05 Second Stage Lensman by E. E. Doc Smith

Author:E. E. Doc Smith [Smith, E. E. Doc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-26T06:39:08.791000+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Helen Goes North

"But listen, Kim!" Clarrissa protested. "all four of you are assuming that I've dead-centered the target. I thought probably I was right, but since I couldn't find any Eich traces, I expected a lot of argument."

"No argument," Kinnison assured her. "You know how they work. They tune in on some one mind, the stronger and more vital the better. In that connection, I wonder that Helen is still around--the ones who disappeared were upper-bracket minds, weren't they?"

She thought a space. "Now that yon mention it, I believe so. Most of them, certainly."

"Thought so. That clinches it, if it needed clinching. They tune in; then drag 'em in in a straight line."

"But that would be so obvious!" she objected.

"It was not obvious, Clarrissa," Tregonsee observed, "until your work made it so: a task which, I would like to say here, could not have been accomplished by any other entity of Civilization."

"Thanks, Tregonsee. But they're smart enough to... you'd think they'd vary their technique, at least enough to get away from those dead straight lines."

"They probably can't," Kinnison decided. "A racial trait, bred into 'em for ages.

They've always worked that way; probably can't work any other way. The Eich undoubtedly told "em to lay off those orgies, but they probably couldn't do it-- the vice is too habit-forming to break, would be my guess. Anyway, we're all in agreement that it's the Overlords?"

They were.

"And there's no doubt as to what we do next?"

There was none. Two great ships, the incomparable Dauntless and the camouflaged warship which had served Kinnison-Cartiff so well, lifted themselves into the stratosphere and headed north. The Lensmen did not want to advertise their presence and there was no great hurry, therefore both vessels had their thought- screens out and both rode upon baffled jets.

Practically all of the crewmen of the Dauntless had seen Overlords in the substance; so far as is known they were the only human beings who had ever seen an Overlord and had lived to tell of it. Twenty two of their former fellows had seen Overlords and had died. Kinnison, Worsel, and vanBuskirk had slain Overlords in unscreened hand-to-hand combat in the fantastically incredible environment of a hyper- spatial tube--that uncanny medium in which man and monster could and did occupy the same space at the same time without being able to touch each other; in which the air or pseudo-air is thick and viscous; in which the only substance common to both sets of dimensions and thus available for combat purposes is dureum--a synthetic material so treated and so saturated as to be of enormous mass and inertia.

It is easier to imagine, then, than to describe the emotion which seethed through the crew as the news flew around that the business next in order was the extirpation of a flock of Overlords.

"How about a couple or three nice duodec torpedoes. Kim, steered right down into the middle of that cavern and touched off--POWIE!--slick, don't you think?" Henderson insinuated.

"Aw, let's not,

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