"Holy jumping rockets!" he exclaimed. "At us already? Why didn't you yell?"
"How much good would that have done?" Kinnison wanted to know. "Of course, if I had known that you were loafing on the job and could have snapped it up a little, I would have. But there's no particular hurry about this. It'll take more than four of them to break us down, and I was hoping that before they can overload us you'd have us traveling. What was on your mind?"
"I came up here—one, to tell you that we're ready to blast; two, to suggest that you hit her easy at first; and three, to ask if you know where there's any grease soap. But you can cancel two and three. We don't want to play around with these boys much longer—they play too rough—and I ain't going to wash up until I see whether she holds together or not. Blast away—and won't those guys be surprised!"
"I'll say so. We were, too, when the Velantians showed us how to compute a screen that would cut a tractor like so much cheese. Here she goes!"
The Lensman twirled a couple of knobs, then punched down hard upon three buttons. As he did so the flaring plates became dark; they were again alone in space. To the dumfounded pirates, inert as they were and with their supposedly unbreakable tractors locked in full grip, it was as though their prey had slipped off into the fourth dimension. Their tractors gripped nothing whatever, their ravening beams bored unimpeded through the space occupied an instant before by resisting screens. They did not know what had happened, or how; and, being deep in the field of interference, they could neither report to nor be guided by the master mind of Boskone.
For minutes Thorndyke, VanBuskirk, and Kinnison waited tensely for they knew not what would happen; but nothing happened and the tension gradually relaxed.
"What was the matter with it?" Kinnison asked, finally.
"Overloaded," was Thorndyke's terse reply.
"Overloaded—hooey!" snapped the Lensman. "How could they overload a Bergenholm? And, even if they could, why in all the nine hells of Valeria would they want to?"