Lensman from rigel, p.8
Lensman From Rigel, page 8
Kinnison was nodding now in agreement.
"However, this is more than speculation," Tregonsee continued. "Mando's name has been heard on a Kalonian planet called Krish-kree and deified on an unexplored planet called Tanse. This is a lead which I personally plan to investigate with your personal help and that of my staff. In fact, there is such a unique situation which threatens Civilization, I am fast concluding, that I have deliberately drawn my own unit-cluster into it, as though by inadvertence, as potential backup help."
"How unusual! You must expect "to confront some extraordinary, stupendous mental forces! I'm impressed!"
"I have three immediate questions to answer. Who tried to do this to me and to the scientists? Why did they try? What new method are they using? My deepest thoughts on who lead inevitably to the faceless Boskone. The why seems an attempt at the disruption of our intelligence services to protect their secret, probably an utterly new and different assault on Civilization. The what is the method or tool of the assault itself.
"Consider the why. The S.I.S., or more likely the S.M.E, knows or is about to know something they wish to conceal. They can't destroy our organizations, but they certainly can slow them down with my death. As for the scientists, they have the most advanced knowledge about their specialties of hyperspace, vortices and black holes. Either the enemy wants that knowledge for themselves or they wanted to destroy our ability to defend ourselves against some use of such knowledge. I believe all the prominent scientists present on the attack scenes are vital pieces in the puzzle. They must be assembled as soon as possible at Ultra Prime--if they're not there already under examination."
Tregonsee pulled up his legs and hunkered down.
"In addition, Kim," the Rigellian projected firmly, to show that it was no whim, "I want a conference of the Council of Scientists called there on Klovia at the same time."
Kinnison sat up ramrod straight.
A groan came from his mouth before he silently spoke. "You've really got a death wish Trig. And now you want me to be part of it. I know things are serious. But are they really this serious? But for you, Trig, I'll do it. I'll convene that madhouse and attend, but I'd rather be locked naked in a cage of frenzied, blood-excited cateagles!"
Will-o'-the-Wisp Warships
When life seems pointless and personal safety is held in contempt, a space vagabond usually ends up dying in some remote corner of the universe, unhonored and forgotten. If that fundamentally desolate person, however, manages to retain a sense of humor, even though much distorted by a cynical sense of the ridiculous, and is additionally fortunate enough to be a member of the Galactic Patrol, the chances are that he may end up with significant recognition and honors. Chances are that he will also be quite equally dead in some remote corner of the universe.
D. D. Cloudd was certainly headed in that direction. He had all the prerequisites for being a dead hero of the Patrol, not really understood by his casual friends but bound to be vividly remembered. What he was doing in the auxiliary engine room of the comm-con Patrol ship, and about to do outside its hull, was putting him just one short step from immortality.
He was dressed in a massive radiation suit, surrounded by four movable walls of dureum. As he moved, the thick, silvery fabric folded grotesquely at his joints and waist. Buried in the top of the bloated shoulders was a round bump which contained his head. He was twisted awkwardly to his right in order to face that way because the suit had no neck on which his head could pivot. He was staring under a raised flap through a shielded transparent slit into a mirror he held.
The images in the mirror were the objects on a high bench, in front of his left hip. He was using the reflection to keep his gaze from directly meeting the radiation of the objects he was studying. Having determined his next actions, he pushed down the flap and turned back, temporarily blind, to let his gloved hands feel, tap and twist the things. He screwed one Type-2X1 into another Type-2X1 to mate them into a Type-2X2. The double cylinder was now once more the Type-2X2 drone which he had captured.
Next to it, glittering in the light of the auxiliary engine room, where they were, was an Ordovik crystal. It sat in a shallow padded box, throwing brilliant little specks and larger rainbow-hued dots on the interior of the upraised lid.
He drew a heavy metallic cloth over the 2X2 and put down the mirror.
"I have the crystal out, as you can see," Cloudd said into his face transmitter. "And the 2X2 is back together. The radiation lasted only while I had the two sections apart. There is no trace of anti-matter. The radiation readings are now ordinary and normal, but what do the technicians say?"
Cloudd listened as the Rigellian and the Manarkan couple took extrasensory readings and confirmed that the extraordinary radiation had stopped. He had some difficulty hearing them, because their thoughts had been translated into audible sounds for him and broadcast into a room which was full of absorption shields for the ship's engines. This was the only place that he felt he could safely take apart and put back together the 2X2.
"Well, that's done," Cloudd said. "I feel fine. Those funny flashes going off inside my head are gone. I cut the number down when I turned my face away and used the mirror. They weren't so many then. And, you know, having tiny little comets whizzing around behind my eyes with colors I've never really appreciated before was kind of fun."
"QX, Cloudd," said Captain Barnard, faintly in his ear. "You did a good job. You proved your point. The deaths of your two assistants were a matter of technique." Cloudd had always maintained that in the first case a servo, even under the personal control of someone, couldn't be sensitive enough. One death. And in the second case, a person who didn't shield himself from unknown radiation effects, even if his dismantling touch was gentle, was susceptible to induced bumbling. Death number two. The third death, the technician, was completely inexcusable. "Leave the crystal and come out now."
"Not yet, Cap'n. I want to take another look at the other thing."
"Listen, Cloudd. You've been at it for three bleedin' hours. Come out and take a rest." "After a look, Cap'n. I feel fine." "QX. Take a look. One look."
Cloudd walked toward the open, flat deck in front of the racks of intricate equipment which were the electronic guts of the ship's engines. There, joined together and stretching out for nearly thirty feet, were many demolition containers, forming one long container. Each section had the stamp of specially structured chain-molecular-dureum representing a fortune in metallurgy. There was virtually no chance that his examination could cause a blast, but the captain was taking no chances on damage to his engines. Those special dureum walls were ample blast protection, backed up by an interior field of force.
Cloudd looked over the side of one of the box walls. There it lay! A thirty-foot section of the elusive Type-50 datadrone! What a shame it held no extra-special secret. Interesting, yes. But disappointingly conventional in its technology. Good work by the captain, though! He had managed to snatch it up while rescuing Cloudd.
Having taken his look, Cloudd moved on to the maintenance airlock door and push-buttoned it into opening.
"No, Cloudd," the captain's voice came faintly again in his earpiece, "I meant a look inside, not outside. Close up that door!" But while the captain was talking, so was Cloudd, much louder, "I'm going to take my look now, Cap'n. I feel fine. The sparks are all gone. There's still some buzzing in my head. I can't hear you too well. In fact, now that I've tuned my monitor to the thing outside, I can't hear you at all." Cloudd kept up a rapid fire of talk, covering the captain's increasingly hot-tempered remarks, such as "Get the bloody hell back inside, Cloudd!" and "Leave it to the servos! That's an order!"
There, in front of Cloudd a hundred feet away floated
the six-foot section of the Type-50 which had been sheared off and left outside the ship as too dangerous to bring aboard. All sorts of warnings about it had been registered by man and machine, and Captain Barnard was a sensible man. He left it outside, isolated by a protective screen off the hull of his ship, and was having it examined by mental probes by capable members of the ship's crew. With what small authority Cloudd had, he had kept the captain from using mechanical servos and devices in fear of doing some unwitting damage. Cloudd, pushing himself off the rim of the outer lock, said, "I don't want any radio waves or other frequencies out here to touch off something or to disturb my instruments. Mental waves are QX. I want to be monitored by all senses. You espers, do you read me? Well, stay tuned to me." He knew that all members of the crew with more or less powers of telepathy, perception, and ESP would be tuned in to guide him and to alert him to any danger sensed by some appropriate signal.
For the next two hours, seeming to him like only ten or twenty minutes, Cloudd gently caressed and manipulated that alien structure and made it give up its knowable secrets. When he returned to his ship and stepped through the closing airlock door to face a grim Captain Barnard, Cloudd knew that the knowledge he now had about datadrone Type-50 was more than enough to placate the exasperated captain one more time.
"Captain!" Cloudd said immediately upon pulling off the upper section of his radiation suit. "These things are priceless!" He was deliberately breathless to head off the captain's words. "The 2X1s are both intact, not partially burned out like all the others I've seen or heard about. What's left of the Type-50 is a complete Type-8 2X carrier collecting hive and transmitting station."
"Patrolman Cloudd, you magnificently mad, bloody fool," Captain Barnard grumped, "what the hell are you nattering about?"
"The 2Xs," Cloudd hastened to explain, elated over his discoveries and his victory over the captain's discipline, "are probes, as we've thought all along, collecting information and even samples of things. They carry their data and specimens into the bays of the Type-8. The Type-8, in turn, with all the homing devices and docking equipment, cuddles up into Type-50's grandmother's pouch, and lets the 2X6, or its sub-sections, tattle about the galaxy in general and Civilization in particular. All of which is narrowcast off through sub-ether to some unknown listener."
The captain had his arm around a muscular Cloudd, who had stepped out of his pants, virtually nude, and was steering him to his quarters. "Go get this gentlemen his bloody clothes," the captain barked at a crewman, "and a couple of flasks of fayalin out of the freezer and bring them to my cabin."
By the time Cloudd had his clothes on his outside and his fayalin in his insides, he felt extremely euphoric. For one of those rare times when he wasn't out in space thundering around on his rocket sled, he was at peace with himself and glad to be alive. He had told the captain much of what he had learned. He had no explanation for the Ordovik crystal, except that it was unusual enough to be an item the drone could well be interested in. Unusual to a drone, that is, but not to a Patrolman. Ordoviks always carried them because they were considered good-luck pieces; the fact was, however, that the crystals helped Ordoviks with their exceptional parapsychological talents. The fact that it was still intact, not crushed or dissolved into powder, seemed to indicate that although it had been en route to the Type-8 for extensive analysis, the process had not yet taken place at the moment of the 2X2's capture. After a good period of sleep, Cloudd confided to the captain, he would lock up the crystal in a strongbox for shipment to the laboratories at Medon, and then he would label, disassemble, and ship the component parts of the Type-50's sensors, memory-banks, and transmitters to the same place.
Cloudd dragged himself down the passageway leading to his cabin, his feet more and more heavy with fatigue as he drew closer to his soft bed and its promise of sleep. When he entered his cabin and closed his door, he intuitively sensed an intruder in his room. He recognized his body's signal--there was an itching on the stumps of his two missing fingers. Cloudd had no Lens. He had no extra powers of perception or telepathy. In this lack of gifts, he was a very ordinary man. But he had what many ordinary men
did not have: a psychic sensitivity, a strong intuition about people, things and situations. All Patrolmen normally carried DeLameters strapped to their waist or thigh. Cloudd, however, was not armed at that moment, and he suddenly felt painfully vulnerable.
As a man of action, he did not wait. He ducked across the room and grabbed at his gun, cradled in his holster, hanging at the head of his bed.
A powerful grip around his wrist pulled his hand away, and a voice said, "QX, Cloudd. I'm a friend. I'm a friend. Lock your door and turn on the light."
When the light came on, a very black Tellurian or Klovian stood by his bunk, next to his pistol, hands spread casually over his hip bones. Cloudd recognized him as one of the crew, his uniform insignia marking him as one of the medical personnel.
"Listen to me, Cloudd. I'm an agent for the Secret Intelligence Services. You've made some remarkable discoveries in the past twelve hours. I've been closely watching you for weeks as a man around whom things can expect to happen. I've circumspectly tried to pick your brains, but I don't know everything you've learned. I do know enough to have made a special report on you to my superiors. You will be receiving orders within the hour right from the Galactic Coordinator's office. You're to report to him--and to my S.I.S. boss, Lensman Tregonsee, as soon as possible. You must take absolutely everything with you which, in your judgment alone, seems important toward solving the datadrone mysteries. Your orders give you that power. Take everything of importance. Keep close charge of the drone materials. This is your personal responsibility. Watch over them. I've sensed that you have found anti-matter. That's of ultra priority. Get them to your destination as soon as possible. No matter what may happen until you get there, don't be sidetracked. Don't obey any other orders, no matter how authentic they may seem."
The black man smiled and stuck out his hand to exchange a powerful grip in greeting and farewell.
"That's it. There's nothing for you to say. There's nothing more for me to say. Forget me. Be careful. And have a good trip." He abruptly strode to the door, unlocked it, turned back to say, "Start packing right now!" and left.
In a whirlwind of activity, Cloudd and the vital parts of the datadrones were off on the comm-con's top-rated shuttle craft to join the Sector Patrol Task Force fourteen light years away. That force was cruising the edge of the charted spaceways bordering the chaotic mass of gases called the Green Parrot Nebula.
When the shuttle craft broke out into normal space to match intrinsics with the flagship, the reception could have been nerve shattering. Cloudd's shuttle, with only two crewmen, was encased in a tractor field and shaken around like a bean in a musicman's gourd. Spy-rays were probing every inch of the craft, sending off all sorts of warning sirens and bells. The cabin and corridor communicators were all blaring, "Patrol orders. Make no aggressive moves. Show your identification. This is the Patrol. You are now under GP control."
D. D. Cloudd was not upset, or even startled, by the raucous reception. As a Patrolman, he knew that any vessel from outside the operating area which was temporarily unidentified was treated as a foe until proved a friend, especially in a state of high alert or on a field of battle. He also felt his mind being tickled by several different probes. He didn't fight the intrusions, though he kept tight security on the confidential knowledge he possessed, and, in recognition of the careful respect with which it was being done, cooperated in the investigation of his motives.
The activities ceased and a voice in his head said, "Three ordinaires now being passed through, QX. Welcome, Patrolmen!" He felt the tractor beams jerk their shuttle craft up and down for an interminably long period of time, as though working them through various force fields and shields surrounding many ships. Finally they came to a bruising halt. He had two emotions: first, he was unreasonably resentful at being called an "ordinaire" just because he was not a perceiver and had no extrasensory powers--he had never considered Lensmen better than he was, just different--and, second, he was surprised at the battle-zone security.
When he was standing before the G-2 intelligence section chief of the task force commander in the active beehive of the G-2 situation room, he understood the precautions.
"Technician Cloudd," the G-2 chief said, "we are approaching a flotilla of pirate ships and are preparing to attack. I don't have much time for you. My commander's orders from S.I.S. are to get you and your shipment as quickly as possible, under guard, to Klovia. We'll take out enough time to record your thoughts concerning your mission and to place it, unexamined, under seal as a safeguard should you lose your life. When that's done, I'll assign three ships-- I'll have to check with G-l about that--so, let's say two ships. I'll assign two ships to escort you to Klovia. They'll be our best. Half our fleet are the latest freedrivers, so you'll travel at least ten to the seventh, if you can comprehend that. You'll be there some time tomorrow our time, covering over eighty-nine hundred light years. That's as quick as possible. You will not be in command, but you will have one of my Lensmen in a mind-lock on you in case you need to communicate under emergency conditions. That's all, Cloudd. Good luck."
The chief turned back to what was obviously a situation tank and fiddled with its curtain, anxious for Cloudd to leave. The screening drapery was there to keep unauthorized persons like Cloudd from seeing things they had no business knowing.
"Sorry, Major," Cloud said, stiffly at attention, being the good Patrolman which he was proud to be if he didn't have to act that way all the time. "I can't have my thoughts transcribed." He didn't like the officious manner of the section chief. The whole reception had set him on edge--the inconsiderate bumpy landing, the "ordinaire" reference, the impersonal interview, the unnecessary reminder of his being "not in command," the idea, good though it was, of having some stranger sitting in his mind. He also felt irritated that the G-2 section chief was a Tellurian woman. Maybe because she was so obviously competent, while at the same time so beautifully feminine.
