The patrol's grand fleet, then, was already massing over its primary objectives, each vessel in a rigidly assigned position. The pilots, captains, and navigators were chatting among themselves jerkily and in low tones, as though even to raise their voices might reveal prematurely to the enemy the concentration of the patrol forces. The firing officers were already at their boards, eyeing hungrily the small switches which they could not throw for so many long minutes yet.
And far below, beside the pirates' air purifier, Kinnison released the locking toggles of his armor and leaped out. To burn a hole in the primary duct took only a second. To drop into that duct his container of thionite, to drench that container with the reagent which would in sixty seconds dissolve completely that container's substance without affecting either its contents or the metal of the duct, to slap a flexible adhesive patch over the hole in the duct, and to leap back into his armor—all these things required only a trifle over one minute. Eleven minutes to go—QX.
Then in the last barracks, even while the Lensman was arrowing up the stairways, a dog again deprived a sleeping man of his thought screen. That man, however, instead of going to work, took up a pair of pliers and proceeded to cut the battery leads of every sleeper in the barracks, severing them so close that no connection could be made without removing the armor.
As those leads were severed, men woke up and dashed into the dome. Along catwalk after catwalk they raced, and apparently that was all that they were doing. But each runner, as he passed a man on duty, flicked a battery plug out of its socket; and that observer, at Kinnison's command, opened the face plate of his armor and breathed deeply of the now drug-laden atmosphere.
Thionite, as has been intimated, is perhaps the worst of all known habit-forming drugs. In almost infinitesimal doses it gives rise to a state in which the victim seems actually to experience the gratification of his every desire, whatever that desire may be. The larger the dose, the more intense the sensation, until—and very quickly—the dosage is reached at which he passes into such an ecstatic stupor that not a single nerve can force a stimulus into his frenzied brain. In this stage he dies.
Thus there was no alarm, no outcry, no warning. Each observer sat or stood entranced, holding exactly the pose he had been in at the instant of opening his face plate. But now, instead of paying attention to his duty, he was plunging deeper and deeper into the paroxysmally ecstatic profundity of a thionite debauch from which there was to be no awakening. Therefore, half of that mighty dome was unmanned before Helmuth even realized that anything at all out of order was going on.
As soon as he realized that something was amiss, however, he sounded the "all-hands-on-duty" alarm and rapped out instructions to the officers in the barracks. But the cloud of death had arrived there first, and to his consternation not one quarter of those officers responded. Quite a number of men did get into the dome, but every one of them collapsed before reaching the catwalks. And three fourths of his working force were hors de combat before he located Kinnison's speeding messengers.
"Blast them down!" Helmuth shrieked, pointing, gesticulating madly.
Blast whom down? The minions of the Lensman were themselves blasting away now, right and left, shouting contradictory but supposedly authoritative orders.
"Blast those men not on duty!" Helmuth's raging voice now filled the dome. "You, at Board 479! Blast that man on Catwalk 28, at Board 495!"