During practically all of the long trip back to Earth, Kinnison kept
pretty much to his cabin, thinking deeply, blackly, and, he admitted
ruefully to himself, to very little purpose. And at Prime Base, through
week after week of its feverish activity, he continued to think.
Finally, however, he was snatched out of his dark abstraction by no
less a personage than Surgeon General Lacy.
"Snap out of it, lad," that worthy advised, smilingly. "When you
concentrate on one thing too long, you know, the vortices of thought
occupy narrower and narrow loci, until finally the effective volume
becomes infinitesimal. Or, mathematically, the then range of
cogitation, integrated between the limits of plus and minus infinity,
approaches zero as a limit--"
"Huh? What are you talking about?" the Lensman demanded.
"Poor mathematics, perhaps, but sound psychology," Lacy grinned. "It
got your undivided attention, didn't it? That was what I was after. In
plain English, if you keep on thinking around in circles you'll soon be
biting yourself in the small of the back. Come on, you and I are going
places."
"Where?"
"To the Grand Ball in honor of the Grand Fleet, my boy--old Dr. Lacy
prescribes it for you as a complete and radical change of atmosphere.
Let's go!"
The city's largest ballroom was a blaze of light and color. A thousand
polychromic lamps flooded their radiance downward through draped
bunting upon an even more colorful throng. Two thousand items of
feminine loveliness were there, in raiment whose fabrics were the boast
of hundreds of planets, whose hues and shades put the spectrum itself
to shame. There were over two thousand men, clad in plain or beribboned
or bemedaled full civilian dress, or in the variously panoplied dress
uniforms of the many Services.
"You're dancing with Miss Forrester first, Kinnison," the surgeon
introduced them informally, and the Lensman found himself gliding
away with a stunning blonde, ravishingly and revealingly dressed in a
dazzlingly blue wisp of Manarkan glamorette--fashion's _dernier cri_.
To the uninformed, Kinnison's garb of plain gray leather might have
seemed incongruous indeed in that brilliantly and fastidiously dressed
assemblage. But to those people, as to us of today, the drab, starkly
utilitarian uniform of the Unattached Lensman transcended far any
other, however resplendent, worn by men: and literally hundreds of eyes
followed the strikingly handsome couple as they slid rhythmically out
upon the polished floor. But a measure of the tall beauty's customary
poise had deserted her. She was slimly taut in the circle of the
Lensman's arm, her eyes were downcast, and suddenly she missed a step.
"'Scuse me for stepping on your feet," he apologized. "A fellow gets
out of practice, flitting around in a speedster so much."
"Thanks for taking the blame, but it's my fault entirely--I know it as
well as you do," she replied, flushing uncomfortably. "I _do_ know how
to dance, too, but--Well, you're a Gray Lensman, you know."
"Huh?" he ejaculated, in honest surprise, and she looked up at him
for the first time. "What has that fact got to do with the price of
Venerian orchids in Chicago--or with my clumsy walking all over your
slippers?"
* * * * *
"Everything in the world," she assured him. Nevertheless, her stiff
young body relaxed and she fell into the graceful, accurate dancing
which she really knew so well how to do. "You see, I don't suppose that
any of us has ever seen a Gray Lensman before, except in pictures, and
actually to be dancing with one is so thrilling that it is really a
shock--I have to get used to it gradually, so to speak. Why, I don't
even know how to talk to you! One couldn't possibly call you plain
mister, as one would any ord--"
"It'll be QX if you just call me 'say'!" he informed her. "Maybe you'd
rather not dance with a dub? What say we go get us a sandwich and a
bottle of fayalin or something?"
"No--never!" she exclaimed. "I didn't mean it that way at all. I'm
going to have this full dance with you, and enjoy every second of it.
And later I am going to pack this dance card--which I hope you will
sign for me--away in lavender, so it will go down in history that in my
youth I really did dance with Gray Lensman Kinnison. I see that I have
recovered enough so that I can talk and dance at the same time. Do you
mind if I ask you some silly questions about space?"
"Go ahead. They won't be silly, if I'm any judge. Elementary, perhaps,
but not silly."
"I hope so, but I think you're being charitable again. Like most of
the girls here, I suppose, I have never been out in deep space at all.
Besides a few hops to the Moon, I have taken only two flits, and they
were both only interplanetary. One to Mars and one to Venus. I never
could see how you deep-space men can really understand what you're
doing--either the frightful speeds at which you travel, the distance
you cover, or the way your communicators work. In fact, a professor
told us that no human mind can understand figures of those magnitudes
at all. But you must understand them, I should think ... oh, perhaps--"
"Or maybe the guy isn't human?" Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously.
"No, your professor was right. We can't understand the figures, but we
don't have to--all we have to do is to work with them. And, now that it
has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are
_Gladys_ Forrester, it is quite clear that you are in that same boat."
"Me? How?" she exclaimed.
"The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet
your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear title to a
million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that
really produces results--the hard way of actual experience. You lost a
lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it all
back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to take
it away from you. The fact that your brain cannot envisage a million
credits has not interfered with your manipulation of that amount, has
it?"
"No, but that's entirely different!" she protested.
"Not in any essential feature," he countered. "I can explain it best,
perhaps, by analogy. You can't visualize, mentally, the size of North
America, either, yet that fact does not bother you in the least while
you are driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On
the ground, I mean, not in the air?"
"A De Khotinsky sporter."
"Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles per hour, and I suppose you
cruise between ninety and a hundred. We'll have to pretend that you
drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you
will tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also,
you have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from
three or four thousand miles away; or, on short wave, from anywhere on
Tellus--"
"I can get tight-beam short-wave programs from the Moon," the girl
broke in. "I've heard them lots of times."
"Yes," Kinnison assented dryly, "at such times as there didn't happen
to be any interference."
"Static _is_ pretty bad, lots of times," the heiress agreed.
* * * * *
"Well, change 'miles' to 'parsecs' and you've got the picture of
deep-space speeds and operations," Kinnison informed her. "Our speed
varies, of course, with the density of matter in space; but on the
average--say one atom of substance per ten cubic centimeters in
space--we tour at about sixty parsecs an hour, and full blast is about
ninety. And our ultra-wave communicators, working below the level of
the ether, in the subether--"
"Whatever that is," she interrupted.
"That's as good a description or definition of it as any," he grinned
at her. "We don't know what even the ether is, or whether or not
it exists as an objective reality; to say nothing of what we so
nonchalantly call the subether. We do not understand gravity, although
we can make it to order. No scientist yet has been able to say how it
is propagated, or even whether or not it is propagated. No one has been
able to devise any kind of an apparatus or meter or method by which
its nature, period, or velocity can be determined. Neither do we know
anything about time or space. In fact, fundamentally, we don't really
_know_ much of anything at all," he concluded.
"Says you. But that makes me feel better, anyway," she confided,
snuggling a little closer. "Go on about the communicators."
"Ultra-waves are faster than ordinary radio waves, which of course
travel through the ether with the velocity of light, in just about
the same ratio as that of the speed of our ships to the speed of slow
automobiles--that is, the ratio of a parsec to a mile. Roughly nineteen
billion to one. Range, of course, is proportional to the square of the
speed."
"Nineteen billion!" she exclaimed. "And you just said that nobody could
understand even a million!"
"That's the point exactly," he went on, undisturbed. "You don't have to
understand or to visualize it. All you have to do is to remember that
deep-space vessels and communicators can cover distance in parsecs at
practically the same rate that Tellurian automobiles can cover miles.
So, when some space-flea talks to you about parsecs, just think of
miles in terms of an automobile and a radio and you won't be far off."
"I never heard it explained that way before--it does make it ever so
much simpler. Will you sign this, please?"
"Just one more point." The music had ceased and he was signing her
card, preparatory to escorting her back to her place. "Like your
supposedly tight-beam Luna-Tellus hookups, our long range, equally
tight-beam communicators are very sensitive to interference, either
natural or artificial. So, while under perfect conditions we can
communicate clear across the Galaxy, there are times--particularly when
the pirates are scrambling the channels--that we can't drive a beam
from here to Alpha Centauri. Thanks a lot for the dance."
* * * * *
The other girls did not quite come to blows as to which of them
was to get him next; and shortly--he never did know exactly how
it came about--he found himself dancing with a luscious, cuddly
little brunette, clad--partially clad, at least--in a high-slitted,
flame-colored sheath of some new fabric which the Lensman had never
seen before. It looked like solidified, tightly woven electricity!
"Oh, Mr. Kinnison!" his new partner cooed, ecstatically. "I think that
all spacemen, and you Lensmen particularly, are just too perfectly darn
_heroic_ for anything! Why, I think that space is just _terrible_! I
simply can't _cope_ with it at _all_!"
"Ever been out, miss?" he grinned. He had never known many social
butterflies, and temporarily he had forgotten that such girls as this
one really existed.
"Why, of _course_!" The young woman kept on being exclamatory.
"Clear out to the Moon, perhaps?" he hazarded.
"Don't be ridic! _Ever_ so much farther than _that_! Why, I went clear
to _Mars_! And it gave me the screaming _meamies_, no less. I thought I
would _collapse_!"
That dance ended ultimately, and other dances with other girls
followed; but Kinnison could not throw himself into the gaiety
surrounding him. During his cadet days he had enjoyed such revels to
the full, but now the whole thing left him cold. His mind insisted
upon reverting to its problem. Finally, in the throng of young people
on the floor, he saw a girl with a mass of red-bronze hair and a
supple, superbly molded figure. He did not need to await her turning
to recognize his erstwhile nurse and later assistant, whom he had last
seen just this side of far-distant Boyssia II.
"Mac!" To her mind alone he sent out a thought through his Lens. "For
the love of Klono, lend a hand--rescue me! How many dances have you got
ahead?"
"None at all--I'm not dating ahead." She jumped as though someone had
jabbed her with a needle, then paused in panic; eyes wide, breath
coming fast, breast pounding. She had felt Lensed thoughts before, but
this was something else, something entirely different. Every cell of
her brain was open to that Lensman's mind--and what _was_ she seeing!
She blanketed her thoughts desperately, tried with all her might not to
think at all!
[Illustration: _She froze suddenly, a gasp of horror half suppressed.
She was seeing things--sensing things beyond comprehension_--]
"QX, Mac," the thought went quietly on within her mind, quite as though
nothing unusual were occurring. "No intrusion meant. You didn't think
it; I already knew that if you started dating ahead you'd be tied up
until day after tomorrow. Can I have the next one?"
"Sure, Kim."
"Thanks--the Lens is off for the rest of the evening."
She sighed in relief as he snapped the telepathic line as though he
were hanging up the receiver of a telephone.
"I'd like to dance with you all, kids," he addressed a large group of
buds surrounding him and eying him hungrily, "but I've got this next
one. See you later, perhaps," and he was gone.
"Sorry, fellows," he remarked casually, as he made his way through the
circle of men around the gorgeous redhead. "Sorry, but this dance is
mine, isn't it, Miss MacDougall?"
She nodded, flashing the radiant smile which had so aroused his ire
during his hospitalization. "I heard you invoke your spaceman's god,
but I was beginning to be afraid that you had forgotten this dance."
"And she said she wasn't dating ahead--the diplomat!" murmured an
ambassador, aside.
"Don't be a dope," a captain of Marines muttered in reply. "She meant
with _us_. That's a Gray Lensman!"
* * * * *
Although the nurse, as has been said, was anything but small, she
appeared almost petite against the Lensman's mighty frame as they took
off. Silently the two circled the great hall once; lustrous, goldenly
green gown--of Earthly nylon, this one, and less revealing than
most--swishing in perfect cadence against deftly and softly stepping
high-laced boots.
"This is better, Mac," Kinnison sighed, finally, "but I lack just seven
thousand kilocycles of being in tune with this. Don't know what's
the matter, but it's clogging my jets. I must be getting to be a
space-louse."
"A space-louse--you? Uh-uh!" She shook her head. "You know very well
what the matter is. You're just too much of a man to mention it."
"Huh?" he demanded.
"Uh-huh," she asserted, positively if obliquely. "Of course you're not
in tune with this crowd. How could you be? I don't fit into it any more
myself, and what I'm doing isn't even a muffled flare compared to your
job. Not one in ten of these fluffs here tonight has ever been beyond
the stratosphere; not one in a hundred has ever been out as far as
Jupiter, or has ever had a serious thought in her head except about
clothes or men; not one of them all has any more idea of what a Lensman
really is than I have of hyperspace or of non-Euclidean geometry!"
"Kitty, kitty!" he laughed. "Sheathe the little claws, before you
scratch somebody!"
"That isn't cattishness; it's the barefaced truth. Or perhaps," she
amended, honestly, "it's both true and cattish, but it's certainly
true. And that isn't half of it. No one in the Universe except yourself
really _knows_ what you are doing, and I'm pretty sure that only two
others even suspect. And Dr. Lacy is not one of them," she concluded,
surprisingly.
Though shocked, Kinnison did not miss a step. "You _don't_ fit into
this matrix, any more than I do," he agreed, quietly. "S'pose you and I
could do a little flit somewhere?"
"Surely, Kim," and, breaking out of the crowd, they strolled out into
the grounds. Not a word was said until they were seated upon a broad,
low bench beneath the spreading foliage of a tree.
Then: "What did you come here for tonight, Mac--the real reason?" he
demanded, abruptly.
"I ... me ... you ... I mean--Oh, skip it!" the girl stammered, a
wave of scarlet flooding her face and down even to her superb, bare
shoulders. Then she steadied herself and went on: "You see, I agree
with you--as you say, I check you to nineteen decimals. Even Dr. Lacy,
with all his knowledge, can be slightly screwy at times, I think."
"Oh, so that's it!" It was not, it was only a very minor part of her
reason; but the nurse would have bitten her tongue off rather than
admit that she had come to that dance solely and only because Kimball
Kinnison was to be there. "You knew, then, that this was old Lacy's
idea?"
"Of course. You would never have come, else. He thinks that you may
begin wobbling on the beam pretty soon unless you put out a few braking
jets."
"And you?"
"Not in a million, Kim. Lacy is as cockeyed as Trenco's ether, and I as
good as told him so. He may wobble a bit, but _you_ won't. You've got a
job to do, and you're doing it. You'll finish it, too, in spite of all
the vermin infesting all the galaxies of the macro-cosmic Universe!"
she finished, passionately.
"Klono's brazen whiskers, Mac!" He turned suddenly and stared intently
down into her wide, gold-flecked, tawny eyes. She stared back for a
moment, then looked away.
"Don't look at me like that!" she almost screamed. "I can't stand
it--you make me feel stark naked! I know that your Lens is off--I'd
simply die if it wasn't--but I think that you're a mind-reader, even
without it!"
* * * * *
She did know that that powerful telepath was off and would remain
off, and she was glad indeed of that fact; for her mind was seething
with thoughts which that Lensman must not know, then or ever. And for
his part, the Lensman knew what she did not even suspect; that had he
chosen to exert the powers at his command she would have been naked,
mentally and physically, to his perception; but he did not exert those
powers--then. The amenities of human relationship demanded that some
fastnesses of reserve remain inviolate, but he had to know what this
woman knew. If necessary, he would take the knowledge away from her by
force, so completely that she would never know that she had ever known
it. Therefore:
"Just what do you know, Mac, and how did you find it out?" he demanded;
quietly, but with a stern finality of inflection that made a quick
chill run up and down the nurse's back.
"I know a lot, Kim." The girl shivered slightly, even though the
evening was warm and balmy. "I learned it from your own mind. When you
called me, back there on the floor, you didn't send just a single,
sharp thought, just as though you were speaking to me, as you always
did before. Instead, it seemed as though I was actually inside your
own mind--the whole of it. I have heard Lensman speak of a wide-open
two-way, but I never had even the faintest inkling of what it would be
like--no one could who has never experienced it. Of course I didn't--I
couldn't--understand a millionth of what I saw, or seemed to see.
It was too vast, too incredibly immense. I never dreamed any mortal
_could_ have a mind like that, Kim! But it was ghastly, too. It gave
me the creepy jitters. It sent me down completely out of control for
a second. And you didn't even know it--I know you didn't! I didn't
want to look, really, but I couldn't help seeing, and I'm glad I
did--I wouldn't have missed it for the world!" she finished, almost
incoherently.
"Hm-m-m. That changes the picture entirely." Much to her surprise, the
man's voice was calm and thoughtful; not at all incensed. Not even
disturbed. "So I spilled the beans myself, on a wide-open two-way,
and didn't even realize it. I knew that you were back-firing about
something, but thought it was because I might think you guilty of petty
vanity. And I called _you_ a dumbbell once!" he marveled.
"Twice," she corrected him, "and the second time I was never so glad to
be called names in my whole life."
"Now I _know_ that I was getting to be a space-louse."
"Uh-uh, Kim," she denied again, gently. "And you aren't a brat or a lug
or a clunker, either, even though I have thought at times that you were
all of those things. But, now that I've actually got all this stuff,
what can you--what can we--do about it?"
"Perhaps ... probably ... I think, since I gave it to you myself, I'll
let you keep it," Kinnison decided, slowly.
"Keep it!" she exclaimed. "Of course, I'll keep it! Why, it's in my
mind--I'll _have_ to keep it--nobody can take _knowledge_ away from
anyone!"
"Oh, sure--of course," he murmured, absently. There were a lot of
things that Mac didn't know, and probably no good end would be served
my enlightening her further. "You see, there's a lot of stuff in my
mind that I don't know much about myself, yet. Since I gave you an
open channel, there must have been a good reason for it, even though,
consciously, I don't know myself what it was." He thought intensely
for moments, then went on: "Undoubtedly the subconscious. Probably it
recognized the necessity of discussing the whole situation with someone
having a fresh viewpoint, someone whose ideas can help me develop a
fresh angle of attack. Haynes and I think too much alike for him to be
of much help."
"You trust _me_ that much?" the girl asked, dumfounded.
"Certainly," he replied without hesitation. "I know enough about you to
know that you can keep your mouth shut."
* * * * *
Thus unromantically did Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, acknowledge the
first glimmerings of the dawning perception of a vast fact--that this
nurse and he were two between whom there never would nor could exist
any iota of doubt or of question.
Then they sat and talked. Not idly, as is the fashion of lovers, of the
minutiae of their own romantic affairs, did these two converse, but
cosmically, of the entire Universe and of the already existent conflict
between the culture of Civilization and Boskonia.
They sat there, romantically enough to all outward seeming; their
privacy assured by Kinnison's Lens and by his ever-watchful sense of
perception. Time after time, completely unconsciously, that sense
reached out to other couples who approached, to touch and to affect
their minds so insidiously that they did not know that they were being
steered away from the tree in whose black moon-shadow sat the Lensman
and the nurse.
Finally the long conversation came to an end and Kinnison assisted his
companion to her feet. His frame was straighter, his eyes held a new
and brighter light.
"By the way, Kim," she asked idly as they strolled back toward the
ballroom, "who is this Klono, by whom you were swearing a while ago?
Another spaceman's god, like Noshabkeming, of the Valerians?"
"Something like him, only more so," he laughed. "A combination of
Noshabkeming, some of the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, all
three of the Fates, and quite a few other things as well. I think,
originally, from Corvina, but fairly widespread through certain
sections of the Galaxy now. He's got so much stuff--teeth and
horns, claws and whiskers, tail and everything--that he's much more
satisfactory to swear by than any other space-god I know of."
"But why do men have to swear at all, Kim?" she queried, curiously.
"It's so silly."
"For the same reason that women cry," he countered. "A man swears to
keep from crying, a woman cries to keep from swearing. Both are sound
psychology. Safety valves--means of blowing off excess pressure that
would otherwise blow fuses or burn out tubes."