"But, Mentor!" Samms protested. "I can't help you on a thing like that! How can I know or report the exact mass, length, and orientation of single hairs?"
"You cannot; but, since you will be wearing your Lens, I myself can and will compare minutely my visualization with the actuality. For know, youth, that wherever any Lens is, there can any Arisian be if he so desires. And now, knowing that fact, and from your own knowledge of the satisfactions to be obtained from chess and other such mental activities, and from the glimpses you have had into my own mind, do you retain any doubts that we Arisians will be fully compensated for the trifling effort involved in furnishing whatever number of Lenses may be required?"
"I have no more doubts. But this Lens ... I'm getting more afraid of it every minute. I see that it is a perfect identification; I can understand that it can be a perfect telepath. But is it something else, as well? If it has other powers ... what are they?"
"I cannot tell you; or, rather, I will not. It is best for your own development that I do not, except in the most general terms. It has additional qualities, it is true; but, since no two entities ever have the same abilities, no two Lenses will ever be of identical qualities. Strictly speaking, a Lens has no real power of its own; it merely concentrates, intensifies, and renders available whatever powers are already possessed by its wearer. You must develop your own powers and your own abilities; we of Arisia, in furnishing the Lens, will have done everything that we should do."
"Of course, sir; and much more than we have any right to expect. You have given me a Lens for Roderick Kinnison; how about the others? Who is to select them?"
"You are, for a time." Silencing the man's protests, Mentor went on: "You will find that your judgment will be good. You will send to us only one entity who will not be given a Lens, and it is necessary that that one entity should be sent here. You will begin a system of selection and training which will become more and more rigorous as time goes on. This will be necessary; not for the selection itself, which the Lensmen themselves could do among babies in their cradles, but because of the benefits thus conferred upon the many who will not graduate, as well as upon the few who will. In the meantime you will select the candidates; and you will be shocked and dismayed when you discover how few you will be able to send.
"You will go down in history as First Lensman Samms; the Crusader, the man whose wide vision and tremendous grasp made it possible for the Galactic Patrol to become what it is to be. You will have highly capable help, of course. The Kinnisons, with their irresistible driving force, their indomitable will to do, their transcendent urge; Costigan, back of whose stout Irish heart lie Erin's best of brains and brawn; your cousins George and Ray Olmstead; your daughter Virgilia...."
"Virgilia! Where doesshefit into this picture? What do you know about her—and how?"
"A mind would be incompetent indeed who could not visualize, from even the most fleeting contact with you, a fact which has been in existence for some twenty three of your years. Her doctorate in psychology; her intensive studies under Martian and Venerian masters—even under one reformed Adept of North Polar Jupiter—of the involuntary, uncontrollable, almost unknown and hence highly revealing muscles of the face, the hands, and other parts of the human body. You will remember that poker game for a long time."
"I certainly will." Samms grinned, a bit shamefacedly. "She gave us clear warning of what she was going to do, and then cleaned us out to the last millo."
"Naturally. She has, all unconsciously, been training herself for the work she is destined to do. But to resume; you will feel yourself incompetent, unworthy—that, too, is a part of a Lensman's Load. When you first scan the mind of Roderick Kinnison you will feel that he, not you, should be the prime mover in the Galactic Patrol. But know now that no mind, not even the most capable in the universe, can either visualize truly or truly evaluate itself. Commissioner Kinnison, upon scanning your mind as he will scan it, will know the truth and will be well content. But time presses; in one minute you leave."
"Thanks a lot ... thanks." Samms got to his feet and paused, hesitantly. "I suppose that it will be all right ... that is, I can call on you again, if...?"
"No," the Arisian declared, coldly. "My visualization does not indicate that it will ever again be either necessary or desirable for you to visit or to communicate with me or with any other Arisian."
Communication ceased as though a solid curtain had been drawn between the two. Samms strode out and stepped into the waiting vehicle, which whisked him back to his lifeboat. He blasted off; arriving in the control room of theChicagoprecisely at the end of the sixth hour after leaving it.
"Well, Rod, I'm back ..." he began, and stopped; utterly unable to speak. For at the mention of the name Samms' Lens had put him fully en rapport with his friend's whole mind; and what he perceived struck him—literally and precisely—dumb.
He had always liked and admired Rod Kinnison. He had always known that he was tremendously able and capable. He had known that he was big; clean; a square shooter; the world's best. Hard; a driver who had little more mercy on his underlings in selected undertakings than he had on himself. But now, as he saw spread out for his inspection Kinnison's ego in its entirety; as he compared in fleeting glances that terrific mind with those of the other officers—good men, too, all of them—assembled in the room; he knew that he had never even begun to realize what a giant Roderick Kinnison really was.
"What's the matter, Virge?" Kinnison exclaimed, and hurried up, both hands outstretched. "You look like you're seeing ghosts! What did they do to you?"
"Nothing—much. But 'ghosts' doesn't half describe what I'm seeing right now. Come into my office, will you, Rod?"
Ignoring the curious stares of the junior officers, the Commissioner and the Councillor went into the latter's quarters, and in those quarters the two Lensmen remained in close consultation during practically all of the return trip to Earth. In fact, they were still conferring deeply, via Lens, when theChicagolanded and they took a ground-car into The Hill.
"But who are you going to send first, Virge?" Kinnison demanded. "You must have decided on at least some of them, by this time."
"I know of only five, or possibly six, who are ready," Samms replied, glumly. "I would have sworn that I knew of a hundred, but they don't measure up. Jack, Mason Northrop, and Conway Costigan, for the first load. Lyman Cleveland, Fred Rodebush, and perhaps Bergenholm—I haven't been able to figure him out, but I'll know when I get him under my Lens—next. That's all."
"Not quite. How about your identical-twin cousins, Ray and George Olmstead, who have been doing such a terrific job of counter-spying?"
"Perhaps ... Quite possibly."
"And if I'm good enough, Clayton and Schweikert certainly are, to name only two of the commodores. And Knobos and DalNalten. And above all, how about Jill?"
"Jill? Why, I don't ... she measures up, of course, but ... but at that, there was nothing said against it, either ... I wonder...."
"Why not have the boys in—Jill, too—and thrash it out?"
The young people were called in; the story was told; the problem stated. The boys' reaction was instantaneous and unanimous. Jack Kinnison took the lead.
"Of course Jill's going, if anybody does!" he burst out vehemently. "Countherout, with all the stuff she's got?Hardly!"
"Why, Jack! This, fromyou?" Jill seemed highly surprised. "I have it on excellent authority that I'm a stinker; a half-witted one, at that. A jelly-brain, with come-hither eyes."
"You are, and a lot of other things besides." Jack Kinnison did not back up a millimeter, even before their fathers. "But even at your sapadilliest your half wits are better than most other people's whole ones; and I never said or thought that your brain couldn't function, whenever it wanted to, back of those sad eyes. Whatever it takes to be a Lensman, sir," he turned to Samms, "she's got just as much of as the rest of us. Maybe more."
"I take it, then, that there is no objection to her going?" Samms asked.
There was no objection.
"What ship shall we take, and when?"
"TheChicago. Now." Kinnison directed. "She's hot and ready. We didn't strike any trouble going or coming, so she didn't need much servicing. Flit!"
They flitted, and the great battleship made the second cruise as uneventfully as she had made the first. TheChicago'sofficers and crew knew that the young people left the vessel separately; that they returned separately, each in his or her lifeboat. They met, however, not in the control room, but in Jack Kinnison's private quarters; the three young Lensmen and the girl. The three were embarrassed; ill at ease. The Lenses were—definitely—not working. No one of them would put his Lens on Jill, since she did not have one.... The girl broke the short silence.
"Wasn't she the most perfectlybeautifulthing you ever saw?" she breathed. "In spite of being over seven feet tall? She looked to be about twenty—except her eyes—but she must have been a hundred, to know so much—but what are you boys staring so about?"
"She!" Three voices blurted as one.
"Yes. She. Why? I know we weren't together, but I got the impression, some way or other, that there was only the one. What didyousee?"
All three men started to talk at once, a clamor of noise; then all stopped at once.
"You first, Spud. Whom did you talk to, and what did he, she, or it say?" Although Conway Costigan was a few years older than the other three, they all called him by nickname as a matter of course.
"National Police Headquarters—Chief of the Detective Bureau," Costigan reported, crisply. "Between forty three and forty five; six feet and half an inch; one seventy five. Hard, fine, keen, a Big Time Operator if there ever was one. Looked a lot like your father, Jill; the same dark auburn hair, just beginning to gray, and the same deep orange-yellow markings in his eyes. He gave me the works; then took this Lens out of his safe, snapped it onto my wrist, and gave me two orders—get out and stay out."
Jack and Mase stared at Costigan, at Jill, and at each other. Then they whistled in unison.
"I see this is not going to be a unanimous report, except possibly in one minor detail," Jill remarked. "Mase, you're next."
"I landed on the campus of the University of Arisia," Northrop stated, flatly. "Immense place—hundreds of thousands of students. They look me to the Physics Department—to the private laboratory of the Department Head himself. He had a panel with about a million meters and gauges on it; he scanned and measured every individual component element of my brain. Then he made a pattern, on a milling router just about as complicated as his panel. From there on, of course, it was simple—just like a dentist making a set of china choppers or a metallurgist embedding a test-section. He snapped a couple of sentences of directions at me, and then said 'Scram!' That's all."
"Sure that was all?" Costigan asked. "Didn't he add 'andstayscrammed'?"
"He didn'tsayit, exactly, but the implication was clear enough."
"The one point of similarity," Jill commented. "Now you, Jack. You have been looking as though we were all candidates for canvas jackets that lace tightly up the back."
"Uh-uh. As though maybeIam. I didn't see anything at all. Didn't even land on the planet. Just floated around in an orbit inside that screen. The thing I talked with was a pattern of pure force. This Lens simply appeared on my wrist, bracelet and all, out of thin air. He told me plenty, though, in a very short time—his last word being for me not to come back or call back."
"Hm ... m ... m." This of Jack's was a particularly indigestible bit, even for Jill Samms.
"In plain words," Costigan volunteered, "we all saw exactly what we expected to see."
"Uh-uh," Jill denied. "I certainly did not expect to see a woman ... no; what each of us saw, I think, was what would do us the most good—give each of us the highest possible lift. I am wondering whether or not there was anything at all really there."
"That might be it, at that." Jack scowled in concentration. "But there must have beensomethingthere—these Lenses are real. But what makes me mad is that they wouldn't give you a Lens. You're just as good a man as any one of us—if I didn't know it wouldn't do a damn bit of good I'd go back there right now and...."
"Don't pop off so, Jack!" Jill's eyes, however, were starry. "I know you mean it, and I could almost love you, at times—but I don't need a Lens. As a matter of fact, I'll be much better off without one."
"Jet back, Jill!" Jack Kinnison stared deeply into the girl's eyes—but still did not use his Lens. "Somebody must have done a terrific job of selling, to make you believe that ... orareyou sold, actually?"
"Actually. Honestly. That Arisian was a thousand times more of a woman than I ever will be, and she didn't wear a Lens—never had worn one. Women's minds and Lenses don't fit. There's a sex-based incompatibility. Lenses are as masculine as whiskers—and at that, only a very few men can ever wear them, either. Very special men, like you three and Dad and Pops Kinnison. Men with tremendous force, drive, and scope. Pure killers, all of you; each in his own way, of course. No more to be stopped than a glacier, and twice as hard and ten times as cold. A woman simplycan'thave that kind of a mind! There is going to be a woman Lensman some day—just one—but not for years and years; and I wouldn't be in her shoes for anything. In this job of mine, of...."
"Well, go on. What is this job you're so sure you are going to do?"
"Why, I don't know!" Jill exclaimed, startled eyes wide. "I thought I knew all about it, but I don't! Do you, about yours?"
They did not, not one of them; and they were all as surprised at that fact as the girl had been.
"Well, to get back to this Lady Lensman who is going to appear some day, I gather that she is going to be some kind of a freak. She'll have to be, practically, because of the sex-based fundamental nature of the Lens. Mentor didn't say so, in so many words, but she made it perfectly clear that...."
"Mentor!" the three men exclaimed.
Each of them had dealt with Mentor!
"I am beginning to see," Jill said, thoughtfully. "Mentor. Not a real name at all. To quote the Unabridged verbatim—I had occasion to look the word up the other day and I am appalled now at the certainty that there was a connection—quote; Mentor, a wise and faithful counselor; unquote. Have any of you boys anything to say? I haven't; and I am beginning to be scared blue."
Silence fell; and the more they thought, those three young Lensmen and the girl who was one of the two human women ever to encounter knowingly an Arisian mind, the deeper that silence became.
"So you didn't find anything on Nevia." Roderick Kinnison got up, deposited the inch-long butt of his cigar in an ashtray, lit another, and prowled about the room; hands jammed deep into breeches pockets. "I'm surprised. Nerado struck me as being a B.T.O.... I thought sure he'd qualify."
"So did I." Samms' tone was glum. "He's Big Time, and an Operator; but not big enough, by far. I'm—we're both—finding out that Lensman material isdamnedscarce stuff. There's none on Nevia, and no indication whatever that there ever will be any."
"Tough ... and you're right, of course, in your stand that we'll have to have Lensmen from as many different solar systems as possible on the Galactic Council or the thing won't work at all. So damned much jealousy—which is one reason why we're here in New York instead of out at The Hill, where we belong—we've found that out already, even in such a small and comparatively homogeneous group as our own system—the Solarian Council will not only have to be made up mostly of Lensmen, but each and every inhabited planet of Sol will have to be represented—even Pluto, I suppose, in time. And by the way, your Mr. Saunders wasn't any too pleased when you took Knobos of Mars and DalNalten of Venus away from him and made Lensmen out of them—and put them miles over his head."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that ... exactly. I convinced him ... but at that, since Saunders is not Lensman grade himself, it was a trifle difficult for him to understand the situation completely."
"You say it easy—'difficult' is not the word I would use. But back to the Lensman hunt." Kinnison scowled blackly. "I agree, as I said before, that we need non-human Lensmen, the more the better, but I don't think much of your chance of finding any. What makes you think ... Oh, I see ... but I don't know whether you're justified or not in assuming a high positive correlation between a certain kind of mental ability and technological advancement."
"No such assumption is necessary. Start anywhere you please, Rod, and take it from there; including Nevia."
"I'll start with known facts, then. Interstellar flight is new to us. We haven't spread far, or surveyed much territory. But in the eight solar systems with which we are most familiar there are seven planets—I'm not counting Valeria—which are very much like Earth in point of mass, size, climate, atmosphere, and gravity. Five of the seven did not have any intelligent life and were colonized easily and quickly. The Tellurian worlds of Procyon and Vega became friendly neighbors—thank God we learned something on Nevia—because they were already inhabited by highly advanced races: Procia by people as human as we are, Vegia by people who would be so if it weren't for their tails. Many other worlds of these systems are inhabited by more or less intelligent non-human races. Just how intelligent they are we don't know, but the Lensmen will soon find out.
"My point is that no race we have found so far has had either atomic energy or any form of space-drive. In any contact with races having space-drives we have not been the discoverers, but the discovered.Ourcolonies are all within twenty six light-years of Earth except Aldebaran II, which is fifty seven, but which drew a lot of people, in spite of the distance, because it was so nearly identical with Earth. On the other hand, the Nevians, from a distance of over a hundred light-years, foundus... implying an older race and a higher development ... but you just told me that they wouldneverproduce a Lensman!"
"That point stopped me, too, at first. Follow through; I want to see if you arrive at the same conclusion I did."
"Well ... I ... I ..." Kinnison thought intensely, then went on: "Of course, the Nevians were not colonizing; nor, strictly speaking, exploring. They were merely hunting for iron—a highly organized, intensively specialized operation to find a raw material they needed desperately."
"Precisely," Samms agreed.
"The Rigellians, however, weresurveying, and Rigel is about four hundred and forty light-years from here. We didn't have a thing they needed or wanted. They nodded at us in passing and kept on going. I'm still on your track?"
"Dead center. And just where does that put the Palainians?"
"I see ... you may have something there, at that. Palain is so far away that nobody knows even where it is—probably thousands of light-years. Yet they have not only explored this system; they colonized Pluto long before our white race colonized America. But damn it, Virge, I don't like it—any part of it. Rigel Four you may be able to take, with your Lens ... even one of their damned automobiles, if you stay solidly en rapport with the driver. ButPalain, Virge! Pluto is bad enough, but the home planet! You can't. Nobody can. It simply can't be done!"
"I know it won't be easy," Samms admitted, bleakly, "but if it's got to be done, I'll do it. And I have a little information that I haven't had time to tell you yet. We discussed once before, you remember, what a job it was to get into any kind of communication with the Palainians on Pluto. You said then that nobody could understand them, and you were right—then. However, I re-ran those brain-wave tapes, wearing my Lens, and could understand them—the thoughts, that is—as well as though they had been recorded in precisionist-grade English."
"What?" Kinnison exclaimed, then fell silent. Samms remained silent. What they were thinking of Arisia's Lens cannot be expressed in words.
"Well, go on," Kinnison finally said. "Give me the rest of it—the stinger that you've been holding back."
"The messages—as messages—were clear and plain. The backgrounds, however, the connotations and implications, were not. Some of their codes and standards seem to be radically different from ours—so utterly and fantastically different that I simply cannot reconcile either their conduct or their ethics with their obviously high intelligence and their advanced state of development. However, they have at least some minds of tremendous power, and none of the peculiarities I deduced were of such a nature as to preclude Lensmanship. Therefore I am going to Pluto; and from there—I hope—to Palain Seven. If there's a Lensman there, I'll get him."
"You will, at that," Kinnison paid quiet tribute to what he, better than anyone else, knew that his friend had.
"But enough of me—how are you doing?"
"As well as can be expected at this stage of the game. The thing is developing along three main lines. First, the pirates. Since that kind of thing is more or less my own line I'm handling it myself, unless and until you find someone better qualified. I've got Jack and Costigan working on it now.
"Second; drugs, vice, and so on. I hope you find somebody to take this line over, because, frankly, I'm in over my depth and want to get out. Knobos and DalNalten are trying to find out if there's anything to the idea that there may be a planetary, or even inter-planetary, ring involved. Since Sid Fletcher isn't a Lensman I couldn't disconnect him openly from his job, but he knows a lot about the dope-vice situation and is working practically full time with the other two.
"Third; pure—or rather, decidedly impure—politics. The more I studiedthatsubject, the clearer it became that politics would be the worst and biggest battle of the three. There are too many angles I don't know a damned thing about, such as what to do about the succession of foaming, screaming fits your friend Senator Morgan will be throwing the minute he finds out what our Galactic Patrol is going to do. So I ducked the whole political line.
"Now you know as well as I do—better, probably—that Morgan is only the Pernicious Activities Committee of the North American Senate. Multiply him by the thousands of others, all over space, who will be on our necks before the Patrol can get its space-legs, and you will see that all that stuff will have to be handled by a Lensman who, as well as being a mighty smooth operator, will have to knowallthe answers and will have to have plenty of guts. I've got the guts, but none of the other prime requisites. Jill hasn't, although she's got everything else. Fairchild, your Relations ace, isn't a Lensman and can never become one. So you can see quite plainly who has got to handle politics himself."
"You may be right ... but this Lensman business comes first...." Samms pondered, then brightened. "Perhaps—probably—I can find somebody on this trip—a Palainian, say—who is better qualified than any of us."
Kinnison snorted. "If you can, I'll buy you a week in any Venerian relaxerie you want to name."
"Better start saving up your credits, then, because from what I already know of the Palainian mentality such a development is distinctly more than a possibility." Samms paused, his eyes narrowing. "I don't know whether it would make Morgan and his kind more rabid or less so to have a non-Solarian entity possess authority in our affairs political—but at least it would be something new and different. But in spite of what you said about 'ducking' politics, what have you got Northrop, Jill and Fairchild doing?"
"Well, we had a couple of discussions. I couldn't give either Jill or Dick orders, of course...."
"Wouldn't, you mean," Samms corrected.
"Couldn't," Kinnison insisted. "Jill, besides being your daughter and Lensman grade, had no official connection with either the Triplanetary Service or the Solarian Patrol. And the Service, including Fairchild, is still Triplanetary; and it will have to stay Triplanetary until you have found enough Lensmen so that you can spring your twin surprises—Galactic Council and Galactic Patrol. However, Northrop and Fairchild are keeping their eyes and ears open and their mouths shut, and Jill is finding out whatever she can about drugs and so on, as well as the various political angles. They'll report to you—facts, deductions, guesses, and recommendations—whenever you say the word."
"Nice work, Rod. Thanks. I think I'll call Jill now, before I go—wonder where she is? ... but I wonder ... with the Lens perhaps telephones are superfluous? I'll try it."
"JILL!" he thought intensely into his Lens, forming as he did so a mental image of his gorgeous daughter as he knew her. But he found, greatly to his surprise, that neither elaboration nor emphasis was necessary.
"Ouch!" came the almost instantaneous answer, long before his thought was complete. "Don't think so hard, Dad, it hurts—I almost missed a step." Virgilia was actually there with him; inside his own mind; in closer touch with him than she had ever before been. "Back so soon? Shall we report now, or aren't you ready to go to work yet?"
"Skipping for the moment your aspersions on my present activities—not quite." Samms moderated the intensity of his thought to a conversational level. "Just wanted to check with you. Come in, Rod." In flashing thoughts he brought her up to date. "Jill, do you agree with what Rod here has just told me?"
"Yes. Fully. So do the boys."
"That settles it, then—unless, of course, I can find a more capable substitute."
"Of course—but we will believe that when we see it."
"Where are you and what are you doing?"
"Washington, D.C. European Embassy. Dancing with Herkimer Third, Senator Morgan's Number One secretary. I was going to make passes at him—in a perfectly lady-like way, of course—but it wasn't necessary. He thinks he can break down my resistance."
"Careful, Jill! That kind of stuff...."
"Is very old stuff indeed, Daddy dear. Simple. And Herkimer Third isn't really a menace; he just thinks he is. Take a look—you can, can't you, with your Lens?"
"Perhaps ... Oh, yes. I see him as well as you do." Fully en rapport with the girl as he was, so that his mind received simultaneously with hers any stimulus which she was willing to share, it seemed as though a keen, handsome, deeply tanned face bent down from a distance of inches toward his own. "But I don't like it a bit—and him even less."
"That's because you aren't a girl," Jill giggled mentally. "This is fun; and it won't hurt him a bit, except maybe for a slightly bruised vanity, when I don't fall down flat at his feet. And I'm learning a lot that he hasn't any suspicion he's giving away."
"Knowing you, I believe that. But don't ... that is ... well, beverycareful not to get your fingers burned. The job isn't worth it—yet."
"Don't worry, Dad." She laughed unaffectedly. "When it comes to playboys like this one, I've got millions and skillions and whillions of ohms of resistance. But here comes Senator Morgan himself, with a fat and repulsive Venerian—he's calling my boy-friend away from me, with what he thinks is an imperceptible high-sign, into a huddle—and my olfactory nerves perceive a rich and fruity aroma, as of skunk—so ... I hate to seem to be giving a Solarian Councillor the heave-ho, but if I want to read what goes on—and I certainly do—I'll have to concentrate. As soon as you get back give us a call and we'll report. Take it easy, Dad!"
"You're the one to be told that, not me. Good hunting, Jill!"
Samms, still seated calmly at his desk, reached out and pressed a button marked "GARAGE". His office was on the seventieth floor; the garage occupied level after level of sub-basement. The screen brightened; a keen young face appeared.
"Good evening, Jim. Will you please send my car up to the Wright Skyway feeder?"
"At once, sir. It will be there in seventy five seconds."
Samms cut off; and, after a brief exchange of thought with Kinnison, went out into the hall and along it to the "DOWN" shaft. There, going free, he stepped through a doorless, unguarded archway into over a thousand feet of air. Although it was long after conventional office hours the shaft was still fairly busy, but that made no difference—inertialess collisions cannot even be felt. He bulleted downward to the sixth floor, where he brought himself to an instantaneous halt.
Leaving the shaft, he joined the now thinning crowd hurrying toward the exit. A girl with meticulously plucked eyebrows and an astounding hair-do, catching sight of his Lens, took her hands out of her breeches pockets—skirts went out, as office dress, when up-and-down open-shaft velocities of a hundred or so miles per hour replaced elevators—nudged her companion, and whispered excitedly:
"Look there! Quick! I never saw one close up before, did you? That's him—himself! First Lensman Samms!"
At the Portal, the Lensman as a matter of habit held out his car-check, but such formalities were no longer necessary, or even possible. Everybody knew, or wanted to be thought of as knowing, Virgil Samms.
"Stall four sixty five, First Lensman, sir," the uniformed gateman told him, without even glancing at the extended disk.
"Thank you, Tom."
"This way, please, sir, First Lensman," and a youth, teeth gleaming white in a startlingly black face, strode proudly to the indicated stall and opened the vehicle's door.
"Thank you, Danny," Samms said, as appreciatively as though he did not know exactly where his ground-car was.
He got in. The door jammed itself gently shut. The runabout—a Dillingham eleven-forty—shot smoothly forward upon its two fat, soft tires. Half-way to the exit archway he was doing forty; he hit the steeply-banked curve leading into the lofty "street" at ninety. Nor was there shock or strain. Motorcycle-wise, but automatically, the "Dilly" leaned against its gyroscopes at precisely the correct angle; the huge low-pressure tires clung to the resilient synthetic of the pavement as though integral with it. Nor was there any question of conflicting traffic, for this thoroughfare, six full levels above Varick Street proper, was not, strictly speaking, a street at all. It had only one point of access, the one which Samms had used; and only one exit—it was simply and only a feeder into Wright Skyway, a limited-access superhighway.
Samms saw, without noting particularly, the maze of traffic-ways of which this feeder was only one tiny part; a maze which extended from ground-level up to a point well above even the towering buildings of New York's metropolitan district.
The way rose sharply; Samms' right foot went down a little farther; the Dillingham began to pick up speed. Moving loud-speakers sang to him and yelled and blared at him, but he did not hear them. Brilliant signs, flashing and flaring all the colors of the spectrum—sheer triumphs of the electrician's art—blazed in or flamed into arresting words and eye-catching pictures, but he did not see them. Advertising—designed by experts to sell everything from aardvarks to Martian zyzmol ("bottled ecstacy")—but the First Lensman was a seasoned big-city dweller. His mind had long since become a perfect filter, admitting to his consciousness only things which he wanted to perceive: only so can big-city life be made endurable.
Approaching the Skyway, he cut in his touring roadlights, slowed down a trifle, and insinuated his low-flyer into the stream of traffic. Those lights threw fifteen hundred watts apiece, but there was no glare—polarized lenses and wind-shields saw to that.
He wormed his way over to the left-hand, high-speed lane and opened up. At the edge of the skyscraper district, where Wright Skyway angles sharply downward to ground level, Samms' attention was caught and held by something off to his right—a blue-white, whistling something that hurtled upward into the air. As it ascended it slowed down; its monotone shriek became lower and lower in pitch; its light went down through the spectrum toward the red. Finally it exploded, with an earth-shaking crash; but the lightning-like flash of the detonation, instead of vanishing almost instantaneously, settled itself upon a low-hanging artificial cloud and became a picture and four words—two bearded faces and "SMITH BROS. COUGH DROPS"!
"Well, I'll be damned!" Samms spoke aloud, chagrined at having been compelled to listen to and to look at an advertisement. "I thought I had seen everything, butthatis really new!"
Twenty minutes—fifty miles—later, Samms left the Skyway at a point near what had once been South Norwalk, Connecticut; an area transformed now into the level square miles of New York Spaceport.
New York Spaceport; then, and until the establishment of Prime Base, the biggest and busiest field in existence upon any planet of Civilization. For New York City, long the financial and commercial capital of the Earth, had maintained the same dominant position in the affairs of the Solar System and was holding a substantial lead over her rivals, Chicago, London, and Stalingrad, in the race for inter-stellar supremacy.
And Virgil Samms himself, because of the ever-increasing menace of piracy, had been largely responsible for the policy of basing the war-vessels of the Triplanetary Patrol upon each space-field in direct ratio to the size and importance of that field. Hence he was no stranger in New York Spaceport; in fact, master psychologist that he was, he had made it a point to know by first name practically everyone connected with it.
No sooner had he turned his Dillingham over to a smiling attendant, however, than he was accosted by a man whom he had never seen before.
"Mr. Samms?" the stranger asked.
"Yes." Samms did not energize his Lens; he had not yet developed either the inclination or the technique to probe instantaneously every entity who approached him, upon any pretext whatever, in order to find out what that entityreallywanted.
"I'm Isaacson ..." the man paused, as though he had supplied a world of information.
"Yes?" Samms was receptive, but not impressed.
"Interstellar Spaceways, you know. We've been trying to see you for two weeks, but we couldn't get past your secretaries, so I decided to buttonhole you here, myself. But we're just as much alone here as we would be in either one of our offices—yes, more so. What I want to talk to you about is having our exclusive franchise extended to cover the outer planets and the colonies."
"Just a minute, Mr. Isaacson. Surely you know that I no longer have even a portfolio in the Council; that practically all of my attention is, and for some time to come will be, directed elsewhere?"
"Exactly—officially." Isaacson's tone spoke volumes. "But you're still the Boss; they'll do anything you tell them to. We couldn't try to do business with you before, of course, but in your present position there is nothing whatever to prevent you from getting into the biggest thing that will ever be. We are the biggest corporation in existence now, as you know, and we are still growing—fast. We don't do business in a small way, or with small men; so here's a check for a million credits, or I will deposit it to your account...."
"I'm not interested."
"As a binder," the other went on, as smoothly as though his sentence had not been interrupted, "with twenty-five million more to follow on the day that our franchise goes through."
"I'm still not interested."
"No ... o ... o ...?" Isaacson studied the Lensman narrowly: and Samms, Lens now wide awake, studied the entrepreneur. "Well ... I ... while I admit that we want you pretty badly, you are smart enough to know that we'll get what we want anyway, with or without you. With you, though, it will be easier and quicker, so I am authorized to offer you, besides the twenty six million credits ..." he savored the words as he uttered them: "twenty two and one-half percent of Spaceways. On today's market that is worth fifty million credits; ten years from now it will be worth fiftybillion. That's my high bid; that's as high as we can possibly go."
"I'm glad to hear that—I'mstillnot interested," and Samms strode away, calling his friend Kinnison as he did so.
"Rod? Virgil." He told the story.
"Whew!" Kinnison whistled expressively. "They're not pikers, anyway, are they? What asweetset-up—and you could wrap it up and hand it to them like a pound of coffee...."
"Or you could, Rod."
"Could be...." The big Lensman ruminated. "Butwhata hookup! Perfectly legitimate, and with plenty of precedents—and arguments, of a sort—in its favor. The outer planets. Then Alpha Centauri and Sirius and Procyon and so on. Monopoly—all the traffic will bear...."
"Slavery, you mean!" Samms stormed. "It would hold Civilization back for a thousand years!"
"Sure, but what dotheycare?"
"That's it ... and he said—and actually believed—that they would get it without my help.... I can't help wondering about that."
"Simple enough, Virge, when you think about it. He doesn't know yet what a Lensman is. Nobody does, you know, except Lensmen. It will take some time for that knowledge to get around...."
"And still longer for it to bebelieved."
"Right. But as to the chance of Interstellar Spaceways ever getting the monopoly they're working for, I didn't think I would have to remind you that it was not entirely by accident that over half of the members of the Solarian Council are Lensmen, and that any Galactic Councillor will automaticallyhaveto be a Lensman. So go right ahead with what you started, my boy, and don't give Isaacson and Company another thought. We'll bend an optic or two in that direction while you are gone."
"I was overlooking a few things, at that, I guess." Samms sighed in relief as he entered the main office of the Patrol.
The line at the receptionist's desk was fairly short, but even so, Samms was not allowed to wait. That highly decorative, but far-from-dumb blonde, breaking off in mid-sentence her business of the moment, turned on her charm as though it had been a battery of floodlights, pressed a stud on her desk, and spoke to the man before her and to the Lensman:
"Excuse me a moment, please. First Lensman Samms, sir...?"
"Yes, Miss Regan?" her communicator—"squawk-box", in every day parlance—broke in.
"First Lensman Samms is here, sir," the girl announced, and broke the circuit.
"Good evening, Sylvia. Lieutenant-Commander Wagner, please, or whoever else is handling clearances," Samms answered what he thought was to have been her question.
"Oh, no, sir; you are cleared. Commodore Clayton has been waiting for you ... here he is, now."
"Hi, Virgil!" Commodore Clayton, a big, solid man with a scarred face and a shock of iron-gray hair, whose collar bore the two silver stars which proclaimed him to be the commander-in-chief of a continental contingent of the Patrol, shook hands vigorously. "I'll zip you out. Miss Regan, call a bug, please."
"Oh, that isn't necessary, Alex!" Samms protested. "I'll pick one up outside."
"Not in any Patrol base in North America, my friend; nor, unless I am very badly mistaken, anywhere else. From now on, Lensmen have absolute priority, and the quicker everybody realizes exactly what that means, the better."
The "bug"—a vehicle something like a jeep, except more so—was waiting at the door. The two men jumped aboard.
"TheChicago—and blast!" Clayton ordered, crisply.
The driver obeyed—literally. Gravel flew from beneath skidding tires as the highly maneuverable little ground-car took off. A screaming turn into the deservedly famous Avenue of Oaks. Along the Avenue. Through the Gate, the guards saluting smartly as the bug raced past them. Past the barracks. Past the airport hangars and strips. Out into the space-field, the scarred and blackened area devoted solely to the widely-spaced docks of the tremendous vessels which plied the vacuous reaches of inter-planetary and inter-stellar space. Spacedocks were, and are, huge and sprawling structures; built of concrete and steel and asbestos and ultra-stubborn refractory and insulation and vacuum-breaks; fully air-conditioned and having refrigeration equipment of thousands of tons per hour of ice; designed not only to expedite servicing, unloading, and loading, but also to protect materials and personnel from the raving, searing blasts of take-off and of landing.
A space-dock is a squat and monstrous cylinder, into whose hollow top the lowermost one-third of a space-ship's bulk fits as snugly as does a baseball into the "pocket" of a veteran fielder's long-seasoned glove. And the tremendous distances between those docks minimize the apparent size, both of the structures themselves and of the vessels surmounting them. Thus, from a distance, theChicagolooked little enough, and harmless enough; but as the bug flashed under the overhanging bulk and the driver braked savagely to a stop at one of the dock's entrances, Samms could scarcely keep from flinching. That featureless, gray, smoothly curving wall of alloy steel loomed so incredibly high above them—extended so terrifyingly far outward beyond its visible means of support! Itmustbe on the very verge of crashing!
Samms stared deliberately at the mass of metal towering above him, then smiled—not without effort—at his companion.
"You'd think, Alex, that a man would get over being afraid that a ship was going to fall on him, but I haven't—yet."
"No, and you probably never will. I never have, and I'm one of the old hands. Some claim not to mind it—but not in front of a lie detector. That's why they had to make the passenger docks bigger than the liners—too many passengers fainted and had to be carried aboard on stretchers—or cancelled passage entirely. However, scaring hell out of them on the ground had one big advantage; they felt so safe inside that they didn't get the colly-wobbles so bad when they went free."
"Well, I've got overthat, anyway. Good-bye, Alex; and thanks."
Samms entered the dock, shot smoothly upward, followed an escorting officer to the captain's own cabin, and settled himself into a cushioned chair facing an ultra-wave view-plate. A face appeared upon his communicator screen and spoke.
"Winfield to First Lensman Samms—you will be ready to blast off at twenty one hundred?"
"Samms to Captain Winfield," the Lensman replied. "I will be ready."
Sirens yelled briefly; a noise which Samms knew was purely a formality. Clearance had been issued; Station PiXNY was filling the air with warnings. Personnel and material close enough to theChicago'sdock to be affected by the blast were under cover and safe.
The blast went on; the plate showed, instead of a view of the space-field, a blaze of blue-white light. The war-ship was inertialess, it is true; but so terrific were the forces released that incandescent gases, furiously driven, washed the dock and everything for hundreds of yards around it.
The plate cleared. Through the lower, denser layers of atmosphere theChicagobored in seconds; then, as the air grew thinner and thinner, she rushed upward faster and faster. The terrain below became concave ... then convex. Being completely without inertia, the ship's velocity was at every instant that at which the friction of the medium through which she blasted her way equaled precisely the force of her driving thrust.
Wherefore, out in open space, the Earth a fast-shrinking tiny ball and Sol himself growing smaller, paler, and weaker at a startling rate, theChicago'sspeed attained an almost constant value; a value starkly impossible for the human mind to grasp.
For hours Virgil Samms sat motionless, staring almost unseeing into his plate. It was not that the view was not worth seeing—the wonder of space, the ever-changing, constantly-shifting panorama of incredibly brilliant although dimensionless points of light, against that wondrous background of mist-besprinkled black velvet, is a thing that never fails to awe even the most seasoned observer—but he had a tremendous load on his mind. He had to solve an apparently insoluble problem. How ...how... HOW could he do what he had to do?
Finally, knowing that the time of landing was approaching, he got up, unfolded his fans, and swam lightly through the air of the cabin to a hand-line, along which he drew himself into the control room. He could have made the trip in that room, of course, if he had so chosen; but, knowing that officers of space do not really like to have strangers in that sanctum, he did not intrude until it was necessary.
Captain Winfield was already strapped down at his master conning plate. Pilots, navigators, and computers worked busily at their respective tasks.
"I was just going to call you, First Lensman." Winfield waved a hand in the general direction of a chair near his own. "Take the Lieutenant-Captain's station, please." Then, after a few minutes: "Go inert, Mr. White."
"Attention, all personnel," Lieutenant-Captain White spoke conversationally into a microphone. "Prepare for inert maneuvering, Class Three. Off."
A bank of tiny red lights upon a panel turned green practically as one. White cut the Bergenholm, whereupon Virgil Samms' mass changed instantly from a weight of zero to one of five hundred and twenty five pounds—ships of war then had no space to waste upon such non-essentials as artificial gravity. Although he was braced for the change and cushioned against it, the Lensman's breathwhooshed!out sharply; but, being intensely interested in what was going on, he swallowed convulsively a couple of times, gasped a few deep breaths, and fought his way back up to normalcy.
The Chief Pilot was now at work, with all the virtuoso's skill of his rank and grade; one of the hall-marks of which is to make difficult tasks look easy. He played trills and runs and arpeggios—at times veritable glissades—upon keyboards and pedals, directing with micrometric precision the tremendous forces of the superdreadnaught to the task of matching the intrinsic velocity of New York Spaceport at the time of his departure to the I. V. of the surface of the planet so far below.
Samms stared into his plate; first at the incredibly tiny apparent size of that incredibly hot sun, and then at the barren-looking world toward which they were dropping at such terrific speed.
"It doesn't seem possible ..." he remarked, half to Winfield, half to himself, "that a sun could be that big and that hot. Rigel Four is almost two hundred times as far away from it as Earth is from Sol—something like eighteen billion miles—it doesn't look much, if any, bigger than Venus does from Luna—yet this world is hotter than the Sahara Desert."
"Well, blue giants are both big and hot," the captain replied, matter-of-factly, "and their radiation, being mostly invisible, is deadly stuff. And Rigel is about the biggest in this region. There are others a lot worse, though. Doradus S, for instance, would make Rigel, here, look like a tallow candle. I'm going out there, some of these days, just to take a look at it. But that's enough of astronomical chit-chat—we're down to twenty miles of altitude and we've got your city just about stopped."
TheChicagoslowed gently to a halt; perched motionless upon softly hissing jets. Samms directed his visibeam downward and sent along it an exploring, questing thought. Since he had never met a Rigellian in person, he could not form the mental image or pattern necessary to become en rapport with any one individual of the race. He did know, however, the type of mind which must be possessed by the entity with whom he wished to talk, and he combed the Rigellian city until he found one. The rapport was so incomplete and imperfect as to amount almost to no contact at all, but he could, perhaps, make himself understood.
"If you will excuse this possibly unpleasant and certainly unwarranted intrusion," he thought, carefully and slowly, "I would like very much to discuss with you a matter which should become of paramount importance to all the intelligent peoples of all the planets in space."
"I welcome you, Tellurian." Mind fused with mind at every one of uncountable millions of points and paths. This Rigellian professor of sociology, standing at his desk, was physically a monster ... the oil-drum of a body, the four blocky legs, the multi-branchiate tentacular arms, that immobile dome of a head, the complete lack of eyes and of ears ... nevertheless Samms' mind fused with the monstrosity's as smoothly, as effortlessly, and almost as completely as it had with his own daughter's!
Andwhata mind! The transcendent poise; the staggeringly tremendous range and scope—the untroubled and unshakeable calm; the sublime quietude; the vast and placid certainty; the ultimate stability, unknown and forever unknowable to any human or near-human race!
"Dismiss all thought of intrusion, First Lensman Samms ... I have heard of you human beings, of course, but have never considered seriously the possibility of meeting one of you mind to mind. Indeed, it was reported that none of our minds could make any except the barest and most unsatisfactory contact with any of yours they chanced to encounter. It is, I now perceive, the Lens which makes this full accord possible, and it is basically about the Lens that you are here?"
"It is," and Samms went on to cover in flashing thoughts his conception of what the Galactic Patrol should be and should become. That was easy enough; but when he tried to describe in detail the qualifications necessary for Lensmanship, he began to bog down. "Force, drive, scope, of course ... range ... power ... but above all, an absolute integrity ... an ultimate incorruptibility...." He could recognize such a mind after meeting it and studying it, but as to finding it ... It might not be in any place of power or authority. His own, and Rod Kinnison's, happened to be; but Costigan's was not ... and both Knobos and DalNalten had made inconspicuousness a fine art....
"I see," the native stated, when it became clear that Samms could say no more. "It is evident, of course, that I cannot qualify; nor do I know anyone personally who can. However...."
"What?" Samms demanded. "I was sure, from the feel of your mind, that you ... but with a mind of such depth and breadth, such tremendous scope and power, you must be incorruptible!"
"I am," came the dry rejoinder. "We all are. No Rigellian is, or ever will be or can be, what you think of as 'corrupt' or 'corruptible'. Indeed, it is only by the narrowest, most intense concentration upon every line of your thought that I can translate your meaning into a concept possible for any of us even to understand."
"Then what ... Oh, I see. I was starting at the wrong end. Naturally enough, I suppose, I looked first for the qualities rarest in my own race."
"Of course. Our minds have ample scope and range; and, perhaps, sufficient power. But those qualities which you refer to as 'force' and 'drive' are fully as rare among us as absolute mental integrity is among you. What you know as 'crime' is unknown. We have no police, no government, no laws, no organized armed forces of any kind. We take, practically always, the line of least resistance. We live and let live, as your thought runs. We work together for the common good."
"Well ... I don't know what I expected to find here, but certainly not this...." If Samms had never before been completely thunderstruck, completely at a loss, he was then. "You don't think, then, that there is any chance?"
"I have been thinking, and there may be a chance ... a slight one, but still a chance," the Rigellian said, slowly. "For instance, that youth, so full of curiosity, who first visited your planet. Thousands of us have wondered, to ourselves and to each other, about the peculiar qualities of mind which compelled him and others to waste so much time, effort, and wealth upon a project so completely useless as exploration. Why, he had even to develop energies and engines theretofore unknown, and which can never be of any real use!"
Samms was shaken by the calm finality with which the Rigellian dismissed all possibility of the usefulness of inter-stellar exploration, but stuck doggedly to his purpose.
"However slight the chance, I must find and talk to this man. I suppose he is now out in deep space somewhere. Have you any idea where?"
"He is now in his home city, accumulating funds and manufacturing fuel with which to continue his pointless activities. That city is named ... that is, in your English you might call it ... Suntown? Sunberg? No, it must be more specific ... Rigelsville? Rigel City?"
"Rigelston, I would translate it?" Samms hazarded.
"Exactly—Rigelston." The professor marked its location upon a globular mental map far more accurate and far more detailed than the globe which Captain Winfield and his lieutenant were then studying.
"Thanks. Now, can you and will you get in touch with this explorer and ask him to call a meeting of his full crew and any others who might be interested in the project I have outlined?"
"I can. I will. He and his kind are not quite sane, of course, as you know; but I do not believe that even they are so insane as to be willing to subject themselves to the environment of your vessel."
"They will not be asked to come here. The meeting will be held in Rigelston. If necessary, I shall insist that it be held there."
"You would? I perceive that you would. It is strange ... yes, fantastic ... you are quarrelsome, pugnacious, anti-social, vicious, small-bodied and small-brained; timid, nervous, and highly and senselessly excitable; unbalanced and unsane; as sheerly monstrous mentally as you are physically...." These outrageous thoughts were sent as casually and as impersonally as though the sender were discussing the weather. He paused, then went on: "And yet, to further such a completely visionary project, you are eager to subject yourself to conditions whose counterparts I could not force myself, under any circumstances whatever, to meet. It may be ... it must be true that there is an extension of the principle of working together for the common good which my mind, for lack of pertinent data, has not been able to grasp. I am now en rapport with Dronvire the explorer."
"Ask him, please, not to identify himself to me. I do not want to go into that meeting with any preconceived ideas."
"A balanced thought," the Rigellian approved. "Someone will be at the airport to point out to you the already desolated area in which the space-ship of the explorers makes its so-frightful landings; Dronvire will ask someone to meet you at the airport and bring you to the place of meeting."
The telepathic line snapped and Samms turned a white and sweating face to theChicago'scaptain.
"God, what a strain! Don't ever try telepathy unless you positively have to—especially not with such an outlandishlydifferentrace as these Rigellians are!"
"Don't worry; I won't." Winfield's words were not at all sympathetic, but his tone was. "You looked as though somebody was beating your brains out with a spiked club. Where next, First Lensman?"
Samms marked the location of Rigelston upon the vessel's chart, then donned ear-plugs and a special, radiation-proof suit of armor, equipped with refrigerators and with extra-thick blocks of lead glass to protect the eyes.
The airport, an extremely busy one well outside the city proper, was located easily enough, as was the spot upon which the Tellurian ship was to land. Lightly, slowly, she settled downward, her jets raving out against a gravity fully twice that of her native Earth. Those blasts, however, added little or nothing to the destruction already accomplished by the craft then lying there—a torpedo-shaped cruiser having perhaps one-twentieth of theChicago'smass and bulk.
The superdreadnaught landed, sinking into the hard, dry ground to a depth of some ten or fifteen feet before she stopped. Samms, en rapport with the entity who was to be his escort, made a flashing survey of the mind so intimately in contact with his own. No use. This one was not and never could become Lensman material. He climbed heavily down the ladder. This double-normal gravity made the going a bit difficult, but he could stand that a lot better than some of the other things he was going to have to take. The Rigellian equivalent of an automobile was there, waiting for him, its door invitingly open.
Samms had known—in general—what to expect. The two-wheeled chassis was more or less similar to that of his own Dillingham. The body was a narrow torpedo of steel, bluntly pointed at both ends, and without windows. Two features, however, were both unexpected and unpleasant—the hard, tough steel of which that body was forged was an inch and a half thick, instead of one-sixteenth; and even that extraordinarily armored body was dented and scarred and marred, especially about the fore and rear quarters, as deeply and as badly and as casually as are the fenders of an Earthly jalopy!
The Lensman climbed, not easily or joyously, into that grimly forbidding black interior. Black? It was so black that the port-hole-like doorway seemed to admit no light at all. It was blacker than a witch's cat in a coal cellar at midnight! Samms flinched; then, stiffening, thought at the driver.
"My contact with you seems to have slipped. I'm afraid that I will have to cling to you rather more tightly than may be either polite or comfortable. Deprived of sight, and without your sense of perception, I am practically helpless."
"Come in, Lensman, by all means. I offered to maintain full engagement, but it seemed to me that you declined it; quite possibly the misunderstanding was due to our unfamiliarity with each others' customary mode of thought. Relax, please, and come in ... there! Better?"
"Infinitely better. Thanks."
And it was. The darkness vanished; through the unexplainable perceptive sense of the Rigellian he could "see" everything—he had a practically perfect three-dimensional view of the entire circumambient sphere. He could see both the inside and the outside of the ground car he was in and of the immense space-ship in which he had come to Rigel IV. He could see the bearings and the wrist-pins of the internal-combustion engine of the car, the interior structure of the welds that held the steel plates together, the busy airport outside, and even deep into the ground. He could see and study in detail the deepest-buried, most heavily shielded parts of the atomic engines of theChicago.
But he was wasting time. He could also plainly see a deeply-cushioned chair, designed to fit a human body, welded to a stanchion and equipped with half a dozen padded restraining straps. He sat down quickly; strapped himself in.
"Ready?"
"Ready."
The door banged shut with a clangor which burst through space-suit and ear-plugs with all the violence of a nearby thunderclap. And that was merely the beginning. The engine started—an internal-combustion engine of well over a thousand horsepower, designed for maximum efficiency by engineers in whose lexicon there were no counterparts of any English words relating to noise, or even to sound. The car took off; with an acceleration which drove the Tellurian backward, deep into the cushions. The scream of tortured tires and the crescendo bellowing of the engine combined to form an uproar which, amplified by and reverberating within the resonant shell of metal, threatened to addle the very brain inside the Lensman's skull.
"You suffer!" the driver exclaimed, in high concern. "They cautioned me to start and stop gently, to drive slowly and carefully, to bump softly. They told me you are frail and fragile, a fact which I perceived for myself and which has caused me to drive with the utmost possible care and restraint. Is the fault mine? Have I been too rough?"
"Not at all. It isn't that. It's the ungodly noise." Then, realizing that the Rigellian could have no conception of his meaning, he continued quickly:
"The vibrations in the atmosphere, from sixteen cycles per second up to about nine or ten thousand." He explained what a second was. "My nervous system is very sensitive to those vibrations. But I expected them and shielded myself against them as adequately as I could. Nothing can be done about them. Go ahead."
"Atmospheric vibrations?Atmosphericvibrations? Atmosphericvibrations?" The driver marveled, and concentrated upon this entirely new concept while he—
1. Swung around a steel-sheathed concrete pillar at a speed of at least sixty miles per hour, grazing it so closely that he removed one layer of protective coating from the metal.
2. Braked so savagely to miss a wildly careening truck that the restraining straps almost cut Samms' body, space-suit and all, into slices.
3. Darted into a hole in the traffic so narrow that only tiny fractions of inches separated his hurtling Juggernaut from an enormous steel column on one side and another speeding vehicle on the other.
4. Executed a double-right-angle reverse curve, thus missing by hair's breadths two vehicles traveling in the opposite direction and one in his own.
5. As a grand climax to this spectacular exhibition of insane driving, he plunged at full speed into a traffic artery which seemed so full already that it could not hold even one more car. But it could—just barely could. However, instead of near misses or grazing hits, this time there were bumps, dents—little ones, nothing at all, really, only an inch or so deep—and an utterly hellish concatenation and concentration of noise.
"I fail completely to understand what effect such vibrations could have," the Rigellian announced finally, sublimely unconscious that anything at all out of the ordinary had occurred. For him, nothing had. "But surely they cannot be of any use?"
"On this world, I am afraid not. No," Samms admitted, wearily. "Here, too, apparently, as everywhere, the big cities are choking themselves to death with their own traffic."
"Yes. We build and build, but never have roads enough."
"What are those mounds along the streets?" For some time Samms had been conscious of those long, low, apparently opaque structures; attracted to them because they were the only non-transparent objects within range of the Rigellian's mind. "Or is it something I should not mention?"
"What? Oh, those? By no means."
One of the nearby mounds lost its opacity. It was filled with swirling, gyrating bands and streamers of energy so vivid and so solid as to resemble fabric; with wildly hurtling objects of indescribable shapes and contours; with brilliantly flashing symbols which Samms found, greatly to his surprise, made sense—not through the Rigellian's mind, but through his own Lens:
"EAT TEEGMEE'S FOOD!"
"Advertising!" Samms' thought was a snort.
"Advertising. You do not perceive yours, either, as you drive?" This was the first bond to be established between two of the most highly advanced races of the First Galaxy!
The frightful drive continued; the noise grew worse and worse. Imagine, if you can, a city of fifteen millions of people, throughout whose entire length, breadth, height, and depth no attempt whatever had ever been made to abate any noise, however violent or piercing! If your imagination has been sufficiently vivid and if you have worked understandingly enough, the product may approximate what First Lensman Samms was forced to listen to that day.
Through ever-thickening traffic, climbing to higher and ever higher roadways between towering windowless walls of steel, the massive Rigellian automobile barged and banged its way. Finally it stopped, a thousand feet or so above the ground, beside a building which was still under construction. The heavy door clanged open. They got out.
And then—it chanced to be daylight at the time—Samms saw a tangle of fighting, screamingcolorswhose like no entity possessing the sense of sight had ever before imagined. Reds, yellows, blues, greens, purples, and every variation and inter-mixture possible; laid on or splashed on or occurring naturally at perfect random, smote his eyes as violently as the all-pervading noise had been assailing his ears.
He realized then that through his guide's sense of perception he had been "seeing" only in shades of gray, that to these people "visible" light differed only in wave-length from any other band of the complete electromagnetic spectrum of vibration.
Strained and tense, the Lensman followed his escort along a narrow catwalk, through a wall upon which riveters and welders were busily at work, into a room practically without walls and ceiled only by story after story of huge I-beams. Yetthiswas the meeting-place; almost a hundred Rigellians were assembled there!
And as Samms walked toward the group a craneman dropped a couple of tons of steel plate, from a height of eight or ten feet, upon the floor directly behind him.
"I just about jumped right out of my armor," is the way Samms himself described his reactions; and that description is perhaps as good as any.
At any rate, he went briefly out of control, and the Rigellian sent him a steadying, inquiring, wondering thought. He could no more understand the Tellurian's sensitivity than Samms could understand the fact that to these people, even the concept of physical intrusion was absolutely incomprehensible. These builders were not workmen, in the Tellurian sense. They were Rigellians, each working his few hours per week for the common good. They would be no more in contact with the meeting than would their fellows on the other side of the planet.
Samms closed his eyes to the riot of clashing colors, deafened himself by main strength to the appalling clangor of sound, forced himself to concentrate every fiber of his mind upon his errand.
"Please synchronize with my mind, as many of you as possible," he thought at the group as a whole, and went en rapport with mind after mind after mind. And mind after mind after mind lacked something. Some were stronger than others, had more initiative and drive and urge, but none would quite do. Until—
"Thank God!" In the wave of exultant relief, of fulfillment, Samms no longer saw the colors or heard the din. "You, sir, are of Lensman grade. I perceive that you are Dronvire."
"Yes, Virgil Samms, I am Dronvire; and at long last I know what it is that I have been seeking all my life. But how of these, my other friends? Are not some of them...?"
"I do not know, nor is it necessary that I find out. You will select ..." Samms paused, amazed. The other Rigellians were still in the room, but mentally, he and Dronvire were completely alone.
"They anticipated your thought, and, knowing that it was to be more or less personal, they left us until one of us invites them to return."
"I like that, and appreciate it. You will go to Arisia. You will receive your Lens. You will return here. You will select and send to Arisia as many or as few of your fellows as you choose. These things I require you, by the Lens of Arisia, to do. Afterward—please note that this is in no sense obligatory—I would like very much to have you visit Earth and accept appointment to the Galactic Council. Will you?"
"I will." Dronvire needed no time to consider his decision.
The meeting was dismissed. The same entity who had been Samms' chauffeur on the in-bound trip drove him back to theChicago, driving as "slowly" and as "carefully" as before. Nor, this time, did the punishment take such toll, even though Samms knew that each terrific lunge and lurch was adding one more bruise to the already much-too-large collection discoloring almost every square foot of his tough hide. He had succeeded, and the thrill of success had its usual analgesic effect.
TheChicago'scaptain met him in the air-lock and helped him remove his suit.
"Are yousureyou're all right, Samms?" Winfield was no longer the formal captain, but a friend. "Even though you didn't call, we were beginning to wonder ... you look as though you'd been to a Valerian clambake, and I sure as hell don't like the way you're favoring those ribs and that left leg. I'll tell the boys you got back in A-prime shape, but I'll have the doctors look you over, just to make sure."
Winfield made the announcement, and through his Lens Samms could plainly feel the wave of relief and pleasure that spread throughout the great ship with the news. It surprised him immensely. Who washe, that all these boys should care so much whether he lived or died?
"I'm perfectly all right," Samms protested. "There's nothing at all the matter with me that twenty hours of sleep won't fix as good as new."
"Maybe; but you'll go to the sick-bay first, just the same," Winfield insisted. "And I suppose you want me to blast back to Tellus?"