But in his every waking hour, working, gambling, or loafing, he studied Bominger and Bominger's various enterprises. The Lensman could not pierce the fat man's thought-screen, and he could never catch him without it. However, he could and did learn much. He read volume after volume of locked account books, page by page. He read secret documents, hidden in the deepest recesses of massive vault. He listened in on conference after conference; for a thought-screen of course, does not interfere with either sight or sound. The Big Shot did not own—legally—the saloon, nor the ornate, almost palatial back room which was his office. Nor did he own the dance hall and boudoirs upstairs, nor the narrow, cell-like rooms in which addicts of twice a score of different noxious drugs gave themselves over libidinously to their addictions. Nevertheless, they were his; and they were only a part of that which was his.
Kinnison detected, traced, and identified agent after agent. With his sense of perception he followed passages, leading to other scenes, utterly indescribable here. One comparatively short gallery, however, terminated in a different setting altogether; for there, as here and perhaps everywhere, ostentation and squalor lie almost back to back. Nalizok's Café, the high-life hot-spot of Radelix! Downstairs was innocuous enough; nothing rough—that is, too rough—was ever pulled there. Most of the robbery there was open and above-board, plainly written upon the checks. But there were upstairs rooms, and cellar rooms, and back rooms. And there were addicts, differing only from those others in wearing finer raiment and being of a self-styled higher stratum. Basically they were the same.
Men, women, girls ever were there, in the rigid muscle-lock of thionite. Teeth hard-set, every muscle tense and staring, eyes jammed closed, fists clenched, faces white as though carved from marble, immobile in the frenzied emotion which characterized the ultimately passionate fulfillment of every suppressed desire; in the release of their every inhibition crowding perilously close to the dividing line beyond which lay death from sheer ecstasy. That was the technique of the thionite-sniffer—to take every microgram that he could stand, to come to, shaken and too weak even to walk; to swear that he would never so degrade himself again; to come back after more as soon as he had recovered strength to do so; and finally, with an irresistible craving for stronger and ever stronger thrills, to take a larger dose than his rapidly-weakening body could endure, and so to cross the fatal line.
There also were the idiotically smiling faces of the hadive smokers, the twitching members of those who preferred the Centralian nitrolabe-needle, the helplessly stupefied eaters of bentlam—but why go on? Suffice it to say that in that one city block could be found every vice and every drug enjoyed by Radeligians and the usual run of visitors; and if perchance you were an unusual visitor, desiring something unusual, Bominger could get it for you—at a price.
Kinnison studied, perceived, and analyzed. Also, he reported, via Lens, daily and copiously, to Narcotics, under Lensman's Seal.
"But Kinnison!" Winstead protested one day. "How much longer are you going to make us wait?"
"Until I get what I came after or until they get onto me," Kinnison replied, flatly. For weeks his Lens had been hidden in the side of his shoe, in a flat sheath of highly charged metal, proof against any except the most minutely searching spy-ray inspection; but this new location did not in any way interfere with its functioning.
"Any danger of that?" the Narcotics head asked, anxiously.
"Plenty—and getting worse every day. More actors in the drama. Some day I'll make a slip—I can't keep this up forever."
"Let us go, then," Winstead urged. "We've got enough now to blow this ring out of existence, all over the planet."