Part 6 (1/2)
A smile twisted Gauntluth's face. ”Fool!” he gritted harshly under his breath.
He continued to watch as Twodyce came to the outer door and activated the announcer. He activated the door-opener. ”Come in, Mr. Twodyce,” he spoke into a microphone. ”Down the hall and first door to your left.”
Gimble Ginnison, fully alert, strode down the corridor and opened the door. Alone behind his desk sat the unsuspecting Kalonian.
”I perceive,” said the zwilnik, [A zwilnik is anyone connected with the drug trade.] ”that you have brought the thionite with you.”
”I have,” said the Lensman. ”Have you the payment ready?”
”Certainly. Half in bar platinum, half in Patrol credits, as specified. But first, of course, I must test the thionite.”
”First I test the platinum,” said Twodyce impa.s.sively.
Gauntluth blinked. ”We seem to be at an impa.s.se,” he murmured. ”However, I think I see a way around it. Know, Twodyce, that you stand now in the focus of a complex of robotic devices which, with rays and beams of tremendous power, will reduce you to a crisp unless you hand over that thionite container instantly .”
'”Since it is inevitable,” Ginnison said calmly, '”I might as well enjoy it.” He carefully put the thionite container on Gauntluth's desk.
Gauntluth needed no further check. Directing his thought toward a lump of force in a nearby corner of the room, he sent a message to Jugavine.
This was the moment for which Ginnison had been waiting. In an instant, he effortlessly took over the zwilnik's [A zwilnik is still a zwilnik.] mind. He allowed Gauntluth to send the message, since it would only further confuse all those concerned. Gauntluth reported in full to Meichfrite that he had, indeed, obtained a goodly supply of thionite.
”Excellent,” the cold thought returned. ”There will be more coming. End communication.”
By main force and awkwardness, Ginnison held Gauntluth's mind in thrall. He now had his second line to the Boskonian base, but Gauntluth, although taken by surprise at first, was now fighting Ginnison's mental control with every mega-erg of his hard Kalonian mind.
”Think you can succeed, even now?” sneered the still-rigid Kalonian mentally. And, with a tremendous effort of will, he moved a pinkie a fraction of a millimeter to cover a photocell. Every alarm in the building went off.
Ginnison's mind clamped down instantly to paralyze the hapless zwilnik. [See above.] With a mirthless smile on his face, Ginnison said: ”I permitted that as a gesture of futility. You did not, as I suggested, contemplate a hamburger.”
”Bah!” came Gauntluth's thought. ”That childishness?”
”Not childishness,” said the Lensman coldly. ”A hamburger is so constructed that most of the meat is hidden by the bun. My resources are far greater than those which appear around the edge.”
Then Ginnison invaded Gauntluth's mind and took every iota of relevant information therein, following which, he hurled a bolt of mental energy calculated to slay any living thing. Perforce, Gauntluth ceased to be a living thing.
Meanwhile, from a hidden and s.h.i.+elded barracks in a subbas.e.m.e.nt of the Queen Ardis came a full squadron of armed and armored s.p.a.ce-thugs, swarming up stairways and elevators to reach the late Gauntluth's suite. Closer, and, at this point in s.p.a.ce and time, far more dangerous, were the DeLameter-armed, thought-screened executives and plug-uglies who were even now battering down the doors of the suite.
Calmly and with deliberation, Ginnison flashed a thought to Woozle: ”HE-E-E-ELP!”
”At speed, Ginnison,” came the reply.
Ginnison went into action. s.n.a.t.c.hing the hermetically sealed thionite container from the desk at which lay the cooling corpse of Gauntluth, he broke the seal and emptied the contents into the intake vent of the air conditioner. He had, of course, taken the precaution of putting anti-thionite plugs in his nostrils; all he had to do was to keep his mouth shut and he would be perfectly safe.
The impalpable purple powder permeated the atmosphere of the hotel. There was enough of the active principle of that deadly drug to turn on fifty million people; since the slightest overdose could kill, every person in the hotel not wearing anti-thionite plugs or s.p.a.ce armor died in blissful ecstasy. Most of Gauntluth's thugs were wearing one or the other, but at least the Galactic Patrol need no longer worry about interference from innocent bystanders.
With lightning speed, Ginnison grabbed a heavy-caliber, water-cooled machine rifle that just happened to be standing near Gauntluth's desk, swiveled it to face the doors of the office, and waited.
At the same moment, a borazon-hard, bronze-berylliumsteel-prowed landing craft smashed into the side of the Hotel Queen Ardis at the fifteenth floor. Steel girders, ferroconcrete walls, and brick facing alike splattered aside as that hard-driven, specially-designed s.p.a.ce boat, hitting its reverse jets at the last second to bring it to a dead halt, crashed into and through the bridal suite. The port slammed open and from it leaped, strode, jumped and strutted a company of Dutch Valerians in full s.p.a.ce armor, swinging their mighty thirty-pound s.p.a.ce axes.
No bifurcate race, wherever situate, will voluntarily face a Valerian in battle. Those mighty warriors, bred in a gravitational field three times that of Tellus, have no ruth for any of Civilization's foes. The smallest Valerian can, in full armor, do a standing high jump of nearly fifteen feet in a field of one Tellurian gravity; he can feint, parry, lunge, swing, and duck with a speed utterly impossible for any of the lesser breeds of man. Like all jocks, they are not too bright. Led by Lieutenant Hess von Baschenvolks, they charged in to block off the armed and armored s.p.a.ce-thugs who were heading toward the top floor. As they charged in, the Lieutenant shouted their battle-cry .
”Kill! Bas.h.!.+ Smas.h.!.+ Cut! Hack! Destroy! Bleed, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! Bleed and die!” And, of course, they did.
A thirty-pound s.p.a.ce axe driven by the muscles of a Valerian can cut its way through any armor.
Heads fell; arms were lopped off; gallons of gore flowed over the expensive carpetry. Leaving behind them dozens of corpses, the Valerians charged upward, toward the suite of offices where the Gray Lensman awaited the a.s.sault of Gauntluth's men, fingers poised, ready to press the hair triggers of the heavy machine rifle.
The news of the attack, however, reached those winsome wights long before the Valerians did.
They knew that, unarmored as they were, they stood no chance against those Patrolmen. They headed for the roof, where powerful 'copters awaited them for their getaway.
It was not until they were all on the roof that the logons, released from the special 'copter less than a kilometer away, and individually controlled by the mighty mind of Gimble Ginnison, launched their attack. The zwilnik [Forget it.] executives and plug-uglies had no chance. Only a few managed to draw and fire their ray guns, and even those few missed their targets. Within a s.p.a.ce of seconds, the entire group had been slashed, cut, scratched, bitten, killed, and half-eaten by the winged horrors that had been released upon them.
In Gauntluth's office, Ginnison waited behind the machine rifle, his fingers still poised on the hair-triggers. The door smashed and fell. But Ginnison recognized the bulky s.p.a.ce-armored eight-foot figure that loomed before him. His hands came away from the triggers as he said: ”Hi, Hess!”
”Duuuhh...Hi, Boss,” said Lieutenant Hess von Baschenvolks.
In a totally black, intrinsically undetectable, ultrapowered speedster, towing three negaspheres of planetary antima.s.s, Gimble Ginnison cautiously approached the hollow sphere of light-obliterating dust which surrounded the dread planet Jugavine of the Meich.
With his second line of communication, it had been a simple job to locate exactly and precisely the planet which had been the source of the disruption which had hit the planet Cadilax.
Further, that mental communication had given Ginnison all the information he needed to wipe out this pernicious pesthole of pediculous parasites on the body politic of Civilization.
The negaspheres were an integral part of the plan.
The negasphere was, and is, a complete negation of matter. To it, a push is, or becomes, a pull, and vice versa. N o radiation of whatever kind can escape from or be reflected by its utterly black surface. It is dense beyond imagining; even a negasphere of planetary antima.s.s is less than a kilometer in diameter.
When a negasphere strikes ordinary matter, the two cancel out, bringing into being vast quant.i.ties of ultrahard and very deadly radiation. A negasphere is, by its very nature, inherently indetectable by any form of radar or spy-ray beam. Even extra-sensory perception reels dizzyingly away from that vast infinitude of absolute negation..
Like the Bergenholm, the negasphere can never really make up its mind about gravity; gravity is, was, and always has been a pull, and it should act as a push against a negasphere; since it does not do so, we must conclude that there is something peculiar about the mathematics of the negasphere.
It is to Ginnison's credit that he had perceived this subtle, but inalterable, anomaly.
Into the hollow cloud of black interstellar dust that surrounded frigid Jugavine, there was but one entrance, and into that entrance the Gray Lensman's speedster, towing with tractors and pressors those three deadly negaspheres, wended its intricate way.
In his office, the Starboard Admiral glowered. ”I don't like it. Ginnison should have taken the full fleet with him.”
The personage he was addressing was Sir Houston Carbarn, the most brilliant mathematical physicist in the known universe. He was one of a handful of living ent.i.ties who could actually think in theabstruse and abstract language of pure mathematics.