First Lensman by E. E. Smith (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📕

have the System’s finest instruments. His positional error could be corrected easily enough; but as he drove nearer and nearer to Cavenda, keeping, toward the last, in line with its one small moon, he wondered more and more as to how much of an allowance he should make for error in his intrinsic, which he had set up practically by guess. And there was another variable, the cutoff. He slowed down to just over one light; but even at that comparatively slow speed an error of one millisecond at cutoff meant a displacement of two hundred miles! He switched the spotter into the Berg’s cutoff circuit, set it for three hundred miles, and waited tensely at his controls.

The relays clicked, the driving force expired, the vessel went inert. Samms’ eyes, flashing from instrument to instrument, told him that matters could have been worse. His intrinsic was neither straight up, as he had hoped, nor straight down, as he had feared, but almost exactly halfway between the two⁠—straight out. He discovered that fact just in time; in another second or two he would have been out beyond the moon’s protecting bulk and thus detectable from Cavenda. He went free, flashed back to the opposite boundary of his area of safety, went inert, and put the full power of the bellowing Diesel to the task of bucking down his erroneous intrinsic, losing altitude continuously. Again and again he repeated the maneuver; and thus, grimly and stubbornly, he fought his ship to ground.

He was very glad to see that the surface of the satellite was rougher, rockier, ruggeder, and more cratered even than that of Earth’s Luna. Upon such a terrain as this, it would be next to impossible to spot even a moving vessel⁠—if it moved carefully.

By a series of short and careful inertialess hops⁠—correcting his intrinsic velocity after each one by an inert collision with the ground⁠—he maneuvered his vessel into such a position that Cavenda’s enormous globe hung directly overhead. Breathing a profoundly deep breath of relief he killed the big engine, cut in his fully-charged accumulators, and turned on detector and spy-ray. He would see what he could see.

His detectors showed that there was only one point of activity on the whole planet. He located it precisely; then, after cutting his spy-ray to minimum power, he approached it gingerly, yard by yard. Stopped! As he had more than half expected, there was a spy-ray block. A big one, almost two miles in diameter. It would be almost directly beneath him⁠—or rather, almost straight overhead⁠—in about three hours.

Samms had brought along a telescope, considerably more powerful than the telescopic visiplate of his scout. Since the surface gravity of this moon was low⁠—scarcely one-fifth that of Earth⁠—he had no difficulty in lugging the parts out of the ship or in setting the thing up.

But even the telescope did not do much good. The moon was close to Cavenda, as astronomical distances go⁠—but really worthwhile astronomical optical instruments simply are not portable. Thus the Lensman saw something that, by sufficient stretch of the imagination, could have been a factory; and, eyes straining at the tantalizing limit of visibility, he even made himself believe that he saw a toothpick-shaped object and a darkly circular blob, either of which could have been the spaceship of the outlaws. He was sure, however, of two facts. There were no real cities upon Cavenda. There were no modern spaceports, or even airfields.

He dismounted the scope, stored it, set his detectors, and waited. He had to sleep at times, of course; but any ordinary detector rig can be set to sound off at any change in its status⁠—and Samms’ was no ordinary rig. Wherefore, when the drug-mongers’ vessel took off, Samms left Cavenda as unobtrusively as he had approached it, and swung into that vessel’s line.

Samms’ strategy had been worked out long since. On his Diesel, at a distance of just over one detet, he would follow the outlaw as fast as he could; long enough to establish his line. He would then switch to atomic drive and close up to between one and two detets; then again go onto Diesel for a check. He would keep this up for as long as might prove necessary.

As far as any of the Lensmen knew, Spaceways always used regular liners or freighters in this business, and this scout was much faster than any such vessel. And even if⁠—highly improbable thought!⁠—the enemy ship was faster than his own, it would still be within range of those detectors when it got to wherever it was that it was going. But how wrong Samms was!

At his first check, instead of being not over two detets away the quarry was three and a half; at the second the distance was four and a quarter; at the third, almost exactly five. Scowling, Samms watched the erstwhile brilliant point of light fade into darkness. That circular blob that he had almost seen, then, had been the spaceship, but it had not been a sphere, as he had supposed. Instead, it had been a teardrop; sticking, sharp tail down, in the ground. Ultra-fast. This was the result. But ideas had blown up under him before, they probably would again. He resumed atomic drive and made arrangements with the Port Admiral to rendezvous with him and the Chicago at the earliest possible time.

“What is there along that line?” he demanded of the superdreadnaught’s Chief Pilot, even before junction had been made.

“Nothing, sir, that we know of,” that worthy reported, after studying his charts.

He boarded the gigantic ship of war, and with Kinnison pored over those same charts.

“Your best bet is Eridan, I think,” Kinnison concluded finally. “Not too near your line, but they could very easily figure that a one-day dogleg would be a good investment. And Spaceways owns it, you know, from core to planetary limits⁠—the richest uranium mines in existence. Made to order. Nobody would suspect a uranium ship. How about throwing a globe around