The Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol remade its formation after a fashion and set off toward the galaxy at touring blast.
And in the control room of the flagship three Lensmen brought a very serious conference to a close.
“You saw what happened to Helmuth’s planet,” Kinnison’s voice was oddly hard, “and I gave you all I could get of the thought about the destruction of all life on Sol III. A big enough duodec bomb in the bottom of an ocean would do it. I don’t really know anything except that we hadn’t better let them catch us asleep at the switch again—we’ve got to be on our toes every second.”
And the Gray Lensman, face set and stern, strode off to his quarters.
CHAPTER 2
WIDE-OPEN TWO-WAY
During practically all of the long trip back to earth Kinnison kept pretty much to his cabin, thinking deeply, blackly, and, he admitted ruefully to himself, to very little purpose. And at Prime Base, through week after week of its feverish activity, he continued to think. Finally, however, he was snatched out of his dark abstraction by no less a personage than Surgeon-Marshal Lacy.
“Snap out of it, lad,” that worthy advised, smilingly. “When you concentrate on one thing too long, you know, the vortices of thought occupy narrower and narrower loci, until finally the effective volume becomes infinitesimal. Or, mathematically, the then range of cogitation, integrated between the limits of plus and minus infinity, approaches zero as a limit .”
“Huh? What are you talking about?” the Lensman demanded.
“Poor mathematics, perhaps, but sound psychology,” Lacy grinned. “It got your undivided attention, didn’t it? That was what I was after. In plain English, if you keep on thinking around in circles you’ll soon be biting yourself in the small of the back. Come on, you and I are going places.”
“Where?”
“To the Grand Ball in honor of the Grand Fleet, my boy—old Doctor Lacy prescribes it for you as a complete and radical change of atmosphere. Let’s go!”
The city’s largest ball-room was a blaze of light and color. A thousand polychromatic lamps flooded their radiance downward through draped bunting upon an even more colorful throng. Two thousand items of feminine loveliness were there, in raiment whose fabrics were the boasts of hundreds of planets, whose hues and shades put the spectrum itself to shame. There were over two thousand men, clad in plain or beribboned or bemedaled full civilian dress, or in the variously panoplied dress uniforms of the many Services.
“You’re dancing with Miss Forrester first, Kinnison,” the surgeon introduced them informally, and the Lensman found himself gliding away with a stunning blonde, ravishingly and revealingly dressed in a dazzlingly blue wisp of Manarkan glamorette—fashion’s dernier cri.
To the uninformed, Kinnison’s garb of plain gray leather might have seemed incongruous indeed in that brilliantly and fastidiously dressed assemblage. But to those people, as to us of today, the drab, starkly utilitarian uniform of the Unattached Lensman transcended far any other, however resplendent, worn by man: and literally hundreds of eyes followed the strikingly handsome couple as they slid rhythmically out upon the polished floor. But a measure of the tall beauty’s customary poise had deserted her. She was slimly taut in the circle of the Lensman’s arm, her eyes were downcast, and suddenly she missed a step.
“ ’Scuse me for stepping on your feet,” he apologized. “A fellow gets out of practice, flitting around in a speedster so much.”
“Thanks for taking the blame, but it’s my fault entirely—I know it as well as you do,” she replied, flushing uncomfortably. “I do know how to dance, too, but . well, you’re a Gray Lensman, you know.”
“Huh?” he ejaculated, in honest surprise, and she looked up at him for the first time. “What has that fact got to do with the price of Venetian orchids in Chicago—or with my clumsy walking all over your slippers?”
“Everything in the world,” she assured him. Nevertheless, her stiff young body relaxed and she fell into the graceful, accurate dancing which she really knew so well how to do. “You see, I don’t suppose that any of us has ever seen a Gray Lensman before, except in pictures, and actually to be dancing with one is . well, it’s really a kind of shock. I have to get used to it gradually. Why, I don’t even know how to talk to you! One couldn’t possibly call you plain Mister, as one would any ord .”
“It’ll be QX if you just call me ‘say’,” he informed her. “Maybe you’d rather not dance with a dub? What say we go get us a sandwich and a bottle of fayalin or something?”
“No—never!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean it that way at all. I’m going to have this full dance with you, and enjoy every second of it. And later I’m going to pack this dance card—which I hope you will sign for me—away in lavender, so it will go down in history that in my youth I really did dance with Gray Lensman Kinnison. Perhaps I’ve recovered enough now to talk and dance at the same time. Do you mind if I ask you some silly questions about space?”
“Go ahead. They won’t be silly, if I’m any judge. Elementary, perhaps, but not silly.”
“I hope so, but I think you’re being charitable again. Like most of the girls here, I suppose, I’ve never been out in deep space at all. Besides a few hops to the moon. I’ve taken only two flits, and they were both only inter-planetary—one to Mars and one to Venus. I never could see how you deep-space men can really understand what you’re doing—either the frightful speeds at which you travel, the distances you cover, or the way your communicators work. In fact, according to the professors, no human mind can understand figures of those magnitudes at all. But you must understand them, I should think . or, perhaps .”
“Or maybe the guy isn’t human?” Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously. “No, the professors are right. We can’t understand the figures, but we don’t have to—all we have to do is to work with ’em. And, now that it has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are Gladys Forrester, it’s quite clear that you and I are in the same boat.”
“Me? How?” she exclaimed.
“The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear title to a million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that really produces results—the hard way of actual experience. You lost a lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it all back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to take it away from you. The fact that your brain can’t envisage a million credits hasn’t interfered with your manipulation of that amount, has it?”
“No, but that’s entirely different!” she protested.
“Not in any essential feature,” he countered. “I can explain it best, perhaps, by analogy. You can’t visualize, mentally, the size of North America, either, yet that fact doesn’t bother you in the least while you’re driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On the ground, I mean, not in the air?”
“A DeKhotinsky sporter.”
“Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles an hour, and I suppose you cruise between ninety and a hundred. We’ll have to pretend that you drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also, you have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from three or four thousand miles away; or, on short-wave, from anywhere on Tellus