Kinnison clenched his teeth and held his breath, his big hands clutching fiercely the pilot's bars; Worsel unheedingly coiled his supple body into an ever smaller, ever harder and more compact bale.
"Ah!" Kinnison exhaled explosively. "It worked!" The psychologist, at Nadreck's impalpable suggestion, had finally thought of the thing. It was a thought-screen generator which had been giving a little trouble and which really should have been checked before this.
Calmly, with the mild self-satisfaction which comes of having successfully recalled to mind a highly elusive thought, the Eich opened one of the dome's unforcible doors and made his unconcerned way directly toward the waiting Lensmen; and as he approached, Nadreck stepped up by logarithmic increments the power of his hold.
"Get ready, please, to cut your screens and to synchronize with me in case anything slips and he tries to break away," Nadreck cautioned; but nothing slipped.
The Eich came up unseeing to the speedster's side and stopped. The drill disappeared. A thought-screen encompassed the group narrowly. Kinnison and Worsel released their screens and also tuned in to the creature's mind. And Kinnison swore briefly, for what they found was meager enough. It was well, however, that they got what they did when they did; for, as has been seen, even that little was very shortly thereafter to be removed.
He knew a great deal concerning the zwilnik doings of the First Galaxy; but so did the Lensmen; they were not interested in them. Neither were they interested, at the moment, in the files or in the records. Regarding the higher-ups, he knew of two, and only two, personalities. By means of an intergalactic communicator he received orders from, and reported to, a clearly defined, somewhat Eichlike entity known to him as Kandron; and vaguely, from occasional stray and unintentional thoughts of this Kandron, he had visualized as being somewhere in the background a human being named Alcon. He supposed that the planets upon which these persons lived were located in the Second Galaxy, but he was not certain, even of that. He had never seen either of them; he was pretty sure that none of his group ever would be allowed to see them. He had no means of tracing them and no desire whatsoever to do so. The only fact he really knew was that at irregular intervals Kandron got into communication with this base of the Eich.
That was all. Kinnison and Worsel let go and Nadreck, with a minute attention to detail which would be wearisome here, jockeyed the unsuspecting monster back into the dome. The native knew fully where he had been, and why. He had inspected the generator and had found it in good order. Every second of elapsed time was accounted for exactly. He had not the slightest inkling that anything out of the ordinary had happened to him or anywhere around him.
As carefully as the speedster had approached the planet, she departed from it. She rejoined the Dauntless, in whose control room Kinnison lined out a solid communicator beam to the Z9M9Z and to Port Admiral Haynes. He reported crisply, rapidly, everything that had transpired.
"So our best bet, chief, is for you and the Fleet to get out of here as fast as Klono will let you," he concluded. "Go straight out Rift 94, staying as far away as possible from both the spiral arm and the Galaxy proper. Unlimber every spotting screen you've got—put them to work along the line between Lyrane and the Second Galaxy. Plot all the punctures, extending the line as fast as you can. We'll join you at max and transfer to the Z9M9Z—her tank is just what the doctors ordered for the job we've got to do."