“Perhaps she isn’t known, out this way. Or maybe they think they’re ready for a show- down . . . or don’t care. But her being here ties me up in hard knots—she’ll recognize me, for all the tea in China. You know the Narcotics’ Lensmen, don’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“Call one of them, right now. Tell him that Dessa Desplaines, the zwilnik houri, is right here on the floor . . . What? He doesn’t know her, either? And none of our boys are Lensmen!
Make it a three-way. Lensman Winstead? Kinnison of Sol in, Unattached. Sure that none of you recognize this picture?” and he transmitted a perfect image of the ravishing creature then moving regally across the floor. “Nobody does? Maybe that’s why she’s here, then—they thought she could get away with it She’s your meat—come and get her.”
“You’ll appear against her, of course?”
“If necessary—but it won’t be. As soon as she sees the game’s up, all hell will be out for noon.”
As soon as the connection had been broken, Kinnison realized that the thing could not be done that way; that he could not stay out of it. No man alive save himself could prevent her from flashing a warning—badly as he hated to, he had to do it Gerrond glanced at him curiously: he had received a few of those racing thoughts.
“Tune in on this.” Kinnison grinned wryly. “If the last meeting I had with her is any criterion, it ought to be good. S’pose anybody around here understands Aldebaranian?”
“Never heard it mentioned if they do.”
The Tellurian walked blithely up to the radiant visitor, held out his hand in Earthly—and Aldebaranian—greeting, and spoke: “Madame Desplaines would not remember Chester Q. Fordyce, of course. It is of the piteousness that I should be 10 accursedly of the ordinariness; for to see Madame but the one time, as I did at the New Year’s Ball in High Altamont, is to remember her forever.”
“Such a flatterer!” the woman laughed. “I trust that you will forgive me, Mr. Fordyce, but one meets so many interesting . . .” her eyes widened in surprise, an expression which changed rapidly to one of flaming hatred, not umnixed with fear.
“So you do know me, you bedroom-eyed Aldebaranian hell-cat,” he remarked, evenly. “I thought you would.”
“Yes, you sweet, uncontaminated sissy, you overgrown superboy-scout, I do!” she hissed, malevolently, and made a quick motion toward her corsage. These two, as has been intimated, were friends of old.
Quick though she was, the man was quicker. His left hand darted out to seize her left wrist; his right, flashing around her body, grasped her right and held it rigidly in the small of her back. Thus they walked away.
“Stop!” she flared. “You’re making a spectacle of me!”
“Now isn’t that just too bad?” His lips smiled, for the benefit of the observers, but his eyes held no glint of mirth. “These folks will think that this is the way all Aldebaranian friends walk together. If you think for a second you’ve got any chance at all of touching that sounder—think again. Stop wiggling! Even if you can shimmy enough to work it I’ll smash your brain to a pulp before it contacts once!”
Outside, in the grounds: “Oh, Lensman, let’s sit down and talk this over!” and the girl brought into play everything she had. It was a distressing scene, but it left the Lensman cold.
“Save your breath,” he advised her finally, wearily. ‘To me you’re just another zwilnik, no more and no less. A female louse is still a louse; and calling a zwilnik a louse is insulting the whole louse family.”
He said that; and, saying it, knew it to be the exact and crystal truth: but not even that knowledge could mitigate in any iota the recoiling of his every fiber from the deed which he was about to do. He could not even pray, with immortal Merritt’s Dwayanu: “Luka—turn your wheel so I need not slay this woman/”
It had to be. Why in all the nine hells of Valeria did he have to be a Lensman? Why did he have to be the one to do it? But it had to be done, and soon; they’d be here shortly.
“There’s just one thing you can do to make me believe you’re even partially innocent,” he ground out, “that you have even one decent thought or one decent instinct anywhere in you.”
“What is that, Lensman? Ill do it, whatever it is!”
“Release your thought-screen and send out a call to the Big Shot.”
The girl stiffened. This big cop wasn’t so dumb—he really knew something. He must die, and at once. How could she get word to . . .?
Simultaneously Kinnison perceived that for which he had been waiting; the Narcotics men were coming.
He tore open the woman’s gown, flipped the switch of her thought-screen, and invaded her mind. But, fast as he was, he was late—almost too late altogether. He could get neither direction line nor location; but only and faintly a picture of a space-dock saloon, of a repulsively obese man in a luxuriously-furnished back room. Then her mind went completely blank and her body slumped down, bonelessly.
Thus Narcotics found them; the woman inert and flaccid upon the bench, the man staring down at her in black abstraction.
CHAPTER 6 – ROUGH-HOUSE
“Suicide? or did you . . .” Gerrond paused, delicately. Winstead, the Lensman of Narcotics, said nothing, but looked on intently.
“Neither,” Kinnison replied, still studying. “I would have had to, but she beat me to it.”
“What d’you mean, ‘neither’? She’s dead, isn’t she? How did it happen?”
“Not yet, and unless I’m more cockeyed even than usual, she won’t be. She isn’t the type to rub herself out. Ever, under any conditions. As to ‘how’, that was easy. A hollow false tooth.
Simple, but new . . . and clever. But why? WHY?” Kinnison was thinking to himself more than addressing his companions. “If they had killed her, yes. As it is, it doesn’t make any kind of sense—any of it.”
“But the girl’s dying!” protested Gerrond. “What’re you going to do?” . .
“I wish to Klono I knew.” The Tellurian was puzzled, groping. “No hurry doing anything about her—what was done to her nobody can undo . . . BUT WHY? . . . unless I can fit these pieces together into some kind of a pattern I’ll never know what it’s all about . . . none of it makes sense . . .” He shook himself and went on: “One thing is plain. She won’t die. If they had intended to kill her, she would’ve died right then. They figure she’s worth saving; in which I agree with them. At the same time, they certainly aren’t planning on letting me tap her knowledge, and they may be figuring on taking her away from us. Therefore, as long^as she stays alive—or even not dead, the way she is now —guard her so heavily that an army can’t get her. If she should happen to die, don’t leave her body unguarded for a second until she’s been autopsied and you know she’ll stay dead. The minute she recovers, day or night, call me. Might as well take her to the hospital now, I guess.”
The call came soon that the patient had indeed recovered.
“She’s talking, but I haven’t answered her,” Gerrond reported. “There’s-something strange here, Kinnison.”
“There would be—bound to be. Hold everything until I get there,” and he hurried to the hospital.
“Good morning, Dessa,” he greeted her in Aldebaranian. “You are feeling better, I hope?”
Her reaction was surprising. “You really know me?” she almost shrieked, and flung herself into the Lensman’s arms. Not deliberately; not with her wonted, highly effective technique of bringing into play the equipment with which she was overpoweringly armed. No; this was the uttery innocent, the wholly unselfconscious abandon of a very badly frightened young girl. “What happened?” she sobbed, frantically, “Where am I? Why are all these strangers here?”
Her wide, child-like, tear-filled eyes sought his; and as he probed them, deeper and deeper into the brain behind them, his face grew set and hard. Mentally, she now was a young and innocent girl! Nowhere in her mind, not even in the deepest recesses of her subconscious, was there the slightest inkling that she had even existed since her fifteenth year. It was staggering; it was unheard of; but it was indubitably a fact. For her, now, the intervening time had lapsed instantaneously—had disappeared so utterly as never to have been!
“You have been very ill, Dessa,” he told her gravely, “and you are no longer a child.” He led her into another room and up to a triple mirror. “See for yourself.”
“But that isn’t II” she protested. “It can’t be! Why, she’s beautiful!”
“You’re all of that,” the Lensman agreed casually. “You’ve had a bad shock. Your memory will return shortly, I think. Now you must go back to bed.”