see—couldn't the damn dumb darling sense —that he was apt to run out of time almost any minute now?
She fairly writhed in an agony of indecision; and indecision, in a Third-Stage Lensman, is a rare phenomenon indeed. She wanted intensely to take over, but if she did, was there any way this side of Palain's purple hells for her to cover up her tracks?
There was none… yet.
Chapter Eight
Black Lensmen
But Kinnison's mind, while slower than his daughter's and much less able, was sure. The four Boskonians in the control-room were screened against his every mental force and it was idle even to hope for another such lucky break as he had just had. They were armored by this time and they had both machine rifles and semi-portable projectors. They were entrenched; evidently intending to fight a delaying and defensive battle, knowing that if they could hold him off until the tube had been traversed, the Lensman would not have a chance. Armed with all they could use of the most powerful mobile weapons aboard—and being four to one, they undoubtedly thought they could win easily enough.
Kinnison thought otherwise. Since he could not use his mind against them he would use whatever he could find, and this ship, having come upon such a mission, would be carrying plenty of weapons—and those four men certainly hadn't had time to tamper with them all. He might even find some negative-matter bombs.
Setting up a spy-ray block, he proceeded to rummage. They couldn't see him, and if any one of them had a sense of perception and cut his screen for even a fraction of a second to use it the battle would end right then. And if they decided to rush him, so much the better. They remained, however, forted up, as he had thought they would, and he rummaged in peace. Various death-dealing implements, invitingly set up, he ignored after one cursory glance into their interiors. He knew weapons—these had been fixed. He went on to the armory.
He did not find any negabombs, but he found plenty of untouched weapons like those now emplaced in the control-room. The rifles were beauties; high-caliber, water-cooled things, each with a heavy dureum shield-plate and a single-ply screen. Each had a beam, too, but machine-rifle beams weren't so hot. Conversely, the semi-portables had lots of screen, but very little dureum. Kinnison lugged one rifle and two semi-portables, by easy stages, into the room next to the control room; so placing them that the control panels would be well out of the line of fire.
What gave Kinnison his chance was the fact that the enemies' weapons were set to cover the door. Apparently they had not considered the possibility that the Lensman would attempt to flank them by blasting through an inch and a half of high-alloy steel. Kinnison did not know whether he could do it fast enough to mow them down from the side before they could reset their magnetic clamps, or not; but he'd give it the good old college try. It was bound to be a mighty near thing, and the Lensman grinned wolfishly behind the guard-plates of his helmet as he arranged his weapons to save every possible fractional second of time.
Aiming one at a spot some three feet above the floor, the other a little lower, Kinnison cut in the full power of his semis and left them on. He energized the rifle's beam— every little bit helped—set the defensive screens at "full", and crouched down into the saddle behind the dureum off, with the ship's dureum cat-walk as close to the floor of the corridor as the dimensions of the tube permitted, he reversed the controls and poised himself for a running headlong dive. He could not feel Radeligian gravitation, of course, but he was pretty sure that he could jump far enough to get through the interface. He took a short run, jerked the line, and hurled himself through the space-ship's immaterial wall. The ship disappeared.
Going through that interface was more of a shock than the Lensman had anticipated. Even taken very slowly, as
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