The Boskonian fleets defending floor were not all destroyed, of course. The

vessels were inertialess. None of the phenomena accompanying the coming into being

of the super-nova were propagated at a velocity above that of light; a speed which to

any space-ship is scarcely a crawl.

     The survivors were, however, disorganized. They had lost their morale when

Floor was wiped out in such a spectacularly nerve-shattering fashion. Also, they had

lost practically all of their high command; for the bosses, instead of riding the ether as

did the Patrol commanders, remained in their supposedly secure headquarters and

directed matters from afar. Mentor and his fellows had removed from this plane of

existence the Eddorians who had been present in the flesh on Floor. The Arisians had

cut all communication between Eddore and the remnants of the Boskonian defensive

force.

     Grand Fleet, then, moved in for the kill; and for a time the action near Arisia was

repeated. Following definite flight-and-course orders from the Z9M9Z, ten or more

Patrol fleets would make short hops. At the end of those assigned courses they would

discover that they had englobed a task-force of the enemy. Bomb and beam!

     Over and over—flit, bomb, and beam!

     One Boskonian high officer, however, had both the time and the authority to act.

A full thousand fleets massed together, their heaviest units outward, packed together

screen to screen in a close-order globe of defense.

     "According to Haynes, that was good strategy in the old days," Kinnison

commented, "but it's no good against loose planets and negaspheres."

     Six loose planets were so placed and so released that their inert masses would

crash together at the center of the Boskonian globe; then, a few minutes later, ten

negaspheres of high anti-mass were similarly launched. After those sixteen missiles had

done their work and the resultant had attained an equilibrium of sorts, there was very

little mopping-up to do.

     The Boskonian observers were competent. The Boskonian commanders now

knew that they had no chance whatever of success; that to stay was to be annihilated;

that the only possibility of life lay in flight. Therefore each remaining Boskonian vice-

admiral, after perhaps a moment of consultation with a few others, ordered his fleet to

drive at maximum blast for his home planet.

     "No use chasing them individually, is there, Kit?" Kinnison asked, when it became

clear in the tank that the real battle was over; that all resistance had ended. "They can't

do anything, and this kind of killing makes me sick at the stomach. Besides, I've got

something else to do."

     "No. Me, too. So have I." Kit agreed with his father in full.

     As soon as the last Boskonian fleet was beyond detector range Grand Fleet

broke up, its component fleets setting out for their respective worlds.

     "The Hell-Hole is still there, Kit," the Gray Lensman said soberly. "If Floor was the

top—I'm beginning to think there is no top—it leads either to an automatic mechanism

set up by the Ploorans or to Ploorans who are still alive somewhere. If Floor wasn't the

top, this seems to be the only lead we have. In either case I've got to take it. Check?"

     "Well, I . . ." Kit tried to duck, but couldn't "Yes, dad, I'm afraid it's check."

     Two big hands met and gripped: and Kinnison went to take leave of his wife.

     There is no need to go into detail as to what those two said or did. He knew that

he was going into danger; that he might not return. That is, he knew empirically or

academically, as a non-germane sort of fact, that he might die. He did not, however,

really believe so. .No man really believes, ever, that any given event will kill him.

     Kinnison expected to be captured, imprisoned, questioned, tortured. He could

understand all of those things, and he did not like any one of them. That he was more

than a trifle afraid and that he hated to leave her now more than he ever had before

were both natural enough—he had nothing whatever to hide from her.

     She, on the other hand, knew starkly that he would never come back. She knew

that he would die in that trap. She knew that she would have to live a lifetime of

emptiness, alone. Hence she had much to conceal from him. She must be just as

scared and as apprehensive as he was, but no more; just as anxious for their continued

happiness as he was, but no more; just as intensely loving, but no more and in exactly

the same sense. Here lay the test. She must kiss him goodbye as though he were going

into mere danger. She must not give way to the almost irresistible urge to act in

accordance with what she so starkly, chillingly knew to be the truth, that she would

never . . . never . . . NEVER kiss her Kim again!

     She succeeded. It is a measure of the Red Lensman's quality that she did not

weaken, even when her husband approached the boundary of the Hell-Hole and sent

what she knew would be his last message.

     "Here it is—about a second now. Don't worry—I'll be back shortly. Clear ether,

Cris!"

     "Of course you will, dear. Clear ether, Kim!"

     His speedster did not mount any special generators, nor were any needed. He

and his ship were sucked into that trap as though it had been a maelstrom.

     He felt again the commingled agonies of inter-dimensional acceleration. He

perceived again the formless, texture-less, spaceless void of blankly gray nothingness

which was the three-dimensionally-impossible substance of the tube. A moment later,

he felt a new and different acceleration—he was speeding up inside the tube! Then,

very shortly, he felt nothing at all. Startled, he tried to jump up to investigate, and

discovered that he could not move. Even by the utmost exertion of his will he could not

stir a finger or an eyelid. He was completely immobilized. Nor could he feel. His body

was as devoid of sensation as though it belonged to somebody else. Worse, for his

heart was not beating. He was not breathing. He could not see. It was as though his

every nerve, motor and sensory, voluntary and involuntary, had been separately

anaesthetized. He could still think, but that was all. His sense of perception still worked.

     He wondered whether he was still accelerating or not, and tried to find out. He

could not. He could not determine whether he was moving or stationary. There were no

reference points. Every infinitesimal volume of that enigmatic grayness was like each

and every other.

     Mathematically, perhaps, he was not moving at all; since he was in a continuum

in which mass, length and time, and hence inertia and inertialessness, velocity and

acceleration, are meaningless terms.

     He was outside of space and beyond time. Effectively, however, he was moving;

moving with an acceleration which nothing material had ever before approached. He

and his vessel were being driven along that tube by every watt of power generable by

one entire Eddorian atomic power plant. His velocity, long since unthinkable, became

incalculable.

     All things end: even Eddorian atomic power was not infinite. At the very peak of

power and pace, then, all the force, all the momentum, all the kinetic energy of the

speedster's mass and velocity were concentrated in and applied to Kinnison's physical

body. He sensed something, and tried to flinch, but could not. In a fleeting instant of

what he thought was time he went past, not through, his clothing and his Lens; past, not

through, his armor; and past, not through, the hard beryllium-alloy structure of his

vessel. He even went past but not through the N-dimensional interface of the hyper-

spatial tube.

     This, although Kinnison did not know it, was the Eddorian's climactic effort. He

had taken his prisoner as far as he could possibly reach: then, assembling and

concentrating all available power, he had given him a catapultic shove into the

absolutely unknown and utterly unknowable. The Eddorian did not know any vector of

the Lensman's naked flight; he did not care where he went. He did not know and could

not compute or even guess at his victim's probable destination.

     In what his spacehound's time sense told him was one second, Kinnison passed

exactly two hundred million foreign spaces. He did not know how he knew the precise

number, but he did. Hence, in the Patrol's measured cadence, he began to count

groups of spaces of one hundred -million each. After a few days, his velocity decreased

to such a value that he could count groups of single millions. Then thousands—

hundreds—tens—until finally he could perceive the salient features of each space

before it was blotted out by the next.

     How could this be? He wondered, but not foggily; his mind was as clear and as

strong as it had ever been. Spaces were coexistent, not spread out like this. In the

fourth dimension they were flat together, like pages in a book, except thinner. This was

all wrong. It was impossible. Since it could not happen, it was not happening. He had

not been and could not be drugged. Therefore some Plooran must have him in a zone

of compulsion. What a zone! What an operator the ape must be!

     It was, however, real—all of it. What Kinnison did not know, then or ever, was

that he was actually outside the boundaries of space; actually beyond the confines of

time. He was going past, not through, those spaces and those times.

     He was now in each space long enough to study it in some detail. He was an

immense distance above this one; at such a distance that he could perceive many

globular super-universes; each of which in turn was composed of billions of lenticular

galaxies.

     Another one. Closer now. Galaxies only; the familiar random masses whose

apparent lack of symmetrical grouping is due to the limitations of Civilization's

observers. He was still going too fast to stop.

     In the next space Kinnison found himself within the limits of a solar system and

tried with all the force of his mind to get in touch with some intelligent entity upon

one—any one —of its planets. Before he could succeed, that system vanished and he

was dropping, from a height of a few thousand kilometers, toward the surface of a warm

and verdant world, so much like Tellus that he thought for an instant he must have

circumnavigated total space. The aspect, the ice-caps, the cloud-effects, were identical.

The oceans, however, while similar, were different; as were the continents. The

mountains were larger and rougher and harder.

     He was falling much too fast. A free fall from infinity wouldn't give him this much

speed!

     This whole affair was, as he had decided once before, absolutely impossible. It

was simply preposterous to believe that a naked man, especially one without blood-

circulation or breath, could still be alive after spending as many weeks in open space as

he had just spent. He knew that he was alive. Therefore none of this was happening;

even though, as surely as he knew that he was alive, he knew that he was falling.

     "Jet back, Lensman!" he thought viciously to himself; tried to shout it aloud.

     For this could be deadly stuff, if he let himself believe it. If he believed that he

was falling from any such height he would die in the instant of landing. He would not

actually crash; his body would not move from wherever it was that it was. Nevertheless

the shock of that wholly imaginary crash would kill him just as dead and just as

instantaneously as though all his flesh had been actually smashed into a crimson smear

upon one of the neighboring mountain's huge, fiat rocks.

     "Pretty close, my bright young Plooran friend, but you didn't quite ring the bell,"

he thought savagely, trying with all the power of his mind to break through the zone of

compulsion. "So I'm telling you something right now. If you want to kill me you'll have to

do it physically, and you haven't got jets enough to swing the load. You might as well cut

your zone, because this kind of stuff has been pulled on me by experts, and it hasn't

worked yet."

     He was apparently failing, feet downward, toward an open, grassy mountain

meadow, surrounded by forests, through which meandered a small stream. He was so

close now that he could perceive the individual blades of grass in the meadow and the

small fishes in the stream; and he was still apparently at terminal velocity.

     Without his years of spacehound's training in inertialess maneuvering, he might •

have died even before he landed, but speed as speed did not affect him at all. He was

used to instantaneous stops from light-speeds. The only thing that worried him was the

matter of inertia. Was he inert or free?

     He declared to himself that he was free. Or, rather, that he had been, was, and

would continue to be motionless. It was physically, mathematically, intrinsically

impossible that any of this stuff had actually occurred. It was all compulsion, pure and

simple, and he—Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman—would not let it get him down. He

clenched his mental teeth upon that belief and held it doggedly. One bare foot struck the

tip of a blade of grass and his entire body came to a shockless halt. He grinned in

relief—this was what he had wanted, but had not quite dared wholly to expect. There

followed immediately, however, other events which he had not expected at all.

     His halt was less than momentary; in the instant of its accomplishment he began

to fall normally the remaining eight or ten inches to the ground. Automatically he sprung

his space-trained knees, to take the otherwise disconcerting jar; automatically his left

hand snapped up to the place where his controls should have been. Legs and arms

worked.'

     He could see with his eyes. He could feel with his skin. He was drawing a breath,

the first time he had breathed since leaving normal space. Nor was it an unduly deep

breath—he felt no lack of oxygen. His heart was beating as normally as though it had

never missed a beat. He was not unusually hungry or thirsty. But all that stuff could

wait—where was that damned Plooran?

     Kinnison had landed in complete readiness for strife. There were no rocks or

clubs handy, but he had his fists, feet, and teeth; and they would do until he could find

or make something better. But there was nothing to fight. Drive his sense of perception

as he would, he could find nothing larger or more intelligent than a deer.

     The farther this thing went along the less sense it made. A compulsion, to be any

good at all, ought to be logical and coherent. It should fit into every corner and cranny of

the subject's experience and knowledge. This one didn't fit anything or anywhere. It

didn't even come close. Yet technically, it was a marvelous job. He couldn't detect a

trace of it. This grass looked and felt real. The pebbles hurt his tender feet enough to

make him wince as he walked to the water's edge. He drank deeply. The water, real or

not, was cold, clear, and eminently satisfying.

     "Listen, you misguided ape!" he thought probingly. "You might as well open up

now as later whatever you've got in mind. If this performance is supposed to be non-

fiction, it's a flat bust. If it's supposed to be science-fiction, it isn't much better. If it's

space-opera, even, you're violating all the fundamentals. I've written better

stuff—Qadgop and Cynthia were a lot more convincing." He waited a moment, then

went on:

     "Who ever heard of the intrepid hero of a space-opera as big as this one started

out to be getting stranded on a completely Earth-like planet and then have nothing

happen? No action at 'all? How about a couple of indescribable monsters of

superhuman strength and agility, for me to tear apart with my steel-thewed fingers?"

     He glanced around expectantly. No monsters appeared.

     "Well, then, how about a damsel for me to rescue from a fate worse than death?

Better make it two of them—safety in numbers, you know—a blonde and a brunette. No

redheads."

     He waited again.

     "QX, sport, no women. Suits me perfectly. But I hope you haven't forgotten about

the tasty viands. I can eat fish if I have to, but if you want to keep your hero happy let's

see you lay down here, on a platter, a one-kilogram steak, three centimeters thick,

medium rare, fried in Tellurian butter and smothered in Venerian superla mushrooms."

     No steak appeared, and the Gray Lensman recalled and studied intensively

every detail of what had apparently happened. It still could not have occurred. He could

not have imagined it. It could not have been compulsion or hypnosis. None of it made

any kind of sense.

     As a matter of plain fact, however, Kinnison's first and most positive conclusion

was wrong. His memories were factual records of actual events and things. He would

eat well during his stay upon that nameless planet, but he "would have to procure his

own food. Nothing would attack him, or even annoy him. For the Eddorian's

binding—this is perhaps as good a word for it as any, since "geas" implies a curse—was

such that the Gray Lensman could return to space and time only under such conditions

and to such an environment as would not do him any iota of physical harm. He must

continue alive and in good health for at least fifty more of his years.

                       *     *     *    *

     And Clarrissa Kinnison, tense and strained, waited in her room for the instant of

her husband's death. They two were one, with a oneness no other man and woman had

ever known. If one died, from any cause whatever, the other would feel it.

     She waited. Five minutes—ten—fifteen—half an hour—an hour. She began to

relax. Her fists unclenched, her shallow breathing grew deeper.

     Two hours. Kim was still alive! A wave of happy, buoyant relief swept through

her; her eyes flashed and sparkled. If they hadn't been able to kill him in two hours they

never could. Her Kim had plenty of jets.

     Even the top minds of Boskonia could not kill her Kim!