Читать книгу Second Stage Lensmen (Unabridged) - E. E. Smith - Страница 5

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When the forces of the Galactic Patrol blasted Helmuth’s Grand Base out of existence and hunted down and destroyed his secondary bases throughout this galaxy, Boskone’s military grasp upon Civilization was definitely broken. Some minor bases may have escaped destruction, of course. Indeed, it is practically certain that some of them did so, for there are comparatively large volumes of our Island Universe which have not been mapped, even yet, by the planetographers of the Patrol. It is equally certain, however, that they were relatively few and of no real importance. For warships, being large, cannot be carried around or concealed in a vest-pocket—a war-fleet must of necessity be based upon a celestial object not smaller than a very large asteroid. Such a base, lying close enough to any one of Civilization’s planets to be of any use, could not be hidden successfully from the detectors of the Patrol.

Reasoning from analogy, Kinnison quite justifiably concluded that the back of the drug syndicate had been broken in similar fashion when he had worked upward through Bominger and Strongheart and Crowninshield and Jalte to the dread council of Boskone itself. He was, however, wrong.

For, unlike the battleship, thionite is a vest-pocket commodity. Unlike the space-fleet base, a drug-baron’s headquarters can be and frequently is small, compact, and highly mobile. Also, the galaxy is huge, the number of planets in it immense, the total count of drug addicts utterly incomprehensible. Therefore it had been found more efficient to arrange the drug hook-up in multiple series-parallel, instead of in the straight en-cascade sequence which Kinnison thought that he had followed up.

He thought so at first, that is, but he did not think so long. He had thought, and he had told Haynes, as well as Gerrond of Radelix, that the situation was entirely under control; that with the zwilnik headquarters blasted out of existence and with all of the regional heads and many of the planetary chiefs dead or under arrest, all that the Enforcement men would have to cope with would be the normal bootleg trickle. In that, too, he was wrong. The lawmen of Narcotics had had a brief respite, it is true; but in a few days or weeks, upon almost as many planets as before, the illicit traffic was again in full swing.

After the Battle of Tellus, then, it did not take the Gray Lensman long to discover the above facts. Indeed, they were pressed upon him. He was, however, more relieved than disappointed at the tidings, for he knew that he would have material upon which to work. If his original opinion had been right, if all lines of communication with the now completely unknown ultimate authorities of the zwilniks had been destroyed, his task would have been an almost hopeless one.

It would serve no good purpose here to go into details covering his early efforts, since they embodied, in principle, the same tactics as those which he had previously employed. He studied, he analyzed, he investigated. He snooped and he spied. He fought; upon occasion he killed. And in due course—and not too long a course—he cut into the sign of what he thought must be a key zwilnik. Not upon Bronseca or Radelix or Chickladoria, or any other distant planet, but right upon Tellus!

But he could not locate him. He never saw him on Tellus. As a matter of cold fact, he could not find a single person who had ever seen him or knew anything definite about him. These facts, of course, only whetted Kinnison’s keenness to come to grips with the fellow. He might not be a very big shot, but the fact that he was covering himself up so thoroughly and so successfully made it abundantly evident that he was a fish well worth landing.

This wight, however, proved to be as elusive as the proverbial flea. He was never there when Kinnison pounced. In London he was a few minutes late. In Berlin he was a minute or so too early, and the ape didn’t show up at all. He missed him in Paris and in San Francisco and in Shanghai. The guy sat down finally in New York, but still the Gray Lensman could not connect—it was always the wrong street, or the wrong house, or the wrong time, or something.

Then Kinnison set a snare which should have caught a microbe—and almost caught his zwilnik. He missed him by one mere second when he blasted off from New York Space-Port. He was so close that he saw his flare, so close that he could slap onto the fleeing vessel the beam of the CRX tracer which he always carried with him.

Unfortunately, however, the Lensman was in mufti at the time, and was driving a rented flitter. His speedster—altogether too spectacular and obvious a conveyance to be using in a hush-hush investigation—was at Prime Base. He didn’t want the speedster, anyway, except inside the Dauntless. He’d go organized this time to chase the lug clear out of space, if he had to. He shot in a call for the big cruiser, and while it was coming he made luridly sulphurous inquiry.

Fruitless. His orders had been carried out to the letter, except in the one detail of not allowing any vessel to take off. This take-off absolutely could not be helped—it was just one of those things. The ship was a Patrol speedster from Deneb V, registry number so-and-so. Said he was coming in for servicing. Came in on the north beam, identified himself properly—Lieutenant Quirkenfal, of Deneb V, he said it was, and it checked. .

It would check, of course. The zwilnik that Kinnison had been chasing so long certainly would not be guilty of any such raw, crude work as a faulty identification. In fact, right then he probably looked just as much like Quirkenfal as the lieutenant himself did.

“He wasn’t in any hurry at all,” the information went on. “He waited around for his landing clearance, then slanted in on his assigned slide to the service pits. In the last hundred yards, though, he shot off to one side and sat down, plop, broadside on, clear over there in the far corner of the field. But he wasn’t down but a second, sir. Long before anybody could get to him—before the cruisers could put a beam on him, even—he blasted off as though the devil was on his tail. Then you came along, sir, but we did put a CRX tracer on him. .”

“I did that much, myself,” Kinnison stated, morosely. “He stopped just long enough to pick up a passenger—my zwilnik, of course—then flitted . and you fellows let him get away with it.”

“But we couldn’t help it, sir,” the official protested. “And anyway, he couldn’t possibly have .”

“He sure could. You’d be surprised no end at what that bimbo can do.”

Then the Dauntless flashed in; not asking but demanding instant right of way.

“Look around, fellows, if you like, but you won’t find a damned thing,” Kinnison’s uncheering conclusion came back as he sprinted toward the dock into which his battleship had settled. “The lug hasn’t left a loose end dangling yet.”

By the time the great Patrol ship had cleared the stratosphere Kinnison’s CRX, powerful and tenacious as it was, was just barely registering a line. But that was enough. Henry Henderson, Master Pilot, stuck the Dauntless’ needle nose into that line and shoved into the driving projectors every watt of “oof” that those Brobdingnagian creations would take.

They had been following the zwilnik for three days now, Kinnison reflected, and his CRX’s were none too strong yet. They were overhauling him mighty slowly; and the Dauntless was supposed to be the fastest thing in space. That bucket up ahead had plenty of legs—must have been souped up to the limit. This was apt to be a long chase, but he’d get that bozo if he had to chase him on a geodesic line along the hyper-dimensional curvature of space clear back to Tellus where he started from!

They did not have to circumnavigate total space, of course, but they did almost leave the galaxy before they could get the fugitive upon their plates. The stars were thinning out fast; but still, hazily before them in a vastness of distance, there stretched a milky band of opalescence.

“What’s coming up, Hen—a rift?” Kinnison asked.

“Uh-huh, Rift Ninety Four,” the pilot replied. “And if I remember right, that arm up ahead is Dunstan’s region and it has never been explored. I’ll have the chart-room check up on it.”

“Never mind; I’ll go check it myself—I’m curious about this whole thing.”

Unlike any smaller vessel, the Dauntless was large enough so that she could—and hence as a matter of course did—carry every space-chart issued by all the various Boards and Offices and Bureaus concerned with space, astronomy, astrogation, and planetography. She had to, for there were usually minds aboard which were apt at any time to become intensely and unpredictably interested in anything, anywhere. Hence it did not take Kinnison long to obtain what little information there was.

The vacancy they were approaching was Rift Ninety Four, a vast space, practically empty of stars, lying between the main body of the galaxy and a minor branch of one of its prodigious spiral arms. The opalescence ahead was the branch—Dunstan’s Region. Henderson was right; it had never been explored.

The Galactic Survey, which has not even yet mapped at all completely the whole of the First Galaxy proper, had of course done no systematic work upon such outlying sections as the spiral arms. Some such regions were well known and well mapped, it is true; either because its own population, independently developing means of space-flight, had come into contact with our Civilization upon its own initiative or because private exploration and investigation had opened up profitable lines of commerce. But Dunstan’s Region was bare. No people resident in it had ever made themselves known; no private prospecting, if there had ever been any such, had revealed anything worthy of exploitation or development. And, with so many perfectly good uninhabited planets so much nearer to Galactic Center, it was of course much too far out for colonization.

Through the rift, then, and into Dunstan’s Region the Dauntless bored at the unimaginable pace of her terrific full-blast drive. The tracers’ beams grew harder and more taut with every passing hour; the fleeing speedster itself grew large and clear upon the plates. The opalescence of the spiral arm became a firmament of stars. A sun detached itself from that firmament: a dwarf of Type G. Planets appeared.

One of these in particular, the second out, looked so much like Earth that it made some of the observers homesick. There were the familiar polar ice-caps, the atmosphere and stratosphere, the high-piled, billowy masses of clouds. There were vast blue oceans, there were huge, unfamiliar continents glowing with chlorophyllic green.

At the spectroscopes, at the bolometers, at the many other instruments men went rapidly and skillfully to work.

“Hope the ape’s heading for Two, and I think he is,” Kinnison remarked, as he studied the results. “People living on that planet would be human to ten places, for all the tea in China. No wonder he was so much at home on Tellus . Yup, it’s Two—there, he’s gone inert.”

“Whoever is piloting that can went to school just one day in his life and that day it rained and the teacher didn’t come,” Henderson snorted. “And he’s trying to balance her down on her tail—look at her bounce and flop around! He’s just begging for a crack-up.”

“If he makes it it’ll be bad—plenty bad,” Kinnison mused. “He’ll gain a lot of time on us while we’re rounding the globe on our landing spiral.”

“Why spiral, Kim? Why not follow him down, huh? Our intrinsic is no worse than his—it’s the same one, in fact.”

“Get conscious, Hen. This is a superbattlewagon—just in case you didn’t know it before.”

“So what? I can certainly handle this super a damn sight better than that ground-gripper is handling that scrap-heap down there.” Henry Henderson, Master Pilot Number One of the Service, was not bragging. He was merely voicing what to him was the simple and obvious truth.

“Mass is what. Mass and volume and velocity and inertia and power. You never stunted this much mass before, did you?”

“No, but what of it? I took a course in piloting once, in my youth.” He was then a grand old man of twenty-eight or thereabouts. “I can line up the main rear center pipe onto any grain of sand you want to pick out on that field, and hold her there until she slags it down.”

“If you think you can spell ‘able’, hop to it!”

“QX, this is going to be fun.” Henderson gleefully accepted the challenge, then clicked on his general-alarm microphone. “Strap down, everybody, for inert maneuvering, Class Three, on the tail. Tail over to belly landing. Hipe!”

The Bergenholms were cut and as the tremendously massive super-dreadnought, inert, shot off at an angle under its Tellurian intrinsic velocity, Master Pilot Number One proved his rating. As much a virtuoso of the banks and tiers of blast keys and levers before him as a concert organist is of his instrument, his hands and feet flashed hither and yon. Not music?—the bellowing, crescendo thunders of those jets were music to the hard-boiled space-hounds who heard them. And in response to the exact placement and the precisely-measured power of those blasts the great sky-rover spun, twisted, and bucked as her prodigious mass was forced into motionlessness relative to the terrain beneath her.

Three G’s, Kinnison reflected, while this was going on. Not bad—he’d guessed it at four or better. He could sit up and take notice at three, and he did so.

This world wasn’t very densely populated, apparently. Quite a few cities, but all just about on the equator. Nothing in the temperate zones at all; even the highest power revealed no handiwork of man. Virgin forest, untouched prairie. Lots of roads and things in the torrid zone, but nothing anywhere else. The speedster was making a rough and unskillful, but not catastrophic landing.

The field which was their destination lay just outside a large city. Funny—it wasn’t a space-field at all. No docks, no pits, no ships. Low, flat buildings—hangars. An air-field, then, although not like any air-field he knew. Too small. Gyros? ’Copters? Didn’t see any—all little ships. Crates—biplanes and tripes. Made of wire and fabric. Wotta woil, wotta woil!

The Dauntless landed, fairly close to the now deserted speedster.

“Hold everything, men,” Kinnison cautioned. “Something funny here. I’ll do a bit of looking around before we open up.”

He was not surprised that the people in and around the airport were human to at least ten places of classification; he had expected that from the planetary data. Nor was he surprised at the fact that they wore no clothing. He had learned long since that, while most human or near-human races—particularly the women—wore at least a few ornaments, the wearing of clothing as such, except when it was actually needed for protection, was far more the exception than the rule. And, just as a Martian, out of deference to conventions, wears a light robe upon Tellus, Kinnison as a matter of course stripped to his evenly-tanned hide when visiting planets upon which nakedness was de rigueur. He had attended more than one state function, without a quibble or a qualm, tastefully attired in his Lens.

No, the startling fact was that there was not a man in sight anywhere around the place; there was nothing male perceptible as far as his sense of perception could reach. Women were laboring, women were supervising, women were running the machines. Women were operating the airplanes and servicing them. Women were in the offices. Women and girls and little girls and girl babies filled the waiting rooms and the automobile-like conveyances parked near the airport and running along the streets.

And, even before Kinnison had finished uttering his warning, while his hand was in the air reaching for a spy-ray switch, he felt an alien force attempting to insinuate itself into his mind.

Fat chance! With any ordinary mind it would have succeeded, but in the case of the Gray Lensman it was just like trying to stick a pin unobtrusively into a panther. He put up a solid block automatically, instantaneously; then, a fraction of a second later, a thought-tight screen enveloped the whole vessel.

“Did any of you fellows .” he began, then broke off. They wouldn’t have felt it, of course; their brains could have been read completely with them none the wiser. He was the only Lensman aboard, and even most Lensmen couldn’t . this was his oyster. But that kind of stuff, on such an apparently backward planet as this? It didn’t make sense, unless that zwilnik . ah, this was his oyster, absolutely!

“Something funnier even than I thought—thought-waves,” he calmly continued his original remark. “Thought I’d better undress to go out there, but I’m not going to. I’d wear full armor, except that I may need my hands or have to move fast. If they get insulted at my clothes I’ll apologize later.”

“But listen, Kim, you can’t go out there alone—especially without armor!”

“Sure I can. I’m not taking any chances. You fellows couldn’t do me much good out there, but you can here. Break out a ’copter and keep a spy-ray on me. If I give you the signal, go to work with a couple of narrow needle-beams. Pretty sure that I won’t need any help, but you can’t always tell.”

The airlock opened and Kinnison stepped out. He had a high-powered thought-screen, but he did not need it—yet. He had his DeLameters. He had also a weapon deadlier by far even than those mighty portables; a weapon so utterly deadly that he had not used it. He did not need to test it—since Worsel had said that it would work, it would. The trouble with it was that it could not merely disable: if used at all it killed, with complete and grim finality. And behind him he had the full awful power of the Dauntless. He had nothing to worry about.

Only when the space-ship had settled down upon and into the hard-packed soil of the airport could those at work there realize just how big and how heavy the visitor was. Practically everyone stopped work and stared, and they continued to stare as Kinnison strode toward the office. The Lensman had landed upon many strange planets, he had been met in divers fashions and with various emotions; but never before had his presence stirred up anything even remotely resembling the sentiments written so plainly upon these women’s faces and expressed even more plainly in their seething thoughts.

Loathing, hatred, detestation—not precisely any one of the three, yet containing something of each. As though he were a monstrosity, a revolting abnormality that should be destroyed on sight. Beings such as the fantastically ugly, spider-like denizens of Dekanore VI had shuddered at the sight of him, but their thoughts were mild compared to these. Besides, that was natural enough. Any human being would appear a monstrosity to such as those. But these women were human; as human as he was. He didn’t get it, at all.

Kinnison opened the door and faced the manager, who was standing at that other-worldly equivalent of a desk. His first glance at her brought to the surface of his mind one of the peculiarities which he had already unconsciously observed. Here, for the first time in his life, he saw a woman without any touch whatever of personal adornment. She was tall and beautifully proportioned, strong and fine; her smooth skin was tanned to a rich and even brown. She was clean, almost blatantly so.

But she wore no jewelry, no bracelets, no ribbons; no decoration of any sort or kind. No paint, no powder, no touch of perfume. Her heavy, bushy eyebrows had never been plucked or clipped. Some of her teeth had been expertly filled, and she had a two-tooth bridge that would have done credit to any Tellurian dentist—but her hair! It, too, was painfully clean, as was the white scalp beneath it, but aesthetically it was a mess. Some of it reached almost to her shoulders, but it was very evident that whenever a lock grew long enough to be a bother she was wont to grab it and hew it off, as close to the skull as possible, with whatever knife, shears, or other implement came readiest to hand.

These thoughts and the general inspection did not take any appreciable length of time, of course. Before Kinnison had taken two steps toward the manager’s desk, he directed a thought:

“Kinnison of Sol III—Lensman, Unattached. It is possible, however, that neither Tellus nor the Lens are known upon this planet?”

“Neither is known, nor does anyone of Lyrane care to know anything of either,” she replied coldly. Her brain was keen and clear: her personality vigorous, striking, forceful. But, compared with Kinnison’s doubly-Arisian-trained mind, hers was woefully slow. He watched her assemble the mental bolt which was intended to slay him then and there. He let her send it, then struck back. Not lethally, not even paralyzingly, but solidly enough so that she slumped down, almost unconscious, into a nearby chair.

“It’s good technique to size a man up before you tackle him, sister,” he advised her when she had recovered. “Couldn’t you tell from the feel of my mind-block that you couldn’t crack it?”

“I was afraid so,” she admitted, hopelessly, “but I had to kill you if I possibly could. Since you are the stronger you will of course kill me.” Whatever else these 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-without-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 bushmaster, 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 five 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. “But listen, you frustrated young murderess. You have already shown yourself to be, basically, a realist in facing physical facts. Why not face mental, intellectual facts in the same spirit?”

“Why, I do, of course. I always do!”

“You do not,” he contradicted, sharply. “Males, according to your lights, have two—and only two—attributes. One, they breed. Two, they fight. They fight each other, and everything else, to the death and at the drop of a hat. Right?”

“Right, but .”

“But nothing—let me talk. Why didn’t you breed the combativeness out of your males, hundreds of generations ago?”

“They tried it once, but the race began to deteriorate,” she admitted.

“Exactly. Your whole set-up is cock-eyed—unbalanced. You can think of me only as a male—one to be destroyed on sight, since I am not like one of yours. Yet, when I could kill you and had every reason to do so, I didn’t. We can destroy you all, but we won’t unless we must. What’s the answer?”

“I don’t know,” she confessed, frankly. Her frenzied desire for killing abated, although her ingrained antipathy and revulsion did not. “In some ways, you do seem to have some of the instincts and qualities of a . almost of a person.”

“I am a person .”

“You are not! Do you think that I am to be misled by the silly coverings you wear?”

“Just a minute. I am a person of a race having two equal sexes. Equal in every way. Numbers, too—one man and one woman .” and he went on to explain to her, as well as he could, the sociology of Civilization.

“Incredible!” she gasped the thought.

“But true,” he assured her. “And now are you going to lay off me and behave yourself, like a good little girl, or am I going to have to do a bit of massaging on your brain? Or wind that beautiful body of yours a couple of times around a tree? I’m asking this for your own good, kid, believe me.”

“Yes, I do believe you,” she marveled. “I am becoming convinced that . that perhaps you are a person—at least of a sort—after all.”

“Sure I am—that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for an hour. And cancel that ‘of a sort’, too .”

“But tell me,” she interrupted, “a thought you used—‘beautiful’. I do not understand it. What does it mean, ‘beautiful body’?”

“Holy Klono’s whiskers!” If Kinnison had never been stumped before, he was now. How could he explain beauty, or music, or art, to this . this matriarchal savage? How explain cerise to a man born blind? And above all, who had ever heard of having to explain to a woman—to any woman, anywhere in the whole macrocosmic universe—that she in particular was beautiful?

But he tried. In her mind he spread a portrait of her as he had seen her first. He pointed out to her the graceful curves and lovely contours, the lithely flowing lines, the perfection of proportion and modeling and symmetry, the flawlessly smooth, firm-textured skin, the supple, hard-trained fineness of her whole physique. No soap. She tried, in brow-furrowing concentration, to get it, but in vain. It simply did not register.

“But that is merely efficiency, everything you have shown,” she declared. “Nothing else. I must be so, for my own good and for the good of those to come. But I think that I have seen some of your beauty,” and in turn she sent into his mind a weirdly distorted picture of a human woman. The zwilnik he was following, Kinnison decided instantly.

She would be jeweled, of course, but not that heavily—a horse couldn’t carry that load. And no woman ever born put paint on that thick, or reeked so of violent perfume, or plucked her eyebrows to such a thread, or indulged in such a hair-do.

“If that is beauty, I want none of it,” the Lyranian declared.

Kinnison tried again. He showed her a waterfall, this time, in a stupendous gorge, with appropriate cloud formations and scenery. That, the girl declared, was simply erosion. Geological formations and meteorological phenomena. Beauty still did not appear. Painting, it appeared to her, was a waste of pigment and oil. Useless and inefficient—for any purpose of record the camera was much faster and much more accurate. Music—vibrations in the atmosphere—would of necessity be simply a noise; and noise—any kind of noise—was not efficient.

“You poor little devil.” The Lensman gave up. “You poor, ignorant, soul-starved little devil. And the worst of it is that you don’t even realize—and never can realize—what you are missing.”

“Don’t be silly.” For the first time, the woman actually laughed. “You are utterly foolish to make such a fuss about such trivial things.”

Kinnison quit, appalled. He knew, now, that he and this apparently human creature beside him were as far apart as the Galactic Poles in every essential phase of life. He had heard of matriarchies, but he had never considered what a real matriarchy, carried to its logical conclusion, would be like.

This was it. For ages there had been, to all intents and purposes, only one sex; the masculine element never having been allowed to rise above the fundamental necessity of reproducing the completely dominant female. And that dominant female had become, in every respect save the purely and necessitously physical one, absolutely and utterly sexless. Men, upon Lyrane II, were dwarfs about thirty inches tall. They had the temper and the disposition of a mad Radeligian cateagle, the intellectual capacity of a Zabriskan fontema. They were not regarded as people, either at birth or at any subsequent time. To maintain a static population, each person gave birth to one person, on the grand average. The occasional male baby—about one in a hundred—did not count. He was not even kept at home, but was taken immediately to the “maletorium”, in which he lived until attaining maturity.

One man to a hundred or so women for a year, then death. The hundred persons had their babies at twenty-one or twenty-two years of age—they lived to an average age of a hundred years—then calmly blasted their male’s mind and disposed of his carcass. The male was not exactly an outcast; not precisely a pariah. He was tolerated as a necessary adjunct to the society of persons, but in no sense whatever was he a member of it.

The more Kinnison pondered this hook-up the more appalled he became. Physically, these people were practically indistinguishable from human, Tellurian, Caucasian women. But mentally, intellectually, in every other way, how utterly different! Shockingly, astoundingly so to any really human being, whose entire outlook and existence is fundamentally, however unconsciously or subconsciously, based upon and conditioned by the prime division of life into two cooperant sexes. It didn’t seem, at first glance, that such a cause could have such terrific effects; but here they were. In cold reality, these women were no more human than were the . the Eich. Take the Posenians, or the Rigellians, or even the Velantians. Any normal, stay-at-home Tellurian woman would pass out cold if she happened to stumble onto Worsel in a dark alley at night. Yet the members of his repulsively reptilian-appearing race, merely because of having a heredity of equality and cooperation between the sexes, were in essence more nearly human than were these tall, splendidly-built, actually and intrinsically beautiful creatures of Lyrane II!

“This is the hall,” the person informed him, as the car came to a halt in front of a large structure of plain gray stone. “Come with me.”

“Gladly,” and they walked across the peculiarly bare grounds. They were side by side, but a couple of feet apart. She had been altogether too close to him in the little car. She did not want this male—or any male—to touch her or to be near her. And, considerably to her surprise, if the truth were to be known, the feeling was entirely mutual. Kinnison would have preferred to touch a Borovan slime-lizard.

They mounted the granite steps. They passed through the dull, weather-beaten portal. They were still side by side—but they were now a full yard apart.