Galactic Patrol (15 page)

-undoubtedly the same Lensman who had conquered one of their super-ships and, after having learned its every secret, had escaped in a lifeboat through the fine-meshed net set to catch him! And, piling Ossa upon Pelion, this same Lensman had-must have-captured ship after unconquerable ship of their best and was even now sailing calmly home with them! It was intolerable, unbearable, an insult that could not and would not be borne.

Therefore, using as tools every pirate ship in that sector of space, Helmuth and his computers and navigators were slowly but grimly solving the equations of motion of that volume of interference. Smaller and smaller became the uncertainties. Then ship after ship bored into the subethereal murk, to match course and velocity with, and ultimately to come to grips with, each focus of disturbance as it was determined.

Thus in a sense and although Kinnison and his friends did not then know it, it was only the failure of the Bergenholm that was to save their lives, and with those lives our present Civilization.

Slowly, hatingly, and, for reasons already given, undetected, Kinnison made pitiful progress toward Trenco, cursing impatiently and impartially his ship, the crippled generator, its designer and its previous operators as he went. But at long last Trenco loomed large beneath them and the Lensman used his Lens.

"Lensman of Trenco spaceport, or any other Lensman within call!” he sent out clearly. "Kinnison of Tellus-Sol III-calling. My Bergenholm is almost out and I must sit down at Trenco spaceport for repairs. I have avoided the pirates so far, but they may be either behind me or ahead of me, or both. What is the situation there?"

"I fear that I can be of no help," came back a weak thought, without the customary identification. "I am out of control. However, Tregonsee is in the . . . . . . “

Kinnison felt a poignant, unbearably agonizing mental impact that jarred him to the very core, a shock that, while of sledge-hammer force, was still of such a keenly penetrant timbre that it almost exploded every cell of his brain. It seemed as though some mighty fist, armed with yard-long needles, had slugged an actual blow into the most vitally sensitive nerve-center" of his being.

Communication ceased, and the Lensman knew, with a sick, shuddering certainty, that while in the very act of talking to him a Lensman had died.

Trenco

Judged by any earthly standards the planet trenco was-and is-a peculiar one indeed. Its atmosphere, which is not sir, and its liquid, which is not water, are its two outstanding peculiarities and the sources of most of its others. Almost half of that atmosphere and by far the greater part of the liquid phase of the planet is a substance of extremely low latent heat of vaporization, with a boiling point such that during the daytime it is a vapor and at night a liquid. To make matters worse, the other constituents of Trenco's gaseous envelope are of very feeble blanketing power, low specific heat, and of high permeability, so that its days are intensely hot and its nights are bitterly cold.

At night, therefore, it rains. Words are entirely inadequate to describe to anyone who has never been there just how it does rain during Trenco' s nights. Upon Earth one inch of rainfall in an hour is a terrific downpour. Upon Trenco that amount of precipitation would scarcely be considered a mist, for along the equatorial belt, in less than thirteen Tellurian hours, it rains exactly forty-seven feet and five inches every night-no more no less, each and every night of every year.

Also there is lightning. Not in Terra's occasional flashes, but in one continuous, blinding glare which makes night as we know it unknown there in nerve-wracking, battering, sense-destroying discharges which make ether and subether alike impenetrable to any ray or signal short of a full driven power beam. The days are practically as bad. The lightning is not violent then, but the bombardment of Trenco's monstrous sun, through that outlandishly peculiar atmosphere, produces almost the same effect.

Because of the difference in pressure set up by the enormous precipitation always and everywhere upon Trenco there is wind-and what a wind( Except at the very poles, where it is too cold for even Trenconian life to exist, there is hardly a spot in which or a time at which an Earthly gale would not be considered a dead calm, and along the equator, at every sunrise and at every sunset, the wind blows from the day side to the night side at the rate of well over eight hundred miles an hour!

Through countless thousands of years wind and wave have planed and scoured the planet Trenco to a geometrically perfect oblate spheroid. It has no elevations and no depressions. Nothing fixed in an-Earthly sense grows or exists upon its surface, no structure has ever been built there able to stay in one place through one whole day of the cataclysmic meteorological phenomena which constitute the natural Trenconian environment.

There live upon Trenco two types of vegetation, each type having innumerable sub-divisions. One type sprouts in the mud of morning, flourishes flatly, by dint of deeply sent and powerful roots, during the wind and the heat of the day, comes to full fruit in later afternoon, and at sunset dies and is swept away by the flood. The other type is freeloading. Some of its genera are remotely like footballs, others resemble tumbleweeds, still others thistledown,, hundreds of others have not their remotest counterparts upon Earth. Essentially, however, they are alike in habits of life. They can sink in the "water" of Trenco, then can burrow in its mud, from which they derive part of their sustenance, they can emerge therefrom into the sunlight, they can, undamaged float in or roll along before the ever-present Trenconian wind, and they can enwrap, entangle, or otherwise seize and hold anything with which they come in contact which by any chance may prove edible.

Animal life, too, while abundant and diverse, is characterized by three qualities.

From lowest to very highest it is amphibious, it is streamlined, and it is omnivorous. Life upon Trenco is hard, and any form of life to evolve there must of stern necessity be willing yes, even anxious, to eat literally anything available. And for that reason all surviving forms of life, vegetable and animal, have a voracity and a fecundity almost unknown anywhere else in the galaxy.

Thionite, the noxious drug referred to earlier in this narrative, is the sole reason for Trenco's galactic importance. As chlorophyll is to Earthly vegetation, so is thionite to that of Trenco. Trenco is the only planet thus far known upon which this substance occurs, nor have our scientists even yet been able either to analyze or to synthesize it. Thionite is capable of affecting only the races who breathe oxygen and possess warm blood, red with hemoglobin. However, the planets peopled by such races are legion, and very shortly after the drug's discovery hordes of addicts smugglers, peddlers, and out-and-out pirates were rushing toward the new Bonanza. Thousands of these adventurers died, either from each other's ray-guns or under an avalanche of hungry Trenconian life, but, thionite being what it is, thousands more kept coming. Also came the Patrol, to curb the evil traffic at its source by b laming down ruthlessly any being attempting to gather any Trenconian vegetation.

Thus between the Patrol and the drug syndicate there rages a bitterly continuous battle to the death. Arrayed against both factions is the massed life of the noisome planet, omnivorous as it is, eternally ravenous, and of an individual power and ferocity and a collective aggregate of numbers by no means to be despised. And eternally raging against all these contending parties are the wind, the lightning, the rain, the flood, and the hellish vibratory output of Trenco' s enormous, malignant, blue-white sun.

This, then, was the planet upon which Kinnison had to land in order to repair his crippled Bergenholm-and in the end how well it was to be that such was the case!

"Kinnison of Tellus, greetings. Tregonsee of Rigel IV calling from Trenco spaceport. Have you ever landed on this planet before?"

"No, but what . . . . .

"Skip that for a time, it is most important that you land here quickly and safely.

Where are you in relation to this planet?"

"Your apparent diameter is a shade under six degrees. We are near the plane of your ecliptic and almost in the plane of your terminator, on the morning side."

'That is well, you have ample time. Place your ship between Trenco and the sun.

Enter the atmosphere exactly fifteen GP minutes from the present moment, at twenty degrees after meridian, as nearly as possible on the ecliptic, which is also our equator.

Go inert as you enter atmosphere, for a free landing upon this planet is impossible.

Synchronize with our rotation, which is twenty six point two GP hours. Descend vertically until the atmospheric pressure is seven hundred millimeters of mercury, which will be at an altitude of approximately one thousand meters. Since you rely largely upon that sense called sight, allow me to caution you now not to trust it. When your external pressure is seven hundred millimeters of mercury your altitude will be one thousand meters, whether you believe it or not. Stop at that pressure and inform me of the fact, meanwhile holding yourself as nearly stationary as you can. Check so far?"

"QX-but do you mean to tell me that we can't locate each other at a
thousand
meters?"
Kinnison s amazed thought escaped him. "What kind of . . . . ."

"I can locate you, but you cannot locate me," came the dry reply. "Everyone knows that Trenco is peculiar, but no one who has never been here can realize even dimly how peculiar it really is. Detectors and spyrays are useless, electromagnetics are practically paralyzed, and optical apparatus is distinctly unreliable. You cannot trust your vision here-do not believe anything you see. It used to require days to land a ship at this port, but with our Lenses and my `sense of perception,' as you call it, it will be a matter of minutes."

Kinnison flashed his ship to the designated position.

"Cut the Berg, Thorndyke, we're all done with it. We've got to build up an inert velocity to match the rotation, and land inert."

'Thanks be to all the gods of space for that." The engineer heaved a sigh of relief.

"I've been expecting it to blow its top for the last hour, and I don't know whether we'd ever have got it meshed in again or not."

"QX on location and orbit," Kinnison reported to the as yet invisible spaceport a few minutes later. "Now, what about that Lensman? What happened?"

"The usual thing," came the emotionless response. "It happens to altogether too many Lensmen who can see, in spite of everything we can tell them He insisted upon going out after his zwilniks in a ground car, and of course we had to let him go. He became confused, lost control, let something-possibly a zwilnik's bomb-get under his leading edge, and the wind and the trencos’ did the rest. He was Lageston of Mercator V-a good man, too. What is your pressure now?"

"Five hundred millimeters."

"Slow down. Now, if you cannot conquer the tendency to believe your eyes, you had better shut off your visiplates and watch only the pressure gauge."

"Being warned, I can disbelieve my eyes, I think," and for a minute or so communication ceased.

At a startled oath from vanBuskirk, Kinnison glanced into the plate and it needed all his nerve to keep from wrenching savagely at the controls. For the whole planet was tipping, lurching. spinning, gyrating madly in a frenzy of impossible motions, and even as the Patrolmen stared a huge mass of something shot directly toward the ship!

"Sheer off, Kim!” yelled the Valerian.

"Hold it, Bus," cautioned the Lensman. 'That's what we've got to expect, you know-I passed all the stuff along as I got it. Everything, that is, except that a 'zwilnik' is anything or anybody that comes after thionite, and that a 'trenco’ is anything, animal or vegetable, that lives on the planet. QX, Tregonsee-seven hundred, and I'm holding steady-I hope!"

"Steady enough, but you are too far away for our landing beam to grasp you.

Apply a little drive . . . . . Shift course to your left and down . . . . . more left . . . . . up a trifle . . . that's it . . . . . slow down . . . . . QX."

There was a gentle, snubbing shock, and Kinnison again translated to his companions the stranger's thoughts.

"We have you. Cut off all power and lock all controls in neutral. Do nothing more until I instruct you to come out."

Kinnison obeyed, and, released from all duty, the visitors stared in fascinated incredulity into the visiplate. For that at which they stared was and must forever remain impossible of duplication upon Earth, and only in imagination can it be even faintly pictured. Imagine all the fantastic and monstrous creatures of a delirium-tremens vision incarnate and actual. Imagine them being hurled through the air, borne by a dust-laden gale more severe than any the great American dust-bowl or Africa's Sahara Desert ever endured. Imagine this scene as being viewed, not in an ordinary, solid distorting mirror, but in one whose falsely reflecting contours were changing constantly, with no logical or intelligible rhythm, into new and ever more grotesque warps. If imagination has been equal to the task, the resultant is what the visitors tried to see.

At first they could make nothing whatever of it. Upon nearer approach, however, the ghastly distortion grew less and the flatly level expanse took on a semblance of rigidity. Directly beneath them they made out something that looked like an immense, flat blister upon the otherwise featureless terrain. Toward this blister their ship was drawn.

A port opened, dwarfed in apparent size to a mere window by the immensity of the structure one of whose entrances it was.
Through this
port the vast bulk of the spaceship was wafted upon the landing-bars, and behind it the mighty bronze-and-steel gates clanged shut. The lock was pumped to a vacuum, there was a hiss of entering air, a spray of vaporous liquid bathed every inch of the vessel's surface, and Kinnison felt again the calm thought of Tregonsee, the Rigellian Lensman.

"You may now open your airlock and emerge. If I have read aright our atmosphere is sufficiently like your own in oxygen content so that you will suffer no ill effects from it. It may be well, however, to wear your armor until you have become accustomed to its considerably greater density."