Children of the Lens

by Edward E Smith

  That made it cannon to cannon, one to one; and the Lensman knew that those two identical rifles could hammer at each others’ defenses for an hour without doing any serious damage. He had, however, one big advantage. Being closer to the bulkhead he could depress his line of fire more than could the Boskonian. He did so, aiming at the clamps, which were not built to take very much of that sort of punishment. One front clamp let go, then the other, and the Lensman knew what to do about the rear pair, which he could not reach. He directed his fire against the upper edge of the dureum plate. Under the awful thrust of that terrific storm of steel the useless front clamps lifted from the floor. The gun mount, restrained from sliding by the unbreakable grip of those rear clamps, reared up. Over it went, straight backward, exposing the gunner to the full blast of Kinnison’s fire. That, definitely, was that.

  Kathryn heaved a sigh of relief; as far as she could “see” the tube was still empty. “That’s my pop!” she applauded inaudibly to herself. “Now” she breathed, “if the darling has just got enough jets to figure out that something may be coming at him down the tube—and sense enough to run back home before it can catch him!”

  Kinnison has no suspicion that any danger to himself might lie within the tube. He had no desire, however, to land alone in an enemy ship in the exact center of an enemy base, and no intention whatever of doing so. Moreover, he had once come altogether too close to permanent immolation in a foreign space because of the discontinuance of a hyper-spatial tube while he was in it, and once was once too many. Also, he had just got done leading with his chin, and once of that, too, was once too many. Therefore his sole thought was to get back into his own space as fast as he could get there, so as soon as the opposition was silenced he hurried into the control-room and reversed the vessel’s drive.

  Behind him Kathryn flipped her speedster end for end and led the retreat. She left the tube before—“before” is an extremely loose and inaccurate word in this connection, but it conveys the better than any other ordinary term—she got back to Base. She caused an officer to broadcast an “evacuation” warning, then hung poised, watching intently. She knew that Kinnison could not leave the tube except at its terminus, hence would have to materialize inside the building itself. She had heard what happened when two hard, dense solids attempted to occupy the same three-dimensional space at the same time; but to view that occurence was not her purpose in lingering. She did not actually know if there was anything in the tube or not; but she did know that if there were, and if it or they should follow her father out into normal space, even she would have need of every jet she could muster.

  Kinnison, maneuvering his Boskonian cruiser to a halt just at the barest perceptible threshold of normal space, in the intermediate zone in which nothing except dureum was solid in either space or pseudo-space, had already given a great deal of thought to the problem of disembarkation. The ship was small, as space-ships go, but even so it was a lot bigger than any corridor of any ordinary structure. Those corridor walls and floors were thick and contained a lot of steel; the ships walls were solid alloy. He had never seen metal materialize within metal and, frankly, he didn’t want to be around, even inside G-P armor, when it happened. Also, there were a lot of explosives aboard, and atomic power plants, and the chance of touching off a loose atomic vortex within a few feet of himself was not one to be taken lightly.

  He had already rigged a line to the master switch. Power off, with the ship’s dureum cat-walk as close to the floor of the corridor as the dimensions of the tube permitted, he reversed the controls and poised himself for a running headlong dive. He could not feel Radeligian gravitation, of course, but he was pretty sure that he could jump far enough to get through the interface. He took a short run, jerked the line, and hurled himself through the space-ship’s immaterial wall. The ship disappeared.

  Going through that interface was more of a shock than the Lensman had anticipated. Even taken very slowly, as it customarily is, inter-dimensional acceleration brings malaise to which no one has ever become accustomed, and taking it so rapidly fairly turned Kinnison inside out. He was going to land with the rolling impact which constitutes perfect technique in such armored maneuvering. As it was, he never did know how he landed, except that he made a boiler-shop racket and brought up against the far wall of the corridor with a climactic clang. Beyond the addition of a few more bruises and contusions to his already abundant collection, however, he was not hurt.

  As soon as he could collect himself he leaped to his feet and rapped out orders. “Tractors—pressors—shears! Heavy stuff, to anchor, not to clamp! Hipe!” He knew what he was up against now, and if they’d only come back he’d yank them out of that blank tube so fast it’d break every blank blank one of their blank blank blank necks!

  And Kathryn, still watching intently, smiled. Her dad was a pretty smart old duck, but he wasn’t using his noggin now—he was cockeyed as Trenco’s ether in even thinking they might come back. If anything at all erupted from that hyper-circle it would be something against which everything he was mustering would be precisely as effective as so much thin air. And she still had no concrete idea of what she so feared. It wouldn’t be essentially physical, she was pretty sure. It would almost have to be mental. But who or what could possibly put it across? And how? And above all, what could she do about it if they did?

  Eyes narrowed, brow furrowed in concentration, she thought as she had never thought before; and the harder she thought the more clouded the picture became. For the first time in her triumphant life she felt small—weak—impotent. It was in that hour that Kathryn Kinnison really grew up.

  The tube vanished; she heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. They, whoever they were, having failed to bring Kinnison to them—this time—were not coming after him—this time. Not an important enough game to play to the end? No, that wasn’t it. Maybe they weren’t ready. But the next time…

  Mentor the Arisian had told her bluntly, the last time she had seen him, to come to him again when she realized that she didn’t know quite everything. Deep down, she had not expected that day ever to come. Now, however, it had. This escape—if it had been an escape—had taught her much.

  “Mother!” She shot a call to distant Klovia. “I’m on Radelix. Everything’s on the green. Dad has just knocked a flock of Boskonians into an outside loop and come through QX. I’ve got to do a little flit, though, before I come home. ’Bye.”

  Kinnison stood intermittent guard over the base for four days after the hyper-spatial tube had disappeared before he gave up; before he did any very serious thinking about what he should do next.

  Could he and should he keep on as Sybly Whyte? He could and he should, he decided. He hadn’t been gone long enough for Whyte’s absence to have been noticed; nothing whatever connected Whyte with Kinnison. If he really knew what he was doing a more specific alias might be better; but as long as he was merely smelling around, Whyte’s was the best identity to use. He could go anywhere, do anything, ask anything of anybody, and all with a perfectly good excuse.

  And as Sybly Whyte, then, for days that stretched into weeks, he roamed—finding, as he had feared, nothing whatever. It seemed as though all Boskonian activity of the type in which he was most interested had ceased with his return from the hyper-spatial tube. Just what that meant he did not know. It was unthinkable that they had given up on him: much more probably they were hatching something new. And the frustration of inaction and the trying to figure out what was coming next was driving him not-so-slowly nuts.

  Then, striking through the doldrums, came a call from Maitland.

  “Kim? You told me to Lens you immediately about any off-color work. Don’t know whether this is or not. The guy may be—probably is—crazy. Conklin, who reported him, couldn’t decide. Neither can I, from Conklin’s report. Do you want to send somebody special, take over yourself, or what?”

  “I’ll take over,” Kinnison decided instantly. If neither Conklin nor Maitland, Gray Lensmen both, could d
ecide, there was no point in sending anyone else. “Where and who?”

  “Planet, Meneas II, not too far from where you are now. City, Meneateles; 116-3-29, 45-22-17. Place, Jack’s Haven, a meteor-miner’s hangout at the corner of Gold and Sapphire Streets. Person, a man called ‘Eddie’.”

  “Thanks, I’ll check.” Maitland did not send, and Kinnison did not want, any additional information. Both knew that since the coordinator was going to investigate this thing himself, he should get his facts, and particularly his impressions, at first and unprejudiced hand.

  To Meneas II, then, and to Jack’s Haven, Sybly Whyte went, notebook very much in evidence. An ordinary enough space-dive Jack’s turned out to be—higher-toned than that Radeligian space-dock saloon of Bominger’s; much less flamboyant than notorious Miners’ Rest on far Euphrosyne.

  “I wish to interview a person named Eddie,” he announced, as he bought a bottle of wine. “I have been informed that he has had deep-space adventures worthy of incorporation into one of my novels.”

  “Eddie? Haw!” The barkeeper laughed raucously. “That space-louse? Somebody’s been kidding you, mister. He’s nothing but a broken-down meteor-miner—you know what a space-louse is, don’t you?—that we let clean cuspidors and do such-like odd jobs for his keep. We don’t throw him out, like we do the others, because he’s kind of funny in one way. Every hour or so he throws a fit, and that amuses people.”

  Whyte’s eager-beaver attitude did not change; his face reflected nothing of what Kinnison thought of this callous speech. For Kinnison did know exactly what a space-louse was. More, he knew what turned a man into one. Ex-meteor-miner himself, he knew what the awesome depths of space, the ever-present dangers, the privations, the solitude, the frustrations, did to any mind not adequately integrated. He knew that only the strong survived; that the many weak succumbed. From sickening memory he knew just what pitiful wrecks those many became. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the information was not necessary:

  “Where is this Eddie now?”

  “That’s him, over there in the corner. By the way he’s acting, he’ll have another fit pretty quick now.”

  The shambling travesty of a man accepted avidly the invitation to table and downed at a gulp the proffered drink. Then, as though the mild potion had been a trigger, his wracked body tensed and his features began to writhe.

  “Cateagles!” he screamed; eyes rolling, breath coming in hard, frantic gasps. “Gangs of cateagles! Thousands! They’re clawing me to bits! And the Lensman! He’s sicking them on! Ow!! YOW!!!” He burst into unintelligible screams and threw himself to the floor. There, rolling convulsively over and over, he tried the impossible feat of covering simultaneously with his two claw-like hands his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and throat.

  Ignoring the crowding spectators, Kinnison invaded the helpless mind before him. He winced mentally as he scanned the whole atrocious enormity of what was there. Then, while Whyte busily scribbled notes, he shot a thought to distant Klovia.

  “Cliff! I’m here in Jack’s Haven, and I’ve got Eddie’s data. What did you and Conklin make of it? You agree, of course, that the Lensman is the crux.”

  “Definitely. Everything else is hop-happy space-drift. The fact that there are not—there can’t be—any such Lensman as Eddie imagined, makes him space-drift, too, in our opinion. We called you in on the millionth chance—sorry we sent you out on a false alarm, but you said we had to be sure.”

  “You needn’t be sorry.” Kinnison’s thought was the grimmest Clifford Maitland had ever felt. “Eddie isn’t an ordinary space-louse. You see, I know one thing that you and Conklin don’t. You noticed the woman? Very faint, decidedly in the background?”

  “Now that you mention her—yes. Too far in the background and too faint to be a key. Most every spaceman has a woman—or a lot of different ones—more or less on his mind all the time, you know. Immaterial, I’d say.”

  “So would I, maybe, except for the fact that she isn’t a woman at all, but a Lyranian…”

  “A LYRANIAN!” Maitland interrupted. Kinnison could feel the racing of his assistant’s thoughts. “That complicates things… But how in Palain’s purple hells, Kim, could Eddie ever have got to Lyrane—and if he did, how did he get away alive?”

  “I don’t know, Cliff.” Kinnison’s mind, too, was working fast. “But you haven’t got all the dope yet. To cinch things, I know her personally—she’s that airport manager who tried her damndest to kill me all the time I was on Lyrane II.”

  “Hm…m…m.” Maitland tried to digest that undigestible bit. Tried, and failed. “That would seem to make the Lensman real, too, then—real enough, at least, to investigate—much as I hate to think of the possibility of a Lensman going that far off the beam.” Maitland’s convictions died hard. “You’ll handle this yourself, then?”

  “Check. At least, I’ll help. There may be people better qualified than I am. I’ll get them at it Thanks, Cliff—clear ether.”

  He lined a thought to his wife; and after a short, warmly ultimate contact, he told her the story.

  “So you see, beautiful,” he concluded, “your wish is coming true. I couldn’t keep you out of this if I wanted to. So check with the girls, put on your Lens, shed your clothes, and go to work.”

  “I’ll do that.” Clarrissa laughed and her soaring spirit flooded his mind. “Thanks, my dear.”

  Then and only then did Kimball Kinnison, master therapist, pay any further attention to that which lay contorted upon the floor. But when Whyte folded up his notebook and left the place, the derelict was resting quietly, and in a space of time long enough so that the putative writer of space-opera would not be connected with the cure, those fits would end. Moreover, Eddie would return, whole, to the void: he would become what he had never before been—a successful meteor-miner.

  Lensmen pay their debts; even to spiders and to worms.

  CHAPTER

  9

  An Arisian Education

  ER ADVENTURE IN THE hyper-spatial tube had taught Kathryn Kinnison much. Realizing her inadequacy and knowing what to do about it, she drove her speedster at high velocity to Arisia. Unlike the Second-Stage Lensmen, she did not even slow down as she approached the planet’s barrier; but, as one sure of her welcome, merely threw out ahead of her an identifying thought.

  “Ah, daughter Kathryn, again you are in time.” Was there, or was there not, a trace of emotion—of welcome, even of affection?—in that usually utterly emotionless thought? “Land as usual.”

  She neutralized her controls as she felt the mighty beams of the landing-engine take hold of her little ship. During previous visits she had questioned nothing—this time she was questioning everything. Was she landing, or not? Directing her every force inwardly, she probed her own mind to its profoundest depths. Definitely, she was her own mistress throughout—no conceivable mind could take hers over so tracelessly. As definitely, then, she was actually landing.

  She landed. The ground on which she stepped was real. So was the automatic flyer—neither plane nor helicopter—which whisked her from the spaceport to her familiar destination, an unpretentious residence in the grounds of the immense hospital. The graveled walk, the flowering shrubs, and the indescribably sweet and pungent perfume were real; as were the tiny pain and the drop of blood which resulted when a needle-sharp thorn pierced her incautious finger.

  Through automatically-opening doors she made her way into the familiar, comfortable, book-lined room which was Mentor’s study. And there, at his big desk, unchanged, sat Mentor. A lot like her father, but older—much older. About ninety, she had always thought, even though he didn’t look over sixty. This time, however, she drove a probe—and got the shock of her life. Her thought was stopped—cold—not by superior mental force, which she could have taken unmoved, but by a seemingly ordinary thought-screen, and her fast-disintegrating morale began visibly to crack.

  “Is all this—are you—real, or not?” she burst out, finally. “If i
t isn’t, I’ll go mad!”

  “That which you have tested—and I—are real, for the moment and as you understand reality. Your mind in its present state of advancement cannot be deceived concerning such elementary matters.”

  “But it all wasn’t, before? Or don’t you want to answer that?”

  “Since the knowledge will affect your growth, I will answer. It was not. This is the first time that your speedster has landed physically upon Arisia.”

  The girl shrank, appalled. “You told me to come back when I found out that I didn’t know it all,” she finally forced herself to say. “I learned that in the tube; but I didn’t realize until just now that I don’t know anything. Is there any use, Mentor, in going on with me?” she concluded, bitterly.

  “Much,” he assured her. “Your development has been eminently satisfactory, and your present mental condition is both necessary and sufficient.”

  “Well, I’ll be a spr…” Kathryn bit off the expletive and frowned. “What were you doing to me before, then, when I thought I got everything?”

  “Power of mind,” he informed her. “Sheer power, and penetration, and control. Depth, and speed, and all the other factors with which you are already familiar.”

  “But what was left? I know there is—lots of it—but I can’t imagine what.”

  “Scope,” Mentor replied, gravely. “Each of those qualities and characteristics must be expanded to encompass the full sphere of thought. Neither words nor thoughts can give any adequate concept of what it means; a practically wide-open two-way will be necessary. This cannot be accomplished, daughter, in the adolescent confines of your present mind; therefore enter fully into mine.”

  She did so: and after less than a minute of that awful contact slumped, inert and boneless, to the floor.

  The Arisian, unchanged, unmoved, unmoving, gazed at her until finally she began to stir.

  “That…father Mentor, that was…” She blinked, shook her head savagely, fought her way back to full consciousness. “That was a shock.”