Read Second stage Lensman for Free Online Page B

exactly what he wants. Hipe!"
         Shortly thereafter, five-man speedsters, plentifully equipped with new
    instruments, flashed at full drive along courses carefully calculated to give the greatest
    possible coverage in the shortest possible time.
         Unobtrusively the loose planets closed in; close enough so that at least three or
    four of them could reach any designated point in one minute or less. The outlying units
    of Grand Fleet, too, were pulled in. That fleet was not actually mobilized—yet—but
    every vessel in it was kept in readiness for instant action.
         "No trace," came the report from the Medonian surveyors, and Haynes looked at
    Kinnison, quizzically.
         "QX, chief—glad of it," the Gray Lensman answered the unspoken query. "If it
    was up, that would mean they were on the way. Hope they don't get a trace for two
    months yet. But I'm next-to-positive that that's the way they're coming and the longer
    they put it off the better—there's a possible new projector that will take a bit of doping
    out. I've got to do a flit—can I have the Dauntless?"
         "Sure—anything you want—she's yours anyway."
         Kinnison went. And, wonder of wonders, he took Sir Austin Cardynge with him.
    From solar system to solar system, from planet to planet, the mighty Dauntless hurtled
    at the incomprehensible velocity of her full maximum blast; and every planet so visited
    was the home world of one of the most cooperative—or, more accurately, one of the
    least non-cooperative—members of the Conference of Scientists. For days brilliant but
    more or less unstable minds struggled with new and obdurate problems; struggled
    heatedly and with friction, as was their wont. Few if any of those mighty intellects would
    have really enjoyed a quietly studious session, even had such a thing been possible.
         Then Kinnison returned his guests to their respective homes and shot his flying
    warship-laboratory back to Prime Base. And, even before the Dauntless landed, the first
    few hundreds of a fleet which was soon to be numbered in the millions of meteor-
    miners' boats began working like beavers to build a new and exactly-designed system
    of asteroid belts of iron meteors.
         And soon, as such things go, new structures began to appear here and there in
    the void. Comparatively small, these things were; tiny, in fact, compared to the Patrol's
    maulers. Unarmed, too; carrying nothing except defensive screen. Each was,
    apparently, simply a power-house; stuffed skin full of atomic motors, exciters, intakes,
    and generators of highly peculiar design and pattern. Unnoticed except by gauntly
    haggard Thorndyke and his experts, who kept dashing from one of the strange craft to
    another, each took its place in a succession of precisely-determined relationships to the
    sun.
         Between the orbits of Mars and of Jupiter, the new, sharply-defined rings of
    asteroids moved smoothly. Most of Grand Fleet formed an enormous hollow
    hemisphere. Throughout all nearby space the surveying speedsters and flitters rushed
    madly hither and yon. Uselessly, apparently, for not one needle of the vortex-detectors
    stirred from its zero-pin.
         As nearly as possible at the Fleet's center there floated the flagship. Technically
    the Z9M9Z, socially the Directrix, ordinarily simply GFHQ, that ship had been built
    specifically to control the operations of a million separate flotillas. At her million-plug
    board stood—they had no need, ever, to sit— two hundred blocky, tentacle-armed
    Rigellians. They were waiting, stolidly motionless.
         Intergalactic space remained empty. Interstellar ditto, ditto. The flitters flitted,
    fruitlessly.
         But if everything out there in the threatened volume of space seemed quiet and
    serene, things in the Z9M9Z were distinctly otherwise. Haynes and Kinnison, upon
    whom the heaviest responsibilities rested, were tensely ill at ease.
         The admiral