“Hadn’t I better be going, too?” asked the commander. “Those orders, you know.”
“A couple of minutes yet. I have another message for you—official. Matthews won’t need a police escort long—if any. When that ship is attacked it is to be the signal for cleaning out every pirate in Greater New York—the worst pirate hot-bed on Tellus. Neither you nor your force will be in on it directly, but you might pass the word around, so that our own men will be informed ahead of the Telenews outfits.”
“Good! That has needed doing for a long time.”
“Yes, but you know it takes a long time to line up every man in such a big organization. They want to get them all, without getting any innocent bystanders.”
“Who’s doing it—Prime Base?”
“Yes. Enough men will be thrown in here to do the whole job in an hour.”
“That is good news—clear ether, Lensman!” and the base commander went back to his post.
As the air-lock toggles rammed home, sealing the exit behind the departing visitor, Kinnison eased his speedster into the air and headed for Valeria. Since the two vessels ahead of him had left atmosphere inertialess, as would he, and since several hundred seconds had elapsed since their take-off, he was of course some ten thousand miles off their line as well as being uncounted millions of miles behind them. But the larger distance meant no more than the smaller, and neither of them meant anything at all to the Patrol’s finest speedster. Kinnison, on easy touring blast, caught up with them in minutes. Closing up to less than one light-year, he slowed his pace to match theirs and held his distance.
Any ordinary ship would have been detected long since, but Kinnison rode no ordinary ship. His speedster was immune to all detection save electromagnetic or visual, and therefore, even at that close range—the travel of half a minute for even a slow space-ship in open space—he was safe. For electromagnetics are useless at that distance: and visual apparatus, even with sub-ether converters, is reliable only up to a few mere thousands of miles, unless the observer knows exactly what to look for and where to look for it.
Kinnison, then, closed up and followed the Prometheus and her mauler escort; and as they approached the Valerian solar system the recall message came booming in. Also, as had been expected, the renegade captain of the freighter sent his defiant answer and his message to the pirate high command. The mauler turned back, the merchantman kept on. Suddenly, however, she stopped, inert, and from her ports were ejected discrete bits of matter—probably the bodies of the Boskonian members of her crew. Then the Prometheus, again inertialess, flashed directly toward the planet Valeria.
An inertialess landing is, of course, highly irregular, and is made only when the ship is to take off again immediately. It saves all the time ordinarily lost in spiraling and deceleration, and saves the computation of a landing orbit, which is no task for an amateur computer. It is, however, dangerous. It takes power, plenty of it, to maintain the force which neutralizes the inertia of mass, and if that force fails even for an instant while a ship is upon a planet’s surface, the consequences are usually highly disastrous. For in the neutralization of inertia there is no magic, no getting of something for nothing, no violation of Nature’s law of the conservation of matter and energy. The instant that force becomes inoperative the ship possesses exactly the same velocity, momentum, and inertia that it possessed at the instant the force took effect. Thus, if a space-ship takes off from Earth, with its orbital velocity of about eighteen and one-half miles per second relative to the sun, goes free, dashes to Mars, lands free, and then goes inert, its original velocity, both in speed and in direction, is instantly restored; with consequences better imagined than described. Such a velocity of course might take the ship harmlessly into the air; but it probably would not.
Inertialess vessels do not ordinarily load freight. They do, however, take on passengers, especially military personnel accustomed to open-space maneuvers in powered space-suits. Men and ship must go inert—separately, of course—immediately after leaving the planet, so that the men can match their intrinsic velocity to the ship’s; but that takes only a very small fraction of the time required for an inert landing.
Hence the Prometheus landed free, and so did Kinnison. He stepped out, fully armored against Valeria’s extremely heavy atmosphere, and laboring a trifle under its terrific gravitation, to be greeted cordially by Lieutenant vanBuskirk, whose fighting men were already streaming aboard the freighter.
“Hi, Kim!” the Dutchman called, gaily. “Everything went off like clockwork. Won’t hold you up long—be blasting off in ten minutes.”
“Ho, Lefty!” the Lensman acknowledged, as cordially, but saluting the newly commissioned officer with an exaggerated formality. “Say, Bus, I’ve been doing some thinking. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea to .”
“Uh-uh, it would not,” denied the fighter, positively. “I know what you’re going to say—that you want in on this party—but don’t say it.”
“But I .” Kinnison began to argue.
“Nix,” the Valerian declared flatly. “You’ve got to stay with your speedster. No room for her inside; she’s clear full of cargo and my men. You can’t clamp on outside, because that would give the whole thing away. And besides, for the first and last time in my life I’ve got a chance to give a Gray Lensman orders. Those orders are to stay out of and away from this ship—and I’ll see to it that you do, too, you little Tellurian shrimp! Boy, what a kick I get out of that!”
“You would, you big, dumb Valerian ape—you always were a small-souled type!” Kinnison retorted. “Piggy-piggy . Haynes, huh?”
“Uh-huh.” VanBuskirk nodded. “How else could I talk so rough to you and get away with it? However, don’t feel too bad—you aren’t missing a thing, really. It’s in the cans already, and your fun is up ahead somewhere. And by the way, Kim, congratulations. You had it coming. We’re all behind you, from here to the Magellanic Clouds and back.”
“Thanks. The same to you, Bus, and many of ’em. Well, if you won’t let me stow away, I’ll tag along behind, I guess. Clear ether—or rather, I hope it’s full of pirates by tomorrow morning. Won’t be, though, probably; don’t imagine they’ll move until we’re almost there.”
And tag along Kinnison did, through thousands and thousands of parsecs of uneventful voyage.
Part of the time he spent in the speedster dashing hither and yon. Most of it, however, he spent in the vastly more comfortable mauler; to the armored side of which his tiny vessel clung with its magnetic clamps while he slept and ate, gossiped and read, exercised and played with the mauler’s officers and crew, in deep-space comradery. It so happened, however, that when the long-awaited attack developed he was out in his speedster, and thus saw and heard everything from the beginning.
Space was filled with the old, familiar interference. The raider flashed up, locked on with magnets, and began to beam. Not heavily—scarcely enough to warm up the defensive screens—and Kinnison probed into the pirate with his spy-ray.
“Terrestrials—North Americans!” he exclaimed, half-aloud, startled for an instant. “But naturally they would be, since this is a put-up job and over half the crew were New York gangsters.”
“The blighter’s got his spy-ray screens up,” the pilot was grumbling to his captain. The fact that he spoke in English was immaterial to the Lensman; he would have understood equally well any other possible form of communication or of thought exchange. “That wasn’t part of the plan, was it?”
If Helmuth or one of the other able minds at Grand Base had been directing that attack it would have stopped right there. The pilot had shown a flash of feeling that, with a little encouragement, might have grown into a suspicion. But the captain was not an imaginative man. Therefore:
“Nothing was said about it, either way,” he replied. “Probably the mate’s on duty—he isn’t one of us, you know. The captain will open