Kinnison wondered that Helmuth's cold voice was not already snapping from the speaker, but he was soon to discover the reason for that silence. Unobserved by the Lensman, one of the observers had recovered sufficiently from his shocked amazement to turn in a riot alarm to the guard room. Five armed men answered that call on the double, stopped and glanced around.
"Guards! Blast Blakeslee down!" Helmuth's unmistakable voice blared from his speaker.
Obediently and manfully enough the five guards tried; and, had it actually been Blakeslee confronting them so defiantly, they probably would have succeeded. It was the body of the communications officer, it is true. The mind operating the muscles of that body, however, was the mind of Kimball Kinnison, gray Lensman, the fastest man with a ray pistol old Tellus had ever produced; keyed up, expecting the move, and with two DeLameters out and poised at hip! This was the being whom Helmuth was so nonchalantly ordering his minions to slay! Faster than any watching eye could follow, five bolts of lightning flicked from Blakeslee's DeLameters. The last guard went down, his head a shriveled cinder, before a single pirate bolt could be loosed.
"You see, Helmuth," Kinnison spoke conversationally to the board, his voice dripping vitriol, "playing it safe from a distance, and making other men pull your chestnuts out of the fire, is a very fine trick as long as it works. But when it fails to work, as now, it puts your tail right into the wringer. I, for one, have been for a long time completely fed up on taking orders from a mere voice; especially from the voice of one whose entire method of operation proves him to be the most pitifully arrant coward in the galaxy."
"Observer! You other at the board!" snarled Helmuth, paying no attention to Kinnison's barbed shafts. "Sound the assembly—armed!"
"No use, Helmuth, he is stone deaf," Kinnison explained, voice sweetly venomous. "I am the only man in this base that you can talk to, and you won't be able to do even that very much longer."
"And you really think that you can get away with this mutiny—this barefaced insubordination—this defiance of my authority?"
"Sure I can. That's what I have been explaining to you. If you were here in person, or ever had been; if any of the boys had ever seen you, or had ever known you as anything except a disembodied voice, maybe I couldn't. But, since nobody has ever seen even your face, that gives me a chance——"
In his distant base Helmuth's mind had flashed over every aspect of this unheard-of situation. He decided to play for time; therefore, even as his hands darted to buttons here and there, he spoke. "Do you want to see my face?" he demanded. "If you do see it, no power in the galaxy——"