you before you destroyed Jarnevon. I know that. Apparently it would have become wholly irreparable if we had got—" she faltered, blushing, then went on, "—if we had kept on about our own personal affairs. That's why he stopped us. We can win out, he meant, if you keep on working. It's your oyster, Kim—it's up to you to open it. You can do it, too—I just know that you can."

"But why didn't he stop you before you fellows smashed Boskone?" Lacy demanded, exasperated.

"I hope you're right, Chris—it sounds reasonable," Kinnison said, thoughtfully. Then, to Lacy:

"That's an easy one to answer, doctor. Because knowledge that comes the hard way is knowledge that really sticks with you. If he had drawn me a diagram before, it wouldn't have helped, the next time I get into a jam. This way it will. I've got to learn how to think, if it cracks my skull.

"Really think," he went on, more to himself than to the other three. "To think so that it counts."

"Well, what are we going to do about it?" Haynes was—he had to be, to get where he was and to stay where he was—quick on the uptake. "Or, more specifically, what are you going to do and what am I going to do?"

"What I am going to do will take a bit of mulling over," Kinnison replied, slowly. "Find some more leads and trace them up, is the best that occurs to me right now. Your job and procedure are rather clearer. You remarked out in space that Boskone knew that Tellus was very strongly held. That statement, of course, is no longer true."

"Huh?" Haynes half pulled himself up from the davenport, then sank back. "Why?" he demanded.

"Because we used the negasphere—a negative-matter bomb of planetary antimass—to wipe out Jalte's planet, and because we smashed Jarnevon between two colliding planets," the Lensman explained, concisely. "Can the present defenses of Tellus cope with either one of those offensives?"

"I'm afraid not—no," the port admiral admitted. "But—"

"We can admit no 'buts,' admiral," Kinnison declared, with grim finality. "Having used those weapons, we must assume that the Boskonian scientists—we'll have to keep on calling them 'Boskonians,' I suppose, until we find a truer name—had recorders on them and have now duplicated them. Tellus must be made safe against anything that we have ever used; against, as well, everything that, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, we can 

 Prev. P 11/232 next