“. . . and you’re making a perfect recovery,” the girl was saying. “You’ll be exactly as you were. But things between us aren’t just as they were, and they never can be again. You know that, Kim. We’ve got unfinished business to transact—let’s take it down off the shelf before you go.”
“Better let it lay, Mac.” All the new-found joy of existence went out of the man’s eyes.
“I’m whole, yes, but that angle was really the least important of all. You never yet have faced squarely the fact that my job isn’t done and that my chance of living through it is just about one in ten. Even Phillips can’t do anything about a corpse.”
“I won’t face it, either, unless and until I must.” Her reply was tranquility itself. “Most of the troubles people worry about in advance never do materialize. And even if it did, you ought to know that I . . . that any woman would rather . . . well, that half a loaf is better than no bread.”
“QX. I haven’t mentioned the worst thing. I didn’t want to—but if you’ve got to have it, here it is,” the man wrenched out. “Look at what I am. A bar-room brawler. A rum-dum. A hard- boiled egg. A cold-blooded, ruthless murderer; even of my own men . . .”
“Not that, Kirn, ever, and you know it,” she rebuked him.
“What else can you call it?” he grated. “A killer besides— a red-handed butcher if there ever was one; then, now, and forever. I’ve got to be. I can’t get away from it. Do you think that you, or any other decent woman, could stand it to live with me? That you could feel my arms around you, feel my gory paws touching you, without going sick at the stomach?”
“Oh, so that’s what’s been really griping you all this time?” Clarrissa was surprised, but entirely unshaken. “I don’t have to think about that, Kim—I know. If you were a murderer or had the killer instinct, that would be different, but you aren’t and you haven’t. You are hard, of course. You have to be . . . but do you think I’d be running a temperature over a softy? You brawl, yes—like the world’s champion you are. Anybody you ever killed needed killing, there’s no question of that. You don’t do these things for fun; and the fact that you can drive yourself to do the things that have to be done shows your real size.
“Nor have you even thought of the obverse; that you lean over backwards in wielding that terrific power of yours. The Desplaines woman, the countess—lots of other instances. I respect and honor you more than any other man I have ever known. Any woman who really knew you would •—she must!
“Listen, Kim. Read my mind, all of it. You’ll really know me then, and understand me better than I can ever explain myself.”
“Have you got a picture of me doing that?” he asked, flatly.
“No, you big, unreasonable clunker, I haven’t!” she flared, “and that’s just what’s driving me mad!” Then, voice dropping to a whisper, almost sobbing; “Cancel that, Kim—I didn’t mean it. You wouldn’t—you couldn’t, I suppose, and still be you, the man I love. But isn’t there something— anything—that will make you understand what I really am?”
“I know what you are.” Kinnison’s voice was uninflected, weary. “As I told you before—the universe’s best It’s what I am that’s clogging the jets—what I have been and what I’ve got to keep on being. I simply don’t rate up, and you’d better lay off me, Mac, while you can.
There’s a poem by one of the ancients—Kipling—the ‘Ballad of Boh Da Thone’—that describes it exactly. You wouldn’t know it. . .”
“You just think I wouldn’t,” nodding brightly. “The only trouble is, you always think of the wrong verses. Part of it really is descriptive of you. You know, where all the soldiers of the Black Tyrone thought so much of their captain?”
She recited: “ ‘And worshipped with fluency, fervor, and zeal “ The mud on the boot-heels of “Crook” O’Neil.’ “That describes you to a ‘T.’”
“You’re crazy for the lack of sense,” he demurred. “I don’t rate like that.”
“Sure you do,” she assured him. “All the men think of you that way. And not only men.
Women, too, darn ‘em— and the next time I catch one of them at it I’m going to kick her cursed teeth out, one by one!”
Kinnison laughed, albeit a trifle sourly. “You’re raving, Mac. Imagining things. But to get back to that poem, what I was referring to went like this. . .”
“I know how it goes. Listen: “ ‘But the captain had quitted the long-drawn strife “ ‘And in far Simoorie had taken a wife; “ ‘And she was a damsel of delicate mold, “ ‘With hair like the sunshine and heart of gold.
“ ‘And little she knew the arms that embraced “ ‘Had cloven a man from the brow to the waist: “ ‘And little she knew that the loving lips “ ‘Had ordered a quivering life’s eclipse, “ ‘And the eyes that lit at her lightest breath “ ‘Had glared unawed in the Gates of Death.
“ ‘(For these be matters a man would hide, “’As a general thing, from an innocent bride.)* That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” she asked, quietly.
“Mac, you know a lot of things you’ve got no business knowing.” Instead of answering her question, he stared at her speculatively. “My sprees and brawls, Dessa Desplaines and the Countess Avondrin, and now this. Would you mind telling me how you get the stuff?”
“I’m closer to you than you suspect, Kirn—I’ve always been. Worsel calls it being ‘en rapport.’ You don’t need to think at me—in fact, you have to put up a conscious block to keep me out. So I know a lot that I shouldn’t, but Lensmen aren’t the only ones who don’t talk. You’d been thinking about that poem a lot—it worried you—so I checked with Archeology on it. I memorized most of it.”
“Well, to get the true picture of me you’ll have to multiply that by a thousand. Also, don’t forget that loose heads might be rolling, out onto your breakfast table almost any morning instead of only once.”
“So what?” she countered evenly. “Do you think I could sit for Kipling’s portrait of Mrs.
O’Neil? Nobody ever called my mold delicate, and Kipling, if he had been describing me, would have said: “
“With hair like a conflagration, “ ‘And a heart of solid brass!’ “Captain O’Neil’s bride, as well as being innocent and ignorant, strikes me as having been a good deal of a sissy, something of a weeping willow, and no little of a shrinking violet Tell me, Kirn, do you think she would have made good as a sector chief nurse?”
“No, but that’s neither . . .”
“It is, too,” she interrupted. “You’ve got to consider that I did, and that it’s no job for any girl with a weak stomach. Besides, the Boh’s head took the fabled Mrs. O’Neil by surprise. She didn’t know that her husband used to be in the wholesale mayhem-and-killing business. I do.
“And lastly, you big lug, do you think I’d be making such bare-faced passes at you unless I knew exactly what the score is—exactly where you stand? You’re too much of a gentleman to read my mind; but I’m not that sque . . . I had to know.”
“Huh?” he demanded, blushing fiercely. “You really know, then, that. . .” he would not say it, even then.
“Of course I know!” She nodded; then, as the man spread his hands helplessly, she abandoned her attempt to keep the conversation upon a light level.
“I know, my dear. There’s nothing we can do about ft yet.” Her voice was unsteady, her heart in every word. “You have to do your job, and I honor you for that, even if it does take you away from me. It’ll be easier for you, though, I think, and I know it will be easier for me, to have it out in the open. Whenever you’re ready, Kim, I’ll be here—or somewhere—waiting. Clear ether, Gray Lensman!” and, rising to her feet, she turned back toward the hospital.
“Clear ether, Chris!” Unconsciously he used the pet name by which he had thought of her so long. He stared after her for a minute, hungrily. Then, squaring his shoulders, he strode away.
And upon far Jarnevon Eichmil, the First of Boskone, was conferring with Jalte via communicator. Long since, the Kalonian had delivered through devious channels the message of Boskone to an imaginary director of Lensmen; long since had he received this cryptically direful reply: “Morgan lives, and so does—Star A Star.”
Jalte had not been able to report to his chief any news concerning the fate of that which the speedster bore, since spies no longer existed within the reservations of the Patrol. He had learned of no discovery that any Lensman had made. He could not venture a hypothesis as to how this Star A Star had heard of Jarnevon or had learned of its location. He was sure of only one thing, and that was a grimly disturbing fact indeed. The Patrol was re-arming throughout the galaxy, upon a scale theretofore unknown. Eichmil’s thought was cold: “That means but one thing. A Lensman invaded you and learned of us here—in no other way could knowledge of Jarnevon have come to them.”