That made it cannon to cannon, one to one; and the Lensman knew that those two identical rifles could hammer at each other's defenses for an hour without doing any serious damage. He had, however, one big advantage. Being closer to the bulkhead he could depress his line of fire more than could the Boskonian. He did so, aiming at the clamps, which were not built to take very much of that sort of punishment. One front clamp let go, then the other, and the Lensman knew what to do about the rear pair, which he could not reach. He directed his fire against the upper edge of the dureum plate. Under the awful thrust of that terrific storm of steel the useless front clamps lifted from the floor. The gun mount, restrained from sliding by the unbreakable grip of the rear clamps, reared up. Over it went, straight backward, exposing the gunner to the full blast of Kinnison's fire. That, definitely, was that.
Kathryn heaved a sigh of relief; as far as she could "see", the tube was still empty. "That's my Pop!" she applauded inaudibly to herself. "Now," she breathed, "if the darling has just got jets enough to figure out what may be coming at him down this tube—and sense enough to run back home before it can catch him!"
Kinnison had no suspicion at all that any danger to himself might lie within the tube. He had no desire, however, to land alone in a strange and possibly half-crippled enemy ship in the exact center of an enemy base, and no intention whatever of doing so. Moreover, he had once come altogether too close to permanent immolation in a foreign space because of the discontinuance of a hyperspatial tube while he was in it, and once was once too many. Also, he had just got done leading with his chin, and once of that, too, was once too many. Therefore, his sole thought was to get back into his own space as fast as he could get there, so as soon as the opposition was silenced he hurried into the control room and reversed the vessel's drive.
Behind him, Kathryn flipped her speedster end for end and led the retreat. She left the tube before—"before" is an extremely loose and inaccurate word in this connection, but it conveys the idea better than any other ordinary term—she got back to Base. She caused an officer to broadcast an "evacuation" warning, then hung poised high above Base, watching intently. She knew that Kinnison could not leave the tube except at its terminus, hence would have to materialize inside Base itself. She had heard of what happened when two dense, hard solids attempted to occupy the same three-dimensional space at the same time; but to view that occurrence was not her purpose in lingering. She did not actually know whether there was anything in the tube or not; but she did know that if there were, and if it or they should follow her father out into normal space, even she would have need of every jet she could muster.
Kinnison, maneuvering his Boskonian cruiser to a halt just at the barest perceptible threshold of normal space, in the intermediate zone in which nothing except dureum was solid in either space or pseudospace, had already given a great deal of thought to the problem of disembarkation. The ship was small, as spaceships go, but even so it was a lot bigger than any corridor of Base. Those corridor walls and floors were thick and contained a lot of steel; the ship's walls were solid alloy. He had never seen metal materialize within metal and, frankly, he didn't want to be around, even inside D-armor, when it happened. Also, there were a lot of explosives aboard, and atomic power plants, and the chance of touching off a loose atomic vortex in the very middle of Base and within a few feet of himself was not one to be taken lightly.
He had already rigged a line to a master switch. Power off, with the ship's dureum catwalk as close to the floor of the corridor as the dimensions of the tube permitted, he reversed the controls and poised himself for the running headlong dive. He could not feel Radeligian gravitation, of course, but he was pretty sure that he could leap far enough to get through the interface. He took a short run, jerked the line, and hurled himself through the spaceship's immaterial wall. The ship disappeared.
Going through that interface was more of a shock than the Lensman had anticipated. Even taken very slowly, as it customarily is, interdimensional acceleration brings malaise to which no one has ever become accustomed, and taking it so rapidly fairly turned Kinnison inside out. He was going to land with the rolling impact which constitutes perfect technique in such armored maneuvering. As it was, he never did know how he landed, except that he made a boiler-shop racket and that he brought up against the far wall of the corridor with a climactic clang. Beyond the addition of a few more bruises and contusions to his already abundant collection, however, he was not harmed.
As soon as he could collect himself he leaped to his feet and rapped out orders. "Tractors—pressors—shears! Heavy stuff, to anchor, not to clamp! Hipe!" He knew what he was up against now, and, if they'd just come back, he'd yank them out of that tube so fast it'd break their neck!