“I sure will; and I’ll try to figure out a way of getting down to ground without bringing all the pirates in space along with us.”
Then Henderson came in to stand his watch, Kinnison slept, and the mighty Bergenholm continued to hold the vessel inertialess. In fact, all the men were thoroughly rested and refreshed before the expected breakdown came. And when it did come they were more or less prepared for it. The delay was not sufficiently long to enable the pirates to find them again; but from that point in space to the ill-famed planet which was their destination, progress was one long series of hops.
The sweating, grunting, swearing engineers made one seemingly impossible repair after another, by dint of what dodge, improvisation, and makeshift only the fertile brain of LaVerne Thorndyke ever did know. The Master Technician, one of the keenest and most highly trained engineers of the whole Solarian System, was not used to working with his hands. Although young in years, he was wont to use only his head, in directing the labors and the energies of others.
Nevertheless, he was now working like a stevedore. He was permanently grimy and greasy—their one can of mechanics’ soap had been used up long since—his finger-nails were black and broken, his hands and face were burned, blistered, and cracked. His muscles ached and shrieked at the unaccustomed effort, until now they were on the build. But through it all he had stuck uncomplainingly, even buoyantly, to his task. One day, during an interlude of free flight, he strode into the control-room and glanced at the course-plotting goniometer, then started into the “tank.”
“Still on the original course, I see. Have you got anything doped out yet?”
“Nothing very good, that’s why I’m staying on this course until we reach the point closest to Trenco. I’ve figured until my alleged brain backfired on me, and here’s all I can get:
“I’ve been shrinking and expanding our interference zone, changing its shape as much as I could, and cutting it off entirely now and then; to cross up their surveyors as much as I could. When we come to the jumping-off place we’ll simply cut off everything that is sending out traceable vibrations. The Berg will have to run, of course, but it doesn’t radiate much and we can ground out practically all of that. The drive is the bad feature—it looks as though we’ll have to cut down to where we can ground out the radiation.”
“How about the flare?” Thorndyke took the inevitable slide-rule from a pocket of his overalls.
“I’ve already had the Velantians build us some baffles—we’ve got lots of spare tantalum, tungsten, carballoy, and refractory, you know—just in case we should want to use them.”
“Radiation . detection . decrement . cosine squared theta . . . um . . . call it point zero zero three eight,” the engineer mumbled, squinting at his “slip-stick.” “Times half a million . about nineteen hundred lights will have to be tops. Mighty slow, but we would get there sometime—maybe. Now about the baffles,” and he went into another bout of computation during which could be distinguished a few such words as “temperature . . . inert corpuscles . . . velocity . . . fusion-point . . . Weinberger’s Constant .” Then:
“It figures that at about eighteen hundred lights your baffles go out,” he announced. “Pretty close check with the radiation limit. QX, I guess—but I shudder to think of what we may have to do to that Bergenholm to hold it together that long.”
“It’s not so hot. I don’t think much of the scheme myself,” admitted Kinnison frankly. “Probably you can think up something better before .”
“Who, me? What with?” Thorndyke interrupted, with a laugh. “Looks to me like our best bet—anyway, ain’t you the master mind of this outfit? Blast off!”
Thus it came about that, long later, the Lensman cut off his interference, cut off his driving power, cut off every mechanism whose operation generated vibrations which would reveal to enemy detectors the location of his cruiser. Space-suited mechanics emerged from the stern lock and fitted over the still white-hot vents of the driving projectors the baffles they had previously built.
It is of course well known that all ships of space are propelled by the inert projection, by means of high-potential static fields, of nascent fourth-order particles or “corpuscles,” which are formed, inert, inside the inertialess projector, by the conversion of some form of energy into matter. This conversion liberates some heat, and a vast amount of light. This light, or “flare,” shining as it does directly upon and through the highly tenuous gas formed by the projected corpuscles, makes of a speeding space-ship one of the most gorgeous spectacles known to man; and it was this very spectacular effect that Kinnison and his crew must do away with if their bold scheme were to have any chance at all of success.
The baffles were in place. Now, instead of shooting out in tell-tale luminescence, the light was shut in—but so, alas, was approximately three percent of the heat. And the generation of heat must be cut down to a point at which the radiation-equilibrium temperature of the baffles would be below the point of fusion of the refractories of which they were composed. This would cut down their speed tremendously; but on the other hand, they were practically safe from detection and would reach Trenco eventually—if the Bergenholm held out.
Of course there was still the chance of visual or electromagnetic detection, but that chance was vanishingly small. The proverbial task of finding a needle in a haystack would be an easy one indeed, compared to that of seeing in a telescope or upon visiplate or magneplate a dead-black, lightless ship in the infinity of space. No, the Bergenholm was their great, their only concern; and the engineers lavished upon that monstrous fabrication of metal a devotion to which could be likened only that of a corps of nurses attending the ailing baby of a multi-millionaire.
This concentration of attention did get results. The engineers still found it necessary to sweat and to grunt and to swear, but they did somehow keep the thing running—most of the time. Nor were they detected—then.
For the attention of the pirate high command was very much taken up with that fast-moving, that ever-expanding, that peculiarly-fluctuating volume of interference; utterly enigmatic as it was and impenetrable to their every instrument of communication. In that system was the Prime Base of the Galactic Patrol. Therefore it was the Lensman’s work—undoubtedly the same Lensman who had conquered one of their super-ships and, after having learned its every secret, had escaped in a lifeboat through the fine-meshed net set to catch him! And, piling Ossa upon Pelion, this same Lensman had—must have—captured ship after unconquerable ship of their best and was even now sailing calmly home with them! It was intolerable, unbearable, an insult that could not and would not be borne.
Therefore, using as tools every pirate ship in that sector of space, Helmuth and his computers and navigators were slowly but grimly solving the equations of motion of that volume of interference. Smaller and smaller became the uncertainties. Then ship after ship bored into the sub-ethereal murk, to match course and velocity with, and ultimately to come to grips with, each focus of disturbance as it was determined.
Thus in a sense and although Kinnison and his friends did not then know it, it was only the failure of the Bergenholm that was to save their lives, and with those lives our present Civilization.
Slowly, hatingly, and, for reasons already given, undetected, Kinnison made pitiful progress toward Trenco; cursing impatiently and impartially his ship, the crippled generator, its designer and its previous operators as he went. But at long last Trenco loomed large beneath them and the Lensman used his Lens.
“Lensman of Trenco space-port, or any other Lensman within call!” he sent out clearly. “Kinnison of Tellus—Sol III—calling. My Bergenholm is almost out and I must sit down at Trenco space-port for repairs. I have avoided the pirates so far, but they may be either behind me or ahead of me, or both. What is the situation there?”
“I fear that I can be of