“What are you going to do with the stranger?” the Lyranian asked, avoiding the issue.
“I’m going to take some information away from her, that’s all. Why? What were you going to do with her yourselves?”
“We were—and are going to kill it,” came flashing reply. The lethal bolt came even before the reply; but, fast as the Elder One was, the Gray Lensman was faster. He blanked out the thought, reached over and flipped on the Aldebaranian’s thought-screen.
“Keep it on until we get to the ship, sister,” he spoke aloud in the girl’s native tongue. “Your battery’s low, I know, but it’ll last long enough. These hens seem to be strictly on the peck.”
“I’ll say they are—you don’t know the half of it.” Her voice was low, rich, vibrant. “Thanks, Kinnison.”
“Listen, Red-Top, what’s the percentage in playing so dirty?” the Lensman complained then. “I’m doing my damndest to let you off easy, but I’m all done dickering. Do we go out of here peaceably, or do we fry you and your crew to cinders in your own lard, and walk out over the grease spots? It’s strictly up to you, but you’ll decide right here and right now.”
The Elder One’s face was hard, her eyes flinty. Her fingers were curled into ball-tight fists. “I suppose, since we cannot stop you, we must let you go free,” she hissed, in helpless but controlled fury. “If by giving my life and the lives of all these others we could kill you, here and now would you two die…but as it is, you may go.”
“But why all the rage?” the puzzled Lensman asked. “You strike me as being, on the whole, reasoning creatures. You in particular went to Tellus with this zwilnik here, so you should know…”
“I do know,” the Lyranian broke in. “That is why I would go to any length, pay any price whatever, to keep you from returning to your own world, to prevent the inrush of your barbarous hordes here…”
“Oh! So that’s it!” Kinnison exclaimed. “You think that some of our people might want to settle down here, or to have traffic with you?”
“Yes.” She went into a eulogy concerning Lyrane II, concluding, “I have seen the planets and the races of your so-called Civilization, and I detest them and it. Never again shall any of us leave Lyrane; nor, if I can help it, shall any stranger ever come here.”
“Listen, angel-face!” the man commanded. “You’re as mad as a Radeligian cateagle—you’re as cockeyed as Trenco’s ether. Get this, and get it straight. To any really intelligent being of any one of forty million planets, your whole Lyranian race would be a total loss with no insurance. You’re a God-forsaken, spiritually and emotionally starved, barren, mentally ossified, and completely monstrous mess. If I, personally, never see either you or your planet again, that will be exactly twenty seven minutes too soon. This girl here thinks the same of you as I do. If anybody else ever hears of Lyrane and thinks he wants to visit it, I’ll take him out of—I’ll knock a hip down on him if I have to, to keep him away from here. Do I make myself clear?”
“Oh, yes—perfectly!” she fairly squealed in school-girlish delight. The Lensman’s tirade, instead of infuriating her farther, had been sweet music to her peculiarly insular mind. “Go, then, at once—hurry! Oh, please, hurry! Can you drive the car back to your vessel, or will one of us have to go with you?”
“Thanks. I could drive your car, but it won’t be necessary. The ’copter will pick us up.”
He spoke to the watchful Ralph, then he and the Aldebaranian left the hall, followed at a careful distance by the throng. The helicopter was on the ground, waiting. The man and the woman climbed aboard.
“Clear ether, persons!” The Lensman waved a salute to the crowd and the Tellurian craft shot into the air.
Thence to the Dauntless, which immediately did likewise, leaving behind her, upon the little airport, a fused blob of metal that had once been the zwilnik’s speedster. Kinnison studied the white face of his captive, then handed her a tiny canister.
“Fresh battery for your thought-screen generator; yours is about shot.” Since she made no motion to accept it, he made the exchange himself and tested the result. It worked. “What’s the matter with you, kid, anyway? I’d say you were starved, if I hadn’t caught you at a full table.”
“I am starved,” the girl said, simply. “I couldn’t eat there. I knew they were going to kill me, and it…it sort of took away my appetite.”
“Well, what are we waiting for? I’m hungry, too—let’s go eat.”
“Not with you, either, any more than with them. I thanked you, Lensman, for saving my life there, and I meant it. I thought then and still think that I would rather have you kill me than those horrible, monstrous women, but I simply can’t eat.”
“But I’m not even thinking of killing you—can’t you get that through your skull? I don’t make war on women; you ought to know that by this time.”
“You will have to.” The girl’s voice was low and level. “You didn’t kill any of those Lyranians, no, but you didn’t chase them a million parsecs, either. We have been taught ever since we were born that you Patrolmen always torture people to death. I don’t quite believe that of you personally, since I have had a couple of glimpses into your mind, but you’ll kill me before I’ll talk. At least, I hope and I believe that I can hold out.”
“Listen, girl.” Kinnison was in deadly earnest. “You are in no danger whatever. You are just as safe as though you were in Klono’s hip pocket. You have some information that I want, yes, and I will get it, but in the process I will neither hurt you nor do you mental or physical harm. The only torture you will undergo will be that which, as now, you give yourself.”
“But you called me a…a zwilnik, and they always kill them,” she protested.
“Not always. In battles and in raids, yes. Captured ones are tried in court. If found guilty, they used to go into the lethal chambers. Sometimes they do yet, but not usually. We have mental therapists now who can operate on a mind if there’s anything there worth saving.”
“And you think that I will wait to stand trial, in the entirely negligible hope that your bewhiskered, fossilized therapists will find something in me worth saving?”
“You won’t have to,” Kinnison laughed. “Your case has already been decided—in your favor. I am neither a policeman nor a Narcotics man; but I happen to be qualified as judge, jury, and executioner. I am a therapist to boot. I once saved a worse zwilnik than you are, even though she wasn’t such a knockout. Now do we eat?”
“Really? You aren’t just…just giving me the needle?”
The Lensman flipped off her screen and gave her unmistakable evidence. The girl, hitherto so unmovedly self-reliant, broke down. She recovered quickly, however, and in Kinnison’s cabin she ate ravenously.
“Have you a cigarette?” She sighed with repletion when she could hold no more food.
“Sure. Alsakanite, Venerian, Tellurian, most anything—we carry a couple of hundred different brands. What would you like?”
“Tellurian, by all means. I had a package of Camerfields once—they were gorgeous. Would you have those, by any chance?”
“Uh-huh,” he assured her. “Quartermaster! Carton of Camerfields, please.” It popped out of the pneumatic tube in seconds. “Here you are sister.”
The glittery girl drew the fragrant smoke deep, down into her lungs.
“Ah, that tastes good! Thanks, Kinnison—for everything. I’m glad you kidded me into eating; that was the finest meal I ever ate. But it won’t take, really. I’ve never broken yet, and I won’t break now. If I do, I won’t be worth a damn, to myself or to anybody else, from then on.” She crushed out the butt. “So let’s get on with the third degree. Bring on your rubber hose and your lights and your drip-can.”
“You’re still on the wrong foot, Toots,” Kinnison said, pityingly. What a frightful contrast there was between her slimly rounded body, in its fantastically gorgeous costume, and the stark somberness of her eyes! “There’ll be no third degree, no hose, no lights, nothing li
ke that. In fact, I’m not even going to talk to you until you’ve had a good long sleep. You don’t look hungry any more, but you’re still not in tune, by seven thousand kilocycles. How long has it been since you really slept?”
“A couple of weeks, at a guess. Maybe a month.”
“Thought so. Come on; you’re going to sleep now.”
The girl did not move. “With whom?” she asked, quietly. Her voice did not quiver, but stark terror lay in her mind and her hand crept unconsciously toward the hilt of her dagger.
“Holy Klono’s claws!” Kinnison snorted, staring at her in wide-eyed wonder. “Just what kind of a bunch of hyenas do you think you’ve got into, anyway?”
“Bad,” the girl replied, gravely. “Not the worst possible, perhaps, but from my standpoint plenty bad enough. What can I expect from the Patrol except what I do expect? You don’t need to kid me along, Kinnison. I can take it, and I’d a lot rather take it standing up, facing it, than have you sneak up on me with it after giving me your shots in the arm.”
“What somebody has done to you is a sin and a shrieking shame,” Kinnison declared, feelingly. “Come on, you poor little devil.” He picked up sundry pieces of apparatus, then, taking her arm, he escorted her to another, almost luxuriously furnished cabin.
“That door,” he explained carefully, “is solid chrome-tungsten-molybdenum steel. The lock can’t be picked. There are only two keys to it in existence, and here they are. There’s a bolt, too, that’s proof against anything short of a five-hundred-ton hydraulic jack, or an atomic-hydrogen cutting torch. Here’s a full-coverage screen, and a twenty-foot spy-ray block. There is your stuff out of the speedster. If you want help, or anything to eat or drink, or anything else that can be expected aboard a ship like this, there’s the communicator. QX?”
“Then you really mean it? That I…that you… I mean…”
“Absolutely,” he assured her. “Just that. You are completely the master of your destiny, the captain of your soul. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Kinnison. Good-night, and th…thanks.” The girl threw herself face downward upon the bed in a storm of sobs.
Nevertheless, as Kinnison started back toward his own cabin, he heard the massive bolt click into its socket and felt the blocking screens go on.
CHAPTER
5
…Illona of Lonabar
OME TWELVE OR FOURTEEN hours later, after the Aldebaranian girl had had her breakfast, Kinnison went to her cabin.
“Hi, Cutie, you look better. By the way, what’s your name, so we’ll know what to call you?”
“Illona,”
“Illona what?”
“No what—just Illona, that’s all.”
“How do they tell you from other Illonas, then?”
“Oh, you mean my registry number. In the Aldebaranian language there are not the symbols—it would have to be ‘The Illona who is the daughter of Porlakent the potter who lives in the house of the wheel upon the road of…’”
“Hold everything—well call you Illona Potter.” He eyed her keenly. “I thought your Aldebaranian wasn’t so hot—didn’t seem possible that I could have got that rusty. You haven’t been on Aldebaran II for a long time, have you?”
“No, we moved to Lonabar when I was about six.”
“Lonabar? Never heard of it—I’ll check up on it later. Your stuff was all here, wasn’t it? Did any of the red-headed person’s things get mixed in?”
“Things?” She giggled sunnily, then sobered in quick embarrassment “She didn’t carry any. They’re horrid, I think—positively indecent—to run around that way.”
“Hm…m. Glad you brought the point up. You’ve got to put on some clothes aboard this ship, you know.”
“Me?” she demanded. “Why, I’m fully dressed…” She paused, then shrank together visibly. “Oh! Tellurians—I remember, all those coverings! You mean, then…you think I’m shameless and indecent too?”
“No. Not at all—yet.” At his obvious sincerity Illona unfolded again. “Most of us—especially the officers—have been on so many different planets, had dealings with so many different types and kinds of entities, that we’re used to anything. When we visit a planet that goes naked, we do also, as a matter of course; when we hit one that muffles up to the smothering point we do that, too. ‘When in Rome, be a Roman candle’, you know. The point is that we’re at home here, you’re the visitor. It’s all a matter of convention, of course; but a rather important one. Don’t you think so?”
“Covering up, certainly. Uncovering is different. They told me to be sure to, but I simply can’t. I tried it back there, but I felt naked!”
“QX—we’ll have the tailor make you a dress or two. Some of the boys haven’t been around very much, and you’d look pretty bare to them. Everything you’ve got on, jewelry and all, wouldn’t make a Tellurian sun-suit, you know.”
“Then have them hurry up the dress, please. But this isn’t jewelry, it is…”
“Jet back, beautiful. I know gold, and platinum, and…”
“The metal is expensive, yes,” Illona conceded. “These alone,” she tapped one of the delicate shields, “cost five days of work. But base metal stains the skin blue and green and black, so what can one do? As for the beads, they are synthetics—junk. Poor girls, if they buy it themselves, do not wear jewelry, but beads, like these. Half a day’s work buys the lot.”
“What!” Kinnison demanded.
“Certainly. Rich girls only, or poor girls who do not work, wear real jewelry, such as…the Aldebaranian has not the words. Let me think at you, please?”
“Sorry, nothing there that I recognize at all,” Kinnison answered, after studying a succession of thought-images of multi-colored, spectacular gems. “That’s one to file away in the book, too, believe me. But as to that ‘junk’ you’ve got draped all over yourself—half a day’s pay—what do you work at for a living, when you work?”
“I’m a dancer—like this.” She leaped lightly to her feet and her left boot whizzed past her ear in a flashingly fast high kick. Then followed a series of gyrations and contortions, for which the Lensman knew no names, during which the girl seemed a practically boneless embodiment of suppleness and grace. She sat down; meticulous hairdress scarcely rumpled, not a buckle or bracelet awry, breathing hardly one count faster.
“Nice.” He applauded briefly. “Hard for me to evaluate such talent as that—I thought you were a pilot. However, on Tellus or any one of a thousand other planets I could point out to you, you can sell that ‘junk’ you’re wearing for—at a rough guess—about fifty thousand days’ work.”
“Impossible!”
“True, nevertheless. So, before we land, you’d better give them to me, so that I can send them to a bank for you, under guard.”
“If I land.” As Kinnison spoke Illona’s manner changed; darkened as though an inner light had been extinguished. “You have been so friendly and nice, I was forgetting where I am and the business ahead. Putting it off won’t make it any easier. Better be getting on with it, don’t you think?”
“Oh, that? That’s all done, long ago.”
“What?” she almost screamed. “It isn’t! It couldn’t be!”
“Sure. I got most of the stuff I wanted last night, while I was changing your thought-screen battery. Menjo Bleeko, your big-shot boss, and so on.”
“You didn’t! But…you must have, at that, to know it…but you didn’t hurt me, or anything…you couldn’t have operated—changed me, because I have all my memories…or seem to… I’m not an idiot, I mean any more than usual…”
“You’ve been taught a good many sheer lies, and quite a few half truths,” he informed her, evenly. “For instance, what did they tell you that hollow tooth would do to you when you broke the seal?”
“Make my mind a blank. But one of their doctors would get hold of me very soon and give me the antidote that would restore me exactly as I was before.”
“That is one of the half trut
hs. It would certainly have made your mind a blank, but only by blasting most of your memory files out of existence. Their therapists would ‘restore’ you by substituting other memories for your real ones—whatever other ones they pleased.”
“How horrible! How perfectly ghastly! That was why you treated it so, then; as though it were a snake. I wondered at your savagery toward it. But how, really, do I know that you are telling the truth?”
“You don’t,” he admitted. “You will have to make your own decisions after acquiring full information.”
“You are a therapist,” she remarked, shrewdly. “But if you operated on my mind you didn’t ‘save’ me, because I still think exactly the same as I always did about the Patrol and everything pertaining to it…or do I?… Or is this…” her eyes widened with a startling possibility.
“No, I didn’t operate,” he assured her. “No such operation can possibly be done without leaving scars—breaks in the memory chains—that you can find in a minute if you look for them. There are no breaks or blanks in any chain in your mind.”
“No—at least, I can’t find any,” she reported after a few minutes’ thought. “But why didn’t you? You can’t turn me loose this way, you know—a z…an enemy of your society.”
“You don’t need saving,” he grinned. “You believe in absolute good and absolute evil, don’t you?”
“Why of course—certainly! Everybody must!”
“Not necessarily. Some of the greatest thinkers in the universe do not.” His voice grew somber, then lightened again. “Such being the case, however, all you need to ‘save’ yourself is experience, observation, and knowledge of both sides of the question. You’re a colossal little fraud, you know.”
“How do you mean?” She blushed vividly, her eyes wavered.
“Pretending to be such a hard-boiled egg. ‘Never broke yet’. Why should you break, when you’ve never been under pressure?”
“I have so!” she flared. “What do you suppose I’m carrying this knife for?”
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