"But listen, Kim!" Clarrissa protested. "What makes you all so sure that it's Overlords? There's nothing on my map there to prove—Why, it might be anything!"
"It might not, too," Kinnison stated. "Barring the contingency of the existence of a life form unknown to any one of the four of us and which operates exactly as the Overlords do operate, that hypothesis is the only one both necessary and sufficient to explain all the facts which you have plotted upon your chart. Think a minute—you know how they work. They tune in on some one mind, the stronger and more vital the better. The fact that the Lyranians have such powerful minds is undoubtedly one big reason why the Overlords are here. In that connection, it's a mystery to me how Helen has lived so long—all the persons who disappeared had high-powered minds, didn't they?"
She thought for a space. "Now that you mention it, I believe that they did; as far as I know, anyway."
"Thought so. That clinches it, if it needed any clinching. But to go on, they tune in and blank out the victim's mind completely, filling it with an overwhelming urge to rush directly to the cavern. How else can you explain the number of these disappearances; and above all, the fact that the great majority of those lines of yours point directly to that one spot? For your information, I will add that the ones that do not so point are probably observational errors—the person was seen before she disappeared, instead of afterward."
"But that's so ... so evident," she began. "Would they do anything—"
"It wasn't evident to you at first, was it?" he countered. "And, evident or not, they always have worked that way; and, as far as anyone has been able to find out, they never have worked any other way. Quite probably, therefore, they can't. The Eich undoubtedly told them to lay off, just as they did before; but apparently they can't do that, either—permanently. This torturing and life eating of theirs seems to be a racial vice—like a drug habit, only worse. They can quit it for a while, but after about so long they simply have to go on another bender. Convinced?"
"Wel-l-l, I suppose so," she admitted doubtfully, and Kinnison turned to the group at large.
"There is no doubt, I take it, as to what course of action we are to pursue in the matter of this cavern of Overlords?" he asked, superfluously.
There was none. The decision was unanimous and instant that it must be wiped out. The two great ships, the incomparable Dauntless and the camouflaged warship which had served Kinnison-Cartiff so well, lifted themselves into the stratosphere and headed north. The Lensmen did not want to advertise their presence and there was no great hurry, therefore both vessels had their thought-screens out and both rode upon baffled jets.
Practically all of the crewmen of the Dauntless had seen Overlords in the substance; so far as is known they were the only human beings who had ever seen an Overlord and had lived to tell of it. Twenty-two of their former fellows had seen Overlords and had died. Kinnison, Worsel and Van Buskirk had slain Overlords in unscreened hand-to-hand combat in the fantastically incredible environment of a hyperspatial tube—that uncanny medium in which man and monster could and did occupy the same space at the same time without being able to touch each other; in which the air or pseudoair is thick and viscous; in which the only substance common to both sets of dimensions and thus available for combat purposes is a synthetic material so treated and so saturated as to be of enormous mass and inertia.