“Hm . . . m. That changes the picture entirely.” Much to her surprise, the man’s voice was calm and thoughtful; not at all incensed. Not even disturbed. “So I spilled the beans myself, on a wide-open two-way, and didn’t even realize it . . . I knew you were backfiring about something, but thought it was because I might think you guilty of petty vanity. And I called you a dumbbell once!” he marveled.
“Twice,” she corrected him, “and the second time I was never so glad to be called names in my whole life.”
“Now I know I was getting to be a space-louse.”
“Uh-uh, Kim,” she denied again, gently. “And you aren’t a brat or a lug or a clunker, either, even though I have called you such. But, now that I’ve actually got all this stuff, what can you—what can we—do about it?”
“Perhaps . . . probably . . . I think, since I gave it to you myself, I’ll let you keep it,”
Kinnison decided, slowly.
“Keep it!” she exclaimed. “Of course I’ll keep it! Why, it’s in my mind—I’ll have to keep it—nobody can take knowledge away from anyone!”
“Oh, sure—of course,” he murmured, absently. There were a lot of thing that Mac didn’t know, and no good end would be served by enlightening her farther. “You see, there’s a lot of stuff in my mind that I don’t know much about myself, yet Since I gave you an open channel, there must have been a good reason for it, even though, consciously, I don’t know myself what it was.” He thought intensely for moments, then went on: “Undoubtedly the subconscious.
Probably it recognized the necessity of discussing the whole situation with someone having a fresh viewpoint, someone whose ideas can help me develop a fresh angle of attack. Haynes and I think too much alike for him to be of much help.”
“You trust me that much?” the girl asked, dumbfounded.
“Certainly,” he replied without hesitation. “I know enough about you to know that you can keep your mouth shut.”
Thus unromantically did Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, acknowledge the first glimmerings of the dawning perception of a vast fact—that this nurse and he were two between whom there never would nor could exist any iota of doubt or of question.
Then they sat and talked. Not idly, as is the fashion of lovers, of the minutiae of their own romantic affairs, did these two converse, but cosmically, of the entire Universe and of the already existent conflict between the cultures of Civilization and Boskonia.
They sat there, romantically enough to all outward seeming; their privacy assured by Kinnison’s Lens and by his ever-watchful sense of perception. Time after time, completely unconsciously, that sense reached out to other couples who approached; to touch and to affect their minds so insidiously that they did not know that they were being steered away from the tree in whose black moon-shadow sat the Lensman and the nurse.
Finally the long conversation came to an end and Kinnison assisted his companion to her feet. His frame was straighter, his eyes held a new and brighter light.
“By the way, Kim,” she asked idly as they strolled back toward the ball-room, “who is this Klono, by whom you were swearing a while ago? Another spaceman’s god, like Noshabkeming, of the Valerians?”
“Something like him, only more so,” he laughed. “A combination of Noshabkeming, some of the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, all three of the Fates, and quite a few other things as well. I think, originally, from Corvina, but fairly wide-spread through certain sections of the galaxy now. He’s got so much stuff—teeth and horns, claws and whiskers, tail and everything—that he’s much more satisfactory to swear by than any other space-god I know of.”
“But why do men have to swear at all, Kim?” she queried, curiously. “It’s so silly.”
“For the same reason that women cry,” he countered. “A man swears to keep from crying, a woman cries to keep from swearing. Both are sound psychology. Safety valves —means of blowing off excess pressure that would otherwise blow fuses or burn out tubes.”
CHAPTER 3 – DEI EX MACHINA
In the library of the port admiral’s richly comfortable home, a room as heavily guarded against all forms of intrusion as was his private office, two old but active Gray Lensmen sat and grinned at each other like the two conspirators which in fact they were. One took a squat, red bottle of fayalin from a cabinet and filled two small glasses. The glasses clinked, rim to rim.
“Here’s to love!” Haynes gave the toast.
“Ain’t it grand!” Surgeon-Marshal Lacy responded.
“Down the hatch!” they chanted in unison, and action followed word.
“You aren’t asking if everything stayed on the beam.” This from Lacy.
“No need—I had a spy-ray on the whole performance.”
“You would—you’re the type.
However, I would have, too, if I had a panel full of them in my office. . .. Well, say it, you old space-hellion!” Lacy grinned again, albeit a trifle wryly.
“Nothing to say, saw-bones. You did a grand job, and you’ve got nothing to blow a jet about.”
“No? How would you like to have a red-headed spitfire who’s scarcely dry behind the ears yet tell you to your teeth that you’ve got softening of the brain? That you had the mental capacity of a gnat, the intellect of a Zabriskan fontema? And to have to take it, without even heaving the insubordinate young jade into the can for about twenty-five well-earned black spots?”
“Oh, come, now, you’re just blasting. It wasn’t that bad!”
“Perhaps not—quite—but it was bad enough.”
“She’ll grow up, some day, and realize that you were foxing her six ways from the origin.”
“Probably. . . . In the meantime, it’s all part of the bigger job. . . . Thank God I’m not young any more. They suffer so.”
“Check. How they suffer!”
“But you saw the ending and I didn’t How did it turn out?” Lacy asked.
“Partly good, partly bad.” Haynes slowly poured two more drinks and thoughtfully swirled the crimson, pungently aromatic liquid around and around in his glass before he spoke again. “Hooked—but she knows it, and I’m afraid she’ll do something about it.”
“She’s a smart operator—I told you she was. She doesn’t fox herself about anything.
Hmm. . . . A bit of separation is indicated, it would seem.”
“Check. Can you send out a hospital ship somewhere, so as to get rid of her for two or three weeks?”
“Can do. Three weeks be enough? We can’t send him anywhere, you know.”
“Plenty—hell be gone in two.” Then, as Lacy glanced at him questioningly, Haynes continued: “Ready for a shock? He’s going to Lundmark’s Nebula.”
“But he can’t! That would take years! Nobody has ever got back from there yet, and there’s this new job of his. Besides, this separation is only supposed to last until you can spare him for a while!”
“If it takes very long he’s coming back. The idea has always been, you know, that intergalactic matter may be so thin— one atom per liter or so—that such a flit won’t take one- tenth the time supposed. We recognize the danger—he’s going well heeled.”
“How well?”
The very best”
“I hate to clog their jets this way, but it’s got to be done. We’ll give her a raise when I send her out—make her sector chief. Huh?”
“Did I hear any such words lately as spitfire, hussy, and jade, or did I dream them?”
Haynes asked, quizzically.
“She’s all of them, and more—but she’s one of the best nurses and one of the finest women that ever lived, too!”
“QX, Lacy, give her her raise. Of course she’s good. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be in on this deal at all. In fact, they’re about as fine a couple of youngsters as old Tellus ever produced.”
“They are that. Man, what a pair of skeletons!”
* * * And in the Nurses’ Quarters a young woman with a wealth of red-bronze-auburn hair and tawny eyes was staring at her own reflection in a mirror.
“You half-wit, you ninny, you lug!” she stormed, bitterly if almost inaudibly, at that reflection. “You lame-brained moron, you red-headed, idiotic imbecile, you microcephalic dumb-bell, you clunker! Of all the men in this whole cockeyed galaxy, you would have to make a dive at Kimball Kinnison, the one man who thinks you’re just part of the furniture. At a Gray Lensman. . . .” Her expression changed and she whispered softly, “A. . . Gray. . . Lensman. He can’t love anybody as long as he’s carrying that load. They can’t let themselves be human . . . quite . . . perhaps loving him will be enough. . ..”
She straightened up, shrugged, and smiled; but even that pitiful travesty of a smile could not long endure. Shortly it was buried in waves of pain and the girl threw herself down upon her bed.