"Might I then offer a suggestion?" asked Worsel, of a sudden diffident.
"Surely!" the Lensman replied in surprise. "Your ideas have never been any kind of poppycock. Why so bashful all at once?"
"Because this one is so…ah…so peculiarly personal, since you men regard so highly the privacy of your minds. Our two sciences, as you have already observed, are vastly different. You are far beyond us in mechanics, physics, chemistry, and the other applied sciences. We, on the other hand, have delved much deeper than you have into psychology and the other introspective studies. For that reason I know positively that the Lens you wear is capable of enormously greater things than you are at present able to make it perform. Of course I cannot use your Lens directly, since it is attuned to your own ego. However, if the idea appeals to you, I could, with your consent, occupy your mind and use your Lens to put you en rapport with your fellows. I have not volunteered the suggestion before because I know how averse your mind is to any foreign control."
"Not necessarily to foreign control," Kinnison corrected him. "Only to enemy control. The idea of friendly control never even occurred to me. That would be an entirely different breed of cats. Go to it!"
Kinnison relaxed his mind completely, and that of the Velantian came welling in, wave upon friendly, surging wave of benevolent power. And not only—or not precisely—power. It was more than power, it was a dynamic poignancy, a vibrant penetrance, a depth and clarity of perception that Kinnison in his most cogent moments had never dreamed a possibility. The possessor of that mind knew things, cameo–clear in microscopic detail, which the keenest minds of Earth could perceive only as chaotically indistinct masses of mental light and shade, of no recognizable pattern whatever!
"Give me the thought–pattern of him with whom you wish first to converse," came Worsel's thought, this time from deep within the Lensman's own brain.
Kinnison felt a subtle thrill of uneasiness at that new and ultra–strange dual personality, but thought back steadily. "Sorry—I can't."
"Excuse me, I should have known that you cannot think in our patterns. Think, then, of him as a person—as an individual. That will give me, I believe, sufficient data."
Into the Earthman's mind there leaped a picture of Henderson, sharp and clear. He felt his Lens actually tingle and throb as a concentration of vital force such as he had never known poured through his whole being and into that almost– living creation of the Arisians, and immediately thereafter he was in full mental communication with the Master Pilot! And there, seated across the tiny mess–table of their lifeboat, was LaVerne Thorndyke, the Master Technician.
Henderson came to his feet with a yell as the telepathic message bombshelled into his brain, and it required several seconds to convince him that he was not the victim of space–insanity or suffering from any other form of hallucination. Once convinced, however, he acted—his life–boat shot toward far Velantia at maximum blast.
Then, "Nelson! Allerdyce! Thompson! Jenkins! Uhlenhuth! Smith! Chatway!…" Kinnison called the roll.
Nelson, the specialist in communications, answered his captain's call. So did Allerdyce, the juggling quartermaster. So did Uhlenhuth, a technician. So did those in three other boats. Two of these three were apparently well within the danger zone and might get nipped in their dash, but their crews elected without hesitation to take the chance. Four boats, it was already known, had been captured by the pirates. The others…
"Only eight boats," Kinnison mused. "Not so good—but it could have been a lot worse—they might have got us all by this tune—and maybe some of them are just out of our reach." Then, turning to the Velantian, who had withdrawn his mind as soon as the job was. done.
"Thanks, Worsel," he said simply. "Some of those lads coming in have got plenty of just what it takes, and how we can use them!"
One by one the lifeboats made port, where their crews were welcomed briefly but feelingly before they were put to work. Nelson, one of the last pair to arrive, was particularly welcome.
"Nels, we need you badly," Kinnison informed him as soon as greetings had been exchanged. "The pirates have a beam, carrying a peculiarly scrambled signal, that they can receive and decode through any ordinary kind of blanketing interference, and you're the best man we've got to study their system. Some of these Velantian scientists can probably help you a lot on that—any race that can develop a screen against thought figures ought to know more than somewhat about vibration in general. We've got working models of the pirates' instruments, so you can figure out their patterns and formulas. When you've done that, I want you .and your Velantians to design something that will scramble all the pirates' communicator beams in space, as far as you can reach. If you can fix things so they can't talk any more than we can it'll help a lot, believe me!"
"QX, Chief, we'll give if the works," and the radio man called for tools, apparatus, and electricians.
Then throughout the great airport the many Velantians and the handful of Patrolmen labored mightily, side by side, and to very good effect indeed. Slowly the port became ringed about by, and studded everywhere with, monstrous mechanisms. Everywhere there were projectors, refractory throated demons ready to vomit forth every force known to the expert technicians of the Patrol. There were absorbers, too, backed by their bleeder resistors, air–gaps, ground–rods, and racks for discharged accumulators. There, too, were receptors and converters for the cosmic energy which was to empower many of the devices. There were, of course, atomic motor–generators by the score, and battery upon battery of gigantic accumulators. And Nelson's highpowered scrambler was ready to go to work.
These machines appeared crude, rough, unfinished, for neither time nor labor had been wasted upon non–essentials. But inside each one the moving parts fitted with micrometric accuracy and with hair–spring balance. All, without exception, functioned perfectly.
At Worsel's call, Kinnison climbed up out of a great beam–proof pit, the top of whose wall was practically composed of tractor–beam projectors. Pausing only to make sure that a sticking switch on one of the screen–dome generators had been replaced, he hurried to the heavily armored control room, where his little force of fellow Patrolmen awaited him.
"They're coming, boys," he announced. "You all know what to do. There are a lot more things we could have done if we'd had more time, but as it is we'll just go to work on them with what we've got," and Kinnison, again all brisk Captain, bent over his instruments.
In the ordinary course of events the pirate would have flashed up to the planet with spy–rays out and issuing a peremptory demand for the planet to show a clean bill of health or to surrender instantly such fugitives as might lately have landed upon it. But Kinnison did not—could not—wait for that. The spy– rays, he knew, would reveal the presence of his armament, and such armament most certainly did not belong to this planet. Therefore he acted first, and everything happened practically at once.
A tracer lashed out, the pilot–ray of the rim–battery of extraordinarily powerful tractors. Under their terrific pull the inertialess ship flashed toward their center of action. At the same moment there burst into activity Nelson's scrambler, a dome–screen against cosmic–energy intake, and a full circle of super–powered projectors.
All these things occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the vessel was being slowed down by the atmosphere of Velantia before her startled commander could even realize that he was being attacked. Only the automatically–reacting defensive screens saved that ship from instant destruction, but they did so save it and in seconds the pirates' every weapon was furiously ablaze.