Galactic Patrol Read Online Free PDF Page A

the visiplates in flaming, zig-zag lines of light as pursued and pursuer passed solar system after solar system in fantastic, light-years-long hops, yet Henderson kept his cruiser upon the pirate's tail and steadily cut down the distance between them. Soon a tractor beam licked out from the Patrol ship, touched the fleeing marauder lightly, and the two spaceships flashed toward each other.
    Nor was the enemy unprepared for combat. One of the crack raiders of Boskone, master pirate of the known Universe, she had never before found difficulty in conquering any vessel fleet enough to catch her. Therefore, her commander made no attempt to cut the beans. Or rather, since the two inertialess vessels flashed together to repellor-zone contact in such a minute fraction of a second that any human action within that time was impossible, it would be more correct to say that the pirate captain changed his tactics instantly from those of flight to those of combat.
    He thrust out tractor beams of his own, and from the already white-hot refractors throats of his projectors there raved out horribly potent beams of annihilation, beams of dreadful power which tore madly at the straining defensive screens of the Patrol ship.
    Screens flared vividly, radiating all the colors of the spectrum. Space itself seemed a rainbow gone mad, for there were being exerted there forces of a magnitude to stagger the imagination, forces to be yielded only by the atomic might from which they sprang, forces whose neutralization set up visible strains in the very fabric of the ether itself.
    The young commander clenched his fists and swore a startled deep-space oath as red lights flashed and alarmbells clanged. His screens were leaking like sieves --
    practically down -- needle after needle of force incredible stabbing at and through his wallshield -- four stations gone already and more going l
    "Scrap the plan!" he yelled into his microphone. "Open everything to absolute top -
    - short out all resistors -- give 'em everything you can put through the bare busbars.
    Dalhousie, cut all your repellors, bung us right up to their zone. All you beamers, concentrate on Area Five. Break down those screens!' Kinnison was hunched rigidly over his panel, his voice came grittily through locked teeth. "Get through to that wallshield so I can use this Q-gun!"
    Under the redoubled force of the Britannia's attack the defenses of the enemy began to fail. Kinnison's hands flew over his controls. A port opened in the Patrol-ship's armored side and an ugly snout protruded -- the projector-ringed muzzle of a squat and monstrous cannon. From its projector bands there leaped out with the velocity of light a tube of quasi-solid force which was in effect a continuation of the gun's grim barrel, a tube which crashed through the weakened third screen of the enemy with a space-wracking shock and struck savagely, with writhing, twisting thrusts, at the second. Aided by the massed concentration of the Britannia's every battery of short-range beams, it went through. And through the first. Now it struck the very-wall-shield of the outlaw -- that impregnable screen which, designed to bear the brunt of any possible inert collision, had never been pierced or ruptured by any material substance, however applied.
    To this inner defense the immaterial gun-barrel clung. Simultaneously the tractor beams, hitherto exerting only a few dynes of force, stiffened into unbreakable, inflexible rods of energy, binding the two ships of apace into one rigid system, each, relative to the other, immovable.
    Then Kinnison's flying finger tip touched a button and the Q-gun spoke. From its sullen throat there erupted a huge torpedo. Slowly the giant projectile crept along, watched in awe and amazement by the officers of both vessels. For to those space-hardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl, and here was a thing that would require four or five whole seconds to cover a mere ten kilometers of