"You don't want it!" The colonel stared, narrow–eyed. "What do you want, then?" He knew, of course, that Gannel wanted something.
"Your help," Kinnison admitted, candidly. "I want to get onto Alcon's personal staff, as adviser. With my experience and training, I figure that there's more in it for me there than here in the Guards. Here's my proposition—if I help you, by showing you how to work out your field problems and in general building you up however I can instead of tearing you down, will you use your great influence with the general and Prime Minister Fossten to have me transferred to the Household?"
"Will I? I'll say I will!" the colonel agreed, with fervor. He did not add "If I can't kill you first"—that was understood.
And Kinnison did build the colonel up. He taught him things about the military business which that staff officer had never even suspected; he sounded depths of strategy theretofore completely unknown to the zwilnik. And the more Kinnison taught him, the more eager the colonel became to get rid of him. He had been suspicious and only reluctantly cooperative at first; but as soon as he realized that he could not kill his tutor and that if the latter stayed in the Guards it would be only a matter of days—at most of weeks—until Gannel would force himself into the colonelcy by sheer force of merit, he pulled in earnest every wire he could reach.
Before the actual transfer could be effected, however, Kinnison received a call from Nadreck.
"Excuse me, please, for troubling you," the Palainian apologized, "but there has been a development hi which you may perhaps be interested. This Kandron has been given orders by Alcon to traverse a hyper–spatial tube, the terminus of which will appear at coordinates 217–493–28 at hour eleven of the seventh Thralian day from the present."
"Fine business! And you want to chase him, huh?" Kinnison jumped at the conclusion. "Sure—go ahead. I'll meet you there. I'll fake up some kind of an excuse to get away from here and we'll run him ragged…"
"I do not," Nadreck interrupted, decisively. "If I leave my work here it will all come undone. Besides, it would be dangerous—foolhardy. Not knowing what lies at the other end of that tube, we could make no plans and could have no assurance of safety, or even of success. You should not go, either—that is unthinkable. I am reporting this matter in view of the possibility that you may think it significant enough to warrant the sending of some observer whose life is of little or no importance."
"Oh…uh–huh…I see. Thanks, Nadreck." Kinnison did not allow any trace of his real thought to go out before he broke the line. Then:
"Funny ape, Nadreck," he cogitated, as he called Haynes. "I don't get his angle at all—I simply can't figure him out…Haynes? Kinnison," and he reported in full.
"The Dauntless has all the necessary generators and equipment, and the place is far enough out so that she can make the approach without any trouble," the Lensman concluded. "We'll burn whatever is at the other end of that tube clear out of the ether. Send along as many of the old gang as you can spare. Wish we had time to get Cardynge—he'll howl like a wolf at being left out—but we've got only a week…"
"Cardynge is here," Haynes broke in. "He has been working out some stuff for Thorndyke on the sunbeam. He is finished now, though, and will undoubtedly want to go along."
"Fine!" and explicit arrangements for the rendezvous were made.
It was not unduly difficult for Kinnison to make his absence from duty logical, even necessary. Scouts and observers reported inexplicable interferences with certain communications lines. With thoughts of THE Lensman suffusing the minds of the higher–ups, and because of Gannel's already– demonstrated prowess and keenness, he scarcely had to signify a willingness to investigate the phenomena in order to be directed to do so.
Nor did he pick a crew of his own sycophants. Instead, he chose the five highestranking privates of the battalion to accompany him upon this supposedly extremely dangerous mission; apparently entirely unaware that two of them belonged to the colonel, two to the general, and one to the captain who had taken his place.
The colonel wished Major Gannel luck—verbally—even while hoping fervently that THE Lensman would make cold meat of him in a hurry; and Kinnison gravely gave his well–wisher thanks as he set out. He did not, however, go near any communications lines; although his spying crew did not realize the fact. They did not realize anything; they did not know even that they became unconscious within five minutes after leaving Thrale.
They remained unconscious while the speedster in which they were was drawn into the Dauntless' capacious hold. In the Patrol ship's sick–bay, under expert care, they remained unconscious during the entire duration of their stay on board.
The Patrol pilots picked up Kandron's flying vessel with little difficulty; and, nullifiers full out, followed it easily. When the zwilnik ship slowed down to feel for the vortex the Dauntless slowed also, and baffled her driving jets as she sneaked up to the very edge of electro–detector range. When the objective disappeared from threedimensional space the point of vanishment was marked precisely, and up to that point the Patrol ship flashed in seconds.
The regular driving blasts were cut off, the special generators were cut in. Then, as the force–fields of the ship reacted against those of the Boskonian "shore" station, the Patrolmen felt again in all their gruesome power the appallingly horrible sensations of inter–dimensional acceleration. For that sensation is, literally, indescribable. A man in good training can overcome sea– sickness, air–sickness, and space–sickness. He can overcome the nausea and accustom himself to the queasily terrifying endless–fall sensation of weightlessness. He can become inured to the physical and mental ills accompanying inertialessness. No man ever has, however, been able to get used to inter–dimensional acceleration.
It is best likened to a compression; not as a whole, but atom by atom. A man feels as though he were being twisted—corkscrewed in some monstrously obscure fashion which permits him neither to move from his place nor to remain where he is. It is a painless but utterly revolting transformation, progressing in a series of waves; a rearrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion, an incomprehensibly impossible extrusion of each ultimate particle of his substance in an unknowable, ordinarily non– existent direction.
The period of acceleration over, the Dauntless began to travel at uniform velocity along whatever course it was that the tube took. The men, although highly uncomfortable and uneasy, could once more move about and work. Sir Austin Cardynge in particular was actually happy and eager as he flitted from one to another of the automatic recording instruments upon his special panel. He resembled more closely than ever a lean, gray tomcat, Kinnison thought—he almost expected to see him begin to lick his whiskers and purr.
"You see, my ignorant young friend," the scientist almost did purr as one of the recording pens swung wildly across the ruled paper, "it is as I told you— the lack of exact data upon even one tiny factor of this extremely complex phenomenon is calamitous. While my notes were apparently complete and were certainly accurate, our experimental tubes did not function perfectly. The time factor was irreconcilable—completely so, in every aspect, even that of departure from and return to normal space—and it is unthinkable that time, one of the fundamental units, is or can be intrinsically variable…"
"You think so?" Kinnison broke in. "Look at that," pointing to the ultimate of timepieces, Cardynge's own triplex chronometer. "Number One says we've been in this tube for an hour, Number Two says a little over nine minutes, and according to Number Three we won't be starting for twenty minutes yet—it must be running backwards—let's see you comb that out of your whiskers!"