It did. When Kinnison concentrated his attention upon the base he saw it. He advanced toward it at the speed of thought and entered it; passing through screens and metal walls without hindrance and without giving alarm. He saw men at their accustomed tasks and heard, or rather sensed, their conversation: the everyday chat of their professions. A thrill shot through him at a dazzling possibility thus revealed.
If he could make one of those fellows down there do something without his knowing that he was doing it, the problem was solved. That computer, say; make him uncover that calculator and set up a certain integral on it. It would be easy enough to get into touch with him and have him do it, but this was something altogether different.
Kinnison got into the computer's mind easily enough, and willed intensely what he was to do; but the officer did not do it. He got up; then, staring about him in bewilderment, sat down again.
"What's the matter?" asked one of his fellows. "Forget something?"
"Not exactly." The computer still stared. "I was going to set up an integral. I didn't want it, either. I could swear that somebody told me to set it up."
"Nobody did," grunted the other, "and you'd better start staying home nights. Then maybe you wouldn't get funny ideas."
This wasn't so good, Kinnison reflected. The guy should have done it and shouldn't have remembered a thing about it. Well, he hadn't really thought he could put it across at that distance, anyway. He didn't have the brain of an Arisian. He'd have to follow his original plan, of close-up work.
Waiting until the base was well into the night side of the planet and making sure that his flare baffles were in place, he allowed the speedster to drop downward, landing at some little distance from the fortress. There he left the ship and made his way toward his objective in a rapid series of long, inertialess hops. Lower and shorter became the hops. Then he cut off his power entirely and walked until he saw before him, rising from the ground and stretching interminably upward, an almost invisibly shimmering web of force. This, the prowler knew, was the curtain which marked the border of the reservation, the trigger upon which a touch, either of solid object or of beam, would liberate a veritable inferno of the most destructive agencies generable.
To the eye that base was not impressive, being merely a few square miles of level ground, outlined with low, broad pill boxes and studded here and there with harmless-looking, bulging domes. There were a few clusters of buildings. That was all—to the eye—but Kinnison was not deceived. He knew that the base itself was a thousand feet underground; that the pill boxes housed lookouts and detectors; and that those domes were simply weather shields which, rolled back, would expose projectors second in power not even to those of Prime Base itself.