Second stage Lensman by Edward Elmer Smith Read Free Book Online

had his formation made, but he did not like it at all. It was too big, too
    loose, too cumbersome. The Boskonian fleet might appear anywhere, and it would take
    him far, far too long to get any kind of a fighting formation made, anywhere. So he
    worried. Minutes dragged—he wished that the pirates would hurry up and start
    something!
         Kinnison was even less easy in his mind. He was not afraid of negaspheres,
    even if Boskonia should have them; but he was afraid of fortified, mobile planets. The
    super-maulers were big and powerful, of course, but they very definitely were not
    planets; and the big, new idea was mighty hard to jell. He didn't like to bother Thorndyke
    by calling him—the master technician had troubles of his own—but the reports that were
    coming in were none too cheery. The excitation was wrong or the grid action was too
    unstable or the screen potentials were too high or too low or too something. Sometimes
    they got a concentration, but it was just as apt as not to be a spread flood instead of a
    tight beam. To Kinnison, therefore, the minutes fled like seconds—but every minute that
    space remained clear was one more precious minute gained.
         Then, suddenly, it happened. A needle leaped into significant figures. Relays
    clicked, a bright red light flared into being, a gong clanged out its raucous warning. A
    fractional instant later ten thousand other gongs in ten thousand other ships came
    brazenly to life as the discovering speedster automatically sent out its number and
    position; and those other ships—surveyors all—flashed toward that position and dashed
    frantically about. Theirs the task to determine, in the least number of seconds possible,
    the approximate location of the center of emergence.
          For Port Admiral Haynes, canny old tactician that he was, had planned his
    campaign long since. It was standing plain in his tactical tank—to englobe the entire
    space of emergence of the foe and to blast them out of existence before they could
    maneuver. If he could get into formation before the Boskonians appeared it would be a
    simple slaughter—if not, it might be otherwise. Hence seconds counted; and hence he
    had had high-speed computers working steadily for weeks at the computation of
    courses for every possible center of emergence.
         "Get me that center—fast!" Haynes barked at the surveyors, already blasting at
    maximum.
         It came in. The chief computer yelped a string of numbers. Selected loose-leaf
    binders were pulled down, yanked apart, and distributed on the double, leaf by leaf.
    And:
         "Get it over there! Especially the shock-globe!" the Port Admiral yelled.
         For he himself could direct the engagement only in broad; details must be left to
    others. To be big enough to hold in any significant relationship the millions of lights
    representing vessels, fleets, planets, structures, and objectives, the Operations tank of
    the Directrix had to be seven hundred feet in diameter; and it was a sheer physical
    impossibility for any ordinary mind either to perceive that seventeen million cubic feet of
    space as a whole or to make any sense at all out of the stupendously bewildering maze
    of multi-colored lights crawling and flashing therein.
         Kinnison and Worsel had handled Grand Fleet Operations during the battle of
    Jarnevon, but they had discovered that they could have used some help. Four Rigellian
    Lensmen had been training for months for that all-important job, but they were not yet
    ready. Therefore the two old masters and one new one now labored at GFO: three
    tremendous minds, each supplying something that the others lacked. Kinnison of Tellus,
    with his hard, flat driving urge, his unconquerable, unstoppable will to do. Worsel of
    Velantia, with the prodigious reach and grasp which had enabled him, even without the
    Lens, to scan mentally a solar system eleven light-years distant. Tregonsee of Rigel IV,
    with the