A smile twisted Gauntluth"s face. "Fool!" he gritted harshly under his breath.

He continued to watch as Twodyce came to the outer door and activated the announcer. He activated the door-opener. "Come in, Mr. Twodyce," he spoke into a microphone. "Down the hall and first door to your left."

Gimble Ginnison, fully alert, strode down the corridor and opened the door. Alone behind his desk sat the unsuspecting Kalonian.

"I perceive," said the zwilnik, [A zwilnik is anyone connected with the drug trade.] "that you have brought the thionite with you."

"I have," said the Lensman. "Have you the payment ready?"

"Certainly. Half in bar platinum, half in Patrol credits, as specified. But first, of course, I must test the thionite."

"First I test the platinum," said Twodyce impa.s.sively.

Gauntluth blinked. "We seem to be at an impa.s.se," he murmured. "However, I think I see a way around it. Know, Twodyce, that you stand now in the focus of a complex of robotic devices which, with rays and beams of tremendous power, will reduce you to a crisp unless you hand over that thionite container instantly ."

""Since it is inevitable," Ginnison said calmly, ""I might as well enjoy it." He carefully put the thionite container on Gauntluth"s desk.

Gauntluth needed no further check. Directing his thought toward a lump of force in a nearby corner of the room, he sent a message to Jugavine.

This was the moment for which Ginnison had been waiting. In an instant, he effortlessly took over the zwilnik"s [A zwilnik is still a zwilnik.] mind. He allowed Gauntluth to send the message, since it would only further confuse all those concerned. Gauntluth reported in full to Meichfrite that he had, indeed, obtained a goodly supply of thionite.

"Excellent," the cold thought returned. "There will be more coming. End communication."

By main force and awkwardness, Ginnison held Gauntluth"s mind in thrall. He now had his second line to the Boskonian base, but Gauntluth, although taken by surprise at first, was now fighting Ginnison"s mental control with every mega-erg of his hard Kalonian mind.

"Think you can succeed, even now?" sneered the still-rigid Kalonian mentally. And, with a tremendous effort of will, he moved a pinkie a fraction of a millimeter to cover a photocell. Every alarm in the building went off.

Ginnison"s mind clamped down instantly to paralyze the hapless zwilnik. [See above.] With a mirthless smile on his face, Ginnison said: "I permitted that as a gesture of futility. You did not, as I suggested, contemplate a hamburger."

"Bah!" came Gauntluth"s thought. "That childishness?"

"Not childishness," said the Lensman coldly. "A hamburger is so constructed that most of the meat is hidden by the bun. My resources are far greater than those which appear around the edge."

Then Ginnison invaded Gauntluth"s mind and took every iota of relevant information therein, following which, he hurled a bolt of mental energy calculated to slay any living thing. Perforce, Gauntluth ceased to be a living thing.

Meanwhile, from a hidden and shielded barracks in a subbas.e.m.e.nt of the Queen Ardis came a full squadron of armed and armored s.p.a.ce-thugs, swarming up stairways and elevators to reach the late Gauntluth"s suite. Closer, and, at this point in s.p.a.ce and time, far more dangerous, were the DeLameter-armed, thought-screened executives and plug-uglies who were even now battering down the doors of the suite.

Calmly and with deliberation, Ginnison flashed a thought to Woozle: "HE-E-E-ELP!"

"At speed, Ginnison," came the reply.

Ginnison went into action. s.n.a.t.c.hing the hermetically sealed thionite container from the desk at which lay the cooling corpse of Gauntluth, he broke the seal and emptied the contents into the intake vent of the air conditioner. He had, of course, taken the precaution of putting anti-thionite plugs in his nostrils; all he had to do was to keep his mouth shut and he would be perfectly safe.

The impalpable purple powder permeated the atmosphere of the hotel. There was enough of the active principle of that deadly drug to turn on fifty million people; since the slightest overdose could kill, every person in the hotel not wearing anti-thionite plugs or s.p.a.ce armor died in blissful ecstasy. Most of Gauntluth"s thugs were wearing one or the other, but at least the Galactic Patrol need no longer worry about interference from innocent bystanders.

With lightning speed, Ginnison grabbed a heavy-caliber, water-cooled machine rifle that just happened to be standing near Gauntluth"s desk, swiveled it to face the doors of the office, and waited.

At the same moment, a borazon-hard, bronze-berylliumsteel-prowed landing craft smashed into the side of the Hotel Queen Ardis at the fifteenth floor. Steel girders, ferroconcrete walls, and brick facing alike splattered aside as that hard-driven, specially-designed s.p.a.ce boat, hitting its reverse jets at the last second to bring it to a dead halt, crashed into and through the bridal suite. The port slammed open and from it leaped, strode, jumped and strutted a company of Dutch Valerians in full s.p.a.ce armor, swinging their mighty thirty-pound s.p.a.ce axes.

No bifurcate race, wherever situate, will voluntarily face a Valerian in battle. Those mighty warriors, bred in a gravitational field three times that of Tellus, have no ruth for any of Civilization"s foes. The smallest Valerian can, in full armor, do a standing high jump of nearly fifteen feet in a field of one Tellurian gravity; he can feint, parry, lunge, swing, and duck with a speed utterly impossible for any of the lesser breeds of man. Like all jocks, they are not too bright. Led by Lieutenant Hess von Baschenvolks, they charged in to block off the armed and armored s.p.a.ce-thugs who were heading toward the top floor. As they charged in, the Lieutenant shouted their battle-cry .

"Kill! Bash! Smash! Cut! Hack! Destroy! Bleed, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! Bleed and die!" And, of course, they did.

A thirty-pound s.p.a.ce axe driven by the muscles of a Valerian can cut its way through any armor.

Heads fell; arms were lopped off; gallons of gore flowed over the expensive carpetry. Leaving behind them dozens of corpses, the Valerians charged upward, toward the suite of offices where the Gray Lensman awaited the a.s.sault of Gauntluth"s men, fingers poised, ready to press the hair triggers of the heavy machine rifle.

The news of the attack, however, reached those winsome wights long before the Valerians did.

They knew that, unarmored as they were, they stood no chance against those Patrolmen. They headed for the roof, where powerful "copters awaited them for their getaway.

It was not until they were all on the roof that the logons, released from the special "copter less than a kilometer away, and individually controlled by the mighty mind of Gimble Ginnison, launched their attack. The zwilnik [Forget it.] executives and plug-uglies had no chance. Only a few managed to draw and fire their ray guns, and even those few missed their targets. Within a s.p.a.ce of seconds, the entire group had been slashed, cut, scratched, bitten, killed, and half-eaten by the winged horrors that had been released upon them.

In Gauntluth"s office, Ginnison waited behind the machine rifle, his fingers still poised on the hair-triggers. The door smashed and fell. But Ginnison recognized the bulky s.p.a.ce-armored eight-foot figure that loomed before him. His hands came away from the triggers as he said: "Hi, Hess!"

"Duuuhh...Hi, Boss," said Lieutenant Hess von Baschenvolks.

In a totally black, intrinsically undetectable, ultrapowered speedster, towing three negaspheres of planetary antima.s.s, Gimble Ginnison cautiously approached the hollow sphere of light-obliterating dust which surrounded the dread planet Jugavine of the Meich.

With his second line of communication, it had been a simple job to locate exactly and precisely the planet which had been the source of the disruption which had hit the planet Cadilax.

Further, that mental communication had given Ginnison all the information he needed to wipe out this pernicious pesthole of pediculous parasites on the body politic of Civilization.

The negaspheres were an integral part of the plan.

The negasphere was, and is, a complete negation of matter. To it, a push is, or becomes, a pull, and vice versa. N o radiation of whatever kind can escape from or be reflected by its utterly black surface. It is dense beyond imagining; even a negasphere of planetary antima.s.s is less than a kilometer in diameter.

When a negasphere strikes ordinary matter, the two cancel out, bringing into being vast quant.i.ties of ultrahard and very deadly radiation. A negasphere is, by its very nature, inherently indetectable by any form of radar or spy-ray beam. Even extra-sensory perception reels dizzyingly away from that vast infinitude of absolute negation..

Like the Bergenholm, the negasphere can never really make up its mind about gravity; gravity is, was, and always has been a pull, and it should act as a push against a negasphere; since it does not do so, we must conclude that there is something peculiar about the mathematics of the negasphere.

It is to Ginnison"s credit that he had perceived this subtle, but inalterable, anomaly.

Into the hollow cloud of black interstellar dust that surrounded frigid Jugavine, there was but one entrance, and into that entrance the Gray Lensman"s speedster, towing with tractors and pressors those three deadly negaspheres, wended its intricate way.

In his office, the Starboard Admiral glowered. "I don"t like it. Ginnison should have taken the full fleet with him."

The personage he was addressing was Sir Houston Carbarn, the most brilliant mathematical physicist in the known universe. He was one of a handful of living ent.i.ties who could actually think in theabstruse and abstract language of pure mathematics.

"I don"t like his going in there alone," the Starboard Admiral continued. "If that hollow sphere of dust is as black and bleak as he says it is, he will have nothing to guide him but his sense of perception."

"DIV B = O; CURL B = je-+ (aE/ao); DIV E = Pe; CURL E = O (aB/ao )." said Sir Houston Carbarn thoughtfully. "True," agreed the Starboard Admiral. "but I can see no way for him to illuminate such a vast amount of s.p.a.ce with the means at his command. That hollow globe is two pa.r.s.ecs across, and contains within it only a single solid body-the planet Jugavine. How can he possibly get enough illumination to find the planet?"

"X2.

+ y2 + Z2.

= r2 ," murmured Sir Houston, "E = MC2 .".

"Yes, yes, obviously"" snapped the Starboard Admiral, "but in order to illumine the interior of that hollow globe, he will have to find Jugavine first, and to do that he needs illumination. It seems to me this involves a paradox."

"pq ? qp." Sir Houston snapped forcefully.

"Ah, I see what you mean," said the Starboard Admiral. "But what about Banlon of Downlo?

According to Ginnison"s report, Banlon is returning to Jugavine with a cargo of Trenconian broadleaf which he somehow managed to steal from under the very noses of Trigonemetree, the Rigellian Lensman in charge of our base on Trenco. If Ginnison destroys Jugavine, Banlon"s sense of perception will immediately tell him that the planet no longer exists, and he will not fall into Ginnison"s trap. How is he going to get around that?"

"?" mused Sir Houston abstractedly.

Gimble Ginnison, Gray Lensman, had no need of slow, electromagnetic radiation to locate the planet of the Meich. His tremendous sense of perception had pinpointed that doomed planet exactly.

Calculating carefully the intrinsic velocity of his first negasphere in relation to that of the planet of the Meich, he released that black, enigmatic ball of negation toward its hapless target.

The negasphere struck. Or perhaps not. Is it possible for nothing to strike anything? Let us say.

then, that the negasphere began to occupy the same s.p.a.ce as that of Jugavine. At the hyperdimensional surface of contact, the matter and antimatter mutually vanished. Where the negasphere struck, a huge hole appeared in that theretofore frigid planet. The planet collapsed in on itself, its very substance eaten away by the all-devouring negasphere. The radiation of that mutual annihilation wrought heated havoc upon the doomed planet. Helium boiled; hydrogen melted; nitrogen fizzed; and all fell collapsingly into the rapidly diminishing negasphere.

When the awful and awesome process had completed itself, there was nothing left. Thus perished the Meich.

When the process was completed, the Gray Lensman hurled his two remaining negaspheres toward the exact same spot in s.p.a.ce.

Then he sat and waited for Banlon of Downlo.

Time pa.s.sed. Ginnison, ever on the alert with his acute sense of perception, at last detected Banlon"s speedster entering the globe of dust. Banlon could not detect, at that distance, the flare of radiation which had resulted from the destruction of Jugavine. That radiation, struggling along at the speed of light, would require years to reach the interior surface of the globe.

Ginnison, waiting like a cat at a mouse hole, pounced at the instant that Banlon entered the globe.

One flash of a primary beam, and Banlon of Downlo was forced into the next plane of existence. He ceased to be, save as white-hot gas, spreading and dissipating its energy through a relatively small volume of s.p.a.ce.

Immediately, Ginnison Lensed his report back to Prime Base, then made his way out of the hollow globe and back to the Dentless.

The Starboard Admiral frowned and looked up at Sir Houston Carbarn. "I"m afraid I still don"t understand. After Jugavine was destroyed, Banlon, with his sense of perception, which is instantaneous and is not hampered by the velocity of light, should have detected the fact that the planet no longerexisted. Why did he continue on in toward a non-existent planet?"

Sir Houston Carbarn smiled. "(-1)(-1) = +1," he informed.

The Starboard Admiral slammed his palm on the desk. "Of course! The principle of the double negative! Two negaspheres made a posisphere! Banlon thought it was Jugavine! Our Gray Lensman has genius, Sir Houston!"

"!" agreed Sir Houston.

When Gimble Ginnison strode into his quarters aboard the Dentless, Woozle was waiting for him.

"What now?" queried that sapient serpent.

"Now for a decent meal, Woozle." He activated a communicator. "Galley? Send up a two-inch-thick steak, rare. Mashed potatoes and thick brown gravy. And a quart of black coffee."

"Yes, sir," came the reply. "And what about dessert, sir?"

Ginnison sat down in his chair with a triumphant sigh of relief. "Now, at last," he said, "I can enjoy that for which I have waited so long."

"The strawberries, sir?"

"Exactly. The strawberries."

THE BEST POLICY.

By Randall Garrett

Much to my chagrin, I never met the late Eric Frank Russell. I have admired his writing over the years, and wanted to meet him, but the opportunity never presented itself.

But if this story sounds like his work, it is because of my appreciation of his style.

Thagobar Larnimisculus Verf, Borgax of Fenigwisnok, had a long name and an important t.i.tle, and he was proud of both. The t.i.tle was roughly translatable as "High-Sheriff-Admiral of Fenigwisnok," and Fenigwisnok was a rich and important planet in the Dal Empire. t.i.tle and name looked very impressive together on doc.u.ments, of which there were a great many to be signed.

Thagobar himself was a prime example of his race, a race of power and pride. Like the terrestrial turtles, he had both an exoand an endoskeleton, although that was his closest resemblance to the chelonia. He was humanoid in general shape, looking something like a cross between a medieval knight in full armor and a husky football player clad for the gridiron. His overall color was similar to that of a well-boiled lobster, fading to a darker purple at the joints of his exoskeleton. His clothing was spa.r.s.e, consisting only of an abbreviated kilt embroidered with fanciful designs and emblazoned with a swirl of glittering gems. The emblem of his rank was engraved in gold on his plastron and again on his carapace, so that he would be recognizable both coming and going.

All in all, he made quite an impressive figure, in spite of his five feet two inch height.

As commander of his own s.p.a.ceship, the Verf, it was his duty to search out and explore planets which could be colonized by his race, the Dal. This he had done diligently for many years, following exactly his General Orders as a good commander should.

And it had paid off. He had found some nice planets in his time, and this one was the juiciest of the lot.

Gazing at the magniscreen, he rubbed his palms together in satisfaction. His ship was swinging smoothly in an orbit high above a newly-discovered planet, and the magniscreen was focused on the landscape below. No Dal ship had ever been in this part of the galaxy "before, and it was comforting to have discovered a colonizable planet so quickly.

"A magnificent planet!" he said. " A wonderful planet! Look at that green! And the blue of those seas!" He turned to Lieutenant Pelquesh. "What do you think? Isn"t it fine?"