“Kinnison to Admiral Clayton. None,” the Port Admiral replied, as formally, then went on via Lens: “No comment or criticism to make, Alex. You fellows have done a job so far and you’ll keep on doing one. How much detection have you got out?”

  “Twelve detets—three globes of diesels. If we sit here and do nothing the boys will get edgy and go stale, so if you and Virge agree we’ll give ’em some practice. Lord knows they need it, and it’ll keep ’em on their toes. But about the Blacks—they may be figuring on delaying any action until we’ve had time to crack from boredom. What’s your idea on that?”

  “I’ve been worried about the same thing. Practice will help, but whether enough or not I don’t know. What do you think, Virge? Will they hold it up deliberately or strike fast?”

  “Fast,” the First Lensman replied, promptly and definitely. “As soon as they possibly can, for several reasons. They don’t know our real strength, any more than we know theirs. They undoubtedly believe, however, the same as we do, that they are more efficient than we are and have the larger force. By their own need of practice they will know ours. They do not attach nearly as much importance to morale as we do; by the very nature of their regime they can’t. Also, our open challenge will tend very definitely to force their hands, since face-saving is even more important to them than it is to us. They will strike as soon as they can and as hard as they can.”

  Grand Fleet maneuvers were begun, but in a day or so the alarms came blasting in. The enemy had been detected; coming in, as the previous Black Fleet had come, from the direction of Coma Berenices. Calculating machines clicked and whirred; orders were flashed, and a brief string of numbers; ships by the hundreds and the thousands flashed into their assigned positions.

  Or, more precisely, almost into them. Most of the navigators and pilots had not had enough practice yet to hit their assigned positions exactly on the first try, since a radical change in axial direction was involved, but they did pretty well; a few minutes of juggling and jockeying were enough. Clayton and Schweikert used a little caustic language—via Lens and to their fellow Lensmen only, of course—but Samms and Kinnison were well enough pleased. The time of formation had been very satisfactorily short and the cone was smooth, symmetrical, and of beautifully uniform density.

  The preliminary formation was a cone, not a cylinder. It was not a conventional Cone of Battle in that it was not of standard composition, was too big, and had altogether too many ships for its size. It was, however, of the conventional shape, and it was believed that by the time the enemy could perceive any significant differences it would be too late for him to do anything about it. The cylinder would be forming about that time, anyway, and it was almost believed—at least it was strongly hoped—that the enemy would not have the time or the knowledge or the equipment to do anything about that, either.

  Kinnison grinned to himself as his mind, en rapport with Clayton’s, watched the enemy’s Cone of Battle enlarge upon the Admiral’s conning plate. It was big, and powerful; the Galactic Patrol’s publicly-known forces would have stood exactly the chance of the proverbial snowball in the nether regions. It was not, however, the Port Admiral thought, big enough to form an efficient cylinder, or to handle the Patrol’s real force in any fashion—and unless they shifted within the next second or two it would be too late for the enemy to do anything at all.

  As though by magic about ninety-five percent of the Patrol’s tremendous cone changed into a tightly-packed double cylinder. This maneuver was much simpler than the previous one, and had been practiced to perfection. The mouth of the cone closed in and lengthened; the closed end opened out and shortened. Tractors and pressors leaped from ship to ship, binding the whole myriad of hitherto discrete units into a single structure as solid, even comparatively as to size, as a cantilever bridge. And instead of remaining quiescent, waiting to be attacked, the cylinder flashed forward, inertialess, at maximum blast.

  Throughout the years the violence, intensity, and sheer brute power of offensive weapons had increased steadily. Defensive armament had kept step. One fundamental fact, however, had not changed throughout the ages and has not changed yet. Three or more units of given power have always been able to conquer one unit of the same power, if engagement could be forced and no assistance could be given; and two units could practically always do so. Fundamentally, therefore, strategy always has been and still is the development of new artifices and techniques by virtue of which two or more of our units may attack one of theirs; the while affording the minimum of opportunity for them to retaliate in kind.

  The Patrol’s Grand Fleet flashed forward, almost exactly along the axis of the Black cone; right where the enemy wanted it—or so he thought. Straight into the yawning mouth, erupting now a blast of flame beside which the wildest imaginings of Inferno must pale into insignificance; straight along that raging axis toward the apex, at the terrific speed of the two directly opposed velocities of flight. But, to the complete consternation of the Black High Command, nothing much happened. For, as has been pointed out, that cylinder was not of even approximately normal composition. In fact, there was not a normal war-vessel in it. The outer skin and both ends of the cylinder were purely defensive. Those vessels, packed so closely that their repellor fields actually touched, were all screen; none of them had a beam hot enough to light a match. Conversely, the inner layer, or “Liner,” was composed of vessels that were practically all offense. They had to be protected at every point—but how they could ladle it out!

  The leading and trailing edges of the formation—the ends of the gigantic pipe, so to speak—would of course bear the brunt of the Black attack, and it was this factor that had given the Patrol’s strategists the most serious concern. Wherefore the first ten and the last six double rings of ships were special indeed. They were all screen—nothing else. They were drones, operated by remote control, carrying no living thing. If the Patrol losses could be held to eight double rings of ships at the first pass and four at the second—theoretical computations indicated losses of six and two—Samms and his fellows would be well content.

  All of the Patrol ships had, of course, the standard equipment of so-called “violet,” “green,” and “red” fields, as well as duodecaplylatomate and ordinary atomic bombs, dirigible torpedoes and transporters, slicers, polycyclic drills, and so on; but in this battle the principal reliance was to be placed upon the sheer, brutal, overwhelming power of what had been called the “macro beam”—now simply the “beam.” Furthermore, in the incredibly incandescent frenzy of the chosen field of action—the cylinder was to attack the cone at its very strongest part—no conceivable material projectile could have lasted a single microsecond after leaving the screens of force of its parent vessel. It could have flown fast enough; ultra-beam trackers could have steered it rapidly enough and accurately enough; but before it could have traveled a foot, even at ultra-light speed, it would have ceased utterly to be. It would have been resolved into its subatomic constituent particles and waves. Nothing material could exist, except instantaneously, in the field of force filling the axis of the Black’s Cone of Battle; a field beside which the exact center of a multi-billion-volt flash of lightning would constitute a dead area.

  That field, however, encountered no material object. The Patrol’s “screeners,” packed so closely as to have a four hundred percent overlap, had been designed to withstand precisely that inconceivable environment. Practically all of them withstood it. And in a fraction of a second the hollow forward end of the cylinder engulfed, pipe-wise, the entire apex of the enemy’s war-cone, and the hitherto idle “sluggers” of the cylinder’s liner went to work.

  Each of those vessels had one heavy pressor beam, each having the same push as every other, directed inward, toward the cylinder’s axis, and backward at an angle of fifteen degrees from the perpendicular line between ship and axis. Therefore, wherever any Black ship entered the Patrol’s cylinder or however, it was driven to and held at the axis and forced backward along that axis. None of them, however, got very far. They were perforce in single file; one ship opposing at least one solid ring of giant sluggers who did not have to concern themselves with defense, but could pour every iota of their tremendous resources into offensive beams. Thus the odds were not merely two or three to one; but never less than eighty, and very frequently over two hundred to one.

  Under the impact of those unimaginable torrents of force the screens of the engulfed vessels flashed once, practically instantaneously through the spectrum, and went down. Whether they had two or three or four courses made no difference—in fact, even the ultra-speed analyzers of the observers could not tell. Then, a couple of microseconds later, the wall-shields—the strongest fabrics of force developed by man up to that time—also failed. Then those ravenous fields of force struck bare, unprotected metal, and every molecule, inorganic and organic, of ships and contents alike, disappeared in a bursting flare of energy so raw and so violent as to stagger even those who had brought it into existence. It was certainly vastly more than a mere volatilization; it was deduced later that the detonating unstable isotopes of the Black’s own bombs, in the frightful temperatures already existing in the Patrol’s quasi-solid beams, had initiated a chain reaction which had resulted in the fissioning of a considerable proportion of the atomic nuclei of usually completely stable elements!

  The cylinder stopped; the Lensmen took stock. The depth of erosion of the leading edge had averaged almost exactly six double rings of drones. In places the sixth ring was still intact; in others, which had encountered unusually concentrated beaming, the seventh was gone. Also, a fraction of one percent of the manned war-vessels had disappeared. Brief though the time of engagement had been, the enemy had been able to concentrate enough beams to burn a few holes through the walls of the attacking cylinder.

  It had not been hoped that more than a few hundreds of Black vessels could be blown out of the ether at this first pass. General Staff had been sure, however, that the heaviest and most dangerous ships, including those carrying the enemy’s High Command, would be among them. The midsection of the apex of the conventional Cone of Battle had always been the safest place to be; therefore that was where the Black admirals had been and therefore they no longer lived.

  In a few seconds it became clear that if any Black High Command existed, it was not in shape to function efficiently. Some of the enemy ships were still blasting, with little or no concerted effort, at the regulation cone which the cylinder had left behind; a few were attempting to get into some kind of a formation, possibly to attack the Patrol’s cylinder. Indecision was visible and rampant.

  To turn that tremendous cylindrical engine of destruction around would have been a task of hours, but it was not necessary. Instead, each vessel cut its tractors and pressors, spun end for end, reconnected, and retraced almost exactly its previous course; cutting out and blasting into nothingness another “plug” of Black warships. Another reversal, another dash; and this time, so disorganized were the foes and so feeble the beaming, not a single Patrol vessel was lost. The Black fleet, so proud and so conquering of mien a few minutes before, had fallen completely apart.

  “That’s enough, Rod, don’t you think?” Samms thought then. “Please order Clayton to cease action, so that we can hold a parley with their senior officers.”

  “Parley, hell!” Kinnison’s answering thought was a snarl. “We’ve got ’em going—mop ’em up before they can pull themselves together! Parley be damned!”

  “Beyond a certain point military action becomes indefensible butchery, of which our Galactic Patrol will never be guilty. That point has now been reached. If you do not agree with me, I’ll be glad to call a Council meeting to decide which of us is right.”

  “That isn’t necessary. You’re right—that’s one reason I’m not First Lensman.” The Port Admiral, fury and fire ebbing from his mind, issued orders; the Patrol forces hung motionless in space. “As President of the Galactic Council, Virge, take over.”

  Spy-rays probed and searched; a communicator beam was sent. Virgil Samms spoke aloud, in the lingua franca of deep space.

  “Connect me, please, with the senior officer of your fleet.”

  There appeared upon Samms’ plate a strong, not unhandsome face; deep-stamped with the bitter hopelessness of a strong man facing certain death.

  “You’ve got us. Come on and finish us.”

  “Some such indoctrination was to be expected, but I anticipate no trouble in convincing you that you have been grossly misinformed in everything you have been told concerning us; our aims, our ethics, our morals, and our standards of conduct. There are, I assume, other surviving officers of your rank, although of lesser seniority?”

  “There are ten other vice-admirals, but I am in command. They will obey my orders or die.”

  “Nevertheless, they shall be heard. Please go inert, match our intrinsic velocity, and come aboard, all eleven of you. We wish to explore with all of you the possibilities of a lasting peace between our worlds.”

  “Peace? Bah! Why lie?” The Black commander’s expression did not change. “I know what you are and what you do to conquered races. We prefer a clean, quick death in your beams to the kind you deal out in your torture rooms and experimental laboratories. Come ahead—I intend to attack you as soon as I can make a formation.”

  “I repeat, you have been grossly, terribly, shockingly misinformed.” Samms’ voice was quiet and steady; his eyes held those of the other. “We are civilized men, not barbarians or savages. Does not the fact that we ceased hostilities so soon mean anything to you?”

  For the first time the stranger’s face changed subtly, and Samms pressed the slight advantage.

  “I see it does. Now if you will converse with me mind to mind. …” The First Lensman felt for the man’s ego and began to tune to it, but this was too much.

  “I will not!” The Black put up a solid block. “I will have nothing to do with your cursed Lens. I know what it is and will have none of it!”

  “Oh, what’s the use, Virge!” Kinnison snapped. “Let’s get on with it!”

  “A great deal of use, Rod,” Samms replied, quietly. “This is a turning-point. I must be right—I can’t be that far wrong,” and he again turned his attention to the enemy commander.

  “Very well, sir, we will continue to use spoken language. I repeat, please come aboard with your ten fellow vice-admirals. You will not be asked to surrender. You will retain your side-arms—as long as you make no attempt to use them. Whether or not we come to any agreement, you will be allowed to return unharmed to your vessels before the battle is resumed.”

  “What? Side-arms? Returned? You swear it?”

  “As President of the Galactic Council, in the presence of the highest officers of the Galactic Patrol as witnesses, I swear it.”

  “We will come aboard.”

  “Very well. I will have ten other Lensmen and officers here with me.”

  The Boise, of course, inerted first; followed by the Chicago and nine of the tremendous teardrops from Bennett. Port Admiral Kinnison and nine other Lensmen joined Samms in the Boise’s con room; the tight formation of eleven Patrol ships blasted in unison in the space-courtesy of meeting the equally tight formation of Black warships halfway in the matter of intrinsic velocity.

  Soon the two little sub-fleets were motionless in respect to each other. Eleven Black gigs were launched. Eleven Black vice-admirals came aboard, to the accompaniment of the full military honors customarily granted to visiting admirals of friendly powers. Each was armed with what seemed to be an exact duplicate of the Patrol’s own current blaster; Lewiston, Mark Seventeen. In the lead strode the tall, heavy, gray-haired man with whom Samms had been dealing; still defiant, still sullen, still concealing sternly his sheer desperation. His block was still on, full strength.

  The man next in line was much younger than the leader, much less wrought up, much more intent. Samms felt for this man’s ego, tuned to it, and got the shock of his life. This Black vice-admiral’s mind was not at all what he had expected to encounter—it was, in every respect, of Lensman grade!

  “Oh … how? You are not speaking, and … I see … the Lens … the Lens!” The stranger’s mind was for seconds an utterly indescribable turmoil in which relief, gladness, and high anticipation struggled for supremacy.

  In the next few seconds, even before the visitors had reached their places at the conference table, Virgil Samms and Corander of Petrine exchanged thoughts which would require many thousands of words to express; only a few of which are necessary here.

  “The Lens … I have dreamed of such a thing, without hope of realization or possibility. How we have been misled! They are, then, actually available upon your world, Samms of Tellus?”

  “Not exactly, and not at all generally,” and Samms explained as he had explained so many times before. “You will wear one sooner than you think. But as to ending this warfare. You survivors are practically all natives of your own world. Petrine?”

  “Not ‘practically,’ we are Petrinos all. The ‘teachers’ were all in the Center. Many remain upon Petrine and its neighboring worlds, but none remain alive here.”

  “Ohlanser, then, who assumed command, is also a Petrino? So hardheaded, I had assumed otherwise. He will be a stumbling-block. Is he actually in supreme command?”

  “Only by and with our consent, under such astounding circumstances as these. He is a reactionary, of the old, diehard, war-dog school. He would ordinarily be in supreme command and would be supported by the teachers if any were here; but I will challenge his authority and theirs; standing upon my right to command my own fleet as I see fit. So will, I think, several others. So go ahead with your meeting.”