The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith

men!”

      Men, hundreds of them, armed and armored, swarmed through the freighter’s locks. But as the last man of the boarding party passed the portal something happened that was most decidedly not on the program. The outer port slammed shut and its toggles drove home!

      “Blast those screens! Knock them down—get in there with a spy-ray!” barked the pirate captain. He was not one of those hardy and valiant souls who, like Gildersleeve, led in person the attacks of his cut-throats. He emulated instead the higher Boskonian officials and directed his raids from the safety of his control-room; but, as has been intimated, he was not exactly like those officials. It was only after it was too late that he became suspicious. “I wonder if somebody could have double-crossed us? . Highjackers?”

      “We’ll bally soon know,” the pilot growled, and even as he spoke the spy-ray got through, revealing a very shambles.

      For vanBuskirk and his Valerians had not been caught napping, nor were they a crew—unarmored, partially armed, and rendered even more impotent by internal mutiny, strife, and slaughter—such as the pirates had expected to find.

      Instead, the boarders met a force that was overwhelmingly superior to their own. Not only in the strength and agility of its units, but also in that at least one semi-portable projector commanded every corridor of the freighter. In the blasts of those projectors most of the pirates died instantly, not knowing what struck them.

      They were the fortunate ones. The others knew what was coming and saw it as it came, for the Valerians did not even draw their DeLameters. They knew that the pirates’ armor could withstand for minutes any hand-weapon’s beams, and they disdained to remount the heavy semi-portables. They came in with their space-axes, and at the sight the pirates broke and ran screaming in panic fear. But they could not escape. The toggles of the exit port were socketed and locked.

      Therefore the storming party died to the last man; and, as vanBuskirk had foretold, it was scarcely even a struggle. For ordinary armor is so much tin-plate against a Valerian swinging a space-axe.

      The spy-ray of the pirate captain got through just in time to see the ghastly finale of the massacre, and his face turned first purple, then white.

      “The Patrol!” he gasped. “Valerians—a whole company of them! I’ll say we’ve been double-crossed!”

      “Righto—we’ve been jolly well had,” the pilot agreed. “You don’t know the half of it, either. Somebody’s coming, and it isn’t a boy scout. If a mauler should suck us in, we’d be very much a spent force, what?”

      “Cut the gabble!” snapped the captain. “Is it a mauler, or not?”

      “A bit too far away yet to say, but it probably is. They wouldn’t have sent those jaspers out without cover, old bean—they know we can burn that freighter’s screens down in an hour. Better get ready to run, what?”

      The commander did so, wild thoughts racing through his mind. If a mauler got close enough to him to use magnets, he was done. His heaviest beams wouldn’t even warm up a mauler’s screens; his defenses wouldn’t stand up for a second against a mauler’s blasts . and he’d be ordered back to base .

      “Tally ho, old fruit!” The pilot slammed on maximum blast. “It’s a mauler and we’ve been bloody well jobbed. Back to base?”

      “Yes,” and the discomfited captain energized his communicator, to report to his immediate superior the humiliating outcome of the supposedly carefully-planned coup.

      CHAPTER 16

      Kinnison Meets the Wheelmen

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      As the pirate fled into space Kinnison followed, matching his quarry in course and speed. He then cut in the automatic controller on his drive, the automatic recorder on his plate, and began to tune in his beam-tracer; only to be brought up short by the realization that the spy-ray’s point would not stay in the pirate’s control room without constant attention and manual adjustment. He had known that, too. Even the most precise of automatic controllers, driven by the most carefully stabilized electronic currents, are prone to slip a little at even such close range as ten million miles, especially in the bumpy ether near solar systems, and there was nothing to correct the slip. He had not thought of that before; the pilot always made those minor corrections as a matter of course.

      But now he was torn between two desires. He wanted to listen to the conversation that would ensue as soon as the pirate captain got into communication with his superior officers; and, especially should Helmuth put in his beam, he very much wanted to trace it and thus secure another line on the headquarters he was so anxious to locate. He now feared that he could not do both—a fear that soon was to prove well grounded—and wished fervently that for a few minutes he could be two men. Or at least a Velantian; they had eyes and hands and separate brain-compartments enough so that they could do half-a-dozen things at once and do each one well. He could not; but he could try. Maybe he should have brought one of the boys along, at that. No, that would wreck everything, later on; he would have to do the best he could.

      Communication was established and the pirate captain began to make his report; and by using one hand on the ray and the other on the tracer, he managed to get a partial line and to record scraps of the conversation. He missed, however, the essential part of the entire episode, that part in which the base commander turned the unsuccessful captain over to Helmuth himself. Therefore Kinnison was surprised indeed at the disappearance of the beam he was so laboriously trying to trace, and to hear Helmuth conclude his castigation of the unlucky captain with:

      “. not entirely your fault, I will not punish you at all severely this time. Report to our base on Aldebaran I, turn your vessel over to commander there, and do anything he tells you to for thirty of the days of that planet.”

      Frantically Kinnison drew back his tracer and searched for Helmuth’s beam; but before he could synchronize with it the message of the pirates’ high chief was finished and his beam was gone. The Lensman sat back in thought.

      Aldebaran! Practically next door to his own Solarian System, from which he had come so far. How had they possibly managed to keep concealed, or to re-establish, a base so close to Sol, through all the intensive searching that had been done? But they had—that was the important thing. Anyway, he knew where he was going, and that helped. One other thing he hadn’t thought of, and one that might have spoiled everything, was the fact that he couldn’t stay awake indefinitely to follow that ship! He had to sleep sometime, and while he was asleep his quarry was bound to escape. He of course had a CRX tracer, which would hold a ship without attention as long as it was anywhere within even extreme range; and it would have been a simple enough matter to have had a photo-cell relay put in between the plate of the CRX and the automatic controls of the spacer and driver—but he had not asked for it. Well, luckily, he now knew where he was going, and the trip to Aldebaran would be long enough for him to build a dozen such controls. He had all the necessary parts and plenty of tools.

      Therefore, following the pirate ship easily as it tore through space, Kinnison built his automatic “chaser,” as he called it. During each of the first four or five “nights” he lost the vessel he was pursuing, but found it without any great difficulty upon awakening. Thereafter he held it continuously; improving day by day the performance of his apparatus until it could do almost anything except talk. After that he devoted his time to an intensive study of the general problem before him. His results were highly unsatisfactory; for in order to solve any problem one must have enough data to set it up, either in actual equations or in logical sequences, and Kinnison did not have enough data. He had altogether too many unknowns and not enough knowns.

      The first specific problem was that of getting into the pirate base. Since the searchers of the Patrol had not found it, that base must be very well hidden indeed. And hiding anything as large as a base on Aldebaran I, as he remembered it, would be quite a feat in itself. He had been in that system only once, but .

      Alone