"Smith, E E Doc - Lensman 4 - Gray Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

recorders go to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten. Even that wasn't anywhere nearly
enough—everything in the recorder circuits blew."
"But how could they handle them . . ." von Hohendorff began to ask.
"They didn't—they pointed them and died," Thorndyke explained, grimly. "They traded
one projector and its crew for one cruiser and its crew—a good trade from their viewpoint."
"There will be no more such trades," Haynes declared.
Nor were there. The Patrol had maulers enough to en-globe the enemy craft at a distance
greater even than the effective range of those suicidal beams, and it did so.
Shielding screens cut off the Boskonians' intake of cosmic power and the relentless
beaming of the bull-dog maulers began. For hour after hour it continued, the cordon ever
tightening as the victims' power lessened. And finally even the gigantic accumulators of the
immense fortresses were drained. Their screens went down under the hellish fury of the maulers'
incessant attack, and in a space of minutes thereafter the structures and their contents ceased to
exist save as cosmically atomic detritus.
The Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol remade its formation after a fashion and set off
toward the galaxy at touring blast.
And in the control room of the flagship three Lensmen brought a very serious conference
to a close.
"You saw what happened to Helmuth's planet," Kinnison's voice was oddly hard, "and I
gave you all I could get of the thought about the destruction of all life on Sol III. A big enough
duodec bomb in the bottom of an ocean would do it. I don't really know anything except that we
hadn't better let them catch us asleep at the switch again—we've got to be on our toes every
second."
And the Gray Lensman, face set and stern, strode off to his quarters.

CHAPTER 2
WIDE-OPEN TWO-WAY

During practically all of the long trip back to earth Kinnison kept pretty much to his
cabin, thinking deeply, blackly, and, he admitted ruefully to himself, to very little purpose. And
at Prime Base, through week after week of its feverish activity, he continued to think. Finally,
however, he was snatched out of his dark abstraction by no less a personage than Surgeon-
Marshal Lacy.
"Snap out of it, lad," that worthy advised, smilingly. "When you concentrate on one thing
too long, you know, the vortices of thought occupy narrower and narrower loci, until finally the
effective volume becomes infinitesimal. Or, mathematically, the then range of cogitation,
integrated between the limits of plus and minus infinity, approaches zero as a limit. . ."
"Huh? What are you talking about?" the Lensman demanded.
"Poor mathematics, perhaps, but sound psychology," Lacy grinned. "It got your
undivided attention, didn't it? That was what I was after. In plain English, if you keep on
thinking around in circles you'll soon be biting yourself in the small of the back. Come on, you
and I are going places."
"Where?"
"To the Grand Ball in honor of the Grand Fleet, my boy— old Doctor Lacy prescribes it
for you as a complete and radical change of atmosphere. Let's go!"
The city's largest ball-room was a blaze of light and color. A thousand polychromatic
lamps flooded their radiance downward through draped bunting upon an even more colorful
throng. Two thousand items of feminine loveliness were there, in raiment whose fabrics were the
boasts of hundreds of planets, whose hues and shades put the spectrum itself to shame. There
were over two thousand men, clad in plain or beribboned or bemedaled full civilian dress, or in