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First Lensman

<h2>CHAPTER 17</h2> Forty thousand miles from Earth's center the Chicago loafed along a circular arc, inert, at a mere ten thousand miles an hour; a speed which, and not by accident, kept her practically stationary above a certain point on the planet's surface. Nor was it by chance that both Virgil Samms and Roderick Kinnison were aboard. And a dozen or so other craft, cruisers and such, whose officers were out to put space-time in their logs, were flitting aimlessly about; but never very far away from the flagship. And farther out—well out—a cordon of diesel-powered detector ships swept space to the full limit of their prodigious reach. The navigating officers of those vessels knew to a nicety the place and course of every ship lawfully in the ether, and the appearance of even one unscheduled trace would set in motion a long succession of carefully-planned events. And far below, grazing atmosphere, never very far from the direct line between the Chicago and Earth's core, floated a palatial pleasure yacht. And this craft carried not one Lensman, or two, but eight; two of whom kept their eyes fixed upon their observation plates. They were watching a lunch-box resting upon the bottom of a lake. "Hasn't it radiated yet?" Roderick Kinnison demanded. "Or been approached, or moved?" "Not yet," Lyman Cleveland replied, crisply. "Neither Northrop's rig nor mine has shown any sign of activity." He did not amplify the statement, nor was there need. Mason Northrop was a Master Electronicist; Cleveland was perhaps the world's greatest living expert. Neither of them had detected radiation. Ergo, none existed. Equally certainly the box had not moved, or been moved, or approached. "No change, Rod," Doctor Frederick Rodebush Lensed the assured thought. "Six of us have been watching the plates in five-minute shifts." A few minutes later, however: "Here is a thought which may be of interest," DalNalten the Venerian announced, spraying himself with a couple pints of water. "It is natural enough, of course, for any Venerian to be in or on any water he can reach—I would enjoy very much being on or in that lake myself—but it may not be entirely by coincidence that one particular Venerian, Ossmen, is visiting this particular lake at this particular time." "What!" Nine Lensmen yelled the thought practically as one. "Precisely. Ossmen." It was a measure of the Venerian Lensman's concern that he used only two words instead of twenty or thirty. "In the red boat with the yellow sail." "Do you see any detector rigs?" Samms asked. "He wouldn't need any," DalNalten put in. "He will be able to see it. Or, if a little colane had been rubbed on it which no Tellurian could have noticed, any Venerian could smell it from one end of that lake to the other." "True. I didn't think of that. It may not have a transmitter after all." "Maybe not, but keep on listening, anyway," the Port Admiral ordered. "Bend a plate on Ossmen, and a couple more on the rest of the boats. But Ossmen is clean, you say, Jack? Not even a spy-ray block?" "He couldn't have a block, Dad. It'd give too much away, here on our home grounds. Like on Eridan, where their ops could wear anything they could lift, but we had to go naked." He flinched mentally as he recalled his encounter with Hazel the Hell-cat, and Northrop flinched with him. "That's right, Rod," Olmstead in his boat below agreed, and Conway Costigan, in his room in Northport, concurred. The top-drawer operatives of the enemy depended for safety upon perfection of technique, not upon crude and dangerous mechanical devices. "Well, since you're all so sure of it, I'll buy it," and the waiting went on. Under the slight urge of the light and vagrant breeze, the red boat moved slowly across the water. A somnolent, lackadaisical youth, who very evidently cared nothing about where the boat went, sat in its stern, with his left arm draped loosely across the tiller. Nor was Ossmen any more concerned. His only care, apparently, was to avoid interference with the fishermen; his under-water jaunts were long, even for a Venerian, and he entered and left the water as smoothly as only a Venerian—or a seal—could. "However, he could have, and probably has got, a capsule spy-ray detector," Jack offered, presently. "Or, since a Venerian can swallow anything one inch smaller than a kitchen stove, he could have a whole analyzing station stashed away in his stomach. Nobody's put a beam on him yet, have you?" Nobody had. "It might be smart not to. Watch him with 'scopes ... and when he gets up close to the box, better pull your beams off of it. DalNalten, I don't suppose it would be quite bright for you to go swimming down there too, would it?" "Very definitely not, which is why I am up here and dry. None of them would go near it." They waited, and finally Ossmen's purposeless wanderings brought him over the spot on the lake's bottom which was the target of so many Tellurian eyes. He gazed at the discarded lunch-box as incuriously as he had looked at so many other sunken objects, and swam over it as casually—and only the ultra-cameras caught what he actually did. He swam serenely on. "The box is still there," the spy-ray men reported, "but the package is gone." "Good!" Kinnison exclaimed, "Can you 'scopists see it on him?" "Ten to one they can't," Jack said. "He swallowed it. I expected him to swallow it box and all." "We can't see it, sir. He must have swallowed it." "Make sure." "Yes, sir.... He's back on the boat now and we've shot him from all angles. He's clean—nothing outside." "Perfect! That means he isn't figuring on slipping it to somebody else in a crowd. This will be an ordinary job of shadowing from here on in, so I'll put in the umbrella." The detector ships were recalled. The Chicago and the various other ships of war returned to their various bases. The pleasure craft floated away. But on the other hand there were bursts of activity throughout the forest for a mile or so back from the shores of the lake. Camps were struck. Hiking parties decided that they had hiked enough and began to retrace their steps. Lithe young men, who had been doing this and that, stopped doing it and headed for the nearest trails. For Kinnison pere had erred slightly in saying that the rest of the enterprise was to be an ordinary job of shadowing. No ordinary job would do. With the game this nearly in the bag it must be made absolutely certain that no suspicion was aroused, and yet Samms had to have facts. Sharp, hard, clear facts; facts so self-evidently facts that no intelligence above idiot grade could possibly mistake them for anything but facts. Wherefore Ossmen the Venerian was not alone thenceforth. From lake to hotel, from hotel to car, along the road, into and in and out of train and plane, clear to an ordinary-enough-looking building in an ordinary business section of New York, he was never alone. Where the traveling population was light, the Patrol operatives were few and did not crowd the Venerian too nearly; where dense, as in a metropolitan station, they ringed him three deep. He reached his destination, which was of course spy-ray proofed, late Sunday night. He went in, remained briefly, came out. "Shall we spy-ray him, Virge? Follow him? Or what?" "No spy-rays. Follow him. Cover him like a blanket. At the usual time give him the usual spy-ray going-over, but not until then. This time, make it thorough. Make certain that he hasn't got it on him, in him, or in or around his house." "There'll be nothing doing here tonight, will there?" "No, it would be too noticeable. So you, Fred, and Lyman, take the first trick; the rest of us will get some sleep." When the building opened Monday morning the Lensmen were back, with dozens of others, including Knobos of Mars. There were also present or nearby literally hundreds of the shrewdest, most capable detectives of Earth. "So this is their headquarters—one of them at least," the Martian thought, studying the trickle of people entering and leaving the building. "It is as we thought, Dal, why we could never find it, why we could never trace any wholesaler backward. None of us has ever seen any of these persons before. Complete change of personnel per operation; probably inter-planetary. Long periods of quiescence. Check?" "Check: but we have them now." "Just like that, huh?" Jack Kinnison jibed; and from his viewpoint his idea was the more valid, for the wholesalers were very clever operators indeed. From the more professional viewpoint of Knobos and DalNalten, however, who had fought a steadily losing battle so long, the task was not too difficult. Their forces were beautifully organized and synchronized; they were present in such overwhelming numbers that "tails" could be changed every fifteen seconds; long before anybody, however suspicious, could begin to suspect any one shadow. Nor was it necessary for the tails to signal each other, however inconspicuously, or to indicate any suspect at change-over time. Lensed thoughts directed every move, without confusion or error. And there were tiny cameras with tremendous, protuberant lenses, the "long eyes" capable of taking wire-sharp close ups from five hundred feet; and other devices and apparatus and equipment too numerous to mention here. Thus the wholesalers were traced and their transactions with the retail peddlers were recorded. And from that point on, even Jack Kinnison had to admit that the sailing was clear. These small fry were not smart, and their customers were even less so. None had screens or detectors or other apparatus; their every transaction could be and was recorded from a distance of many miles by the ultra-instruments of the Patrol. And not only the transactions. Clearly, unmistakeably, the purchaser was followed from buying to sniffing; nor was the time intervening ever long. Thionite, then as now, was bought at retail only to use, and the whole ghastly thing went down on tape and film. The gasping, hysterical appeal; the exchange of currency for drug; the headlong rush to a place of solitude; the rigid muscle-lock and the horribly ecstatic transports; the shaken, soul-searing recovery or the entranced death. It all went on record. It was sickening to have to record such things. More than one observer did sicken in fact, and had to be relieved. But Virgil Samms had to have concrete, positive, irrefutable evidence. He got it. Any possible jury, upon seeing that evidence, would know it to be the truth; no possible jury, after seeing that evidence, could bring in any verdict other than "guilty". Oddly enough, Jack Kinnison was the only casualty of that long and hectic day. A man—later proved to be a middle-sized potentate of the underworld—who was not even under suspicion at the time, for some reason or other got the idea that Jack was after him. The Lensman had, perhaps, allowed some part of his long eye to show; a fast and efficient long-range telephoto lens is a devilishly awkward thing to conceal. At any rate the racketeer sent out a call for help, just in case his bodyguards would not be enough, and in the meantime his personal attendants rallied enthusiastically around. They had two objects in view; One, to pass a knife expeditiously and quietly through young Kinnison's throat from ear to ear; and: Two, to tear the long eye apart and subject a few square inches of super-sensitive emulsion to the bright light of day. And if the Big Shot had known that the photographer was not alone, that the big, hulking bruiser a few feet away was also a bull, they might have succeeded. Two of the four hoods reached Jack just fractionally ahead of the other two; one to seize the camera, the other to swing the knife. But Jack Kinnison was fast; fast of brain and nerve and muscle. He saw them coming. In three flashing motions he bent the barrel of the telephoto into a neat arc around the side of the first man's head, ducked frantically under the fiercely-driven knife, and drove the toe of his boot into the spot upon which prize-fighters like to have their rabbit-punches land. Both of those attackers lost interest promptly. One of them lost interest permanently; for a telephoto lens in barrel is heavy, very rigid, and very, very hard. While Battling Jack was still off balance, the other two guards arrived—but so did Mason Northrop. Mase was not quite as fast as Jack was; but, as has been pointed out, he was bigger and much stronger. When he hit a man, with either hand, that man dropped. It was the same as being on the receiving end of the blow of a twenty-pound hammer falling through a distance of ninety seven and one-half feet. The Lensmen had of course also yelled for help, and it took only a split second for a Patrol speedster to travel from any given point to any other in the same county. It took no time at all for that speedster to fill a couple of square blocks with patterns of force through which neither bullets nor beams could be driven. Therefore the battle ended as suddenly as it began; before more thugs, with their automatics and portables, could reach the scene. Kinnison fils cursed and damned fulminantly the edict which had forbidden arms that day, and swore that he would never get out of bed again without strapping on at least two blasters; but he had to admit finally that he had nothing to squawk about. Kinnison pere explained quite patiently—for him—that all he had got out of the little fracas was a split lip, that young Northrop's hair wasn't even mussed, and that if everybody had been packing guns some scatter-brained young damn fool like him would have started blasting and blown everything higher than up—would have spoiled Samms' whole operation maybe beyond repair. Now would he please quit bellyaching and get to hell out? He got. <hr class="tb" /> "That buttons thionite up, don't you think?" Rod Kinnison asked. "And the lawyers will have plenty of time to get the case licked into shape and lined up for trial." "Yes and no." Samms frowned in thought. "The evidence is complete, from original producer to ultimate consumer; but our best guess is that it will take years to get the really important offenders behind bars." "Why? I thought you were giving them altogether too much time when you scheduled the blow-off for three weeks ahead of election." "Because the drug racket is only a small part of it. We're going to break the whole thing at once, you know, and Mateese covers a lot more ground—murder, kidnapping, bribery, corruption, misfeasance—practically everything you can think of." "I know. What of it?" "Jurisdiction, among other things. With the President, over half of the Congress, much of the judiciary, and practically all of the political bosses and police chiefs of the Continent under indictment at once, the legal problem becomes incredibly difficult. The Patrol's Department of Law has been working on it twenty four hours a day, and the only thing they seem sure of is a long succession of bitterly-contested points of law. There are no precedents whatever." "Precedents be damned! They're guilty and everybody knows it. We'll change the laws so that...." "We will not!" Samms interrupted, sharply. "We want and we will have government by law, not by men. We have had too much of that already. Speed is not of the essence; justice very definitely is." "'Crusader' Samms, now and forever! But I'll buy it, Virge—now let's get back down to earth. Operation Zwilnik is all set. Mateese is going good. Zabriska tied into Zwilnik. That leaves Operation Boskone, which is, I suppose, still getting nowhere fast." The First Lensman did not reply. It was, and both men knew it. The shrewdest, most capable and experienced operatives of the Patrol had hit that wall with everything they had, and had simply bounced. Low-level trials had found no point of contact, no angle of approach. Middle level, ditto. George Olmstead, working at the highest possible level, was morally certain that he had found a point of contact, but had not been able to do anything with it. "How about calling a Council conference on it?" Kinnison asked finally. "Or Bergenholm at least? Maybe he can get one of his hunches on it." "I have discussed it with them all, just as I have with you. No one had anything constructive to offer, except to go ahead with Bennett as you are doing. The concensus is that the Boskonians know just as much about our military affairs as we know about theirs—no more." "It would be too much to expect them to be dumb enough to figure us as dumb enough to depend only on our visible Grand Fleet, after the warning they gave us at The Hill," Kinnison admitted. "Yes. What worries me most is that they had a running start." "Not enough to count," the Port Admiral declared. "We can out-produce 'em and out-fight 'em." "Don't be over-optimistic. You can't deny them the possession of brains, ability, man-power and resources at least equal to ours." "I don't have to." Kinnison remained obstinately cheerful. "Morale, my boy, is what counts. Man-power and tonnage and fire-power are important, of course, but morale has won every war in history. And our morale right now is higher than a cat's back—higher than any time since John Paul Jones—and getting higher by the day." "Yes?" The question was monosyllabic but potent. "Yes. I mean just that—yes. From what we know of their system they can't have the morale we've got. Anything they can do we can do more of and better. What you've got, Virge, is a bad case of ingrowing nerves. You've never been to Bennett, in spite of the number of times I've asked you to. I say take time right now and come along—it'll be good for what ails you. It will also be a very fine thing for Bennett and for the Patrol—you'll find yourself no stranger there." "You may have something there ... I'll do it." Port Admiral and First Lensman went to Bennett, not in the Chicago or other superdreadnaught, but in a two-man speedster. This was necessary because space-travel, as far as that planet was concerned, was a strictly one-way affair except for Lensmen. Only Lensmen could leave Bennett, under any circumstances or for any reason whatever. There was no out-going mail, express, or freight. Even the war-vessels of the Fleet, while on practice maneuvers outside the bottle-tight envelopes surrounding the system, were so screened that no unauthorized communication could possibly be made. "In other words," Kinnison finished explaining, "we slapped on everything anybody could think of, including Bergenholm and Rularion; and believe me, brother, that was a lot of stuff." "But wouldn't the very fact of such rigid restrictions operate against morale? It is a truism of psychology that imprisonment, like everything else, is purely relative." "Yeah, that's what I told Rularion, except I used simpler and rougher language. You know how sarcastic and superior he is, even when he's wrong?" "How I know!" "Well, when he's right he's too damned insufferable for words. You'd've thought he was talking to the prize boob of a class of half-wits. As long as nobody on the planet knew that there was any such thing as space-travel, or suspected that they were not the only form of intelligent life in the universe, it was all right. No such concept as being planet-bound could exist. They had all the room there was. But after they met us, and digested all the implications, they would develop the colly-wobbles no end. This, of course, is an extreme simplification of the way the old coot poured it into me; but he came through with the solution, so I took it like a little man." "What was the solution?" "It's a shame you were too busy to come in on it. You'll see when we land." But Virgil Samms was quick on the uptake. Even before they landed, he understood. When the speedster slowed down for atmosphere he saw blazoned upon the clouds a welter of one many-times repeated signal; as they came to ground he saw that the same set of symbols was repeated, not only upon every available cloud, but also upon airships, captive balloons, streamers, roofs and sides of buildings—even, in multi-colored rocks and flower-beds, upon the ground itself. "Twenty Haress," Samms translated, and frowned in thought. "A date of the Bennettan year. Would it by any chance happen to coincide with our Tellurian November fourteenth of this present year?" "Bright boy!" Kinnison applauded. "I thought you'd get it, but not so fast. Yes—election day." "I see. They know what is going on, then?" "Everything that counts. They know what we stand to win—and lose. They've named it Liberation Day, and everything on the planet is building up to it in a grand crescendo. I was a little afraid of it at first, but if the screens are really tight it won't make any difference how many people know it, and if they aren't the beans would all be spilled anyway. And it really works—I get a bigger thrill every time I come here." "I can see where it might work." Bennett was a fully Tellurian world in mass, in atmosphere and in climate; her native peoples were human to the limit of classification, both physically and mentally. And First Lensman Samms, as he toured it with his friend, found a world aflame with a zeal and an ardor unknown to blase Earth since the days of the Crusades. The Patrol's cleverest and shrewdest psychologists, by merely sticking to the truth, had done a marvelous job. Bennett knew that it was the Arsenal and the Navy Yard of Civilization, and it was proud of it. Its factories were humming as they had never hummed before; every industry, every business, every farm was operating at one hundred percent of capacity. Bennett was dotted and spattered with spaceports already built, and hundreds more were being rushed to completion. The already staggering number of ships of war operating out of those ports was being augmented every hour by more and ever more ultra-modern, ultra-fast, ultra-powerful shapes. It was an honor to help build those ships; it was a still greater one to help man them. Competitive examinations were being held constantly, nor were all or even most of the applicants native Bennettans. Samms did not have to ask where these young people were coming from. He knew. From all the planets of Civilization, attracted by carefully-worded advertisements of good jobs at high pay on new and highly secret projects on newly discovered planets. There were hundreds of such ads. Most were probably the Patrol's, and led here; many were of Spaceways, Uranium Incorporated, and other mercantile firms. The possibility that some of them might lead to what was now being called Boskonia had been tested thoroughly, but with uniformly negative results. Lensmen had applied by scores for those non-Patrol jobs and had found them bona-fide. The conclusion was unavoidable—Boskone was doing its recruiting on planets unknown to any wearer of Arisia's Lens. On the other hand, more than a trickle of Boskonians were applying for Patrol jobs, but Samms was almost certain that none had been accepted. The final screening was done by Lensmen, and in such matters Lensmen did not make many or serious mistakes. Bennett had been informed of the First Lensman's arrival, and Kinnison had been guilty of a gross understatement indeed in telling Samms that he would not be regarded as a stranger. Wherever Samms went he was met by wildly enthusiastic crowds. He had to make speeches, each of which was climaxed by a tremendous roar of "TO LIBERATION DAY!" "No Lensman material here, you say, Rod?" Samms asked, after the first city-shaking demonstration was over. One of his prime concerns, throughout his life, was this. "With all this enthusiasm? Sure?" "We haven't found any good enough to refer to you yet. However, in a few years, when the younger generation gets a little older, there certainly will be." "Check." The tour of inspection and acquaintance was finished, the two Lensmen started back to Earth. "Well, my skeptical and pessimistic friend, was I lying, or not?" Kinnison asked, as soon as the speedster's ports were sealed. "Can they match that or not?" "You weren't—and I don't believe they can. I have never seen anything like it. Autocracies have parades and cheers and demonstrations, of course, but they have always been forced—artificial. Those were spontaneous." "Not only that, but the enthusiasm will carry through. We'll be piping hot and ready to go. But about this stumping—you said I'd better start as soon as we get back?" "Within a few days, I'd say." "I wouldn't wonder, so let's use this time in working out a plan of campaign. My idea is to start out like this...." <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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