Chapter XXIII

Kinnison played, worked, rested, ate, and slept. He boxed, strenuously and viciously, with masters of the craft. He practiced with his DeLameters until he had regained his old-time speed and dead-center accuracy. He swam for hours at a time, he ran in cross-country races. He lolled, practically naked, in hot sunshine. And finally, when his muscles were writhing and rippling as of yore beneath the bronzed satin of his skin, Lacy answered his insistent demands by coming to see him.

The Gray Lensman met the flier eagerly, but his face fell when he saw that the surgeon general was alone.

"No, MacDougall didn't come--she isn't around any more," he explained guilefully.

"Huh?" came the startled query. "How come?"

"Out in space--out Borova way somewhere. What do you care? After the way you acted you've got the crust of a rhinoceros to think that--"

"You're crazy, Lacy! Why, we ... she--It's all fixed up."

"Funny kind of fixing. Moping around Base, crying her red head off. Finally, though, she decided that she had some Scotch pride left, and I let her go aboard again. If she isn't all done with you, she ought to be." This, Lacy figured, would be good for what ailed the big saphead. "Come on, and I'll see whether you're fit to go back to work or not."

He was fit. "QX, lad, flit!" Lacy discharged him informally with a slap upon the back. "Get dressed and I'll take you back to Haynes--he's been snapping at me like a turtle ever since you've been out here."

At Prime Base, Kinnison was welcomed enthusiastically by the admiral.

"Feel those fingers, Kim!" he exclaimed. "Perfect! Just like the originals!"

"Mine, too. They do feel good."

"It's a pity that you got your new ones so quick. You'd appreciate 'em much more after a few years without 'em. But to get down to business. The fleets have been taking off for a couple of weeks--we're to join up as the line passes. If you haven't anything better to do, I'd like to have you aboard the _Z9M9Z_."

"I don't know of any place I'd rather be, sir--thanks."

"QX. Thanks should be the other way. You can make yourself mighty useful between now and zero time." He eyed the young man speculatively.

Haynes had a special job for him, Kinnison knew. As a Gray Lensman, he could not be given any military rank or post, and he could not conceive of the admiral of Grand Fleet wanting him around as an aid-de-camp.

"Spill it, chief," he invited. "Not orders, of course--I understand that perfectly. Requests or ... ah-hum ... suggestions."

"I _will_ crown you with something yet, you whelp!" Haynes snorted, and Kinnison grinned. These two were very close, in spite of their disparity in years; and very much of a piece. "As you get older you will realize that it is good tactics to stick pretty close to Gen Regs. Yes, I _have_ got a job for you, and it's a nasty one. Nobody else has been able to handle it, not even two companies of Rigellians. Grand Fleet Operations."

"_Grand Fleet Operations!_" Kinnison was aghast. "Holy ... Klono's ... brazen ... bowels! What makes you think I've got jets enough to swing _that_ load, chief?"

"I haven't any idea whether you can or not. I know, however, that if you can't, nobody can; and in spite of all the work we've done on the thing we'll have to operate as a mob, as we did before, and not as a fleet. If so, I shudder to think of the results."

"QX. If you'll send for Worsel, we'll try it a fling or two. It'd be a shame to build a whole ship around an Operations tank and then not be able to use it; I'll see what I can do. By the way, I haven't seen my head nurse--Miss MacDougall, you know--any place lately. Have you? I ought to tell her 'thanks' or something--maybe send her a flower."

"Nurse? MacDougall? Oh, yes, the redhead. Let me see--did hear something about her the other day. Married? No, that wasn't it.... She took a hospital ship somewhere. Alsakan--Vandemar--somewhere; didn't pay any attention. She doesn't need thanks--or flowers, either--she's getting paid for her work. Much more important, don't you think, to get Operations straightened out?"

"Undoubtedly, sir," Kinnison replied stiffly, and as he went out Lacy came in.

The two old conspirators greeted each other with knowing grins. _Was_ Kinnison taking it big! He was falling, like ten thousand bricks down a well.

"Do him good to undermine his position a bit. Too cocky altogether. But _how_ they suffer!"

"Check!"

* * * * *

Kinnison rode toward the flagship in a mood which even he could not have described. He had expected to see her, as a matter of course--he wanted to see her--confound it, he _had_ to see her! Why did she have to do a flit now, of all the times on the calendar? She knew that the fleet was shoving off, and that he'd have to go along--and nobody knew where she was. When he got back he'd find her if he had to chase her all over the Galaxy. He'd put an end to this. Duty was duty, of course--but Chris was CHRIS--and half a loaf _was_ better than no bread!

He jerked back to reality as he entered the gigantic teardrop which was technically the _Z9M9Z_, socially the _Directrix_, and ordinarily _GFHQ_. She had been designed and built specifically to be Grand Fleet Headquarters, and nothing else. She bore no offensive armament; but since she had to protect the presiding geniuses of combat, she had every possible defense.

Port Admiral Haynes had learned a bitter lesson during the expedition to Helmuth's base. Long before that relatively small Grand Fleet got there he was sick to the core, realizing that fifty thousand vessels simply could not be controlled or maneuvered as a group. If that base had been capable of an offensive, or even of a real defensive, or if Boskone could have put their fleets into that star cluster in time, the Patrol would have been defeated ignominiously; and Haynes, wise old tactician that he was, knew it only too well.

Therefore, immediately after the return from that "triumphant" venture, he gave orders to design and to build, at whatever cost, a flagship capable of directing efficiently a million combat units.

The "tank"--the three-dimensional galactic chart which is a necessary part of every pilot room--had grown and grown as it became evident that it must be the prime agency in Grand Fleet Operations. Finally, in this last rebuilding, the tank was seven hundred feet in diameter and eighty feet thick in the middle--over seventeen million cubic feet of space in which more than two million tiny lights crawled hither and thither in hopeless confusion. For, after the technicians and designers had put that tank into actual service, they had discovered that it was useless. No available mind had been able either to perceive any situation as a whole, or to identify with certainty any light or group of lights needing correction. And as for linking up any particular light with its individual, blanket-proof communicator in time to issue orders in space combat--

Kinnison looked at the tank, then around the full circle of the million-plug board encircling it. He observed the horde of operators, each one trying frantically to do something. Next he shut his eyes, the better to perceive everything at once, and studied the problem for an hour.

"Attention, everybody!" he thought then. "Open all circuits--do nothing at all for a while." He then called Haynes.

"I think that we can clean up this mess if you'll send over some Simplex analyzers and the crew of technicians. Helmuth had a sweet set-up on multiplex controls, and Jalte had some ideas that we can adapt to fit this tank. If we add them all together, we may have something."

* * * * *

And by the time Worsel arrived, they did.

"Red lights are fleets already in motion," Kinnison explained rapidly to the Velantian. "Greens are fleets still at their bases. Ambers are the planets the greens took off from--connected, you see, by Ryerson string-lights. The white star is us, the _Directrix_. That violet cross 'way over there is Jalte's planet, our first objective. The pink comets are our free planets, their tails showing their intrinsic velocities. Being so slow, they had to start long ago. The purple circle is the negasphere. It's on its way, too. You take that side, I'll take this. They were supposed to start from the edge of the twelfth sector. The idea was to make it a smooth, bowl-shaped sweep across the Galaxy, converging upon the objective, but each of the fleet commanders apparently wants to run this war to suit himself. Look at that guy there--he's beating the gun by nine thousand parsecs. Watch me pin his ears back!"

He pointed his Simplex at the red light which had so offendingly sprung into being. There was a whirring click and the number 449276 flashed above a board. An operator flicked a switch.

"Grand Fleet Operations!" Kinnison snapped. "Why are you taking off without orders?"

"Why, I ... I'll give you the vice-admiral, sir--"

"No time! Tell your vice-admiral that one more such break will put him in irons. Land at once! GFO--off!"

"With around a million fleets to handle, we can't spend much time on anyone," he thought at Worsel, "but after we get them lined up and get our Rigellians broken in, it won't be so bad."

The breaking in did not take long; definite and meaningful orders flew faster and faster along the tiny, but steel-hard beams of the communicators.

"Take off.... Increase drive four point five.... Decrease drive two point seven.... Change course to--" and so it went, hour after hour and day after day.

And with the passage of time came order out of chaos. The red lights formed a gigantically sweeping, curving wall, its almost imperceptible crawl representing an actual velocity of almost one hundred parsecs an hour. Behind that wall blazed a sea of amber, threaded throughout with the brilliant filaments which were the Ryerson lights. Ahead of it lay a sparkling, almost solid blaze of green. Closer and closer the wall crept toward the bright white star.

And in the "reducer"--the standard, ten-foot tank in the lower well--the entire spectacle was reproduced in miniature. It was plainer there, clearer and much more readily seen; but it was so crowded that details were indistinguishable.

Haynes stood beside Kinnison's padded chair one day, staring up into the immense lens and shaking his head. He went down the flight of stairs to the reducer, studied that, and again shook his head.

"This is very pretty, but it doesn't mean a thing," he thought at Kinnison. "It begins to look as though I'm going along just for the ride. You--or you and Worsel--will have to do the fighting, too, I'm afraid."

"Uh-huh," Kinnison demurred. "What do we--or anyone else--know about tactics, compared to you? You've got to be the brains. That's why we had the boys rig up the original working model there, for a reducer. On that you can watch and figure out the gross developments and tell us in general terms what to do. Knowing that, we will know who ought to do what, from the big tank here, and we will pass your orders along."

"Say, that _will_ work, at that!" and Haynes brightened visibly. "Looks as though a couple of those reds are going to knock our star out of the tank, doesn't it?"

"It'll be close in that reducer. They'll probably touch. Close enough in real space--less than three parsecs."

The zero hour came and the Tellurian armada of eighty-one sleek destroyers--eighty superdreadnoughts and the _Directrix_--spurned Earth and took its place in that hurtling wall of crimson. Solar system after solar system was passed; fleet after fleet leaped into the ether and fitted itself into the smoothly geometrical pattern which GFO was nursing along so carefully.

Through the Galaxy the formation swept, and out of it, toward a star cluster. It slowed its mad pace; the center hanging back, the edges advancing and folding in.

"Surround the cluster and close in," the admiral directed; and, under the guidance now of two hundred Rigellians, civilization's vast Grand Fleet closed smoothly in and went inert. Drivers flared white as they fought to match the intrinsic velocity of the cluster.

"Vice admirals of all fleets, attention! Using secondaries only, fire at will upon any enemy object coming within range. Engage outlying structures and such battle craft as may appear. Keep assigned distance from planet and stiffen cosmic screens to maximum. Haynes--off!"

From untold millions of projectors there raved out gigantic rods, knives, and needles of force, under the impact of which the defensive screens of Jalte's guardian citadels flamed into terrible refulgence. Duodec bombs were hurled--tight-beam-directed monsters of destruction which, swinging around in huge circles to attain the highest possible measure of momentum, flung themselves against Boskone's defenses in Herculean attempts to smash them down. They exploded; each as it burst filling all nearby space with blindingly intense violet light and with flying scraps of metal. Q-type helices, driven with all the frightful kilowattage possible to Medonian conductors and insulation, screwed in, biting, gouging, tearing in wild abandon. Shear-planes, hellish knives of force beside which Tellurian lightning is pale and wan, struck and struck and struck again--fiendishly, crunchingly.

But those grimly stolid fortresses could take it. They had been repowered; their defenses stiffened to such might as to defy, in the opinion of Boskone's experts, any projectors capable of being mounted upon mobile bases. And not only could they take it--those formidably armed and armored planetoids could dish it out as well. The screens of the Patrol ships flared high into the spectrum under the crushing force of sheer enemy power. Not a few of those defenses were battered down, clear to the wall shields, before the unimaginable ferocity of the Boskonian projectors could be neutralized.

* * * * *

And at this spectacularly frightful deep-space engagement Jalte, Boskone's galactic director, and through him Eichmil, First of Boskone itself, stared in stunned surprise.

"It is insane!" Jalte gloated. "The fools judged our strength by that of Helmuth; not considering that we, as well as they, would be both learning and doing during the intervening time. They have a myriad of ships, but mere numbers will never conquer my outposts, to say nothing of my works here."

"They are not fools. I am not sure--" Eichmil cogitated.

He would have been even less sure could he have listened to a conversation which was even then being held.

"QX, Thorndyke?" Kinnison asked.

"On the green," came instant reply. "Intrinsic, placement, releases--everything on the green!"

"Cut!" and the lone purple circle disappeared from tank and from reducer. The master technician had cut his controls and every pound of metal and other substance surrounding the negasphere had been absorbed by that enigmatic volume of nothingness. No connection or contact with it was now possible; and with its carefully established intrinsic velocity it rushed engulfingly toward the doomed planet. One of the mastodonic fortresses which lay in its path vanished utterly, with nothing save a burst of invisible cosmics to mark its passing. It approached its goal. It was almost upon the planet before any of the defenders perceived it; and even then they could neither understand nor grasp it. All detectors and other warning devices remained static, but:

"Look! There! Something's _coming_!" an observer jittered, and Jalte swung his plate.

Jalte saw--nothing. Eichmil saw the same thing. There was nothing to see. A vast, intangible nothing--yet a nothing tangible enough to occult everything material in a full third of the cone of vision! Jalte's operators hurled into it their mightiest beams. Nothing happened. They struck nothing and disappeared. They loosed their heaviest duodec torpedoes; gigantic missiles whose warheads contained enough of that frightfully violent detonate to disrupt a world. Nothing happened--not even an explosion. Not even the faintest flash of light. Shell and contents alike merely and, oh, so incredibly peaceful, ceased to exist. There were important bursts of cosmics, but they were invisible and inaudible; and neither Jalte nor any member of his crew were to live long enough to realize how terribly they had already been burned.

Gigantic pressors shoved against it; beams of power sufficient to deflect a satellite; beams whose projectors were braced, in steel-laced concrete down to bedrock, against any conceivable thrust. But this was _negative_, not positive, matter--matter negative in every respect of mass, inertia, and force. To it a push was a pull. Pressors to it were tractors--at contact they pulled themselves up off their massive foundations and hurtled into the appalling blackness.

* * * * *

Then the negasphere struck. Or did it? Can nothing strike anything? It would be better, perhaps, to say that the spherical hyperplane which was the three-dimensional cross-section of the negasphere began to occupy the same volume of space as that in which Jalte's unfortunate world already was. And at the surface of contact of the two the materials of both disappeared. The substance of the planet vanished; the incomprehensible nothingness of the negasphere faded away into the ordinary vacuity of empty space.

Jalte's base, all the three hundred square miles of it, was taken at the first gulp. A vast pit opened where it had been, a hole which deepened and widened with horrifying rapidity. And as the yawning abyss enlarged itself the stuff of the planet fell into it, in turn to vanish. Mountains tumbled into it, oceans dumped themselves into it. The hot, frightfully compressed and nascent material of the planet's core sought to erupt--but instead of moving, it, too, vanished. Vast areas of the world's surface crust, tens of thousands of square miles in extent, collapsed into it, splitting off along crevasses of appalling depth, and became nothing. The stricken globe shuddered, trembled, ground itself to bits in paroxysm after ghastly paroxysm of disintegration.

What was happening? Eichmil did not know, since his "eye" was destroyed before any really significant developments could eventuate. He and his scientists could only speculate and deduce--which, with surprising accuracy, they did. The officers of the Patrol ships, however, _knew_ what was going on, and they were scanning with intently narrowed eyes the instruments which were recording instant by instant the performance of the new cosmic super-screens which were being assaulted so brutally.

For, as has been said, the negasphere was composed of negative matter. Instead of electrons, its building blocks were positrons--the "Dirac holes" in an infinity of negative energy. Whenever the field of a positron encountered that of an electron, the two neutralized each other, giving rise to two quanta of hard radiation. And, since those encounters were occurring at the rate of countless trillions per second, there was tearing at the Patrol's defenses a flood of cosmic rays of an intensity which no spaceship had ever before been called upon to withstand. But the new screens had been figured with a factor of safety of five, and they stood up.

The planet dwindled with soul-shaking rapidity to a moon, to a moonlet, and finally to a discreetly conglomerate aggregation of meteorites before the mutual neutralization ceased.

"Primaries now," Haynes ordered briskly, as the needles of the cosmic-ray-screen meters dropped back to the points of normal functioning. The probability was that the defenses of the Boskonian citadels would now be automatic only, that no life had endured through that awful flood of lethal radiation; but he was taking no chances. Out flashed the penetrant super rays and the fortresses, too, ceased to exist save as the impalpable infradust of space.

And the massed Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol, making its formation, hurtled outward through the intergalactic void.