First lensman, p.18
First Lensman, page 18
part #2 of Lensman Series
“Unfortunately, I am not. The signal will almost certainly come in from an unpredictable direction, from a ship so far away that even a super-fast cruiser could not get close enough to her to detect—just a minute. Rod!” He Lensed the elder Kinnison so sharply that both young Lensmen jumped.
“What is it, Virge?”
Samms explained rapidly, concluding: “So I would like to have you throw a globe of scouts around this whole Zabriskan system. One detet1 out and one detet apart, so as to be able to slap a tracer onto any ship laying a beam to this planet, from any direction whatever. It would not take too many scouts, would it?”
“No; but it wouldn’t be worth while.”
“Why not?”
“Because it wouldn’t prove a thing except what we already know—that Spaceways is involved in the thionite racket. The ship would be clean. Merely another relay.”
“Oh. You’re probably right.” If Virgil Samms was in the least put out at this cavalier dismissal of his idea, he made no sign. He thought intensely for a couple of minutes. “You are right. I will have to work from the Cavenda end. How are you coming with Operation Bennett?”
“Nice!” Kinnison enthused. “When you get a couple of days, come over and see it grow. This is a fine world, Virge—it’ll be ready!”
“I’ll do that.” Samms broke the connection and called Dronvire.
“The only change here is for the worse,” the Rigellian reported, tersely. “The slight positive correlation between deaths from thionite and the arrival of Spaceways vessels has disappeared.”
There was no need to elaborate on that bare statement. Both Lensmen knew what it meant. The enemy, either in anticipation of statistical analysis or for economic reasons, was rationing his small supply of the drug.
And DalNalten was very much unlike his usual equable self. He was glum and unhappy; so much so that it took much urging to make him report at all.
“We have, as you know, put our best operatives to work on the interplanetary lines,” he said finally, half sullenly. “We have secured quite a little data. The accumulating facts, however, point more and more definitely toward an utterly preposterous conclusion. Can you think of any valid reason why the exports and imports of thionite between Tellus and Mars, Mars and Venus, and Venus and Tellus, should all be exactly equal to each other?”
“What!”
“Precisely. That is why Knobos and I are not yet ready to present even a preliminary report.”
Then Jill. “I can’t prove it, any more than I could before, but I’m pretty sure that Morgan is the Boss. I have drawn every picture I can think of with Isaacson in the driver’s seat, but none of them fit?” She paused, questioningly.
“I am already reconciled to adopting that view; at least as a working hypothesis. Go ahead.”
“The fact seems to be that Morgan has always had all the left-wingers of the Nationalists under his thumb. Now he and his man Friday, Representative Flierce, are wooing all the radicals and so-called liberals on our side of both Senate and House—a new technique for him—and they’re offering plenty of the right kind of bait. He has the commentators guessing, but there’s no doubt whatever in my mind that he is aiming at next Election Day and our Galactic Council.”
“And you and Dronvire are sitting idly by, doing nothing, of course?”
“Of course!” Jill giggled, but sobered quickly. “He’s a smooth, smooth worker, Dad. We are organizing, of course, and putting out propaganda of our own, but there’s so pitifully little that we can actually do—look and listen to this for a minute, and you’ll see what I mean.”
In her distant room Jill manipulated a reel and flipped a switch. A plate came to life, showing Morgan’s big, sweating, passionately earnest face.
“… and who are these Lensmen, anyway?” Morgan’s voice bellowed, passionate conviction in every syllable. “They are the hired minions of the classes, stabbers in the back, crooks and scoundrels, tools of ruthless wealth! They are hirelings of the interplanetary bankers, those unspeakable excrescences on the body politic who are still grinding down into the dirt, under an iron heel, the face of the common man! In the guise of democracy they are trying to set up the worst, the most outrageous tyranny that this universe has ever. …” Jill snapped the switch viciously.
“And a lot of people swallow that … that bilge!” she almost snarled. “If they had the brains of a … of even that Zabriskan fontema Mase told me about, they wouldn’t, but they do!”
“I know they do. We have known all along that he is a masterly actor; we now know that he is more than that.”
“Yes, and we’re finding out that no appeal to reason, no psychological countermeasures, will work. Dronvire and I agree that you’ll have to arrange matters so that you can do solid months of stumping yourself. Personally.”
“It may come to that, but there’s a lot of other things to do first.”
Samms broke the connection and thought. He did not consciously try to exclude the two youths, but his mind was working so fast and in such a disjointed fashion that they could catch only a few fragments. The incomprehensible vastness of space—tracing—detection—Cavenda’s one tiny, fast moving moon—back, and solidly, to detection.
“Mase,” Samms thought then, carefully. “As a specialist in such things, why is it that the detectors of the smallest scout—lifeboat, even—have practically the same range as those of the largest liners and battleships?”
“Noise level and hash, sir, from the atomics.”
“But can’t they be screened out?”
“Not entirely, sir, without blocking reception completely.”
“I see. Suppose, then, that all atomics aboard were to be shut down; that for the necessary heat and light we use electricity, from storage or primary batteries or from a generator driven by an internal-combustion motor or a heat-engine. Could the range of detection then be increased?”
“Tremendously, sir. My guess is that the limiting factor would then be the cosmics.”
“I hope you’re right. While you are waiting for the next signal to come in, you might work out a preliminary design for such a detector. If, as I anticipate, this Zabriska proves to be a dead end, Operation Zabriska ends here—becomes a part of Zwilnik—and you two will follow me at max to Tellus. You, Jack, are very badly needed on Operation Boskone. You and I, Mase, will make appropriate alterations aboard a J-class vessel of the Patrol.”
XII
Approaching Cavenda in his dead-black, converted scout-ship, Virgil Samms cut his drive, killed his atomics, and turned on his super-powered detectors. For five full detets in every direction—throughout a spherical volume over ten detets in diameter—space was void of ships. Some activity was apparent upon the planet dead ahead, but the First Lensman did not worry about that. The drug-runners would of course have atomics in their plants, even if there were no spaceships actually on the planet—which there probably were. What he did worry about was detection. There would be plenty of detectors, probably automatic; not only ordinary sub-ethereals, but electros and radars as well.
He flashed up to within one and a quarter detets, stopped, and checked again. Space was still empty. Then, after making a series of observations, he went inert and established an intrinsic velocity which, he hoped, would be close enough. He again shut off his atomics and started the sixteen-cylinder Diesel engine which would do its best to replace them.
That best was none too good, but it would do. Besides driving the Bergenholm it could furnish enough kilodynes of thrust to produce a velocity many times greater than any attainable by inert matter. It used a lot of oxygen per minute, but it would not run for very many minutes. With her atomics out of action his ship would not register upon the plates of the long-range detectors universally used. Since she was nevertheless traveling faster than light, neither electromagnetic detector-webs nor radar could “see” her. Good enough.
Samms was not the System’s best computer, nor did he have the System’s finest instruments. His positional error could be corrected easily enough; but as he drove nearer and nearer to Cavenda, keeping, toward the last, in line with its one small moon, he wondered more and more as to how much of an allowance he should make for error in his intrinsic, which he had set up practically by guess. And there was another variable, the cutoff. He slowed down to just over one light; but even at that comparatively slow speed an error of one millisecond at cutoff meant a displacement of two hundred miles! He switched the spotter into the Berg’s cutoff circuit, set it for three hundred miles, and waited tensely at his controls.
The relays clicked, the driving force expired, the vessel went inert. Samms’ eyes, flashing from instrument to instrument, told him that matters could have been worse. His intrinsic was neither straight up, as he had hoped, nor straight down, as he had feared, but almost exactly halfway between the two—straight out. He discovered that fact just in time; in another second or two he would have been out beyond the moon’s protecting bulk and thus detectable from Cavenda. He went free, flashed back to the opposite boundary of his area of safety, went inert, and put the full power of the bellowing Diesel to the task of bucking down his erroneous intrinsic, losing altitude continuously. Again and again he repeated the maneuver; and thus, grimly and stubbornly, he fought his ship to ground.
He was very glad to see that the surface of the satellite was rougher, rockier, ruggeder, and more cratered even than that of Earth’s Luna. Upon such a terrain as this, it would be next to impossible to spot even a moving vessel—if it moved carefully.
By a series of short and careful inertialess hops—correcting his intrinsic velocity after each one by an inert collision with the ground—he maneuvered his vessel into such a position that Cavenda’s enormous globe hung directly overhead. Breathing a profoundly deep breath of relief he killed the big engine, cut in his fully-charged accumulators, and turned on detector and spy-ray. He would see what he could see.
His detectors showed that there was only one point of activity on the whole planet. He located it precisely; then, after cutting his spy-ray to minimum power, he approached it gingerly, yard by yard. Stopped! As he had more than half expected, there was a spy-ray block. A big one, almost two miles in diameter. It would be almost directly beneath him—or rather, almost straight overhead—in about three hours.
Samms had brought along a telescope, considerably more powerful than the telescopic visiplate of his scout. Since the surface gravity of this moon was low—scarcely one-fifth that of Earth—he had no difficulty in lugging the parts out of the ship or in setting the thing up.
But even the telescope did not do much good. The moon was close to Cavenda, as astronomical distances go—but really worthwhile astronomical optical instruments simply are not portable. Thus the Lensman saw something that, by sufficient stretch of the imagination, could have been a factory; and, eyes straining at the tantalizing limit of visibility, he even made himself believe that he saw a toothpick-shaped object and a darkly circular blob, either of which could have been the spaceship of the outlaws. He was sure, however, of two facts. There were no real cities upon Cavenda. There were no modern spaceports, or even airfields.
He dismounted the scope, stored it, set his detectors, and waited. He had to sleep at times, of course; but any ordinary detector rig can be set to sound off at any change in its status—and Samms’ was no ordinary rig. Wherefore, when the drug-mongers’ vessel took off, Samms left Cavenda as unobtrusively as he had approached it, and swung into that vessel’s line.
Samms’ strategy had been worked out long since. On his Diesel, at a distance of just over one detet, he would follow the outlaw as fast as he could; long enough to establish his line. He would then switch to atomic drive and close up to between one and two detets; then again go onto Diesel for a check. He would keep this up for as long as might prove necessary.
As far as any of the Lensmen knew, Spaceways always used regular liners or freighters in this business, and this scout was much faster than any such vessel. And even if—highly improbable thought!—the enemy ship was faster than his own, it would still be within range of those detectors when it got to wherever it was that it was going. But how wrong Samms was!
At his first check, instead of being not over two detets away the quarry was three and a half; at the second the distance was four and a quarter; at the third, almost exactly five. Scowling, Samms watched the erstwhile brilliant point of light fade into darkness. That circular blob that he had almost seen, then, had been the spaceship, but it had not been a sphere, as he had supposed. Instead, it had been a teardrop; sticking, sharp tail down, in the ground. Ultra-fast. This was the result. But ideas had blown up under him before, they probably would again. He resumed atomic drive and made arrangements with the Port Admiral to rendezvous with him and the Chicago at the earliest possible time.
“What is there along that line?” he demanded of the superdreadnaught’s Chief Pilot, even before junction had been made.
“Nothing, sir, that we know of,” that worthy reported, after studying his charts.
He boarded the gigantic ship of war, and with Kinnison pored over those same charts.
“Your best bet is Eridan, I think,” Kinnison concluded finally. “Not too near your line, but they could very easily figure that a one-day dogleg would be a good investment. And Spaceways owns it, you know, from core to planetary limits—the richest uranium mines in existence. Made to order. Nobody would suspect a uranium ship. How about throwing a globe around Eridan?”
Samms thought for minutes. “No … not yet, at least. We don’t know enough yet.”
“I know it—that’s why it looks to me like a good time and place to learn something,” Kinnison argued. “We know—almost know, at least—that a super-fast ship, carrying thionite, has just landed there. This is the hottest lead we’ve had. I say englobe the planet, declare martial law, and not let anything in or out until we find it. Somebody there must know something, a lot more than we do. I say hunt him out and make him talk.”
“You’re just popping off, Rod. You know as well as I do that nabbing a few of the small fry isn’t enough. We can’t move openly until we can strike high.”
“I suppose not,” Kinnison grumbled. “But we know so damned little, Virge!”
“Little enough,” Samms agreed. “Of the three main divisions, only the political aspect is at all clear. In the drug division, we know where thionite comes from and where it is processed, and Eridan may be—probably is—another link. On the other end, we know a lot of peddlers and a few middlemen—nobody higher. We have no actual knowledge whatever as to who the higher-ups are or how they work; and it’s the bosses we want. Concerning the pirates, we know even less. ‘Murgatroyd’ may be no more a man’s name than ‘zwilnik’ is. …”
“Before you get too far away from the subject, what are you going to do about Eridan?”
“Nothing, for the moment, would be best, I believe. However, Knobos and DalNalten should switch their attention from Spaceways’ passenger liners to the uranium ships from Eridan to all three of the inner planets. Check?”
“Check. Particularly since it explains so beautifully the merry-go-round they have been on so long—chasing the same packages of dope backwards and forwards so many times that the corners of the boxes got worn round. We’ve got to get the top men, and they’re smart. Which reminds me—Morgan as Big Boss does not square up with the Morgan that you and Fairchild smacked down so easily when he tried to investigate the Hill. A loud-mouthed, chiseling politician might have a lockbox full of documentary evidence about party bosses and power deals and chorus girls and Martian tekkyl coats, but the man we’re after very definitely would not.”
“You’re telling me?” This point was such a sore one that Samms relapsed into idiom. “The boys should have cracked that box a week ago, but they struck a knot. I’ll see if they know anything yet. Tune in, Rod. Ray!” He Lensed a thought at his cousin.
“Yes, Virge?”
“Have you got a spy-ray into that lockbox yet?”
“Glad you called. Yes, last night. Empty. Empty as a sub-deb’s skull—except for an atomic-powered gimmick that it took Bergenholm’s whole laboratory almost a week to neutralize.”
“I see. Thanks. Off.” Samms turned to Kinnison. “Well?”
“Nice. A mighty smart operator.” Kinnison gave credit ungrudgingly. “Now I’ll buy your picture—what a man! But now—and I’ve got my ears pinned back—what was it you started to say about pirates?”
“Just that we have very little to go on, except for the kind of stuff they seem to like best, and the fact that even armed escorts have not been able to protect certain types of shipments of late. The escorts, too, have disappeared. But with these facts as bases, it seems to me that we could arrange something, perhaps like this. …”
* * *
A fast, sleek freighter and a heavy battle-cruiser bored steadily through the interstellar void. The merchantman carried a fabulously valuable cargo: not bullion or jewels or plate of price, but things literally above price—machine tools of highest precision, delicate optical and electrical instruments, fine watches and chronometers. She also carried First Lensman Virgil Samms.
And aboard the warship there was Roderick Kinnison; for the first time in history a mere battle-cruiser bore a Port Admiral’s flag.
As far as the detectors of those two ships could reach, space was empty of man-made craft; but the two Lensmen knew that they were not alone. One and one-half detets away, loafing along at the freighter’s speed and paralleling her course, in a hemispherical formation open to the front, there flew six tremendous teardrops; superdreadnaughts of whose existence no Tellurian or Colonial government had even an inkling. They were the fastest and deadliest craft yet built by man—the first fruits of Operation Bennett. And they, too, carried Lensmen—Costigan, Jack Kinnison, Northrop, Dronvire of Rigel Four, Rodebush, and Cleveland. Nor was there need of detectors: the eight Lensmen were in as close communication as though they had been standing in the same room.
