“Well, change ‘miles’ to ‘parsecs’ and you’ve got the picture of deep-space speeds and operations,” Kinnison informed her. “Our speed varies, of course, with the density of matter in space; but on the average—say one atom of substance per ten cubic centimeters of space—we tour at about sixty parsecs an hour, and full blast is about ninety. And our ultra-wave communicators, working below the level of the ether, in the sub-ether .”
“Whatever that is,” she interrupted.
“That’s as good a definition of it as any,” he grinned at her. “We don’t know what even the ether is, or whether or not it exists as an objective reality; to say nothing of what we so nonchalantly call the sub-ether. We can’t understand gravity, even though we make it to order. Nobody yet has been able to say how it is propagated, or even whether or not it is propagated—no one has been able to devise any kind of an apparatus or meter or method by which its nature, period, or velocity can be determined. Neither do we know anything about time or space. In fact, fundamentally, we don’t really know much of anything at all,” he concluded.
“Says you . but that makes me feel better, anyway,” she confided, snuggling a little closer. “Go on about the communicators.”
“Ultra-waves are faster than ordinary radio waves, which of course travel through the ether with the velocity of light, in just about the same ratio as that of the speed of our ships to the speed of slow automobiles—that is, the ratio of a parsec to a mile. Roughly nineteen billion to one. Range, of course, is proportional to the square of the speed.”
“Nineteen billion!” she exclaimed. “And you just said that nobody could understand even a million!”
“That’s the point exactly,” he went on, undisturbed. “You don’t have to understand or visualize it. All you have to know is that deep-space vessels and communicators cover distances in parcecs at practically the same rate that Tellurian automobiles and radios cover miles. So, when some space-flea talks to you about parsecs, just think of miles in terms of an automobile and a teleset and you’ll know as much as he does—maybe more.”
“I never heard it explained that way before—it does make it ever so much simpler. Will you sign this, please?”
“Just one more point.” The music had ceased and he was signing her card, preparatory to escorting her back to her place. “Like your supposedly tight-beam Luna-Tellus hookups, our long-range, equally tight-beam communicators are very sensitive to interference, either natural or artificial. So, while under perfect conditions we can communicate clear across the galaxy, there are times—particularly when the pirates are scrambling the channels—that we can’t drive a beam from here to Alpha Centauri. . Thanks a lot for the dance.”
The other girls did not quite come to blows as to which of them was to get him next; and shortly—he never did know exactly how it came about—he found himself dancing with a luscious, cuddly little brunette, clad—partially clad, at least—in a high-slitted, flame-colored sheath of some new fabric which the Lensman had never seen before. It looked like solidified, tightly-woven electricity!
“Oh, Mr. Kinnison!” his new partner cooed, ecstatically, “I think all spacemen, and you Lensmen particularly, are just too perfectly darn heroic for anything! Why, I think space is just terrible! I simply can’t cope with it at all!”
“Ever been out, Miss?” he grinned. He had never known many social butterflies, and temporarily he had forgotten that such girls as this one really existed.
“Why, of course!” The young woman kept on being exclamatory.
“Clear out to the moon, perhaps?” he hazarded.
“Don’t be ridic—ever so much farther than that—why, I went clear to Mars! And it gave me the screaming meamies, no less—I thought I would collapse!”
That dance ended ultimately, and other dances with other girls followed; but Kinnison could not throw himself into the gayety surrounding him. During his cadet days he had enjoyed such revels to the full, but now the whole thing left him cold. His mind insisted upon reverting to its problem. Finally, in the throng of young people on the floor, he saw a girl with a mass of red-bronze hair and a supple, superbly molded figure. He did not need to await her turning to recognize his erstwhile nurse and later assistant, whom he had last seen just this side of far-distant Boyssia II.
“Mac!” To her mind alone he sent out a thought. “For the love of Klono, lend a hand—rescue me! How many dances have you got ahead?”
“None at all—I’m not dating ahead.” She jumped as though someone had jabbed her with a needle, then paused in panic; eyes wide, breath coming fast, heart pounding. She had felt Lensed thoughts before, but this was something else, something entirely different. Every cell of his brain was open to her—and what was she seeing! She could read his mind as fully and as easily as . as . as Lensmen were supposed to be able to read anybody’s! She blanketed her thoughts desperately, tried with all her might not to think at all!
“QX, Mac,” the thought went quietly on within her mind, quite as though nothing unusual were occurring. “No intrusion meant—you didn’t think it; I already knew that if you started dating ahead you’d be tied up until day after tomorrow. Can I have the next one?”
“Surely, Kim.”
“Thanks—the Lens is off for the rest of the evening.” She sighed in relief as he snapped the telepathic line as though he were hanging up the receiver of a telephone.
“I’d like to dance with you all, kids,” he addressed at large the group of buds surrounding him and eyeing him hungrily, “but I’ve got this next one. See you later, perhaps,” and he was gone.
“Sorry, fellows,” he remarked casually, as he made his way through the circle of men around the gorgeous red-head. “Sorry, but this dance is mine, isn’t it, Miss MacDougall?”
She nodded, flashing the radiant smile which had so aroused his ire during his hospitalization. “I heard you invoke your spaceman’s god, but I was beginning to be afraid that you had forgotten this dance.”
“And she said she wasn’t dating ahead—the diplomat!” murmured an ambassador, aside.
“Don’t be a dope,” a captain of Marines muttered in reply. “She meant with us—that’s a Gray Lensman!”
Although the nurse, as has been said, was anything but small, she appeared almost petite against the Lensman’s mighty frame as they took off. Silently the two circled the great hall once; lustrous, goldenly green gown—of Earthly silk, this one, and less revealing than most—swishing in perfect cadence against deftly and softly stepping high-zippered gray boots.
“This is better, Mac,” Kinnison sighed, finally, “but I lack just seven thousand kilocycles of being in tune with this. Don’t know what’s the matter, but it’s clogging my jets. I must be getting to be a space-louse.”
“A space-louse—you? Uh-uh!” She shook her head. “You know very well what the matter is—you’re just too much of a man to mention it.”
“Huh?” he demanded.
“Uh-huh,” she asserted, positively if obliquely. “Of course you’re not in tune with this crowd—how could you be? I don’t fit into it any more myself, and what I’m doing isn’t even a baffled flare compared to your job. Not one in ten of these fluffs here tonight has ever been beyond the stratosphere; not one in a hundred has ever been out as far as Jupiter, or has ever had a serious thought in her head except about clothes or men; not one of them all has any more idea of what a Lensman really is than I have of hyper-space or of non-Euclidean geometry!”
“Kitty, kitty!” he laughed. “Sheathe the little claws, before you scratch somebody!”
“That isn’t cattishness, it’s the barefaced truth. Or perhaps,” she amended, honestly,