The colonel wished Major Gannel good luck, verbally, even while hoping fervently that the Lensman would make cold meat of him in a hurry; and Kinnison gravely gave his well-wisher thanks as he set out. He did not, however, go near any communications lines; although his spying crew did not realize the fact. They did not realize anything; they did not know even that they became unconscious within five minutes after leaving Thrale.
They remained unconscious while the speedster in which they were was drawn into the Dauntless' capacious hold. In the Patrol ship's sick bay, under expert care, they remained unconscious during the entire duration of their stay on board.
The Patrol pilots picked up Kandron's flying vessel with little difficulty; and, nullifiers full out, followed it easily. When the zwilnik ship slowed down to feel for the vortex, the Dauntless slowed also, and baffled her driving jets as she sneaked up to the very edge of electrodetector range. When the objective disappeared from three-dimensional space the point of vanishment was marked precisely, and up to that point the Patrol ship flashed in seconds.
The regular driving blasts were cut off, the special generators were cut in. Then, as the force fields of the ship reacted against those of the Boskonian "shore" station, the Patrolmen felt again in all their gruesome power the appallingly horrible sensation of interdimensional acceleration. For that sensation is, literally, indescribable. A man in good training can overcome seasickness, airsickness, and spacesickness. He can overcome the nausea and accustom himself to the queasily terrifying endless-fall sensation of weightlessness. He can, and does, become so inured to as to regard as perfectly normal the outrages to the sensibilities incident to inertialessness in its crudest forms. No man has, however, been able to get used to interdimensional acceleration.
It is best likened to a compression; not as a whole, but atom by atom. A man feels as though he were being twisted—cork-screwed in some monstrously obscure fashion which permits him neither to move from his place nor to remain where he is. It is a painless but utterly revolting transformation, progressing in a series of waves; a rearrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion, an incomprehensibly impossible extrusion of each ultimate particle of his substance in an unknowable, ordinarily nonexistent direction.
The period of acceleration over, the Dauntless traveled at uniform velocity along whatever course it was that the tube took and the men, although highly uncomfortable and uneasy, could once more move about and work. Sir Austin Cardynge in particular was actually happy and eager as he flitted from one to another of the automatic recording instruments upon his special panel. He resembled more closely than ever a lean, gray tomcat, Kinnison thought—he almost expected to see him begin to lick his whiskers and pur.