Gray Lensman

by E E 'Doc' Smith

  For Lacy was thunder-struck. If he had ever known it—and he must have—he had completely forgotten that MacDougall had this ship. This was awful—terrible!

  "Oh, yes ,. . yes, of course. How do you do? Mighty glad to see you again. How's everything going?" He pumped her hand vigorously, thinking frantically the while what he would— what he could say next "Oh, by the way, who is to be in charge of the operating room?"

  "Why, I am, of course," she replied in surprise. "Who else would be?"

  "Anyone else!" he wanted to say, but did not—then. "Why, that isn't at all necessary . . . I would suggest . . ."

  "You'll suggest nothing of the kind!" She stared at him intently; then, as she realized what his expression really meant—she had never before seen such a look of pitying anguish upon his usually sternly professional face—her own turned white and both hands flew to her throat.

  "Not Kirn, Lacy!" she gasped. Gone now was everything of poise, of insouciance, which had so characterized her a moment before. She who had worked unflinchingly upon all sorts of dismembered, fragmentary, maimed and mangled men was now a pleading, stricken, desperately frightened girl. "Not Kim—please! Oh, merciful God, don't let it be my Kirn!"

  "You can't be there, Mac." He did not need to tell her. She knew. He knew that she knew.

  "Somebody else— anybody else."

  "No!" came the hot negative, although the blood drained completely from her face, leaving it as white as the immaculate uniform she wore. Her eyes were black, burning holes. "It's my job, Lacy, in more ways than one. Do you think I'd let anyone else work on him?" she finished passionately.

  "You'll have to," he declared. "I didn't want to tell you this, but he's a mess." This, from a surgeon of Lacy's long and wide experience, was an unthinkable statement. Nevertheless:

  "All the more reason why I've got to do it. No matter what shape he's in I'll let no one else work on my Kim!"

  "I say no. That's an order—official!"

  "Damn such orders!" she flamed. "There's nothing back of it—you know that as well as I do!"

  "See here, young woman . . . !"

  "Do you think you can order me not to perform the very duties I swore to do?" she stormed. "And even if it were not my job, I'd come in and work on him if I had to get a torch and cut my way in to do it. The only way you can keep me out is to have about ten of your men put me into a strait-jacket—and if you do that I'll have you kicked out of the Service bodily!"

  "QX, MacDougall, you win." She had him there. This girl could and would do exactly that. "But if you faint I'll make you wish. . . ."

  "You know me better than that, doctor." She was cold now as a woman of marble. "If he dies I'll die too, right then; but if he lives I'll stand by."

  "You would, at that," the surgeon admitted. "Probably you would be able to hold together better than any one else could. But there'll be after-effects in your case, you know."

  "I know." Her voice was bleak. "I'll live through them . . . if Kim lives." She became all nurse in the course of a breath. White, cold, inhuman; strung to highest tension and yet placidly calm, as only a truly loving woman in life's great crises can be. "You have had reports on him, doctor. What is your provisional diagnosis?"

  "Something like elephantiasis, only worse, affecting both arms and both legs. Drastic amputations indicated. Eye-sockets. Burns. Multiple and compound fractures. Punctured and incised wounds., Traumatism, ecchymosis, extensive extravasations, oedema. Profound systemic shock. The prognosis, however, seems to be favorable, as far as we can tell."

  "Oh, I'm glad of that," she breathed, the woman for a moment showing through the armor of the nurse. She had not dared even to think of prognosis. Then she had a thought. "Is that really true, or are you just giving me a shot in the arm?" she demanded.

  "The truth—strictly," he assured her. "Worsel has an excellent sense of perception, and has reported fully and clearly. His brain, mind, and spine are not affected in any way, and we should be able to save his life. That is the one good feature of the whole thing."

  The speedster finally matched the intrinsic velocity of the hospital ship. She went free, flashed up to the Pasteur, inerted, and maneuvered briefly. The larger vessel engulfed the smaller. The Gray Lensman was carried into the operating room. The anaesthetist approached the table and Lacy was stunned at a thought from Kinnison.

  "Never mind the anaesthetic, Doctor Lacy. You can't make me unconscious without killing me. Just go ahead with your work. I held a nerve-block while the Delgonian was doing his stuff and I can hold it while you're doing yours."

  "But we can't, man!" Lacy exclaimed. "You've got to be under a general for this job—we can't have you conscious. You're raving, I think. It will work—it always has. Let us try it, anyway, won't you?"

  "Sure. It'll save me the trouble of holding the block, even though it won't do anything else. Go ahead."

  The attendant doctor did so, with the same cool skill and to the same end-point as in thousands of similar and successful undertakings. At its conclusion, "Gone now, aren't you, Kinnison?" Lacy asked, through his Lens.

  "No," came the surprising reply. "Physically, it worked. I can't feel a thing and I can't move a muscle, but mentally I'm still here."

  "But you shouldn't be!" Lacy protested. "Perhaps you were right, at that—we can't give you much more without danger of collapse. But you've got to be unconscious! Isn't there some way in which you can be made so?"

  "Yes, there is. But why do I have to be unconscious?" he asked, curiously.

  'To avoid mental shock—seriously damaging," the surgeon explained. "In your case particularly the mental aspect is graver than the purely physical one."

  "Maybe you're right, but you can't do it with drugs. Call Worsel; he has done it before.

  He had me unconscious most of the way over here except when he had to give me a drink or something to eat. He's the only man this side of Arisia who can operate on my mind."

  Worsel came. "Sleep, my friend," he commanded, gently but firmly. "Sleep profoundly, body and mind, with no physical or mental sensations, no consciousness, no perception even of the passage of time. Sleep so until someone having authority to do so bids you awaken."

  And Kinnison slept; so deeply that even Lacy's probing Lens could elicit no response.

  "He will stay that way?" Lacy asked in awe.

  "Yes."

  "For how long?"

  "Indefinitely. Until one of you doctors or nurses tells him to wake up, or until he dies for lack of food or water."

  "He'll get nourishment. He would make a much better recovery if we could keep him in that state until his injuries are almost healed. Would that hurt him?"

  "Not at all."

  Then the surgeons and the nurses went to work. Since it has already been made amply plain what had to be done to the Gray Lensman, no good end is to be served by following in revolting detail the stark hideousness of its actual doing. Suffice it to say, then, that Lacy was not guilty of exaggeration when he described Kinnison as being a "mess." He was. The job was long and hard. It was heartbreaking, even for those to whom Kinnison was merely another case, not a beloved personality. What they had to do they did, and the white-marble chief nurse carried on through every soul-wrenching second, through every shocking, searing motion of it. She did her part, stoically, unflinchingly, as efficiently as though the patient upon the table were a total stranger undergoing a simple appendectomy and not the one man in her entire Universe undergoing radical dismemberment. Nor did she faint—then.

  "Three or four of the girls fainted dead away, and a couple of the internes turned sort of green around the gills," she explained to your historian in reply to a direct question. She can bring herself to discuss the thing, now that it is so happily past, although she does not like to do so. "But I held on until it was all over. I did more than faint then." She smiled wryly at the memory. "I went into such a succession of hysterical cat-fits that they had to give me hypos and keep me in bed, and they
didn't let me see Kim again until we had him back in Base Hospital, on Tellus. But even old Lacy himself was so woozy that he had to have a couple of snifters of brandy, so the shew I put on wasn't too much out of order, at that."

  Back in Base Hospital, then, time wore on until Lacy decided that the Lensman could be aroused from his trance. Clarrissa woke him up. She had fought for the privilege: first claiming it as a right and then threatening to commit mayhem upon the person of anyone else who dared even to think of doing it

  "Wake up, Kim dear," she whispered. "The worst of it is over now. You are getting well."

  The Gray Lensman came to instantly, in full command of every faculty, knowing everything that had happened up to the instant of his hypnosis by Worsel. He stiffened, ready to establish again the nerve-block against the intolerable agony to which he had been subjected so long, but there was no need. His body was, for the first time in untold eons, free from pain; and he relaxed blissfully, reveling in the sheer comfort of it.

  "I'm so glad that you're awake, Kim," the nurse went on. "I know that you can't talk to me—we can't unbandage your jaw until next week—and you can't think at me, either, because your new Lens hasn't come yet. But ^ can talk to you and you can listen. Don't be discouraged, Kim. Don't let it get you down. I love you just as much as I ever did, and as soon as you can talk we're going to get married. I am going to take care of you . . ."

  "Don't 'poor dear' me, Mac," he interrupted her with a vigorous thought. "You didn't say it, I know, but you were thinking it. I'm not half as helpless as you think I am. I can still communicate, and I can see as well as I ever could, or better. And if you think I'm going to let you marry me to take care of me, you're crazy."

  "You're raving! Delirious! Stark, staring mad!" She started back, then controlled herself by an effort. "Maybe you can think at people without a Lens—of course you can, since you just did, at me—but you can't see, Kim, possibly. Believe me, boy, I know you can't. I was there . . ."

  "I can, though," he insisted. "I got a lot of stuff on my second trip to Arisia that I couldn't let anybody know about then, but I can now. I've got as good a sense of perception as Tregonsee has—maybe better. To prove it, you look thin, worn—whittled down to a nub. You've been working too hard—on me."

  "Deduction," she scoffed. "You'd know I would."

  "QX. How about those roses over there on the table? White ones, yellow ones, and red ones? With ferns?"

  "You can smell them, perhaps," dubiously. Then, with more assurance, "You would know that practically all the flowers known to botany would be here."

  "Well, I’ll count 'em and point 'em out to you, then— or better, how about that little gold locket, with 'CM' engraved on it, that you're wearing under your uniform? I can't smell that, nor the picture in it. . ." The man's thought faltered in embarrassment. "My picture! Klono's whiskers, Mac, where did you get that—and why?"

  "It's a reduction that Admiral Haynes let me have made. I am wearing it because I love you—I've said that before."

  The girl's entrancing smile was now in full evidence. She knew now that he could see, that he would never be the helpless hulk which she had so gallingly thought him doomed to become, and her spirits rose in ecstatic relief. But he would never take the initiative now. QX, then—she would; and this was as good an opening as she would ever have with the stubborn brute. Therefore:

  "More than that, as I also said before, I am going to marry you, whether you like it or not." She blushed a heavenly (and discordant) magenta, but went on unfalteringly: "And not out of pity, either, Kim, or just to take care of you. It's older than that—much older."

  "It can't be done, Mac." His thought was a protest to high Heaven at the injustice of Fate.

  "I've thought it over out in space a thousand times—thought until I was black in the face—but I get the same result every time. It's just simply no soap. You are much too fine a woman—too splendid, too vital, too much of everything a woman should be—to be tied down for life to a thing that's half steel, rubber, and phenoline. It just simply isn't on the wheel, that's all."

  "You're full of pickles, Kim." Gone was all her uncertainty and nervousness. She was calm, poised; glowing with a transcendent inward beauty. "I didn't really know until this minute that you love me, too, but I do now. Don't you realize, you big, dumb, wonderful clunker, that as long as there's one single, little bit of a piece of you left alive I’ll love that piece more than I ever could any other man's entire being?"

  "But I can't, I tell you!" He groaned the thought. "I can't and I won't! My job isn't done yet, either, and next time they'll probably get me. I can't let you waste yourself, Mac, on a fraction of a man for a fraction of a lifetime!"

  "QX, Gray Lensman." Clarrissa was serene, radiantly untroubled. She could make things come out right now; everything was on the green. "Well put this back up on the shelf for a while.

  I'm afraid that I have been terribly remiss in my duties as nurse. Patients mustn't be excited or quarreled with, you know."

  "That's another thing. How come you, a sector chief, to be doing ordinary room duty, and night duty at that?"

  "Sector chiefs assign duties, don't they?" she retorted sunnily. "Now I'll give you a rub and change some of these dressings."

  CHAPTER 22

  REGENERATION

  "Hi, skeleton-gazer!"

  "Ho, Big Chief Feet-on-the-Desk!"

  "I see your red-headed sector chief is still occupying all strategic salients in force."

  Haynes had paused in the Surgeon-Marshal's -office on his way to another of his conferences with the Gray Lensman. "Can't you get rid of her or don't you want to?"

  "Don't want to. Couldn't, anyway, probably. The young vixen would tear down the hospital—she might even resign, marry him out of hand, and lug him off somewhere. You want him to recover, don't you?"

  "Don't be any more of an idiot than you have to. What a question!"

  "Don't work up a temperature about MacDougall, then. As long as she's around him—and that's twenty four hours a day—hell get everything in the universe that he can get any good out of."

  "That's so, too. This other thing's out of our hands now, anyway. Kinnison can't hold his position long against her and himself both—overwhelmingly superior force. Just as well, too—Civilization needs more like those two."

  "Check, but the affair isn't out of our hands, by any means—we've got quite a little fine work to do there yet, as you'll see, before it'll be a really good job. But about Kinnison . . ."

  "Yes. When are you going to fit arms and legs on him? He should be practising with them at this stage of the game, I should think—I was."

  "You should think—but unfortunately, you don't," was the surgeon's dry rejoinder. "If you did, you would have paid more attention to what Phillips has been doing. He's making the final test today. Come along and we'll explain it to you again—your conference with Kinnison can wait half an hour."

  In the research laboratory which had been assigned to Phillips they found von Hohendorff with the Posenian. Haynes was surprised to see the old Commandant of Cadets, but Lacy quite evidently had known that he was to be there.

  "Phillips," the Surgeon-Marshal began, "explain to this warhorse, in words of as few syllables as possible, what you are doing."

  "The original problem was to discover what hormone or other agent caused proliferation of neural tissue . . ."

  "Wait a minute, I'd better do it," Lacy broke in. "Besides, you wouldn't do yourself justice. The first thing he found out was that the problem of repairing damaged nervous tissue was inextricably involved with several other unknown things, such as the original growth of such tissue, its relationship to growth in general, the regeneration of lost members in lower forms, and so on. You see, Haynes, it's a known fact that nerves do grow, or else they could not exist; and in lower forms of life they regenerate. Those facts were all he had, at first. In higher forms, even during the growth stage, regeneration does not occur spontaneous
ly. Phillips set out to find out why.

  "The thyroid controls growth, but does not initiate it, he learned. This fact seemed to indicate that there was an unknown hormone involved—that certain lower types possess an endocrine gland which is either atrophied or non-existent in higher types. If the latter, it was no landing. He reasoned, however, since higher types evolved from lower, that the gland in question might very well exist in a vestigial state. He studied animals, 'thousands of them, from the germ upward. He exhausted the patience of the Posenian authorities; and when they cut off his appropriation, on the ground that the thing was impossible, he came here. We felt that if he were so convinced of the importance of the work as to be willing to spend bis whole life on it, the least we could do would be to support him. We gave him carte blanche.

  "The man is a miracle of perseverance, a keen observer, a shrewd reasoner, and a mechanic par excellence—a born researcher. So he finally found out what it must be—the pineal. Then he had to find the stimulant. Drugs, chemicals, the spectrum of radiation; singly and in combination. Years of plugging, with just enough progress to keep him at it. Visits to other planets peopled by races human to two places or more; learning everything that had been done along that line. When you fellows moved Medon over here he visited it as routine, and there he hit the jackpot. Wise himself is a surgeon, and the Medonians have had warfare and grief enough to develop the medical and surgical arts no end.

  "They knew how to stimulate the pineal, but their method was dangerous. With Phillips’

  fresh viewpoint, his wide-knowledge, and his mechanical genius, they worked out a new and highly satisfactory technique. He was going to try it out on a pirate slated for the lethal chamber, but von Hohendorff heard about it and insisted on being the guinea pig. Got up on his Unattached Lensman's high horse and won't come down. So here we are."

  "Hm . . . m . . . interesting!" The admiral had listened attentively. "You're pretty sure it'll work, then, I gather?"