Gray Lensman. E. E. Smith
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by a yell from the board. “They’re all coming at us at once!”
Whether the scientists of Boskone developed the detector-nullifier before or after Helmuth’s failure to deduce the Lensman’s use of such an instrument is a nice question, and one upon which a great deal has been said. While interesting, the point is really immaterial here; the facts remaining the same—that the pirates not only had it at the time of the Patrol’s first visit to the Second Galaxy, but had used it to such good advantage that the denizens of that recalcitrant planet had been forced, in sheer desperation of self-preservation, to work out a scrambler for that nullification and to surround their world with its radiations. They could not restore perfect detection, but the condition for complete nullification was so critical that it was a comparatively simple matter to upset it sufficiently so that an image of a sort was revealed. And, at that close range, any sort of an image was enough.
The Dauntless, approaching the planet, entered the zone of scrambling and stood revealed plainly enough upon the plates of the enemy vessels. They attacked instantly and viciously; within a second after the lookout had shouted his warning the outer screens of the Patrol ship were blazing incandescent under the furious assaults of a dozen Boskonian beams.
4. — MEDON
~
FOR A MOMENT ALL EYES were fixed apprehensively upon meters and recorders, but there was no immediate cause for alarm. The builders of the Dauntless had built well; her outer screen, the lightest of her series of four, was carrying the attackers’ load with no sign of distress.
“Strap down, everybody,” the expedition’s commander ordered then. “Inert her, Hen. Match velocity with that base,” and as Master Pilot Henry Henderson cut his Bergenholm the vessel lurched wildly aside as its intrinsic velocity was restored.
Henderson’s fingers swept over his board as rapidly and as surely as those of an organist over the banked keys of his console; producing, not chords and arpeggios of harmony, but roaring blasts of precisely-controlled power. Each key-like switch controlled one jet. Lightly and fleetingly touched, it produced a gentle urge; at sharp, full contact it yielded a mighty, solid shove; depressed still farther, so as to lock into any one of a dozen notches, it brought into being a torrent of propulsive force of any desired magnitude, which ceased only when its key-release was touched.
And Henderson was a virtuoso. Smoothly, effortlessly, but in a space of seconds the great vessel rolled over, spiralled, and swung until her landing jets were in line and exerting five gravities of thrust. Then, equally smoothly, almost imperceptibly, the line of force was varied until the flame-enshrouded dome was stationary below them. Nobody, not even the two other Master Pilots, and least of all Henderson himself, paid any attention to the polished perfection, the consummate artistry, of the performance. That was his job. He was a Master Pilot, and one of the hallmarks of his rating was the habit of making difficult maneuvers look easy.
“Take ‘em now, Chief? Can’t we, huh?” Chatway, the Chief Firing Officer, did not say those words. He did not need to. The attitude and posture of the C.F.O. and his subordinates made the thought tensely plain.
“Not yet, Chatty,” the Lensman answered the unsent thought. “We’ll have to wait until they englobe us, so we can get ‘em all. It’s got to be all or none—if even one of them gets away or even has time to analyze and report on the stuff we’re going to use it’ll be just too bad.”
He then got in touch with the officer within the beleaguered base and renewed the conversation at the point at which it had been broken off.
“We can help you, I think; but to do so effectively we must have clear ether. Will you please order your ships away, out of even extreme range?”
“For how long? They can do us irreparable damage in one rotation of the planet.”
“One-twentieth of that time, at most—if we can’t do it in that time we can’t do it at all. Nor will they direct many beams at you, if any. They’ll be working on us.”
Then, as the defending ships darted away, Kinnison turned to his C.F.O.
“QX, Chatty. Open up with your secondaries. Fire at will!”
Then from projectors of a power theretofore carried only by maulers there raved out against the nearest Boskonian vessels beams of a vehemence compared to which the enemies’ own seemed weak, futile. And those were the secondaries!
As has been intimated, the Dauntless was an unusual ship. She was enormous. She was bigger even than a mauler in actual bulk and mass; and from needle-beaked prow to jet-studded stern she was literally packed with power—power for any emergency conceivable to the fertile minds of Port Admiral Haynes and his staff of designers and engineers. Instead of two, or at most three intake-screen exciters, she had two hundred. Her bus-bars, instead of being the conventional rectangular coppers, of a few square inches cross-sectional area, were laminated members built up of co-axial tubing of pure silver to a diameter of over a yard—multiple and parallel conductors, each of whose current-carrying capacity was to be measured only in millions of amperes. And everything else aboard that mighty engine of destruction was upon the same Gargantuan scale.
Titanic though those thrusts were, not a pirate ship was seriously hurt. Outer screens went down, and more than a few of the second lines of defense also failed. But that was the Patrolmen’s strategy; to let the enemy know that they had weapons of offense somewhat superior to their own, but not quite powerful enough to be a real menace.
In minutes, therefore, the Boskonians rushed up and proceeded to englobe the newcomer; supposing, of course, that she was a product of the world below, that she was manned by the race who had so long and so successfully fought off Boskonian encroachment.
They attacked, and under the concentrated fury of their beams the outer screen of the Patrol ship began to fail. Higher and higher into the spectrum it radiated, blinding white... blue... an intolerable violet glare; then, patchily, through the invisible ultra-violet and into the black of extinction. The second screen resisted longer and more stubbornly, but finally it also went down; the third automatically taking up the burden of defense. Simultaneously the power of the Dauntless’ projectors weakened, as though she were shifting her power from offense to defense in order to stiffen her third, and supposedly her last, shielding screen.
“Pretty soon, now, Chatway,” Kinnison observed. “Just as soon as they can report that they’ve got us in a bad way; that it’s just a matter of time until they blow us out of the ether. Better report now—I’ll put you on the spool.”
“We are equipped to energize simultaneously eight of the new, replaceable-unit primary projectors,” the C.F.O. stated, crisply. “There are twenty-one vessels englobing us, and no others within detection. With a discharge period of point six zero and a switching interval of point zero nine, the entire action should occupy one point nine eight seconds.”
“Chief Communications Officer Nelson on the spool. Can the last surviving ship of the enemy report enough in two seconds to do us material harm?”
“In my opinion it can not, sir,” Nelson reported, formally. “The Communications Officer is neither an observer nor a technician; he merely transmits whatever material is given him by other officers for transmission. If he is already working a beam to his base at the moment of our first blast he might be able to report the destruction of vessels, but he could not be specific as to the nature of the agent used. Such a report could do no harm, as the fact of the destruction of the vessels will in any event become apparent shortly. Since we are apparently being overcome easily, however, and this is a routine action, the probability is that this detachment is not in direct communication with Base at any given moment. If not, he could not establish working control in two seconds.”
“Kinnison now reporting. Having determined to the best of my ability that engaging the enemy at this time will not enable them to send Boskone any information regarding our primary armament, I now give the word to... FIRE!”
The underlying principle of the destructive beam produced by overloading a regulation projector had, it is true,