Not by choice, then, but of necessity and in sheer desperation the pirates fought. In the vicious beams of their portables the stone walls of the room glared a baleful red; in spots even were pierced through. Old–fashioned pistols barked, spitting steel–jacketed lead. But the G–P suits were screened against lethal beams by generators capable of withstanding anything of lesser power than a semi–portable projector; G–P armor was proof against any projectile possessing less energy than that hurled by the high–caliber machine rifle. Thus the Boskonian beams splashed off the Valerians' screens in torrents of man–made lightning and in pyrotechnic displays of multi–colored splendor, their bullets ricocheted harmlessly as spent, mis–shapen blobs of metal.
The Patrolmen did not even draw their DeLameters during their inexorable advance. They knew that the pirates' armor was as capable as theirs, and the women were not to die if death for them could possibly be avoided. As they advanced the enemy fell back toward the center of the great room; holding there with the Lyranians forming the outer ring of their roughly–circular formation; firing over the women's heads and between their naked bodies.
Kinnison did not want those women to die. It seemed, however, that die they must, from the sheer, tremendous reflection from the Valerians' fiercely radiant screens, if the Patrolmen persisted in their advance. He studied the enemy formation briefly, then flashed an order.
There ensued a startling and entirely unorthodox maneuver, one possible only to the troopers mere at work, as at Kinnison's command every Valerian left the floor in a prodigious leap. Over the women's heads, over the heads of the enemy; but in mid–leap, as he passed over, each Patrolman swung his axe at a Boskonian helmet with all the speed and all the power he could muster. Most of the enemy died then and there, for the helmet has never been forged which is able to fend the beak of a space–axe driven as each of those was driven. The fact that the Valerians were nine or ten feet off the floor at the time made no difference whatever. They were space–fighters, trained to handle themselves and their weapons in any position or situation; with or without gravity, with or without even inertia.
"You persons—run! Get out of here! SCRAM!" Kinnison fairly shouted the thought as the Valerians left the floor, and the matriarchs obeyed— frantically. Through doors and windows they fled, in all directions and at the highest possible speed.
But in their enthusiasm to strike down the foe, not one of the Valerians had paid any attention to the exact spot upon which he was to land; or, if he did, some one else got there either first or just barely second. Besides, there was not room for them all in the center of the ring, For seconds, therefore, confusion reigned and a boiler–works clangor resounded for a mile around as a hundred and one extra–big and extra–heavy men, a writhing, kicking, pulling tangle of armor, axes, and equipment, jammed into a space which half their number would have filled over–full. Sulphurous Valerian profanity and sizzling deep–space oaths blistered the very air as each warrior struggled madly to right himself, to get one more crack at a pirate before somebody else beat him to it.
During this terrific melee some of the pirates released their screens and committed suicide. A few got out of the room, but not many. Nor far; the men in the helicopters saw to that. They had needle–beams, powered from the Dauntless, which went through the screens of personal armor as a knife goes through ripe cheese.
"Save it, guys—hold everything!" Kinnison yelled as the tangled mass of Valerians resolved itself into erect and warlike units. "No more axe– work— don't let them kill themselves—catch them ALIVE!"
They did so, quickly and easily. With the women out of the way, there was nothing to prevent the Valerians from darting right up to the muzzles of the foes' DeLameters. Nor could the enemy dodge, or run, half fast enough to get away. Armored, shielded hands batted the weapons away—if an arm or leg broke in the process, what the hell?—and the victim was held motionless until his turn came to face the mind–reading Kinnison.
Nothing. Nothing, flat, A string of zeros. And, bitterly silent, Kinnison led the way back to the Dauntless. The men he wanted, the ones who knew anything, were the ones who killed themselves, of course. Well, why not? In like case, officers of the Patrol had undoubtedly done the same. The live ones didn't know where their planet was, could give no picture even of where it lay in the galaxy, did not know where they were going, nor why. Well, so what? Wasn't ignorance the prime characteristic of the bottom layers of dictatorships everywhere? If they had known anything, they would have been under compulsion to kill themselves, too, and would have done it.
In his own room in the Dauntless his black mood lightened somewhat and he called the Elder Person.
"Helen of Troy? I suppose that the best thing we can. do now, for your peace of mind, prosperity, well–being, et cetera, is to drill out of here as fast as Klono and Noshabkeming will let us. Right?"
"Why, I…you…um…that is…" The matriarch was badly flustered at the Lensman's bald summation of her attitude. She did not want to agree, but she certainly did not want these males around a second longer than was necessary.
"Just as well say it, because it goes double for me—you can play it clear across the board, Toots, that if I ever see you again it will be because I can't get out of it." Then, to his chief pilot:
"QX, Hen, give her the off—back to Tellus."
7: Wide-open N-way
Serenely the mighty Dauntless bored her way homeward through the ether, at the easy touring blast—for her—of some eighty parsecs an hour. The engineers inspected and checked their equipment, from instrument–needles to blast– nozzles; relining, repairing, replacing anything and everything which showed any signs of wear or strain because of what the big vessel had just gone through. Then they relaxed into their customary routine of killing time—the games of a dozen planets and the vying with each other in the telling of outrageously untruthful stories.
The officers on watch lolled at ease in their cushioned seats, making much ado of each tiny thing as it happened, even the changes of watch. The Valerians, as usual, remained invisible in their own special quarters. There the gravity was set at twenty seven hundred instead of at the Tellurian normal of nine hundred eighty, there the atmospheric pressure was forty pounds to the square inch, there the temperature was ninety six degrees Fahrenheit, and there vanBuskirk and his fighters lived and moved and had their drills of fantastic violence and stress. They were irked less than any of the others by monotony; being, as has been intimated previously, neither mental nor intellectual giants.
And Kinnison, mirror–polished gray boots stacked in all their majestic size upon a corner of his desk, leaned his chair precariously backward and thought in black concentration. It still didn't make any kind of sense. He had just enough clues—fragments of clues—to drive a man nuts. Menjo Bleeko was the man he wanted. On Lonabar. To find one was to find the other, but how in the steaming hells of Venus was he going to find either of them? It might seem funny not to be able to find a thing as big as a planet—but since nobody knew where it was, by fifty thousand parsecs, and since there were millions and skillions and whillions of planets in the galaxy, a random search was quite definitely out. Bleeko was a zwilnik, or tied in with zwilniks, of course; but he could read a million zwilnik minds without finding, except by merest chance, one having any contact with or knowledge of the Lonabarian.