Chapter XIX

Constance Kinnison did not waste much time in idle recriminations, even at herself. Realizing at last that she was still not fully competent, and being able to define exactly what she lacked, she went to Arisia for final treatment. She took that treatment and emerged from it, as her brother and sisters had emerged, a completely integrated personality.

She had something of everything the others had, of course, as did they all; but her dominants, the characteristics which had operated to make Worsel her favorite Second-Stage Lensman, were much like those of the Velantian. Her mind, like his, was quick and facile, yet of extraordinary power and range. She did not have much of her father's flat, driving urge or of his indomitable will to do; she was the least able of all the Five to exert long-sustained extreme effort. Her top, however, was vastly higher than theirs. Like Worsel's, her armament was almost entirely offensive--she was far and away the deadliest fighter of them all. She only of them all had more than a trace of pure killer instinct; and when roused to full fighting pitch her mental bolts were weapons of as starkly incomprehensible an effectiveness as the sphere of primary action of a superatomic bomb.

As soon as Constance had left the _Velan_, remarking that she was going to Arisia to take her medicine, Worsel called a staff meeting to discuss in detail the matter of the "Hell Hole in Space." That conference was neither long nor heated; it was unanimously agreed that that phenomenon was--_must_ be--simply another undiscovered cavern of Overlords.

In view of the fact that Worsel and his crew had been hunting down and killing Overlords for more than twenty years, the only logical course of action was for them to deal similarly with one more, perhaps the only remaining large group of their hereditary foes. Nor did any doubt of their ability to do so enter any one of the Velantians' minds.

How wrong they were!

They did not have to search for the "Hell Hole." Long since, to stop its dreadful toll, a spherical cordon of robot guard ships had been posted to warn all traffic away from the outer fringes of its influence. Since they merely warned against, but could not physically prohibit, entry into the dangerous space, Worsel did not pay any attention to the guard ships or to their signals as the _Velan_ went through the warning web. His plans were, he thought, well laid. His ship was free. Its speed, by Velantian standards, was very low. Each member of his crew wore a full-coverage thought-screen; a similar and vastly more powerful screen would surround the whole vessel if one of Worsel's minor members were either to tighten or to relax its grip upon a spring-mounted control. Worsel was, he thought, ready for anything.

But the "Hell Hole in Space" was not a cavern of Overlords. No sun, no planet, nothing material existed within that spherical volume of space. That _something_ was there, however, there was no doubt. Slow as was the _Velan's_ pace, it was still too fast by far; for in a matter of minutes, through the supposedly impervious thought-screens, there came an attack of utterly malignant ferocity; an assault which tore at Worsel's mind in a fashion he had never imagined possible; a poignant, rending, unbearably crescendo force whose violence seemed to double with every mile of advance.

The _Velan's_ all-encompassing screen snapped on--uselessly. Its tremendous power was as unopposed as were the lesser powers of the personal shields--that highly inimical thought was coming past, not through, the barriers. An Arisian, or one of the Children of the Lens, would have been able to perceive and to block that band; no one of lesser mental stature could.

Strong and fast as Worsel was, mentally and physically, he got his vessel turned around just barely in time. All his resistance and all his strength had to be called into play to maintain his mind's control over his body; to enable him to spin his ship end for end and to kick her drive up to maximum blast. To his surprise, his agony decreased with distance as rapidly as it had built up; disappearing entirely well before the _Velan_ reached the web she had crossed such a short time before.

Groggy, sick, and shaken, hanging slackly from his bars, the Velantian Lensman was roused to action by the mental and physical frenzy of his crew. Ten of them had died in the Hell Hole; six more were torn to bits before their commander could muster enough force to stop their insane rioting. Then Master Therapist Worsel went to work; and one by one he brought the survivors back. They remembered; but he made those memories bearable.

He then called Kinnison. "... but there didn't seem to be anything personal about it, as one would expect from an Overlord," he concluded his brief report. "It did not concentrate on us, reach for us, or follow us as we left. Its intensity seemed to vary only with distance ... perhaps inversely as distance squared--it might very well have been radiated from a center. While it was nothing like anything I ever felt before, I still think that it must be an Overlord--maybe a sort of Second-Stage Overlord, just as you and I are Second-Stage Lensmen. He is too strong for me now, just as they used to be too strong for us before we met you. By the same reasoning, however, I am pretty sure that if you can come over here, you and I together could figure out a way of taking him. How about it?"

"Mighty interesting, and I'd like to, but I'm right in the middle of a job," Kinnison replied, and went on to explain rapidly what he, as Bradlow Thyron, had done and what he still had to do. "As soon as I can get away I'll come over. In the meantime, fellow old snake, keep away from there. Do a flit--find something else to keep you amused until I can join you."

* * * * *

Worsel set out, and after a few days ... or weeks--idle time means practically nothing to a Velantian--a sharply-Lensed thought drove in.

"Help! A Lensman calling help! Line this thought and come at speed to System--" The message ended as sharply as it had begun; in a flare of agony which, Worsel knew, meant that that Lensman, whoever he was, had died.

Since the thought, although broadcast, had come in strong and clear, Worsel knew that its sender had been close by. While the time had been very short indeed, he had been able to get a line of sorts. Into that line he whirled the _Velan's_ sharp prow and along it she hurtled at the literally inconceivable pace of her absolute-maximum drive. As the Gray Lensman had often remarked, the Velantian superdreadnought had more legs than a centipede, and now she was using them all. In minutes, then, the scene of battle grew large upon her plates.

The Patrol ship, hopelessly out-classed, could last only seconds longer. Her screens were down; her very wall shield was dead. Red pockmarks sprang into being along her sides as the Boskonian needle-beamers wiped out her few remaining controls. Then, as the helplessly raging Worsel looked on, his brain seething with unutterable Velantian profanity, the enemy prepared to board--a course of action which, Worsel could see, was changed abruptly by the fact--and perhaps as well by the terrific velocity--of his own unswerving approach. The conquered Patrol cruiser disappeared in a blaze of detonating duodec; the conqueror devoted his every jet to the task of running away; strewing his path as he did so with sundry items of solid and explosive destruction. Such things, however, whether dirigible or not, whether inert or free, were old and simple stuff to the _Velan's_ war-wise crew. Their spotters and detectors were full out, as was also a practically solid forefan of annihilating and disintegrating beams.

Thus none of the Boskonian's missiles touched the _Velan_, nor, with all his speed, could he escape. Few indeed were the ships of space able to step it, parsec for parsec, with Worsel's mighty craft, and this luckless pirate vessel was not one of them. Up and up the pursuer rushed; second by second the intervening distance lessened. Tractors shot out, locked on, and pulled briefly with all the force of their stupendous generators.

Briefly, but long enough. As Worsel had anticipated, that savage yank had, in the fraction of a second required for the Boskonian commander to recognize and to cut the tractors, been enough to bring the two inertialess war craft practically screen to screen.

"Primaries! Blast!" Worsel hurled the thought even before his tractors snapped. He was in no mood for a long-drawn-out engagement. He _might_ be able to win with his secondaries, his needles, his tremendously powerful short-range stuff and his other ordinary offensive weapons, but he was taking no chances. Besides, the Boskonians might very well have primaries of their own by this time, and if they did his only chance was to use them first. His men knew what to do and would do it without further orders. A dozen or so of those hellishly irresistible projectors of sheer destruction lashed out as one.

One! Two! Three! The three courses of Boskonian defensive screen scarcely winked as each, locally overloaded, flared through the visible into the black and went down.

Crash! The stubborn fabric of the wall shield offered little more resistance before it, too, went down, exposing the bare metal of the Boskonian's hull--and, as is well known, any conceivable material substance simply vanishes, tracelessly, at the merest touch of such fields of force as those.

Driving projectors carved away and main batteries silenced, Worsel's needle-beamers proceeded systematically to riddle every control panel and every lifeboat, to make of the immense space rover a completely helpless hulk.

"Hold!" An observer flashed the thought. "Number Eight slip is empty--Number Eight lifeboat got away!"

"Damnation!" Worsel, at the head of his armed and armored storming party, as furiously eager as they to come to grips with the enemy, paused briefly. "Trace it--or can you?"

"I did. My tracers can hold it for fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty. No longer than twenty."

Worsel thought intensely. Which had first call, ship or lifeboat? The ship, he decided almost instantly. Its resources were vastly greater; most of its personnel were probably practically unharmed. Given any time at all, they might very well be able to jury-rig a primary, and that would be bad--very bad. Besides, there were more people here; and even if, as was distinctly possible, the Boskonian big shot had abandoned his vessel and his crew in an attempt to save his own life, Worsel had plenty of time.

"Hold that lifeboat," he instructed the observer. "Ten minutes is all we need here."

* * * * *

And it was. The Boskonians--barrel-bodied, blocky-limbed monstrosities resembling human beings about as much as they did the Velantians--wore armor, possessed hand-weapons of power, and fought viciously. They had even managed to rig a few semiportable projectors, but none of these were allowed a single blast. Spy-ray observers were alert, and needle-beam operators; hence the fighting was all at hand to hand, with hand-weapons only. For, while the Velantians to a man lusted to kill, they had had it drilled into them for twenty years that the search for information came first; the pleasure of killing, second.

Worsel himself went straight for the Boskonian captain, his pre-selected prey. That wight had a couple of guards with him, but they did not matter--needle-ray men took care of them. He also had a pair of heavy beam guns, which he held steadily on the Velantian. Worsel paused momentarily; then, finding that his screens were adequate, he slammed the control room door shut with a flick of his tail and launched himself, straight and level at his foe, with an acceleration of seven gravities. The captain tried to dodge but could not. The frightful impact did not kill him, but it hurt him, badly. Worsel, on the other hand, was scarcely jarred. Hard, tough, and durable, Velantians are accustomed from birth to knockings-about which would pulverize human bones.

Worsel batted the Boskonian's guns away with two terrific blows of an armored paw, noting as he did so that violent contact with a steel wall did not do their interior mechanisms a bit of good. Then, after cutting off both his enemy's screens and his own, he batted the Boskonian's helmet; at first experimentally, then with all his power. Unfortunately, however, it held. So did the thought-screen, and there were no external controls. That armor was good stuff!

Leaping to the ceiling, he blasted his whole mass straight down upon the breastplate, striking it so hard this time that he hurt his head. Still no use. He wedged himself between two heavy braces, flipped a loop of tail around the Boskonian's feet, and heaved. The armored form flew across the room, struck the heavy steel wall, bounced, and dropped. The bulges of the armor were flattened by the force of the collision, the wall was dented--but the thought-screen still held!

Worsel was running out of time, fast. He couldn't treat the thing very much rougher without killing him, if he wasn't dead already. He couldn't take him aboard; he _had_ to cut that screen here and now! He could see how the armor was put together; but, armored as he was, he could not take it apart. And, since the whole ship was empty of air, he could not open his own.

Or could he? He could. He could breathe space long enough to do what had to be done. He cut off his air, loosened a plate enough to release four or five gnarled hands, and, paying no attention to his involuntarily laboring lungs, set furiously to work. He tore open the Boskonian's armor, snapped off his thought-screen. The creature was not quite dead yet--good! He didn't know a thing, though, nor did any member of his crew, except ... yes, one man--a big shot--had got away. Who or what, was he?

* * * * *

"Tell me!" Worsel demanded, with the full power of mind and Lens, even while he was exploring with all his skill and speed. "TELL ME!"

But the Boskonian was dying fast. The ungentle treatment, and now the lack of air, were taking toll. His patterns were disintegrating by the second, faster and faster. Meaningless blurs, which, under Worsel's vicious probing, condensed into something which seemed to be a Lens.

A _Lensman_? Impossible--starkly unthinkable! But jet back--hadn't Kim intimated a while back that there might be such things as Black Lensmen?

But Worsel himself wasn't feeling so good. He was only half conscious. Red, black, and purple spots were dancing in front of every one of his eyes. He sealed his suit, turned on his air, gasped, and staggered. Two of the nearest Velantians, all of whom had, of course, been _en rapport_ with him throughout, came rushing to his aid; arriving just as he recovered full control.

"Back to the _Velan_, everybody!" he ordered. "No time for any more fun--we've got to get that lifeboat!" Then, as soon as he had been obeyed: "Bomb that hulk ... good. Flit!"

Overtaking the lifeboat did not take long. Spearing it with a tractor and yanking it alongside required only seconds. For all his haste, Worsel found in it only something that looked as though it once might have been a Delgonian Lensman. It had blown itself apart with a grenade. Because of its reptilian tenacity of life, however, it was not quite dead; its Lens still showed an occasional flicker of light and its shattered mind was not yet entirely devoid of patterns. Worsel studied that mind until all trace of life had vanished, then again reported to the Co-ordinator.

"... so you see I guessed wrong. The Lens was too dim to read, but he must have been a Black Lensman. The only readable thought in his mind was an extremely fuzzy one of the planet Lyrane IX. I hate to have hashed the job up so--especially since I had one chance in two of guessing right."

"Well, no use in squawking now." Kinnison paused in thought. "Besides, he could have done it anyway, and would have. You haven't done so badly, at that. You found a Black Lensman who is not a Kalonian, and you've got confirmation of Boskonian interest in Lyrane IX. What more do you want? Stick around fairly close to the Hell Hole, Slim, and as soon as I can make it, I'll join you there."