peculiar women were, they were stark realists. “Go ahead—get it over with. . . . But it
can’t be!” Her thought was a wail of protest. “I do not grasp your thought of a ‘man’, but
you are certainly a male; and no mere male can be—can possibly be, ever— as strong
as a person.”
Kinnison got that thought perfectly, and it rocked him. She did not think of herself
as a woman, a female, at all. She was simply a person. She could not understand even
dimly Kinnison’s reference to himself as a man. To her. “man” and “male” were
synonymous terms. Both meant sex, and nothing whatever except sex.
“I have no intention of killing you, or anyone else upon this planet,” he informed
her levelly, “unless I absolutely have to. But I have chased that speedster over there all
the way from Tellus, and I intend to get the man that drove it here, if I have to wipe out
half of your population to do it. Is that perfectly clear?”
“That is perfectly clear, male.” Her mind was fuzzy with a melange of immiscible
emotions. Surprise and relief that she was not to be slain out of hand; disgust and
repugnance at the very idea of such a horrible, monstrous male creature having the
audacity to exist; stunned, disbelieving wonder at his unprecedented power of mind; a
dawning comprehension that there were perhaps some things which she did not know:
these and numerous other conflicting thoughts surged through her mind. “But there was
no male within the space-traversing vessel which you think of as a ‘speedster’,” she
concluded, surprisingly.
And he knew that she was not lying. “Damnation!” he snorted to himself.
“Fighting women again!”
“Who was she, then—it, I mean,” he hastily corrected the thought.
“It was our elder sister . . .”
The thought so translated by the man was not really “sister”. That term, having
distinctly sexual connotations and implications, would never have entered the mind of
any “person” of Lyrane II. “Elder child of the same heritage” was more like it.
“. . . and another person from what it claimed was another world,” the thought
flowed smoothly on. “An entity, rather, not really a person, but you would not be
interested in that, of course.”
“Of course I would,” Kinnison assured her. “In fact, it is this other person, and not
your elderly relative, in whom I am interested. But you say that it is an entity, not a
person. How come? Tell me all about it.”
“Well, it looked like a person, but it wasn’t. Its intelligence was low, its brain
power was small. And its mind was upon things . . . its thought were so . . .”
Kinnison grinned at the Lyranian’s efforts to express clearly thoughts so utterly
foreign to her mind as to be totally incomprehensible.
“You don’t know what that entity was, but I do,” he broke in upon her floundering.
“It was a person who was also, and quite definitely, a female. Right?”
“But a person couldn’t—couldn’t possibly—be a female!” she protested. “Why,
even biologically, it doesn’t make sense. There are no such things as females—there
can’t be!” and Kinnison saw her viewpoint clearly enough. According to her sociology
and conditioning there could not be.
“We’ll go into that later,” he told her. “What I want now is this female zwilnik. Is
she—or it—with your elder relative now?”
“Yes. They will be having dinner in the hall very shortly.”
“Sorry to bother, but you’ll have to take me to them—right now.”
“Oh, may I? Since I could not kill you myself, I must take you to them so they can
do it. I have been wondering how I could force you to go there,” she explained, naively.
“Henderson?” The Lensman spoke into his microphone— thought-screens, of
course, being no barrier to radio waves.
“I’m going after the zwilnik. This woman here is taking me. Have the ‘copter stay
over me, ready to needle anything I tell them to. While I’m gone go over that speeder
with a fine-tooth comb, and when you get everything we want, blast it. It and the
Dauntless are the only spacecraft on the planet. These janes are man-haters and
mental killers, so keep your thought-screens up. Don’t let them down for a fraction of a
second, because they’ve got plenty of jets and they’re just as sweet and reasonable as
a cageful of cateagles. Got it?”
“On the tape, chief,” came instant answer. “But don’t take any chances, Kim.
Sure you can swing it alone?”
“Jets enough and to spare,” Kinnison assured him, curtly. Then, as the Tellurians’
helicopter shot into the air, he again turned his thought to the manager.
“Let’s go,” he directed, and she led him across the way to a row of parked
ground-cars. She manipulated a couple of levers and smoothly, if slowly, the little
vehicle rolled away.
The distance was long and the pace was slow. The woman was driving
automatically, the while her every sense was concentrated upon finding some weak
point, some chink in his barrier, through which to thrust at him. Kinnison was
amazed—stumped—at her fixity of purpose; at her grimly single-minded determination
to make an end of him. She was out to get him, and she wasn’t fooling.
“Listen, sister,” he thought at her, after a few minutes of it; almost plaintively, for
him. “Let’s be reasonable about this thing. I told you I didn’t want to kill you; why in all
the iridescent hells of space are you so dead set on killing me? If you don’t behave
yourself, I’ll give you a treatment that will make your head ache for the next six months.
Why don’t you snap out of it, you dumb little lug, and be friends?”
This thought jarred her so that she stopped the car, the better to stare directly
and viciously into his eyes.
“Be friends! With a male!” The thought literally seared its way into the man’s
brain.
“Listen, half-wit!” Kinnison stormed, exasperated. “Forget your narrow-minded,
one-planet prejudices and think for a minute, if you can think—use that pint of bean
soup inside your skull for something besides hating me all over the place. Get this—I
am no more a male than you are the kind of a female that you think, by analogy, such a
creature would have to be if she could exist in a sane and logical world.”
“Oh.” The Lyranian was taken aback at such cavalier instruction. “But the others,
those in your so-immense vessel, they are of a certainty males,” she stated with
conviction. “I understood what you told them via your telephone-with-out-conductors.
You have mechanical shields against the thought which kills. Yet you do not have to use
it, while the others—males indubitably—do. You yourself are not entirely male; your
brain is almost as good as a person’s.”
“Better, you mean,” he corrected her. “You’re wrong. All of us of the ship are
men—all alike. But a man on a job can’t concentrate all the time on defending his brain
against attack, hence the use of thought-screens. I can’t use a screen out here,
because I’ve got to talk to you people. See?”
“You fear us, then, so little?” she flared, all of her old animosity blazing out anew.
“You consider our power, then, so small a thing?”
“Right. Right to a hair,” he declared, with tightening jaw. But he did not believe
it—quite. This girl was just about as safe to play around with as five-feet-eleven of
coiled bush-master, and twice as deadly.
She could not kill him mentally. Nor could the elder sister —whoever she might
be—and her crew; he was pretty sure of that. But if they couldn’t do him in by dint of
brain it was a foregone conclusion that they would try brawn. And brawn they certainly
had. This jade beside him weighed a hundred sixty Jive or seventy, and she was trained
down fine. Hard, limber, and fast. He might be able to lick three or four of them—maybe
half a dozen—in a rough-and-tumble brawl; but more than that would mean either killing
or being killed. Damn it all! He’d never killed a woman yet, but it looked as though he
might have to start in pretty quick now.
“Well, let’s get going again,” he suggested, “and while we’re en route let’s see if
we can’t work out some basis of cooperation—a sort of live-and-let-live arrangement.
Since you understood the orders I gave the crew, you realize that our ship carries
weapons capable of razing this entire city in a space of minutes.” It was a statement, not
a question.
“I realize that.” The thought was muffled in helpless fury. “Weapons,
weapons—always weapons! The eternal male! If it were not for your huge vessel and
the peculiar airplane hovering over us I would claw your eyes out and strangle you with
my bare hands!”
“That would be a good trick if you could do it,” he countered, equably enough.