Read Online Second stage Lensman by Edward Elmer Smith - Free Book Online

waited around for his
    landing clearance, then slanted in on his assigned slide to the service pits. In the last
    hundred yards, though, he shot off to one side and sat down, plop, broadside on, clear
    over there in the far corner of the field. But he wasn't down but a second, sir. Long
    before anybody could get to him—before the cruisers could put a beam on him,
    even—he blasted off as though the devil was on his tail. Then you came along, sir, but
    we did put a CRX tracer on him. . . ."
         "I did that much, myself," Kinnison stated, morosely. "He stopped just long
    enough to pick up a passenger—my zwilnik, of course—then flitted . . . and you fellows
    let him get away with it."
         "But we couldn't help it, sir," the official protested. "And anyway, he couldn't
    possibly have . . ."
         "He sure could. You'd be surprised no end at what that bimbo can do."
         Then the Dauntless flashed in; not asking but demanding instant right of way.
         "Look around, fellows, if you like, but you won't find a damned thing," Kinnison's
    uncheering conclusion came back as he sprinted toward the dock into which his
    battleship had settled. "The lug hasn't left a loose end dangling yet."
         By the time the great Patrol ship had cleared the stratosphere Kinnison's CRX,
    powerful and tenacious as it was, was just barely registering a line. But that was
    enough. Henry Henderson, Master Pilot, stuck the Dauntless' needle nose into that line
    and shoved into the driving projectors every watt of that those Brobdingnagian creations
    would take.
         They had been following the zwilnik for three days now, Kinnison reflected, and
    his CRX's were none too strong yet. They were overhauling him mighty slowly; and the
    Dauntless was supposed to be the fastest thing in space. That bucket up ahead had
    plenty of legs—must have been souped up to the limit. This was apt to be a long chase,
    but he'd get that bozo if he had to chase him on a geodesic line along the hyper-
    dimensional curvature of space clear back to Tellus where he started from!
         They did not have to circumnavigate total space, of course, but they did almost
    leave the galaxy before they could get the fugitive upon their plates. The stars were
    thinning out fast; but still, hazily before them in a vastness of distance, there stretched a
    milky band of opalescence.
         "What's coming up, Hen— a rift?" Kinnison asked.
         "Uh-huh, Rift Ninety Four," the pilot replied. "And if I remember right, that arm up
    ahead is Dunstan's region and it has never been explored. I'll have the chart-room
    check up on it."
         "Never mind; I'll go check it myself—I'm curious about this whole thing."
         Unlike any smaller vessel, the Dauntless was large enough so that she
    could—and hence as a matter of course did—carry every space-chart issued by all the
    various Boards and Offices and Bureaus concerned with space, astronomy, astrogation,
    and planetography. She had to, for there were usually minds aboard which were apt at
    any time to become intensely and unpredictably interested in anything, anywhere.
    Hence it did not take Kinnison long to obtain what little information there was.
          The vacancy they were approaching was Rift Ninety Four, a vast space,
    practically empty of stars, lying between the main body of the galaxy and a minor
    branch of one of its prodigious spiral arms. The opalescence ahead was the branch
    —Dunstan's Region. Henderson was right; it had never been explored.
         The Galactic Survey, which has not even yet mapped at all completely the whole
    of the First Galaxy proper, had of course done no systematic work upon such outlying
    sections as the spiral arms. Some such regions were well known and well mapped, it is
    true; either because its own population, independently developing means of space-
    flight, had come into contact with our Civilization upon its own initiative or