Second Stage Lensmen

by Edward E Smith

  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 th
e 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-with-out-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.”