Kinnison feared that force-ball no longer. He still did not know what it was; but he had learned that, whatever its nature might be, it was operated or controlled by thought. Therefore it was and would remain harmless. If the pirate chief softened his screen enough to emit a thought he would never think again.
Doggedly the Lensman drove in, closer and closer. Magnetic clamps locked and held. Two steel-clad, warring figures rolled into the line of fire of the ravening automatic rifle. Kinnison's armor, designed and tested to withstand even heavier stuff, held; wherefore he came through that storm of metal unscathed. Helmuth's, however, even though stronger far than the ordinary personal armor of space, failed; and thus the Boskonian died.
Blasting himself upright, the Patrolman shot across the inner dome to the control panel and paused, momentarily baffled. He could not throw the switches controlling the defensive screens of the gigantic outer dome! His armor, designed for the ultimate of defensive strength, could not and did not bear any of the small and delicate external mechanisms so characteristic of the ordinary spacesuit. To leave his personal tank at that time and in that environment was unthinkable; yet he was fast running out of time. A scant fifteen seconds was all that remained before zero, the moment at which the hellish output of every watt generable by the massed fleet of the Galactic Patrol would be hurled against those screens in their furiously raging destructive might. To release the screens after that zero moment would mean his own death, instantaneous and inevitable.
Nevertheless, he could open those circuits—the conservation of Boskonian property meant nothing to him. He flipped on his own projector and flashed its beam briefly across the banked panels in front of him. Insulation burst into flame, fairly exploding in its haste to disintegrate; copper and silver ran in brilliant streams or puffed away in clouds of sparkling vapor: high-tension arcs ripped, crashed, and cracked among the writhing, dripping, flaring bus-bar. The shorts burned themselves clear or blew their fuses, every circuit opened, every Boskonian defense came down; and then, and only then, could Kinnison get into communication with his friends.
"Haynes!" he thought crisply into his Lens. "Kinnison calling!"
"Haynes acknowledging!" a thought instantly snapped back. "Congrat—"
"Hold it! We're not done yet! Have every ship in the Fleet go free at once. Have them all, except yours, put out full-coverage screens, so that they can't look at or think into this Base."
A moment passed. "Done!"
"Don't come in any closer—I'm on my way out there to you. Have your ship block every band except your personal frequency, which you and I are now on, and caution all Lensmen aboard with you to stay off that channel until further notice. Now as to you, personally, I don't like to seem to be giving orders to the Admiral of the Fleet, but it may be quite essential that you concentrate upon me, and think of nothing else, for the next few minutes."
"Right! I don't mind taking orders from you."