Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered; with fixed–mount weapons impossible of mounting upon a lesser mobile base, with fixed–mount intakes and generators which only planetary resources could excite or feed. Galactic Civilization's war–vessels fell back. Attacking a full–armed planet was no part of their job. And as they fell back the super– maulers moved ponderously up and went to work. This was their dish; for this they had been designed. Tubes, lances, stillettoes of unthinkable energies raved against their mighty screens; bouncing off, glancing away, dissipating themselves in space–torturing discharges as they hurled themselves upon the nearest ground. In and in the monsters bored, inexorably taking up their positions directly over the ultra–protected domes which, their commanders knew, sheltered the vitally important Bergenholms and controls. They then loosed forces of their own. Forces of such appalling magnitude as to burn out in a twinkling of an eye projector–shells of a refractoriness to withstand for ten full seconds the maximum output of a first–class battleship's primary batteries!
The resultant beam was of very short duration, but of utterly intolerable poignancy. No material substance could endure it even momentarily. It pierced instantly the hardest, tightest wall–shield known to the scientists of the Patrol. It was the only known thing which could cut or rupture the ultimately stubborn fabric of a Q–type helix. Hence it is not to be wondered at that as those incredible needles of ravening energy stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again at Boskonian domes every man of the Patrol, even Kimball Kinnison, fully expected those domes to go down.
But those domes held. And those fixed–mount projectors hurled back against the super–maulers forces at the impact of which course after course of fierce– driven defensive screen flamed through the spectrum and went down.
"Back! Get them back!" Kinnison whispered, white–lipped, and the attacking structures sullenly, stubbornly gave way.
"Why?" gritted Haynes. "They're all we've got."
"You forget the new one, chief—give us a chance."
"What makes you think it'll work?" the old admiral flashed the searing thought. "It probably won't—and if it doesn't…"
"If it doesn't," the younger man shot back, "we're no worse off than now to use the maulers. But we've got to use the sunbeam now while those planets are together and before they start toward Tellus."
"QX," the admiral assented; and, as soon as the Patrol's maulers were out of the way:
"Verne?" Kinnison flashed a thought. "We can't crack 'em. Looks like it's up to you—what do you say?"
"Jury–rigged—don't know whether she'll light a cigarette or not—but here she comes!"
The sun, shining so brightly, darkened almost to the point of invisibility. Warvessels of the enemy disappeared, each puffing out into a tiny but brilliant sparkle of light.
Then, before the beam could effect the enormous masses of the planets, the engineers lost it. The sun flashed up—dulled—brightened—darkened— wavered. The beam waxed and waned irregularly; the planets began to move away under the urgings of their now thoroughly scared commanders.
Again, while millions upon millions of tensely straining Patrol officers stared into their plates, haggard Thorndyke and his sweating crews got the sunbeam under control—and, in a heart–stopping wavering fashion, held it together. It flared—sputtered—ballooned out—but very shortly, before they could get out of its way, the planets began to glow. Ice–caps melted, then boiled. Oceans boiled, their surfaces almost exploding into steam. Mountain ranges melted and flowed sluggishly down into valleys. The Boskonian domes of force went down and stayed down.
"QX, Kim—let be," Haynes ordered. "No use overdoing it. Not bad– looking planets; maybe we can use them for something."
The sun brightened to its wonted splendor, the planets began visibly to cool—even the Titanic forces then at work had heated those planetary masses only superficially.
The battle was over.
"What in all the purple hells of Palain did you do, Haynes, and how?" demanded the Z9M9Z's captain.
"He used the whole damned solar system as a vacuum tube!" Haynes explained, gleefully. "Those power stations out there, with all their motors and intake screens, are simply the power leads. The asteroid belts, and maybe some of the planets, are the grids and plates. The sun is…"
"Hold on, chief!" Kinnison broke in. "That isn't quite it. You see, the directive field set up by the…"
"Hold on yourself!" Haynes ordered, briskly. "You're too damned scientific, just like Sawbones Lacy. What do Rex and I care about technical details that we can't understand anyway? The net result is what counts—and that was to concentrate upon those planets practically the whole energy output of the sun. Wasn't it?"
"Well, that's the main idea," Kinnison conceded. "The energy equivalent, roughly, of four million one hundred and fifty thousand tons per second of disintegrating matter."
"Whew!" the captain whistled. "No wonder it frizzled 'em up."
"I can say now, I think, with no fear of successful contradiction, that Tellus is strongly held," Haynes stated, with conviction. "What now, Kim old son?"
"I think they're done, for a while," the Gray Lensman pondered. "Cardynge can't communicate through the tube, so probably they can't; but if they managed to slip an observer through they may know how almighty close they came to licking us. On the other hand, Verne says that he can get the bugs out of the sunbeam in a couple of weeks—and when he does, the next zwilnik he cuts loose at is going to get a surprise."
"I'll say so," Haynes agreed. "We'll keep the surveyors on the prowl, and some of the Fleet will always be close by. Not all of it, of course—we'll adopt a schedule of reliefs—but enough of it to be useful. That ought to be enough, don't you think?"
"I think so—yes," Kinnison answered, thoughtfully. "I'm just about positive that they won't be in shape to start anything here again for a long time. And I had better get busy, sir, on my own job—I've got to put out a few jets."
"I suppose so," Haynes admitted.
For Tellus was strongly held, now—so strongly held that Kinnison felt free to begin again the search upon whose successful conclusion depended, perhaps, the outcome of the struggle between Boskonia and Galactic Civilization.
3: Lyrane the Matriarchy
When the forces of the Galactic Patrol blasted Helmuth's Grand Base out of existence and hunted down and destroyed his secondary bases throughout this galaxy, Boskone's military grasp upon Civilization was definitely broken. Some minor bases may have escaped destruction, of course. Indeed, it is practically certain that some of them did so, for there are comparatively large volumes of our Island Universe which have not been mapped, even yet, by the planetographers of the Patrol. It is equally certain, however, that they were relatively few and of no real importance. For warships, being large, cannot be carried around or concealed in a vest pocket—a war–fleet must of necessity be based upon a celestial object not smaller than a very large asteroid. Such a base, lying close enough to any one of Civilization's planets to be of any use, could not be hidden successfully from the detectors of the Patrol.
Reasoning from analogy, Kinnison quite justifiably concluded that the back of the drug syndicate had been broken in similar fashion when he had worked upward through Bominger and Strongheart and Crowninshield and Jalte to the dread council of Boskone itself. He was, however, wrong.
For, unlike the battleship, thionite is a vest–pocket commodity. Unlike the spacefleet base, a drug–baron's headquarters can be and frequently is small, compact, and highly mobile. Also, the galaxy is huge, the number of planets in it immense, the total count of drug addicts utterly incomprehensible. Therefore it had been found more efficient to arrange the drug hook–up in multiple series– parallel, instead of in the straight en– cascade sequence which Kinnison thought that he had followed up.