Children of the Lens (7 page)

There was the affair of the Prime Minister of DeSilva III, who at a cabinet meeting shot and killed his sovereign and eleven chiefs of state before committing suicide. The president of Viridon; who, at his press conference, ran amuck with a scimitar snatched from a wall, hewed unsuspecting reporters to gory bits until overpowered, and then swallowed poison.

A variant of the theme, but still plainly Kandron's doing, was the interesting episode in which a Tellurian tycoon named Edmundson, while upon an ocean voyage, threw fifteen women passengers overboard, then leaped after them dressed only in a life-jacket stuffed with lead. Another out of the same whimsical mold was that of Dillway, the highly respected operations chief of Central Spaceways. That potentate called his secretaries one by one into his 60th floor office and unconcernedly tossed them, one by one, out of the window. He danced a jig on the coping before diving after them to the street.

A particularly juicy and entertaining bit, Nadreck thought, was the case of Narkor Base Hospital, in which four of the planet's most eminent surgeons decapitated every other person in the place—patients, nurses, orderlies, and all, with a fine disregard of age, sex, or condition—arranged the severed heads, each upright and each facing due north, upon the tiled floor to spell the word "Revenge", and then hacked each other to death with scalpels.

These, and a thousand or more other events of similar technique, Nadreck tabulated and subjected to statistical analysis. Scattered so widely throughout such a vast volume of space, they had created little or no general disturbance; indeed, they had scarcely been noticed by Civilization as a whole. Collected, they made a truly staggering, a revolting and appalling total. Nadreck, however, was inherently incapable of being staggered, revolted, or appalled. That repulsive summation, a thing which in its massed horror would have shaken to the core any being possessing any shred of sympathy or tenderness, was to Nadreck an interesting and not too difficult problem in psychology and mathematics.

He placed each episode in space and in time, correlating each with all of its fellows in a space-time matrix. He determined the locus of centers and derived the equations of its most probable motion. He extended it by extrapolation in accordance with that equation. Then, assuring himself that his margin of error was as small as he could make it, he set out for a planet which Kandron would most probably visit at a time far enough in the future to enable him to prepare to receive the Onlonian.

That planet, being inhabited by near-human beings, was warm, brightly sun-lit, and had an atmosphere rich in oxygen. Nadreck detested it, since his ideal of a planet was precisely the opposite. Fortunately, however, he would not have to land upon it until after Kandron's arrival—possibly not then—and the fact that his proposed quarry was, like himself, a frigid-blooded poison-breather, made the task of detection a simple one.

Nadreck set his indetectable speedster into a circular orbit around the planet, far enough out to be comfortable, and sent out course after course of delicate, extremely sensitive screen. Precision of pattern-analysis was of course needless. The probability was that all legitimate movement of personnel to and from the planet would be composed of warm-blooded oxygen-breathers; that any visitor not so classified would be Kandron. Any frigid-blooded visitor had at least to be investigated, hence his analytical screens had to be capable only of differentiation between two types of beings as far apart as the galactic poles in practically every respect. Nadreck knew that no supervision would be necessary to perform such an open-and-shut separation as that; he would have nothing more to do until his electronic announcers should warn him of Kandron's approach—or until the passage of time should inform him that the Onlonian was not coming to this particular planet.

Being a mathematician, Nadreck knew that any datum secured by extrapolation is of doubtful value. He thus knew that the actual probability of Kandron's coming was less, by some indeterminable amount, than the mathematical one.

Nevertheless, having done all that he could do, he waited with the monstrous, unhuman patience known only to such races as his.

Day by day, week by week, the speedster circled the planet and its big, hot sun; and as it circled, the lone voyager studied. He analyzed more data more precisely; he drew deeper and deeper upon his store of knowledge to determine what steps next to take in the event that this attempt should end, as so many previous ones had ended, in failure.

Chapter Five

The Abduction Of A President

Kinnison the author toiled manfully at his epic of space whenever he was under any sort of observation, and enough at other times to avert any suspicion. Indeed, he worked as much as Sybly Whyte, an advertisedly temperamental writer, had ever worked. Besides interviewing the high and the low, and taking notes everywhere, he attended authors' teas, at which he cursed his characters fluently and bitterly for their failure to co-operate with him. With short-haired women and long-haired men he bemoaned the perversity of a public which compelled them to prostitute the real genius of which each was the unique possessor. He sympathized particularly with a fat woman writer of whodunits, whose extremely unrealistic yet amazingly popular Gray Lensman hero had lived through ten full-length novels and twenty million copies.

Even though her real field was the drama, she wasn't writing the kind of detective tripe that most of these crank-turners ground out, she confided to Kinnison. She had known lots of Gray Lensmen very intimately, and her stories were drawn from real life in every particular!

Thus Kinnison remained in character; and thus he was enabled to work completely unnoticed at his real job of finding out what was going on, how the Boskonians were operating to ruin Radelix as they had ruined Antigan IV.

His first care was to investigate the planet's president. That took doing, but he did it. He examined that mind line by line and channel by channel, with no results whatever. No scars, no sign of tampering. Calling in assistance, he searched the president's past. Still no soap. Everything checked. Boring from within, then, was out. His first hypothesis was wrong; this invasion and this sabotage were being done from without. How?

Those first leaflets were followed by others, each batch more vitriolic in tone than the preceding one. Apparently they came from empty stratosphere; at least, no ships were to be detected in the neighborhood after any shower of the handbills had appeared. But that was not surprising. With its inertialess drive any space-ship could have been parsecs away before the papers touched atmosphere. Or they could have been bombed in from almost any distance. Or, as Kinnison thought most reasonable, they could have been simply dumped out of the mouth of a hyper-spatial tube. In any event the method was immaterial. The results only were important; and those results, the Lensman discovered, were entirely disproportionate to the ostensible causes. The subversive literature had some effect, of course, but essentially it must be a blind. No possible tonnage of anonymous printing could cause that much sheer demoralization.

Crack-pot societies of all kinds sprang up everywhere, advocating everything from absolutism to anarchy. Queer cults arose, preaching free love, the imminent end of the world, and many other departures from the norm of thought. The Author's League, of course, was affected more than any other organization of its size, because of its relatively large content of strong and intensely opinionated minds. Instead of becoming one radical group it split into a dozen.

Kinnison joined one of those "Down with Everything!" groups, not as a leader, but as a follower. Not too sheep-like a follower, but just inconspicuous enough to retain his invisibly average status; and from his place of concealment in the middle of the front row he studied the minds of each of his fellow anarchists. He watched those minds change, he found out who was doing the changing. When Kinnison's turn came he was all set for trouble. He expected to battle a powerful mentality. He would not have been overly surprised to encounter another mad Arisian, hiding behind a zone of hypnotic compulsion. He expected anything, in fact, except what he found—which was a very ordinary Radeligian therapist. The guy was a clever enough operator, of course, but he could not work against even the feeblest opposition. Hence the Gray Lensman had no trouble at all, either in learning everything the fellow knew, or, upon leaving him, in implanting within his mind the knowledge that Sybly Whyte was now exactly the type of worker desired.

The trouble was that the therapist didn't know a thing. This not entirely unexpected development posed Kinnison three questions. Did the high-ups ever communicate with such small fry, or did they just give them one set of orders and cut them loose? Should he stay in this Radeligian's mind until he found out? If he was in control of the therapist when a big shot took over, did he have jets enough to keep from being found out? Risky business; better scout around first, anyway. He'd do a flit.

He drove his black speedster a million miles. He covered Radelix like a blanket, around the equator and from pole to pole. Everywhere he found the same state of things. The planet was literally riddled with the agitators; he found so many that he was forced to a black conclusion. There could be no connection or communication between such numbers of saboteurs and any real authority. They must have been given one set of do-or-die instructions—whether they did or died was immaterial. Experimentally, Kinnison had a few of the leaders taken into custody. Nothing happened.

Martial law was finally declared, but this measure succeeded only in driving the movement underground. What the subversive societies lost in numbers they more than made up in desperation and violence. Crime raged unchecked and uncheckable, murder became an every-day commonplace, insanity waxed rife. And Kinnison, knowing now that no channel to important prey would be opened until the climax, watched grimly while the rape of the planet went on.

President Thompson and Lensman Gerrond sent message after message to Prime Base and to Klovia, imploring help. The replies to these pleas were all alike. The matter had been referred to the galactic council and to the coordinator. Everything that could be done was being done. Neither office could say anything else, except that, with the galaxy in such a disturbed condition, each planet must do its best to solve its own problems.

The thing built up toward its atrocious finale. Gerrond invited the president to a conference in a down-town hotel room, and there, eyes glancing from moment to moment at the dials of a complete little test-kit held open upon his lap:

"I have just had some startling news, Mr. Thompson," Gerrond said, abruptly. "Kinnison has been here on Radelix for weeks."

"What? Kinnison? Where is he? Why didn't he…?"

"Yes, Kinnison. Kinnison of Klovia. The coordinator himself. I don't know where he is, or was. I didn't ask him." The Lensman smiled fleetingly. "One doesn't, you know. He discussed the situation with me at length. I'm still amazed…"

"Why doesn't he stop it, then?" the president demanded. "Or can't he stop it?"

"That's what I've got to explain to you. He won't be able to do a thing, he says, until the last minute…"

"Why not? I tell you, if this thing can be stopped it's got to be stopped, and no matter what has to be done—"

"Just a minute!" Gerrond snapped. "I know you're out of control—I don't like to see Radelix torn apart any better than you do—but you ought to know by this time that Galactic Coordinator Kimball Kinnison is in a better position to know what to do than any other man in the universe. Furthermore, his word is the last word. What he says, goes."

"Of course," Thompson apologized. "I am overwrought… but to see our entire world pulled down around us, our institutions, the work of centuries, destroyed, millions of lives lost… all needlessly…"

"It won't come to that, he says, if we all do our parts. And you, sir, are very much in the picture."

"I? How?"

"Are you familiar with what happened to Antigan IV?"

"Why, no. They had some trouble over there, I recall, but…"

"That's it. That's why this must go on. No planet cares particularly about what happens to any other planet, but Kinnison cares about them all as a whole. If this trouble is headed off now it will simply spread to other planets; if it is allowed to come to a climax there's a chance to put an end to the whole trouble, for good."

"But what has that to do with me? What can I, personally, do?"

"Much. That last act at Antigan IV, the thing that made it a planet of maniacs, was the kidnapping of Planetary President Renwood. Murdered, supposedly, since no trace of him has been found."

"Oh." The older man's hands clenched, then loosened. "I am willing… provided… is Kinnison fairly certain that my death will enable him…"

"It won't get that far, sir. He intends to stop it just before that. He and his associates—I don't know who they are—have been listing every enemy agent they can find, and they will all be taken care of at once. He believes that Boskone will publish in advance a definite time at which they will take you away from us. That was the way it went at Antigan."

"Even from the Patrol?"

"From the main base itself. Coordinator Kinnison is pretty sure they can do it, except for something he can bring into play only at the last moment. Incidentally, that's why we're having this meeting here, with this detector he gave me. He's afraid this base is porous."

"In that case… what can he…" The president fell silent.

"All I know is that we're to dress you in a certain suit of armor and have you in my private office a few minutes before the time they set. We and the guards leave the office at minus two minutes and walk down the corridor, just fast enough to be exactly in front of Room Twenty-four at minus one. We're to rehearse it until our timing is perfect. I don't know what will happen then, but something will."

Time passed; the Boskonian infiltration progressed according to plan. It appeared that Radelix was going in the same fashion in which Antigan IV had gone. Below the surface, however, there was one great difference. Every ship reaching Radelix brought at least one man who did not leave. Some of these visitors were tall and lithe, some were short and fat. Some were old, some were young. Some were pale, some were burned to the color of ancient leather by the fervent rays of space. They were alike only in the "look of eagles" in their steady, quiet eyes. Each landed and went about his ostensible business, interesting himself not at all in any of the others.