"Well, aren't you surprised that I could get the best of him?" Kinnison asked naïvely. He had really expected that Mentor would compliment him upon his prowess, he figured that he had earned a few pats on the back; but here the old fellow was mooning about his own mind and his own philosophy, and acting as though knocking off an Arisian were something to be taken in stride. And it wasn't, by half!
"No," came the flatly definite reply. "You have a force of will, a totalizable and concentratable power, a mental and psychological drive that no mind in the macrocosmic universe can break. I perceived those latent capabilities when I assembled your Lens, and developed them when I developed you. It was their presence which made it certain that you would return here for that development; they made you what you intrinsically are."
"QX, then—skip it. What shall I do with him? It's going to be a real job of work, any way you figure it, for us to keep him alive and harmless until we can get him back there to Arisia."
"We do not want him here," Mentor replied without emotion. "He has no present or future place within our society. Nor, however I consider the matter, can I perceive that he has any longer a permissible or condonable place in the all-inclusive Scheme of Things. He has served his purpose. Destroy him, therefore, forthwith, before he so much as recovers consciousness; lest much and grievous harm befall you."
"I believe you, chief. You chirped it then, if anybody ever did. Thanks"—and communication ceased.
The Lensman's ray gun flamed briefly and what was mortal of Fossten the prime minister became a smoking, shapeless heap.
Kinnison noticed then that a call light was shining brightly upon a communicator panel. This thing must have taken longer than he had supposed. The battle must be over, otherwise all space would still be filled with interference through which no long-range communicator beam could have been driven. Or—could Boskonia have—No, that was unthinkable. The Patrol must have won. This must be Haynes, calling him—
It was. The frightful Battle of Klovia was over. While many of the Patrol ships had yielded, either by choice or by necessity, to the Boskonians' challenge, most of them had not. And the majority of those who did so yield, came out victorious.
While fighting in any kind of recognized formation against such myriads of independently operating, widely spaced individual ships was, of course, out of the question, Haynes and his aids had been able to work out a technique of sorts. General orders were sent out to subfleet commanders, who in turn relayed them to the individual captains by means of visual beams. Single vessels, then, locked to equal or inferior craft—avoiding carefully anything larger than themselves—with tractor zones and held grimly on. If they could defeat the foe, QX. If not, they hung on; until shortly one of the Patrol's maulers—who had no opposition of their own class to face—would come lumbering up. And when the dreadful primary batteries of one of those things cut loose that was, very conclusively, that.