Part 4 (1/2)
On green, warm Tellus, many mega pa.r.s.ecs from the black cloud which enveloped the eternally and infernally frigid planet of the Meich, Lensman Gimble Ginnison, having been released from the hospital at Prime Base, was talking to Surgeon-Major Macy, who had just given him his final checkup.
”How am I, Doc?” he asked respectfully, ”QX for duty?”
Well, you were in pretty bad shape when you came in,” the Lensman surgeon said thoughtfully.
”We almost had to clone you to keep you around, son. Those Axlemen really shot you up.”
”Check. But how am I now?”
The older Lensman looked at the sheaf of charts, films, tapes, and reports on his desk. ”Mmm.
Your skeleton seems in good shape, but I wonder about the rest of you. The most beautiful nurses in the Service attended you during your convalescence, and you never made a pa.s.s-never even patted a f.a.n.n.y.”
”Gosh,” Ginnison flushed hotly, ”was I expected to?”
”Not by me,” the older man said cryptically.
”Well, am I QX for duty? I have to do a flit.”
Surgeon-Major Macy handed Ginnison an envelope..”Take this to the Starboard Admiral's office.
He'll let you know. Where are you flitting for?”
”I'm not sure yet,” Ginnison said evasively, taking the envelope.
”Right. Clear ether, Gimble.”
”Clear ether, Macy .”
True to an old tradition, these two friends never told each other anything.
The Starboard Admiral slit open the envelope and took in its contents at a glance. ”According to Macy, you're fit for duty, son. Congratulations. And, in spite of everything, that was a right smart piece of work you did on Mulligans II.”
Ginnison looked at the tips of his polished boots. ”Gee whiz,” he said, blus.h.i.+ng. Then, looking up: ”If I'm fit for duty, sir, I'd like to make a request. That mess on Cadilax needs to be cleaned up. I'm ready to try it, sir, and I await your orders.”
The Starboard Admiral looked up into the gray eyes of the young, handsome, broad-shouldered, lean, lithe, tough, hard, finely-trained, well-muscled, stubborn, powerful man who stood before him.
”Gim,” he said firmly, ”You have disobeyed every order I have ever given you. It always came out all right, so I can't gripe, but, as of now, I'm getting out from under. I've talked to the Galactic Council, and they agree. We are giving you your Release.”
The Release! The goal toward which every Lensman worked
and so few attained! He was now an Unattached Lensman, responsible to no one and nothing save his own conscience. He was no longer merely a small cog in the mighty machine of the Galactic Patrol He was a Big Wheel!
”Jeepers!” he said feelingly. ”Goshtimighty!”
”It's all of that,” the Starboard Admiral agreed. ”Now go put on your Grays, take the Dentless.
and get the h.e.l.l out of here!”
”Yes, sir!” And Ginnison was gone.
He went to his quarters and took off his black-and-silver uniform. Then he proudly donned the starkly utilitarian gray leather uniform which was the garb of the Unattached Lensman. And as he did so, he made that curious gesture known as Gray Seal. No ent.i.ty has ever donned or ever will don that Gray uniform without making that gesture. It is the only way you can get the zipper closed.
In his office, solidly sealed against both thought and spy-ray beams, the Starboard Admiral sat and stared at the glowing Lens on his wrist, the Lens which was, and is, the symbol of the rank and power ofevery Lensman of the Galactic Patrol.
But it is far more than merely a symbol.
It is a lenticular structure of hundreds of thousands of tiny crystalloids, and each is built and tuned to match the ego of one individual ent.i.ty. It is not, strictly speaking, alive, but its pseudolife is such that when it is in circuit with the living ent.i.ty to whom it is synchronized, it gives off a strong, changing, characteristically polychromatic light. It is a telepathic communicator of astounding power and range, and kills any being besides its owner who attempts to wear it.
Thus, it is both pretty and useful.
Manufactured and issued by the mysterious beings of dread and dreaded Arisia, it cannot be counterfeited, and is given only to those ent.i.ties of the highest honor, integrity, honesty, and intelligence.
That knowledge made the Starboard Admiral, as, indeed, it did all Lensmen, feel smug.
The mighty Dentless. from needle prow to flaring jets, was armed and armored, screened and s.h.i.+elded as was no other s.h.i.+p of her cla.s.s and rating. Under the almost inconceivable thrust of her mighty driving jets, she drilled a hole through the void at her cruising velocity of a hundred pa.r.s.ecs per hour.
Not in the inert state could she so have done, for no body with inertial ma.s.s can travel faster than the velocity of light, which, in the vast reaches of the galaxy, is the veriest crawl.
But her Bergenholm, that intricate machine which renders a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p inertialess, or ”free,”
permitted her to move at whatever velocity her ravening jets could achieve against the meager resistance of the almost perfect vacuum of interstellar s.p.a.ce. Unfortunately, the Bergenholm, while it could completely neutralize inertial ma.s.s, never quite knew what to do with gravitational ma.s.s, which seems to come and go as the circ.u.mstances require.
As the Dentless bored on through the awesome void toward her goal, Ginnison and Chief Firing Officer Flatworthy checked and rechecked her mighty armament. Hot and tight were her ravening primary beams, against which no material object, inert or free, can offer any resistance whatever. When struck by the irresistible torrents of energy from a primary, any form of matter, however hard, however resistant, however refractory, becomes, in a minute fraction of a second, an unimaginably hot cloud of totally ionized gases.
Equally tight, but not so hot, were the ultrapowerful secondaries, whose beams could liquify or ga.s.sify tungsten or even the ultraresistant neocarballoy in the blink of an eye.
The inspection over, Ginnison lit a cigarette with a tertiary and Lensed a thought to an ent.i.ty in another part of the s.h.i.+p. ”Woozle, old snake, I hate to disturb your contemplations, but could you come to my cabin? We have things to discuss.”
”Immediately, Ginnison,” that worthy replied, and shortly thereafter Ginnison's door opened and there entered a leatherwinged, crocodile-headed, thirty-foot-long, crooked-armed, pythonish, reptilian nightmare. He draped himself across a couple of parallel bars, tied himself into a tasteful bow-knot, and extended a few weirdly-stalked eyes. ”Well?”
Ginnison looked affectionately at the horribly monstrous Lensman. ”Concerning l'affaire Cadilax,”
he began.
”I know nothing about it, fortunately,” Woozle interrupted. ”That gives you a chance to explain everything.”
”Very well, then. As you well know, I have spent a long time searching for clues that will lead me to the top echelon of Boskonia-Boskonia, that frightful, inimical. soul-destroying, intergalactic organization which is so ineradicably opposed to all the moral values which we of Civilization hold so dear.”
Woozle closed a few eyes. ”Yes. Continue.”
”On Leanonabar,” Ginnison continued, ”I got a line through Banjo Freeko, the planetary dictator, but only after I blew up the mining industry on his planet and killed a few thousand innocent people-regretfully, of course. But I do that all the time. It revolts me, but I do it.”