“Not always. In battles and in raids, yes. Captured ones are tried in court. If found
guilty, they used to go into the lethal chambers. Sometimes they do yet, but not usually.
We have mental therapists now who can operate on a mind if there’s anything there
worth saving.”
“And you think that I will wait to stand trial, in the entirely negligible hope that
your bewhiskered, fossilized therapists will find something in me worth saving?”
“You won’t have to,” Kinnison laughed. “Your case has already been decided—in
your favor. I am neither a policeman nor a Narcotics man; but I happen to be qualified
as judge, jury, and executioner. I am a therapist to boot. I once saved a worse zwilnik
than you are,- even though she wasn’t such a knockout. Now do we eat?”
“Really? You aren’t just. . . just giving me the needle?”
The Lensman flipped off her screen and gave her unmistakable evidence. The
girl, hitherto so unmovedly self-reliant, broke down. She recovered quickly, however,
and in Kinnison’s cabin she ate ravenously.
“Have you a cigarette?” She sighed with repletion when she could hold no more
food.
“Sure. Alsakanite, Venerian, Tellurian, most anything— we carry a couple of
hundred different brands. What would you like?”
“Tellurian, by all means. I had a package of Camerfields once—they were
gorgeous. Would you have those, by any chance?”
“Uh-huh,” he assured her. “Quartermaster! Carton of Camerfields, please.” It
popped out of the pneumatic tube in seconds. “Here you are sister.”
The glittery girl drew the fragrant smoke deep, down into her lungs.
“Ah, that tastes good! Thanks, Kinnison—for everything. I’m glad you kidded me
into eating; that was the finest meal I ever ate. But it won’t take, really. I’ve never broken
yet, and I won’t break now. If I do, I won’t be worth a damn, to myself or to anybody
else, from then on.” She crushed out the butt. “So let’s get on with the third degree.
Bring on your rubber hose and your lights and your drip-can.”
“You’re still on the wrong foot, Toots,” Kinnison said, pityingly. What a frightful
contrast there was between her slimly rounded body, in its fantastically gorgeous
costume, and the stark somberness of her eyes! “There’ll be no third degree, no hose,
no lights, nothing like that. In fact, I’m not even going to talk to you until you’ve had a
good long sleep. You don’t look hungry any more, but you’re still not in tune, by seven
thousand kilocycles. How long has it been since you really slept?”
“A couple of weeks, at a guess. Maybe a month.”
“Thought so. Come on; you’re going to sleep now.”
The girl did not move. “With whom?” she asked, quietly. Her voice did not quiver,
but stark terror lay in her mind and her hand crept unconsciously toward the hilt of her
dagger.
“Holy Klono’s claws!” Kinnison snorted, staring at her in wide-eyed wonder. “Just
what kind of a bunch of hyenas do you think you’ve got into, anyway?”
“Bad,” the girl replied, gravely. “Not the worst possible, perhaps, but from my
standpoint plenty bad enough. What can I expect from me Patrol except what I do
expect?’You don’t need to kid me along, Kinnison. I can take it, and I’d a lot rather take
it standing up, facing it, than have you sneak up on me with it after giving me your shots
in the arm.”
“What somebody has done to you is a sin and a shrieking shame,” Kinnison
declared, feelingly. “Come on, you poor little devil.” He picked up sundry pieces of
apparatus, then, taking her arm, he escorted her to another, almost luxuriously
furnished cabin.
“That door,” he explained carefully, “is solid chrome-tungsten-molybdenum steel.
The lock can’t be picked. There are only two keys to it in existence, and here they are.
There’s a bolt, too, that’s proof against anything short of a five-hundred-ton hydraulic
jack, or an atomic-hydrogen cutting torch. Here’s a full-coverage screen, and a twenty-
foot spy-ray block. There is your stuff out of the speedster. If you want help, or anything
to eat or drink, or anything else that can be expected aboard a ship like this, there’s the
communicator. QX?
“Then you really mean it? That I . . . that you . . . I mean . . .”
“Absolutely,” he assured her. “Just that You are completely the master of your
destiny, the captain of your soul. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Kinnison. Good-night, and th . . . thanks.” The girl threw herself face
downward upon the bed in a storm of sobs.
Nevertheless, as Kinnison started back toward his own cabin, he heard the
massive bolt click into its socket and felt the blocking screens go on.
CHAPTER 5
. . Illona of Lonabar
Twelve or fourteen hours later, after the Aldebaranian girl had had her breakfast,
Kinnison went to her cabin.
“Hi, Cutie, you look better. By the way, what’s your name, so we’ll know what to
call you?”
“Illona,”
“Illona what?”
“No what—just Illona, that’s all.”
“How do they tell you from other Illonas, then?”
“Oh, you mean my registry number. In the Aldebaranian language there are not
the symbols—it would have to be The Illona who is the daughter of Porlakent the potter
who lives in the house of the wheel upon the road of. . .'”
“Hold everything—well call you Illona Porter.” He eyed her keenly. “I thought your
Aldebaranian wasn’t so hot— didn’t seem possible that I could have got that rusty. You
haven’t been on Aldebaran II for a long time, have you?”
“No, we moved to Lonabar when I was about six.”
“Lonabar? Never heard of it—I’ll check up on it later. Your stuff was all here,
wasn’t it? Did any of the red-headed person’s things get mixed in?”
“Things?” She giggled sunnily, then sobered in quick embarrassment “She didn’t
carry any. They’re horrid, I think —positively indecent—to run around that way.”
“Hm . . . m. Glad you brought the point up. You’ve got to put on some clothes
aboard this ship, you know.”
“Me?” she demanded. “Why, I’m fully dressed . . .” She paused, then shrank
together visibly. “Oh! Tellurians—I remember, all those coverings! You mean, then . . .
you think I’m shameless and indecent too?”
“No. Not at all—yet.” At his obvious sincerity Illona unfolded again. “Most of
us—especially the officers—have been on so many different planets, had dealings with
so many different types and kinds of entities, that we’re used to anything. When we visit
a planet that goes naked, we do also, as a matter of course; when we hit one that
muffles up to the smothering point we do that, too. ‘When in Rome, be a Roman candle’,
you know. The point is that we’re at home here, you’re the visitor. It’s all a matter of
convention, of course; but a rather important one. Don’t you think so?”
“Covering up, certainly. Uncovering is different. They told me to be sure to, but I
simply can’t. I tried it back there, but I felt naked!”
“QX—we’ll have the tailor make you a dress or two. Some of the boys haven’t
been around very much, and you’d look pretty bare to them. Everything you’ve got on,
jewelry and all, wouldn’t make a Tellurian sun-suit, you know.”
“Then have them hurry up the dress, please. But this isn’t jewelry, it is . . .”
“Jet back, beautiful. I know gold, and platinum, and . . .”
“The metal is expensive, yes,” Illona conceded. “These alone,” she tapped one of
the delicate shields, “cost five days of work. But base metal stains the skin blue and
green and black, so what can one do? As for the beads, they are synthetics—junk. Poor
girls, if they buy it themselves, do not wear jewelry, but beads, like these. Half a day’s
work buys the lot.”
“What!” Kinnison demanded.
“Certainly. Rich girls only, or poor girls who do not work, wear real jewelry, such
as . . . the Aldebaranian has not the words. Let me think at you, please?”
“Sorry, nothing there that I recognize at all,” Kinnison answered, after studying a
succession of thought-images of multi-colored, spectacular gems. “That’s one to file
away in the book, too, believe me. But as to that ‘junk’ you’ve got draped all over
yourself—half a day’s pay—what do you work at for a living, when you work?”
“I’m a dancer—like this.” She leaped lightly to her feet and her left boot whizzed
past her ear in a flashingly fast high kick. Then followed a series of gyrations and
contortions, for which the Lensman knew no names, during which the girl seemed a
practically boneless embodiment of suppleness and grace. She sat down; meticulous
hairdress scarcely rumpled, not a buckle or bracelet awry, breathing hardly one count
faster.
“Nice.” He applauded briefly. “Hard for me to evaluate such talent as that—I
thought you were a pilot. However, on Tellus or any one of a thousand other planets I