Semiportables flamed then--heavy stuff--but they might just as well have remained cold. Their beams could not cut the dureum linkages; they slid harmlessly _past_--not through--the wraithlike, figmental invaders at whom they were timed. Kinnison was hauled aboard the Boskonian vessel; its structure and its furnishings and its crew becoming ever firmer and more substantial to his senses as he went from normal into pseudospace. As the pseudoworld became real, the reality of the base behind him thinned into unreality. In seconds it disappeared utterly, and Kinnison knew that to the senses of his fellow human beings he had vanished without leaving a trace. This ship, though, was real enough. So were his captors. * * * * * The net opened, dumping the Lensman ignominiously to the floor. Tractor beams wrenched his blazing DeLameters out of his grasp--whether or not hands and arms came with them was entirely his own lookout. Tractors and pressors jerked him upright, slammed him against the steel wall of the room, held him motionless against it. Furiously he launched his ultimately lethal weapon, the Worsel-designed, Thorndyke-built, mind-controlled projector of thought-borne vibrations which decomposed the molecules without which thought and life itself could not exist. Nothing happened. He explored, finding that even his sense of perception was stopped a full foot away from every part of every one of those humanoid bodies. He settled down then and thought. A great light dawned; a shock struck sickeningly home. No such elaborate and super-powered preparations would have been made for the capture of any civilian. Presidents were old men, physically weak and with no extraordinary powers of mind. No--this whole chain of events had been according to plan--a high Boskonian's plan. Ruining a planet was, of course, a highly desirable feature in itself, but it could not have been the main feature. Somebody with a real brain was out after the four Second-Stage Lensmen and he wasn't fooling. And if Nadreck, Worsel, Tregonsee and himself were all to disappear, the Patrol would know that it had been nudged. But jet back--which of the four other than himself would have taken that particular bait? Not one of them. Weren't they out after them, too? Sure they were--they must be. Oh, if he could only warn them--but after all, what good would it do? They had all warned each other repeatedly to watch out for traps; all four had been constantly on guard. What possible foresight could have avoided a snare set so perfectly to match every detail of a man's physical and mental make-up? But he wasn't licked yet. They had to know what he knew, how he had done what he had done, whether or not he had any superiors and who they were. Therefore they had had to take him alive, just as he had had to take various Boskonian chiefs. And they'd find out that as long as he was alive he'd be a dangerous buzzsaw to monkey with.