Second Stage Lensman (11 page)

"How do you mean?" She blushed vividly, her eyes wavered.

"Pretending to be such a hard-boiled egg. 'Never broke yet'. Why should you break, when you've never been under pressure?"

"I have so!" she flared. "What do you suppose I'm carrying this knife for?"

"Oh, that." He mentally shrugged the wicked little dagger aside as he pondered. "You little lamb in wolfs clothing… but at that, your memories may, I think, be altogether too valuable to monkey with… there's something funny about this whole matrix—damned funny. Come clean, baby-face—why?"

"They told me to," she admitted, wriggling slightly. "To act tough—really tough. As though I were an adventuress who had been everywhere and had done… done everything. That the worse I acted the better I would get along in your Civilization."

"I suspected something of the sort. And what did you zwil—excuse me, you folks—go to Lyrane for, in the first place?"

"I don't know. From chance remarks I gathered that we were to land on one of the planets—any one, I supposed—and wait for somebody."

"What were you, personally, going to do?"

"I don't know that, either—not exactly, that is. I was to take some kind of a ship somewhere, but I don't know what, or when, or where, or why, or whether I was to go alone or take somebody. Whoever it was that we were going to meet was going to give us orders."

"How come those women killed your men? Didn't they have thought-screens, too?"

"No. They weren't agents—just soldiers. They shot about a dozen of the Lyranians when we first landed, just to show their authority, then they dropped dead."

"Um. Poor technique, but typically Boskonian. Your trip to Tellus was more or less accidental, then?"

"Yes. I wanted her to take me back to Lonabar, but she wouldn't. She couldn't have, anyway, because she didn't know any more about where it is than I did."

"Huh?" Kinnison blurted. "You don't know where your own home planet is? What the hell kind of a pilot are you, anyway?"

"Oh, I'm not really a pilot. Just what they made me learn after we left Lonabar, so I'd be able to make that trip. Lonabar wasn't shown on any of the charts we had aboard. Neither was Lyrane—that was why I had to make my own chart, to get back there from Tellus."

"But you must know something!" Kinnison fumed. "Stars? Constellations? The Galaxy—the Milky Way?"

"The Milky Way, yes. By its shape, Lonabar isn't anywhere near the center of the galaxy. I've been trying to remember if there were any noticeable star configurations, but I can't. You see, I wasn't the least bit interested in such things, then."

"Hell's Brazen Hinges! You can't be that dumb—nobody can! Any Tellurian infant old enough to talk knows either the Big Dipper or the Southern Cross! Hold it—I'm coming in and find out for myself."

He came—but he did not find out.

"Well, I guess people can be that dumb, since you so indubitably are," he admitted then. "Or—maybe—aren't there any?"

"Honestly, Lensman, I don't know. There were lots of stars, of course… if there were any striking configurations I might have noticed them; but I might not have, too. As I said, I wasn't the least bit interested."

"That was very evident," dryly. "However, excuse me, please, for talking so rough."

"Rough? Of course, sir," Illona giggled. "That wasn't rough, comparatively—and nobody ever apologized before—I'd like awfully well to help you, sir, if I possibly can."

"I know you would, Toots, and thanks. To get back onto the beam, what put it into Helen's mind to go to Tellus?"

"She learned about Tellus and the Patrol from our minds—none of them could believe at first that there were any inhabited worlds except their own—and wanted to study them at first hand. She took our ship and made me fly it."

"I see. I'm not surprised. I thought that there was something remarkably screwy about those activities—they seemed so aimless and so barren of results—but I couldn't put my finger on it. And we crowded her so close that she decided to flit for home. You could see her, but nobody else could—that she didn't want to."

"That was it. She said that she was being hampered by a mind of power. That was you, of course?"

"And others. Well, that's that, for a while."

He called the tailor in. No, he didn't have a thing to make a girl's dress out of, especially not a girl like that. She should wear glamorette, and sheer—very sheer. He didn't know a thing about ladies' tailoring, either; he hadn't made a gown since he was knee-high to a duck. All he had in the shop was coat-linings. Perhaps nylon would do, after a fashion. He remembered now, he did have a bolt of nylon that wasn't any good for linings—not stiff enough, and red. Too heavy, of course, but it would drape well.

It did. She came swaggering back, an hour or so later, the hem of her skirt swishing against the tops of her high-laced boots.

"Do you like it?" she asked, pirouetting gayly.

"Fine!" he applauded, and it was. The tailor had understated tremendously both his ability and the resources of his shop.

"Now what? I don't have to stay in my room all the time now, please?"

"I'll say not. The ship is yours. I want you to get acquainted with every man on board. Go anywhere you like—except the private quarters, of course—even to the control room. The boys all know that you're at large."

"The language—but I'm talking English now!"

"Sure. I've been giving it to you right along. You know it as well as I do."

She stared at him in awe. Then, her natural buoyancy asserting itself, she flirted out of the room with a wave of her hand.

And Kinnison sat down to think. A girl—a kid who wasn't dry behind the ears yet—wearing beads worth a full grown fortune, sent somewhere… to do what? Lyrane II, a perfect matriarchy. Lonabar, a planet of zwilniks that knew all about Tellus, but wasn't on any Patrol chart, sending expeditions to Lyrane. To the system, perhaps not specifically to Lyrane II. Why? For what? To do what? Strange, new jewels of fabulous value. What was the hook-up? It didn't make any kind of sense yet… not enough data…

And faintly, waveringly, barely impinging upon the outermost, most tenuous fringes of his mind he felt something: the groping, questing summons of an incredibly distant thought.

"Male of Civilization… Person of Tellus… Kinnison of Tellus… Lensman Kinnison of Sol III… Any Lensbearing officer of the Galactic Patrol…" Endlessly the desperately urgent, almost imperceptible thought implored.

Kinnison stiffened. He reached out with the full power of his mind, seized the thought, tuned to it, and hurled a reply—and when that mind really pushed a thought, it traveled.

"Kinnison of Tellus acknowledging!" His answer fairly crackled on its way.

"You do not know my name," the stranger's thought came clearly now. "I am the 'Toots', the 'Rep-Top', the 'Queen of Sheba', the 'Cleopatra', the Elder Person of Lyrane II. Do you remember me, Kinnison of Tellus?"

"I certainly do!" he shot back. What a brain—what a terrific brain—that sexless woman had!

"We are invaded by manlike beings in ships of space, who wear screens against our thoughts and who slay without cause. Will you help us with your ship of might and your mind of power?"

"Just a sec, Toots—Henderson!" Orders snapped. The
Dauntless
spun end-for—end.

"QX, Helen of Troy," he reported then. "We're on our way back there at maximum blast. Say, that name 'Helen of Troy' fits you better than anything else I have called you. You don't know it, of course, but that other Helen launched a thousand ships. You're launching only one; but believe me, Babe, the old
Dauntless
is SOME ship!"

"I hope so." The Elder Person, ignoring the by-play, went directly to the heart of the matter in her usual pragmatic fashion. "We have no right to ask; you have every reason to refuse…"

"Don't worry about that, Helen. We're all good little Boy Scouts at heart. We're supposed to do a good deed every day, and we've missed a lot of days lately."

"You are what you call 'kidding', I think." A matriarch could not be expected to possess a sense of humor. "But I do not lie to you or pretend. We did not, do not now, and never will like you or yours. With us now, however, it is that you are much the lesser of two terrible evils. If you will aid us now we will tolerate your Patrol; we will even promise to endure others of your kind."

"And that's big of you, Helen, no fooling." The Lensman was really impressed. The plight of the Lyranians must be desperate indeed. "Just keep a stiff upper lip, all of you. We're coming loaded for bear, and we are not exactly creeping."

Nor were they. The big cruiser had plenty of legs and she was using them all; the engineers were giving her all the of her drivers would take. She was literally blasting a hole through space; she was traveling so fast that the atoms of substance in the interstellar vacuum, merely wave-forms though they were, simply could not get out of the flyer's way. They were being blasted into nothingness against the
Dauntless
' wall-shields.

And throughout her interior the Patrol ship, always in complete readiness for strife, was being gone over again with microscopic thoroughness, to be put into more readiness, if possible, even than that.

After a few hours Illona danced back to Kinnison's "con" room, fairly bubbling over.

"Why, they're marvelous, Lensman!" she cried, "simply marvelous!"

"What are marvelous?"

"The boys," she enthused. "All of them. They're here because they want to be—why, the officers don't even have whips! They like them, actually! The officers who push the little buttons and things and those who walk around and look through the little glass things and even the gray-haired old man with the four stripes, why they like them all! And the boys were all putting on guns when I left—why, I never heard of such a thing!—and they're just simply crazy about you. I thought it was awfully funny you took off your guns as soon as the ship left Lyrane and you don't have guards around you all the time because I thought sure somebody would stab you in the back or something but they don't even want to and that's what's so marvelous and Hank Henderson told me…"

"Save it!" he ordered. "Jet back, angel-face, before you blow a fuse." He had been right in not operating—this girl was going to be a mine of information concerning Boskonian methods and operations, and all without knowing it. "That's what I've been trying to tell you about our Civilization; that it's based on the freedom of the individual to do pretty much as he pleases, as long as it is not to the public harm. And, as far as possible, equality of all the entities of Civilization."

"Uh-huh, I know you did," she nodded brightly, then sobered quickly, "but I couldn't understand it. I can't understand it yet; I can scarcely believe that you all are so… you know, don't you, what would happen if this were a Lonabarian ship and I would go running around talking to officers as though I were their equal?"

"No—what?"

"It's inconceivable, of course; it simply couldn't happen. But if it did, I would be punished terribly—perhaps though, at a first offense, I might be given only a twenty-scar whipping." At his lifted eyebrow she explained, "One that leaves twenty scars that show for life.

"That's why I'm acting so intoxicated, I think. You see, I…" she hesitated shyly, "I'm not used to being treated as anybody's equal, except of course other girls like me. Nobody is, on Lonabar. Everybody is higher or lower than you are. I'm going to simply love this when I get used to it." She spread both arms in a sweeping gesture. "I'd like to squeeze this whole ship and everybody in it—I just can't wait to get to Tellus and really live there!"

"That's a thing that has been bothering me," Kinnison confessed, and the girl stared wonderingly at his serious face. "We're going into battle, and we can't take time to land you anywhere before the battle starts."

"Of course not! Why should you?" she paused, thinking deeply. "You're not worrying about me, surely? Why, you're a high officer! Officers don't care whether a girl gets shot or not, do they?" The thought was obviously, utterly new.

"We do. It's extremely poor hospitality to invite a guest aboard and then have her killed. All I can say, though, is that if our number goes up… I still don't see how I could have done anything else."

"Oh… thanks, Gray Lensman. Nobody ever spoke to me like that before. But I wouldn't land if I could. I like Civilization. If you… if you don't win, I couldn't go to Tellus anyway, so I'd much rather take my chances here than not, sir, really. I'll never go back to Lonabar, in any case."

"At-a-girl, Toots!" He extended his hand. She looked at it dubiously, then hesitantly stretched out her own. But she learned fast; she put as much pressure into the brief handclasp as Kinnison did. "You'd better flit now, I've got work to do."

"Can I go up top? Hank Henderson is going to show me the primaries."

"Sure. Go anywhere you like. Before the trouble starts I'll take you down to the center and put you into a suit."

"Thanks, Lensman!" The girl hurried away and Kinnison Lensed the master pilot.

"Henderson? Kinnison. Official. Illona just told me about the primaries. They're QX—but no etchings."

"Of course not, sir."

"And please pass a word around for me. I know as well as anybody does that she doesn't belong aboard; but it couldn't be helped and I'm getting rid of her as soon as I possibly can. In the meantime she's my personal responsibility. So—no passes. She's strictly off limits."

"I'll pass the word, sir."

"Thanks." The Gray Lensman broke the connection and got into communication with Helen of Lyrane, who gave him a resume of everything that had happened.

Two ships—big ships, immense space-cruisers—appeared near the airport. Nobody saw them coming, they came so fast. They stopped, and without warning or parley destroyed all the buildings and all the people nearby with beams like Kinnison's needle-beam, except much larger. Then the ships landed and men disembarked. The Lyranians killed ten of them by direct mental impact or by monsters of the mind, but after that everyone who came out of the vessel wore thought-screens and the persons were quite helpless. The enemy had burned down and melted a part of the city, and as a further warning were then making formal plans to execute publicly a hundred leading Lyranians—ten for each man they had killed.