The city’s largest ball-room was a blaze of light and color. A thousand polychromatic 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 boasts 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 ori.
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 man: 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 me 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 . . . well, it’s really a kind of shock. I have to get used to it gradually. 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’m 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. Perhaps I’ve recovered enough now to 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’ve never been out in deep space at all. Besides a few hops to the moon. I’ve 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 distances you cover, or the way your communicators work. In fact, according to the professors, no human mind can understand figures of those magnitudes at all. But you must understand them, I should think . . . or, perhaps . . .”
“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.”