In his hidden retreat so far from the galaxy's crowded suns and worlds, Helmuth was in no enviable or easy frame of mind. Four times he had declared that that accursed Lensman, whoever he might be, must be destroyed, and had mustered his every available force to that end, only to have his intended prey slip from his grasp as effortlessly as a droplet of mercury eludes the clutching fingers of a child.
That Lensman, with nothing except a speedster and a bomb, had taken and had studied one of Boskone's new battleships, thus obtaining for his patrol the secret of cosmic energy. Abandoning his own vessel, then crippled and doomed to capture or destruction, he had stolen one of the ships searching for him and in it he had calmly sailed to Velantia, right through Helmuth's screen of blockading vessels. He had in some way so fortified Velantia as to capture six more Boskonian battleships. In one of those ships he had won his way back to the Prime Base of the patrol, with information of such immense importance that it had robbed the Boskonian organization of its then overwhelming superiority.
More, he had found or had developed new items of equipment which, save for Helmuth's own success in obtaining them, would have given the patrol a definite and decisive superiority over Boskonia. Now both sides were again equal, except for that Lensman and—the Lens.
Helmuth still quailed inwardly whenever he thought of what he had undergone at the Arisian barrier, and he had given up all thought of securing the secret of the Lens by force or from Arisia. But there must be other ways of getting it——
And just then there came in the urgent call from Boyssia II, followed by the stunningly successful revolt of the hitherto innocuous Blakeslee, culminating as it did in the destruction of Helmuth's every Boyssian device of vision or of communication. Blue-white with fury, the Boskonian high chief flung his net abroad to take the renegade; but as he settled back to await results a thought struck him like a blow from a fist: Blakeslee was innocuous. He never had had, did not now and never would have, the cold nerve and the sheer, dominating power he had just shown. Toward what conclusion did that fact point?
The furious anger disappeared from Helmuth's face as though it had been wiped therefrom with a sponge, and he became again the coldly calculating mechanism of flesh and blood that he ordinarily was. This conception changed matters entirely. This was not an ordinary revolt of an ordinary subordinate. The man had done something which he could not possibly do. So what? The Lens again. Again that accursed Lensman, the one who had somehow learned really to use his Lens!
"Wolmark, call every vessel at Boyssia base," he directed, crisply. "Keep on calling them until some one answers. Get whoever is in charge there now and put him on me here."
A few minutes of silence followed, then Vice Commander Krimsky reported in full everything that had happened and told of the threatened destruction of the base.
"You have an automatic speedster there, have you not?"
"Yes, sir."