"Skip it, chief," sneered Kinnison. "Don't try to kid me into believing that you wouldn't kill me now, under any conditions, if you possibly could. As for your face, it makes no difference whatever to me, now, whether I ever see your ugly pan or not."
"Well, you shall!" And Helmuth's visage appeared, concentrating upon the rebellious officer a glare of such fury and such power that any ordinary man must have quailed. But not Blakeslee-Kinnison!
"Well! Not so bad, at that—the guy looks almost human!" Kinnison exclaimed, in the tone most carefully designed to drive even more frantic the helpless and inwardly raging pirate chieftain. "But I've got things to do. You can guess at what goes on around here from now on." And in the blaze of a DeLameter Helmuth's plate, set, and "eye" disappeared. Kinnison had also been playing for time, and his enslaved observer had checked and rechecked this second and highly important line to Helmuth's ultra-secret base.
An instant later Helmuth's view-plate vanished in the DeLameter's blaze.
Then, throughout the fortress, there blared out the urgent assembly call, to which the Lensman added, verbally: "This is a one-hundred-per-cent call-out, including crews of ships in dock as well as regular base personnel. Bring also the patrol nurses. Come as you are and come fast. The doors of the auditorium will be locked in five minutes and any man outside those doors will be given ample reason to wish that he had been on time."
The auditorium was right off the control room, and was so arranged that when a partition was rolled back the control room became its stage. All Boskonian bases were arranged thus, in order that the supervising officers at Grand Base could oversee, through their instruments upon the main panel, just such assemblies as this one was supposed to be. Every man hearing that call assumed that it came from Grand Base, and every man hurried to obey it.