“Don’t ‘poor dear’ me, Mac,” he interrupted her with a vigorous thought. “You didn’t say it, I know, but you were thinking it. I’m not half as helpless as you think I am. I can still communicate, and I can see as well as I ever could, or better. And if you think I’m going to let you marry me to take care of me, you’re crazy.”
“You’re raving! Delirious! Stark, staring mad!” She started back, then controlled herself by an effort. “Maybe you can think at people without a Lens—of course you can, since you just did, at me—but you can’t see, Kim, possibly. Believe me, boy, I know you can’t. I was there . . .”
“I can, though,” he insisted. “I got a lot of stuff on my second trip to Arisia that I couldn’t let anybody know about then, but I can now. I’ve got as good a sense of perception as Tregonsee has—maybe better. To prove it, you look thin, worn—whittled down to a nub. You’ve been working too hard—on me.”
“Deduction,” she scoffed. “You’d know I would.”
“QX. How about those roses over there on the table? White ones, yellow ones, and red ones? With ferns?”
“You can smell them, perhaps,” dubiously. Then, with more assurance, “You would know that practically all the flowers known to botany would be here.”
“Well, I’ll count ‘em and point ‘em out to you, then— or better, how about that little gold locket, with ‘CM’ engraved on it, that you’re wearing under your uniform? I can’t smell that, nor the picture in it. . .” The man’s thought faltered in embarrassment. “My picture! Klono’s whiskers, Mac, where did you get that—and why?”
“It’s a reduction that Admiral Haynes let me have made. I am wearing it because I love you—I’ve said that before.”
The girl’s entrancing smile was now in full evidence. She knew now that he could see, that he would never be the helpless hulk which she had so gallingly thought him doomed to become, and her spirits rose in ecstatic relief. But he would never take the initiative now. QX, then—she would; and this was as good an opening as she would ever have with the stubborn brute. Therefore: “More than that, as I also said before, I am going to marry you, whether you like it or not.” She blushed a heavenly (and discordant) magenta, but went on unfalteringly: “And not out of pity, either, Kim, or just to take care of you. It’s older than that—much older.”
“It can’t be done, Mac.” His thought was a protest to high Heaven at the injustice of Fate.
“I’ve thought it over out in space a thousand times—thought until I was black in the face—but I get the same result every time. It’s just simply no soap. You are much too fine a woman—too splendid, too vital, too much of everything a woman should be—to be tied down for life to a thing that’s half steel, rubber, and phenoline. It just simply isn’t on the wheel, that’s all.”
“You’re full of pickles, Kim.” Gone was all her uncertainty and nervousness. She was calm, poised; glowing with a transcendent inward beauty. “I didn’t really know until this minute that you love me, too, but I do now. Don’t you realize, you big, dumb, wonderful clunker, that as long as there’s one single, little bit of a piece of you left alive I’ll love that piece more than I ever could any other man’s entire being?”
“But I can’t, I tell you!” He groaned the thought. “I can’t and I won’t! My job isn’t done yet, either, and next time they’ll probably get me. I can’t let you waste yourself, Mac, on a fraction of a man for a fraction of a lifetime!”
“QX, Gray Lensman.” Clarrissa was serene, radiantly untroubled. She could make things come out right now; everything was on the green. “Well put this back up on the shelf for a while.
I’m afraid that I have been terribly remiss in my duties as nurse. Patients mustn’t be excited or quarreled with, you know.”
“That’s another thing. How come you, a sector chief, to be doing ordinary room duty, and night duty at that?”
“Sector chiefs assign duties, don’t they?” she retorted sunnily. “Now I’ll give you a rub and change some of these dressings.”
CHAPTER 22 – REGENERATION
“Hi, skeleton-gazer!”
“Ho, Big Chief Feet-on-the-Desk!”
“I see your red-headed sector chief is still occupying all strategic salients in force.”
Haynes had paused in the Surgeon-Marshal’s -office on his way to another of his conferences with the Gray Lensman. “Can’t you get rid of her or don’t you want to?”
“Don’t want to. Couldn’t, anyway, probably. The young vixen would tear down the hospital—she might even resign, marry him out of hand, and lug him off somewhere. You want him to recover, don’t you?”
“Don’t be any more of an idiot than you have to. What a question!”
“Don’t work up a temperature about MacDougall, then. As long as she’s around him—and that’s twenty four hours a day—hell get everything in the universe that he can get any good out of.”
“That’s so, too. This other thing’s out of our hands now, anyway. Kinnison can’t hold his position long against her and himself both—overwhelmingly superior force. Just as well, too—Civilization needs more like those two.”
“Check, but the affair isn’t out of our hands, by any means—we’ve got quite a little fine work to do there yet, as you’ll see, before it’ll be a really good job. But about Kinnison . . .”
“Yes. When are you going to fit arms and legs on him? He should be practising with them at this stage of the game, I should think—I was.”
“You should think—but unfortunately, you don’t,” was the surgeon’s dry rejoinder. “If you did, you would have paid more attention to what Phillips has been doing. He’s making the final test today. Come along and we’ll explain it to you again—your conference with Kinnison can wait half an hour.”
In the research laboratory which had been assigned to Phillips they found von Hohendorff with the Posenian. Haynes was surprised to see the old Commandant of Cadets, but Lacy quite evidently had known that he was to be there.
“Phillips,” the Surgeon-Marshal began, “explain to this warhorse, in words of as few syllables as possible, what you are doing.”
“The original problem was to discover what hormone or other agent caused proliferation of neural tissue . . .”
“Wait a minute, I’d better do it,” Lacy broke in. “Besides, you wouldn’t do yourself justice. The first thing he found out was that the problem of repairing damaged nervous tissue was inextricably involved with several other unknown things, such as the original growth of such tissue, its relationship to growth in general, the regeneration of lost members in lower forms, and so on. You see, Haynes, it’s a known fact that nerves do grow, or else they could not exist; and in lower forms of life they regenerate. Those facts were all he had, at first. In higher forms, even during the growth stage, regeneration does not occur spontaneously. Phillips set out to find out why.
“The thyroid controls growth, but does not initiate it, he learned. This fact seemed to indicate that there was an unknown hormone involved—that certain lower types possess an endocrine gland which is either atrophied or non-existent in higher types. If the latter, it was no landing. He reasoned, however, since higher types evolved from lower, that the gland in question might very well exist in a vestigial state. He studied animals, ‘thousands of them, from the germ upward. He exhausted the patience of the Posenian authorities; and when they cut off his appropriation, on the ground that the thing was impossible, he came here. We felt that if he were so convinced of the importance of the work as to be willing to spend bis whole life on it, the least we could do would be to support him. We gave him carte blanche.
“The man is a miracle of perseverance, a keen observer, a shrewd reasoner, and a mechanic par excellence—a born researcher. So he finally found out what it must be—the pineal. Then he had to find the stimulant. Drugs, chemicals, the spectrum of radiation; singly and in combination. Years of plugging, with just enough progress to keep him at it. Visits to other planets peopled by races human to two places or more; learning everything that had been done along that line. When you fellows moved Medon over here he visited it as routine, and there he hit the jackpot. Wise himself is a surgeon, and the Medonians have had warfare and grief enough to develop the medical and surgical arts no end.
“They knew how to stimulate the pineal, but their method was dangerous. With Phillips’ fresh viewpoint, his wide-knowledge, and his mechanical genius, they worked out a new and highly satisfactory technique. He was going to try it out on a pirate slated for the lethal chamber, but von Hohendorff heard about it and insisted on being the guinea pig. Got up on his Unattached Lensman’s high horse and won’t come down. So here we are.”