something. But, however it was done, Kinnison and his Lens managed to hold; and under the appalling, the never-ceasing concentration of force the monster’s defenses began gradually to weaken and go down.
Then sketchily, patchily, there was revealed to Kinnison’s sight and sense of perception—a—a—a BRAIN!
There was a body, of sorts, of course—a peculiarly neckless body designed solely to support that gigantic, thin-skulled head. There were certain appendages of limbs, and such-like appurtenances and incidentalia to nourishment, locomotion, and the like; but to all intents and purposes the thing was simply and solely a brain.
Kinnison knew starkly that it was an Arisian—it looked enough like old Mentor to be his twin brother. He would have been stunned, except for the fact that he was far too intent upon victory to let any circumstance, however distracting, affect his purpose. His concentration upon the task in hand was so complete that nothing—literally nothing whatever—could sway him from it.
Step by short, hard, jerky step, Kinnison advanced. Close enough, he selected certain areas upon the sides of that enormous head and with big, hard, open hands he went viciously to work. Right, left, right, left, he slapped those bulging temples brutally, rocking monstrous head and repulsive body from side to side, pendulum-like, with every stunning blow.
His fist would have smashed that thin skull, would perhaps have buried itself deep within the soft tissues of that tremendous brain; and Kinnison did not want to kill his inexplicable opponent—yet. He had to find out first what this was all about.
He knew that he was due to black out soon as he let go, and he intended to addle the thing’s senses so thoroughly that he would be completely out of action for hours—long enough to give the Lensman plenty of time in which to recover his strength.
He did so.
Kinnison did not quite faint. He did, however, have to lie down flat upon the floor; as limp, almost, as the dead men so thickly strewn about.
And thus, while the two immense Grand Fleets met in battle, Boskonia’s flagship hung inert and silent in space afar; manned by fifteen hundred corpses, one unconscious Brain, and one utterly exhausted Gray Lensman.
CHAPTER
21
The Battle of Klovia
OSKONIA’S GRAND FLEET WAS, as has been said, enormous. It was not as large as that of the Patrol in total number of ships, since no ordinary brain nor any possible combination of such brains could have coordinated and directed the activities of so vast a number of units. Its center was, however, heavier; composed of a number and a tonnage of super-maulers which made it self-evidently irresistible.
In his training of his operations staff Kinnison had not overlooked a single bet, had not made a single move which by its falsity might have excited Premier Fossten’s all-too-ready suspicions. They had handled Grand Fleet as a whole in vast, slow maneuvers; plainly the only kind possible to so tremendous a force. Kinnison and his officers had in turn harshly and thoroughly instructed the sub-fleet commanders in the various arts and maneuvers of conquering units equal to or smaller than their own.
That was all; and to the Boskonians, even to Fossten, that had been enough. That was obviously all that was possible. Not one of them realized that Tyrant Gannel very carefully avoided any suggestion that there might be any intermediate tactics, such as that of three or four hundred sub-fleets, too widely spread in space and too numerous to be handled by any ordinary mind or apparatus, to englobe and to wipe out simultaneously perhaps fifty sub-fleets whose commanders were not even in communication with each other. This technique was as yet the exclusive property of the Patrol and the Z9M9Z.
And in that exact operation, a closed book to the zwilniks, lay—supposedly and tactically—the Patrol’s overwhelming advantage. For Haynes, through his four highly-specialized Rigellian Lensmen and thence through the two hundred Rigellian operator-computers, could perform maneuvers upon any intermediate scale he pleased. He could handle his whole vast Grand Fleet and its every component part—he supposed—as effectively, as rapidly, and almost as easily as a skilled chess player handles his pieces and his pawns. Neither Kinnison nor Haynes can be blamed, h
owever, for the fact that their suppositions were somewhat in error; it would have taken an Arisian to deduce that this battle was not to be fought exactly as they had planned it.
Haynes had another enormous advantage in knowing the exact number, rating, disposition, course, and velocity of every main unit of the aggregation to which he was opposed. And third, he had the sunbeam, concerning which the enemy knew nothing at all and which was now in good working order.
It is needless to say that the sunbeam generators were already set to hurl that shaft of irresistible destruction along the precisely correct line, or that Haynes’ Grand Fleet formation had been made with that particular weapon in mind. It was not an orthodox formation; in any ordinary space-battle it would have been sheerly suicidal. But the Port Admiral, knowing for the first time in his career every pertinent fact concerning his foe, knew exactly what he was doing.
His fleet, instead of driving ahead to meet the enemy, remained inert and practically motionless well within the limits of Klovia’s solar system. His heavy stuff, instead of being massed at the center, was arranged in a vast ring. There was no center except for a concealing screen of heavy cruisers.
When the far-flung screens of scout cruisers came into engagement, then, the Patrol scouts near the central line did not fight, but sped lightly aside. So did the light and heavy-cruisers and the battleships. The whole vast center of the Boskonians drove onward, unopposed, into—nothing.
Nevertheless they kept on driving. They could, without orders, do nothing else, and no orders were forthcoming from the flagship. Commanders tried to get in touch with Grand Fleet Operations, but could not; and, in failing, kept on under their original instructions. They had, they could have, no suspicion that any minion of the Patrol was back of what had happened to their top brass. The flagship had been in the safest possible position and no attack had as yet been made. They probably wondered futilely as to what kind of a mechanical breakdown could have immobilized and completely silenced their High Command, but that was—strictly—none of their business. They had had orders, very definite orders, that no matter what happened they were to go on to Klovia and to destroy it. Thus, however wondering, they kept on. They were on the line. They would hold it. They would blast out of existence anything and everything which might attempt to bar their way. They would reach Klovia and they would reduce it to its component atoms.
Unresisted, then, the Boskonian center bored ahead into nothing, until Haynes, through his Rigellians, perceived that it had come far enough. Then Klovia’s brilliantly shining sun darkened almost to the point of extinction. Along the line of centers, through the space so peculiarly empty of Patrol ships, there came into being the sunbeam—a bar of quasi-solid lightning into which there had been compressed all the energy of well over four million tons per second of disintegrating matter.
Scouts and cruisers caught in that ravening beam flashed briefly, like sparks flying from a forge, and vanished. Battleships and super-dreadnoughts the same. Even the solid warhead of fortresses and maulers was utterly helpless. No screen has ever been designed capable of handling that hellish load; no possible or conceivable substance can withstand save momentarily the ardor of a sunbeam. For the energy liberated by the total annihilation of four million tons per second of matter is in fact as irresistible as it is incomprehensible.
The armed and armored planets did not disappear. They contained too much sheer mass for even that inconceivably powerful beam to volatilize in any small number of seconds. Their surfaces, however, melted and boiled. The controlling and powering mechanisms fused into useless pools of molten metal. Inert, then, inactive and powerless, they no longer constituted threats to Klovia’s well-being.
The negaspheres also were rendered ineffective by the beam. Their anti-masses were not decreased, of course—in fact, they were probably increased a trifle by the fervor of the treatment—but, with the controlling superstructures volatilized away, they became more of menace to the Boskonian forces than to those of Civilization. Indeed, several of the terrible things were drawn into contact with ruined planets. Then negasphere and planet consumed each other, flooding all nearby space with intensely hard and horribly lethal radiation.
The beam winked out; Klovia’s sun flashed on. The sunbeam was—and is—clumsy, unwieldy, quite definitely not rapidly maneuverable. But it had done its work; now the component parts of Civilization’s Grand Fleet started in to do theirs.
Since the Battle of Klovia—it was and still is called that, as though it were the only battle which that warlike planet has ever seen—has been fought over in the classrooms of practically every civilized planet of two galaxies, it would be redundant to discuss it in detail here.
It was, of course, unique. No other battle like it has ever been fought, either before or since—and let us hope that no other ever will be. It is studied by strategists, who have offered many thousands of widely variant profundities as to what Port Admiral Haynes should have done. Its profound emotional appeal, however, lies only and sheerly in its unorthodoxy. For in the technically proper space battle there is no hand-to-hand fighting, no purely personal heroism, no individual deeds of valor. It is a thing of logic and of mathematics and of science, the massing of superior fire-power against a well-chosen succession of weaker opponents. When the screens of a space-ship go down that ship is done, her personnel only memories.
But here how different! With the supposed breakdown of the lines of communication to the flagship, the sub-fleets carried on in formation. With the destruction of the entire center, however, all semblance of organization or of cooperation was lost. Every staff officer knew that no more orders would emanate from the flagship. Each knew chillingly that there could be neither escape nor succor. The captain of each vessel, thoroughly convinced that he knew vastly more than did his fleet commander, proceeded to run the war to suit himself. The outcome was fantastic, so utterly bizarre that the Z9M9Z and her trained coordinating officers were useless. Science and tactics and the million lines of communication could do nothing against a foe who insisted upon making it a ship-to-ship, yes, a man-to-man affair!
The result was the most gigantic dog-fight in the annals of military science. Ships—Civilization’s perhaps as eagerly as Boskonia’s—cut off their projectors, cut off their screens, the better to ram, to board, to come to grips personally with the enemy. Scout to scout, cruiser to cruiser, battleship to battleship, the insane contagion spread. Haynes and his staff men swore fulminantly, the Rigellians hurled out orders, but those orders simply could not be obeyed. The dog-fight spread until it filled a good sixth of Klovia’s entire solar system.
Board and storm! Armor—DeLameters—axes! The mad blood-lust of hand-to-hand combat, the insensately horrible savagery of our pirate forbears, multiplied by millions and spread out to fill a million million cubic miles of space!
Haynes and his fellows wept unashamed as they stood by helpless, unable to avoid or to prevent the slaughter of so many splendid men, the gutting of so many magnificent ships. It was ghastly—it was appalling—it was WAR!
And far from this scene of turmoil and of butchery lay Boskonia’s great flagship, and in her control room Kinnison began to recover. He sat up groggily. He gave his throbbing head a couple of tentative shakes. Nothing rattled. Good—he was QX, he guessed, even if he did feel as limp as nine wet dishrags. Even his Lens felt weak; its usually refulgent radiance was sluggish, wan, and dim. This had taken plenty out of them, he reflected soberly; but he was mighty lucky to be alive. But he’d better get his batteries charged. He couldn’t drive a thought across the room, the shape he was in now, and he knew of only one brain in the universe Capable of straightening out this mess.
After assuring himself that the highly inimical brain would not be able to function normally for a long time to come, the Lensman made his way to the galley. He could walk without staggering already—fine! There he fried himself a big, thick, rare steak—his never-failing remedy for all the ills to which flesh is heir�
�and brewed a pot of Thralian coffee; making it viciously, almost corrosively strong. And as he ate and drank his head cleared magically. Strength flowed back into him in waves. His Lens flamed into its normal splendor. He stretched prodigiously; inhaled gratefully a few deep breaths. He was QX.
Back in the control room, after again checking up on the still quiescent brain—he wouldn’t trust this Fossten as far as he could spit—he hurled a thought to far-distant Arisia and to Mentor, its ancient sage.
“What’s an Arisian doing in this Second Galaxy, working against the Patrol? Just what is somebody trying to pull off?” he demanded heatedly, and in a second of flashing thought reported what had happened.
“Truly, Kinnison of Tellus, my mind is not entirely capable,” the deeply resonant, slow simulacrum of a voice resounded within the Lensman’s brain. The Arisian never hurried; nothing whatever, apparently, not even such a cataclysmic upheaval as this, could fluster or excite him. “It does not seem to be in accord with the visualization of the Cosmic All which I hold at the moment that any one of my fellows is in fact either in the Second Galaxy or acting antagonistically to the Galactic Patrol. It is, however, a truism that hypotheses, theories, and visualizations must fit themselves to known or observed facts, and even your immature mind is eminently able to report truly upon actualities. But before I attempt to revise my visualization to conform to this admittedly peculiar circumstance, we must be very sure indeed of our facts. Are you certain, youth, that the being whom you have beaten into unconsciousness is actually an Arisian?”
“Certainly I’m certain!” Kinnison snapped. “Why, he’s enough like you to have been hatched out of half of the same egg. Take a look!” and he knew that the Arisian was studying every external and internal detail, part, and organ of the erstwhile Fossten of Thrale.
Second Stage Lensmen Page 28
