Gray Lensman (5 page)

"Or maybe the guy isn't human?" Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously. "No, the professors are right. We can't understand the figures, but we don't have to—all we have to do is to work with 'em. And, now that it has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are
Gladys
Forrester, it's quite clear that you and I are in the 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 tide 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 can't envisage a million credits hasn't interferred 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 doesn't bother you in the least while you're driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On the ground, I mean, not in the air?"

"A DeKhotinsky sporter."

"Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles an 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 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 of 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 sub-ether. . ."

"Whatever that is," she interrupted.

"That's as good a 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 sub-ether. We can't understand gravity, even though we make it to order.

Nobody 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 visualize it All you have to know is that deep-space vessels and communicators cover distances in parsecs at practically the same rate that Tellurian automobiles and radios cover miles. So, when some space-flea talks to you about parsecs, just think of miles in terms of an automobile and a teleset and you'll know as much as he does— maybe more."

"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 all spacemen, and you Lensmen particularly, are just too perfectly darn
heroic
for anything! Why, I think 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 gayety 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. "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, heart pounding. She had felt Lensed thoughts before, but this was something else, something entirely different Every cell of his brain was open to her— and what
was
she seeing! She could read his mind as fully and as easily as . . . as . . . as Lensmen were supposed to be able to read anybody's! She blanketed her thoughts desperately, tried with all her might not to think at all!

"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?"

"Surely, 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 at large the group of buds surrounding him and eyeing 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 red-head. "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 silk, this one, and less revealing than most—swishing in perfect cadence against deftly and softly stepping high-zippered gray 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 baffled 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 hyper-space 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 Doctor 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. . . we . . . 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 Doctor 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 jots."

"And you?"

"Not in a million, Kim. Lacy's 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 macrocosmic 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 your Lens is off—I'd simply die if it wasn't—but 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 the fact; for her mind was seething with thoughts which that Lensman must not know, then or ever. And for his part, the Lensman knew much better than she did 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, I didn't get just a single, sharp thought, as though you were speaking to me, as I always did before.

Instead, it seemed as though I was actually inside your own mind—the whole of it I've heard Lensmen speak of a wide-open two-way, but I never had even the faintest inkling of what such a thing 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. 1 never dreamed any mortal
could
have a mind like that, Kim! But it was ghastly, too—it gave me the shrieking jitters and just about sent me down out of control. 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. 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 it3 . . . I knew you were backfiring about something, but thought it was because I might think you guilty of petty vanity. And I called
you a
dumbbell once!" he marveled.