the hammocks, had been observing, computing and conferring.
“She’s got a lot of speed, Admiral-most of it straight down,” Henderson reported.
“On her landing jets it’ll take close to two G’s on a full revolution to bring her in. Either
one of us can balance her down, but it’ll have to be straight on her tail and it’ll mean
over five G’s most of the way. Which do you want?”
“Which is more important, Lacy, time or pressure?” Haynes transferred decision
to the surgeon.
`Time.” Lacy decided .instantly. “Fight her down!” His patient had been through
so much already of force and pressure that a little more would not do additional hurt,
and time was most decidedly of the essence. Doctor, nurse, and admiral leaped into
hammocks, pilots at their controls tightened safety belts and acceleration straps-five
gravities for over half an hour is no light matter-and the fight was on.
Starkly incandescent flares ripped and raved from driving jets and aide jets. The
speedster spun around viciously, only to be curbed, skillfully if savagely, at the precisely
right instant. Without an orbit, without even a corkscrew or other spiral, she was going
down-straight down. And not upon her under jets was this descent to be, nor upon her
even more powerful braking jets. Master Pilot Henry Henderson, Prime Base’s best,
was going to kill the awful inertia of the speedster by “balancing her down on her tail.”
Or, to translate from the jargon of space, he was going to hold the tricky, cranky little
vessel upright upon the terrific blasts of her main driving projectors, against the Earth’s
gravitation and against all other perturbing forces, while her driving force counteracted,
overcame, and dissipated the full frightful measure of the kinetic energy of her mass
and speed!
And balance her down he did. Haynes was afraid for a minute that that intrepid
wight was actually going to land the speedster on her tail. He didn’t-quite-but he had
only a scant hundred feet to spare when he nosed her over and eased her to ground on
her under-jets.
The crash-wagon and its crew were waiting, and as Kinnison was rushed to the
hospital the others hurried to the net room. Doctor Lacy first, of course, then the nurse,
and, to Haynes’ approving surprise, she took it like a veteran. Hardly had the surgeon
let himself out of the “cocoon” than she was in it, and hardly had the terrific surges and
recoils of her own not inconsiderable one hundred and forty-five pounds of mass
abated than she herself was out and sprinting across the sward toward the hospital.
Haynes went back to his office and tried to work, but he could not concentrate,
and made his way back to the hospital. There he waited, and as Lacy came out of the
operating room he buttonholed him.
“How about it, Lacy, will be live?” he demanded.
“Live? Of course he’ll live.” the surgeon replied, gruffly. “Can’t tell you details yet-
we won’t know, ourselves, for a couple of hours yet. Do a flit, Haynes. Come back at
sixteen forty-not a second before-and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Since there was no help for it the Port Admiral did go away, but he was back
promptly on the tick of the designated hour.
“How is he?” he demanded without preamble. “Will he really live, or were you
just giving me a shot in the arm?”
“Better than that, much better,” the surgeon assured him. “Definitely so, yes.
He’s in much better shape than we dared hope. Must have been a very light crash
indeed – nothing seriously the matter with him at all. We won’t even have to amputate,
from what we can see now. He should make a one hundred percent recovery, not only
without artificial members, but with scarcely a scar. He couldn’t have been in a space
crack-up at all, or he wouldn’t have come out with so little injury.”
“Fine, Doc-wonderful! Now the details.”
“Here’s the picture.” The doctor unrolled a full-length X-ray print, showing every
anatomical detail of the Lensman’s interior structure. “First, just notice that skeleton. It
is really remarkable. Slightly out of true here and there right now, of course, but I
believe it’s going to turn out to be the first absolutely perfect male skeleton I have ever
seen. That young man will go far, Haynes.”
“Sure he will. Why else do you suppose we put him in Gray? But I didn’t come
over here to be told that-show me the damage.”
“Look at the picture-see for yourself. Multiple and compound fractures, you
notice, of legs and arm, and a few ribs. Scapula, of course-there. Oh, yes, there’s a
skull fracture, too, but it doesn’t amount to much. That’s all-the spine, you see, isn’t
injured at all.”
“What d’you mean, ‘that’s all’? How about his wounds? I saw some of them
myself, and they were not pin-pricks.”
“Nothing of the least importance. A few punctured wounds and a couple of
incised ones, but nothing even close to a vital part. He won’t need even a transfusion,
since he stopped the major hemorrhages himself, shortly after he was wounded. There
are a few burns, of course, but they are mostly superficial-none that will not yield quite
readily to treatment.”
“Mighty glad of that. He’ll be here six weeks, then?”
“Better call it twelve, I think-ten at least. You see, some of the fractures,
especially those in the left leg, and a couple of burns, are rather severe, as such things
go. Then, too, the length of time elapsing between injury and treatment didn’t do
anything a bit of good.”
“In two weeks hell be wanting to get up and go places and do things, and in six
hell be tearing down your hospital, stone by stone.”
“Yes.” The surgeon smiled. “He isn’t the type to make an ideal patient, but, as I
have told you before, I like to have patients that we do not like.”
“And another thing. I want the files on his nurses, particularly the red-headed
one.”
“I suspected that you would, so I had them sent down. Here you are. Glad you
noticed MacDougall-she’s by way of being my favorite. Clarrissa MacDougall-Scotch, of
course, with that name-twenty years old. Height, five feet six, weight, one forty-five and
a half. Here are her pictures, conventional and X-ray. Man, look at that skeleton!
Beautiful! The only really perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman.”
“It isn’t the skeleton Im interested in,” grunted Haynes. “It’s what is outside the
skeleton that my Lensman will be looking at.’
“You needn’t worry about MacDougall,,” declared the surgeon. -“One good look
at that picture will tell you that. She classifies-with that skeleton she has to. She couldn’t
leave the beam a millimeter, even if she wanted to. Good, bad, or indifferent, male or
female, physical, mental, moral, and psychological, the skeleton tells the -whole story.”
“Maybe it does to you, but not to me,” and Haynes took up the “conventional”
photograph a stereoscope in full, true color, an almost living duplicate of the girl in
question. Her thick, heavy hair was not red, but was a vividly intense and brilliant
auburn, a coppery bronze, flashed with red and gold. Her eyes . . . . . bronze was all
that he could think of, with flecks of topaz and of tawny gold. Her skin, too, was faintly
bronze, glowing with even more than healthy youth’s normal measure of sparkling
vitality. Not only was she beautiful, the Port Admiral decided, in the words of the
surgeon, she “classified.”
“Hm . . . . m. Dimples, too,” Haynes muttered. “Worse even than I thought-she’s
a menace to civilization,” and he went on to read the documents. “Family . . . . . hm.
History . . . . experiences . . . reactions and characteristics . . . . behavior patterns . . . .
psychology . . . . mentality . . . .”
“She’ll do, Lacy,” he advised the surgeon finally. “Keep her on with him . . . . .”
“Do!” Lacy snorted. “It isn’t a question of whether she rates. Look at that hair-
those eyes. Pure Samms. A man to match her would have to be one in a hundred
thousand million. With that skeleton, though, he is.”
“Of course he is. You don’t seem to realize, you myopic old appendix-snatcher,
that he’s pure Kinnison!”
“Ah . . . so maybe we could . . . . but he won’t be falling for anybody yet, since
he’s just been unattached. He’ll be bullet-proof for quite a while. You ought to know that
young, Lensmen-especially young Gray Lensmen-can’t see anything but their jobs, for a
couple of years, anyway.”
“His skeleton tells you that, too, huh?” Haynes grunted, skeptically. “Ordinarily,
yes, but you never can tell, especially in hospitals . . .
“More of your layman’s misinformation!” Lacy snapped. “Contrary to popular
belief, romance does not thrive in hospitals, except, of course, among the staff. Patients