She did so, but not to sleep. Instead, she went into a trance; and so, almost, did Kinnison.
For over an hour he ‘ay intensely a-sprawl in an easy chair, the while he engraved, day by day, a memory of missing years into that bare storehouse of knowledge. And finally the task was done.
“Sleep, Dessa,” he told her then. “Sleep. Waken in eight hours; whole.”
“Lensman, you’re a maw/” Gerrond realized vaguely what had been done. “You didn’t give her the truth, of course?”
“Far from it. Only that she was married and is a widow. The rest of it is highly fictitious—just enough like the real thing so she can square herself with herself if she meets old acquaintances. Plenty of lapses, of course, but they’re covered by shock.”
“But the husband?” queried the inquisitive Radeligian.
“That’s her business,” Kinnison countered, callously. “Shell tell you sometime, maybe, if she ever feels like it. One thing I did do, though—they’ll never use her again. The next man that tries to hypnotize her will be lucky if he gets away alive.”
The advent of Dessa Desplaines, however, and his curious adventure with her, had altered markedly the Lensman’s situation. No one else in the throng had worn a screen, but there might have been agents . . . anyway, the observed facts would enable the higher-ups to link Fordyce up with what had happened . . . they would know, of course, that the real Fordyce hadn’t done it. . . he could be Fordyce no longer . ..
Wherefore the real Chester Q. Fordyce took over and a stranger appeared. A Posenian, supposedly, since against the air of Radelix he wore that planet’s unmistakable armor. No other race of even approximately human shape could “see” through a helmet of solid, opaque metal.
And in this guise Kinnison continued his investigations. That place and that man must be on this planet somewhere; the sending outfit worn by the Desplaines woman could not possibly reach any other. He h-‘d a good picture of the ro~m and a fair picture—several pictures, in fact—of the man. The room was an actuality; all he had to do was to fill in the details which definitely, by unmistakable internal evidence, belonged there. The man was different. How much of the original picture was real, and how much of it was bias?
She was, he knew, physically fastidious in the extreme. He knew that no possible hypnotism could nullify completely the basic, the fundamental characteristics of the subconscious. The intrinsic ego could not be changed. Was the man really such a monster, or was the picture in the girl’s mind partially or largely the product of her physical revulsion?
For hours he sat at a recording machine, covering yard after yard of tape with every possible picture of the man he wanted. Pictures ranging from a man almost of normal build up to a thing embodying every repulsive detail of the woman’s mental image. The two extremes, he concluded, were highly improbable. Somewhere in between . . . the man was fat, he guessed. Fat, and had a mean pair of eyes. And, no matter how Kinnison had changed the man’s physical shape he had found it impossible to eradicate a personality that was definitely bad.
“The guy’s a louse,” Kinnison decided, finally. “Needs killing. Glad of that—if I have to keep on fighting women much longer I’ll go completely nuts. Got enough dope to identify the ape now, I think.”
And again the Tellurian Lensman set out to comb the planet, city by city. Since he was not now dealing with Lens-men, every move he made had to be carefully planned and as carefully concealed. It was heartbreaking; but at long last he found a bartender who knew his quarry. He was fat, Kinnison discovered, and he was a bad egg. From that point on, progress was rapid. He went to the indicated city, which was, ironically enough, the very Ardith from which he had set out; and, from a bit of information here and a bit there, he tracked down his man.
Now what to do? The technique he had used so successfully upon Boysia II and in other bases could not succeed here; there were thousands of people instead of dozens, and someone would certainly catch him at it. Nor could he work at a distance. He «»s no Arisian, he had to be right beside his job. He would have to turn dock-walloper.
Therefore a dock-walloper he became. Not like one, but actually one. He labored prodigiously, his fine hands and his entire being becoming coarse and hardened. He ate prodigiously, and drank likewise. But, wherever he drank, his liquor was poured from the bartender’s own bottle or from one of similarly innocuous contents; for then as now bartenders did not themselves imbibe the corrosively potent distillates in which they dealt. Nevertheless, Kinnison became intoxicated— boisterously, flagrantly, and pugnaciously so, as did his fellows.
He lived scrupulously within his dock-walloper’s wages. Eight credits per week went to the company, in advance, for room and board; the rest he spent over the fat man’s bar or gambled away at the fat man’s crooked games—for Bominger, although engaged in vaster commerce far, nevertheless allowed no scruple to interfere with his esurient rapacity. Money was money, whatever its amount or source or however despicable its means of acquirement The Lensman knew that the games were crooked, certainly. He could see, however they were concealed, the crooked mechanisms of the wheels. He could see the crooked workings of the dealers’ minds as they manipulated their crooked decks. He could read as plainly as his own the cards his crooked opponents held. But to win or to protest would have set him apart, hence he was always destitute before pay-day. Then, like his fellows, he spent his spare time loafing in the same saloon, vaguely hoping for a free drink or for a stake at cards, until one of the bouncers threw him out.
But in his every waking hour, working, gambling, or loafing, he studied Bominger and Bominger’s various enterprises. The Lensman could not pierce the fat man’s thought-screen, and he could never catch him without it. However, he could and did learn much. He read volume after volume of locked account books, page by page. He read secret documents, hidden in the deepest recesses of massive vaults. He listened in on conference after conference; for a thought- screen of course does not interfere with either sight or sound. The Big Shot did not own—legally—the saloon, nor the ornate, almost palatial back room which was his office, or sound. The Big Shot did not own—legally—the saloon, nor the narrow, cell-like rooms in which addicts of twice a score of different noxious drugs gave themselves over libidinously to their addictions. Nevertheless, they were his; and they were only a part of that which was his.
Kinnison detected, traced, and identified agent after agent. With his sense of perception he followed passages, leading to other scenes, utterly indescribable here. One comparatively short gallery, however, terminated in a different setting altogether; for there, as here and perhaps everywhere, ostentation and squalor lie almost back to back. Nalizok’s Café, the high-life hot- spot of Radelix! Downstairs innocuous enough; nothing rough—that is, too rough—was ever pulled there. Most of the robbery there was open and aboveboard, plainly written upon the checks. But there were upstairs rooms, and cellar rooms, and back rooms. And there were addicts, differing only from those others in wearing finer raiment and being of a self-styled higher stratum. Basically they were the same.
Men, women, girls even were there, in the rigid muscle-lock of thionite. Teeth hard-set, every muscle tense and straining, eyes jammed closed, fists clenched, faces white as though carved from marble, immobile in the frenzied emotion which characterizes the ultimately passionate fulfilment of every suppressed desire; in the release of their every inhibition crowding perilously close to the dividing line beyond which lay death from sheer ecstasy. That is the technique of the thionite-sniffer—to take every microgram that he can stand, to come to, shaken and too weak even to walk; to swear that he will never so degrade himself again; to come back after more as soon as he has recovered strength to do so; and finally, with an irresistible craving for stronger and ever stronger thrills, to take a larger dose than his rapidly-weakening body can endure and so to cross the fatal line.
There also were the idiotically smiling faces of the hadive smokers, the twitching members of those who preferred the Centralian nitrolabe-needle, the helplessly stupefied eaters of bentlam—but why go on? Suffice it to say that in that one city block could be found every vice and every drug enjoyed’ by Radeligians and the usual run of visitors; and if perchance you were an unusual visitor, desiring something unusual, Bominger could get it for you—at a price.
“But Kinnison studied, perceived, and analyzed. Also, he reported, via Lens, daily and copiously, to Narcotics, under Lensman’s Seal.