Takeoff! by Randall Garrett Read Free Book Online Page B

each ravening beam smashing into, through, and past the already weakened shields of the Boskonian battleships. Like tissue paper in the flame of an oxyhydrogen torch, the dozen ships dissolved into whitehot gas.
    As far as his detectors could scan, Ginnison could see that there was not a single threat in the ether about the Dentless.
    “Navigator,” he ordered crisply, “continue toward Cadilax.”

    From his coign of vantage, so many parsecs away, Banlon stared in unbelief at his instruments, knowing to the full what they had reported. But after that first momentary shock, the ultrahard logic of his ultracold brain reasserted itself.
    “Shit,” he thought. And, flipping his speedster end-for-end, he turned around and ran.

    Came, betimes, to Cadilax, a bum.
    He showed up, unobtrusively, in the streets of Ardis, the capital of that disturbed planet. He was, apparently, a man approaching sixty—graying, flabby, rheumy-eyed, alcoholic, and not too bright. He was so typical of his kind that no one noticed him; he was merely one of ten thousand such who wandered about the streets of the various cities of Cadilax. He hung around the bars and bistros of the spaceport, cadging drinks, begging for small change, leering innocuously at the hookers, and telling stories of the days of his youth, when he was “somebody.” He claimed to have been a doctor, a lawyer, a pimp, a confidence man, a bartender, a judge, a police officer, a religious minister, and other such members of highly respected occupations, but he could never produce any proof that he had ever been anyone of them.
    And no one expected him to, for that was the sine qua non of the spaceport bum. He was what he was, and no one expected more of him. He called himself Goniff, and, because of his vaguely erudite manner of speech, soon became known as “Professor” Goniff.
    He was never completely sober, and never completely drunk.
    The student of this history has, of course, already surmised that beneath this guise lay the keen mind and brain of Gimble Ginnison, Gray Lensman, and he is right.
    Throughout this time, Ginnison was searching out and finding a wight bedight Gauntluth.
    It had taken time. The Gray Lensman’s mind had probed into the depths of degradation, the valleys of vileness, the caverns of corruption, in the dregs of the noxious minds of the foulest folk of a planet before finding that name and that individual. He might have found him earlier, had he not been enjoying himself so much.
    At first, only vaguely had he been able to construct from the clues available a picture of the all-powerful drug baron and pirate who ruthlessly ruled the underworld of Cadilax. Then, as time went on and more and more data came in, his visualization of Gauntluth became complete.
    Gauntluth was tall, lean, and tough, with the all-pervading cadaverous blue of a Kalonian. His headquarters were in the Queen Ardis Hotel, the biggest luxury hotel on the planet, which catered only to the top fringe of the upper crust of the ultra-ultra.
    There, in his superbly screened and shielded suite of offices, Gauntluth controlled, through an intricate webwork of communications’ and by a highly efficiently organized army of minions, the drug traffic of half a dozen solar systems.
    For long Ginninson pondered, and came to the obvious conclusion that “Professor” Goniff could in no wise gain admission to the elite society of the Queen Ardis Hotel. Therefore Goniff the bum vanished.
    Instead, it was Lester Q. Twodyce, cosmopolitan, and wealthy playboy, who checked into the Queen Ardis with an entourage of flunkies and yes-men, not one of whom could easily be detected as an officer of the Galactic Patrol. As was de rigeur on Cadilax, everyone of Twodyce’s men wore a thought-screen.
    Carefully, step by step, Ginnison laid his trap. Through the highest ranks of Gauntluth’s organization, it became known that Lester Q. Twodyce had something valuable that he was eager to sell. It became