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

observation plates. They were watching a lunch-box resting upon the bottom of a lake.

“Hasn’t it radiated yet?” Roderick Kinnison demanded. “Or been approached, or moved?”

“Not yet,” Lyman Cleveland replied, crisply. “Neither Northrop’s rig nor mine has shown any sign of activity.”

He did not amplify the statement, nor was there need. Mason Northrop was a Master Electronicist; Cleveland was perhaps the world’s greatest living expert. Neither of them had detected radiation. Ergo, none existed.

Equally certainly the box had not moved, or been moved, or approached. “No change, Rod,” Doctor Frederick Rodebush Lensed the assured thought. “Six of us have been watching the plates in five-minute shifts.”

A few minutes later, however: “Here is a thought which may be of interest,” DalNalten the Venerian announced, spraying himself with a couple pints of water. “It is natural enough, of course, for any Venerian to be in or on any water he can reach⁠—I would enjoy very much being on or in that lake myself⁠—but it may not be entirely by coincidence that one particular Venerian, Ossmen, is visiting this particular lake at this particular time.”

“What!” Nine Lensmen yelled the thought practically as one.

“Precisely. Ossmen.” It was a measure of the Venerian Lensman’s concern that he used only two words instead of twenty or thirty. “In the red boat with the yellow sail.”

“Do you see any detector rigs?” Samms asked.

“He wouldn’t need any,” DalNalten put in. “He will be able to see it. Or, if a little colane had been rubbed on it which no Tellurian could have noticed, any Venerian could smell it from one end of that lake to the other.”

“True. I didn’t think of that. It may not have a transmitter after all.”

“Maybe not, but keep on listening, anyway,” the Port Admiral ordered. “Bend a plate on Ossmen, and a couple more on the rest of the boats. But Ossmen is clean, you say, Jack? Not even a spy-ray block?”

“He couldn’t have a block, Dad. It’d give too much away, here on our home grounds. Like on Eridan, where their ops could wear anything they could lift, but we had to go naked.” He flinched mentally as he recalled his encounter with Hazel the Hellcat, and Northrop flinched with him.

“That’s right, Rod,” Olmstead in his boat below agreed, and Conway Costigan, in his room in Northport, concurred. The top-drawer operatives of the enemy depended for safety upon perfection of technique, not upon crude and dangerous mechanical devices.

“Well, since you’re all so sure of it, I’ll buy it,” and the waiting went on.

Under the slight urge of the light and vagrant breeze, the red boat moved slowly across the water. A somnolent, lackadaisical youth, who very evidently cared nothing about where the boat went, sat in its stern, with his left arm draped loosely across the tiller. Nor was Ossmen any more concerned. His only care, apparently, was to avoid interference with the fishermen; his underwater jaunts were long, even for a Venerian, and he entered and left the water as smoothly as only a Venerian⁠—or a seal⁠—could.

“However, he could have, and probably has got, a capsule spy-ray detector,” Jack offered, presently. “Or, since a Venerian can swallow anything one inch smaller than a kitchen stove, he could have a whole analyzing station stashed away in his stomach. Nobody’s put a beam on him yet, have you?”

Nobody had.

“It might be smart not to. Watch him with scopes⁠ ⁠… and when he gets up close to the box, better pull your beams off of it. DalNalten, I don’t suppose it would be quite bright for you to go swimming down there too, would it?”

“Very definitely not, which is why I am up here and dry. None of them would go near it.”

They waited, and finally Ossmen’s purposeless wanderings brought him over the spot on the lake’s bottom which was the target of so many Tellurian eyes. He gazed at the discarded lunch-box as incuriously as he had looked at so many other sunken objects, and swam over it as casually⁠—and only the ultra-cameras caught what he actually did. He swam serenely on.

“The box is still there,” the spy-ray men reported, “but the package is gone.”

“Good!” Kinnison exclaimed, “Can you ’scopists see it on him?”

“Ten to one they can’t,” Jack said. “He swallowed it. I expected him to swallow it box and all.”

“We can’t see it, sir. He must have swallowed it.”

“Make sure.”

“Yes, sir.⁠ ⁠… He’s back on the boat now and we’ve shot him from all angles. He’s clean⁠—nothing outside.”

“Perfect! That means he isn’t figuring on slipping it to somebody else in a crowd. This will be an ordinary job of shadowing from here on in, so I’ll put in the umbrella.”

The detector ships were recalled. The Chicago and the various other ships of war returned to their various bases. The pleasure craft floated away. But on the other hand there were bursts of activity throughout the forest for a mile or so back from the shores of the lake. Camps were struck. Hiking parties decided that they had hiked enough and began to retrace their steps. Lithe young men, who had been doing this and that, stopped doing it and headed for the nearest trails.

For Kinnison père had erred slightly in saying that the rest of the enterprise was to be an ordinary job of shadowing. No ordinary job would do. With the game this nearly in the bag it must be made absolutely certain that no suspicion was aroused, and yet Samms had to have facts. Sharp, hard, clear facts; facts so self-evidently facts that no intelligence above idiot grade could possibly mistake them for anything but facts.

Wherefore Ossmen the Venerian was not alone thenceforth. From lake to hotel, from hotel to car, along the road, into and in and out of train and plane, clear to an ordinary-enough-looking building in an ordinary business section of New York, he was never alone. Where the traveling population was light, the Patrol operatives were few and did not crowd the Venerian too nearly;