Children of the lens

by E. E. Smith

Worsel set out, and after a few days ... or weeks—idle time means practically nothing to a Velantian—a sharply-Lensed thought drove in.

"Help! A Lensman calling help! Line this thought and come at speed to System—" The message ended as sharply as it had begun; in a flare of agony which, Worsel knew, meant that that Lensman, whoever he was, had died.

Since the thought, although broadcast, had come in strong and clear, Worsel knew that its sender had been close by. While the time had been very short indeed, he had been able to get a line of sorts. Into that line he whirled the Velan's sharp prow and along it she hurtled at the literally inconceivable pace of her absolute-maximum drive. As the Gray Lensman had often remarked, the Velantian superdreadnought had more legs than a centipede, and now she was using them all. In minutes, then, the scene of battle grew large upon her plates.

The Patrol ship, hopelessly out-classed, could last only seconds longer. Her screens were down; her very wall shield was dead. Red pockmarks sprang into being along her sides as the Boskonian needle-beamers wiped out her few remaining controls. Then, as the helplessly raging Worsel looked on, his brain seething with unutterable Velantian profanity, the enemy prepared to board—a course of action which, Worsel could see, was changed abruptly by the fact—and perhaps as well by the terrific velocity—of his own unswerving approach. The conquered Patrol cruiser disappeared in a blaze of detonating duodec; the conqueror devoted his every jet to the task of running away; strewing his path as he did so with sundry items of solid and explosive destruction. Such things, however, whether dirigible or not, whether inert or free, were old and simple stuff to the Velan's war-wise crew. Their spotters and detectors were full out, as was also a practically solid forefan of annihilating and disintegrating beams.

Thus none of the Boskonian's missiles touched the Velan, nor, with all his speed, could he escape. Few indeed were the ships of space able to step it, parsec for parsec, with Worsel's mighty craft, and this luckless pirate vessel was not one of them. Up and up the pursuer rushed; second by second the intervening distance lessened. Tractors shot out, locked on, and pulled briefly with all the force of their stupendous generators.

Briefly, but long enough. As Worsel had anticipated, that savage yank had, in the fraction of a second required for the Boskonian commander to recognize and to cut the tractors, been enough to bring the two inertialess war craft practically screen to screen.

"Primaries! Blast!" Worsel hurled the thought even before his tractors snapped. He was in no mood for a long-drawn-out engagement. He might be able to win with his secondaries, his needles, his tremendously powerful short-range stuff and his other ordinary offensive weapons, but he was taking no chances. Besides, the Boskonians might very well have primaries of their own by this time, and if they did his only chance was to use them first. His men knew what to do and would do it without further orders. A dozen or so of those hellishly irresistible projectors of sheer destruction lashed out as one.

One! Two! Three! The three courses of Boskonian defensive screen scarcely winked as each, locally overloaded, flared through the visible into the black and went down.

Crash! The stubborn fabric of the wall shield offered little more resistance before it, too, went down, exposing the bare metal of the Boskonian's hull—and, as is well known, any conceivable material substance simply vanishes, tracelessly, at the merest touch of such fields of force as those.

Driving projectors carved away and main batteries silenced, Worsel's needle-beamers proceeded systematically to riddle every control panel and every lifeboat, to make of the immense space rover a completely helpless hulk.