board. Go anywhere you like—except the private quarters, of course—even to the
control room. The boys all know that you’re at large.”
“The language—but I’m talking English now!”
“Sure. I’ve been giving it to you right along. You know it as well as I do.”
She stared at him in awe. Then, her natural buoyancy asserting itself, she flirted
out of the room with a wave of her hand.
And Kinnison sat down to think. A girl—a kid who wasn’t dry behind the ears
yet—wearing beads worth a full grown fortune, sent somewhere . . . to do what? Lyrane
II, a perfect matriarchy. Lonabar, a planet of zwilniks that knew all about Tellus, but
wasn’t on any Patrol chart, sending expeditions to Lyrane. To the system, perhaps not
specifically to Lyrane II. Why? For what? To do what? Strange, new jewels of fabulous
value. What was the hook-up? It didn’t make any kind of sense yet. . . not enough data .
. .
And faintly, waveringly, barely impinging upon the outermost, most tenuous
fringes of his mind he felt something: the groping, questing summons of an incredibly
distant thought.
“Male of Civilization . . . Person of Tellus . . . Kinnison of Tellus . . . Lensman
Kinnison of Sol III . . . Any Lensbearing officer of the Galactic Patrol . . .” Endlessly the
desperately urgent, almost imperceptible thought implored.
Kinnison stiffened. He reached out with the full power of his mind, seized the
thought, tuned to it, and hurled a reply— and when that mind really pushed a thought, it
traveled.
“Kinnison of Tellus acknowledging!” His answer fairly crackled on its way.
“You do not know my name,” the stranger’s thought came clearly now. “I am the
Toots’, the ‘Rep-Top’, the ‘Queen of Sheba”, the ‘Cleopatra’, the Elder Person of Lyrane
II. Do you remember me, Kinnison of Tellus?”
“I certainly do!” he shot back. What a brain—what a terrific brain—that sexless
woman had!
“We are invaded by manlike beings in ships of space, who wear screens against
our thoughts and who slay without cause. Will you help us with your ship of might and
your mind of power?”
“Just a sec, Toots—Henderson!” Orders snapped. The Dauntless spun end-for-
end.
“QX, Helen of Troy,” he reported then. “We’re on our way back there at maximum
blast. Say, that name ‘Helen of Troy’ fits you better than anything else I have called you.
You don’t know it, of course, but that other Helen launched a thousand ships. You’re
launching only one; but believe me, Babe, the old Dauntless is SOME ship!”
“I hope so.” The Elder Person, ignoring the by-play, went directly to the heart of
the matter in her usual pragmatic fashion. “We have no right to ask; you have every
reason to refuse . . .”
“Don’t worry about that, Helen. We’re all good little Boy Scouts at heart. We’re
supposed to do a good deed every day, and we’ve missed a lot of days lately.”
“You are what you call ‘kidding’, I think.” A matriarch could not be expected to
possess a sense of humor. “But I do not lie to you or pretend. We did not, do not now,
and never will like you or yours. With us now, however, it is that you are much the lesser
of two terrible evils. If you will aid us now we will tolerate your Patrol; we will even
promise to endure others of your kind.”
“And that’s big of you, Helen, no fooling.” The Lensman was really impressed.
The plight of the Lyranians must be desperate indeed. “Just keep a stiff upper lip, all of
you. We’re coming loaded for bear, and we are not exactly creeping.”
Nor were they. The big cruiser had plenty of legs and she was using them all; the
engineers were giving her all the of her drivers would take. She was literally blasting a
hole through space; she was traveling so fast that the atoms of substance in the
interstellar vacuum, merely wave-forms though they were, simply could not get out of
the flyer’s way. They were being blasted into nothingness against the Dauntless” wall-
shields.
And throughout her interior the Patrol ship, always in complete readiness for
strife, was being gone over again with microscopic thoroughness, to be put into more
readiness, if possible, even than that.
After a few hours Illona danced back to Kinnison’s “con” room, fairly bubbling
over.
“Why, they’re marvelous, Lensman!” she cried, “simply marvelous!”
“What are marvelous?”
“The boys,” she enthused. “All of them. They’re here because they want to
be—why, the officers don’t even have whips! They like them, actually! The officers who
push the little buttons and things and those who walk around and look through the little
glass things and even the gray-haired old man with the four stripes, why they like them
all! And the boys were all putting on guns when I left—why, I never heard of such a
thing!—and they’re just simply crazy about you. I thought it was awfully funny you took
off your guns as soon as the ship left Lyrane and you don’t have guards around you all
the time because I thought sure somebody would stab you in the back or something but
they don’t even want to and that’s what’s so marvelous and Hank Henderson told me . .
.”
“Save it!” he ordered. “Jet back, angel-face, before you blow a fuse.” He had
been right in not operating—this girl was going to be a mine of information concerning
Boskonian methods and operations, and all without knowing it. “That’s what I’ve been
trying to tell you about our Civilization; that it’s based on the freedom of the individual to
do pretty much as he pleases, as long as it is not to the public harm. And, as far as
possible, equality of all the entities of Civilization.”
“Uh-huh, I know you did,” she nodded brightly, then sobered quickly, “but I
couldn’t understand it. I can’t understand it yet; I can scarcely believe that you all are so
. . . you know, don’t you, what would happen if this were a Lonabarian ship and I would
go running around talking to officers as though I were their equal?”
“No—what?”
“It’s inconceivable, of course; it simply couldn’t happen. But if it did, I would be
punished terribly—perhaps though, at a first offense, I might be given only a twenty-scar
whipping.” At his lifted eyebrow she explained, “One that leaves twenty scars that show
for life.
“That’s why I’m acting so intoxicated, I think. You see, I . . .” she hesitated shyly,
“I’m not used to being treated as anybody’s equal, except of course other girls like me.
Nobody is, on Lonabar. Everybody is higher or lower than you are. I’m going to simply
love this when I get used to it.” She spread both arms in a sweeping gesture. “I’d like to
squeeze this whole ship and everybody in it—I just can’t wait to get to Tellus and really
live there!”
“That’s a .thing that has been bothering me,” Kinnison confessed, and the girl
stared wonderingly at his serious face. “We’re going into battle, and we can’t take time
to land you anywhere before the battle starts.”
“Of course not Why should you?” she paused, thinking deeply. “You’re not
worrying about me, surely? Why, you’re a high officer! Officers don’t care whether a girl
gets shot or not, do they?” The thought was obviously, utterly new.
“We do. It’s extremely poor hospitality to invite a guest aboard and then have her
killed. All I can say, though, is that if our number goes up . . . I still don’t see how I could
have done anything else.”
“Oh . . . thanks, Gray Lensman. Nobody ever spoke to me like that before. But I
wouldn’t land if I could. I like Civilization. If you . . . if you don’t win, I couldn’t go to Tellus
anyway, so I’d much rather take my chances here than not, sir, really. I’ll never go back
to Lonabar, in any case.”
“At-a-girl, Toots!l” He extended his hand. She looked at it dubiously, then
hesitantly stretched out her own. But she learned fast; she put as much pressure into
the brief handclasp as Kinnison did. “You’d better flit now, I’ve got work to do.”
“Can I go up top? Hank Henderson is going to show me the primaries.”
“Sure. Go anywhere you like. Before the trouble starts I’ll take you down to the
center and put you into a suit.”
“Thanks, Lensman!” The girl hurried away and Kinnison Lensed the master pilot.
“Henderson? Kinnison. Official. Illona just told me about the primaries. They’re
QX—but no etchings.”
“Of course not, sir.”
“And please pass a word around for me. I know as well as anybody does that she
doesn’t belong aboard; but it couldn’t be helped and I’m getting rid of her as soon as I