Into the Earthman's mind there leaped a picture of Henderson, sharp and clear. He felt his Lens actually tingle and throb as a concentration of vital force such as he had never known poured through his whole being and into that almost-living creation of the Arisians, and immediately thereafter he was in full mental communication with the chief pilot of the ill-fated Brittania! And there, seated across the tiny mess table of their lifeboat, was Thorndyke, the master technician.
Henderson came to his feet with a yell as the telepathic message bombarded into his brain, and it required several seconds to convince him that he was not the victim of space insanity or suffering from any other form of hallucination. Once convinced, however, he acted. His lifeboat shot toward far Velantia at maximum blast.
Then: "Nelson! Allerdyce! Thompson! Jenkins! Uhlenhuth! Smith! Chatway——" Kinnison called the roll of the survivors.
Nelson, the Brittania's communications officer, answered his captain's call. So did Allerdyce, the juggling quartermaster. So did Uhlenhuth, a technician. So did those in three other boats. Two of these three were apparently well within the danger zone, and might get nipped in their dash, but their crews elected without hesitation to take the chance. Four boats, it was already known, had been captured by the pirates. The remaining eight were either so distant as to be out of range of even the Worsel-driven Lens, or they had been taken by pirates who had not yet reported to Helmuth.
"Eight out of twenty," Kinnison mused. "Not so good, but it could have been a lot worse. They might very well have taken us all by this time."
Then he turned to the Velantian, who had withdrawn his mind as soon as its task was done. "Thanks, Worsel," he said simply. "Some of those lads coming in have got plenty of just what it takes, and how we can use them!"
One by one the lifeboats of the Brittania came into port, where their crews were welcomed briefly, but feelingly, before they were put to work. Nelson, the communications officer, among the last to arrive, was to the Lensman particularly welcome.
"Nels, we need you badly," Kinnison informed him as soon as greetings had been exchanged. "The pirates have a beam, carrying a peculiarly scrambled wave that they can receive and decode through any kind of ordinary blanketing interference, and you're the best man of us all to study their system. Some of these Velantian scientists can probably help you a lot on that—any race that can develop a screen against thought figures to know more than somewhat about vibration in general. We've got working models of the pirates' instruments, so that you can figure out their patterns and formulas. That ought to be simple.
"When you've done that, I want you and your Velantians to design something that will scramble all the pirates' communicator beams in space, from here to the near rim of the galaxy. If you can fix things so that they can't talk, any more than we can, it'll help a lot, believe me!"