to the scores of Rigellian switchboard operators, who in turn flashed them out along the communicator beams to the pilot rooms on every one of the tens of thousands of Patrol ships. As the orders were received and the different units moved into attacking positions, the smaller craft of the Task Force and the screen of scouts for the Grand Fleet slipped back through the ranks, out of the way of the expected explosive spray of interlocking power beams.

  There were three ways for Worsel to observe the enemy: eyes, sense of perception, and telepathic input. Using all his eyes, he studied the battle tank, looked at the electronic screen at various magnifications, and did a direct telescopic scan. He compared this to the various impressions from the other observers whose thoughts filled the battle room. Then he projected his perception out into space and swept it back and forth at incredible speed.

  The results were utterly confusing to his logical, compartmented mind. None of his comparisons roughly matched. There were five hundred and thirty-eight thousand enemy ships, give or take fifty thousand. Fifty thousand! There was no understandable reason why there should be a ten percent difference between his own perceptive powers and the electronic monitors. Then, too, he could detect only one-twentieth of the life forces which should have been present to man that fleet. The "phantom" issue was definitely present. Even within the three dimensional tank, display lights would alternately flicker strongly or weakly at a five percent rate. Some even appeared and disappeared. Everyone noticed the effect and attempted various explanations, the most common one being attributed to ships slipping in and out of Nth space or the fourth dimension.

  "No," said Nadreck. "It's not fourth dimensional. I don't believe its Nth dimensional, either. If anything, it reminds me of an etheric dimensional transference, which is theoretical and never before observed by me."

  "Etheric!" Worsel said, a deep ripple of emotion shaking his thoughts. "That sounds nasty, sort of Delgonian, sort of, sort of--" He was reluctant to say it.

  "--Sort of like Eichwoor!" Worsel's thought was completed by Lalla Kallatra. To her, a possible return of disembodied

  Woor of the Eich from another existence was excruciating, and she knew Worsel, who had joined with her to drive the evil Eichwoor back into its supernatural world, felt the same.

  "You have some reason to be superstitious," Nadreck said disdainfully in his peculiarly impersonal, yet smug, manner, "but do not become paranoid." Granted that the Eich had been, were still, among the most baneful of Civilization's enemies, near the top of the Boskonian hierarchy, Nadreck did not find frigid-blooded poison-breathing entities like the Eich and the Onlonians instinctively repulsive, as humanoids did. As for the Eichwoor, he had looked for those dead spirits and had found nothing. "I admit other dimensions beyond our time and space, unknown even to me. But the unknown doesn't have to be unnatural or supernatural. I have been patiently explaining to Kallatra, who listens, even if you don't, Worsel. I have no evidence of a spirit world, therefore I find your fears irrational. Eichwoor ghosts, indeed! They are ghosts from your minds." The story of Kallatra's dead father, the quasi-robot Deuce O'Sx, his ethereal soul on guard in the spirit world against the Eichwoor, was exceedingly irritating to him because so many Lensmen accepted as a fact something Nadreck couldn't prove. "There's more of a young girl's sentimentality than scientific logic muddling your mind, Worsel."

  Admiral LaForge did not allow himself to be inhibited by the confusing observations. The orders continued to flow out to his captains. The double crescent spread wider, the tips twisting into an arc, growing into a clockwise circle.

  LaForge projected an accelerated countdown--5-4-3-2-1-- and a hundred thousand beams of prodigious energy flew from a hundred thousand Patrol ships to smite the enemy. There were three pulses. One flash followed another followed another. Raw energy flickered against the sides of the enemy. Yet there were no spitting balls of force splattering against defensive screens! There were no roiling clouds of thermonuclear fire, no incandescent clusters of miniature suns! Instead, the focal points of power seemed to be swallowed up by a corresponding shield, sponged up without a trace, with answering fire returned fully as powerful. One, two, three pulses. The hundred thousand Patrol ships flared around the edges, rocked and quivered, their screens absorbing the sledgehammer blows with brilliantly sparkling curtains of resistance.

  Worsel heard LaForge's amazed and discouraged comment meant for no one else's mind. "Klono, no! How did they do that? They've invented the perfect screen!"

  The damage reports were coming in. There were no serious casualties, but half of the attackers had suffered some minor damage. The enemy's ray guns were at least as powerful as the Patrol's, despite any power drain by their screens in dissipating the attack. LaForge's plan to force the enemy into a defensive posture, to minimize the equipment loss and bloodshed on his own side, was obviously impossible.

  There was a quick council of war. Worsel made an emphatic request. "Try one more volley, Laf! I think I've noticed something."

  Again there was a quick countdown and again there were a hundred thousand stabs of energy, nearly as powerful as the first time. One, two, three bursts. And as rapidly as they struck, there was return fire. One. Then another. Then a third. Again the Patrol ships reeled and shivered, but held to their formation of a cartwheeling circle in the blackness.

  "Reflections!" Worsel said. "That's not their fire, that's our fire! They're throwing back our own beams at us!"

  Admiral LaForge's response was calm but pained. "That practically disarms us. We can lob some duodec bombs at them, but..." Maitland and Worsel were busy exchanging ideas.

  "We sent out about a hundred thousand triple bursts on the first volley," Maitland said. "We got back about ninety-five thousand. What happened to about five percent?"

  "Five percent of our fire missed," Worsel suggested.

  "Impossible," LaForge said. "Our gunners, with the type of aiming systems we have, should be practically perfect."

  "Nadreck and I have the answer to that," Kallatra said, injecting herself into an exchange where she normally should have stayed out. "Those missing beams were fired at ships with fluctuating mass. They weren't really there. They were flickering in and out between reality and unreality. Our beams went into empty space. And five percent was the first time. Our second volley was twelve percent wasted."

  The fleet continued to swirl in formation, but space was empty of any missiles or beams. The enemy tactics were identical to the Patrol's. Like a gigantic mirrored twin, the Spawn fleet itself rotated in space less than ten million miles away. Most of the men of the Patrol were watching the Spawn now, each one by his own convenient method.

  What they then saw were like visions in a nightmare. The Patrolmen didn't want to believe their eyes, their instruments, or their senses of perception. They double-checked, they triple-checked. The nightmare visions remained.

  "Giant spaceships! GIANT spaceships!"

  They had suddenly appeared from behind the half-million Spawn ships. The uniform size of the mammoth superships staggered their imaginations.

  The largest ships of the Galactic Patrol were basically the maulers. They were gigantic and cumbersome, but they were far more powerful than any other type in the Patrol's arsenal. They were, in fact, mobile fortresses packed with titanic accumulators, their large-throated projectors capable of clawing an enemy's defenses into shreds. When the super-maulers had been built a few short years before, it was assumed that they perhaps would never be surpassed.

  These new Spawn ships were five times larger than the Galactic Patrol's finest warships. Except for the lack of GP markings, they were exact but expanded copies of the GP super maulers. Five times larger could mean twenty-five times more powerful!

  The Spawn superships hung in space just behind the wheeling front line of the enemy vanguard. The rest of the Spawn ships had faded into the background, by contrast now looking insignificant.

  "By Klono's carballoy claws!" LaForge said. "My instruments tell me they are real, but my instincts tell me that they're not!" For the rest of the Lensmen and fleet command there was stunned silence.

  "Obviously illusionary," Nadreck said, his thought waves to the others incomprehensibly phlegmatic, "images of our own ships. But there is a substance of reality here. My calculations show that my theory of reflectivity is correct, but my statistical deductions are wrong. We did not lose five percent on the first volley. We did not lose twelve percent on the second volley. We lost double that amount each time. That means that there are some real ships, perhaps five to ten percent, firing their own weapons, mixed up with those which are merely reflecting our power. Therefore, we must be ultra-careful. These illusions of super warships may have some extra sting to them."

  For the first time, Kinnison's thoughts came to the others on the flagship. "I've already monitored your speculations and extracted all the facts you've been observing. We'll be going over them here on Klovia. Meanwhile, fellows, Tregonsee has been reached by me and he's making use of his Lens. He's got some facts for you to consider."

  Tregonsee's unperturbed thoughts flooded in on them, boosted by Kinnison, who had assumed the role of informational processor. "I've heard your discussion. Your deductions are right up to a point. Ninety-five percent of the spawn fleet is quasi-real. That is, for every one hundred metric tons, there are five metric tons of conventional warship." As quickly as possible, Tregonsee told them about the Qu'orr and their ships. "So the Qu'orr, using another space-time continuum, are turning energy into matter. The medium is analogous to Nth space, where the laws of matter and energy as we know them are different, but existing as a material place, unlike the Eichwoor's plane of existence. The objects they shape by manifesting ectomatter through mental energy are pseudo-molecular structures of substance, with the appearance of reality without the properties of reality. They therefore have measurable mass, comparable to the original pattern. The enormous energy needed could be derived by their pervasive minds from standard cosmic sources, such as mini-black-holes. But they are ersatz bits and pieces glued together by an alien willpower, reflecting and repelling normal matter as if they had the properties of a solid. Most remarkable is the ability of this thought-matter to absorb and use our own thought-energy to reinforce the illusion of what we think we see."

  "All well and good, Tregonsee," LaForge said, exasperated, "but how do I deal with the situation? I've got some real enemy ships out there capable of harming us and getting away with it. Do I simply charge in and fire only when fired upon? Will that do it?"

  "No, no," Tregonsee said. "Keep your distance. There's something worse that's developing, and you'll soon know what it is. I'm sending Cloudd to you with further information and advice. Nadreck! Keep sweeping the enemy sector. If you spot anything unusual, put it on Kinnison's net. I'll be busy for some time on a certain planet, but I'll be monitoring the net.

  "Anything to say worth delaying me, Kinnison? No? Then I'm clearing ether."

  "Tregonsee!" That was Nadreck, breaking off his scanning to call. "Tregonsee!"

  "He just cleared ether, Nadreck," Kinnison said.

  "It's Cloudd I really wanted. I've some important news, but it'll await his arrival. And I want you to identify where Tregonsee is going; I sense that there's something I should know."

  "I'll brief you and Worsel shortly on narrow beam. But what's the important news?"

  "Cloudd should know there's a huge massing of datadrones behind the Spawn fleet. They are zooming in from as far away as the First Galaxy. I deduce the scale of this conflict is drawing all of them to this battlefield. Maybe they anticipate Armageddon.

  "More to the point, I have scanned the sector of enemy space out to the edge of the galaxy. Most enemy spaceships are imitations made from abnormal matter, nothing more. I have also found controlled vortices in the area with the same configurations as hyperspatial tubes. They are invisible, probably lying just on the other side of Nth space, and probably artificial. Also I find that the super spaceships, unlike the earlier conventional ones, are impenetrable by my sense of perception. I therefore cannot tell what they contain."

  "Thorny!" Kinnison called to LaVerne Thorndyke, agitated by Nadreck's findings. "Did you hear? What do you make of Nadreck's report?"

  The expert on hyperspace was slow to reply. "I don't know. I think I should transfer to one of our scout ships, with all my portable equipment, and make personal inspection as close as possible. I also want to take along the crystal Nadreck is carrying as possible bait. May I respectfully request authorization?"

  "Sounds too dangerous," Kinnison began, but was interrupted by Thorndyke with, "Let me judge that. Laf feels responsible for my protection, tell him you approve."

  "What do you think, Nadreck?"

  "It sounds interesting. I will go and take Thorndyke and the crystal with me."

  "QX. Got that, Laf? Good luck, both of you!"

  Within minutes Nadreck and Thorndyke had left the flagship in Nadreck's undetectable speedster, each with their own equipment, and with the special crystal.

  As they began their huge circle of the Spawn fleet, Kinnison, finishing his tightly beamed confidential report to Worsel on Tregonsee's complete disclosures, narrow beamed Nadreck in turn.

  Nadreck learned what he intuitively expected to learn. It was not the name of Helmuth that surprised him, as Worsel had been. It was the name of Ish-Ingvors. That name perturbed him, shocking him as much as that strange nonchalant Palainian was capable of being shocked. "Shingvors!" Nadreck reminded Kinnison that such was the name of the planet where, in the past, an important Boskonian link with the Eich had been broken. "Shingvors! There is a smell of the Dregs about this whole affair!"

  Nadreck cut off without further explanation, beginning to sense that there was an inimical, shadowy yet potent entity personally confronting him. He did not know that this foe, to be his implacable, hidden enemy for many years, was the monstrous Kandron, fugitive from Onlo, the world Nadreck had destroyed. Nor did Kinnison suspect this; in fact, Kinnison did not realize Kandron still lived, now ripening into one of the worst malignancies to confront Civilization in the following decade. If Kinnison had known, he would have exploded with dismay.

  Ten minutes passed with no further communication with Nadreck. The two great fleets slowly circled in silent confrontation, the Patrol almost imperceptibly slipping backward, the Spawn almost immeasurably nudging forward. Nadreck's ship had vanished into the blackness, its cloak of invisibility denying by any means a reading on its location.

  The huge Spawn maulers, although each one five times larger than the Patrol's and numbering in the tens of thousands,

  began to withdraw! From the circling formation they had assumed, they split their ring and in a trailing single file accelerated away in a twisting S-curve, blinking out of sight one by one as they went inert. Simultaneously, one by one new spaceships took their places, reversing the maneuver. There were only a tenth as many--but they were each ten times larger than those they replaced! They were incredibly monstrous!

  No one on the Patrol flagship believed that they really existed. But every instrument, every perception said they did!

  The sense of an open communication channel with Nadreck and Thorndyke, which had been up to this point firm within the minds of the Lensmen, was gone now. It had been snuffed out like the midnight noises in a forest when disturbed by evil omens.

  "Nadreck!" Worsel called. "Give us a sign you're all right! Thorndyke! What's happening?"

  The silence in the war room of the flagship, with those monster ships floating on the wall screens, was oppressive.

  Then Thorndyke's mechanically projected terror-filled thoughts shot into the waiting Lensmen's minds:

  "... a black hole disappearing into another black hole... the mass of a galactic cluster...!"

  And at that moment, each monster warship jerked backward into accelerating flight and, bursting into view for all of the Patrol to see, so large and so close as to block out the view of all of the Spawn's titanic super-super-maulers, was an even larger single Spawn warship! There had been a tenfold increase of the tenfold increase! The thing was beyond comprehension. By itself it seemed to equal the entire Spawn fleet!

  Admiral LaForge shifted his gaze from his glowing tank, in which the image of the thing was suspended like a metal egg confronted by tiny Patrol dots of light, to the electronic viewing screen, where the enormity of the ultra-super-ship could be really grasped, so many thousands of miles away, and he whispered in awe, "A--Doomsday--Machine!"

  The link with Kinnison went dead.

  A Galaxy Faces Death

  "It is your decision," Tregonsee told Cloudd. "I will not make it for you."

  Benson Cloudd's face was inches away from the hard, sharp bristles and the pliant, fleshy hairs of the pulpy head of the Qu'orr. They undulated across his skin, not touching, but stirring the air to make him feel they did touch. His eyes were tightly closed, as much a natural reflex from the nearness of the living whiskers to his eyeballs as it was to shut out the horrible sight. Was he himself to become a semi-zombie like that burned-out Kalonian?

  "It may be painful," Tregonsee whispered in his brain, "but I believe they will stop such pain when they realize you suffer it. If anything goes wrong, I know I can save you, and if your arm is mutilated, I know it can be healed."

  Cloudd thought, "QX. QX. I'm on your side, Qu'orr."

  "They are just looking for the truth," Tregonsee repeated, calmly soothingly. "They have read me and treated me honorably."

  Cloudd raised his right hand and blindly reached out, slowly and carefully, toward the inevitable contact.

  "Remember, when it takes your arm, don't draw back. Relax."

  Relax? I have courage, but I can't simply turn off my nerve ends and throttle my imagination. His hand encountered the waving stalks. He felt the writhing, snake-smooth things wrapping around his entire arm. There was no pain, except in his imagination. Take a good look at one of the good guys, me. The Galactic Patrol is on your side. As Tregonsee had coached him, Cloudd asserted, The Galactic Patrol is not your enemy. We do not enslave. We fight evil. We are your friends, and we will destroy your real enemies."

 

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