"Smith, E E 'Doc' - Lensman 05 - Second Stage Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

"Told you!"
"Put us back!"
It was an entirely unpremeditated, unconscious duet. The two old officers were completely dumbfounded. Arisians never had come out of their shells, they never would. Infinitely less disturbing would have been the authentic tidings that a brick house had fallen upstairs. They had nursed this romance along so carefully, had timed it so exactly, and now it had gone p-f-f-f-t-it had been taken out of their hands entirely. That thought flashed through their minds first. Then, as catastrophe follows lightning's flash, the real knowledge exploded within their consciousnesses that, in some unguessable fashion or other, the whole Boskonian campaign had gone p-f-f-f-t, too.
Port Admiral Haynes, master tactician, reviewed in his keen strategist's mind every phase of the recent struggle, without being able to find a flaw in it.
"There wasn't a loop-hole anywhere," he said aloud. "Where do they figure we slipped up?"
"We didn't slip-I slipped," Kinnison stated, flatly. "When we took BomingerЦthe fat Chief Zwilnik of Radelix, you knowЦI took a bop on the head to learn that Boskone had more than one string per bow. Observers, independent, for every station at all important. I learned that fact thoroughly then, I thought. At least, we figured on Boskone's having lines of communication past, not through, his Regional Directors, such as Prellin of Bronseca. Since I changed my line of attack at that point, I did not need to consider whether or not Crowninshield of Tressilia III was by-passed in the same way; and when I had worked my way up through Jalte in his star-cluster to Boskone itself, on Jarnevon, I had forgotten the concept completely. Its possibility didn't even occur to me. That's where I fell down."
"I still don't see it!" Haynes protested. "Boskone was the top!"
"Yeah?" Kinnison asked, pointedly. "That's what I thoughtЦbut prove it."
"Oh." The Port Admiral hesitated. "We had no reason to think otherwise... looked at in that light, this intervention would seem to be conclusive... but before that there was no..."
"There were so," Kinnison contradicted, "but I didn't see them then. That's where my brain went sour; I should have seen them. Little things, mostly, but significant. Not so much positive as negative indices. Above all, there was nothing whatever to indicate that Boskone actually was the top. That idea was the product of my ownЦwishful and very low-grade thinking, with no basis or foundation in fact or in theory. And now," he concluded bitterly, "because my skull is so thick that it takes an idea a hundred years to filter through itЦbecause a sheer, bare fact has to be driven into my brain with a Valerian maul before I can grasp itЦwe're sunk without a trace."
"Wait a minute, Kim, we aren't sunk yet," the girl advised, shrewdly. "The fact that, for the first time in history, an Arisian has taken the initiative in communicating with a human being, means something bigЦreally big. Mentor does not indulge in what he calls 'loose and muddy' thinking. Every part of every thought he sent carries meaningЦplenty of meaning."
"What do you mean?" As one, the three men asked substantially the same question; Kinnison, by virtue of his faster reactions, being perhaps half a syllable in the lead.
"I don't know, exactly," Clarrissa admitted. "I've got only an ordinary mind, and it's firing on half its jets or less right now. But I do know that his thought was 'almost' irreparable, and that he meant precisely thatЦnothing else. If it had been wholly irreparable he not only would have expressed his thought that way, but he would have stopped you before you destroyed Jarnevon. I know that. Apparently it would have become wholly irreparable if we had got..." she faltered, blushing, then went on, "...if we had kept on about our own personal affairs. That's why he stopped us. We can win out, he meant, if you keep on working. It's your oyster, Kim... it's up to you to open it. You can do it, tooЦI just know you can."
"But why didn't he stop you before you fellows smashed Boskone?" Lacy demanded, exasperated.
"I hope you're right, CrisЦit sounds reasonable," Kinnison said, thoughtfully. Then, to Lacy:
"That's an easy one to answer, doctor. Because knowledge that comes the hard way is knowledge that really sticks with you. If he had drawn me a diagram before, it wouldn't have helped, the next time I get into a jam. This way it will. I've got to learn how to think, if it cracks my skull.
"Really think," he went on, more to himself than to the other three. "To think so it counts."
"Well, what are we going to do about it?" Haynes wasЦhe had to be, to get where he was and to stay where he wasЦquick on the uptake. "Or, more specifically, what are you going to do and what am I going to do?"
"What I am going to do will take a bit of mulling over," Kinnison replied, slowly. "Find some more leads and trace them up, is the best that occurs to me right now. Your job and procedure are rather clearer. You remarked out in space that Boskone knew that Tellus was very strongly held. That statement, of course, is no longer true."
"Huh?" Haynes half-pulled himself up from the davenport, then sank back. "Why?" he demanded.
"Because we used the negasphereЦa negative-matter bomb of planetary anti-massЦto wipe out Jalte's planet, and because we smashed Jarnevon between two colliding planets," the Lensman explained, concisely. "Can the present defenses of Tellus cope with either one of those offensives?"
"I'm afraid not... no," the Port Admiral admitted. "But..."
"We can admit no 'buts', admiral," Kinnison declared, with grim finality. "Having used those weapons, we must assume that the Boskonian scientists -we'll have to keep on calling them 'Boskonians', I suppose, until we find a truer nameЦhad recorders on them and have now duplicated them. Tellus must be made safe against anything we have ever used; against, as well, everything that, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, we can conceive of the enemy using."
"You're right... I can see that," Haynes nodded.
"We've been underestimating them right along," Kinnison went on. "At first we thought they were merely organized outlaws and pirates. Then, when it was forced upon us that they could match usЦovermatch us in some thingsЦwe still wouldn't admit that they must be as large and as wide-spread as we areЦgalactic in scope. We know now that they were wider-spread than we are. Inter-galactic. They penetrated into our galaxy, riddled it, before we knew that theirs was inhabited or inhabitable. Right?"
"To a hair, although I never thought of it in exactly that way before."
"None of us haveЦmental cowardice. And they have the advantage," Kinnison continued, inexorably, "in knowing that our Prime Base is on Tellus; whereas, if Jarnevon was not in fact theirs, we have no idea whatever where it is. And another point. Was that fleet of theirs a planetary outfit?"
"Well, Jarnevon was a big planet, and the Eich were a mighty warlike race."
"Quibbling a bit, aren't you, chief?"
"Uh-huh," Haynes admitted, somewhat sheepishly. "The probability is very great that no one planet either built or maintained that fleet."
"And that leads us to expect what?"
"Counter-attack. In force. Everything they can shove this way. However, they've got to rebuild their fleet, besides designing and building the new stuff. We'll have time enough, probably, if we get started right now."
"But, after all, Jarnevon may have been their vital spot," Lacy submitted.
"Even if that were true, which it probably isn't," the now thoroughly convinced Port Admiral sided in with Kinnison, "it doesn't mean a thing, Sawbones. If they should blow Tellus out of space it wouldn't kill the Galactic Patrol. It would hurt it, of course, but it wouldn't cripple it seriously. The other planets of Civilization could, and certainly would, go ahead with it."
"My thought exactly," from Kinnison. "I check you to the proverbial nineteen decimals."
"Well, there's a lot to do and I'd better be getting at it." Haynes and Lacy got up to go. "See you in my office when convenient?"
"I'll be there as soon as I tell Clarrissa goodbye."
At about the same time that Haynes and Lacy went to Nurse MacDougall's room, Worsel the Velantian arrowed downward through the atmosphere toward a certain flat roof. Leather wings shot out with a snap and in a blast of windЦVelantians can stand eleven Tellurian gravitiesЦhe came in his customary appalling landing and dived unconcernedly down a nearby shaft. Into a corridor, along which he wriggled blithely to the office of his old friend, Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke.
"Verne, I have been thinking," he announced, as he coiled all but about six feet of his sinuous length into a tight spiral upon the rug and thrust out half a dozen weirdly stalked eyes.
"That's nothing new," Thorndyke countered. No human mind can sympathize with or even remotely understand the Velantian passion for solid weeks of intense, uninterrupted concentration upon a single thought. "What about this time? The whichness of the why?"
"That is the trouble with you Tellurians," Worsel grumbled. "Not only do you not know how to think, but you..."
"Hold on!" Thorndyke interrupted, unimpressed. "If you've got anything to say, old snake, why not say it? Why circumnavigate total space before you get to the point?"
"I have been thinking about thought..."
"So what?" the technician derided. "That's even worse. That's a logarithmic spiral if there ever was one."
"ThoughtЦand Kinnison," Worsel declared, with finality.
"Kinnison? OhЦthat's different. I'm interestedЦvery much so. Go ahead."
"And his weapons. His DeLameters, you know."
"No, I don't know, and you know I don't know. What about them?"
"They are so... so... so obvious." The Velantian finally found the exact thought he wanted. "So big, and so clumsy, and so obtrusive. So inefficient, so wasteful of power. No subtletyЦno finesse."
"But that's far and away the best hand-weapon that has ever been developed!" Thorndyke protested.