“Uh-huh,” gloomily. “By Klono, I hate to put my Grays away! I’m not going to do it,
either, until after we’re married and I’m really settled down onto the job.”
“Of course not. You’ll be wearing them for some time yet, I’m thinking.” Haynes’
tone was distinctly envious. “Getting your job reduced to routine will take a long, long
time . . . It’ll probably take years even to find out what it’s really going to be.”
“That’s so, too,” Kinnison brightened visibly. “Well, clear ether, President
Haynes!” and he turned away, whistling unmelodiously—in fact, somewhat
raucously—through his teeth.
CHAPTER 23
Attainment
At base hospital it was midnight. the two largest of Thrale’s four major moons
were visible, close together in the zenith, almost at the full: shining brilliantly from a
cloudless, star-besprinkled sky upon the magnificent grounds.
Fountains splashed and tinkled musically. Masses of flowering shrubs, bordering
meandering walks, flooded the still air with a perfume almost cloying in its intensity. No
one who has once smelled the fragrance of Thralian thorn-flower at midnight will ever
forget it—it is as though the poignant sweetness of the mountain syringa has been
blended harmoniously with the heavy, entrancing scent of the jasmine and the
appealing pungency of the lily-of-the-valley. Statues of gleaming white stone and of
glinting metal were spaced infrequently over acres and acres of springy, close-clipped
turf. Trees, not over-high but massive of bole and of tremendous spread and thickness
of foliage, cast shadows of impenetrable black.
“QX, Cris?” Kinnison Lensed the thought as he entered the grounds: she had
known that he was coming. “Kinda late, I know, but I wanted to s^e you, and you don’t
have to punch the clock.”
“Surely, Kim,” and her low, infectious chuckle welled out. “What’s the use of
being a Red Lensman, else? This is just right—you couldn’t make it any sooner and
tomorrow would have been too late—much too late.”
They met at the door and with arms around each other strolled wordless down a
walk. Across the resilient sward they made their way and to a bench beneath one of the
spreading trees.
Kinnison swept her into both arms, hers went eagerly around his neck. How long,
how unutterably long it had been since they had stood thus, nurse’s white crushed
against Lensman’s Gray!
They had no need, these Lensmen, of sight. Nor of language. Hence, since
words are so pitifully inadequate, no attempt will be made to chronicle the ecstasy of
that reunion. Finally, however:
“Now that we’re together again I’ll never let you go,” the man declared aloud.
“If they separate us again it will simply break my heart,” Clarrissa agreed. Then,
woman-like, she faced the facts and made the man face them, too. “Let’s sit down, Kim,
and have this out. You know as well as I do that we can’t go on if. . . if we can’t. . . that’s
all.”
“I do not,” Kinnison said, flatly. “We’ve got a right to some happiness, you and I.
They, can’t keep us apart forever, sweetheart—we’re going straight through with it this
time.”
“Uh-uh, Kim,” she denied gently, shaking her spectacular head. “What would
have happened if we’d have gone ahead before, leaving those horrible Thralians free to
ruin Civilization?”
“But Mentor stopped us then,” Kinnison argued. Deep down, he knew that if the
Arisian called he would have to answer, but he argued nevertheless. “If the job wasn’t
done, he would have stopped us before we got this far—I think.”
“You hope, you mean,” the girl contradicted. “What makes you think—if you
really do—that he might not wait until the ceremony has actually begun?”
“Not a thing in the universe. He might, at that,” Kinnison confessed, bleakly.
“You’ve been afraid to ask him, haven’t you?”
“But the job must be done!” he insisted, avoiding the question. “The prime
minister—that Fossten—must have been the top; there couldn’t possibly be anything
bigger than an Arisian to be back of Boskone. It’s unthinkable! They’ve got no military
organization left—not a beam hot enough to light a cigarette or a screen that would stop
a firecracker. We have all their records—everything. Why, it’s just a matter of routine
now for the boys to uproot them completely; system by system, planet by planet.”
“Uh-huh.” She eyed him shrewdly, there in the dark. “Cogent. Really pellucid. As
clear as so much crystal—and twice as fragile. If you’re so sure, why not call Mentor
and ask him, right now? You’re not afraid of just the calling part, like I am; you’re afraid
of what he’ll say.”
“I’m going to marry you before I do another lick of work of any kind, anywhere,”
he insisted, doggedly.
“I just love to hear you say that, even if I do know you’re just popping off!” She
snuggled deeper into the curve of his arm. “I feel that way too, but both of us know very
well that if Mentor stops us . . . even at the altar . . .” her thought slowed, became tense,
solemn. “We’re Lensmen, Kim, you and I. We both know exactly what that means. We’ll
have to muster jets enough, some way or other, to swing the load. Let’s call him now,
Kim, together. I just simply can’t stand this not knowing . . . I can’t, Kim . . . I can’t!”
Tears come hard and seldom to such a woman as Clarrissa MacDougall; but they came
then—and they hurt.
“QX, ace.” Kinnison patted her back and her gorgeous head. “Let’s go—but I tell
you now that if he says ‘no’ I’ll tell him to go out to the Rim and take a swan-dive off into
inter-galactic space.”
She linked her mind with his, thinking in affectionate half-reproach, “I’d like to,
too, Kim, but that’s pure balloon juice and you know it. You couldn’t . . .” she broke off
as he hurled their joint thought to Arisia the Old, going on frantically:
“You think at him, Kim, and I’ll just listen. He scares me into a shrinking,
quivering pulp!”
“QX, ace,” he said again. Then: “Is it permissible that we do what we are about to
do?” he asked crisply of Arisia’s ancient sage.
“Ah, ’tis Kinnison and MacDougall; once of Tellus, henceforth of Klovia,” the
calmly unsurprised thought rolled in. “I was expecting you at this time. Any mind,
however far from competent, could have visualized this event in its entirety. That which
you contemplate is not merely permissible; it has now become necessary,” and as
usual, without tapering off or leave-taking, Mentor broke the line.
The two clung together rapturously then for minutes, but something was
obtruding itself disquietingly upon the nurse’s mind.
“But his thought was ‘necessary’, Kim?” she asked, rather than said. “Isn’t there a
sort of a sinister connotation in that, somewhere? What did he mean?”
“Nothing—exactly nothing,” Kinnison assured her, comfortably. “He’s got a
complete picture of the macro-cosmic universe in his mind—his ‘Visualization of the
Cosmic AH’, he calls it—and in it we get married now, just as I’ve been telling you we
are going to. Since it gripes him no end to have even the tiniest thing not conform to his
visualization, our marriage is NECESSARY, in capital letters. See?”
“Uh-huh . . . Oh, I’m glad!” she exclaimed. “That shows you how scared of him I
am,” and thoughts and actions became such that, although they were no doubt of much
personal pleasure and satisfaction, they do not require detailed treatment here.
Clarrissa MacDougall resigned the next day, without formality or fanfare. That is,
she thought that she did so then, and rather wondered at the frictionless ease with
which it went through: it had simply not occurred to her that in the instant of being made
an Unattached Lensman she had been freed automatically from every man-made
restraint. That was one of the few lessons hard for her to learn; it was the only one
which she refused consistently even to try to learn.
Nothing was said or done about the ten thousand credits which had been
promised her upon the occasion of her fifteen-minutes-long separation from die Patrol
following the fall of Jarnevon. She thought about it briefly, but with no real sense of loss.
Some way or other, money did not seem important. Anyway, she had some—enough
for a fairly nice, if limited, trousseau—in a Tellurian bank. She could undoubtedly get it
through the Disbursing Office here.
She took off her Lens and stuffed it into a pocket. That wasn’t so good, she
reflected. It bulged, and besides, it might fall out; and anyone who touched it would die.
She didn’t have a bag; in fact, she had with her no civilian clothes at all. Wherefore she
put it back on, pausing as she did so to admire the Manarkan star-drop flashing pale fire
from the third finger of her left hand. Of Cartiff’s whole stock of fine gems, this was the
loveliest.
It was not far to the Disbursing Office, so she walked; window-shopping as she