Galactic Patrol (24 page)

Therefore the storming party died to the last man, and, as vanBuskirk had foretold, it was scarcely even a struggle. For ordinary armor is so much tin-plate against a Valerian swinging a space-axe.

The spy-ray of the pirate captain got through just 3n time to see the ghastly finale of the massacre, and his face turned first purple, then white.

"The Patrol!" he gasped. "Valerians-a whole company of them ! I'll say we've been double-crossed !"

"Righto -- we've been jolly well had," the pilot agreed. "You don't know the half of it, either. Somebody's coming, and it isn't a boy scout. If a mauler should suck us in, we'd be very much a spent force, what?"

"Cut the gabble!" snapped the captain. "Is it a mauler, or not?"

"A bit too far away yet to say, but it probably is. They wouldn't have sent those jaspers out without cover, old bean-they know we can burn that freighter's screens down in an hour. Better get ready to run, what?"

The commander did so, wild thoughts racing through his mind. If a mauler got close enough to him to use magnets, he was done. His heaviest beams wouldn't even warm up a mauler's screens, his defenses wouldn't stand up for a second against a mauler's blasts . . . . , and he'd be ordered back to base . . . . .”

“Tally ho, old fruit !" The pilot slammed on maximum blast. "It's a mauler and we've been bloody well jobbed. Back to base?"

"Yes," and the discomfited captain energized his communicator, to report to his immediate superior the humiliating outcome of the supposedly carefully-planned coup.

Kinnison Meets the Wheelmen

As the pirate fled into space Kinnison followed, matching his quarry in course and speed.

He then cut in the automatic controller on his drive, the automatic recorder on his plate, and began to tune in his beam-tracer, only to be brought up short by the realization that the spyray's point would not stay in the pirate's control room without constant attention and manual adjustment. He had known that, too. Even the most precise of automatic controllers, driven by the most carefully stabilized electronic currents, are prone to slip a little at even such close range as ten million miles, especially in the bumpy ether near solar systems, and there was nothing to correct the slip. He had not thought of that before, the pilot always made those minor corrections as a matter of course.

But now he was torn between two desires. He wanted to listen to the conversation that would ensue as soon as the pirate captain got into communication with his superior officers, and, especially should Helmuth put in his beam, he very much wanted to trace it and thus secure another line on the headquarters he was so anxious to locate. He now feared that be could not do both-a fear that soon was to prove well grounded-and wished fervently that for a few minutes he could be two men. Or at least a Velantian, they had eyes and hands and separate brain-compartments enough so that they could do half-a-dozen things at once and do each one well. He could not, but he could try. Maybe he should have brought one of the boys along, at that. No, that would wreck everything, later on, he would have to do the best he could.

Communication was established and the pirate captain began to make his report, and by using one hand on the ray and the other on the tracer, he managed to get a partial line and to record scraps of the conversation. He missed, however, the essential part of the entire episode, that part in which the base commander turned the unsuccessful captain over to Helmuth himself. Therefore Kinnison was surprised indeed at the disappearance of the beam he was so laboriously trying to trace, and to hear Helmuth conclude his castigation of the unlucky captain with. .

. . . . . not entirely your fault, I will not punish you at all severely this time. Report to our base on Aldebaran I, turn your vessel over to commander there, and do anything he tells you to for .thirty of the days of that planet."

Frantically Kinnison drew back his tracer and searched for Helmuth's beam, but before he could synchronize with it the message of the pirates' high chief was finished and his beam was gone. The Lensman sat back in thought.

Aldebaran I Practically next door to his own Solarian System, from which he had come so far. How had they possibly managed to keep concealed, or to re-establish, a base so close to Sol, through all the intensive searching that had been done? But they
had-that was
the important thing. Anyway, he knew where he was going, and that helped. One other thing he hadn't thought of, and one that might have spoiled everything, was the fact that he couldn't stay awake indefinitely to follow that ship! He had to sleep sometime, and while he was asleep his quarry was bound to escape. He of course had a CRX tracer,
which would
hold a ship without attention as long as it was anywhere within even extreme range, and it would have been
a
simple enough matter to have had a photocell relay put in between the plate of the CRX and the automatic controls of the spacer and driver-but he had not asked for it. Well, luckily, he now knew where he was going, and the trip to Aldebaran would. be long enough for him to build a dozen such controls. He had all the necessary parts and plenty of tools.

Therefore, following the pirate ship easily as it tore through space, Kinnison built his automatic "chaser," as he called it. During each of the first four or five "nights" he lost the vessel he was pursuing, but found it without any great difficulty upon awakening.

Thereafter he held it continuously, improving day by day the performance of his apparatus until it could do almost anything except talk. After that he devoted his time to an intensive study of the general problem before him. His results were highly unsatisfactory, for in order to solve any problem one must have enough data to set it up, either in actual equations or in logical sequences, and Kinnison did not have enough data.

He had altogether too many unknowns and not enough knowns.

The first specific problem was that of getting into the pirate base. Since the searchers of the Patrol had not found it, that base must be very well hidden indeed. And hiding anything as large as a base on Aldebaran I, as he remembered it, would be quite a feat in itself. He had been in that system only once, but . . . . .

Alone in his ship, and in deep space although he was, he blushed painfully as he remembered what had happened to him during that visit. He had chased a couple of dope runners to Aldebaran II, and there he had encountered the most vividly, the most flawlessly, the most remarkably and intriguingly beautiful girl. he had ever seen. He had seen beautiful women, of course, before and in plenty. He had seen beauties amateur and professional, social butterflies, dancers, actresses, models, and posturers, both in the flesh and in Telenewscasts, but he bad never supposed that such an utterly ravishing creature as she was could exist outside of a thionite dream. As a timidly innocent damsel in distress she had been perfect, and if she had held that pose a little longer Kinnison shuddered to think of what might have happened.

But, having known too many dope-runners and too few Patrolmen, she misjudged entirely, not only the cadet's sentiments, but also his reactions. For, even as she came amorously into his arms, he had known that there was something screwy. Women like that did not play that kind of game for nothing. She must be mixed up with the two he had been chasing. He got away from her, with only a couple of scratches, just in time to capture her confederates as they were making their escape-and he had been afraid of beautiful women ever since. He'd like to see that Aldebaranian hell-cat again-just once.

He'd been just a kid then, but now . . . . .

But that line of thought was getting him nowhere, fast. It was Aldebaran I that he had better be thinking of. Barren, lifeless, desolate, airless, waterless. Bare as his hand, covered with extinct volcanoes, cratered, jagged, and torn. To hide a base on that planet would take plenty of doing, and, conversely, it would be correspondingly difficult to approach. If on the surface at all, which he doubted very strongly, it would be covered. In any event, all its approaches would be thoroughly screened and equipped with lookouts on the ultra-violet and on the infra-red, as well as on the visible. His detector nullifier wouldn't help him much there. Those screens and lookouts were bad-very, very bad.

Question-could
anything
get into that base without setting off an alarm?

His speedster could not even get close, that was certain. Could he, alone? He would have to wear armor, of course, to hold his air, and it would radiate. Not necessarily-he could land out of range and walk, without power, but there were still the screens and the lookouts. If the pirates were on their toes it simply wasn't in the cards, and he had to assume that they would be alert.

What, then, could pass those barriers? Prolonged consideration of every fact of the situation gave definite answer and marked out clearly the course he must take.

Something admitted by the. pirates themselves was the only thing that could get in. The vessel ahead of his was going in. Therefore he must and would enter that base within the pirate vessel itself. With that point derided there remained only the working out of a method, which proved to be almost ridiculously simple.

Once inside the base, what should he-or rather, what could he-do? For days he made and discarded plans, but finally he tossed them all out of his mind. So much depended upon the location of the base, its personnel, its arrangement, and its routine, that he could develop not even the rough draft of a working plan. He knew what he wanted to do, but he had not even the remotest idea as to how he could go about doing it. Of the openings that appeared, he would have to choose the most feasible and fit his actions to whatever situation then and there obtained.

So deciding, he shot his spy-ray toward the planet and studied it with care. It was indeed as he had remembered it, or worse. Bleakly, hotly arid, it had no soil whatever, its entire surface being composed of igneous rock, lava, and pumice. Stupendous ranges of mountains cries-crossed and intersected each other at random, each range a succession of dead volcanic peaks and blown-off craters. Mountainside and rocky plain, crater-wall and valley floor, alike and innumerably were pockmarked with sub-craters and with immensely yawning shell-holes, as though the whole planet had been throughout geologic ages the target of an incessant cosmic bombardment.

Over its surface and through and through its volume he drove his spy-ray, finding nothing. He bored into its substance with his detectors and his tracers, with results completely negative. Of course, closer up, his electromagnetics would report iron-plenty of it – but that information would also be meaningless. Practically all planets had iron cores. As far as his instruments could tell-and he had given Aldebaran I a more thorough going-over by far than any ordinary surveying ship would have given it-there was no base of any kind upon or within the planet. Yet he
knew
that a base was there. So what? -

maybe-Helmuth's base might be inside the galaxy after all, protected from detection in the same way, probably by solid miles of iron or of iron ore. A second line upon that base had now become imperative. But they were approaching the system fast, he had better get ready.

He belted on his personal equipment, including a nullifier, then inspected his armor, checking its supplies and apparatus carefully before he hooked it ready to his hand.

Glancing into the plate, he noted with approval that his "chaser" was functioning perfectly. Pursued and pursuer were now both well inside the solar system of Aldebaran, and, as slowed the pirate so slowed the speedster. Finally the leader went inert in preparation for his spiral, but Kinnison was no longer following. Before .he went inert he flashed down to within fifty thousand miles of the planet's forbidding surface. He then cut his Bergenholm, threw the speedster into an almost circular orbit, well away from the landing orbit selected by the pirate, cut off all his power, and drifted. He stayed in the speedster, observing and computing, until he had so exactly defined its path that he could find it unerringly at any future instant. Then he went into the airlock, stepped out into space, and, waiting only to be sure that the portal had snapped shut behind him, set his course toward the pirate's spiral.

Inert now, his progress was so slow as to seem imperceptible, but he had plenty of time. And it was only relatively that his speed was low. He was actually hurtling through space at the rate of well over two thousand miles an hour, and his powerful little driver was increasing that speed constantly by an acceleration of two Earth gravities.

Soon the vessel crept up, beneath him now, and Kinnison increasing his drive to five gravities, shot toward it in a long, slanting dive. This was the most ticklish minute of the trip, but the Lensman had assumed correctly that the ship's officers would be looking ahead of them and down, not backward and up. They were, and he made his approach unseen. The approach itself, the boarding of an inert spaceship at its frightful landing-spiral velocity, was elementary to any competent spaceman. There was not even a flare to bother him or to reveal him to sight, as the braking jets were now doing all the work.

Matching course and velocity ever more closely, he crept up-flung his magnet-pulled up, hand over hand-opened the emergency inlet lock – and there he was.

Unconcernedly he made his way along the sternway and into the now deserted quarters of the fighters. There he lay down in a hammock, snapped the acceleration straps, and shot his spy-ray into the control room. And there, in the pirate captain's own visiplate, he observed the rugged and torn topography of the terrain below as the pilot fought his ship down, mile by mile. Tough going, this, Kinnison reflected, and the bird was doing a nice job, even if he was taking it the hard way, bringing her down straight on her nose instead of taking one more spiral around the planet and then sliding in on her under jets, which were designed and placed specifically for such work. But taking it the hard way he was, and his vessel was bucking, kicking, bouncing and spinning on the terrific blasts of her braking jets. Down she came, fast, and it was only after she was actually inside one of those stupendous craters, well below the level of its rim, that the pilot flattened her out and assumed normal landing position.