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

to those opposing his advance. Therefore, with every faculty of his newly-enlarged mind
concentrated upon that thought-screened, armored head behind the bellowing gun and the flaring
projectors, Kinnison held his line and forged ahead.
Attentive as he was to Helmuth's thought-screen, the Patrolman was ready when it
weakened slightly and a thought began to seep through, directed at that peculiar ball of force. He
blanketed it savagely, before it could even begin to take form, and attacked the screen so
viciously that the Boskonian had either to restore full coverage instantly or else die there and
then.
Kinnison feared that force-ball no longer. He still did not know what it was; but he had
learned that, whatever its nature might be, it was operated or controlled by thought. Therefore it
was and would remain harmless; for if the pirate chief softened his screen enough to emit a
thought he would never think again.
Doggedly the Lensman drove in, closer and closer. Magnetic clamps locked and held.
Two steel-clad, waning figures rolled into the line of fire of the ravening automatic rifle.
Kinnison's armor, designed and tested to withstand even heavier stuff, held; wherefore he came
through that storm of metal unscathed. Helmuth's, however, even though stronger far than the
ordinary personal armor of space, failed; and thus the Boskonian died.
Blasting himself upright, the Patrolman shot across the inner dome to the control panel
and paused, momentarily baffled. He could not throw the switches controlling the defensive
screens of the gigantic outer dome! His armor, designed for the ultimate of defensive strength,
could not and did not bear any of the small and delicate external mechanisms so characteristic of
the ordinary space-suit. To leave his personal tank at that time and in that environment was
unthinkable; yet he was fast running out of time. A scant fifteen seconds was all that remained
before zero, the moment at which the hellish output of every watt generable by the massed fleet
of the Galactic Patrol would be hurled against those screens in their furiously, ragingly
destructive might. To release the screens after that zero moment would mean his own death,
instantaneous and inevitable.
Nevertheless he could open those circuits—the conservation of Boskonian property
meant nothing to him. He flipped on his own projector and flashed its beam briefly across the
banked panels in front of him. Insulation burst into flame, fairly exploding in its haste to
disintegrate; copper and silver ran in brilliant streams or puffed away in clouds of sparkling
vapor: high-tension arcs ripped, crashed, and crackled among the writhing, dripping, flaring bus-
bars. The shorts burned themselves clear or blew their fuses, every circuit opened, every
Boskonian defense came down; and then, and only then, could Kinnison get into communication
with his friends.
"Haynes!" he thought crisply into his Lens. "Kinnison calling!"
"Haynes acknowledging!" a thought instantly snapped back. "Congrat. . ."
"Hold it! We're not done yet! Have every ship in the Fleet go free at once. Have them all,
except yours, put out full-coverage screens, so that they can't look at this base—that's to keep
'em from thinking into it."
A moment passed. "Done!"
"Don't come in any closer—I'm on my way out to you. Now as to you personally—I don't
like to seem to be giving orders to the Port Admiral, but it may be quite essential that you
concentrate on me, and think of nothing else, for the next few minutes."
"Right! I don't mind taking orders from you." "QX—now we can take things a bit easier."
Kinnison had so arranged matters that no one except himself could think into that stronghold,
and he himself would not. He would not think into that tantalizing enigma, nor toward it, nor
even of it, until he was completely ready to do so. And how many persons, I wonder, really
realize just how much of a feat that was? Realize the sort of mental training required for its
successful performance?