Time passed; the Boskonian infiltration progressed strictly according to plan. Upon the surface it appeared that Radelix was going in almost the same fashion in which Antigan IV had gone. Below the surface, however, there was one great difference. Every ship, whether liner or freighter or tramp, which docked at any spaceport of 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 complexion 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.
Again the Boskonians declared their contempt of the Patrol by setting the exact time at which the president was to be taken. Again the appointed hour was midnight.
Vice Admiral Lensman Gerrond was, as Kinnison had intimated frequently, somewhat of a brass hat. He did not, he simply could not believe that his Base was as pregnable as the Co-ordinator had assumed it to be. Kinnison, knowing that all ordinary defenses would be useless, had not even mentioned them. Gerrond, unable to believe that his hitherto invincible and invulnerable weapons and defenses were all of a sudden useless, mustered them of his own volition.
All leaves had been canceled. Every detector, every beam, every device of defense and of offense was fully manned. Every man was keyed up and alert. And Gerrond, while the least bit apprehensive that something was about to happen which was not in the book, was pretty sure in his stout old war-dog's soul that he and his men had stuff enough.
At two minutes before midnight the armored president and his escorts left Gerrond's private office. One minute later they were passing the door of the specified room. A bomb exploded shatteringly behind them, armored men rushed yelling out of a branch corridor in their rear. Everybody stopped and turned to look. So, the hidden Kinnison assured himself, did an unseen observer in an invisibly hovering, three-dimensional hypercircle.
Kinnison threw the door open, flashed an explanatory thought at the president, yanked him into the room and into the midst of a corps of Lensmen armed with devices not usually encountered even in Patrol bases. The door snapped shut and Kinnison stood where the president had stood an instant before, clad in armor identical with that which the president had worn. The exchange had required less than one second: it had been observed by no one.
"QX, Gerrond and you fellows!" Kinnison drove the thought. "The president is safe—I'm taking over. Double time straight ahead—hipe! Get into the clear—give us a chance to use our stuff!"
The unarmored men broke into a run, and as they did so the door of Room Twenty-four swung open and stayed open. Weapons snouted out, shoved by armored men. Armored men and heavy weapons erupted from other doors and from more branch corridors. The hypercircle, which was, in fact, the terminus of a hyperspatial tube, began to thicken toward visibility.
It did not, however, materialize. Only by the intensest effort of vision could it be discerned as the sheerest wisp, more tenuous than the thinnest fog. The men within the ship, if ship it was, were visible only as striations in air are visible, and no more to be made out in detail. Instead of a full materialization, the only thing that was or became solid or tangible was a dead-black thing which reached purposefully outward and downward toward Kinnison, a thing combined of tongs and coarse-meshed, heavy net.